Читать книгу Fallen Skies - Philippa Gregory - Страница 13

Mike, the SM at the Palais music hall, was quieter and more morose than ever at the close of the second week in Southsea. He would work all night loading the scenery, the props and all the costumes into the big lorry which would drive to Southampton and unload at the Southampton Palais, ready for the show to open on Monday night, and then he would be responsible for the whole company on tour.

Lily watched the girls packing their make-up and their bags, their lucky charms and their dried flowers with a sense of excitement. ‘What’s Southampton Palais like?’ she asked Madge, who was the only one who had worked the tour before.

‘Same as this one. Except there are sinks in the dressing rooms which is nice. And sometimes if they forget and leave the boiler on, there’s hot water to wash in. Digs are all right too, if we go to the same ones. The landlady is a good sort. Bit of a sport. She used to be an actress in her younger days, there are pictures of her all over the house. She’ll turn a blind eye if you’re late in. And if she takes a fancy to you, she’ll let you sit in her front room and you can have visitors.’

‘No-one’s going to visit me at Southampton,’ Lily said unwarily.

‘What’s happened to the Captain in his big car then?’ Madge demanded. ‘Did he try it on?’

The entire dressing room fell silent and everyone looked at Lily. ‘No, he didn’t!’ she said indignantly. ‘He wouldn’t do such a thing.’ She felt the need to defend Stephen against mass female suspicion. ‘He’s just … busy,’ she said lamely. ‘He’s a lawyer, you know. He works in his family’s law firm. They’ve been lawyers for four generations. And he’s very busy right now.’

Susie said something under her breath and the girl next to her laughed.

Helena put her arm around Lily’s shoulder and gave her a hug. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said. ‘And the big ones are always the hardest to catch.’

‘I didn’t try and catch him!’ Lily said indignantly. ‘And if I’d wanted to catch him …’

‘You what?’ Susie asked. ‘If you’d wanted him – what then?’

‘I could have had him,’ Lily said lamely.

There was a ripple of sceptical amusement.

‘Never mind,’ Helena said again. ‘Better luck next time, eh, Lil?’

Lily nodded; there was no point trying to convince them that Stephen had proposed and been rebuffed. But as she packed her comb and the little pot of hair cream which Charlie had given her into her vanity bag, she could not resist imagining the uproar it would have caused if she had strolled into the dressing room with a large diamond on her finger and the news that she was to be Mrs Stephen Winters. Lily smiled at the thought. They would have screamed the place down and Sylvia de Charmante would have died of envy.

It would have been fun to be engaged to Stephen. Not married of course; but it would have been fun to be engaged. He would certainly have bought her a large diamond ring. It would have been nice to have been taken out to dinner from the Southampton lodging house in the big grey car and see the curtains twitch as the girls watched her drive away. It was tiring to walk to the tram stop at the end of the day. The Argyll had been comfortable, and the dinners had been fun, and Stephen had been very pleasant when he had held her hand in the darkness and smiled at her.

But the kiss on the beach had been shocking. And Lily’s pride as well as her youth had recoiled from Stephen’s declaration that he was prepared to make her his wife. She threw in her flannel and her towel and slammed the dressing case shut.

‘I’m packed,’ she said.

‘See you Monday!’ Madge called. ‘Town station, ten o’clock, Monday morning. Don’t be late!’

‘I won’t! See you then!’ Lily called.

Stephen was at the stage door with a bouquet of creamy golden roses. Helen Pears was waiting discreetly halfway down the alley.

‘I couldn’t let you go away like that,’ Stephen said. His face was anxious, he looked like a boy in trouble, not an experienced older man.

Lily took the flowers automatically and said nothing.

‘I’m sorry,’ Stephen said. ‘I startled you. I startled myself actually! I like you awfully, Lily, and I’d like you to consider being my wife. I’d do my best to make you very happy. I’d give you everything you want, you know. I’d like you just to give it a thought. Don’t say “no” outright.’

Lily started walking towards her mother, her arms full of roses. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said.

‘Leave it for a while then. Put it out of your mind. It was an idea of mine but you’re probably right, you’re too young to be thinking of marriage. We’ll be friends, shall we, Lily? Like we were before?’

Helen Pears was beside them, glancing from her daughter’s face to Stephen’s anxious expression.

‘Captain Winters?’ she said coolly.

Stephen glanced at her. ‘I’ve made a bit of a fool of myself, Mrs Pears,’ he said. ‘I asked Lily to marry me and of course, she’s too young to be thinking of such things yet. I like her awfully, you see, and I just thought I’d ask. But if she wants, and if you permit, we’ll consider ourselves friends again. Just friends.’

‘It’s up to Lily,’ Mrs Pears said gently. ‘She’s much too young to marry and she’s got her career to think of as well.’

‘Oh yes, her career,’ Stephen said dismissively. ‘But can we be friends again, Lily?’

Lily’s good nature was too strong to withstand Stephen’s anxious look. And besides, the Argyll was waiting, and the roses were nice. The girls would be coming out of the stage door at any moment and then they would see who had failed to land a big catch. It would be fun if Stephen drove over to Southampton and took her out for dinner and anyway, Coventry was holding open the door and smiling at her, as if he was pleased to see her again. And there was nothing creepy about Coventry at all – she had imagined that. Charlie Smith had said that Stephen was no older than him; and Charlie Smith was certainly not too old.

‘All right!’ Lily said. ‘I’d like that.’ She freed one hand from holding the roses and held it out to Stephen. ‘We’ll be friends again.’

Stephen shook her hand firmly, as if she were a young clerk at his office. ‘That’s grand,’ he said. ‘And now – would you like a farewell dinner, Mrs Pears? Lily? To say goodbye to the Queens Hotel before you conquer the south of England?’

Lily glanced at her mother and then nodded. ‘Divine!’ she said, using Sylvia de Charmante’s favourite word of praise. ‘Too, too divine!’

Stephen called for her at the grocery shop on Sunday morning. Mrs Pears had agreed that they might all go out for a picnic. Coventry had a large hamper in the boot of the Argyll, and a spirit stove, a tea kettle, a silver teapot, and a complete tea service.

‘On a Sunday, darling?’ Muriel had asked her son. ‘Such an odd day for a picnic. I don’t think it’s quite the thing.’

‘She’s going away tomorrow, Mother, if she doesn’t come now I don’t know when she’ll be free again. And I’ve longed for a picnic in the country for weeks. The forecast is good for tomorrow. And if you don’t tell anyone – who’s to know?’

Muriel had sighed and said nothing more. The tea party to introduce Stephen to young women of his own class had been a total failure. He had hated them all. And Muriel, watching them over her tea cup as they postured and preened, had hated them too. Marjorie had obviously studied the magazines to learn how to be a Modern Girl and was both shocking and vulgar. Sarah had been sickeningly sentimental. Stephen, trapped on the sofa between two versions of post-war womanhood, had looked uncomfortable – even angry. He must wonder, Muriel thought, what it was all for – those long two and a half years away – when he comes home and finds girls like Marjorie and Sarah as the best that Portsmouth can offer, his father a cripple, and the house silent with grief. She sighed.

She was still grieving for her oldest son, their heir. Christopher had marched off to war believing that it would be an adventure like a Boys’ Own story. They had all thought that then. It sounded like madness now. But in the first heady days of 1914 there had been a sort of wild carnival atmosphere as if the boys were going away on some delightful crusade. The newspapers had been full of pictures of handsome young men smiling and waving, and the journalists had written that England would reclaim her power and her strength with the British Expeditionary Force. There had not been a war since the Boer war – and the faraway privations of that struggle were quickly forgotten. The Germans were behaving like animals in Europe and should be abruptly stopped. Everyone knew that the British soldier – Tommy Atkins – was the finest in the world.

People were bored of peace. All the rumblings and discontent in the country, all the eccentricities and oddness of the young men and women would be blown away when they had their chance to be great. The newspapers said it, the clergy blessed it in the pulpits. Everyone believed that a war – a good romp of a quick war – would somehow set them up, would unite the nation, cleanse it. The country needed a war, they told themselves. They were a fighting nation, an imperial nation. They needed to prove themselves again.

Christopher had been in the Officer Training Corps at school and joined the Reserve Army after school. He believed it was his duty to go and – more than that – he had thought it the finest adventure possible. He had volunteered and been commissioned at once. His father and he went down to the tailors Gieves, on the harbourside, and ordered his uniform in a joyous male shopping trip which had ended in the Dolphin Hotel with a bottle of champagne for the hero. He had looked wonderfully handsome in khaki. He had been very fair with clear pale skin and light blue eyes. He looked like a boy off to boarding school when he leaned out of the train window and waved his new cap with the shiny badge and shouted goodbye.

He died within seven weeks, during the first disastrous battle that they would later call the first battle of the Somme, when they had to distinguish it from the second, then the third and then the fourth: battles fought again and again, over the same ground, now layered with dead like some strange soft shale rock.

Muriel learned to be grateful that Christopher had died early. He had never known trench warfare and the souring of courage and hope that seemed to happen in the mud. She was glad that her fair-headed son had never come home alive with lice and shaking with nerves. She was glad, afterwards, that it had been quick for him, that she had never had to listen to him screaming from nightmares or found him huddled under his bed, soaked in sweat, keening with terror. Christopher had ridden out like a hero and was gone for ever, before she had time to miss him. She had not even finished knitting his gloves.

Stephen had been totally different. He had resisted recruitment to the very last moment. The news of Christopher’s death had come and his father had dropped where he stood, as if a bullet had found his heart. But still Stephen would not go. His father had been able to move his hand then, his right hand, and he had written Stephen a note, the only thing he ever wrote. It read: ‘Now, your turn.’ Stephen had completely ignored it.

His godfather had written to him that it was his duty to go, and that he would be cut from the old man’s will if he did not volunteer. It was no empty threat. The old man had a large house in Knightsbridge. Stephen had secretly enjoyed the knowledge that it would one day be his ever since Christopher’s death had left him as sole heir. But even that threat did not move him from his refusal to go. One painful evening after dinner Muriel had told him that she was convinced that it was her duty to let him go, and his to leave. She had read in the paper that a woman’s service to her country meant sacrifice. She was ready to sacrifice him. A popular daily paper was minting medals for women who sent their sons to war. Muriel recognized the rightness of the award. A woman could do nothing, could give nothing – but she could let her son go. Muriel had tears in her eyes when she told Stephen that she was convinced that he must leave. But nothing would make him go.

It was only when it became apparent to him that conscription was coming, and that no fit young man would escape, that he could either volunteer as an officer or be conscripted as a soldier, that he went down to the town hall and signed on. He went without telling his mother of his intention, and he came back with a face like a servant.

There was no joyous backslapping trip to Gieves with his father. His father’s hand had lost its strength; he could not write. He nodded at the news, but Stephen had no praise from him. There was no singing on the train which took him and the other surly late volunteers to London. There were no optimistic promises about being home by Christmas.

When she was clearing out his room, after he had gone, Muriel found an envelope tucked at the back of the drawer for his socks. There was no letter, but it was not empty: there was a white feather in it. Someone had posted a white feather to her son. She looked at the postmark. It was posted in Portsmouth, their home town where they had been well-known and respected for generations. Someone had troubled themselves to discover Stephen’s home address and post him a white feather. Someone had seen his reluctance to fight and named him as a coward.

Muriel had thought then that Stephen would never forgive any of them. When he had come home on leave with his face white and tight, slept for days and wallowed in the bath, eaten as if he were starving, but never once smiled at her nor at his father, she knew she was right. She asked him in the new humble voice that she was learning to use to him, measuring the extent of her misjudgement, ‘Is it very, very bad, Stephen? I’ve seen photographs and it looks …’

He had looked at her with his broad handsome face hardened and aged to stone. ‘You have sent me to my death,’ he said simply, and turned away.

Muriel moved restlessly around the sitting room. Stephen had been proved wrong. He had not died, he had come home; and now he had a new life to make. He had his work to do, and he would find a suitable wife, he should have a child, a son to continue the family. It was Muriel’s job to find a girl who would bring some life into this quiet house where the old man upstairs lay in silence and grieved for his brightest lost son.

The girl, the right girl, must be somewhere among Muriel’s many acquaintances. Muriel would make the effort, she would give tea parties, lunch parties and even dinner parties. She would put aside her grief and her longing for silence and fill the house with women and girls so that Stephen could take his pick. He would meet a girl and like her, and the threads of life could be picked up and knitted on like one of those interminable khaki mufflers which everyone had made so badly for four years. The tight cruel look that crossed Stephen’s face sometimes would go. His stammer would fade away and be forgotten. And the nightmares, when he woke the whole house with his screaming – these too would stop. Stephen’s wife would turn him back into a civilian. Stephen’s wife would pick up the pieces left by the war and mend him into a whole man again.

The girl from the Palais and this picnic in the country could not be prevented. Muriel had lost her power over Stephen when she sent him to his brother’s graveyard. He had thought then that if she had loved him at all she would have fought to keep him safe, at home. Her betrayal had opened a wide gulf between them that Muriel alone could not bridge. But Muriel still had authority. The chorus girl from the Palais would never set foot in number two, The Parade.

Lily lay on her back, a stem of grass in her mouth, hat askew, watching the blue sky and the small pale clouds drifting across it. Stephen was leaning back against the Argyll’s polished mudguard, hardly daring to breathe for fear of harming his sense of peace.

‘This is nice,’ Lily said carelessly.

Stephen nodded. There were no words for how he felt, watching Lily’s face turned up to the sky, her long body stretched seductively over a tartan rug, her little feet in white stockings and white sandals, demurely crossed. On the corner of the rug Mrs Pears repacked the picnic basket. Coventry sat on a log a little way off smoking a cigarette.

There was a lark going upwards and upwards into the blue. Lily’s eyes – as blue as the sky – watched it soaring, listening to its call. ‘Funny little bird,’ she said. ‘What’s it doing that for?’

‘For joy,’ Stephen said softly. His heart felt tight in his chest. Lily’s profile, as clear and exquisite as a cameo, burned into his mind. He thought he would see her face, blanched by the bright colours of the tartan rug, for ever. He thought this one picture of a pretty girl on a summer day might drive all the other pictures from his mind.

‘How lovely,’ Lily said wonderingly. ‘I never thought they sang because they were happy. I thought they just sang because they had to.’

Stephen smiled. He could feel laughter bubbling inside him like an underground spring, blocked for too many years. ‘Like a paid choir?’ he asked.

Lily giggled at her own silliness. ‘Like the chorus line,’ she said. ‘Whether they feel like it or not. Up at dawn and in a line, twitter twitter twitter. You, sparrow, you’re flat!’

‘And the stars come on later,’ Stephen suggested. ‘The blackbird. And the nightingale only comes for command performances. And the cuckoo has a really short season!’

‘Does it? Why?’

Stephen was puzzled by her ignorance. ‘It’s only here in spring,’ he said.

Lily turned to look at him, one casual hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Stephen drank in the crook of her elbow, her short hair spilling out from her hat.

‘Is it?’

‘You know the song – “April come she will, May she will stay, June she change her tune …”’

Lily giggled gloriously. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sing it to me!’

Stephen laughed, a croaky unfamiliar feeling. ‘I can’t sing!’

‘Sing!’ Lily commanded.

Stephen glanced across at Coventry and Mrs Pears, embarrassed. Both of them were deaf and blind to him and Lily. Coventry was slowly smoking, looking out over the hills. Mrs Pears had taken some sewing out of her bag and was concentrating on her stitching.

April, come she will,

May she will sing all day,

June she will change her tune,

July she will fly,

August go she must.

Lily sat up, clasping her knees, to listen.

‘Sing it again!’ she commanded.

This time she joined in with him, her clear steady voice hesitating around the tune and stumbling on the words.

‘Again,’ she said when they had finished. ‘Please, Stephen. It’s so pretty.’

He sang it again with her, watching her mouth shaping the words and the unwavering concentration on her face. She was very young still. He thought of Marjorie and Sarah at his mother’s tea party with their affectations and tricks. Lily was like a child beside them. Like a child or like a woman of extraordinary purity. As if she lived in a different country altogether from post-war England with its greed and compromise. She was like the other girl, when he first saw her in Belgium, a simple girl who worked on the land and knew only the seasons and crops. A girl who trotted her donkey cart past a line of silent marching men and looked at them with pity in her eyes.

‘I’ve got it,’ Lily said. She gestured him to be quiet and then sang the song through to him. ‘Is that right?’ she asked.

Stephen felt his heart move inside him as if it had been frozen and dead for years.

‘Oh Lily, I do love you so,’ he said.

And Lily, with the sun on her back, too content to demur, reached forward and put her hand to his cheek in a gesture that silenced and caressed him, at once.

On the drive home Stephen hesitated about asking permission to visit Lily in Southampton or elsewhere on tour. But Lily’s smiling contentment throughout the long sunny day had made him more confident.

‘I should like to visit Lily next week, while she is in Southampton,’ he said, speaking across her to Mrs Pears. ‘I have to go to Southampton for business on Wednesday. If you would give your permission I should like to take Lily out to dinner and take her back to her lodgings later.’

He watched for the slight movement which was Lily’s nudge and her nod. Mrs Pears hesitated. ‘Lily’s still very young, Captain Winters,’ she said. ‘I don’t want her talked about. Girls gossip and there’s more gossip talked in the theatre than you would imagine. I think it’s perhaps better for Lily if she goes home with the other girls after the show.’

‘Oh, Ma!’ Lily remonstrated.

Helen Pears shook her head, addressed herself to Stephen. ‘I don’t want to make one rule for you and a different one for everyone else,’ she said frankly. ‘Lily’s bound to get asked. The answer should always be the same. She doesn’t go out to dinner without me. If I can’t be there, then she can’t go.’

Lily hunched her shoulders but she did not appeal against her mother’s decision.

‘What about taking her out for tea, between the shows? As I have done in Portsmouth?’ Stephen asked. He could feel his anger rising that Helen Pears should stand between him and Lily. Like all women, he thought, very quick to sacrifice someone else for their own ends.

Helen nodded. ‘If it is not inconvenient for you when you are working,’ she said. ‘Lily may certainly go out to tea with you in Southampton.’

Lily peeped a smile at him from under her hat. ‘On Wednesday?’ she asked.

‘Wednesday,’ he said.

‘You keep Captain Winters at arm’s length,’ Helen observed to Lily as she watched the Argyll drive off from the upstairs sitting room window. ‘He’s very much in love with you. And if he asks you out to dinner again, you remember I said no.’

‘He’s nice though,’ Lily said. ‘He’s nice to take us out like that. I haven’t had such a lovely day ever, I don’t think. And did you see the china? And the teapot? It was solid silver, wasn’t it?’

Helen nodded. She had felt the weight of the pot as she had repacked the hamper.

‘Plenty of money there,’ she observed. ‘But not for you. You don’t have to marry, you don’t have to make a choice for years. You can be free, Lily, with your talent. You’ve got your career ahead of you and all sorts of opportunities.’

Lily came away from the window, immediately diverted. ‘I wonder what Charlie has in mind for a new act,’ she said. ‘Has he told you?’

Helen shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you can do what he says. He’s got a wonderful eye. He’ll go far. I heard some gossip when I was waiting for you the other day that he’s applied for the post of musical director at the Kings Theatre, Southsea. A proper theatre – not just music hall. That’d be a big step for him! I wouldn’t be surprised if he got it either.’

Lily nodded. ‘He can play anything,’ she said proudly. ‘If you just sing it to him once he can play it straight away. I’m going to sing him the cuckoo song. I think it’s really pretty.’

‘Cuckoo song!’ Helen said indulgently. ‘You’d better get yourself packed for tomorrow. I’ll make us some supper. I’ve got some nice ham in the shop which won’t last another day. I’ve got some biscuits and tea for you to take with you. Don’t forget to eat properly, Lil. And your washing is on the landing, all ironed.’

Lily moved to the door and stopped to put her arms around her mother. ‘Will you be all right without me?’ she asked. ‘You’ve never had to manage without me before.’

Helen patted her on the back. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘It’s a big start for you. I’d rather see you do it than anything else in the world. I wouldn’t stand in your way, Lil. You go off and I’ll be proud of you.’ She hugged her daughter tight for a moment, and quickly blinked the tears from her eyes before she let her go so Lily would not see what it was costing her. Lily was her creation, made of finer stuff than the other children of their street. Every spare penny had been poured into Lily’s singing, into Lily’s dancing, into her elocution. It was only sense, now that the girl had her chance, for her mother to send her out to the wider world, and be proud. But it was only natural that she should feel deeply bereft, as if Lily were still her baby taken from her too early.

She gave Lily a little push. But the girl hesitated at the door. ‘D’you think Charlie Smith likes me? I mean as a girl, not just as a singer?’

Helen looked at her daughter. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? He’s really old, according to you. As old as Captain Winters. And injured in the war too.’

Lily nodded, unconvinced.

‘You can go out to dinner with him, if he asks you, while you’re on tour,’ Helen said. ‘You’d be perfectly safe with him, Lily.’

‘Because he’s not in love with me and Stephen is?’

‘Something like that,’ Helen said. ‘And he knows the line.’

‘I like him awfully,’ Lily confided.

Helen smiled. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s a good friend to you, Lily, you wouldn’t have got this far without his help. You keep him as a friend and bide your time. You’ve got years ahead of you for love.’