Fallen Skies

Fallen Skies Philippa Gregory Terrific novel set in the Roaring Twenties, reissued to accompany Philippa Gregory’s bestselling novel, The Other Boleyn GirlLily Valance wants to forget the war. She's determined to enjoy the world of the 1920s, with its music, singing, laughter and pleasure. When she meets Captain Stephen Winters, a decorated hero back from the Front, she's drawn to his wealth and status. In Lily he sees his salvation – from the past, from the nightmare, from the guilt at surviving the Flanders plains where so many were lost.But it's a dream that cannot last. Lily has no intention of leaving her singing career. The hidden tensions of the respectable facade of the Winters household come to a head. Stephen's nightmares merge ever closer with reality and the truth of what took place in the mud and darkness brings him and all who loves him to a terrible reckoning… PHILIPPA GREGORY Fallen Skies Copyright (#ulink_0cf32068-341e-59d1-b587-852f93d71ef6) This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993 Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1993 Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007233069 Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007370108 Version: 2018–02–16 Dedication (#ulink_60f4a59d-acb9-5a2d-975d-f2aeaf33261b) This book is dedicated to Private Frederick John Carter of the 11th Scottish Rifles who died at Salonika, 12th September 1917, aged twenty-four Epigraph (#ulink_1a1e1758-8ba8-5f2d-b44c-b9af3b6ac0f7) Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928 Contents Cover (#u08b37fb5-bfe6-5431-9d06-d544b7c1dc11) Title Page (#u6fe0143c-4dc9-5873-ada0-2ecd5cb3f8cc) Copyright (#u720ac166-66c2-5587-a341-c3206a4295e8) Dedication (#ue14aec04-7078-5917-8b5c-b3c0c8bb6bec) Epigraph (#ue1fb8d06-cba2-53bf-bc55-67a429a889a1) Chapter One (#ue2b12f8b-ddc0-5b70-8d40-e3d70474f3e8) Chapter Two (#ua54b5038-abf1-5c15-a54f-bf1e47ee8909) Chapter Three (#u37406a98-c588-5593-8d69-497b35b7fb1e) Chapter Four (#ubade3ac7-f849-5c8d-aed8-1df6651ce37c) Chapter Five (#u2ba32e8b-19f5-511a-94fc-f7cb86c0c33a) Chapter Six (#ud3dd23dd-de67-5844-930a-b793dc3604e0) Chapter Seven (#ud773a52c-af48-57df-99d6-635646be89e5) Chapter Eight (#u44eafbfa-42ab-5248-9d85-0c8861d639e1) Chapter Nine (#ucc202faa-d7da-5f6b-a993-bc686f8db5ca) Chapter Ten (#u0c01c794-24a4-5323-be4b-8d8726fd3892) Chapter Eleven (#u3fc9512a-4bd7-52f3-a324-a0e54d7fdf8a) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter One (#ulink_851b77f0-6108-5aa4-b05e-d397c327bde0) Stephen’s mouth was filling with mud, wet slurry pressed on his eyelids, slid into his nostrils like earthworms. He flailed helplessly against the weight of it on his face, on his body, in his hair. He felt the silty terrible power of it pinning him down. When he opened his mouth to scream it poured into his throat, he could taste its wetness: the terrible non-taste of earth. He choked on it, retching and heaving for breath, spitting and hawking. He was drowning in it, he was being crushed by its weight, he was being buried alive. His hands like paddles, he scrabbled against it, trying to claw a space for his face, and then he grabbed linen sheet, woollen blankets, counterpane, and he opened his eyes, clogged only by sleep, and saw the white ceiling of his home. He whooped like a sick child, gasping in terror, rubbing his face roughly, dragging his palm across his lips, across his tongue where the dead taste still lingered. He whispered ‘Oh God, oh God,’ pitifully, over and over again. ‘Oh God, oh God.’ Then he turned his head and saw her. In the doorway was his mother, her dressing-gown pulled on over her thick cotton nightdress, her tired face set in lines of fear and … something else. He stared at her, trying to read the expression on her face: disapproval. His bedside table was overturned, the ugly pottery electric lamp broken, his jug of water spilling into a puddle on the carpet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was humble, ashamed. ‘I was dreaming.’ She came into the room and lifted up the table. She set the empty jug and the pieces of the bedside light on it in mute accusation. ‘I wish you’d let me call Dr Mobey,’ she said. ‘You were having a fit.’ He shook his head quickly, his anger rising. ‘It was nothing. A bad dream.’ ‘You should take one of my sleeping tablets.’ Stephen dreaded deep sleep more than anything else. In deep sleep the dream would go on, the dream of the collapsed dug-out, the dream of scrabbling and suffocating, and only after a lifetime of screaming horror, the bliss of feeling the earth shift and tumble and Coventry’s gentle hands scraping the soil from his face and hearing his voice saying, ‘You’re all right, Sir. I’m here now. We’ll have you out in a jiffy.’ Stephen had wept then, wept like a baby. There had been no-one but Coventry to see his coward’s tears, and he had wiped them away with dirty bleeding hands. Coventry had dug bare-handed, refusing to put a spade in the earth. He had scrabbled in the mud like a dog for its master and then they had both wept together; like new-found lovers, like reunited twins. ‘I’ll go downstairs and make myself a brew,’ he said. ‘You get to bed. I don’t want any tablets.’ ‘Oh, go to sleep,’ Stephen’s mother said irritably. ‘It’s four in the morning. Far too late for tea.’ He got out of bed and threw his dressing-gown around his shoulders. When he stood, his height and maleness could dominate her. Now he was the master of the house, not a sick man screaming with nightmares. ‘I think I’ll have a brew and a cigarette,’ he said with the upper-class drawl he had learned from the senior officers in the trenches. ‘Then I’ll sleep. You toddle off, old lady.’ She turned, obedient but resentful. ‘Well, don’t make a mess for Cook.’ He shepherded her out of the room and she shied away from him as if fear were contagious, as if terror were catching. ‘I wish you’d let me call Dr Mobey,’ she said again, pausing on the landing before she turned into her bedroom. ‘He says it’s very common. They have all sorts of things to cure nervous troubles. It’s just hysteria.’ Stephen smoothed his moustache, his broad handsome face regaining its confident good looks. He laughed. ‘I’m not a hysteric,’ he said. His voice was rich with his male pride. ‘Not me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I just get the odd bad dream.’ He turned away from her and loped down the stairs. The hall was dark but the fanlight above the front door showed him the green baize door that separated the domestic quarters in the basement from the rest of the house. He opened the door and went quietly down the back stairs. The kitchen was light; it was warm from the kitchen range. Coventry was at the stove, warming a teapot. He looked up when Stephen entered and took him in, took him all in, with one comprehensive glance. Stephen sighed with relief at the sight of him. ‘Had a bit of a dream,’ he said. ‘Fancied a cup of tea, and here you are. Ministering bloody angel.’ Coventry smiled his slow crooked smile. As Stephen watched, he spooned five heaped spoonfuls of tea from the caddy into the teapot, adding them to the old dregs left in the pot. He poured boiling water on the stale brew and stood the pot on the range for a few moments, then took up the two mugs. He put four spoonfuls of sugar into each mug and poured a dark stream of tea from the pot. It tasted stewed, and sour from the old tea, as strong as poison and teeth-grittingly sweet. It was how it had tasted in the trenches. It was that taste which told you that you were alive, that you had come back, against all odds, from a night patrol, from a dawn attack, from a lonely dangerous sniper’s mission. The strong sweet taste of tea was the taste of survival. The taste of mud was death. Stephen sank into one of the chairs before the range and put his slippered feet against the warm oven door. ‘Good Christ, Coventry! I wish you would speak again,’ he said. ‘I wish I could stop dreaming.’ He sipped a taste of tea, the strong sour brew rinsing his mouth clean of the taste of dream-mud. ‘I wish it had never happened,’ Stephen said with rare bleak honesty. ‘I wish to Christ it had never happened at all.’ Stephen Winters first saw Lily on the stage of the Palais music hall on the opening night of the first show, 5 May 1920: her debut. He missed her solo song – he was at the bar and then in the gents. But in the can-can finale his cousin David Walters, on a flying visit to Portsmouth, had nudged him and said: ‘See that girl? Can’t half kick. Bet she’s French.’ ‘Damn the French,’ Stephen said automatically. ‘Beer at five francs a glass and then someone’s peed in it.’ ‘See that girl?’ David persisted. ‘Pretty girl.’ Stephen had looked, blearily, through the glass window of the bar and seen Lily dive down into the splits and then fling her head up, beaming. She looked ready to laugh for joy. ‘Oh yes,’ Stephen said, surprised. ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Pretty girl,’ David repeated drunkenly. They watched while the orchestra galloped into the walk-down and the artists came downstage and took their bows. There was something about Lily’s face that appealed to Stephen. Something he could not name. ‘I know what,’ he said suddenly to David. ‘She looks like the girls used to look – before.’ ‘No! She’s got short hair. None of them had short hair before.’ ‘She does, she does,’ Stephen persisted. ‘She looks like the girls used to look. She looks …’ David was cheering the star, Sylvia de Charmante, who was curtseying deeply, like a debutante at court. ‘She looks like there had never been a war,’ Stephen said slowly. ‘She looks like there had never been a war at all.’ ‘Go backstage!’ David said with sudden abrupt determination. ‘If you like the look of her, take her out!’ ‘D’you think she would come?’ Stephen asked. The curtain had dropped and now rose. Lily was at the end of the line; he could see her blush at the applause and her frank grin. ‘Oh yes,’ David said cheerily. ‘Heroes we are. Bloody heroes. We should have worn our medals.’ ‘I didn’t think you’d got any medals. I didn’t know they gave medals for pushing papers in London.’ ‘We can’t all be you,’ David said pleasantly. ‘Charging around, blowing your whistle and massacring Huns single-handed.’ He slapped Stephen on the back. ‘Let’s have a little bracer and ask the girl out,’ he said. ‘She can bring along a friend for me. They’re all tarts, these girls. She’ll come like a shot.’ He shouldered his way back to the bar and shouted for two single whiskies. Stephen downed his in one thirsty gulp. ‘Come on, then,’ David said cheerily. ‘There’s usually a stage door around the back somewhere.’ The two men pushed through the crowd spilling out of the little music hall and then linked arms to stroll down the dark alley at the side of the theatre. Further down the alley a couple were locked in each other’s arms; the woman’s hat was pushed back as they kissed passionately. ‘Dirty bitch,’ Stephen said with sudden venom. ‘I hate tarts.’ ‘Oh, you hate everybody when you’ve had a drink,’ David said jovially. ‘Bang on the door!’ A hatch in the stage door opened at once. George, the stage door porter, looked out. ‘Please send our compliments to the dancers,’ David said with assurance. ‘We were wondering if you could tell us the name of the little blonde one.’ The porter looked blankly at them. A shilling found its way from Stephen’s pocket to gleam in the gaslight. George opened the door and the shilling changed hands. ‘The young one, with the fair bobbed hair.’ ‘Miss Lily Valance, gentlemen.’ ‘We wanted to ask her to dinner. Her and a friend.’ ‘She can bring the plump dark one who was on with the conjuror,’ David interrupted. ‘Miss Madge Sweet, gentlemen.’ ‘Ask them both. Shall I write a note?’ The porter nodded. Stephen took out his card case. It had a small silver propelling pencil inside. On one of his cards he wrote in small spidery script: ‘My cousin and I would be honoured if you would come to the Queens Hotel for dinner with us. We are at the stage door.’ ‘We’ll wait for a reply,’ he said to the porter. The porter nodded and was about to go inside when a middle-aged woman, drably dressed, came down the alley behind the two men, quietly said ‘Excuse me’, and stepped between them and through the open door. ‘These gentlemen are asking for Lily,’ the porter told her. Helen Pears turned and looked at them both. ‘My daughter,’ she said quietly. Stephen had to remind himself that she was only the mother of a chorus girl and therefore she could not be a lady. There was no need to feel abashed. She was a tart’s mother, she was probably an old tart herself. ‘I am Captain Stephen Winters,’ he said, invoking his wartime status. ‘This is Captain David Walters. We were wondering if Miss Valance and Miss Sweet would like to have dinner with us.’ The woman did not even smile at him, she had the cheek to look him straight in the eye, and she looked at him coldly. ‘At the Queens,’ he said hastily to indicate his wealth. She said nothing. ‘We can go in my car, my driver is waiting,’ he added. Helen Pears nodded. She did not seem at all impressed. ‘I will tell Miss Sweet of your invitation,’ she said levelly. ‘But my daughter does not go out to dinner.’ She went inside and the porter, raising sympathetic eyebrows, shut the door in their faces. ‘That’s that then,’ David said disconsolately. ‘What a harridan!’ ‘You go on, I’ll meet you at the Queens.’ ‘You’ve got no chance here, not with her ma on sentry-go.’ ‘I’ll give it a try,’ Stephen said. ‘Go on.’ ‘Forlorn hoper!’ Stephen walked with David down to the end of the alley and waved across at Coventry, waiting in the big Argyll limousine in front of the music hall. ‘Bring the car up here,’ he called. Coventry nodded, and drove the car up to the end of the alley. Half a dozen of the cast looked at it curiously as they went past. Stephen stood by the rear passenger door and waited. He could see the streetlight glint on Lily’s fair hair, only half-covered by a silly little hat, as she walked down the shadowy alley, her hand tucked in her mother’s arm. They were laughing together. Stephen was struck at once by the easy warmth between them. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Valance, Miss Valance,’ Stephen said with careful politeness. ‘I must apologize for my behaviour. I was in Belgium for too long, and I’ve forgotten my English manners.’ Lily beamed at him with her open friendly smile. Her mother stood waiting. Stephen felt a frisson of irritation. The woman showed no respect for a gentleman. He opened the car door. ‘I quite understand that it is too late for dinner,’ he said smoothly. ‘But may I, at least, see you home? It is so difficult to get a cab at this time of night.’ Stephen saw the quick movement as Lily pinched her mother’s arm. Helen Pears hesitated for only a moment and then she nodded. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘We live in Highland Road.’ Helen went in first, Lily next. Stephen climbed in after them and spoke into the tube that ran from the back seat to the driver. ‘Highland Road.’ ‘It’s the grocery shop on the corner. Pears Grocers.’ ‘My family is a Portsmouth family too,’ Stephen said, desperate for some common ground. ‘We are Winters the lawyers.’ Helen nodded. ‘I know.’ ‘Do you? I beg your pardon! I did not recognize you.’ ‘We’ve never met. I saw your photograph in the Hampshire Telegraph.’ There was a short awkward silence. ‘I thought the porter said your name was Miss Valance,’ Stephen said gently to Lily. She glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. Stephen felt desire like hunger. She was hardly a woman yet, she was still a girl with skin like cream and hair like honey. ‘Valance is my stage name,’ she said. Her voice was clear, her speech elocution-pure. ‘My real name is Lily Pears.’ The car drove slowly down Marmion Road; Stephen felt he was no further forward. ‘I wonder if you would like to come to dinner tomorrow night?’ he said nervously to Helen. ‘You and Miss Pears. And Mr Pears too, if he would like to come?’ ‘I am a widow. There is no Mr Pears.’ Helen paused. Stephen saw again the quick secret movement of Lily’s gloved hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Yes, Captain Winters, thank you. That would be very nice.’ ‘Shall I pick you up after the show?’ ‘Thank you,’ Helen said again. The big car slowed and stopped. Lily and her mother got out on to the pavement, and Stephen followed them. ‘I’ll say goodnight then, and look forward to dining with you both tomorrow,’ he said. Helen held out her hand and Stephen shook it, and then turned to Lily. He took her gloved hand in his and felt the warmth of her palm through the white cotton. She looked up at him and smiled. She smiled as if she had some secret assurance, some private conviction, that nothing bad could ever happen to her. Stephen, looking down into that bright little face, felt again the potent magic of young confidence. He had not seen a face like that since the early days, the first days of the war. The young subalterns from public schools looked like that – as if life were one easy glorious adventure and nothing would ever disappoint them. ‘Goodnight, Miss Pears,’ he said. ‘I will see you tomorrow.’ ‘Goodnight, Captain Winters.’ Her voice was light and steady with an undercurrent of amusement, as if she might giggle at any moment at this game of being grown-up. He let go her hand with reluctance, and waited by the car until the poky little door of the shop doorway had shut behind them. ‘Goodnight,’ he said again. Coventry drove him in silence to the Queens Hotel, where he dined with David, and then got royally drunk at half a dozen of the worst pubs in Portsmouth. Chapter Two (#ulink_1936978c-6c91-548d-bc29-c8dd5ae7c1f4) The dinner was not a success. Lily was overawed by the gold and crimson grandeur of the Queens Hotel dining room, Stephen was awkward in the company of women and had little to say to Lily under these formal circumstances. They had discussed the eclipse of the moon a few nights earlier; Stephen had speculated about British chances at the Antwerp Olympics; then he had fallen silent. He had nothing to say to Lily. If she had been the tart that he first thought, then he would have taken her to some cheerful bar and got her so drunk that she would go to an alleyway at the back of the pub and let him take her, with deliberate roughness, against a brick wall. But with the two women masquerading as ladies, Stephen did not know how to deal with them. He could not resist his desire for Lily, nervous as a child in the formal dining room, wary of waiters and wide-eyed at the other diners. She was cheaply pretty in her little blue cocktail dress and her frivolous feather of a hat. Her mother was as dignified as a duchess in a beaded black gown and gloves. The waiter, sensing another hiatus in a stilted evening, removed the pudding plates and replaced them with small coffee cups, cream, sugar, and a large silver coffee pot. Mrs Pears turned her attention from the band and the dancers and poured coffee into the three cups. ‘Jolly good dinner,’ Stephen said, seeking thanks. Mrs Pears nodded. ‘I expect it makes a change for you, from rationing.’ Mrs Pears shook her head. ‘The only good thing about running a shop is that you never go short.’ ‘Oh, really, Ma!’ Lily exclaimed, thinking of the dried ends of ham joints and day-old bread. Stephen had flushed a deep brick-red. ‘I thought … I thought … that things were dreadfully short,’ he said. ‘Th … th … that was what they t … t … told us.’ Mrs Pears’s smile was sardonic. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They would have told you that. But there would have been enough for everyone if people had shared. As it was, those who could afford it never did without.’ ‘You s … s … sold from under the counter?’ Stephen demanded. ‘P … p … profiteered?’ ‘I saw that Lily had shoes on her feet and food on the table. I bought her ballet lessons and singing lessons. I made my money from rich and selfish people who would rather pay a little more than do without. If you call that profiteering, Captain, then I’m a wartime profiteer. But you’d best look around at the company you’re in before you point an accusing finger at me.’ Lily’s fair head was bowed over her coffee cup. The feathers in her hat trembled with embarrassment. ‘Hush, Ma,’ she said softly. Mrs Pears pointed one black-gloved finger at the next-door table. ‘That man is Councillor Hurt, cloth-maker. Ask him how much khaki and serge he ran off in the four years. Ask him about the greatcoats and trousers like paper. The other is Alderman Wilson, scrap metal. Ask him about the railings and saucepans and scrap given free for the war effort but then sold by him for thousands. And that’s Mr Askew, munitions. Ask him about the girls whose skins are still orange and about the shells which never worked.’ She paused. ‘We were all profiteers from the war except those that died. Those who didn’t come back. They were the mugs. Everyone else did very nicely indeed.’ Stephen’s hands were trembling with his anger. He thrust them beneath the tablecloth and gripped hard. ‘Let’s dance!’ Lily said suddenly. ‘I adore this tune.’ She sprang to her feet. Stephen automatically rose with her. She led him to the dance floor, his arm went around her waist and she slipped her little hand in his. Their feet stepped lightly in time, gracefully. Lily’s head went back and she smiled up at Stephen, whose face was still white with rage. Lily sang the popular song softly to him: If you could remember me, Any way you choose to, What would be your choice? I know which one I would do … Above them the winking chandelier sparkled as they turned and circled the floor. Stephen’s colour slowly came back to his cheeks. Lily sang nonsense songs, as a mother would sing to a frightened child: When you dood the doodsie with me, And I did the doodsie with you. The music stopped and Lily spun around and clapped the band. They bowed. The band leader bowed particularly to Lily. ‘Miss Lily Valance!’ he announced. Lily flushed and glanced at her mother. The older woman nodded her head towards the bandstand. Lily obediently went up to the band leader, her hand still on Stephen’s arm. ‘Miss Lily Valance, the new star of the Palais!’ the band leader announced with pardonable exaggeration. ‘Wait there,’ Lily said to Stephen and hitched up her calf-length dress and clambered up on to the bandstand. ‘“Tipperary!”’ someone shouted from the floor. ‘Sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary!”’ Lily shook her head with a smile, and then stepped to the front of the stage. ‘I’ll sing “Danny Boy”.’ The band played the overture and Lily stood very still, listening to the music like a serious child. The dining room fell silent as Lily lifted her small pale face and sang. She had a singing voice of remarkable clarity – more like the limpid purity of a boy soprano than a girl singer from a music hall. She sang artlessly, like a chorister practising alone. She stood with both her hands clasped loosely before her, not swaying nor tapping her feet, her face raised and her eyes looking outwards, beyond the ballroom, beyond the dockyard, beyond the very seas themselves, as if she were trying to see something on the horizon, or beyond it. It was not a popular song from the war, nor one that recalled the dead – the mugs who had gained nothing. Lily never sang war songs. But no-one looking at her and listening to her pure poignant voice did not think of those others who had left England six years ago, with faces as hopeful and as untroubled as hers, who would never come home again. When the last note held, rang and fell silent the room was very quiet, as if people were sick of dancing and pretending that everything was well now, in this new world that was being made without the young men, in this new world of survivors pretending that the lost young men had never been. Then one of the plump profiteers clapped his hands and raised a full glass of French champagne and cried: ‘Hurrah for pretty Lily!’ and ‘Sing us something jolly, girl!’ then everyone applauded and called for another song and shouted for the waiter and another bottle. Lily shook her head with a little smile and stepped down from the stage. Stephen led her back to their table. A bottle of champagne in a silver bucket of ice stood waiting. ‘They sent it,’ Mrs Pears said, nodding towards the next-door table. ‘There’s no need to thank them, Lily, you just bow and smile.’ Lily looked over obediently, bowed her head as her mother had told her and smiled demurely. ‘By jove, you’re a star!’ Stephen exclaimed. Lily beamed at him. ‘I hope so!’ Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling. ‘I really hope so!’ The waiter brought the round flat glasses for champagne and filled one for each of them. Lily raised her glass to the neighbouring table and dimpled over the top of it. ‘That’ll do,’ her mother said. Stephen grinned at Mrs Pears. ‘I see you keep Lily in order!’ She nodded. ‘I was a singer on the halls before I met Mr Pears. I learned a thing or two then.’ ‘Ma goes with me everywhere,’ Lily said serenely. ‘Nearly time to go home,’ Mrs Pears said. ‘Lily’s got a matin?e tomorrow. She needs her sleep.’ ‘Of course!’ Stephen nodded to the waiter for the bill. The two women stood up and drifted across the dance floor to fetch their wraps from the cloakroom while Stephen paid. He waited for them outside, on the shallow white steps under the big glass awning. Coventry drew up in the big grey Argyll motor car, got out, walked around to open the back door and stood, holding it wide. Stephen and Coventry looked at each other, a long level look without speaking while Stephen lit a cigarette and drew in the first deep draw of fresh smoke. Then the doorman opened the double doors and the women came out, muffled against the cool of the May evening. The men broke from their silent communion and stepped forward. Stephen licked his fingers and carefully pinched out the lighted ember of his cigarette, and raised his hand to tuck it behind his ear. Coventry shot a quick warning glance at him, saying nothing. Stephen exclaimed at himself, flushed, and dropped the cigarette into one of the stone pots that flanked the steps. He helped Lily and her mother into the luxurious grey-upholstered seats of the car and got in after them. Coventry drove slowly to the Highland Road corner shop and parked at the kerb. Mrs Pears went into the dark interior of the shop with a word of thanks and goodnight as Lily paused on the doorstep, the glazed shop door ajar behind her. Stephen thought Lily was herself a little commodity, a fresh piece of provender, something he might buy from under the counter, a black-market luxury, a pre-war treat. Something he could buy and gobble up, every delicious little scrap. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’ Lily said, like a polite child. ‘Come out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Coventry can drive us along the seafront.’ ‘Can’t. I’ve got a matin?e.’ ‘The next day then, Sunday?’ ‘If Ma says I can.’ ‘I’ll call for you at three.’ ‘All right.’ Stephen glanced shiftily towards the darkened shop. He could not see Mrs Pears in the shadowed interior. He leaned towards Lily. Her pale face was upturned to look at him, her fair hair luminous in the flickering gas lighting. Stephen put his hand on her waist. She was soft under his tentative touch, unstructured by stiff corsets. She reminded him of the other girl, a girl long ago, who only wore corsets to Mass on a Sunday. On weekdays her skin was hot and soft beneath a thin cotton shirt. He drew Lily towards him and she took a small step forward. She was smiling slightly. He could smell her light sweet perfume. He could feel the warmth of her skin through the cheap fabric of her cocktail dress. ‘Time to come in, Lily,’ said her mother’s voice immediately behind them. Stephen released her at once. ‘Goodnight, Captain Winters. Thank you for a lovely dinner,’ said Mrs Pears from the darkness inside the shop. The door behind Lily opened wide, and with a glance like a mischievous schoolgirl, she waved her white-gloved hand and went in. Stephen sat beside Coventry for the short drive home, enjoying the open air of the cab. ‘Damned pretty girl,’ he said. He took a couple of cigarettes from his case and lit them both, holding the two in his mouth at once. The driver nodded. Stephen passed a cigarette to him. The man took it without taking his eyes from the road, without a word of thanks. ‘Pity about the mother,’ Stephen said half to himself. ‘Fearfully respectable woman.’ The driver nodded, exhaled a wisp of smoke. ‘Not like a showgirl at all, really,’ Stephen said. ‘I could almost take her home for tea.’ The driver glanced questioningly at Stephen. ‘We’ll see,’ Stephen said. ‘See how things go. A man must marry, after all. And it doesn’t matter much who it is.’ He paused. ‘She’s like a girl from before the war. You can imagine her, before the war, living in the country on a farm. I could live on a little farm with a girl like that.’ The cool air, wet with sea salt, blew around them. It was chilly, but both men relished the discomfort, the familiar chill. ‘There are plenty of girls,’ Stephen said harshly. ‘Far too many. One million, don’t they say? One million spare women. Plenty of girls. It hardly matters which one.’ Coventry nodded and drew up before the handsome red-brick house. In the moonlight the white window sills and steps were gleaming bright. ‘You sleeping here tonight?’ Stephen asked as he opened the car door. The driver nodded. ‘Brew-up later?’ The man nodded again. Stephen stepped from the car and went through the imposing wrought-iron gate, through the little front garden, quiet in the moonlight, and up the scoured white steps to the front door. He fitted his key in the lock and stepped into the hall as his mother came out of the drawing room. ‘You’re early, dear,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘Nice dinner?’ ‘The Queens. Same as usual.’ ‘Anyone I know?’ ‘No-one you know, Mother.’ She hesitated, her curiosity checked by their family habit of silence and secrecy. Stephen went towards the stairs. ‘Father still awake?’ he asked. ‘The nurse has just left him,’ Muriel said. ‘He might have dozed off, go in quietly.’ Stephen nodded and went up the stairs to his father’s bedroom. It was dark inside, a little nightlight burning on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. The fire had died down, only the embers glowing dark red. Stephen stood inside the door waiting for his eyes to get used to the darkness. Suddenly, he felt his chest constrict with terror and his heart hammered. It was being in the darkness, waiting and straining to be able to see, and knowing he had to go forward, half-blind, while they could watch him, at their ease, in safety; watch him clearly against the pale horizon, and take Their time to put the cross-sight neatly in the centre of his silhouette, and gently, leisurely, squeeze the trigger. He put his hand behind him and tugged the door open. The bright electric light from the landing flooded into the room and Stephen shuddered with relief. He loosened his collar and found his neck and his face were wet with the cold sweat of fear. ‘Damn.’ He could see now that his father was awake. His big head was turned towards the door and his sunken eyes were staring. ‘I hate the dark,’ Stephen said, moving towards the bed. He pulled up a low-seated high-backed chair and sat at his father’s head. The sorrowful dark eyes stared at him. The left side of the man’s face was twisted and held by the contraction of a stroke. The other half was normal, a wide deeply lined face. ‘Took a girl out to dinner,’ Stephen said. He took his father’s hand without gentleness, as if it were a specimen of pottery which had been handed to him for his inspection. He hefted the limp hand, and let it fall back on the counterpane. ‘Music hall girl,’ he said. ‘Nothing special.’ With an extended finger he lifted one of his father’s fingers and dropped it down again. There was no power in any part of the man’s body. ‘You’re like a corpse yourself, you know,’ Stephen said conversationally. ‘One of the glorious dead you are. You’d never have been like this but for Christopher, would you? Mother told me – she handed you the telegram, you took one glance at it and fell down like you were dead.’ There was complete silence in the room except for the slow ticking of the mantelpiece clock. ‘You wouldn’t have dropped down half-dead for me, would you?’ Stephen said with a hard little laugh. ‘Not for me! One of the white feather brigade?’ He raised his father’s hand, casually lifting the limp index finger with his own. Then he dropped it down again. ‘Who would ever have dreamed that I’d come home a hero and Christopher never come home at all?’ He smiled at the wide-eyed, frozen face. ‘You do believe I’m a hero?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you?’ Stephen heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs and he got up from the chair and smoothed the counterpane. ‘Sleep well.’ He went quietly out of the room. ‘Goodnight, Mother,’ he said. She was going to her bedroom opposite. ‘Are you going to bed now?’ ‘I’m having a brew with Coventry,’ he said. She smiled, containing her irritation. ‘You two are like little boys having feasts after lights out. Don’t leave cigarette ends around, Cook complains and it’s me who has to deal with her – not you.’ He nodded and went down the stairs, through the baize door at the head of the basement stairs and down to the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. It was the only place in the house that smelled of life. His father’s bedroom smelled like a hospital, the drawing room smelled of cold flowers and furniture polish. But down here there were mingled smells of cooking and soapsuds, tobacco smoke and ironing. The range was still hot and Coventry had a kettle on the top. On the wide scrubbed kitchen table drawn up before the range was a battered tin teapot and two white enamelled mugs. Coventry poured the tea, added four spoonfuls of sugar to each cup and stirred them each ritually, five times, clockwise. The two men sat in comfortable silence, facing the kitchen range. They hunched up their shoulders, they wrapped their hands around their mugs. They sat close, shoulders, forearms and elbows just touching, huddled as if they were still in a dug-out. They did not speak; their faces were serene. Lily, dressed in cotton pyjamas, leaned against the window frame and watched the moonlight reflected on the shiny slates of the roofs opposite. ‘He’s ever so handsome,’ she said. Helen Pears, turning down the bed and slipping a hot water bottle between the cold sheets, grunted non-committally. ‘Don’t you think he’s handsome?’ ‘Get into bed, Lil. You’ll catch your death of cold.’ Lily left the window unwillingly. Helen drew the thick blackout curtains on the lingering yellow moon. ‘He was a hero in the war,’ Lily claimed. One of the girls had read about him in the newspaper. He captured a farmhouse and killed all the Huns.’ Helen held up the covers, Lily slid into bed reluctantly and Helen tucked her up like a child. ‘Did I sing well?’ ‘Like a bird.’ ‘They liked me, didn’t they?’ ‘They loved you.’ ‘Will you sit with me till I’m asleep?’ ‘I’ve got a bit of sewing to do, I’ll sit in my chair.’ Helen fetched her sewing and sat in the basketweave nursery chair under the gaslight. She was darning Lily’s stockings, her face screwed into tired lines. When Lily’s dark eyelashes closed, Helen put her work away and turned down the light. She paused for a moment in the darkness, watching her sleeping daughter, as she had done for the long years of Lily’s babyhood and childhood. ‘Goodnight,’ she said very quietly. ‘Goodnight, my dearest. Sweet dreams.’ Chapter Three (#ulink_ae78f3db-2e6c-50ff-8cd5-64fdcec68740) Lily had been stage-struck from babyhood when she would drape herself in her mother’s old feather boa and traipse around the little flat above the shop, singing in her true little voice. Against all the odds Helen Pears had forced the corner shop into profit and saved the money to send Lily to ballet school and to a singing teacher. Scrimping on the household bills and hiding money from her husband, she had managed to get Lily a training which had been good enough to win her a place in the chorus of the Palais, owned by the Edwardes Music Halls of Southsea, Bournemouth and Plymouth. It was not what Helen Pears had wanted for her daughter, but it was the best she could provide. And it was the first step in moving the girl away from the narrow streets and narrow lives of Portsmouth. Lily might have been a dancer in the chorus line for ever, if she had not caught the eye of the musical director, Charlie Smith, in the first week of rehearsals. ‘Here, Lily, can you sing?’ he asked during a break in one of the sessions. The dancers were scattered around the front seats of the darkened theatre, their feet up on the brass rail that surrounded the orchestra pit, drinking tea out of thermos flasks, eating sandwiches and gossiping. Charlie was picking out a tune on the piano. ‘Yes,’ Lily said, surprised. ‘Can you read music?’ Lily nodded. ‘Sing me this,’ he said, tossing a sheet of music at her. Charlie started the rippling chords of the introduction. Lily, her eyes still on the song sheet, walked to the orchestra pit, stepped casually over the brass rail and leaned against the piano to sing. There was a little silence when she had finished. ‘Very nice,’ he said casually. ‘Good voice production.’ ‘Back to work everybody, please,’ the stage manager called from the wings. ‘Mr Brett wants to see the greyhound number. Just mark it out. Miss Sylvia de Charmante will be here this afternoon. Until then please remember to leave room for her.’ Charlie winked at Lily. ‘Buy you lunch,’ he said. The girls climbed the catwalk up to the stage and got into line, leaving a space in the middle for the soloist. ‘She’s got a dog,’ the stage manager said dismally. ‘A greyhound thing. Remember to leave space for it. Madge, you’ll have to move stage left a bit. Lily, give her a bit more room.’ ‘What does the greyhound do?’ Charlie demanded. ‘Bites chorus girls, I hope,’ Mike, the SM, said without a flicker of a smile. ‘From the top, please.’ They ate lunch in a working-men’s caf? in one of the little roads near the Guildhall Square. Charlie drank tea and smoked cigarettes. Lily ate a bread and dripping sandwich and drank milk. ‘Disgusting,’ Charlie said. Lily beamed and shamelessly wiped her mouth on her sleeve. ‘Would you like to be a singer?’ Charlie asked. ‘Want to be a star?’ ‘Course,’ Lily said. ‘Who doesn’t?’ ‘Not very old, are you?’ Charlie asked. ‘Seventeen? Eighteen?’ ‘I’m seventeen and a half.’ Charlie grinned. ‘I could get you a spot. We’re an act short. We need a girl singer. But something a bit different. Want to do it?’ Lily gaped for a moment, but then shot him a quick suspicious look. ‘Why me?’ Charlie shrugged. ‘Why not? Someone’s got to do it. Who else is there?’ ‘Madge Sweet, Tricia de Vogue, Helena West.’ Lily ticked the names of three of the other five dancers off her fingers. ‘They can all sing.’ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve heard them all. They all sound like someone else. They’re all “in the style of” … I’ve got something else in mind. An idea I’ve had for a while. D’you want it or not?’ Lily grinned at him. ‘I told you already,’ she said. ‘I want to be a star. Course I want it.’ ‘Bring your ma here to see me this evening,’ Charlie said. ‘I have my tea here too.’ Back at the theatre, Charlie found the director talking on the stage door telephone, dictating a telegram to Miss Sylvia de Charmante at the Variety Theatre, London, due on the eleven o’clock train from Waterloo and still not arrived. Charlie took him gently by the elbow. ‘Lily Pears, in the chorus, I want her to try the song I told you about,’ Charlie said persuasively. ‘You said we could give it a go. There’s no-one else available and a big gap in the second half.’ William Brett flapped an irritated hand and said, thank God there were still some people who wanted work – and what more could he do to get that overpaid spoiled damned prima donna out of her hotel bed and down to Southsea for rehearsals? Charlie nodded and drifted across the stage and down the steps to the orchestra pit to play a few soft chords. ‘Places please, dancers,’ the stage manager said with infinite patience from the prompt corner. ‘I shall walk Miss Sylvia’s steps and you can dance around me.’ ‘Will you sing soprano as well?’ Charlie asked. The SM scowled at him. ‘Like a bleeding canary if that’s what it takes to get this show on the road,’ he said dourly. Lily waited till the afternoon tea break to tell the girls that she was to have a song in the show and then smiled smugly as they fluttered around her and kissed their congratulations. Her smile was as false as the kisses and the cries of delight. They were a company bonded by work and riven with jealousy. Lily’s luck was declared to be phenomenal. ‘I’m just so envious I am sick!’ Madge Sweet said, hugging Lily painfully hard. ‘How will you do your hair? And what will you wear?’ Helena asked. ‘You don’t have anything to wear, do you? This is your first show?’ ‘I expect my ma will get me something,’ Lily said. ‘She was in the business. There’s all her old costumes in a box at home.’ The girls burst into high malicious laughter. ‘A hundred-year-old tea gown is just what Mr Brett wants, I don’t think!’ Tricia said. ‘Moth-eaten fan!’ ‘Bustle and crinoline!’ Lily set her teeth and held her smile. ‘I’ll think of something.’ ‘You could wear your hair long,’ Madge suggested. She pulled the pins at the back of Lily’s head and Lily’s thick golden hair tumbled from the roll at the nape of her neck and fell down. It reached to her waist. ‘You could wear it with a hair band and sing a girl’s song. Alice in Wonderland type.’ ‘Little Lily Pears, the child star!’ Tricia suggested sarcastically. ‘I shan’t be Pears,’ Lily said with sudden decision. ‘I’ll use my ma’s stage name. She was Helen Valance. I’ll be Lily Valance.’ ‘Lily Valance! God ’elp us!’ Tricia said. ‘Dancers, please,’ the SM called. ‘The flower scene. Please remember that in front of you is a conjuror who will be taking flowers out of your baskets and coloured flags and ribbons and God knows what else. The conjuror isn’t here yet either. But leave a space for him centre stage. We don’t have the baskets yet, but remember you’ve got to hold them up towards him so he can do the trick. Have we got the music?’ ‘Music’s here,’ Charlie said from the pit. ‘One out of three isn’t bad, I suppose,’ the SM said miserably. ‘When you’re ready, Mr Smith.’ Helen Pears shut the shop early to meet Lily at the stage door and walk her home. She knew her daughter was old enough to walk home alone, and there would be no men at the stage door until the show was open. But Lily was her only child and, more than that, the only person in the world she had ever loved. Helen Pears’s life had been one of staunchly endured disappointments: a failed stage career, an impoverished corner shop, a husband who volunteered in a moment of drunken enthusiasm for a ship which blew up at sea before it had even fired a shot in anger. Only in the birth of her fair-headed daughter had she experienced a joy unalloyed by disappointment. Only in Lily’s future could she see a life that might, after all, be full of hope. Lily said nothing to her mother until they were crossing the road before the music hall. Then she breathlessly announced that she was to sing a solo. Helen stopped in the middle of the tram tracks and squeezed Lily’s hand so hard that she cried out. ‘This is your first step,’ Helen said. ‘Your first season and you’re further ahead than I ever got. This is your big chance, Lily. We’ll make it work for you.’ Lily smiled up at her mother. ‘As soon as I can earn enough we’ll sell the shop,’ she promised. ‘As soon as I earn enough I’ll buy you a house in Southsea, on the seafront, somewhere really nice.’ ‘I’ll talk to this Charlie Smith,’ Helen said with decision. ‘And to Mr Brett too, if needs be.’ ‘Charlie said to meet him for tea,’ Lily said, leading the way. ‘He wants to talk to you.’ Charlie was sitting at the window. He half-rose to greet them and shook hands with Helen. The woman behind the counter brought them thick white mugs of tea. ‘We can go back to the theatre and try something out,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m working late tonight anyway. Sylvia de Charmante’s music has arrived and I have to adapt it for our orchestra. We can try out Lily’s song. I’ve got an idea for it.’ ‘Nothing tasteless,’ Helen stipulated. Charlie met her determined gaze across the scrubbed wood table. ‘Your daughter has class, Mrs Pears,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to lose that.’ The theatre was very cool and quiet and empty, smelling hauntingly of stale beer and cigarettes. The rows of seats stretched back from the stage until they vanished into the darkness. The pale balcony floated in the dusty air. There was a hush in the theatre like that in an empty church, a waiting hush. Charlie’s little green light in the orchestra pit was the only illumination. Lily and Helen, crossing the darkened stage, were like ghosts of old dancers moving silently towards an audience that had vanished, called up and gone. On the left of the stage was the rickety catwalk and steps. Helen walked gingerly down and sat in the front row near Charlie’s piano. ‘Can we have some lights?’ Charlie called to a technician working somewhere backstage. A couple of houselights came on, and one working stage light. ‘Sit down,’ Charlie said to Helen. ‘I have an idea for her.’ Lily stood at her ease in the centre of the stage. She smiled at her mother. ‘D’you know this?’ Charlie handed a sheet of music up to her. Lily gave a little gasp of surprise and then giggled. ‘I know it!’ she said. ‘I’ve never sung it!’ ‘Try it,’ Charlie suggested. He played a few rippling chords and nodded to Helen. ‘Just listen,’ he said. The beat of the music was regular, like a hymn. Helen knew the clear simple notes but could not think of the song. Then Lily on the stage, half-lit, threw back her head and sang Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Helen felt tears prickle behind her eyes as the sounds arched upwards into the bell-shaped ceiling, and the piano accompaniment formed a perfectly paced symmetry with the rhythm and cadence of the song. It was a holy moment, like the sound of a blackbird singing in no-man’s-land. When Lily was silent and the last chord had died away, Helen found her cheeks were wet. ‘That was lovely,’ she said. She fumbled in her handbag for her handkerchief. ‘Just lovely,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly music hall!’ Lily complained. She dropped to one knee to speak to Charlie in the pit. ‘I can’t do that in front of an audience.’ Charlie grinned at her, turned and spoke to Helen. ‘Just wait a moment,’ he said. ‘Think of Lily in a chorister’s outfit. Red gown and a white surplice, white ruff.’ ‘Blue,’ Helen said instantly. ‘Brings out the colour of her eyes.’ ‘Blue gown,’ Charlie agreed. ‘She comes out. No-one knows what to expect. She sings like that. Just simply. Like an angel. Everyone cries. All the old ladies, all the tarts, all the drunks. They’ll weep into their beer and they’ll love her.’ ‘They’ll laugh themselves sick,’ Lily said. Charlie shook his head. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, Lily, and I know what tickles their fancy. They like their ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays and they like a class act. They like something that makes them feel pious. They love a good weep.’ Helen nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But if they heckle …’ Charlie shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘London maybe. Birmingham maybe. Glasgow, certainly. But not here. And not anywhere on tour. They want a good time, a good laugh and a good weep. They’ll adore her.’ ‘I’m a chorus girl!’ Lily protested. ‘Not a choir girl!’ ‘Not a choir girl,’ Charlie agreed. He nodded to Helen. ‘Keep thinking the ruff and the white surplice. Keep thinking Christmas cards and carols and weddings.’ He climbed out of the pit and strode up the catwalk. ‘Let your hair down,’ he said to Lily. He stood behind her and folded her sheet of music into a little fan. ‘Hold this under your chin,’ he said. He nodded to Helen. ‘Think of a spotlight, very white, and no make-up at all. Perhaps a little pale powder. No lipstick.’ He scooped up Lily’s mass of blonde hair and folded it so that it was as short as a bob. ‘Choir boy,’ he said. ‘Ain’t I a genius?’ There was a full minute of silence from the auditorium. ‘You’d never cut her hair,’ Helen said finally, outraged. ‘Bob it,’ Charlie said. ‘So it’s the same length all around. She has a side parting and it comes down to the middle of her ears both sides. We oil it back a little bit, off her face. Nothing shiny, nothing slick. Just a newly washed boy. A well-scrubbed choir boy. A little angel from heaven.’ Lily giggled irrepressibly, but stood still as Charlie had ordered her, holding her folded sheet music under her chin while Charlie held her hair in handfuls off her neck. ‘A young Vesta Tilley,’ Helen said incredulously. ‘Delicious,’ Charlie said. ‘Tasteful,’ Helen conceded. ‘And hidden oomph,’ Charlie said, looking over Lily’s shoulder. ‘She’s just gorgeous. There isn’t a public school boy in England that wouldn’t fall down and die for her. Ain’t I right?’ Helen nodded. As he sensed her agreement Charlie dropped Lily’s hair and took the mock-ruff from under her chin. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’ he asked. She shrugged and grinned. ‘I’ve wanted my hair bobbed for ages,’ she said. He laughed. ‘As easy as that?’ ‘Ma said I had to keep it long,’ Lily said. ‘If I can have my hair bobbed I’ll sing whatever you like!’ They never rehearsed Lily’s song again. She tried it through once more with Charlie that night and he gave her the score and told her to learn the words and practise with her singing teacher. Mr Brett the director was resigned to the experiment. Charlie had been batting on for years about a choir boy number and with the conjuror drunk in Swansea and Miss Sylvia de Charmante still in London, he had neither time nor energy for an audition and an argument. Besides, Charlie Smith was rarely wrong. ‘So what are you singing?’ the girls asked in the crowded dressing room. The costumes, hung on hangers on hooks on the wall, bulged out into the room, shrouded in cotton sheets to keep them clean. Lily, as the youngest and newest dancer, had her hairbrush and comb perched on the inconvenient corner of the table, nearest to the door and overwhelmed by hanging gowns. ‘It’s a classical song,’ Lily said. ‘Charlie Smith’s idea.’ ‘He’s off his rocker,’ Madge said. ‘You should speak to Mr Brett and tell him you won’t do it.’ ‘I couldn’t do that.’ ‘You ought to,’ Helena said. ‘It’s not fair making you sing something no-one wants to hear. You should try “Blue-eyes”.’ She sang the chorus in a hard nasal tone, nodding at Lily. ‘Or “Walking my Girl”,’ one of the other dancers suggested. She sang the first verse. ‘No!’ someone else exclaimed. ‘That wouldn’t suit Lily, she ought to have something saucy!’ There was a gale of sarcastic laughter. ‘I can see your ma letting you do something saucy and tying your garter during the chorus!’ Susie said. ‘What are you wearing anyway?’ ‘A long blue gown,’ Lily said mendaciously. ‘Charlie told Ma what I should have and she’s making it for me.’ ‘You’re not going to set the town alight,’ Madge said, without troubling to conceal her pleasure. ‘A classical song and a home-made dress! Not so lucky as you thought then, Lily.’ ‘Probably be dropped after the Southsea opening anyway,’ Susie said. ‘We’re running hours too long.’ Lily kept her head down and her mouth shut. The night before the dress rehearsal Lily and her mother took a tram up to Commercial Road, Southsea, the best part of town, for Lily to have her hair cut. ‘Not a woman. No woman in the history of the world has ever known how to cut hair,’ Charlie decreed. ‘You’re to go to David’s, on Commercial Road. I’ve told him you’ll be there at seven. He’s keeping open just for you so there won’t be any men around. You can be quite private.’ Helen had frowned. ‘Come on, Ma!’ Lily had urged. ‘It can’t hurt.’ David’s shop was closed for the night as Charlie had predicted. The blinds were discreetly down. ‘Charlie Smith told me you wanted a straight bob,’ David said. Lily sat in the comfortable barber’s chair, her feet tucked up on the foot rail, looking at herself in the mirror. ‘No fringe, just the same length all around,’ she said. ‘Like a boy’s.’ David nodded and took the pins from her hair. The tumble of gold silky hair fell down. He glanced at Helen. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Don’t ask me, I could weep,’ Helen said grimly. ‘Just do it.’ Helen looked at the floor but she heard the snipping of the scissors and the soft fall of heavy hair. The floor was a patterned linoleum, smart and easy to keep clean. Out of the corner of her eye Helen could see a fallen lock of deep gold. ‘Take a look,’ David said after a while. Helen glanced up. Lily was stunning. Firstly she noticed Lily’s long neck and the way she held her head. She could see the shape of her little head, her small ears. Helen walked slowly around to the front of the chair. Lily’s hair was combed smoothly to one side, just long enough to tuck behind her ears. Helen had never seen her daughter’s features so clearly, she stared at her as if she were a stranger. The clear lines of her face were exposed, the bones of her cheeks, her forehead, her nose. The curve of her mouth and her huge dark-lashed deep blue eyes. She was a beautiful androgynous object of desire. A tomboy, a romantic poet, a St Joan. David was watching Helen’s face with a half-smile. ‘Charlie’s a clever man,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you have something a bit special here.’ Helen nodded, her eyes still on Lily’s rapt self-absorbed beauty. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’ ‘What a lark!’ Lily breathed adoringly at her reflection. ‘What a giddy lark.’ Chapter Four (#ulink_e17f3360-3af3-5045-b7ce-dfdcac8b6f7d) There were shrieks and screams in the dressing room the next day when Lily took her cloche hat off her newly bobbed head but the girls were too busy with their own worries to interrogate her. The technical rehearsal in the morning went as badly as everyone expected. The backdrops and props had been kept to the bare essentials of a touring set which would be loaded and unloaded all along the south coast; but even so there was a problem with a quick change of scene which had to be done over and over again until the crew could do it quickly and noiselessly while the comedian told jokes in front of the curtains and the dancers raced down the stone steps backstage to their cramped dressing room to change their costumes. ‘I’ll break me bloody neck on these stairs,’ Madge cursed as she scurried down the steps in her silver high heels. They worked through the dinner break, snacking on sandwiches and tea while William Brett, with infinite and weary patience, went through the lighting cues again. One of the stage lads went out and bought hot meat pies for everyone at three in the afternoon. Lily went to eat hers in the dressing room. ‘Not in here! Not in here!’ Susie screamed. ‘Mike’ll kill you if he sees you taking hot food into a dressing room.’ Lily froze on the threshold, backed rapidly into the corridor and demolished the pie in three giant bites. They took their dinner break at four. ‘Total run through at six o’clock. I want everyone here at five thirty,’ William said. ‘And we’ll run through as if for real. I’m not stopping for anything. We open tomorrow and I want to see it as for real. No changes, no accidents.’ They went out for their tea in a dismal group to Charlie’s caf?. Sylvia de Charmante, who had arrived that very day from London in a gentleman’s car and a cloud of apologies, came with them, and the drunken conjuror as well. Miss de Charmante was graciousness itself, promising the woman behind the counter a complimentary ticket to the show if she could make her a cup of tea just as she liked it. Charlie sat in his usual seat like a sardonic pixie and kept quiet. ‘D’you like my hair?’ Lily finally prompted him. He nodded briefly. ‘It’s how I thought it would be.’ Lily waited for him to say something more but Charlie only drank his tea and smiled at her. ‘Scared?’ he asked finally. ‘Petrified!’ Lily said with a quavery laugh. Charlie grinned. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bet running on it, Lily. I’ve got a guinea on you.’ Lily’s face lit up. ‘Have you?’ ‘It’s time we went,’ Charlie said to everyone generally. The conjuror extracted a silver hip flask from his pocket and splashed a measure of dark treacly rum into his tea cup. ‘Bloody Southsea,’ he said in his rich plummy voice. ‘My God, I hate the seaside.’ Lily watched him, fascinated, as he downed a mixture of cold tea and rum. ‘Do you?’ she asked. He glanced at her with brief interest and looked away. ‘I just said so,’ he replied with massive dignity. The chorus girls opened the show with a charleston number, then they changed into long gowns while the comic was on, and strolled in a slow languid walk from one side of the tiny stage to the other while Sylvia de Charmante sang her first song, a mournful ballad. Two of the girls assisted Arnold the conjuror’s first appearance and came back to the dressing room giggling about his fumbling and Mr Brett’s silent white-faced anger in the front row. Then there was a juggling act – a brother and sister team who had arrived only that morning from Dover – and then the interval. Lily was on after the opening song from the chorus. She took her choir boy gown to the ladies’ toilet. She did not want to change in front of the other girls and endure their ribaldry when she was already sick with nerves. She sat on the toilet with her cotton camiknickers rolled up and her fists pushed into her churning stomach. ‘Oh God,’ she said miserably. She stood up and unwrapped the precious gown from its white sheet, then the snowy surplice and ruff. She had tried them on at home and she knew she could do the fastenings. But now her fingers were trembling with nerves and she could not hook the back at all. In the end she twisted the whole gown around and did most of the hooks in front and then pushed it around to the back. The surplice was just thrown over the gown and her mother had put a single popper on the starched ruff which Lily could see in the broken triangle of mirror shoved behind a water pipe on the wall. Her face was pale, even her lips were white. ‘Oh God,’ Lily said. She could hear the dancers clattering up the steps to the stage and then she heard the thump of the orchestra for their number. Lily’s stomach suddenly contracted with nausea and she had to pull up her gown and undo her knickers again. Nothing came but a trickle of urine. Lily wiped herself and pulled the chain. The cistern was slow to fill. It would not flush. Lily bundled the robe to one side and put both hands down to try to button her knickers. By the time she managed it her face was flushed and the gown crumpled. ‘Oh God, I look awful.’ At least her hair was perfect. Lily smoothed it flat again, pushed it just a little more off her face. She felt as if she had been waiting in the cold evil-smelling toilet for days and days. She heard the SM’s boy coming up the stairs and his knock on the door. ‘You in there, Lily?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you sick?’ ‘No.’ ‘Three minutes.’ Lily turned to the mirror again, straightened the ruff, smoothed the surplice. She turned to the door with absolute reluctance. Suddenly she needed to pee again. ‘Oh God,’ Lily said miserably. ‘I can’t. I mustn’t! There isn’t time!’ She opened the door and peered out. There was no-one in the corridor. She tiptoed down the stairs and through the door to the wings of the stage. The girls were near the end of their number, banging out the beat. Lily went and stood behind the stage manager’s desk, trying to blend into the shadows. He glanced behind at the movement and then gave a double-take. ‘My God, you scared me to death. I thought you were a ghost. What the hell are you supposed to be?’ ‘Choir boy.’ ‘Charlie Smith must have gone off his head,’ the SM said bluntly. ‘Has Mr Brett seen you?’ ‘Not yet.’ The man buried his face in his hands as if he could not stand the prospect. ‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘We’re all dead. But you especially are dead and buried.’ ‘I feel it,’ Lily said, quite without sarcasm. ‘I wish I was.’ The girls clattered to a standstill. ‘Applause applause,’ came the weary voice from the dark auditorium. ‘No announcement at all now. Lily comes straight on.’ The girls, clearing the stage, pushed past Lily as she stepped forward. She just heard Madge say, ‘Wait a minute, what’re you wearing?’ and then she was under the dazzling hot lights and she could see nothing but Charlie’s face and his raised hand, and a quick bright nod to her and the regular sweet notes of the start of ‘Jesu, Joy …’ Lily, her mouth dry and her throat so tight that she knew she would be mute for the rest of her life, stood still with her hands clasped before her and longed for a pee. She opened her mouth on cue, knowing no sound would come, and then she heard, as if it were someone else singing, the sweet steady notes in their ordered simplicity. ‘Jes-u, joy (wait) of man’s desir-ing (wait wait wait) holy wis-dom, lo-ve most bright …’ ‘Golly,’ Lily thought. ‘It’s all right.’ It was as if her own stage-fright had moved her to a place where she could feel neither nerves nor her own body. She sang clearly and simply and her ears could hear the rightness of the sounds, and even enjoy them, as if they were being sung by another girl. As if it were not Lily Pears, sick with fear, under a burning hot spotlight, with all the Palais Dancers crowded in the wings behind her, waiting to laugh. She sang as she had been taught, simply and clearly, and held the last note. The final chords died away like ringing bells. ‘You win a guinea, Charlie. Very nice indeed. Applause, applause, weep, weep. Next,’ William said from the darkness. Charlie threw a grin at Lily and the drum rolled. ‘Come off,’ the SM hissed behind her. ‘Come on! Clear the stage. You’ve had your moment of glory, duckie. It’s someone else now.’ Mesmerio the hypnotist, splendid in a black tie and tails, pushed past Lily and stepped on to the stage. Lily, still dazzled by the lights, stepped into the wings and went slowly down the stairs to the dressing room. The girls, silenced by a glower from the SM, went with her like a patrol with a prisoner in their midst. ‘Well!’ Madge said, outraged, as soon as the dressing room door was shut. ‘I never saw such a performance in my life!’ ‘Pie!’ ‘I thought she was sweet! You were sweet, Lily!’ ‘She looked more like a boy than a girl!’ ‘Charlie must be off his head!’ ‘Too scared to hang around the dockyard more like!’ ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I always thought Charlie Smith liked boys – now look what he’s done to Lily!’ Lily undid her ruff and pulled her surplice off over her head, hardly hearing them. Helena undid the hooks of the gown for her. ‘They’re all crooked. You should have got someone to help you.’ ‘I will tomorrow,’ Lily said vaguely. ‘Where did you learn to sing like that – proper singing?’ ‘With my teacher.’ Lily felt a deep sleepy weariness, as if all the excitement and nervousness had drained out of her body, leaving her empty and exhausted. ‘I’ve had singing lessons since I was little.’ ‘You ought to be a proper singer, opera or something.’ Lily smiled, shook her head. ‘I’m not good enough,’ she said. She hung her gown with the surplice and the ruff on the hanger and then wrapped the sheet around them. Helena thrust her next costume towards her. It was a scarlet froth of tulle with a black tightly-laced boned bodice for the finale – a can-can. Lily stepped into it and Helena spun her around and did up the hooks at the back. ‘You all right? You’re very quiet.’ Lily’s little face was pale against the harsh cherry-red of the gown. ‘I’m fine.’ The boy knocked on the door. ‘Finale. Five minutes.’ There was a rush towards the mirror. Madge screamed for someone to do her up quick! and then the six of them burst out of the dressing room and clattered up the narrow stone steps to the wings. Sylvia de Charmante was singing her final song. It was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Lily – last of the line in the wings – leaned back against the cold wall and gritted her teeth. She hated the song. She hated all the war songs. She hated their sentimental lushness, she hated the stupidity of men whistling them as they marched to the Front. She had taken her father’s death as an act of folly, not heroism. Alone of all the kids in the street, Lily hated the war, and disliked and blamed Kitchener when everyone else worshipped him. Lily never knitted socks and balaclavas, she never joined a gang to collect scrap paper. A solitary rebel, she pretended that the war, which overshadowed her childhood and drained it of joy, did not exist. ‘Applause, applause, weep, weep. Very nice, Miss de Charmante,’ William said from the front row. ‘Now, Sylvia, step forward. Gauze down. Lights down. Can-can backdrop down. Sylvia, you’re still bowing, taking flowers. Then you walk slowly slowly slowly across the stage and you’re gone. And we should be ready … now.’ Absolutely nothing happened. ‘Mike!’ William said very quietly through his teeth. The SM waved frantically to the stage hands. ‘Clear the stage, we’re going up!’ he hissed. ‘Go!’ The drummer gave a long exciting roll on the drums and Charlie at the piano with the trumpeter and the two violins burst into a spirited thumping rendition of the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ – the traditional can-can music. Lily, with Helena’s hand firmly clutching her boned waist, and her hand behind Helena’s back gripping Madge’s wrist, started marking the steps as the first girl on the stage – Susie – danced out sideways. Lily’s head went up; she loved the can-can. She grinned at the morose SM as she danced out under the hot lights, matching her kick to the others, then keeping the rhythm of the music with the low half-kicks as the line folded in on itself and Lily and Susie were face to face and then pairing off, dancing around, in pairs through the middle and into the line of the can-can again. It was a short number. Can-can was spectacular, but exhausting. Charlie played it at the edge of safety – as fast as he dared. The girls’ screams as they kicked, or cartwheeled, or jumped into the splits, were screams of protest, not excitement. But Lily loved it. The relief at her song being over, her simple delight at being on stage and the absolute fun of the music and the dancing, and Charlie’s darkened face in the orchestra pit, kept her feet pounding on the stage. The final dance step and dive into the splits came too soon for her. Lily stayed in the splits, her head up, her face radiant. ‘Applause, applause, rapturous applause,’ William said miserably. ‘Walk down.’ The chorus girls stepped smartly up, walked forward in time to Charlie’s brisk march, took a bow and then fell back either side of the stage. In order of increasing importance the stars entered from the rear of the stage, strode forwards, took a bow and stepped to one side. Arnold the drunken magician stood in front of Lily and she could see nothing more than his back and his outflung hand inviting applause. The curtain fell, throwing the stage into twilight. The cast formed themselves into two straight lines facing the curtain, waiting for it to rise again. They bowed. The curtain fell. The music reached a closing phrase and stopped. It was as if the strings of puppets had been snapped. All the smiles were switched off and everybody slumped, ostentatiously weary. ‘That fool on the light had me in blue,’ Sylvia de Charmante exclaimed. ‘Darling girl, if you don’t hold your basket steady I’ll be taking ribbons off your tits, not out of your basket,’ Arnold said to Madge. ‘I can’t run around the stage after you.’ ‘We were too bunched up in the can-can,’ Helena complained. ‘I was squashed in the middle.’ ‘I can’t spread out any more,’ Susie replied. ‘I was half in the wings as it was.’ The curtains rose slowly, as if to signal this was work, not performance. ‘Get changed and then out here for notes in five minutes,’ William said. ‘All of you. Five minutes only.’ Lily looked towards the orchestra pit to Charlie. He was checking his sheet music and did not look up. ‘Come on, Lily,’ said one of the girls. ‘We’ve only got five minutes.’ The ‘notes’ were William’s final chance to make corrections. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. The stars he spoke to individually. Sylvia de Charmante was soothed and complimented until she consented to sit down and listen to the general comments. She even agreed to speed up ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. ‘It can sound like a dirge otherwise,’ William said tactfully. ‘It’s the song. It’s draggy. I love the way you do it, but it needs to move along.’ He was not so tender with the feelings of the dancers, nor the jugglers, nor the conjuror. ‘Arnold, get yourself sorted out,’ he said. ‘We could see the ribbons in the baskets. It needs to be quicker.’ ‘The girl must hold the basket still,’ Arnold said, looking reproachfully at Madge. ‘She will,’ William said with quiet menace. ‘Now, jugglers – I know it’s difficult on a stage raked as steeply as this one; but you’re hired to catch the bloody things, not fling them past each other into the wings.’ ‘Hypnotist – very nice. Lily – very nice. Tumblers – very nice. Can you speed up the final position a bit? It’s slow.’ The tumblers nodded. ‘The walk-down.’ There was a brief depressed silence. ‘Do it again,’ William said. ‘I’m sorry, but we’ll do it again and again until it goes march-march-march. You’re trailing down like you’re off to the Somme. I want a bit of briskness. I want a bit of life. Back up on stage and don’t wander off. You’re all going to the right places but you’re taking too long. I want it quick. I want it catchy. I want you to run if you have to. Gentlemen – you can certainly run. Ladies – an elegant scuttle please. March-march-march. Let’s get a move on.’ There was a general murmur of irritation and boredom and then the cast went back up the catwalk to the stage and took their places. ‘Chorus girls, you’re in your line, in the splits. Don’t bunch up. Spread out. There’s only six of you, there’s no need to advertise it. Spread out and look like twenty.’ Lily wriggled over sideways. ‘Now, Charlie! Can we have the whole thing quicker?’ ‘You can do. But it’ll be more of a gallop than a march.’ ‘Gallop the bloody thing then. Let’s have the Charge of the Light Brigade, not an advance up the Menin Road. I want it to move!’ Charlie nodded to the orchestra. One, two-three, four,’ he said quickly. ‘That speed. Off we go. One, two-three, four.’ The drum rolled. The chorus line leaped to their feet, stepped briskly forward and bowed. Lily found herself almost running backwards, trying to keep time to the music and get to her place. The stars stormed down the centre of the stage, bowed, and dashed to their positions. Only Sylvia de Charmante swayed down, serene and unruffled, at the same speed as before, smiling. ‘Thank you,’ William said. ‘Hold it there.’ Lily waited with malicious anticipation for Sylvia de Charmante to receive one of William’s pithy criticisms. ‘Much, much better,’ he said. ‘That’s the speed. That’s fine. Sylvia, you were gorgeous. Just a tiny bit faster to the front and the audience will have longer to see you. You’re lost at the back of the stage, we don’t know you’re there. Come downstage quicker and you have all the time in the world in the spotlight taking your bow.’ Lily eyed William with growing respect. ‘Ok then, we’re done,’ William said. ‘Over to you, Mike.’ The SM came out from the wings, his shirt blotchy with sweat. ‘Tea matin?e tomorrow at three,’ he said. ‘Everyone here by two thirty. Any problems with costumes, see Mary in wardrobe straight away. Two thirty tomorrow. Goodnight everybody. Well done.’ Lily went back to the dressing room and found her hat and coat. The hat had fallen off the peg to the floor and was dusty. Lily brushed it absent-mindedly and pulled it on her head. She wanted to see Charlie. She went back up the stairs to the stage. The crew were tidying up and the SM had gone from his corner. Lily stepped out on to the stage and looked out into the darkness. With the stage lights dimmed she could see the auditorium. Immediately below the stage were the stalls. Each seat had a little bracket where a tray for drinks or tea could be clipped. Lily tried to imagine the seats filled with people talking, laughing, drinking and flirting. At the back of the theatre was the bar with a half-glass partition to separate the drinkers and promenaders from the seated audience. Lily would have to sing clearly and loudly enough to be heard over their chatter and the shouting of orders. Above them was the circle, and behind the circle seats, the circle bar with waiter service. Lily looked up at the vaulted ceiling painted blue with white and pink clouds and a yellow sunburst in the middle. She breathed in the smell of the theatre – stale cigarette smoke, cold air, the smell of emptiness where there had been a crowd. It smelled of magic. Anything could happen here. Lily stepped forward, holding out her arms as she had seen Sylvia de Charmante do, as if to embrace an adoring crowd. She bowed with immense dignity as if she were overwhelmed with praise. When she came up she was smiling for a shower of bouquets. Chapter Five (#ulink_293d0b7e-8db2-59d6-b44b-d2c1ceb82046) Helen walked Lily to the theatre for her debut at the tea matin?e and then went around to the front of the house and treated herself to a ticket in the circle. Lily had been weepy with nerves and Helen had smiled calmly and told her to fear nothing. Only now that the stage door was closed behind her daughter could she acknowledge how anxious she was feeling. She sat in the little seat and ordered tea. She had not treated herself to such an outing in years but when the tea tray came, and the sandwiches, and the slice of cake, she found her mouth was so dry that she could taste nothing. Charlie Smith came out with the orchestra, looking handsome and young in his black tie and tails. Helen smiled down at him, knowing he could not see her, willing him to help Lily in performance as she knew he had helped her in rehearsal. So much depended on the girl doing well. Not just the financial investment – all those saved shillings and pennies through all the hard years – but Lily’s whole future. Helen could not see a way for Lily to escape from the backstreets of her home unless her talent could carry her away, far away, to distant music halls and perhaps even theatres. Lily might be one of the prettiest girls in Portsmouth but that was not enough. She had to be seen, she had to be perceived as a talented girl, an exceptional girl. If this chance did not work for her she would be behind the counter of the Highland Road grocery shop for life. Helen put her tea tray to one side. She could not bear to think of Lily working a twelve- or fourteen-hour day, six days a week, to earn a wage that would barely feed her. The first half of the show passed with frightening speed. Helen stayed in her seat for the interval, then the houselights went down, Charlie slipped into his place at the front of the orchestra and opened the second half with the chorus girls’ number. Helen barely saw them. The girls dashed off stage and then there was a brief silence and the measured beautiful beats of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ started and the spotlight shone down on Lily. At the first note Helen relaxed. It was flawless. Lily’s pale gold hair and pale face were luminous in the spotlight, her voice as clear as an angel’s. Helen let the music wash over her, freeing her from anxiety. When the last note came and Lily held it clearly, without a quaver of nerves, Helen found that she was shaking with sobs, crying very softly for joy in her daughter’s talent, and pride. Helen went backstage after the performance with her face calm and powdered. She gave Lily a swift hug at the stage door and promised to collect her after the evening show. She did not think Lily would need a chaperone, the song was not one likely to attract the rougher sort of man, nor even an idle gentleman. But that night, at the stage door, waiting for Lily, were Stephen and David. Helen Pears realized then that Lily’s choices for her future were wider and more hopeful than she had ever imagined. For the next week Stephen divided his time between his work at the family legal practice, and thinking of Lily. He went to see the show twice more. He liked her singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, but he hated her dancing the can-can. When she was on the stage he did not look at her or at any of the girls but glared around the bar at other men. If anyone had passed a comment about her, he would have hit him. After the show he would wait beside the big Argyll with Coventry at the wheel for Lily and her mother and drive them home. He took them out to dinner a second time, at the fish restaurant just off the seafront. He persuaded Lily to try oysters – which she thought disgusting. He ordered lobster in hot butter for her. Helen let him take Lily for a drive along the seafront in the afternoon, but not out into the countryside. The early May weather was promising. Stephen wanted a picnic. He wanted to sit with Lily in a hayfield and watch larks in the sky. He wanted to lie back on a tartan rug and sleep for once without dreams. He wanted to look from Portsdown Hill across half of Hampshire without planning in his mind where he would put a machine gun post to defend the summit, or calculate how long it would take to dig a good deep trench across those quiet fields. The hayfields were pale watery green, starred with thousands of wildflowers, rich with butterflies and busy with nesting birds. It was a different world, a different countryside from the lands that had been his home for two and a half years. He could not believe that fields could sprout such different crops as purple vetch and white clover here, and shell cases and dead men over there. The long flat Flanders plain must have been green and growing once. He could not imagine the Menin Road verged with primroses, wet with bluebells. It was another world. There could be no connection between that place which he had left far, far behind him, and this Hampshire, in this spring of 1920 when Stephen fell in love. He did not know how to court her. Lily’s bright light was for everyone. She smiled with equal radiance on him, on Coventry, on Charlie Smith, on a passer-by who asked her for directions to Clarence Parade. The joyous expectancy of Lily’s smile was a universal currency. Anyone could buy. Stephen longed to ration her. She loved his car. She learned to enjoy the comfort of a ride home instead of the walk to the tram stop and then the cold wait. She liked to walk into a restaurant on his arm. But the smile she gave a waiter for pulling out her chair was no less grateful than the smile she gave Stephen for paying the bill. She had no sense of money, he could not buy her. If he gave her a bouquet of hot-house roses, sugar pink in tight sweet buds, she would exclaim with pleasure; but she would be just as delighted with a primrose in a pot from Charlie Smith. She had no sense of status either, and Stephen was uncomfortable with Lily’s blithe belief that the only reason she had not met his mother and visited his house for tea was because his father was so ill that they never entertained. Mrs Pears understood the situation perfectly, and Stephen feared her dark knowledgeable glance. She knew very well that he was using Lily to amuse himself while he settled to the urgent peacetime tasks of repairing the family business and choosing a girl from his own class for marriage. Mrs Pears held the line against him like a veteran gunner at a salient point. He feared that she would poison Lily against him, abuse him behind his back even though she ate his dinners. But then he realized that Lily was not someone whose mind you could poison. If you said something disagreeable or spiteful, Lily would look at you, rather wide-eyed and surprised. If it was a funny piece of malice – and he had heard Charlie Smith compare Sylvia de Charmante to a Jersey cow in season – then Lily would scream with laughter and then cram her palm against her mouth to muffle helpless giggles. But if she heard spiteful talk, without the sugar of wit, Lily looked somehow anxious – as if it were her own reputation under attack. And then she would look puzzled and ask one of her frighteningly candid questions – ‘Do you dislike him then?’ Stephen learned that Mrs Pears would not oppose him directly. She would bide her time and watch him. When he escorted them home he could hold Lily’s hand in the shadowy darkness of the car. But always Mrs Pears waited in the shop while he said goodnight to Lily on the doorstep. In the ten days while he drove Lily home, and out along the seafront, and paid for expensive dinners, he never even kissed her goodnight. It was Lily who brought matters to a head. ‘I shall miss you, Stephen,’ she said easily. They were taking tea at a caf? in Palmerston Road. Mrs Pears had unbent so far as to allow Stephen to take Lily out to tea without a chaperone. Lily had eaten a hearty tea: sandwiches, tea-cakes, scones and a handsome wedge of chocolate cake. ‘Oh, that was divine!’ she said. ‘Don’t they feed you at the theatre? Go on, you can have another slice.’ ‘D’you think I dare? No! The waitress is looking at me. She’ll think I’m a starving Belgian. I won’t! But I’ll have another cup of tea.’ As she poured her tea, her earlier sentence suddenly struck Stephen. ‘Why should you miss me? I’m not going away.’ Lily beamed at him. She had a little smudge of chocolate cake at the corner of her mouth. Stephen longed to lean forwards and wipe it off with his napkin. ‘No, but I am. This is a touring show. We go to Southampton next Monday.’ For a moment he felt nothing, as if her words were the whine of a bomb which would rock the ground with a dull terrifying thud a few moments after the incoming shriek. ‘Going? But when will you be back?’ Lily gazed upwards in thought. ‘Um. July,’ she said finally. ‘We’re touring the south coast from here to Plymouth. Misery, misery! How will I ever get enough to eat in Plymouth without you!’ Stephen said nothing. He could imagine only too well how Lily would be wined and dined in Plymouth. ‘Is your mother going?’ Lily shook her head. ‘She can’t get anyone to mind the shop. Well, she could get Sarah. But she doesn’t really trust Sarah to manage on her own. So she has to wait until she can get Clare – but she’s a school teacher, so she can’t come until the school holidays and even then …’ ‘Never mind that now! How will you manage, on your own?’ ‘I’ll be all right! I’ll be with the other girls in digs. The company books ahead for us, you know. It’ll be just like being here. Same show. Same work. The only thing that will be different is I shan’t have you to buy me lovely teas!’ Stephen could feel a shudder starting up through him. He felt very cold. He felt like smashing the table and shouting at Lily, or at the waitress, or at damned Helen Pears for her careful – no, her suspicious – chaperonage of him and then her feckless way of letting her daughter draggle off all around the south coast with God knows who. ‘You’ll be lonely.’ ‘Oh no.’ Lily had been looking out of the window at the people walking by. ‘Stephen! D’you see that woman in that most extraordinary hat! I hope it’s not a new fashion. It’s enormous!’ She glanced back at him and noticed his dark glower. ‘Oh, sorry! No, I won’t be lonely. Some of the girls are nice, and Arnold is all right when you get to know him, and the jugglers are really good fun. Charlie Smith is quite wonderful. It’s a nice company. It’ll be fun going from one town to another, all together. We’ll travel by train, you know. Arnold is going to teach me how to play poker. And Henry – that’s Mesmerio – says he’ll teach me how to hypnotize people! It’ll be good fun. And who knows, someone might see me and like me!’ ‘What?’ ‘A producer or a director or a manager. Someone might be on holiday and spot me! It could happen. Charlie says it could happen. And then I’d be off to London!’ Stephen nodded slowly. ‘So I won’t see you until July,’ he said. Lily smiled at him happily. ‘No.’ Stephen nodded at the waitress and paid the bill. ‘Let’s drive back along the seafront,’ he said. Coventry was parked on the other side of the road, watching for them. But as Stephen took Lily’s arm to guide her across the road a man shuffled forward on a ramshackle home-made wheelchair, a tea chest on little castors. ‘Sir!’ he cried. ‘Captain! D’you remember me?’ Stephen turned. The man was a pitiful sight. His legs had been amputated at the thighs and his trousers were pinned neatly over the stumps. He was wearing an army greatcoat which had been roughly cut to blazer-length to keep his chest and shoulders warm. Around his neck he had a large placard reading: ‘Old soldier, Portsmouth Battalion, wife and three children to support. Please help.’ ‘Captain! I can’t remember your name but you were in command of us at Beselare. D’you remember, Sir? I lost my legs there. We got stuck in the shellhole and couldn’t get out? D’you remember we were there all night with the shells going from one side to another like bleeding birds? And Corporal Cray bit through his tongue to stop himself screaming?’ Stephen had shrunk back against Lily. His mouth was working but he could get no words to come. ‘D … d … d …’ ‘D’you remember you gave me morphine from my field pack and joked with me? And we had nothing to drink. D’you remember how hot it was that long day?’ Stephen was blanched white. He stared at the crippled man as if he were a ghost. ‘Oh, go away!’ Lily said roughly. Stephen swallowed his stammer in surprise. ‘Go away!’ Lily said brusquely. ‘Go down to the British Legion and get some work you can do with your hands. You should be ashamed of yourself, begging in the street.’ ‘I can’t get work, missis …’ the man said. ‘There’s no work for men like me.’ ‘Then your wife should work and you could keep house,’ Lily said swiftly. ‘You’ve no right to clutter up the shops with your stupid little trolley and your horrible stories.’ ‘They’re not stories,’ he blustered. ‘They’re true. Every damned word! And if you think they’re horrible you should have been there yourself. There were things I saw over there which would make your dreams a terror to you for the rest of your life.’ ‘I’m too young,’ Lily said sharply. ‘It wasn’t my war. I was too young. So don’t tell me about your nightmares because it’s nothing to do with me!’ She pulled Stephen towards the car away from the veteran. ‘You’ve got no pity!’ he shouted at her back. ‘No pity! We died for you and your sort. Out there in the mud. We died for you!’ Lily turned back. ‘I don’t care!’ she shouted. A tram rang its bell and came rumbling between them. ‘I don’t care!’ Lily yelled over the noise of the tram. ‘It wasn’t my war, I didn’t ask you to go, I didn’t ask anyone to die, and I don’t want to know anything about it now!’ Coventry was holding the door. Lily flung herself inside and Stephen followed her. ‘Just drive!’ Stephen forced the words out. Coventry nodded and set the big car in motion. Stephen looked out of the back window. The crippled soldier had gone. He turned to Lily as if he could scarcely believe her. ‘My G … God, Lily, you were angry.’ ‘I hate the war,’ Lily said fiercely. ‘All the time, all the time I was a girl if there was anything I wanted to do, or anything I wanted to have it was always “no” – because there was a war on. ‘I was twelve when it started. My dad went rushing off the first moment he could and got himself killed. And now, all the time people want to hear the war songs, want to go on and on about what it was like before, and how it was better then. Well, it’s my time now. And if it isn’t as good as it was then – well, at least it will be as good as I can have. ‘I’m sick of all the old soldiers and sailors and the charities. I’m sick and tired of it. All my childhood we were fighting the war, no-one would talk about anything else, and now it’s over people still want to go on and on about it. I want to leave it behind. I want to forget it!’ Stephen said nothing. Coventry drew the Argyll up at the edge of Southsea Common and the seafront promenade. Coventry got out of the car and stood by the bonnet. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, looking out to sea. The silence went on. ‘D’you think I’m selfish?’ Lily asked suddenly. ‘I think you’re wonderful,’ Stephen burst out. He felt a great wave of relief. ‘I’ve never heard anyone talk like that before. It wasn’t my war either, you know. I felt as if I never knew why I was there. But I just had to stay and stay and stay there. Whatever it was like. My brother, Ch … Ch … Christopher – he wanted to go. He volunteered.’ He took a breath. ‘But I l … left it to the very l … last moment. They’d have con … conscripted me if I hadn’t gone. They called me a c … a c … a coward. Someone sent me a f … a f … a feather.’ His stammer had escaped his control. He bared his lips, straining to make the words come. Lily watched him with wide scared eyes. Stephen struggled and then shrugged. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ he said. Lily shook her little head. ‘Well, I don’t want to know. I don’t know whether it should have happened. I don’t know whether you should have been there. I don’t care. It’s over now, Stephen. You don’t have to think about it any more.’ Stephen reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking slightly. ‘You d … don’t want to know about it?’ Lily shook her head. ‘Why should I?’ she asked coldly. ‘It’s past. It’s long gone. I want to live my life now. I don’t care about the past.’ Stephen exhaled a long cloud of smoke. The tension was draining away from his face. He was staring at Lily as if she had said something of extraordinary importance. As if she had the key to some freedom for him. ‘It’s over,’ he repeated as if he were learning a lesson from her. Lily smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said. ‘It’s finished and gone. You’ll never have to go back there. You don’t have to even think about it. I never want to hear about it from you or anybody else.’ Stephen drew a deep breath. ‘Let’s have a look at the sea.’ He opened the door and got out. Coventry dropped his cigarette and opened the door for Lily. ‘We’ll just walk for a little,’ Stephen said. Lily’s hat lifted off her head precariously with the offshore breeze. They walked along the promenade and then stepped off the low wall on to the shingle of the beach. Ahead of them was the short white fist of the pier extending out into the sea. The little theatre and amusement parlour at the end of the pier were being repainted white for the summer season of Vaudeville shows. They could see the ladders and the workmen. Lily pulled off her hat and held it in her hand as they walked. Stephen slid his arm around her waist, Lily leaned against his shoulder, comfortable with his closeness. ‘I shall miss you,’ she said as if it were a new thought. ‘I shall miss you while I am away.’ Stephen paused, turned her towards him, leaned down and kissed her on her smiling lips, held her body close to his for the first time and sensed her slightness, the roundness of her breasts against his chest, the warmth of her face against his. He smelled the warm clean female smell of her, the scent of her hair. He kissed her, pressing his lips on hers and then licking the corner of her mouth, tasting that little provocative smudge of chocolate. He was excited by her rejection of the war; he felt elated as if she could set him free from his nightmares, free from his sense that the war could never end while he, and all the men scarred like him, fought it and re-fought it in their dreams. And she was warm like that other girl had been, and soft, like that other girl had been. And her skin smelled of desire. Lily stayed still, her feet shifting slightly on the shingle for a few moments, struggling with her discomfort. She felt stifled and claimed and overpowered. She let him hold her for a little while with a sense of confused courtesy, as if she should not rebuff him, not after their sudden slide into intimacy. He had trusted her with a confidence; she could not pull her body away roughly. So she let him hold her, resenting the weight of his body against hers, tense against the insistent closing of his arms. Then she felt the disgusting touch of his tongue on the corner of her lips, and the smooth scented brush of his moustache, and she shuddered with instinctive revulsion, and stepped back, her gloved hand up at her mouth rubbing her lips. ‘Don’t!’ she said breathlessly. ‘You shouldn’t …’ Stephen smiled. He felt very much older and more experienced than Lily, who had been a little girl at school when other women had forced him to war. ‘Was that your first kiss?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ He chuckled, ‘I will give you very many more than that, Lily, my lovely Lily.’ He drew a breath. He felt daring. He saw himself through Lily’s eyes, handsome, wealthy, powerful. He gave a little excited laugh, freed by Lily’s rejection of the past, by Lily’s hatred of the war. ‘I will give you many more kisses,’ he promised recklessly. ‘Many, many more. I will marry you. I am prepared to marry you, Lily. So what d’you say to that?’ Lily’s face was blank with surprise. Her hand fell to her side and the little smudge of chocolate was very dark against the whiteness of her skin. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I never thought of you like that. I’m very sorry. I must have been very silly. But I’m much too young. And you’re much too old, Captain Winters. I am sorry.’ They said nothing, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension. Stephen flushed slowly, a deep dark red. He felt deeply, horribly snubbed by Lily. All of their days together and their treats together were shaken and remade into a new, offensive pattern. He had been a sugar daddy, a patron – while he had thought himself an acknowledged lover. ‘Lily,’ he said and he reached out his hand to draw her back from her sudden enmity, from her sudden girlish rejection. Wobbly on the shingle in her little shoes, Lily stepped quickly back, out of his reach. The sea, a few yards away, washed in and out, sucking at the pebbles of the foreshore, a nagging ominous sound, like distant gunfire. Lily looked frightened, ready for flight. Stephen was filled with a bullying desire to smack her. She had led him on with her prettiness and her provocative respectability and now she shrank like some virgin child from his touch. She did not understand that she was compromised by his dinners, that she had been bought by his little treats. She was cheating on the sale. He wanted to grab her and pinch her. He wanted to hold her with one arm and rummage inside her pretty jacket. He wanted to rub her breasts and pinch her nipples. He wanted to strip away Lily’s delicacy and thrust his hand up her skirt. She was not a lady, whatever she might like to pretend, she was a chorus girl. If it had been dark he would have grabbed her and slapped her face. Frustrated by daylight and chaperoned by the people walking on the promenade, Stephen stared at Lily with a desire very near to hatred. ‘I should like to go back to the theatre now, please,’ Lily said in a very small voice. ‘I should like to go.’ Chapter Six (#ulink_28322635-4298-5dde-a7ca-38d05c5c3f7b) Stephen was not waiting at the stage door to drive Lily home after the last show that night. Helen Pears, accustomed to the silver gleam of the Argyll under the lights at the end of the alley, hesitated and glanced around for it. ‘I don’t think he’ll be here,’ Lily said quietly. Helen tucked her daughter’s hand under her arm and they walked to the tram stop. Charlie Smith loped up behind them, droplets of water from the sea mist like sequins in his black curly hair. ‘Lost your beau, Lily?’ ‘Looks like it,’ she said. Charlie cocked an eyebrow at Helen to see how she was taking the news. ‘Small loss,’ he offered. ‘He asked me …’ Lily was driven to speech by sheer indignation. ‘You’ll never believe what he asked me! You’ll never believe what he thought I would do!’ Helen and Charlie exchanged a shocked glance. ‘Don’t look at me, I had him down as a gentleman,’ Helen said defensively. ‘They were only ever alone at tea. I was always with them in the evening. I would have sworn he knew the line.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘Belgium,’ he said shortly. ‘The gentlemen died first.’ ‘He asked me to marry him!’ Lily said angrily. ‘Actually, he didn’t even ask me! He said: “I am prepared to marry you”, as if he was doing me a favour. As if I should be grateful! And he kissed me too, and it was horrid. And if it’s going to be like that I shan’t ever spoon with anyone. I think it’s quite beastly!’ They had reached the empty tram shelter. Helen put her arm around Lily’s shoulders but Lily shook her off. ‘You’d have thought he’d know better at his age!’ Lily said, still indignant. ‘You’d have thought he’d know I didn’t think of him like that! He’s old enough to be my father!’ Charlie chuckled. ‘He’s about the same age as me, Lily,’ he said. ‘Not quite old enough to be your father.’ Lily flushed scarlet from the collar of her coat to the brim of her hat. ‘You’re different,’ she said, muffled. ‘You don’t seem old. You weren’t a soldier like him.’ Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was actually. I went over in the first wave. It was my luck that I took a bullet in the first week. I was invalided out for the rest of the war. It didn’t damage me like those men that were there for all that long time.’ Lily turned her face away. ‘You’re different from him,’ she insisted. ‘You understand me. He should have known that I didn’t think of him like that.’ Charlie glanced at Helen. She was watching Lily’s rosy face. ‘Men don’t always see things that clearly, Lil,’ he said gently. ‘A man sees someone who takes his fancy, and he tries it on. And a lot of girls would have thought themselves lucky to catch your Captain.’ ‘Charlie’s right,’ Helen said. ‘When you said that he’d upset you, I thought he’d asked you to be his girl – to set you up in little rooms somewhere, I didn’t think he’d propose marriage. I never thought he was that serious. I’d never have dreamed his family would allow it.’ Lily said nothing. ‘It’s a compliment,’ Charlie pursued. ‘He’s a big name in this town, Winters. Good family, plenty of money, handsome house by the Canoe Lake. A lot of girls would be glad to catch him, Lil.’ Lily shook her head, crossly. ‘He’s miles too old,’ she said. ‘And he’s funny. He stammers when he talks about the war. And his driver never speaks at all. He’s nicknamed Coventry because he’s silent. He and Stephen just look at each other as if they can tell what the other is thinking. It’s creepy. I never liked him like that. I never gave him reason to think I liked him like that.’ Her voice quavered slightly. ‘I didn’t lead him on. He’s too old. How was I to know that he didn’t know that he was miles too old?’ Helen tucked Lily’s little hand under her arm. ‘Now that’s enough,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re getting yourself all upset over nothing. As you say, he’s old enough to look after himself. He’s made you an offer. You’ve said “no”. That’s an end to it.’ The wires above them hummed and the tram clattered around the corner and stopped beside them. It rocked as they clambered on and sat on the scratchy seats. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to say yes?’ Lily turned to her mother. ‘You don’t think he’s a catch?’ Helen Pears hesitated. Charlie smiled knowingly at her, enjoying her dilemma before Lily’s open-faced honesty. ‘He is a good catch,’ she said cautiously. ‘If you were a girl without talent then you couldn’t do better, Lily, and that’s the truth. If you didn’t have me behind you, and the shop, and Charlie here to help you with your work, then you’d have done well to have him. He’s not a bad sort. He’s a gentleman and his wife would be a lady wherever she came from. ‘But you don’t need to marry, not while you’ve got me.’ She took Lily’s gloved hand in her own and squeezed it. ‘Why, you’re just starting out,’ she said. ‘Who knows how far you’ll go?’ ‘We’re off to Southampton next week anyway,’ Charlie said. ‘And I want you to try a new song. Not in the show, but I want you to rehearse it with me while we’re on tour. There might be an opening in Portsmouth when we get back and I’ve got an idea.’ ‘What do I have to do now?’ Lily demanded. ‘Go bald? Scalped?’ ‘Worse than that!’ Charlie winked at Helen. The conductor came towards them and chinked the large brown pennies in his dirty hand. ‘Fares please!’ Charlie paid for them all. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. ‘This is my stop. I’ll see you at the matin?e, Lil. Sleep well, and don’t bother about it.’ He leaned forward and patted her face. Lily looked up at him and smiled like a trusting child. On impulse Charlie bent and gently kissed her forehead. ‘Little Lil,’ he said tenderly. The tram stopped and he jumped down to the pavement. Lily raised her hand to him in farewell. Her face was scarlet. Neither woman saw the car parked in the shadows at the end of the street. It had followed the tram on its short journey. Coventry turned to Stephen sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Stephen shrugged as if in answer to a question. ‘I just wanted to see her safe home, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’m a damn fool, I know.’ Coventry went back to his silent contemplation of the dark street. ‘Can we go to your place?’ Stephen asked suddenly. ‘Go and have a brew? It’s early yet.’ Coventry nodded and started the engine. They took the eastern road out of town, past the lounging heap of Eastney Barracks, an ominous pile of heavy red brick with two marines guarding the gates. Stephen’s hand went up to the salute out of habit, and then he checked himself with a laugh. Beyond the town the car picked up speed. They drove on a low flat road alongside the harbour. The tide was out, and over the mudflats the reflection of the moon chased alongside them. There was a mist rolling in from the sea and somewhere out in the Solent a foghorn called into the lonely darkness. The road raced over a low wood bridge built on piles driven into the chocolate-coloured mud. Stephen glanced inland and saw the black outline of the roofs of Portsmouth houses against the dark sky. There were concrete gun emplacements all along the coast road, and ugly tangles of barbed wire still despoiling the beach. Stephen looked at the mat of wire with a hard face. ‘She’s like water,’ he said suddenly. ‘She’s like a cold glass of clean water. She’d take the taste of mud out of my mouth.’ They turned right on the main coast road, driving east towards the rising moon. It was nearly full, a blue-silver moon, very close to the earth, the craters and pocks on the asymmetric face very clear. The light was so bright that the yellow lamps of the Argyll barely showed on the road ahead. On the right of the road were the flat marshes of Farlington running down towards the sea, and a pale barn owl quartering the sedges and rough grass. On the left was a patchwork of little fields growing vegetables and salty hay. ‘Very bright,’ Stephen said uneasily. ‘Very bright tonight.’ Then he shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter now,’ he reminded himself. They drove a little way, and then turned right, south to the sea. There was a small village and then a darkened water mill. Coventry slowed the Argyll and drove past an old toll-gate pub. The inn sign creaked in the wind, the paint all blistered away from the picture of a sailing ship. The mist was coming inshore, rolling in from the sea. Ahead of them was a low narrow bridge joining the island to the mainland. Beneath the mist, the sea, closing from both sides, washed and sucked at the wooden piles of the bridge. Coventry slowed and drove carefully over. Stephen watched the wet mudflats on either side of the car where they gave way to sedge and shrubs and reeds. A sea bird, disturbed in its sleep, called once, a lingering liquid call, and then fell silent. The mist batted against the headlights, fluttered in ribbons on the windscreen. ‘Can you see?’ Stephen asked. Coventry nodded. He had lived on Hayling Island all his life. He had known this road before the summer visitors came, when it was a mud track for the fishermen and there was no bridge to the mainland, only a ferry. He drove unerringly through the flickering mist to the south of the island where it jutted out into the sea and the waves broke all day and all night on the ceaselessly shifting shingle beaches. They turned right along the seashore. Only one road, a sand track, ran west. At the westernmost point of the island was a solitary inn where you could take the ferryboat which plied across the narrow harbour from Southsea. In summer, people took pleasure trips to Hayling Island for the day, to picnic on the wide beaches and play in the sandy dunes. In the evenings the ferries crossed from one side to another in a constant stream, the women’s sunshades and pretty dresses reflected in the harbour water and in the quiet evening air you could hear people laughing. The foghorn moaned. Sand from the high dunes on their left had drifted over the road and Coventry leaned forward to see his way in the mist. The road was pot-holed and the Argyll lurched when one wheel dropped into a rut. Stephen and Coventry were smiling, enjoying the darkness and mist, the bad road, the discomfort. On the right of the road was an inlet of still water, a little harbour off the main tidal reach. Dimly in the mist loomed the outlines of houseboats – three of them – pinned in the shallows by little white-painted staircases stretching from the shore. One was a pretty holiday home: there were empty pots waiting for geraniums on the steps. Furthest out, and the most ramshackle, was a grounded houseboat stained black with marine varnish and with no lights showing. It was Coventry’s. He had gone from it in a dull rage when he had been conscripted, knowing that his father could not survive without his earnings, knowing that the houseboat was icily cold in winter and damp all the year round. His father had died in the winter of 1917 and they had not allowed Coventry home in time to be with him. The old man had died alone, wheezing with pneumonia. Coventry had arrived for the funeral and then returned to the Front to serve as Stephen’s batman. He parked the car alongside the houseboat and followed Stephen up the rickety gangplank. The houseboat had been long grounded. Its main structure was boat; but a permanent roof had been built on top, and what had once been the engine room and below decks was now a two-roomed cabin. Stephen went in first; the unlocked door opened directly into a small living room. There was one dining chair drawn up to a little table before the fire and one easy chair at the hearthside. Through the doorway beyond was the other room, Coventry’s bedroom, with a box for his clothes and a camp bed, as they had used in the estaminet behind the lines. Coventry came in behind Stephen and drew down the blinds and shut the door before he struck a match to light the oil lamp. Stephen sniffed at the smell of burning oil with relish. There was a little coal-burning range and a kettle filled with water set beside it. The fire was laid with newspaper twists and driftwood sculpted into pale monstrous shapes by the ceaseless working of the sea. The two rooms were cold and damp with the tang of the sea fret. Coventry set a match to the bleached wood and shook half a scuttle of coal on top. Stephen sat in the easy chair and watched as Coventry moved silently around the room, fetching the mugs, the teapot, the tea caddy and the sugar. ‘Got any biscuits?’ Stephen asked. Coventry reached into a cupboard and brought out a tin. Stephen beamed as if his own home – luxuriously equipped, warm and carpeted, and filled with delicacies – were a lifetime away. ‘Oh, good show!’ While the kettle boiled, both men bent down and unlaced their shoes and put them to one side. The weather had been dry for days and both Stephen and Coventry rode in a car, walking only for pleasure. But they felt their socks with anxious attention, and put their shoes alongside the range so that they could warm through. Stephen undid the belt from his trousers and carefully put it within reach, over the back of his chair. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘That’s comfortable.’ The kettle whistled and Coventry made the tea. Once again he made fresh tea on top of the dregs of the old, and the brew was sour and stewed. Stephen watched him as he measured four spoonfuls of sugar into each mug, poured the tea, stirred it vigorously clockwise and then passed the mug to Stephen. They each took a stale biscuit and ate in silence. ‘She’s like water,’ Stephen said thoughtfully. ‘I feel as if I could wash in her and I’d be clean. I feel that if I had her, if she loved me, I would be like I was before it all. I can get back to the world that I had – if I can have Lily.’ ‘You were late last night,’ Stephen’s mother said pleasantly at breakfast. ‘It was midnight before I heard you come in. Did you have a good time?’ ‘I went over to Hayling Island and had a brew with Coventry,’ Stephen said from behind his paper. ‘Drove myself home. But if you want to go anywhere this morning Coventry can drive you. He’ll be in at nine to take me to the office. He’s coming over on the ferry.’ ‘I’m going to the hairdresser at eleven,’ Muriel said. ‘I don’t need the car before then. Will you be home this afternoon?’ Stephen put down the newspaper and buttered a second slice of toast. ‘I’ve got a client at three but I should be home by four,’ he said. ‘Another wartime marriage on the ropes. Should be fairly straightforward.’ ‘I’m having some people round for tea. I thought you might like to meet them.’ Stephen grimaced. ‘A hen party? I’d rather not!’ Muriel looked at her son across the table. ‘I should like you to be here, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re not meeting anyone nice of your own age. Lady Philmore is coming with her daughter, and Mrs Dent with Sarah, and Mr and Mrs Close with their two girls. You won’t be the only man. Mr Close is very pleasant. You’ve met him before. He edits some kind of defence journal in London, I believe.’ ‘Lots of girls,’ Stephen observed neutrally. Muriel smiled at him serenely. ‘There are lots of girls. And they don’t all dance in the chorus at the Palais. You should meet some of them.’ Stephen raised an eyebrow. ‘Has David been gossiping?’ he asked. Muriel’s smile remained bright. ‘Never you mind. My staff work has always been excellent. I shall expect you home at half past four.’ Stephen finished his cup of tea and stood up, tossing the linen napkin down beside his breakfast plate. ‘I shall report for duty, as required,’ he said. ‘Is Father awake?’ At Muriel’s nod he left the room and went up the stairs to the master bedroom. The old man was having his breakfast. The nurse was spoon-feeding him boiled egg. At every spoonful she gently wiped the twisted side of his face where the runny yolk spilled out and ran down his chin. Stephen looked without emotion at the wreck of what had once been his father. ‘I’m off to work,’ he said clearly. The nurse rose and went to take the breakfast tray away. ‘Don’t bother, this is just a flying visit.’ He went closer to the bed and leaned towards his father. The grave eyes stared at him. ‘Business is good,’ Stephen said. ‘I’m interviewing for a new clerk today, an extra one. There’s a lot of buying and selling of houses going on, plenty of conveyancing work. Endless divorce work.’ One dark eye blinked like a roguish wink. ‘I’ll give them your best,’ Stephen said. ‘They ask after you every day. I always tell them you’re as well as can be expected.’ He turned to the nurse. ‘That’s what you’re supposed to say – isn’t it? “As well as can be expected”? Or do you say “doing nicely”?’ The nurse smiled. ‘He’s doing very nicely,’ she said. ‘Very nicely indeed, aren’t you, Mr Winters?’ ‘That’s good,’ Stephen said with a cold smile. ‘I’ll remember to tell them that he’s doing nicely. I’ll tell them that he’s lying there like a corpse with his breakfast running down his face and doing nicely.’ He left the room and went downstairs. Coventry was waiting at the foot of the stairs with his peaked chauffeur’s hat under his arm. ‘To the office then,’ Stephen said. ‘And then come back and take Mrs Winters to the hairdresser for eleven.’ Coventry nodded, opened the front door and followed Stephen out down the steps. ‘If she were here with me I don’t think I’d be so damn cruel,’ Stephen said thoughtfully as he got into the back of the car and Coventry walked around to the driver’s door. ‘If she were here with me I wouldn’t feel so bloody. When I’m with her I feel like it’s all over. I feel it’s finished at last. Sometimes I even feel as if we might have won.’ He broke off as Coventry slammed the door and started the car. ‘It would be fun to send back the car for her to go to the hairdressers,’ he said. A smile lit up his face and made him seem boyish for a moment. He could not think of any other reason for a woman wanting a car than to go to the hairdressers. ‘It would be fun to see her riding around in it on her own,’ he said. ‘Lily in the back of my car with some decent clothes and a ring on her finger, going to the hairdressers. That would be a sight to see!’ Stephen’s working day was slow and tedious. He had his father’s office – a tacit acknowledgement that his father would never come back to work. His father’s partner in the firm, John Pascoe, had the office opposite. He was an elderly man, nearing retirement. He would have been replaced by his son Jim three years ago, but Jim had gone over the top at Loos in 1915 and run into that acrid gaseous mist and never come back. After months of delay and false hopes and bureaucratic muddles over Paskoe or Pascoe or Paske the War Office had regretfully decided that Jim Pascoe would never sit behind his father’s desk. John Pascoe had grown more grey and stooped since Jim had been missing. He once had the bad form to ask Stephen if it was not – really now – not too bad out there. ‘The conchies now, and the pacifists, they make it out as seven sorts of hell. But it wasn’t like that really – was it?’ Stephen had looked at him with silent hatred. But the public school, officer code of never complaining, never telling tales, kept him dumb. ‘Jim wouldn’t have suffered,’ Mr Pascoe asserted. ‘In an attack you scarcely know what’s going on, do you? The excitement of it? And everything?’ Stephen thought of the first day at Loos when the British poisonous gas had been fired into a clear beautiful autumn morning and drifted slowly slowly back on the wind, like the veil of a whorish bride, to sink into the British trenches and blind and choke the soldiers who were waiting for the order to run forward into barbed wire, which was still perfectly intact, towards guns, which were still expertly manned. Everyone had known that the weather was wrong for the attack, that the wind would blow the gas back towards the British. Everyone had known that it was morally wrong to use gas, that gas was banned from warfare. Everyone knew that the attack would fail and that men would die for nothing. But the HQ staff let it go ahead because they wanted to see the gas, and because the chain of command was so slow and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to cancel an advance even though it was bound to fail. A thousand deaths here or there made little difference – and anyway, that is the nature of war. Stephen started to say that Jim died a hero. That he would not have suffered. That when you run forward, stumbling through the churned earth towards the bright flashes of cracking fire with the shells whining above you and the sudden earth-shaking crump of them landing near you, then you go joyfully: for your country, for freedom, for your God. But his stammer choked on the lies and all he could do was to shake his head, shake his head like a broken doll and say: ‘He d … he d … he d …’ ‘I’m sorry,’ John Pascoe had said quickly. ‘I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ They never spoke of the war again. ‘Busy day?’ Pascoe asked now, opening his door at Stephen’s footstep on the stairs. The office was a twisted old building in Old Portsmouth, the most ancient part of the town. The streets were cobbled, they glowed an eerie shadowy blue from the gas lighting at night. The office floors went up and down and there were little turns and extra stairs in every corridor. It was not an efficient building but it suited the firm’s Dickensian style. ‘Not very busy,’ Stephen said. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ John shook his head. ‘I’ve got a paternity suit you might like to look at,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve got a good case. She’s a respectable girl, and the man sounds a bit of a cad.’ ‘All right,’ Stephen said. ‘Shove the file over later on.’ He worked on letters all the morning, dictating replies to his clerk. They would be typed and posted in the afternoon. The clerk had only one arm. Stephen kept his eyes turned away from the pinned sleeve. The man’s job had been done by girls while he was away at the Front, but Stephen had insisted that men take the jobs when they returned, though they were not paid at the pre-war rate. Stephen kept the cheaper women’s wages and gave jobs back to men. He did not like women in the office. He did not like their high frivolous voices answering the telephone. He thought it unsuitable that a spinster should read the divorce cases with their detailed adulteries and abuses, and he would never have employed a married woman whose place was at home. In the afternoon, after a leisurely lunch with John Pascoe at their usual table at the Dolphin Hotel on the High Street, he saw Mrs Shirley Walker, whose husband had beaten her, buggered her, and finally run off. She had no evidence and no witnesses either for the beatings or buggery. ‘Did you tell no-one?’ Stephen asked gently. She was pale with distress at having to tell the secret, and to a stranger. She was as guilty as if she had been the abuser. She shook her head. Stephen stayed silent for a few moments, hoping the quiet of his room and the measured judicial tick of the clock would calm her. He was sleepy and quiet himself. On Tuesdays at the Dolphin Hotel it was stew with dumplings and he felt full and satisfied. ‘May I ask,’ he said softly, ‘is there any especial reason why you wish to divorce your husband? Do you wish to remarry?’ She shook her head again and blew her nose into a damp scrap of plain handkerchief. Stephen assessed her looks. She would have been a pretty girl at her marriage in 1914. Since then she had given birth to one child and watched it die in the flu epidemic at the end of the war, and then her soldier-husband had come home and knocked the hope out of her. She was pale, underweight and miserable. In these competitive times she would not be remarrying. There were thousands and thousands of widows far prettier than her, looking for men to replace those who still lay in the mud. ‘What I suggest is that we note that your husband has abandoned you and that you divorce him for desertion in seven years from now.’ Her pink-rimmed eyes leaped to his face. ‘Why can’t I divorce him right now?’ Stephen hesitated. ‘I am sorry to say that you have no grounds for divorce.’ She looked dumbfounded. She gestured to the notes Stephen had made of her stilted account of her marriage. ‘But he hit me, and he did … that.’ Stephen nodded. ‘Unfortunately we have no proof. If he were to deny it in court then it would simply be your word against his.’ ‘But he’s been with other women!’ She was becoming angry now, there were red spots on her cheeks. Stephen sighed. ‘Adultery by the husband is not grounds for divorce.’ ‘I thought it was.’ ‘If a wife is adulterous, then that is a ground for divorce. But if a husband is adulterous then there has to be some offence to aggravate his adultery. And we have no evidence of anything else against your husband.’ ‘It doesn’t seem right, that.’ She was dissatisfied. She got up from the chair. She had a small brown handbag, worn at the seams, and an umbrella with an ugly synthetic handle. Stephen thought of Lily’s light grace. ‘I’m no further on than I was.’ ‘You cannot have an immediate divorce as the law stands,’ Stephen said. ‘But we can get you a divorce in seven years’ time if Mr Walker does not return.’ ‘That’s not right,’ she said. ‘That’s not fair. All through the war I worked in the dockyard. I painted the ships. I was a painter. Long hours I worked and precious little pay. What do I get for serving?’ Stephen looked at her with sudden dislike. ‘I don’t think anyone came out of the war very well,’ he said sharply. ‘But the women did better than most! They stayed at home in perfect safety after all!’ He saw the rebellion in her face flare, and then bank down. ‘Thank you very much, Sir,’ she said. He saw her from the room with as much courtesy as if she had been a lady and then took his hat and his soft tailored greatcoat from the coatpeg in the corner and ran down the stairs to where Coventry was waiting for him by the car. Stephen’s earlier calm had deserted him and did not return on the short journey home. He felt rattled by the woman’s ugliness and her sordid story, and he did not want to attend his mother’s tea party which was in full swing when he entered the drawing room. ‘What’s wrong, Captain Winters?’ Marjorie Philmore said blithely. ‘A penny for your dark thoughts!’ They had trapped Stephen between two girls, Marjorie and Sarah, on the sofa, a small table before him with his tea cup and plate and a napkin on his knee. ‘Just business worries. A poor woman came to see me today to divorce her husband. He’s a bit of a brute.’ ‘How horrid!’ Sarah exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. ‘How absolutely horrid!’ ‘Can’t she dump him?’ Marjorie asked. She was ‘fast’, Stephen noticed. She wore an outrageously short skirt and silk stockings. He knew, with weary prescience, that after tea she would take a cigarette holder out of her sequined clutch bag and insist upon smoking a cigarette in his mother’s drawing room. Stephen, who never smoked except in his own room, or in his study, would have to watch her puffing ostentatiously, but not inhaling, while his mother tried to look as if she were not anxious about the smell on the curtains. ‘I think divorce is possible,’ he said dryly. ‘I am advising her.’ ‘How horrid!’ Sarah said again. ‘Do you have to do all sorts of ghastly things, Captain? As a lawyer? All sorts of horrid quarrels?’ ‘Some.’ ‘Oh, do tell!’ Marjorie said. ‘Really steamy divorces with shocking evidence? Do you employ private detectives or do you snoop around hotels yourself?’ ‘Marjorie darling …’ Lady Philmore said indulgently. ‘She’s such a flapper,’ she said to Muriel. ‘Such high spirits!’ ‘I rarely take cases of that nature,’ Stephen said icily. ‘We are an old-established and very respectable firm. We choose our clients rather carefully.’ ‘Stuffy of you!’ Marjorie exclaimed. ‘I should simply adore to be a lawyer and stand up in court and say, “May I assist your memory?” and “Would you call yourself a respectable woman, Mrs Bloggs?” Are you really vile to witnesses, Captain? Or do you look at them with your lovely smile and get them to tell you everything?’ ‘Unfortunately, although women are now admitted to the bar, it would be some years before you could qualify. I don’t think you would make a good lawyer, Miss Philmore.’ ‘Call me Marjie! Everybody does!’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘More tea, Stephen?’ Muriel asked. ‘No thank you, Mother. I am sorry but I have to leave you. I promised to drop some papers around to John Pascoe. Will you excuse me, Mother? Ladies? I have so enjoyed meeting you.’ Stephen rose from his seat on the sofa and the parlour maid had no choice but to move the heavily laden table and let him escape. Marjorie put a hand on his arm. ‘Come back after you’ve played postman and we’ll go out for drinks,’ she invited. ‘I know a quite wonderful place round the back of Palmerston Road. A real dive!’ ‘I am sorry, I have an appointment for dinner. Perhaps another time.’ Stephen closed the door behind him and leaned back against it. ‘Lily,’ he whispered. Chapter Seven (#ulink_bc11494e-6c17-50c9-9bdd-a97304dbdd57) 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.’ Chapter Eight (#ulink_2976779a-e406-5f79-92a1-5bf34bf08665) Helen did not go with Lily to the station. She ordered a cab for her and waved her off from the shop doorway. There were customers in the shop and they had no time for any farewell more than a hurried peck on the cheek. ‘Write to me if you need me,’ Lily said hastily as her mother thrust her into the cab. ‘You know I’ll come home if you need me.’ ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Helen said brusquely. ‘You go and have a lovely time, Lily. Be sure you eat properly and get enough sleep.’ She slammed the car door. ‘And remember what I said – no dinners out.’ Lily nodded and waved, turning around to watch her mother’s indomitable figure recede as the car drove away. Helen stood in the road, her arm raised, waving and waving until the cab was out of sight. Then she wiped her face roughly on her white apron and strode back into the shop. ‘Who’s next?’ she said crossly. ‘And there’s no credit, so don’t ask for it.’ Lily, gripping her handbag tightly on her lap, with her vanity bag on the seat beside her, rode on her own to the station, tipped the driver and called the porter for her suitcase all by herself, and then merged joyously with the company waiting on platform two for the Southampton train. Charlie was there, supervising the trunks going into the luggage wagon. Sylvia de Charmante was being driven to Southampton by a gentleman friend and would meet them at the theatre. ‘I’d have thought you’d have got Captain Winters to drive you,’ Madge said. ‘Is he back on the scene for keeps?’ Lily smirked. ‘He took me and Ma out for the day yesterday. In the Argyll. We had a picnic. He has a real silver teapot. And really good china. Just for a picnic!’ The train drew in, snorting smoke and hissing steam. The stoker leaned out over the curved panel of the cab and winked at the girls, his face shiny with sweat and streaked with coal dust. Porters opened the doors and the company piled into adjoining carriages. Charlie found himself seated beside Lily. ‘So, are you planning your wedding, then, Lily?’ he asked with a smile under cover of the noise of the girls getting settled and piling their hatboxes into the overhead shelves. Lily giggled. ‘No, I told him not, and he’s not going to ask me again. Ma won’t let him take me out to dinner on my own but I can have tea with him. He’s coming to Southampton on Wednesday.’ ‘Well, watch your step,’ Charlie advised. ‘If your ma is happy with it then I suppose it’s all right. But watch your step with him, Lily.’ Lily turned her candid blue gaze on him. ‘What d’you mean?’ Charlie flushed a little and shifted in his seat. ‘Oh dammit, Lil, you know what I mean!’ ‘D’you mean he might want to kiss me and spoon even though I told him we wouldn’t get married?’ Charlie nodded. ‘He won’t do that!’ Lily said decidedly. ‘He’s a gentleman after all.’ The engine hissed a cloud of white steam and the doors slammed down the length of the train. ‘Shut the window! Shut the window! We’ll all get covered in smuts!’ the girls cried. They pulled the window up, and fastened it with the big leather strap on the brass hook. The station master blew a loud blast on his whistle, raised the green flag and dropped it. The engine started forward and there was the exciting thump as the carriages moved too, and then with a rattle the whole train eased forward and wheels rolled into their regular clatter. ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ said Charlie ironically. ‘A gentleman!’ Lily had thought the show would be different in another theatre, but it was reassuringly the same. There was less of a panic in the quick costume changes because the girls’ dressing room was nearer the stage. It was a bigger room and Lily had a proper place at the mirror, and her own peg for her costume. Charlie Smith complained about a draught in the orchestra pit and wore a vest and then a ludicrous pair of combinations under his immaculate white shirt and black bow tie. One of the scene changes was too much for the Southampton crew, and after they had fluffed it for two successive nights it was dropped entirely. But apart from small alterations, the show was up and running, and Lily found the familiar songs and scene changes and the acts made the theatre feel like home in a strange city. The lodgings were fun. They were all living together in the same house and Lily loved supper after the last show, when Charlie Smith sat at the head of the table and Mike the SM sat at the foot, and the girls gossiped and told jokes and stories of theatre life. Lily felt the proud glow of being one of the elite. There were other lodgings in Southampton, there were other dinner tables. But this was the table for the cast at the Palais. They were all noisy and exhibitionist even when the curtains had closed and they were home for the night. Sylvia de Charmante’s gentleman friend took her out to dinner at night and she rarely spent time with the rest of them. The other acts ate with the chorus girls, or picnicked in their rooms. There was always someone going shopping who wanted company, or someone who had to stay home and sew her stockings who wanted Lily to sit with her. There was a piano at the digs and Charlie would play every morning and sometimes call Lily into the room to sing with him. She would sing for as much as a couple of hours at a time until she was tired. ‘Slower,’ Charlie would say. ‘More oomph, Lily. A little more slur there and raise your eyes and smile, really slowly. Attagirl! That’s it!’ And Lily would lean, as he commanded, against the piano and sing leisurely, as if the audience would wait all night for the next note. ‘Keep ’em guessing!’ Charlie said. ‘You’re a queen and they’re your subjects. Don’t ever let them think they know what it’s all about. You’ve got to be the boss.’ Lily’s teacher at home had been a singer trained in the classical tradition. She had taught Lily to sing standing upright with her eyes fixed on a distant horizon. Charlie taught her to drape herself over a piano and introduced her to ragtime. Not that ragtime was particularly easy. ‘Count, for God’s sake, Lily!’ he said impatiently. ‘Don’t guess it!’ ‘I did count!’ Lily protested. ‘I came in on the third beat!’ ‘You rushed it. It’s syncopated. You sing it like a march. Leave it slow, Lil. Do it one-two-and-three this time.’ Lily sang it again and was rewarded by one of Charlie’s dark-eyed beams. ‘Angel,’ he said. ‘Do it again, and really hit it this time.’ On Wednesday Stephen came as he had promised. The Argyll was waiting outside the Southampton Palais stage door. Charlie chanced to be going out as Lily met Stephen on the doorstep. ‘Hello, Captain Winters,’ Charlie said easily. ‘Taking Lily out to tea?’ Stephen nodded, his eyes never leaving Lily’s face, pink under Madge’s cream cloche hat. ‘The Raleigh Tea Rooms are very nice,’ Charlie observed. ‘We’re going to the Grand,’ Stephen said. ‘There’s a band there, and dancing. I thought you might like it, Lily.’ ‘Divine!’ Lily said. ‘Back at six,’ Charlie said impartially. He glanced at Coventry, holding the passenger door open for Lily. He smiled at him. Coventry looked at him and slowly put a finger to his cap. ‘See you at six,’ Charlie said again and sauntered down the street. Lily enjoyed the tea dance. Stephen was relaxed and more amusing when they were alone. He could dance well and Lily liked being held by him. His arm was warm and firm around her waist and she felt that her hand in his was held as if it were precious. She enjoyed the feeling of being dainty, special. She liked how Stephen rested his cheek softly against her hat. He was close without being oppressive. His touch on her was light, a caress, not an embrace. The Grand was expensive. Lily was the youngest woman there, and certainly the only girl in a borrowed hat and without a little fur stole. She liked the waiters’ deference to Stephen, and the shining service for the tea. She liked the little cakes and the good china. ‘I wish Ma could be here. She’d love it.’ ‘Shall I take her a message from you? Would you like me to go and see her?’ ‘That’d be nice of you,’ Lily said. ‘I write to her every couple of days. She’s only got a delivery lad to help in the shop and it’s a lot of work for one. Especially on Thursdays when the wholesalers’ lorries deliver.’ ‘I could go and see her on Thursday evenings and telephone you,’ Stephen said. ‘I could keep an eye on her for you.’ Lily giggled. ‘I don’t think she’d like that! But you could pretend you were passing. You could go in and buy some cigarettes or something, couldn’t you?’ ‘And then I’ll phone you,’ Stephen said. ‘If you give me the number of all of the places on your tour I could call you every Thursday to tell you that she’s all right.’ The dance ended and Lily beamed up at him and clapped the band. ‘You’re lovely. Thank you. I’d like that.’ Stephen returned Lily to the stage door at six o’clock on the dot. Charlie Smith was leaning against the door smoking a cigarette and watching girls walk past. ‘Hello again, you’re very prompt.’ ‘Army training,’ Stephen said with a grimace. ‘Were you over there?’ ‘Briefly,’ Charlie said. ‘I took a piece of shell at Arras and ended up training conscripts in Wales for the rest of the war.’ ‘One of the lucky ones.’ There was an edge to Stephen’s voice. ‘I know it.’ ‘I was there till the bitter end.’ Lily put out her gloved hand to Stephen. ‘Thank you for a lovely tea,’ she said formally. ‘I will write to you with the telephone numbers.’ Stephen took her hand and held it. He glanced over her head. Charlie smiled blandly at him from the doorway. ‘Goodbye, Lily.’ Stephen yielded to yet another chaperone. ‘Have a lovely time and come home to us soon.’ Lily patted his cheek and then vanished inside the stage door. ‘Bye,’ Charlie said. Stephen got into the passenger seat beside the driver and the big Argyll eased away. ‘Bye,’ Charlie said again to the empty street. In the following weeks Stephen missed Lily more every day. In her absence he could forget the way her speech sometimes grated on him and the occasional cheerful twang of her Portsmouth accent. He forgot Lily’s vanity and her ambition to succeed in a vulgar profession in a vulgar age. He forgot how much he disliked the determined gentility of Mrs Pears, and the way she looked at him as if he were not to be trusted. He forgot his dislike of Charlie Smith who had seemed to linger at the stage doorway to see Lily safely in. He forgot his jealousy of Lily’s bright promiscuous smile. All he remembered was the light in Lily’s face, the exact shade of blue of her eyes, her silky cap of fair hair. He remembered her at the picnic sprawled out on the rug, at once wanton and demure with her little white-stockinged feet in the white sandals crossed at the ankles. He adored her hats – frivolous little pots which fitted her head like a bluebell on the head of an elf in a children’s picture. And he felt that enjoyable half-painful ache of desire when he thought of her against the red curtain in her blue choir boy’s gown with her pale face upraised and her voice as clear and pure as a ringing bell from heaven. He drove past the corner shop every day. He did not care whether Helen Pears was well or ill. But if she were to be taken sick then someone would have to contact Lily and fetch her home. Stephen wanted to snatch her from the music hall tour. Stephen wanted to draw up in his big car and take her away from the noisy, reckless crowd of them. He wanted to take her away from the chorus line, from the men who would drink at the bar and watch the girls’ legs, from Charlie Smith. But every day the sign on the door was turned to ‘Open’ at seven thirty promptly, and Helen did not turn it around to ‘Closed’ until seven or eight o’clock at night. Stephen’s work continued around him in its slow routine. Women seeking to escape husbands married in a hurry in the excitement of the war came to his office and wept, registered their complaint and left thinking Stephen sympathetic and kindly. An officer who had married a nurse in a spasm of wounded despair, and then learned that she was the hospital cleaner, an unmarried woman with three children at home, found Stephen worldly and understanding. A woman charged with theft, a man charged with violence, a drunkard, a wartime profiteer making his will, an officer whose estate had to be managed by a trust now that he vomited in crowds and screamed at night, all these victims of the war traipsed through Stephen’s office and told their stories, and thought him compassionate. Not one of them touched him. Muriel Winters, watching her son who had gone to the war in despair and come back stricken, thought that her firstborn was mouldering to Flanders clay, and her second was calcifying to stone. Stephen’s head would nod, and his hand would move slowly, accurately across the page, but he was as distant from the pain of the people who came to him for help as Muriel had been from the battle when she had heard the rumble of guns like a faraway thunderstorm one still sunny day in Kent and said innocently, ‘Listen! What’s that noise?’ and then been unable to imagine what it must be like to be under shellfire in Belgium so savage that the noise of it could be heard in an English garden. Muriel gave a dinner party. She knew the house was too quiet. The silent man upstairs, Stephen walled inside himself, Coventry neurasthenic and mute. Muriel wanted noise in the house which was not the thin hidden cry of a woman who has lost both sons. She invited the Dents and Sarah. It was another failure. Sarah was huge-eyed and trembling with sensitivity. Stephen’s work, his father’s health, even the weather drew from Sarah a little shiver of compassion and an earnest nod. She put her hand on Stephen’s hand and whispered to him that she knew the war had been awful – too dreadfully awful. Muriel saw Stephen hold his hand still under the insult of the woman’s pity. But after dinner, when the guests had gone, Muriel saw Stephen slip through the baize door to the kitchen and knew that he would sit late with Coventry that night in the silence which was their last and most secure refuge. Stephen’s best moment in the week was when he went into the corner shop on Thursday to buy his cigarettes and ask after Lily. Helen Pears seemed pleased to see him. The second time he came she made tea for them both and they perched on stools on either side of the counter in the empty shop and Helen read to him from Lily’s letter. She had written from Bournemouth of the grandness of the hotels and the wonderful long sandy beach. They were playing at a music hall near the Winter Gardens and Lily went out in the afternoons and sat in a deck-chair by the bandstand to listen to the band play and watch the people walking by. She never mentioned a man’s name. She never asked her mother to send her good wishes to Stephen, though she knew he was calling. Her letters were full of the summer gardens, and hats, the lengths of skirts which were being worn and the fun they had on their day off when the entire cast went down to the beach and paddled. Lily had bought a swimming costume and was teaching some of the other girls to swim. Stephen thought of Lily’s long pale legs stretched out on the sand and felt his throat contract with a feeling as potent as fear, which he had come to know as desire. Once a week he spoke to Lily. He timed his call so that she would be off stage at the end of the performance. He telephoned the numbers she had sent to him, ticking each stage door off the list as she moved steadily away from him: from Southampton to Bournemouth, to Poole, further and further away, travelling westwards down the coast. Behind her voice, on the crackly line, he could hear doors banging and people calling to each other. He knew she was only ever half-attentive. Once he found himself talking to one of the other girls as they teased Lily about his phone call. All day Stephen would plan what to say when he spoke with her, but then he would find Lily morose and quiet after a bad performance, or bubbling with joy after a good evening and a delivery of flowers. She was out of his control. Stephen hated her being beyond his control. ‘Is Ma well?’ was the only question Lily would always ask. And after he had told her that Helen was well and busy he knew that he would lose her attention, and that however long he tried to spin out their talk Lily’s mind was no longer with him. She was, he thought, too frivolous, too light and above all too young to be trusted far from home. If he had not loved her so much Stephen thought he would have hated her. On the fourth Thursday of Lily’s absence there was a change. The shop was shuttered and dark when Stephen called at seven o’clock in the evening. He knocked on the door for some moments and stepped back to look up at the little flat. The windows were all in darkness, and no light came on at his knock. ‘She’s poorly,’ a woman volunteered from the red brick doorway beside the shop. ‘She’s got the flu and they’ve taken her to the Royal. Proper poorly she is.’ Stephen stepped forward eagerly. ‘Very bad? Should her daughter be sent for?’ The woman nodded. ‘Yes, but none of us know where she is. She’s on tour with one of the music halls. And Helen’s mind was wandering with the fever. She kept asking for her but we didn’t know where to send.’ ‘I know.’ Stephen found his hands were shaking. ‘I know where she is. Should I fetch her?’ The woman nodded. ‘The doctor said she’d best come home. But none of us knew where to send. We didn’t even know which town she was in. And Helen couldn’t tell us. It’s the Spanish flu, you know, she’ll be lucky if she pulls through.’ Stephen turned away and strode to the Argyll. ‘The Royal Hospital,’ he said shortly to Coventry. ‘My luck’s turned at last.’ He was not allowed to see Helen. The ward sister spoke to him in the corridor outside the ward. She said that the daughter should certainly be sent for. The mother was sick, but not in immediate danger. She was asking for her daughter and the girl should be there. Stephen drove home and found Muriel while Coventry packed for them both. ‘I have to go to Sidmouth, I’ll take the car and Coventry.’ Muriel dropped her sewing into her lap. ‘Sidmouth? But why, Stephen? What has happened?’ ‘The girl I was seeing, Lily Pears, her mother is ill and asking for her. I’m going to fetch her. I should be back late tomorrow night, or early Saturday. Depends on the roads.’ Muriel followed Stephen out into the hall. Coventry was holding his coat out for him. ‘Stephen …’ He turned and she saw his face was alight with a kind of wild excitement. Coventry too had the same keen expression, as if something at last was about to happen. As if all the long months of the peace had been wasted time. As if they were both only half-alive during the peace, as if sudden action were the only joy they could feel. ‘She’s not the sort of girl you want to get involved with,’ Muriel said rapidly and softly. She put her hand on Stephen’s arm to draw him back to the sitting room. ‘Send her a telegram, my dear, that’s all you need to do. You shouldn’t go and fetch her. It’s not right.’ Stephen brushed her hand off his arm. He hardly even saw her. ‘I love her,’ he said simply. ‘I hope she’ll marry me. Of course I’m going to fetch her.’ He turned abruptly away from her and ran up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. His father’s room was in half-darkness, lit only by the light from the dying fire, but his father was still awake. He looked towards the door as Stephen burst in and his dark gaze focused on Stephen’s sudden vitality. Stephen stepped up to the bed. ‘I’m going away for a couple of days. I’m going to fetch a girl I know. Her mother’s sick and she should come home.’ Stephen’s smile was radiant. ‘I like her awfully, Father. I’ll bring her to see you. I think you’d like her too.’ He moved towards the door. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. Then he suddenly checked himself and came back into the room. He picked up his father’s limp hand from its place on the counterpane. He held it and looked into his father’s immobile face. ‘I’ve been a bastard. I’ve been a bastard to you. If Lily will have me, it’ll all be different. I’ll be different.’ Stephen swung from the room. His mother, waiting at the foot of the stairs, watched him run down and thought, for the first time since he had come home, that he moved with the grace of a young man, that he was still a young man, one who could fall in love and flirt and chatter and laugh. He kissed her on the cheek as he went past, hardly checking his stride, and then he and Coventry were down the front steps and out through the garden gate. Coventry slung the suitcases into the boot of the car and Stephen got into the front passenger seat beside him. As the car moved away she caught a glimpse of their faces, as excited as boys. ‘Coast road,’ Stephen said, consulting the map book. ‘D’you know it? Southampton, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Sidmouth. Quite a run.’ Coventry nodded. ‘We’ll do it in watches,’ Stephen decided. ‘You drive for four hours now, wake me at midnight. I’ll take twelve till four and then wake you. What about petrol? Are there cans in the boot?’ Coventry nodded again, watching the road as they drove along the front, careful of summer visitors in their best clothes returning to their hotels after admiring the sunset over the sea. ‘Provisions?’ Coventry jerked his head to the rear seat. There was a picnic basket half-shut on a loaf of bread and a ham, a flask for a hot drink and some apples. Coventry had raided the kitchen as casually as an invading army. ‘Should get there around midday, maybe earlier,’ Stephen said, scanning the map. ‘Catch her before she goes to the theatre anyway. Pack her bags, bring her home. Home by midnight or so.’ He stretched luxuriously in his seat and shut his eyes. ‘Wake me at midnight,’ he ordered, and he fell instantly asleep. Chapter Nine (#ulink_97202ba3-6b73-5a64-b7ac-59bc83e30bf0) Lily loved Weymouth even more than Bournemouth. The town was smaller and the audiences less smart but the countryside around the little resort was spectacularly beautiful with wide sheep-grazed fields interlinked with winding hedged country lanes and scatterings of prosperous grey stonebuilt villages. Charlie borrowed a motorbike and sidecar from one of the stage crew and on their day off, Sunday in the first week of June, drove Lily out along the coast. Lily, very daring, wore a pair of slacks lent to her by Madge. ‘Keep your legs in the sidecar, you’ll cause a riot, you hussy,’ Charlie said tolerantly. Lily had hesitated. ‘D’you like them? I’m not sure if they’re all right to wear out of doors.’ ‘We’ll go down secluded lanes, all you will frighten is cows.’ They took a picnic with them. Lily, remembering the Argyll and the grand picnic set, laughed when she saw Charlie’s doorstep sandwiches of cheese and pickle in brown paper bags, and a bottle of lemonade for them to drink. ‘You’re a good deal too choosy.’ Charlie spread his feast on Lily’s outspread head scarf. They had stopped at the crest of a cliff, looking out to sea. Below them a little white chalk path wound down to a bay. The waters were a clear light-filled blue, so clean that Lily could see the shadows of seaweed shifting in the currents and sometimes the flicker of a school of dark fish. ‘The trouble is you’ve been spoiled,’ Charlie pronounced. ‘I have not! I like cheese and pickle. I can like posh things and ordinary things. I can like both.’ Lily took a sandwich and bit into it Beside them, at clifftop level, a kittiwake gull riding the thermals from the beach below them wheeled inland, its bright black eyes on Lily and her sandwich. Lily took a piece of crust and flung it upwards. ‘There you go, wasting good food!’ Charlie said instantly. Lily chuckled easily. ‘I didn’t waste it, I gave it to a seagull. Seagulls have a right to be fed I suppose.’ Charlie unstoppered the lemonade and took a swig from the bottle before wiping the mouth and handing it to Lily. ‘Forgot cups.’ ‘That’s all right.’ Lily drank and handed the bottle back to him. ‘D’you think Sylvia de Charmante is really good? I’ve watched and watched her and I can’t see what she does that is so much better than anyone else.’ ‘Better than you, you mean?’ Lily flushed and shot a shy look at Charlie. ‘Well yes, actually. I know I’ve got loads to learn and everything but …’ He nodded. ‘She’s no better than you, in fact her voice is weaker and she’s much less musical. But she got herself a name during the war and she’ll trade on that for the rest of her life. I saw her once, she did one of those recruitment shows with a film of the Western Front and free beer at the bar, and some songs and a kiss for the lads who went up and signed on. Poor fools.’ ‘Did many go?’ Charlie shrugged. ‘A dozen or so, I suppose. It made little difference in the end. Once conscription came in everyone had to go. It just made the difference to what time you got there.’ ‘I’m glad you weren’t there for long,’ Lily said. ‘I don’t like to hear about it. It spoiled everything for me when I was a girl. The streets had to be kept dark, and it was always cold. Everyone’s dads and brothers went away. Everyone was short tempered and there was never enough money.’ Charlie nodded. ‘Poor Lily,’ he said mockingly. Lily threw the rest of the crust to the gull and lay back on the short springy turf. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to think I was lucky because I was a girl, and my dad died quickly and didn’t come home a cripple, and my ma had the shop. But she never thought there was any point to the war. Not from the very beginning. And so I never thought it was so wonderful either. And when the kids in the streets did pageants, or the girls did knitting, or collected newspapers or cloths or whatever, I always thought that it was a great big lie. And I thought Kitchener was a bully, I hated his face on the posters everywhere you went. He used to give me nightmares.’ Charlie chuckled. ‘You’re preaching to a convert, Lily, I never liked the man either. I volunteered to go because I thought it was a good cause and that Germany had to be stopped. I bought it almost at once –’ ‘Where were you hurt?’ ‘Lungs.’ ‘Did it hurt very bad?’ ‘Ohhh.’ Charlie flapped his hand at the memory. ‘Pretty bad. And then I came home and trained more poor fools in a dismal camp at the back of beyond in Wales for the rest of the war.’ Charlie lay back and closed his eyes. ‘Rhyll. It feels like a long, long time ago now.’ ‘And Sylvia de Charmante made her name out of it,’ Lily pursued. Charlie chuckled. ‘Yes. You won’t have a chance like that, but I’ve got an idea for you, Lil. When we get back to Portsmouth I may have a new job. I may get the post of music director at the Kings.’ Lily sat up at once. ‘Golly.’ Charlie smiled. ‘Yes indeed. You may call me Mr Smith. I’ll see if I can get you an audition as an act. They’ll put a show together, like this one, and then do a two- or three-theatre tour with it. It’s a different group of theatres and it’s Variety – not old-fashioned music hall. So you’ll have a chance to do a little bit more.’ ‘Was that your idea? That you told Ma and me about?’ Charlie nodded. ‘Why are you so nice to me?’ Lily burst out. ‘You picked me out of the chorus line and asked me to sing, and then you tried out your choir boy idea using me, so I’ve got an act of my own now and billing on the posters. And now you’re thinking about something new. Why are you so good to me?’ Charlie’s arm was over his eyes, blocking out the overhead sun. He raised it slightly and squinted at her. ‘Because,’ he said equably. ‘No, why?’ He grinned. ‘Because I choose to.’ Lily leaned over him and put her hand, tentatively, on his chest. ‘Because you like me?’ Charlie took his arm from his face and put his hand on top of Lily’s. ‘Yes, I like you a lot.’ There was a long silence. The gull, weaving back over them, cast a fleeting shadow and cried a short mournful cry. Lily dropped her fair head to Charlie’s upturned, passive face. The sleek bob of her hair fell forward and brushed both his cheeks. Lily hesitated, her lips an inch above his. Charlie made no gesture at all. Lily bent a little lower and kissed him. Charlie’s other hand came behind Lily’s waist and held her gently. Lily raised her head and sighed, scanning his dark face. Charlie smiled up at her, still unmoving. ‘Charlie …’ He put his hand up and covered her lips. ‘Don’t chatter, Lil. You’ll only say things that you’ll regret.’ Lily shot a puzzled look at him as he sat up. She leaned towards him, expecting him to put his arms around her, but he got to his feet and put out his hand and pulled her up. ‘Let’s go and have a paddle,’ he said. He led the way down the little path, Lily slipping and breaking into a little run with an affected shriek of alarm behind him. She wanted him to turn to catch her and hold her in his arms but Charlie strode on, hands determinedly in his pockets, down the steep zig-zag path to the sea. He reached the water’s edge while Lily was still hopping and limping over the stones in her little shoes. He picked up some flat stones from around his feet and skimmed them across the waves. Lily came up beside him and put her hand on the small of his back as he stood, watching the waves. ‘Charlie …’ He gave a sudden wordless exclamation and then turned and caught her into his arms, crushing her against him, her face into his shoulder, his cheek pressed against her fair head. Lily, unable to move, hardly able to breathe, stood motionless, half-dizzy with sudden desire. As soon as he slackened his grip, Lily flung her arms around his neck and raised her face but Charlie did not kiss her. He held her gently, scanning her face. Lily was flushed, her eyes bright. ‘I thought you said spooning was beastly and you were never going to do it with anybody?’ Lily caught her breath. ‘This is different, I feel …’ She broke off. ‘Charlie, will you kiss me?’ His smile down at her eager face was very rueful. ‘I suppose I will,’ he said with mock reluctance, then he bent his dark head and his lips met hers. Lily felt herself melt with rising desire. Her conscious mind noted that her legs felt suddenly weak and her whole body was longing for the touch of Charlie all over. She tightened her arms around his neck, pressing his mouth still harder down on hers. She heard herself make a tiny noise, a little moan, and suddenly understood what her mother had meant about getting carried away. Lily felt that Charlie could have carried her away in a handcart and she would not have objected. More than anything else in the world she wanted to lie down and feel the weight of Charlie along the length of her body. She bent slightly at the knees. Charlie stayed determinedly upright. After a few minutes he released her, and then put his arm around her waist to steady her. Lily’s eyelids fluttered open slowly. She looked around at the blue moving sea, the shingle beach and Charlie’s tight smile. ‘And that’s our lot,’ Charlie said gently. ‘Your ma would skin me alive if she knew I’d brought you out into the country and then kissed you.’ ‘No she wouldn’t, she likes you.’ ‘She might like me when she sees me taking care of you at the theatre. She’d like me a lot less if she knew I took advantage of you when we’re away on tour.’ ‘But you didn’t.’ Lily, finding her legs still a little unsteady, sat on the shingle and looked up at Charlie. ‘I took advantage of you.’ ‘Well, you’re a forward hussy,’ Charlie said pleasantly. ‘And you won’t catch me in a weak moment again.’ He turned his back to Lily and stooped and picked out another flat stone. ‘Watch this,’ he said. He threw it with a smooth sideways lob at the tops of the waves and the stone skipped. ‘Four! Four jumps. Bet you can’t do better than that!’ ‘Bet you I can. I spent my childhood on Southsea beach, remember.’ Lily scrambled to her feet and picked a stone. Feet astride, frowning as she took aim, she threw it at the waves. It skipped along from crest to crest. ‘Three, four, five!’ Lily yelled, diverted. ‘Beat five if you can!’ Charlie picked another stone but it sank on four. Lily’s next was too heavy and dropped down at three. They threw for a few more moments. ‘It’s hot,’ Lily said. ‘I wish I’d brought my swimming costume.’ Charlie shot a quick look along the cliff. The skyline was deserted for miles in both directions, the only access to the cove was down the little zig-zag path. ‘You could swim in your camiknickers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a towel in the sidecar.’ Lily was unbuttoning her shirt. ‘Will you swim?’ Charlie grinned. ‘Why not? I’ll get that towel first.’ He set off up the cliff path as Lily stepped out of Madge’s trousers and folded them carefully, laying them on the shingle. She picked her way down to the water’s edge over the knobbly stones. Charlie, climbing up the path, heard her shriek as a wave splashed her thighs. He turned and looked back. Lily was wearing old-fashioned cotton camiknickers. They clung to her slim long back and as a wave splashed her he could see the smooth lovely outline of her buttocks. He watched her for a little while, saw her confident plunge into a wave and the strength of her stroke. When he turned to walk the last few yards to the motorcycle, his face was grim. Lily was a small dot heading out to the horizon when Charlie arrived back at the beach with a large stripy towel. He shouted to her, and when she turned, waved her inwards. He stripped down to his shorts and waded into the sea and swam out towards her. ‘Going for France, Lil?’ Lily pointed to a tiny island, weed-covered, which stood in the centre of the bay. ‘I was going to that.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘Too far,’ he said firmly. ‘You will keep an old man happy and stay within your depth.’ Lily made a face at him and duck-dived. He saw the gleam of greenish fair hair underwater and then felt a tickle around his toes. When Lily burst up out of the water she was laughing so much that she choked. She turned and swam away from him and Charlie gave chase. For an hour they played in the deep water and then they swam inshore and lazed in the shallows. The receding tide had uncovered a little shelf of sand studded with small pink shells. Lily, rolled over and back by the incoming waves, collected a handful, and then got up. ‘You can have first go with the towel,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll have another quick swim.’ He turned his back on her and went out to sea and swam until he judged she would be dressed. When he came back inshore she was waiting for him with the towel spread out as if she would wrap him up in it. Charlie took it from her hands, fending her off, and skipped over the pebbles to his clothes. Lily openly watched him as he dried himself and pulled on his shirt and trousers. ‘You’ve got lovely skin.’ Her voice was lazy. Charlie sensed her desire as sweet as perfume. He grinned. ‘Smooth as a baby’s bottom.’ ‘My dad was hairy all over. I don’t like that. But you’ve got a lovely smooth back.’ ‘I want a cup of tea,’ Charlie announced. ‘Did you see a tea shop at any of those villages we came through?’ Lily thought. ‘Wasn’t there one at the post office, in that last little place?’ ‘Excellent,’ Charlie said. ‘You may race me up the cliff.’ Lily started out at a good pace but stopped halfway up, panting and holding her side. Charlie, at a steady jog, trotted past her and overtook her. He slowed and they reached the top neck and neck. ‘An honourable draw,’ Charlie said. He scrunched the paper bags, put the empty lemonade bottle in the sidecar and shook the crumbs from Lily’s headscarf. ‘Sidmouth tomorrow. Have you ever been there, Lil?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been anywhere but day-trips from home. I just love it. Is Sidmouth pretty – like here?’ Charlie nodded and helped Lily into the sidecar. ‘It’s pretty all along here,’ he said. He kickstarted the engine and it roared into life. ‘Tea for two!’ he yelled. The motorbike swung out into the lane and cruised along. Charlie relished the smell of the hedges in bloom and the flowers on the roadside. Over the noise of the engine he could hear Lily singing: ‘… a boy for you, a girl for me …’ She looked up and smiled at him with her whole heart in her eyes. Charlie, despite himself, winked at her and smiled back. The theatre in Sidmouth was the smallest they had played on the tour. The bar at the back of the theatre was open to the auditorium. If they were rowdy in the bar then the audience would turn around in their seats and yell at them. Sometimes fights broke out. Lily was in a state of utter terror at going before them to sing a sacred song but Charlie had been right when he had judged the deep sentimental streak in the most unruly English crowd. And Lily did not realize how captivating she was as a choir boy. They listened to Lily with attention and they clapped warmly and long at the end of her song. Sylvia de Charmante, on the other hand, received whistles and catcalls and loud indecent suggestions. She rode the wave of noise like an old trooper. Nothing upset her. Lily, waiting in the wings, found that she had her hands up over her mouth in horror at the lewdness of the shouts from the bar at the back but Sylvia swayed in time to the music and sang a little louder to drown out the heckling. ‘She doesn’t answer them,’ Charlie pointed out to Lily. They were between shows, sitting at the bar at the back of the theatre drinking lemonade. ‘Sometimes you can go downstage and give as good as you get. I’ve seen people do that with a really sticky house. But generally you do better just to sing over the top of the noise and leave it to the audience whether they listen to you or not.’ ‘I should never have the nerve.’ ‘You’d better learn to have the nerve. You’ve got to be able to sing for the drunks at the bar as well as the ladies in the dress circle, Lil. If you’re a performer you have to grab them whoever they are.’ Lily nodded. ‘I’ll learn.’ ‘Let’s try out that new act for you,’ Charlie said. He led the way through the darkened auditorium. A cleaning woman was sweeping under the seats, grunting with the effort. She straightened up to let them pass, watching them without interest. Charlie opened the little door to the orchestra pit and waved Lily up to the stage. ‘D’you know “Burlington Bertie”, Lil?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘I want you to do it. We’ll dress you in a gent’s morning suit, flower in your pocket, umbrella, all the props. Just sing it through for now. See how it sounds.’ Charlie shuffled through some music in his case. ‘Here’s the words,’ he said, handing up a sheet. Off you go. Just sing it. No actions.’ Lily stood still as he instructed and sang the little song, ‘I’m Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten thirty …’, concentrating only on the tune and the light syncopation of the rhythm. ‘Ever see Vesta Tilley do it?’ Charlie demanded when they reached the end of the song. Lily shook her head. ‘She did it like a man. She walked like a man, she moved her hands like a man. She had this big bust on her, and her waistcoat stretched over it and then she went on stage and sang and moved exactly like a man. People loved it. It was really …’ Charlie flapped his hand, seeking the right word. ‘Contradictory. Entertaining.’ ‘I don’t know I can do that.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘No! No! It’s been done! You never do what’s been done already. You don’t want to be the second Vesta Tilley, you want to be a wholly original Lily Valance. You do the song differently. How would you do it?’ Lily thought. ‘It’d have to be in boy’s clothes. It’s a song about being a man. I’d have to do it in man’s clothes.’ Charlie nodded, waited for more. ‘It’s almost a sad song,’ Lily suddenly said. ‘I don’t know how to do it but in a way it’s a song about someone pretending to be something he isn’t. Someone with nothing to do. It comes over funny, but if you actually think about his life – it’s lonely.’ Charlie snapped the fingers on both hands. ‘Jackpot! You try it!’ He played the introductory notes, Lily took a fold of her blouse in each hand, as a man holds the lapels of his coat, and strolled across the stage. She sang with a sort of lingering wistfulness, her clear voice very sweet on the simple tune. ‘Magic,’ Charlie said softly to himself over the keyboard. ‘Burlington Bertie as one of the lost generation. No real friends, no-one who knows what it was like. One of the ones who came back, who’s learning to envy those who won’t ever come back. A young man who has buried young men. Magic.’ Lily stood downstage, looking down at Charlie in the pit. ‘It felt really sad,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how to do it.’ ‘That’ll do nicely for a try-out.’ Charlie hid his delight. ‘That’s all I wanted for today. Just to hear it through.’ Madge stepped out on to the stage. ‘Would you hear something through of mine?’ ‘All requests graciously received,’ Charlie said with patience. ‘What did you want to do, Madge?’ ‘It’s a ragtime song. I want to have it as an audition piece. It’s called “Red Hot Baby”.’ ‘“Red Hot Baby”,’ Charlie repeated. ‘Can you count, Madge? Can you count beats to a bar?’ ‘Not really,’ Madge said cheerfully. ‘But if you play it over to me and sing it to me then I can remember it.’ Charlie took the music and set it in the stand. He counted Madge in. She missed the introduction. He played it through again and nodded her when to start. This time she hit the beat and stayed with it, more or less, till the end of the song. She had a thin little voice but she could keep a tune, and she danced with a lot of energy, swinging her hips and winking at the empty auditorium. The cleaning woman wasted one glance on all of them and carried on with her work. Charlie clattered into the finale and did a mock drum-roll with the bass notes. ‘Not bad!’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard coon-shouting, Madge?’ Madge shook her head. ‘You don’t worry about the tune at all, you just shout as though you are hoarse over the top of the music and dance like you do – only more so.’ Lily widened her eyes. ‘She’ll get arrested.’ Madge gurgled. ‘Divine!’ ‘Once more?’ Charlie offered. ‘Try it without singing the tune, Madge, try just talking it. Leave the tune to me, but make sure you hit the rhythm of it. You’ve got to get the beat of it – the rest can look after itself.’ Madge took a couple of steps upstage and cakewalked her way to the front. Her speaking voice was lower than her singing, huskier. At once the song became compelling, sexual. Madge winked at Charlie and went into a few dance steps, wiggling her bottom with a swing of her hip on each beat. At the end of the song she stretched out her arms and frankly jiggled her breasts and then finished with her arms upflung and her head thrown back. Lily applauded with her mouth open. Charlie roared with laughter. ‘A star is born, Madge! That’s the way to do it! You want an exotic kind of set, like a speakeasy or a club, and some kind of tight dress with a big slit up the front. You’ll be a huge hit!’ ‘Will you suggest it to Mr Brett?’ Madge asked breathlessly. ‘He listens to you. He let you put Lily in even though he didn’t think it would work.’ ‘If someone drops out and makes a space, I’ll mention it to him. And it’d be a good audition piece for you, Madge. It’s a real knock ’em dead number.’ Madge beamed. ‘Will you rehearse me again sometime? Like you do with Lily?’ Charlie smiled. ‘I have no favourites, ladies. Of course I will.’ Madge blew him a kiss for thanks and then slipped her hand through Lily’s arm and led her off the stage. ‘Liar,’ she said under her breath. ‘He does have favourites. You.’ They went to their dressing room. It was empty, the other girls had gone out for tea. Lily dropped into the broken-springed armchair, the only furniture in the room. Madge sat before the mirror and scowled at her reflection. ‘Are you courting?’ she asked. ‘I can’t tell with you two. He takes you out a lot and you went out for the day on Sunday but then he treats you like he treats the rest of us when we’re all together.’ Lily slung her legs over the arm of the chair and picked at the frayed edge of the loose cover. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think he’s wonderful. Sometimes I feel like he really likes me, and then other times I don’t know. He makes a big fuss of my singing and he’s really taught me a lot. But he’d do the same for you, I think.’ ‘He doesn’t take me out for a day in the country,’ Madge observed. ‘Did he kiss you?’ Lily flushed. ‘Sort of. Actually, Madge, I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had a proper boyfriend and Charlie is so …’ ‘So what?’ ‘When he looks at me,’ Lily said slowly. ‘When he looks at me and smiles and his eyes are so dark and his smile is so …’ ‘Well?’ ‘I just want to take all my clothes off and crawl all over him!’ Lily said defiantly. ‘I do! When he smiles at me I don’t care what I do. And I don’t care what anyone thinks.’ Madge shrieked with laughter. ‘Lily!’ she said. ‘Your ma would go mad!’ Lily’s face was alight with mischief and desire. ‘I don’t care! I don’t care what she would think. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I must be in love with him. I must be. This must be what it feels like.’ Madge nodded. ‘Head over heels,’ she said. Lily looked at her wonderingly. ‘D’you think so? Is this it? I’m in love?’ Madge nodded. ‘Just think of that!’ Lily said. ‘I’m in love with Charlie Smith.’ ‘But what about him?’ Lily frowned and picked at the threads of the armchair cover again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He kissed me on the beach and he held me really tight. But then he said we shouldn’t. That my ma would be angry. And then he didn‘t touch me for the rest of the day.’ ‘He thinks of you as a little kid,’ Madge advised. ‘He knows your ma and he dressed you up in the choir boy costume. He thinks of you as a little girl still. You’ll have to show him you’re a woman if you want him to take you seriously.’ Lily’s dark blue eyes were huge. ‘How?’ Madge shrugged and then giggled. ‘If I felt like you do I’d wait till everyone had gone to bed and then I’d sneak down the corridor and just get into his bed.’ Lily gave a short delighted scream and clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘I’d never dare!’ she said. ‘What if he threw me out? What if he was angry?’ Madge shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t be angry. There isn’t a man in England who would be angry! He might say you were too young or that your ma wouldn’t like it but at least you’d be there – wouldn’t you? And he’d have to do something!’ ‘He might tell me he doesn’t like me,’ Lily said. ‘He won’t say that,’ Madge replied. ‘Anyone can see that he’s crazy about you. But he won’t say so. You want to move him on a bit, Lil. Get him going. There’s only a fortnight left of the tour and then you might never work with him again. If you want him, you’d better catch him while you can.’ Chapter Ten (#ulink_a83125ab-f46d-558d-bbbb-59bf20173411) Lily walked her way through the evening performance and was white and silent at supper at the digs. Even the conjuror noticed it. ‘Have you got a gyppy tum, darling?’ he asked. ‘I can let you have a drop of brandy if it would settle it. I happen to have a little bottle in my room.’ Lily flushed scarlet while Madge snorted on a laugh. ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ Lily said. ‘Just a bit tired.’ ‘Better go to bed early then,’ Madge said with a wealth of meaning. Lily shot a reproachful look at her. ‘I’m fine,’ she said again. After dinner had been cleared away and the teapot served and Madge had poured everyone a cup, the cast started drifting off to their rooms. In the first weeks of the tour they had often gone out after supper, to clubs or late-opening pubs. But as they had moved further and further west the towns had become smaller, and even in June at the start of the holiday season there were few late-night bars. They would still go out on a Saturday night, booking a table for all of them and going out as a gang. But in the middle of the week even the chorus girls would go to bed after the late supper and sleep in until midday. Lily lay wakefully in her bed. She shared her bedroom with Susie, who had sat at the mirror for ten minutes, creaming her face, and was now fast asleep. She had a little travelling clock by the bed and Lily could see it in the moonlight if she leaned up. She had promised herself that she would go to Charlie’s room at midnight. The clock said five minutes past and Lily still had not found the courage to make a move. The minute hand clicked to six minutes past and Lily sat up in bed. From there she could see her own reflection in the dressing table mirror: the smooth bobbed hair, her big dark eyes and the prosaic candy-stripe of her pyjamas. Lily thought with envy of Sylvia de Charmante’s lace-trimmed negligee. Charlie would probably take one look at her in her faded hand-me-down pyjamas and laugh aloud. Lily grimaced at the mirror and swung her bare feet to the cold oilcloth floor. On the dressing table was Susie’s turquoise and gold bottle of eau de cologne. With a guilty glance at the girl fast asleep in her bed, Lily put a generous dab behind each ear, down her neck, and then tipped a chilly rivulet which ran down between her breasts under her pyjama jacket. She screwed the little metal cap back on, and tiptoed for the door. It creaked as it opened and Lily froze, expecting Susie to wake and call out. Nothing happened. Susie turned over in her bed and stayed asleep. Lily shut the door cautiously behind her and crept down the corridor. There was a narrow strip of red and blue patterned carpet over the stained wood floorboards. Lily slid her bare feet cautiously down the carpet runner, flinching from boards which creaked as they received her weight. Charlie’s room was at the back of the boarding house, near the bathroom. If anyone should open their door and see her, Lily could say that she was going to the toilet. Only her intent face and the strong waft of eau de cologne would deny her story. Lily reached Charlie’s door and put her hand on the door knob. It turned easily under her touch. ‘Oh blimey,’ Lily said miserably and stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. The curtains were drawn open and the room half-lit by moonlight. Lily could see Charlie lying on his back, one hand behind his head, the other hand outflung. He was wearing pyjamas but the buttons of the jacket were undone. Lily could see his pulse beating steadily and unhurried at his throat, and the smooth skin of his chest. She felt her longing to touch him rise up like a fever and obliterate her nervousness. As she watched his eyelids flicker as he dreamed, and his chest rise and fall with his steady confident breathing, she knew that whatever it cost her in embarrassment or even shame, she had to feel the skin of his chest against her face. She had to lie beside him. Even if it were only for a moment. Even if it were only once. Lily untied the cord of her pyjama trousers and dropped them to the floor, undid the buttons of her jacket and shrugged it off. Then she lifted the bedclothes and slid into bed beside Charlie. He did not wake at first. He moved over to the far side of the bed as if to make room for her and he smiled in his sleep as if he welcomed her. He stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder, and, as if he had been shaken awake by the sense of that smooth skin under his fingertips, his eyes flew open and he said at once: ‘Oh my God, Lil! You’d better go.’ Lily didn’t move. She lay on her side, her head on his pillow, her eyes fixed on his face, and said nothing. Charlie flinched away to the far side of the bed and gathered his pyjama jacket around his body. ‘Lily, you must go!’ he said again. He passed a hand quickly over his face, to rub his sleep away. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’ Lily extended a hand cautiously, like someone reaching out to touch a strange animal. She put her fingers on the base of his throat where she had seen his pulse beating steadily as he slept. Under her touch she could feel his pulse speeding up. Lily smiled. She no longer felt like a young girl, a silly girl, with an infatuation for a man who cared nothing for her. She felt his pulse thudding faster at her touch and she knew he desired her. ‘I love you,’ she said wonderingly. ‘I couldn’t bear for you not to know it. I’ve loved you from the moment I first met you.’ Charlie sat up in the bed, drew up his knees, and rested his head on his crossed arms, his whole body armouring itself against her. ‘Lily, this is crazy,’ he said. ‘You must get out of my bed and go back to your own room and we’ll talk about it in the morning.’ Lily shook her head. ‘No,’ she said simply. She sat up beside him. The sheet slid away from her and Charlie could see the smooth pale skin of her shoulders and the curve of her breasts. ‘This is very unfair.’ Lily chuckled irresistibly. Charlie felt himself smiling in response. ‘Put your arm around me,’ she commanded. He put his arm around her and she leaned her fair head on his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her skin through his thin pyjama jacket, he sensed her nakedness and he felt the start of the long ache of his pain. ‘Don’t you care for me at all?’ Lily asked. Unconsciously his grip tightened. ‘Don’t think that,’ he said softly. ‘I do care for you.’ Lily turned her face up to him. ‘I don’t mean like a friend, or a pupil. I want you to love me. Like a lover.’ Charlie’s face was dark with tension. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said softly. ‘You’re too young, Lil. You don’t know what you’re asking. And I cannot …’ Lily tipped her head back. In the moonlight the smooth column of her neck was pale, her breasts emerged from the rumpled bedclothes. Charlie, despite himself, put a hand to her cheek, her chin, stroked down the sensuous line of her neck, cupped her breast in his hand. Lily put her arm around his neck and drew his head down to kiss her. They slid down into the pillows together and Charlie kissed her face hungrily, like a man snatching at a meal; kissed her lips and her closed eyelids, kissed her ears and her neck, kissed her breasts and then lipped tenderly, and then more roughly, at her nipples. Lily moaned very quietly and arched her back, reaching up for his touch. Charlie’s arms held her close. Lily buried her face in his neck. She could smell the clean smell of his hair, the tang of his sweat, she could smell the overpowering scent of warmed eau de cologne. Charlie sighed and then rolled on top of her, Lily opened her legs and wrapped them around his thighs, tightened her arms around his back and arched her body upwards to meet him. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. As if that word of assent broke a spell, Charlie wrenched himself away from her and flung himself to the edge of the bed. He threw back the covers and got out of bed, not even looking at Lily. ‘It’s not possible, Lil,’ he said tightly. ‘Please believe me. This is not possible.’ He picked up her pyjamas from the floor and thrust them at her. ‘Put these on. Get them on, Lil, I won’t speak to you until you’re dressed.’ ‘I …’ ‘Get dressed!’ he ordered angrily. He flung himself to the hearthrug before the gas fire and fumbled with matches. He turned the brass tap for the gas and with a little pop-popping the flame rippled along the base of the fire and the white spiky bones grew pink and then orange and then glowed a steady red. Lily fastened the buttons of her pyjama jacket with shaking hands. She slid out of bed and pulled on the trousers. She was scarlet with shame. Then she sat on the edge of the bed like a naughty child sent to her room as a punishment, with nothing to do but to wait for adult forgiveness. ‘I’m dressed,’ she said in a small voice. Charlie turned around and saw her stricken face. ‘Oh, come here,’ he said, holding one arm out to her. Lily tumbled off the bed to the hearthrug and into his arms. He held her firmly, affectionately. He patted her back as if he were consoling her for some little hurt. Then he seated her in the chair beside the fire and sat back on the hearthrug, at a little distance from her so that he could see her face. ‘I’ll have to tell you something which I prefer to keep private,’ he said. ‘Will you promise to tell no-one?’ Lily nodded. ‘It’s about my injury, from the war.’ Lily thought of half his lung missing, and then remembered the smooth skin of his back, the silky warmth of his chest, his run up the cliff path when he had raced her to the motorbike, and how he had reached the top without being breathless. ‘You said you were injured in the lungs.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘I was injured in the groin,’ he said precisely. His face was stiff, the words forced out. ‘Castrated. I’m not a proper man, Lily. I couldn’t ever be your husband. I took a piece of shell across my thighs. It took out my balls and half my penis.’ His face was grim, he was forcing the words out. ‘We were trapped in a shellhole, heads down into the earth. Half of the men took wounds in their legs and buttocks. It was a pitiful day – a long, long day. We were on a night patrol which went wrong, we were pinned down in no-man’s-land from dawn till twilight. They couldn’t get stretchers out to us till dark.’ He was silent for a moment then he shook his head at the memory. ‘It’s a common injury,’ he said. ‘Fighting over that ground with no shelter. There were a lot of men injured low. It’s your instinct to get your head down, to shelter your face. We must have been a funny sight.’ His smile was as bitter as gas. ‘Our heads ducked down and our bums left out. We must have been a funny sight,’ he said again. Lily put her hand out gently and rested it on the sleeve of his pyjama jacket. Charlie gave her a brief unhappy smile. ‘So I can’t give you children, and I can’t give you pleasure, normal pleasure,’ he said. ‘I thought that I might be able to be your friend. But I can offer you nothing more than my friendship.’ Lily said nothing. The fire made a little popping noise and the flames flickered and jumped from orange to yellow. Charlie reached behind Lily’s chair and put another sixpence in the meter from a little pile balanced on top of the metal box. The gas flowed steadily again and the bones of the fire glowed. ‘I don’t care,’ Lily said, scarcely taking in what he was saying. ‘I love you. Do you love me, Charlie? That’s all I want to know.’ He shrugged with a hard smile as if none of it mattered very much at all. ‘Oh yes, I love you, Lily. I utterly and absolutely adore you.’ She reached forward at once but he fended her off. ‘It doesn’t matter – don’t you see? It doesn’t make any difference. You should marry a man who can give you all the things you deserve. I wouldn’t want anything less than that for you. You should have the best. I want the best for you. I don’t want you married to a cripple, to half a man.’ Lily shook her head. ‘It does matter,’ Charlie insisted. ‘You think now that you love me enough to overlook it. That we could be happy together in spite of it. But you would want children. And you are young and beautiful and passionate. You need a lover, Lil, not half a man. I am not the man for you. I am of no use to any woman.’ He had been looking at the prosaic flicker of the fire but now he glanced up at Lily’s face. She was very still but her face was shiny with the wetness of many tears. He pulled her down beside him on the hearthrug and held her close. ‘If I loved you any less, then I would marry you and make you stay with me,’ he said softly into her hair. ‘If I loved you any less I would marry you and keep you and try to convince you that children don’t matter, that making love doesn’t matter. But I love you so much that I won’t do that to you.’ He took a breath. ‘I made up my mind when I was first injured. I wouldn’t do that to any woman. I’ll even play ragtime at your wedding.’ Lily shook her head and turned to argue but Charlie kissed her into silence. Her mouth was wet and salty. He took the sleeve of his pyjamas and wiped her face very gently. ‘I’m not a child,’ Lily said. He nodded. ‘I know it. You’re a beautiful and desirable woman, Lil. And I wish to God that my luck was different. There have been times when I’ve wished that the shell had killed me outright; but I don’t think that any more. Not even now – with you in my arms and nothing I can do for you. There are things that I have had to put from me and forget, and there are things which I can still have and enjoy. I cannot be your lover but I’m damned if I’ll spend my whole life regretting that. I didn’t come out of that shellhole and on to that stretcher and through that bloody dressing station where young men – children – were dying all around me, to spend the rest of my life wishing it away. I won’t grieve, Lil. Don’t you grieve either.’ Her young bright courage rose at that, as he had thought it would. She pushed back her hair. ‘But you do love me?’ He smiled. ‘Oh, you’re a woman all right! Yes. I love you, and I will never love anyone else like I love you tonight. Will that do for you? I never have loved anyone as I feel for you. And I have never told anyone else about this – my injury. I love you and I trust you, Lil. And I’ll help you with your career when I can, and sometimes we’ll work together and we’ll always be friends. Will that do?’ Lily nodded, and tried to smile. ‘But I won’t stand in your light. I won’t overshadow you. You have to go forward. You’ll meet other men and you’ll like them and one of them you will love. You’ll love him even more than you love me now. That’s how it has to be, that’s how I want it. I want you to promise me that you’ll love and marry when you wish. Don’t hold back for me. Because I won’t thank you for it.’ Lily nodded forlornly, her face strained, dark shadows under her eyes. ‘You look all in,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s enough for tonight. We’ll talk more tomorrow if you want, sweetheart. But you go now. Off to bed with you.’ ‘Can’t I stay here? Just for a few moments? Can’t we cuddle up together and just hold each other?’ He pulled her to her feet and settled her into his bed. He got in beside her, careful that their bodies did not touch. He put his arm around her shoulder and she rested her head on his chest. He lay very still until the steady rhythm of her breathing told him that she was asleep. Only then did his face relax and he felt the warmth of his tears on his own cheeks as he acknowledged the ache in his body where his balls had been, and the pain of his heart, still thudding too fast from impotent desire. They both jumped awake at the hammering on the front door. Charlie, with an old trained response, was out of his bed and at the bedroom door before he was fully awake. ‘Damn. That’s torn it,’ he said. Lily slipped out of bed and came to his side. They could hear the landlady opening the door and the flush of the cistern from the next door bathroom. ‘Miss Pears?’ the woman said to the caller. ‘I think all the girls are still asleep.’ Lily shot a quick anxious look at Charlie. ‘You’ll have to make a run for it,’ he said. ‘Try and look as if you’re coming out of the bathroom.’ He half-opened the door but then pulled her back behind it as the conjuror’s partner saw the door open and said jovially, ‘Morning, Charlie! What’s all the damned noise about so early?’ ‘Miss Pears,’ said the man clearly from the doorstep. ‘It’s an emergency.’ ‘That’s Stephen Winters,’ Lily hissed. She paused for a moment and then realized. ‘My God! It must be my ma.’ She slipped from Charlie’s restraining hand, tore open the door and ran to the stairs. ‘Stephen!’ she called, running downstairs towards him, careless of her striped pyjamas and her rumpled hair. ‘Is Ma ill? What’s happened?’ Charlie followed to the head of the stairs to listen. ‘She’s very ill, Lily,’ Stephen said. Charlie could hear the triumph in the man’s voice, his self-importance. ‘She’s got Spanish flu. She’s at the Royal Infirmary. I drove all night to come and fetch you. I’ll take you home to her now.’ Lily turned away from him and looked up the stairs to Charlie. Stephen followed the direction of her gaze and saw Charlie, dark-jawed and weary, standing at the head of the stairs. ‘What should I do?’ Lily asked him. He nodded at Stephen. ‘You’d better get dressed and pack, Lil. You’d better go at once.’ He spoke past her to Stephen. ‘Are you fit to drive back? There are trains.’ Stephen gleamed at him. Despite driving all night he looked glossy with health. Charlie felt rumpled and dissolute, blinking in the late-morning brightness, still aching from the distress of last night. ‘I shared the driving with my man,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ll trouble your landlady for some bread and cheese to take with us and we’ll be off as soon as Miss Pears is ready.’ Charlie nodded. ‘Please, both of you, come in. Mrs Harris will make you some tea and some breakfast. Lil had better have something to eat before she goes as well.’ He waved Stephen into the dining room and retreated to his bedroom, pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt. He felt better once he was dressed. He went next door to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. His deep-set dark eyes looked at him from the mirror. His face was grim. Downstairs two of the chorus girls were fluttering around the dining room in their dressing-gowns. Mrs Harris brought in tea and chunky bacon sandwiches thick with butter and dripping with fat. Stephen sat quietly in the midst of all the confusion and excitement and ate hungrily. Coventry ate standing up beside the sideboard. Lily came into the room with her handbag and vanity case. Charlie went up to her bedroom to fetch her suitcase and put it by the front door. In the dining room the girls were pressing Lily to eat, but all she would have was a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. ‘Telephone from Portsmouth as soon as you know what’s happening,’ Madge instructed. ‘Let us know how she is.’ Lily nodded, chewing bread without being able to swallow. She sipped tea. Charlie felt his heart wrenched for her white-faced fear. ‘D’you want me to come with you?’ he said suddenly, offering the impossible. Lily looked at him while Stephen covertly watched them both. ‘No,’ she said gently. ‘I know you can’t. It’s all right. I’m a grown-up now.’ He smiled at her, the tender intimate smile of lovers who have spent the night in each other’s arms. ‘You are indeed,’ he said. ‘Be brave, Lil.’ She nodded and ate the last of the slice. ‘Time to go,’ Stephen said. He pressed his napkin to his moustache and threw it down. Mrs Harris had given him the best linen, Charlie noticed. He drained his tea cup and went towards the door. Coventry loaded the suitcase into the boot of the Argyll and opened the door for Lily. Mrs Harris bustled up from the basement kitchen with a bag of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of ginger beer. Stephen took them with a word of thanks and got into the back seat beside Lily. Coventry slammed his door and started the engine. The girls screamed good wishes to Lily who leaned forward and waved. Charlie met her eyes. She mouthed ‘I love you’ to him and he nodded and raised a hand in acknowledgement, as the big car drew away from the kerb. ‘Isn’t he the dreamiest man in the world?’ Madge demanded as they went back into the house. ‘Isn’t he just the best?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Charlie agreed. ‘Smug bastard.’ Chapter Eleven (#ulink_d1b075e4-703c-53de-8190-340c04495a48) Stephen did not speak much to Lily during the first part of the drive. After he had told her all he knew of her mother’s health they sat in silence, watching the countryside roll by as Coventry drove as quickly as the curving country roads allowed. Stephen’s nose prickled. He could smell scent on Lily. He had never smelled perfume on her before. She smelled cheap, like a chorus girl, like a tart. The clarity of his decision, when he had told his mother that he loved Lily, faded away at the girl’s real presence, at her smell. She had been warm and rumpled when she had run downstairs. There had been something domestic and repellent about her cheap pyjamas and her ruffled hair and her sleepy face. Stephen wanted Lily as she was when she was on stage as a choir boy, flawless as a china doll. When she had come down the stairs to the front door she had been a warm sleepy sensuous female. It was not just the smell of cheap perfume he disliked, it was the smell of warm skin. Stephen shook his head. He had not liked the digs, he had not liked Mrs Harris. And most of all he had disliked how Charlie Smith had been at once a part of that world – he had the same dreamy tranced expression as Lily, he too was still warm from a comfortable bed – and at the same time he had been commanding. Stephen had envisaged himself ordering Lily. But she turned at once to Charlie to ask him what she should do. And Charlie somehow had taken control of the whole situation. Charlie had looked like an enlisted man, a common man, barefoot, unshaven and scruffy, but even so he had told Lily to pack and sent Stephen and Coventry in for breakfast. Stephen scanned his memory of the man and saw him coming in to the dining room, hastily washed, and saw the long level look exchanged between him and Lily. He glanced across the back seat at her. Lily was asleep, her head thrown back, her little hat askew. There were dark blue shadows in the delicate skin under her closed eyes. Her face was white, a sprinkling of freckles over her nose showing brown against her pallor. Stephen stared at her, torn between longing and anger. He loved her, he desired her, he wanted to hold her and protect her. He wanted to serve her and keep her. Especially he wanted to keep her well away from that hugger-mugger intimate domesticity that he sensed when she and Charlie had looked at each other and Charlie had decided what she should do. Stephen shuddered, shook his head. He slid back the glass panel between the rear seats and the driver. ‘We’ll go back the same way,’ he said. He wanted to hear the normality of his voice giving orders. He did not want to think of Lily and Charlie. He could not believe that she would allow such a man, a common man, to be intimate with her. He did not want to see Charlie’s pale dark-jawed face or Lily looking up the stairs, up to him. ‘It was a good road,’ he said to Coventry. ‘We made good time.’ Coventry nodded his alert attentive nod. Coventry always listened, never changed. He had been allocated to Stephen as his batman when Stephen had arrived at the Front and had stayed with him ever since. He had spoken very little, even in those days. But his smile was as reassuring as an older brother. Whenever there had been an attack and they had been pinned down in the trenches, sometimes for hours, Coventry always managed to make a brew and bring Stephen a mug of hot tea and a slice of bread and cheese. When they had to advance, Coventry was always at Stephen’s side. Stephen knew that if he was hit, then Coventry would stop and drag him to safety. All the others would go on, obeying orders and ignoring the wounded even if they screamed for help. But Coventry would stop for Stephen, and while he had morphine in his pack Stephen would never be left, screaming with pain, waiting for the stretcher bearers to reach him, knowing they might never come at all. Once Stephen had taken an order on the field telephone to advance and the fool at the other end would not listen when Stephen told him that the wire ahead of them had not been cut. He tried and tried to tell him that they could not advance for against them was a sprawl of ragged razor-sharp barbed wire and behind that were the Huns with six machine gun emplacements, and behind the Hun soldiers was their artillery which had the range of the British trenches and would see them as they stumbled across the waste ground. They would snipe at Stephen and his men, with their trained deadly accuracy, and they would mow them down with the easy spray of machine gun fire. Shelling them with big heavy artillery shells would be as easy as range practice for them. Stephen had been screaming, trying to tell that bland voice that it could not be done, when Coventry had leaned over Stephen’s shoulder and snatched the telephone wire from its connecting point, so the phone went suddenly dead. ‘Bad connection,’ he had said. ‘Sorry, sir. Rotten connection. I doubt you could hear him, could you?’ Later that day, while Coventry was leisurely repairing the telephone, a runner arrived to tell them that the attack was cancelled because the weather was too bright and there had been some muddle and there were no reserve forces in place. They would never have cancelled it just because some junior officer at the front line had said that he would die, and all his men would die, if they obeyed. Stephen had often protested in those days, his early days at the Front in 1917. In those days Stephen had felt anger at his entrapment in the killing grounds of the Flanders plain, had felt an urgent longing to live. In those days Coventry could speak. Stephen glanced at Lily; her face was turned away, her eyes were shut. He reached through the panel and put his hand on Coventry’s shoulder. He felt the comfort of the good wool material of Coventry’s grey uniform jacket. He felt the reassuring meatiness of Coventry’s muscled shoulder. ‘Four hours,’ he said. ‘I’ll take over driving in four hours,’ and fell asleep. Lily’s eyes were shut but she was not asleep. She felt trapped in a nightmare of her worst fear. The moment Stephen had told her of her mother’s illness she had felt as if she had stepped into a cold shady morass. Even now, in the comfort of the car with the warm morning sun gilding the upholstery and the veneered wood, Lily could feel herself chilled inside. She could hardly imagine her mother ill in bed. Helen had been remorselessly fit for all of Lily’s life. She was a powerful woman, she could shift crates of lemonade bottles, stack boxes of dried goods. She had risen at six every morning of her life and worked until nine or ten every night. Lily could not imagine her mother with that core of physical strength drained from her. She could hardly imagine her tired – it was impossible to imagine her sick. Lily turned her face into the sunlight as it flickered through the windscreen. Coventry was driving into the sun, his eyes screwed up against the glare, his hat pulled down so that the peak of the cap shaded his eyes. On the windscreen the splattered bodies of insects glowed like little specks of gold. ‘Please, Jesus, no,’ Lily whispered. ‘Please make her well. Please make her well.’ At midday Coventry pulled over to an open gateway to a field. Stephen awoke as soon as the car stopped. ‘My shift?’ he asked. ‘Where are we?’ In answer Coventry opened the driver’s door and spread the road map on the warm bonnet of the Argyll. Stephen got out of the back seat and stretched. The midday sun was hot on the back of his neck, his dark business suit was crumpled, the shirt dirty at the collar. ‘By God, I’d be a lot more comfortable in uniform. I never thought I’d say that.’ Coventry smiled grimly and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, lit two in his mouth and passed one to Stephen. They looked at the map, their heads close together. In the back seat Lily stirred and opened her eyes. Through the windscreen the two men looked as if they were embracing like brothers. ‘We’re making good time,’ Stephen said, pleased. ‘We’ll take a pee-break and I’ll drive.’ He went to the rear door of the car and then suddenly hesitated. He did not know how to tell Lily that she could urinate in the field. Lily looked up at him and got out of the car. She stretched. ‘I slept well,’ she lied. ‘Are we stopping for lunch?’ ‘We’ll eat as we drive,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ll drive now. If you want a …’ He broke off. All the euphemisms his mother used at tea parties were hopelessly inappropriate in this thick hayfield. How could he ask Lily if she wanted to powder her nose or wash her hands? Stephen flushed a deep mortified red. He did not know the common forms of speech between men and women. He could not deal with ordinary life with Lily. She was a lady to him, and thus a whole world of experience was taboo, unmentionable. ‘Coventry and I are going to stretch our legs for a moment,’ he said awkwardly. ‘We’ll be five minutes.’ Lily turned her puzzled face to him and Stephen backed away from her, and touched Coventry’s arm. ‘Pee in the next field,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come on.’ Coventry followed him. Lily, still not understanding, watched the two men go. They climbed over a five-barred gate and then Lily saw the top of Stephen’s brown head and Coventry’s cap line up side by side and stand still. She gave a quick embarrassed giggle. ‘Bloody fool,’ she said. She stepped a little way from the Argyll so that the hedge hid her from the road and squatted to relieve herself. She watched the clear trickle of urine soak into the ground and smelled the damp sweet smell of wet earth and the musky aroused smell of her own body with innocent animal relish. Then she straightened up and pulled down her tailored summer skirt. ‘Damn fool,’ she said again. Stephen and Coventry stood in the other field staring into the distance until Stephen checked his watch to ensure that he had given Lily the full five minutes, and then they clambered awkwardly over the gate. Stephen was still blushing. ‘Ready to go on?’ he asked Lily. ‘Yes.’ Stephen got behind the wheel with Coventry sitting beside him, leaving Lily alone in the back seat. ‘You eat all you want from the picnic basket,’ Stephen said as he started the engine. ‘Then Coventry will take it from you and we’ll have the rest. We had a good breakfast, so make sure you have all that you want.’ Lily unbuckled the leather straps on the hamper and opened the lid. She was too unhappy to be hungry. She took a slice of bread and a piece of cheese and an apple and one of the bottles of ginger beer. ‘That’s all I want.’ Coventry kneeled up on the front passenger seat and leaned into the back to take the picnic hamper from Lily. Then he sat back into his seat with the hamper on his lap. ‘Cheese sandwich and a piece of that ham in with it too,’ Stephen said, glancing over. Coventry deftly sliced bread, cheese and ham with his pocket knife and passed a bulky sandwich over to Stephen. He ate nothing himself until Stephen had finished, and he held the ginger beer bottle while Stephen drank. Only when Stephen said, ‘I’m done now’, did Coventry choose his own food and eat. Lily, watching the two men in their monosyllabic communion, sensed long days and nights of working and keeping watch and resting together when there had been nothing to say except a brief order or an assent. She dozed, lulled by the swaying of the car, and when she awoke it was mid-afternoon and the sun was behind them instead of ahead. ‘Where are we?’ ‘Just outside Southampton,’ Stephen said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Not long now. We’ll go straight to the Royal Infirmary.’ Lily nodded. She watched the wide green fields of Hampshire without seeing them. She still could not believe that her mother was ill. She still could not believe that the little shop which had opened every week day for ten years was shut today and would not open tomorrow. Stephen drove swiftly and well. A hay cart pulled out in front of him, towed by an old slow tractor. He waited until the road straightened and then pulled out to the right and swept past it. The driver waved amiably, Coventry raised a hand in reply. Lily watched for the familiar landmarks of Portsmouth, the ugly suburbs of Hilsea and Portsdown. Stephen turned right off the coast road and headed south down the Fratton Road to the hospital. The Argyll swept through the gateway and up to the entrance. Lily was out of the car and running through the hospital door before Stephen had brought the car to a complete halt. ‘Damn! I wanted to go in with her,’ he said. He opened his door. ‘Drive home at once and tell Mother that I am back and that she must make up the spare bedroom for Lily. We’ll come home when we’re finished here. Come back here and wait for me. Quick as you can.’ There was no sign of Lily in the shadowy entrance hall. She must have found her way to the right ward at once. Stephen said ‘Damn’ again and ran up the stone steps to the women’s medical ward on the first floor. A nurse was in the corridor. Stephen nodded at her in his authoritative way. ‘Helen Pears?’ he asked. ‘She’s in there,’ the nurse said. ‘I’ll tell Sister you’re here.’ She threw a quick flirtatious look at Stephen from under her eyelashes but he was already turning away and going into the side room. Lily was leaning over her mother’s bed, her face wrenched with pain. She had her mother’s hand held to her heart. Helen Pears was barely conscious. Her face was waxy and white, the skin of her eyelids and her lips pale yellow. Every breath came unwillingly in a deep rattling sigh. When she opened her eyes they were misty as if they were filming over already. Stephen nodded. He had seen enough men die to know the signs. ‘Ma? Can you hear me? Ma?’ The hand Lily was pressing to her heart tightened slightly. ‘Lily,’ the dying woman said softly. As her mother said her name Lily gave a little gasp and the tears tumbled down her face. ‘Oh, Ma! You’re all right, aren’t you? You’re going to be well?’ The door behind Stephen opened and the Ward Sister came into the room. ‘Are you the daughter?’ she asked. Lily nodded without taking her eyes from her mother’s face. ‘I should like to have a word with you,’ the Sister said. ‘Would you step outside, Miss Pears?’ Lily glanced up at her with sudden impatience. ‘Not now.’ She pulled up a chair to her mother’s bedside and sat leaning towards her so her head was nearly on her mother’s pillow. ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve had a wonderful time but I’ve missed you so much, Ma. I thought of you every day. And I so wished you could have come too.’ A small weary smile went across the pale face. ‘But after this season I might get work in town,’ Lily said encouragingly. ‘Charlie may be MD at the Kings! Think of that, Ma! And he has worked on an audition piece for me and wants me to try for an act there! You get well and you’ll be able to see me up on that lovely stage!’ ‘Miss Pears,’ the Sister interrupted again. ‘I have other patients to attend to. Please come outside for a moment.’ Lily glanced up at the woman and Stephen realized that although she had heard the harshness of the tone and the irritation in the voice she had not taken in the words at all. Her whole awareness was focused on her mother. She had forgotten that Stephen or the Sister were even there. He took the Sister’s arm. ‘I’m a friend of the family,’ he said. ‘I’ve just fetched Lily from Sidmouth to see her mother. Please tell me the news. I’ll tell Lily later.’ He drew her from the room. ‘She should prepare herself for the end,’ the Sister said bluntly. ‘Mrs Pears has an acute form of Spanish influenza and she has not responded to any treatment. It has developed into pneumonia. We don’t think she will last the night.’ Stephen nodded. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Is she in pain?’ The Sister shook her head. ‘We are giving her morphine to control the pain,’ she said. ‘But of course it makes her rather vague. If her daughter wants to speak to her we could stop the morphine for a little while. I had not thought she was so young.’ Stephen shook his head decisively. ‘Mrs Pears should not suffer pain,’ he said firmly. ‘Lily needs no words of advice. She has friends who will care for her. They both know that. She would not want to see her mother suffer.’ The Sister nodded. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do,’ she said. Stephen smiled slightly and touched her arm. ‘I am sure you have been wonderful,’ he said. ‘I wonder, could you obtain a cup of tea for Miss Pears? It has been a long and worrying day for her.’ The Sister nodded and sent a junior nurse scurrying. Stephen stayed outside the room in the corridor, watching Lily through the little porthole window in the door. For a long while she stayed with her head close to her mother’s head on the pillow. When the junior nurse came in with the tea she took it without thanking her and drank it almost as if she did not know what she was doing. She stroked her mother’s hair off her face, she smoothed the coarse cotton of the pillow slip. She held her hand. She talked to her constantly. Stephen watched her animated face through the window and knew that she was trying to push death away with the force of her will, to summon her mother back to life. She was trying to build a bridge between life and the drowsy half-coma that held Helen Pears. She sang to her. Stephen saw Lily’s face uplifted and the tears on her cheeks and heard, muffled through the door, her silver longing voice. It nearly worked. It very nearly worked. She nearly succeeded. Helen’s grip on her daughter’s hand tightened and her primrose-coloured eyelids flickered open once. She stared at her for one moment with a curious intensity as if she wanted to convey a whole lifetime of wisdom and experience in one look. And then there was a deep gurgling rattle in her throat and she spewed a lungful of yellow slime on to the pillow, and she closed her eyes and died. Stephen was in through the door in a moment, drawing Lily away from the bed, shouting for the nurses. They came in and bundled the two of them out of the room while they cleaned her up. Stephen held Lily close while they stood together in the corridor outside. He watched through the porthole window over her head. He was unemotional. Stephen had seen too many deaths to be moved by one more, and that of a civilian and a woman. When they had changed the pillow slip and the dead woman was clean they let them in again. Stephen stepped back and let Lily say goodbye to her mother alone. Lily had no idea what she should do. She had seen the rituals of mourning on her street but never been present at a death. She had some vague memory of an Irish family whose child died and they had opened the window to let the soul fly to heaven. Stephen, watching through the door, saw Lily bend over her mother and kiss her cold still lips. Then she went to the window and tried to open it. It was an old sash window, the cords had broken and it had been painted shut with successive layers of thick magnolia gloss. It would never move. Lily tugged and tugged at it, her fingers thrust through the handles at the foot of the window. It would never move. Stephen watched her. Lily banged against the frame, trying to loosen it. Stephen watched her in case she smashed the glass with her bare hands but although she had the intensity of an anxious child she was not hysterical. Lily turned from the window. He could see she was not crying though her face was very pale. She went back to her mother, lying so still and cold in the bed, and he saw her nod and say something to the dead woman. Then, still whispering, she came towards the door. She opened the door and held it open, in an odd gesture as if she were calling someone to follow her. She went past Stephen without a glance at him. ‘Come on,’ he heard her say. ‘Come with me. Come with me. I’ll set you free.’ She went swiftly past him to the head of the stairs, her high heels clattering lightly down the stone steps and he could hear her still saying, ‘Come on, come with me. Come on,’ as she ran down to the entrance hall. He quickly went after her, watched her as she held the swinging entrance door open with that odd gesture again, as if waiting for someone to follow behind her. ‘Come on,’ she said to the empty air and the deserted hall. ‘Come on.’ Outside at the head of the hospital steps she paused. Stephen stood in the doorway, waiting to see what she would do next. ‘There,’ she said and her voice was as desolate as a bereaved child’s. ‘There. You can see it now. You can see the sky. You can go straight up to heaven now. And I’m letting you go, Ma, I’m letting you go. Good luck. God bless. Goodbye.’ She was shaking now as if the words were being forced from her when really she wanted to hold her mother beside her for ever. She even raised her hand in a little helpless wave like a child when a parent leaves for the first time. ‘Goodbye,’ Lily whispered. Stephen, watching her, thought of the other dead he had seen. The thousand thousand thousands of them, dead in dug-outs, buried in shellholes, blown into fragments, cut by bullets, gassed, smashed, spitted on bayonets. He turned and nodded to Coventry and the waiting car. Another death made little difference. Lily would get over it, he thought. She got into the car without realizing where she was. Coventry raised an eyebrow at Stephen and Stephen shook his head in that old familiar gesture which meant that someone, a friend, a colleague, a beloved comrade had bought it. Dead. Coventry shrugged, which meant acceptance of the news. The two men, and all the other survivors, had learned a code for death which was now so familiar as to be unconscious. Of course, they would never grieve for any loss ever again. Coventry drove to the front door of Stephen’s home and held the passenger door open for Lily. She stepped out of the car and took Stephen’s arm without looking around her. On the Canoe Lake behind them a swan chased a seagull and the bird squawked and flew off. Lily did not turn her head. She did not hear it. The tweeny had been waiting for them, the door swung open. Muriel Winters came out of the drawing room, her face stiff with anger. Stephen guided Lily past her into the handsome room and thrust her into an armchair. ‘Sit here. I’ll get you some tea, and then you must have a lie down,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a room ready for you here. Don’t worry about a thing.’ He took his mother firmly by the arm and drew her from the room across the hall into the dining room opposite. ‘Stephen, I simply cannot …’ ‘Lily’s mother has just died. She has nowhere to go. She is to stay here until she has decided what she wants to do.’ ‘She must have family or friends of her own.’ ‘She has no-one.’ Muriel looked at her son in open disbelief. ‘She must have someone. A neighbour who would take her in.’ ‘She has no family and no close friends, and anyway, I want her to stay here.’ ‘It’s most unsuitable,’ Muriel said. ‘For how long is she to stay here? And what am I to say about her? I am sure that I’m very sorry about her bereavement, Stephen; but surely you see that she cannot possibly stay here.’ ‘She will stay here. And you may tell everyone that we are engaged to be married. That makes it all right, doesn’t it? I will post a notice in the Telegraph tomorrow. That makes it quite all right, doesn’t it, Mother?’ Muriel fell backwards and then steadied herself with a hand on a dark wooden table. ‘Oh no, Stephen. Not marriage. Not to a singer. Not to a chorus girl!’ ‘Yes, marriage. And she is not a chorus girl any more. She will retire from the stage of course. She will become my wife and she will never sing in public again. You can tell your friends that she is a local girl whose parents had a small retail business. I suppose that is suitable?’ Muriel could feel her whole face trembling. ‘Stephen, I beg you to reconsider.’ Her voice shook with her distress. ‘This is because of the war, I know. You think that none of the girls of your sort can understand how you feel. But they can, my dear, we all suffered. We all put a brave face on it. You don’t have to pick up some little nobody because you think you can teach her to suit you. There are so many girls, nice girls. Of course Miss Pears can stay while she makes other arrangements. She can stay as long as she wishes. But let’s not be hasty, Stephen. Don’t announce an engagement. Let’s not say anything to anyone.’ Stephen gave a harsh laugh. ‘I’ve made up my mind, Mother. Nothing you can say will change it. But you are right, you’re damnably right, I give you credit for seeing that. It is to do with the war. It is because you and the nice girls packed me and every one of those p … p … poor devils into a place that none of you could ever imagine. You sent me like a child to p … p … play on a tram track. You, and all the nice girls, sent me with a handful of white feathers and then posted me a parcel of c … c … cake and a pair of mittens. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you! Any of you! Not just you, but all the p … p … pretty harpies. You and all the nice girls marching under b … banners and singing p … patriotic songs. All of you women who b … believe in war, and send others to do the fighting.’ Muriel was trembling, her face was pale. ‘I knew you felt like this, Stephen.’ Her hand was at her throat, gripping her pearls. ‘I knew you were angry with me and your father for making you go. But don’t punish me by marrying an unsuitable girl. If you marry a girl who is no good, a girl from the stage, then you’ll have misery ahead of you. The war’s over and thank God you came through safely. I want you to have a good life now, Stephen, not some dreadful struggle with a bad wife.’ Stephen turned on her a face with so ghastly a gleam that Muriel recoiled, fell back until she was against the heavily polished sideboard. The rattle of expensive china stopped her. ‘I came through safely, did I?’ Stephen repeated. His smile was like the wide grin of a naked skull. ‘Safely, is it, Mother! Safely with the dreams I have, and the sudden panics. A chauffeur who can’t speak and a life that is unbearable to me? Filled with hatred for the old m … men. F … filled with hatred for the young women. Hating the men who survived like me, wondering who they b … betrayed, where they skulked to miss the killing shells. Hating the ones who d … d … died because they are the saints and now I will always live in their shadow. And this is safety?’ Muriel gave a little cry and put her hand up to her mouth to stifle the sound. ‘I tell you Lily is my saviour! She is free of the smell of it, free of the sound of it, free of the knowledge of it. How it happened I don’t know but it hasn’t touched her or spoiled her or corrupted her. When she’s beside me I feel clean again. I can’t tell you how or why. But if I don’t marry her and have her for ever, for ever, Mother, then I will go m … m … m …’ He snatched a deep breath to say the word. ‘Mad.’ There was a short terrible silence. Stephen went on very quietly. ‘I know it. I know it. I feel half mad already at times. I dream – I dream – but you don’t want to know my dreams. ‘You kept your distance from the reality and you don’t want to know the taste of it as it comes back to me. I wake vomiting sometimes, Mother. I dream of something I found in my mess tin. We were shelled while eating dinner, and a new officer, a young lad, was sitting beside me one moment, and the next, he was gone … but in my mess tin, and on my spoon halfway to my mouth, and on my face, on my lips so that I tasted it, was his blood and his bits of flesh, against my lips, in my mouth …’ Stephen gagged on his words and turned away. Muriel held on to the sideboard with both hands. Her knees were trembling, she would have fallen if she had let go. Stephen pulled out a chair from the table and flung himself down with his head in his hands, breathing deeply until the sweat on his neck cooled and his stomach stopped churning. ‘I b … beg your pardon, Mother,’ he said with careful politeness. ‘I c … c … can’t think what I was saying. I have had too little sleep over the past few days. Please forgive me.’ Muriel rubbed her slack mouth. ‘My dear,’ she started. ‘I knew you felt …’ ‘You really must excuse me,’ Stephen said icily. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking of, dragging all that old weary stuff up. I p … p … p … prefer not to talk of it.’ Muriel stared at him hopelessly as he got to his feet and turned a cold shut face towards her. ‘But I hope you will be glad for me,’ he insisted tonelessly. ‘I hope you will be happy for me, Mother, and that you will learn to love Lily in time.’ Muriel looked up at him imploringly. ‘Of course,’ she said quietly. ‘If that is what you truly wish.’ ‘I’ll go to her now,’ Stephen said. ‘She’s had the devil of a day. She should go to bed, I think. Did you have the blue room made ready for her?’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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