Fallen Skies Read online

She looked up at him in surprise. She was putting Christopher’s towelling nappy on him and securing it with a large pin in the middle. He could see that although she was looking towards him and apparently attending, her whole concentration was on the placing of the pin, and the shielding of the delicate skin of Christopher’s stomach with her other hand.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” he said irritably.

  She sat the baby on her lap and gently pulled the nightgown over his head. At the hem, white on white, was embroidered CCW. “For God’s sake!” Stephen said again.

  Lily looked at him in genuine surprise. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “There’s nothing the matter with me! It’s not me who is hysterical about the baby,” he exclaimed. “It’s got to stop, Lily. My son must be brought up in a normal household.”

  She was fastening the buttons at the back of the nightgown with enormous care.

  “This is normal,” she said reasonably. Her voice was softened by her child’s proximity. “He’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about. He’s fine—aren’t you?”

  “It is not normal to have him on your knee at tea time. It is not normal to have him on your knee at dinner. It is not normal to go up to bed at damned half past nine because once it’s his bedtime you might as well go too!”

  “I get tired,” Lily said defensively.

  “Because you’re doing too much for him,” Stephen said instantly. “We need a nanny.”

  “No, we don’t,” Lily said quickly. “I’m tired today because I was singing a lot. Usually I’m not tired. And I won’t bring him down to dinner if you don’t want, Stephen. It just seemed so silly. Him upstairs, and us down. And you don’t see him during the day at all. The evening is the only time you can be with him. I brought him down so you could see him.”

  “We need a nanny,” Stephen said, sticking to his one point. “And I have found one.”

  There was silence. Lily turned a shocked face to him. “A nanny?”

  “Nanny Janes. She starts tomorrow at nine.”

  “Stephen, I . . .”

  “She’s on a month’s trial. She has wonderful references. She’s just what we need. She will have my old room, downstairs, the nursery. Christopher will sleep down there with her. And I shall move back in here with you.”

  “No,” Lily said simply.

  Stephen got up from the bed and crossed to the window and looked out. It was a cold night. There was a rush of clouds going across a pale distant moon. The sea was uneasy, pitted with scuds of rain.

  “I won’t argue with you about this,” he said determinedly. “I will not have my home turned into a bear garden by you and this baby. Nanny Janes starts tomorrow. Christopher will sleep with her in the nursery. That is all.”

  “Your mother . . .” Lily started.

  “Mother knows. She suggested a nanny. We are none of us happy at the way you have been behaving. You have brought this on yourself, Lily.” He moved to the door. Not since the earliest days of their courtship had he felt so powerful. He felt utterly determined to keep Christopher and Lily in their place, subservient, separated, controlled.

  He opened the door, ready to leave.

  “Stephen, please . . .”

  “No,” he said simply. It was a great pleasure to deny her, before even hearing her request. He could not help smiling. He went out through the door and he shut it quietly behind him. He stood on the landing, silently enjoying his triumph. Lily had defeated him over the theatre, she had taken her beating and then gone on stage. But the balance of power was different now. She had Christopher. She could not even raise her voice with Christopher in her arms.

  Stephen ran lightly down the stairs, across the hall and out into the rain without even a coat. The Argyll was waiting for him. Coventry had the engine running. Stephen flung himself into the passenger seat, slammed the door and laughed aloud.

  Coventry let in the gear and moved off. “Let’s get drunk!” Stephen said happily. “Let’s go out and find a couple of whores, and get hugely drunk!”

  28

  STEPHEN AND COVENTRY STAGGERED DOWN THE STREET, their arms around each other’s shoulders. A prostitute by a lamp post lounged forward, and then stepped back again into the shadows. She had worked the hard streets of Portsmouth long enough to know men who were too dangerous in drink for safe business. There were plenty of men like that. Sailors hardened out of their humanity on Atlantic convoy work, soldiers who had spent long years in the trenches and would never risk a direct glance at anything again. And men like these two: outwardly well, but sick inside from a cancer of anger or despair. She stayed still and silent in the doorway and let them pass.

  They walked until they found the car, parked as usual some distance from the pub where they had been drinking.

  “Let’s go home,” Stephen said. “Your home.”

  Coventry opened the door for him and then went around to the driver’s side. The moon was clear, illuminating the dark terrace streets around them with an eerie unforgiving light. Coventry drove with the headlights turned off, as if a gunner dug in on the Portsdown hills above the city might be watching for a telltale beam.

  It was a cold night for June. Stephen had come out without a coat and the air rushing through the half-open cab of the car was cool and damp, blowing in off the sea. Stephen shivered, bunched up in the passenger seat and blew whisky breath on his clenched hands with relish.

  “Chilly,” he said. “But we’ve known cold that’ll never be matched by any weather in this country. D’you remember the winter of 1917? D’you remember the snow? God! I do! Woke up one morning and the place was white. There were damn great drifts over the tops of the trenches. You couldn’t even see them. And chaps wanting to throw snowballs as if we were at some damn kids’ party.”

  He shook his head. “That was the morning we lost James Dilke. He just stepped off the road. The mud on either side had frozen on top but it was just a crust covered with snow. He went down like a stone before anyone could get to him. His pack dragged him down on his back and the mud closed over his face while he was screaming.” Stephen paused at the memory of the eighteen-year-old boy, and his face rosy against the whiteness of the snow as he went down. “Stupid not to make the road wider. Stupid not to mark it out before the snow fell. Stupid to step off.”

  Coventry drove with serene concentration as if Stephen was speaking of a time before his birth, before history.

  “I . . . I . . .” Stephen stopped to take a breath. “I . . . I . . . I liked him,” he said. And suddenly his voice was that of a child who cannot understand loss. “We called him Lucky Dilke. L . . . Lucky Dilke because he took a bullet clean through his helmet and it just parted his hair. And then he st . . . st . . . stepped off the road and drowned before we even knew what was happening. All of us running around and shouting for a rope while he went down.”

  Coventry nodded, as if he had never been there. As if this were all news to him.

  They had been driving along the line of the coast, and now they turned south down the road to Hayling Island. The tide was in, the waves sucked and pushed against the piles of the little bridge. The moon was silver on the black water. Stephen scanned the sleeping landscape all around them for a flicker of light from a match, or a giveaway reflection of moonlight on polished metal. There was nothing. The island was asleep and the country was at peace.

  “Too bright,” Stephen said.

  The westbound track along the coast had deteriorated after the winter storms. It was deeply rutted and silted with sand blown in from the dunes at the beach. Coventry eased the Argyll in and out of sand drift and ditch with practised skill.

  “I used to like driving to headquarters with you,” Stephen said, watching Coventry’s ease with the car. “Get away from the noise for a bit. The little roads, and even some trees which were still growing. I used to like that.” He sighed.

  “It lasted so long,” he said softly. “So damned long. I think I could have borne a few months of i