Fallen Skies Read online

  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.”

  4

  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 café. 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.