Fallen Skies Read online

  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