Fallen Skies Read online

  Lily held her coffee cup on her lap and looked blankly at the dried flower arrangement in the fireplace. She did not even seem to hear him.

  “Lily, my dear,” Stephen said. She turned her pale face slowly towards him. “I have made arrangements for your mother’s funeral for the day after tomorrow. I thought you might need some clothes. A black dress perhaps, and shoes and a hat of course. We have an account at Handleys, which you may make use of. I wonder, Mother, if you would go with Lily and help her choose whatever is necessary and charge it to the account?”

  “I’m free all day tomorrow.”

  “In that case I shall send Coventry back with the car after he has driven me to the office. Perhaps you would both like to join me for lunch at the Dolphin? I generally lunch there.”

  Muriel waited for Lily to consent but the girl said nothing. There was an awkward silence. Muriel wondered if Lily had heard, and looked to Stephen for guidance, raising her eyebrows slightly.

  He put down his coffee and crossed the room to stand before the fireplace as if he were warming the seat of his trousers.

  “You would want to show proper respect for your mother’s funeral, wouldn’t you, Lily?” he said encouragingly. “You would want a black dress and a jacket or coat. Some new black shoes and a black hat. A proper hat! Not one of your little flowerpots!”

  Lily suddenly stood and put down her cup and saucer with such force that the coffee tray rattled. “No!”

  Muriel jumped. It was the first time she had heard Lily speak louder than a whisper.

  “My mother had no time for any of that nonsense. When my father died at sea she didn’t even chip in to a fund for a memorial for the men who were lost. She said life was for living and money was for spending on living people. She never wore black and she never put me in black either. And I don’t think it would be respectful to her—or to myself—to go to her funeral in clothes which a stranger had bought me.”

  “Lily!”

  Muriel slipped from her chair and stole from the room, the very model of maternal tact. She wanted Lily to feel no restraint. She wanted Stephen to hear every word of backstreet abuse which Lily must have at her tongue’s end. She closed the door behind her and was too much of a lady to listen. She walked quietly up the stairs to Rory Winters’s bedroom and drew up a chair beside his bed and held his hand in silence.

  In the drawing room Stephen was on his knees before Lily. “I asked you before, and you said no; but you’re all alone now, Lily, and you need someone to look after you. You wouldn’t be at her funeral in stranger’s clothes, Lily. You would be dressed as you should be, out of respect to your mother. And of course I would buy your clothes. Now and always. I want you to be my wife, Lily. I want to take care of you.”

  Lily let Stephen hold her hands, she looked down on him as if he were an importunate dog, pawing for attention. “Oh don’t. Don’t, Stephen. Not now.”

  “Yes, now,” Stephen said, getting up. “You have to accept things from me, Lily, you have no money of your own.”

  “There’s the shop, and Ma had some insurance.”

  “I’ve checked, and it is bad news, my dear.” Stephen spoke with concealed relish. “You must be brave. The shop was a tenancy and in fact the rent is owing from the last quarter. There are no buildings or assets to come to you, my dear. Your mother had cashed in her insurance policy during the war. I imagine she found it difficult to make ends meet. And her illness has left her estate with some bills which will have to be met. If I can sell the stock in the shop and the goodwill to an incoming tenant I imagine you will make some thirty or forty pounds. But you will have no more than that.”

  “I can go back to work. I can get a job.”

  “You can. But I doubt you feel much like getting up on a stage and doing the can-can now, do you, Lily? I really don’t think you could do it. And I don’t think your mother would want you going around the music halls, looking for work, having to take whatever was offered and mixing with all sorts of people without her caring for you. Why, I remember the very first time we went out to dinner you told me that she went everywhere with you. How could you cope in that world alone, Lily? I don’t think she’d want you out in that world on your own.”

  Lily’s face was wretched, her lower lip was red and sore where she had bitten at the skin. Her face was ugly with strain. “I don’t care what I do. I don’t care what becomes of me. I am lost without her. I’ve heard people say that and I never knew what they meant but I know now. I am lost without her.”

  Stephen let the silence go on. He could see Lily’s pain naked on her young face. He had seen that look before, on young children in Belgium and France, when they had lost both parents and their home in one night of shelling. They were blank-faced but in their eyes was deep terror and deep despair. Lily, robbed of the only person in the world who had ever cared for her, was as lost as a Belgian refugee.

  “Marry me. I’ll take care of you. Marry me and you’ll have no financial worries, you’ll be well looked after. She liked me. She knew I would care for you. She said you could come out to tea with me—d’you remember? She trusted me to care for you. I think if she could advise you now she would tell you to marry me.”

  Lily looked at him with that dark-eyed look of blank despair. “I don’t know.”

  Stephen took her hands again. “I know,” he said firmly. “You don’t have to think about it, Lily. I will take care of everything.”

  Lily sighed. She was too weary to care one way or another. “All right.”

  Stephen hesitated for a moment in his persuasive murmur.

  “What?”

  “I said, all right.”

  Stephen tightened his grip on her hands and leaped to his feet. He put his arms around Lily and felt her ungiving stiffness. “Lily, my darling—”

  “Don’t. I can’t hear it now. I’ve said all right.”

  “Of course, of course.” Stephen was placatory.

  “But I’m going to the funeral in my own dress.”

  “Whatever you say, Lily, whatever you say.”

  He released her and waited. He thought that she would turn to him for comfort. He expected some kind of reward for his proposal and for releasing her when she asked. But Lily walked past him, opened the drawing room door and went out of the room. He heard her going up the stairs to her bedroom and the door softly closing. He wanted to feel triumphant—a man who has won the woman he desires. Instead he felt a worm of irritation, as if Lily had given herself and yet retreated to an even more impenetrable place. It was like winning the first trench but then finding that there is another trench behind, and another behind that, and that you will never reach the end; you will never finish the struggle.

  Lily lay on her bed in the blue room, facing the ceiling. She was hardly aware that she had agreed to be Stephen’s wife. His voice came to her thickly, dully, like someone speaking through water. She lived in a bubble of pain and loss which nothing seemed to penetrate. She could not believe that her mother was not alive, she could not believe that her present life was real. Every morning on waking she would keep her eyes tight shut, willing the ceiling to be her old bedroom at home. Every morning she willed herself to hear her mother’s voice calling: “Time to get up, Lily.” But the voice never came.

  She blamed herself, in the guilty way of all survivors. She thought that if she had never left Portsmouth then her mother would never have taken ill. She thought her mother had been overworked, in the shop on her own. She imagined her skipping meals, she imagined her sliding into bed at night too weary to make a proper supper. She imagined her opening the shop at half past six prompt every morning while her flu got worse and worse, until she collapsed. Lily was sure that if she had been there she would have made her mother rest; she somehow believed that the flu germs would not even have taken hold if she had been there, encircling her mother with her young strong love. Lily was too young to bear tragedy. She had turned her face from the war and refused to be touched by it. She wa