Fallen Skies Read online

  Stephen’s mouth came down on hers. Lily tasted whisky and the stale taste of cigarette smoke. She stayed absolutely still, her face upraised. She let him kiss her cool lips and she let his arm go around her waist and press her closer to him. She felt a sense of enormous detachment, as if her real self had retreated to a corner of her mind, curled up, and was watching Stephen’s hand as it slid down over the curve of Lily’s buttock and clenched it tight.

  Stephen’s tongue touched the corner of her mouth. Lily found she was holding her breath and breathed out with a sigh, relaxing her lips. At once his other arm came around her and his grip tightened. His tongue probed into her mouth. Lily froze, enduring the sense of invasion. She was afraid she would gag.

  He pushed her gently back on the bed. Lily stiffened as if she were going to struggle and then suddenly the fight went out of her and she sat, and then, obedient to his hand on her shoulder, she lay back. She thought for a second, for nothing more than a second, of the night she had spent in Charlie Smith’s narrow single bed, and the warmth, and the popping light of the gas fire, and a man whose body she had longed to touch all over, who had lain silent and smiling, holding her close.

  The green silk counterpane was cold, slick against the nape of her neck. Stephen was pressing down on top of her, his knee driving in between her legs, forcing her to open them, and then he was lying between her legs and his hand was fumbling down between them.

  The clock on the mantelpiece gave a whirr, and then struck. The little silvery bells rang one—two—three—four—Lily gave a gasp. “Four o’clock!” she exclaimed. Her voice was high with panic. She snatched a breath and brought it under control. She could act her way out of this. She knew she could act her way through this horror. She thought of her ma saying, “You’re a born actress, Lily,” and the lessons where she had been taught to mimic a thousand emotions—fear, anger, shock, terror, grief. She had never been taught to sound like a lady, like an upper-class virgin on her way to tea. But Lily was gambling that she could do it.

  Stephen’s hand was under her skirt, fumbling at her thighs, the cool bare stretch of thigh between stocking top and camiknickers. “Four o’clock,” Lily said calmly. “Tea time, Stephen.”

  As he hesitated she slid up the bed away from him, pulling down the yellow linen skirt, and smiling at him. She felt her lower lip tremble with her fear, and she reassembled the smile at once. “Tea time,” she said.

  Stephen got up at once from the bed, turned his back to her, adjusted his trousers and turned back. “You must forgive me,” he said with a throaty chuckle. “Broad daylight too. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.”

  Lily crossed to the mirror and combed her hair. Her face was absolutely serene. The room was reflected behind her and she was watching Stephen closely. He looked half-abashed and half-proud.

  “You must forgive me. I have waited to be alone with you as my wife for a very long time. I feel very passionate. A man has feelings like this. Urgent feelings. They cannot be denied. It is bad for the health to deny these feelings for too long.”

  Lily nodded and put down her comb. Unconsciously she was reproducing precisely the gestures and the well-born confidence of Stephen’s mother. “Of course,” she said smoothly. She had not listened to one word that he had said. But she had heard, attentively, the voice of a man bringing himself back under control. She would be safe from Stephen until tonight. She would be safe until the strict conventions of his class sanctioned the act of intercourse. Stephen thought it wrong to make love at tea time. The time for lovemaking between a respectable man and his wife was night-time and in the dark. Anything else, by daylight, or anywhere else but the marital bed, was the behaviour of a whore and a client.

  Lily put on her hat and took up her gloves and they went downstairs to the residents’ lounge for tea.

  It was gay downstairs. There was a little quartet playing music from light operas and Strauss waltzes and there were a number of well-dressed women and attractive men taking tea together. Lily looked around her with interest. She could see now that her yellow dress and coat were badly cut and ordinary compared with the London fashions. It had stood out in the Portsmouth department store, but here they were using lighter materials, double-lined even treble-lined for decency but which still floated out when the woman walked or moved, and fell in loose folds and pleats when she sat still. Lily could not see the secret of the cut of the fabric but she could see that the dresses flowed in a shimmer of material while hers stayed obstinately stiff. Her hat, she noted with relief, was entirely all right.

  “I should like to go to the shops,” she said with sudden decision. Stephen had lit another cigarette, but when the waiter came with the tea things and a tray of scones and another tray of little cakes he put it out.

  “I am longing to buy some clothes,” Lily said. “D’you know where we should go, Stephen?”

  “I should think Harrods would be the place to start,” he said. “Mother jotted down some names for me. I have them in my diary. But she hasn’t been up to town for clothes for years. If we go now, we should catch them before they close, and you can ask the girls there where they would recommend.”

  Lily nodded. Her face over the teapot was bright. She looked like the old Lily that Stephen had desired as his saviour from his fear of war. She was experiencing a rush of elation at having got away from the bedroom so easily and so well. Lily set aside the thought of the coming night. She had been forced down by Stephen, and she had felt the panic of weakness; but then she had talked herself out of trouble. Lily beamed at him and drained her cup of tea.

  Stephen smiled back. “Well, Mrs. Winters,” he said. “You look as if you were enjoying married life, I must say.”

  “What a lark!” Lily said. Her voice shook slightly with fright, but then she got it under control. “What a huge lark!”

  • • •

  The shopping trip was a success. Stephen loved being waited on and treated with unctuous respect. They fetched him a little gilt chair in the women’s dress department and he sat at the glass showcase for gloves smoking a cigarette and watching while Lily changed from one fashionable frock to another. Now and then Stephen would wave a hand authoritatively at one of the three women who were serving them and say: “She must have that one! We’ll take it!”

  Lily was feeling very bright and modern surrounded by beautiful dresses and watched by a handsome man, her new husband. She had never before had more than one new dress at a time, and since all her clothes were made by either her mother or her Aunt Mary she had seen them at every stage of their making—from the cloth, to the cut-pieces, to the final dress. By then the dress had lost its gloss of newness and Lily had lost her excitement over it. After it had been fitted half a dozen times and Lily had been co-opted to sew the seams and the hem it felt like an old dress, certainly a familiar one.

  But these beauties came from some mysterious store room at the back of the shop. The shop assistant eyed Lily with a flattering gaze as if she could hardly believe how young and pretty she was. Then she turned to Stephen and shrugged her shoulders. “Everything we have would look ravishing on Madam,” she said simply. Then she raised one finger. “But I do have something which I think is extra-special.”

  She snapped her finger and one of the sales girls rushed to fetch another dress which was a full-length evening gown of the sheerest blue silk. It draped Lily like water pouring over a naked statue. One small brooch held it at one shoulder, a scarf of the material was tossed over the other. It was too long but they offered to take up the hem at once, that very evening.

  “Madam is too beautiful in it,” the senior sales woman said. “I knew it would be so. She can wear anything, but the pure classical line is hers to perfection.”

  Stephen stroked his moustache and winked over the top of his gloved hand at Lily. “I say, you do look rather the thing, Lily,” he said with careful casualness. “You really do look the very thing indeed.”

  And Lily, looking a