Fallen Skies Read online

  Stephen shrugged. “You are to say nothing. We agreed that. And the other people do not matter. They did not give their names, you will never see them again. They are not witnesses. No-one of any importance saw anything. And I shall deny it.”

  Lily grasped the arms of the chair as if she were falling. “Now hang on a minute,” she said.

  Stephen shook his head and smiled at his handsome reflection. He crossed to the wardrobe and took out a fresh, perfectly ironed shirt and pulled it on. He unbuttoned his fly, facing Lily, and half-dropped his trousers to tuck in his shirt. Lily saw the silk of his underpants and the bulge of his penis. He was half-erect. He stood before her like that for a moment. Lily fell silent at once.

  Stephen tucked in his shirt and did up his trousers with a smile. He chose a new tie from the dressing table drawer.

  “Poor darling, you must be starving,” he said in a quite different voice. “No lunch! I tell you what—let’s go mad and splash out. I’ll take you to tea at the Ritz! They probably have some dancing. Let’s go and have tea at the Ritz!”

  Lily hesitated.

  “I’ll wait downstairs while you change,” Stephen offered. “Wear your very best frock, Lily. You look rather crumpled.”

  Lily got to her feet. Her pretty summer dress was soiled where she had knelt on the pavement. The heel of her shoe had kicked out the hem and the skirt was bedraggled. Stephen gave a little loving chuckle. “You look like a mad thing. No-one would believe a word you said,” he told her. “A mad little waif and stray. Smarten up, darling, you’re not fit to go anywhere like that!”

  He went from the room and shut the door behind him. Lily could hear his confident step marching down the corridor. Obediently, she opened the wardrobe and changed her dress for a blue linen outfit with a matching jacket and a little flowery hat. She looked at herself in the mirror as if only her own prettiness could be trusted in this world of shifting evidence.

  Downstairs Stephen was chatting with the concierge, leaning against the man’s polished desk. He said something that made the man laugh and then passed him a coin. The man palmed it and threw Stephen a half-salute.

  “He says there’s a wonderful show at the Lyndhurst,” Stephen said, joining Lily. “Let’s go on to it after tea.”

  Lily looked at the concierge, at the receptionist clerks who had seen Stephen stumbling into the hotel like a blinded soldier. None of them glanced towards her, no-one hid a smile. Stephen, offering her his arm, guiding her confidently across the marble floor, was glossy with well-being. Anyone looking from his smooth confident smile to Lily’s strained pallor would see a charming worldly man with a nervous young wife.

  The doorman held the door for them and whistled for a cab. Stephen slid him a coin, the doorman tipped his hat with a smile. Lily sat beside Stephen in the cab and watched the streets and the faces of people sliding past the window. Nothing was real; not the busy streets, not Stephen’s glowing confidence. Lily longed for her mother and the old world of certainties where her mother had kept her safe.

  Tea at the Ritz was a success. Lily regained her colour and she and Stephen danced. The show was good and they had dinner at a restaurant on their way home. In the night Stephen reached out for Lily, while he was half-asleep. Lily rolled over to the extreme edge of the bed to avoid his touch. Stephen settled on his back and slept deeply. Lily lay awake, watching the lights moving along the ceiling.

  Stephen dreamed. He was at the start of it once more. They disembarked at Calais but under the bright lights of the dockside Stephen had no sense of foreign soil. There was too much to do—the men to order to the waiting railway carriages, the stores, the equipment, the roll call. It was not until he climbed over the legs of his fellow officers to his window seat that he had a chance to look out into the darkness and try to sense this strange country where his brother had died.

  It was dark and quiet. A thick honey moon skimmed the tops of trees, highlighted hedges. The train clattered swiftly through the backs of darkened villages. Stephen caught a glimpse of station names, of small back gardens trimmed into bare tidiness. When they moved into the open countryside he saw fields and hedges, the broad gleam of a river. The road, running alongside the railway, was as straight as the railway track. A Roman road, Stephen thought sleepily, going to Rome. Running far away from the destination of the railhead, at the end of the line. “How I wish I was on it,” he said aloud carelessly.

  “Do what, old man?” someone asked drowsily.

  “Nothing.”

  It was nothing, the wish to be walking down the road with a light holiday pack on his shoulders and that jolly amber moon laying a striped shadow across the road from one slim poplar tree to the next. It was nothing, his dream of going into a little roadside bar and drinking a cold beer, sitting outside at a little metal table and watching some old man ride by on a wagon full of straw pulled by a plump spoiled horse. Nothing.

  Stephen dozed with his face against the cold hardness of the window, his teeth juddering when the train crossed points. He was not yet soldier enough to sleep through everything.

  The train went too fast for him. He wanted it to travel slower, to take time for the dawn to catch up with them so that he could see the quiet fields and the grazing cows showing palely through the morning mist. He wanted to idle along the embankments and see the flowers growing in the coarse grass. He wanted to travel at walking pace so that he and the men could drop down from the high wagons and stroll beside the train, picking flowers, picking fruit, winding bindweed into garlands.

  Someone kicked his foot. “You’re groaning, old man,” he said. “Keeping me awake.”

  “Sorry.”

  Stephen wanted the train to ride forever under the round sovereign moon across the pale landscape intersected with dark hedges and high etched trees and dotted with dark contented farmhouses. He wanted to sit forever gazing out of the window as the landscape loomed close and then slid by. He wanted never to arrive. He wanted never to arrive.

  A few hours later and he was awakened by a dark raw rumble which sounded like thunder very low and very close. And he knew that he had been asleep and dreaming. And that they were at St. Omer station, and that his war had begun.

  He awoke with a jerk and with that familiar falling feeling in his belly—terror. For a second he lay, his eyes raking the room from one corner to another, with no idea where he was. There had been so many rooms in his two and a half years. So many billets, so many little corners where he had slumped and slept, his exhaustion overwhelming his fear. He put his hand out and there was Lily, quiet and warm beside him.

  Stephen sighed as his terror bled away from him. It was over. He need never dream of that quiet journey again. He would never again travel home on leave and then back to the Front thinking each time that this would surely be his last. This time he would surely die. This time, if nothing else, his sheer choking terror would block his throat and kill him.

  He moved closer to Lily’s sleeping warmth. He need fear nothing, he told himself. The war was over. He would never make that journey again. No-one would ever make him go.

  But it was no use. Stephen had no faith in the future. They broke his will when they sent him to the Front, and then again when they released him to go home and then again sent him back. He learned, in some deep and frightened place, that he could not stop them from sending him where they wished. They could send him to the trenches. They could send him forward into uncut barbed wire to face skilled machine gunners. Nothing he could do would stop them. He could not even say “no.” His face twisted, Stephen gathered Lily into his arms, put a firm hand over her mouth, and plunged himself without warning into her body, battering himself against her inert dryness, forcing himself inside her. Only when he reached release did he tear away from her and let her go. Only then could he sleep again. He slept without dreams.

  • • •

  “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to leave,” Stephen said baldly the next morning at breakfast.