Fallen Skies Read online

  There was a tap on the door. Lily called “Come in!” The door burst open and Madge Sweet flung herself into the room and into Lily’s arms.

  “Well, here’s a surprise!” she said. “And you number three on the bill, a married woman and looking as if butter wouldn’t!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “ ‘Red Hot Baby’ of course! And chorus. So if you don’t want to talk to me, you needn’t.”

  “Of course I do! Who else will I know?”

  Madge threw herself into the broken armchair and cocked her legs over the side. “Not a soul, I don’t think. It’s an entirely new cast. I shouldn’t even be here. I had a falling-out with the Midsummer tour at Weymouth and I packed my bags and walked out.”

  Lily gasped. “You didn’t!”

  “I did! Mind you, I wouldn’t have been so quick if I hadn’t known there’d be work for me here! But Charlie said he’d get me a solo and the MD who took over from him on the Midsummer Madness tour was a brute! So I walked out night before last, and here I am with a solo spot!”

  “I’m to do ‘Burlington Bertie,’ and maybe ragtime as well.”

  Madge nodded. “Fast worker,” she said without heat. “I suppose that’s lover boy putting in a good word for you.”

  “D’you mean Charlie?” Lily queried.

  “How many lovers do you have?”

  Lily smiled and shrugged. “He got me the audition but Mr. Rice himself heard me sing.”

  “Oh, hell!” Madge said. “I suppose you do have a voice. But I thought that hubby would keep you home. What does he think about it all?”

  Lily glanced to see that the dressing room door was shut. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  Madge looked blankly at her. “Come again?”

  “He doesn’t know!” Lily said. There was a quaver of laughter in her voice. “I’m going to see him off to work in the morning and then come here, and I’ll be home by the time he gets home for tea.”

  “Not once the show starts you won’t.”

  “I’ll have told him by then. He can’t stop me once we’re into performance.”

  “The hell he can’t!” Madge exclaimed. “You must be mad, Lily Pears. You made your choice, girl, and you chose to be Mrs. Winters. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Lily hesitated. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I thought you’d be on my side.”

  “I am on your side. But I’m not blooming mad. You can’t live in that posh house and take tea with all the lords and ladies and then come out and sing on stage.”

  “Vesta Tilley did . . .” Lily started.

  “Vesta Tilley’s husband said she could! You can’t carry on like this without Stephen’s say-so. You can’t do it, Lily. You’d better tell Mr. Rice, here and now, that it’s no good and leave.”

  Lily turned her back to Madge and sat before the mirror. “I can’t,” she said. Her defiance collapsed and Madge saw her mouth quiver. “Honestly, Madge, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s like being buried alive in that house. Stephen’s out all day, every day. His ma has a hundred things to do, none of them worth doing. His dad lies upstairs like a dead man, and no-one goes to see him unless they have to. Nobody talks, nobody laughs. Nobody ever sings. Nobody ever has any fun. I can’t live there. I have to have something to do. I’m a singer. I have to sing. I have to be on stage. I can’t just die on my feet. I’m eighteen! What am I going to do for the rest of my life?”

  Madge shrugged. “You should be running the house.”

  “His ma does everything. I’m not allowed even to choose what I eat.”

  “You’ll have a baby.”

  “I don’t want a baby. Stephen doesn’t want a baby. He makes sure we don’t have one.”

  “You should visit your friends.”

  Lily simply shrugged her shoulders in reply.

  Madge thought of Lily’s mother dead before her daughter was a woman, of the corner shop and the noisy vulgar women who would not be welcome at number two, The Parade, of Lily’s hopeless loneliness. “Well, you surely can’t get away with not telling him,” she said pragmatically. “He’ll have to know.”

  “When we open,” Lily said. “That’s when I’ll tell him. When it’s too late for him to do anything about it. I’ll tell him then.”

  • • •

  Charlie was running rehearsals. The stage manager was miserable with summer flu and had handed everything over to him. Richard Rice was in an office tucked away high up in the dress circle and had left Charlie to organize things. Charlie decided to run through all the soloists and all the acts in the morning and early afternoon and leave the chorus till mid-afternoon, either side of the tea break. All morning the chorus worked in the circle bar with the choreographer.

  “So you get home on time,” Madge said spitefully to Lily as the dancers came into the theatre for their practice with the band. “Nice to have friends in high places.”

  “Oh, hush,” Lily said. “It makes sense to have the acts on stage first, and he won’t keep you late.”

  “The acts can go now,” Charlie said from the pit. “All except anyone who has a number which they have rehearsed with the chorus girls. We’ll do those now. The rest of you can go. Tomorrow, same time, eleven o’clock.”

  Lily smiled at him. It was just four. She would have plenty of time to get home before Stephen returned from the office. “Goodbye,” she called to Charlie. He barely looked up from his notes. “Goodbye, Lil,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  Lily slipped out of the stage door and walked briskly around the building to the main road. The tram stopped outside the Kings. She had to wait only a few minutes before it came. It rattled down the Palmerston Road, then on down the Clarendon Road and terminated at East Southsea station. Lily walked the little way up Granada Road and tapped on the front door of her home at twenty past four. No-one had given her a door key.

  Browning let her in. Muriel came forward out of the drawing room. “Lily, my dear,” she said. “I was just going to have tea.”

  “Lovely,” Lily said easily. “I’ll go and take my hat off.”

  She washed her face and hands, rubbing the lipstick away with her flannel. She combed her hair. She beamed at herself in the mirror. The carpet men had come, as Muriel had promised they would, and there was a deep blue carpet on the bedroom floor which matched the blue trim of the curtains.

  “Lovely,” Lily said with satisfaction. She was on her way downstairs for tea when she heard the noise of Stephen’s key in the lock. She had timed it to perfection. Stephen was surprised, when he came into the hall, that Lily came down the stairs and kissed him. She had obviously forgotten the morning’s conflict over the bathroom. Stephen, receiving her into his arms, decided to forget about it too.

  • • •

  “I don’t know what to do,” Muriel confided on the telephone to Jane Dent. It was the second week of rehearsals. “The wretched girl goes out every day, dressed to the nines, and gets back minutes before Stephen is home, and she looks at me and smiles as if she knows that I daren’t say a thing.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him?” Jane asked.

  “How can I! They’ve been married less than a month. I can hardly say to him that his wife is having an affair with another man. I’ve no evidence. I know nothing for sure.”

  “Speak to her?” Jane suggested. She was filing her nails while she listened to Muriel. This was not the first telephone call on the subject. She was losing interest.

  “She just smiles at me, and she’s so pleasant, and Stephen is so happy. I hardly want to drop a bombshell into the middle of all that.”

  “Leave it alone then,” Jane advised. “If it is a bombshell it’ll go off anyway. Someone will plough it up and lose a leg. He’ll catch Lily out sooner or later. You need have nothing to do with it.”

  “But what will happen then?” Muriel wailed. “If it goes on so long and he catches her out too late?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Jane s