Fallen Skies Read online

  The sitting room door was flung open and they heard footsteps on the stairs. “Not another word,” they heard Stephen say as he forced Lily up the stairs to their bedroom. “Not here. Not now. Upstairs. You can explain upstairs.”

  “But, Stephen . . .” Lily said quickly.

  “Up!” They heard the bedroom door slam and then a high panicky voice—Lily’s—talking very rapidly. Stephen interrupted her once, twice, and then they heard him shout at her. “It’s in the paper, your name is in the paper, you bloody little whore!”

  “Oh dear,” Muriel said. “This is awful.”

  Lily was shouting back, the door too thick for them to hear the words. But they could sense her defiance, and it was that which triggered Stephen’s deep rage.

  They heard him bellow at her and then the ceiling shook as he ran across the room, grabbed her, and threw her on the bed. Then they heard Lily scream. It was a single scream of pure terror.

  Muriel leaped to her feet and took two swift paces to the door, then she stopped and returned to her seat again. Her face was white. “I can’t interfere,” she said in a frightened whisper. “I mustn’t interfere. It’s nothing to do with me. They’re in their own room. I can’t interfere.”

  She glanced at Rory. He was moving. For the first time in six years he was moving the muscles of his jaw. The slack disused muscles in his neck tightened, as he tried to heave himself upwards.

  “Rory!” Muriel said, frightened. “What is it?”

  There was another scream from upstairs, a raw scream of pain. Rory heaved himself to one side and looked at Muriel. His slack mouth, twisted and useless from the stroke, was moving, working. “Help,” he said in a voice croaky with disuse. “Help.”

  “Oh my God! I’ll get Nurse,” Muriel said, then she stopped at the door. “But I can’t! I can’t call her. She can’t come upstairs while this is going on! She’ll hear!”

  “Help.” Rory groaned on the word, saliva drooled from his mouth at the effort of speaking.

  Muriel turned from the door. “I can’t get help,” she snapped. “In a minute, Rory, in a minute. You’ll have to wait.”

  Upstairs they could hear Lily crying out. “No! No! No! No!” They could hear the noise of the bedsprings.

  “He’s raping her,” Muriel said to herself in horror. “He’s up there now, raping her.”

  Rory’s idle muscles could not be forced to obey him. He opened his mouth, gasping with the effort but no sound came. Then, in a sudden convulsive jerk, he heaved himself to the edge of the bed. “Help her!” he bellowed and then he flung himself headlong towards the floor.

  There was a terrible damaging thud. Rory went face down into the floor, his slack arms helpless to protect him. Blood from his nose gushed into the carpet. Muriel tore open the door and shouted up the stairs. “Stephen! Stephen! You must come! Your father has had an accident! Stephen, come down!”

  There was a sudden silence from upstairs and then the bedroom door was torn open. Stephen came running down the stairs, glowing with energy. His flies were undone and his shirt torn. Muriel could see a long scratch from his eye running down his cheek. Lily had fought all the way from the door to the bed. He was sweating, his face and his chest were shiny with sweat, and he was radiant. He was alive in a way that Muriel had never seen before. He looked like a young savage god called away from a feast. There was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth and he licked it with unconscious relish.

  Muriel recoiled. “Stephen!”

  Stephen shook his head as if re-entering the normal world. “What’s the matter?” he said, his voice too loud.

  “Your father’s had another stroke. He’s fallen. Help me!”

  Stephen came down the stairs two at a time, tucking his shirt into his waistband and buttoning his flies. Muriel stood well back to let him go into his father’s room. She could smell sex on him like a poisonous musk. She could smell the hot aroused smell of a man, a dangerous man. She put her hand over her mouth, covering her nose. She found she was shivering as if she were icy cold. She was afraid of him.

  “Call the nurse,” Stephen said over his shoulder. “And then telephone the doctor.”

  He kneeled beside his father on the carpet. Rory was crumpled head-down into the floor, his feet, above his head, still tangled in bedclothes. He was bleeding from the nose and a dark bruise was starting to show on the crown of his head. He looked up at Stephen and his dark eyes were shielded and secretive.

  “Still alive anyway,” Stephen said spitefully as his mother went downstairs out of earshot. “Still hanging on, eh?”

  He put his hands under his father’s arms and heaved his body on to the bed and then pushed his legs over. Rory was jumbled like a guy in an urchin’s barrow. Stephen pushed him into the centre of the bed.

  Nurse Bells, her hair awry and her face flushed from a large lunch and a bottle of Stephen’s wine, burst into the room. “Leave it to me, Mr. Stephen,” she said. “I’ll get us sorted out. Your mother is telephoning the doctor. D’you know what happened?”

  “No,” Stephen said. “Mother just called that he was having another stroke and had fallen out of bed.”

  Nurse Bells nodded. “Don’t you worry,” she said kindly. “Leave him to me. I’ll get him comfortable again.”

  Stephen nodded and went towards the door. “What’s that?” Nurse Bells demanded. Very softly they could hear the sound of Lily crying. She was crying like a beaten child, quietly, without hope of answer.

  “My wife’s upset,” Stephen said. “A death in her family.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Nurse Bells said politely. She pulled back the bedclothes and heaved Rory back into his usual sitting position. Stephen turned back at the door. He found he could not meet Rory’s black unseeing stare.

  He closed the door behind him.

  21

  STEPHEN SAT DOWNSTAIRS DRINKING TEA, leaving Lily crying quietly in their bed while Dr. Mobey examined Rory. His nose had bled and his forehead and face were badly bruised from his fall; but he was not seriously hurt. The doctor thought it was not another stroke but that something more interesting might have taken place. Rory might be trying to break through his silence. He asked Muriel if anything had happened to stimulate Rory, if he had been trying to get out of bed, or move. Had he been disturbed or angered by anything?

  Muriel, holding to the family standard of silence, even at the cost of her husband’s health, said that nothing had disturbed Rory, she had come into the room to see him thrashing on the bed and then fall on his face. Rory could not contradict her, but Muriel felt his dark eyes on her while she spoke.

  After the doctor left Muriel ordered tea in the drawing room. She said not one word to Stephen about the screams from his bedroom. She poured tea for him without meeting his eyes, and then took her cup upstairs to sit with Rory. Stephen nodded. The no-man’s-land between his mother and himself would not easily be crossed. He did not want it crossed. He stayed in the drawing room in moody silence, sitting in his favourite chair by the cold grate. At seven o’clock as the sky outside the tower window was turning primrose-coloured in the west, Stephen rang for Browning to make a fresh pot of tea for one, on a pretty tray for him to take upstairs to Lily. Browning went into the garden and picked a rose and put it in a little glass vase. There was a round of dainty sandwiches and three small dry cakes left over from Cook’s Friday baking session. Stephen took the tray with a word of thanks and carried it upstairs to Lily.

  He opened the bedroom door with caution but Lily had stopped crying. She was lying on her back on the crumpled bedclothes. She had pulled down her skirt, but her blouse was torn from collar to waist. She had a bruise on her cheekbone and a cut on her lip. She looked at her husband as he came through the door, proffering his pretty tray, as if he were her mortal enemy.

  “Feeling better?” he asked pleasantly. He put the tray down on her bedside table. Lily sat up, pulled her shirt together, set a pillow behind her back and took the cup of tea