Fallen Skies Read online

  “Just glance,” Lily said with pretend irritation. “And anyway, you’re a chauffeur, not a nanny. If I want to be late for lunch I damn well can be.”

  Coventry grinned, sketched her a deep and humble bow and went to fetch the Argyll with his arms full of little parcels for Stephen’s baby.

  He waited outside Handley’s store, as he knew he would have to; but when Lily came out, a hatbox swinging from one hand, she was with Madge.

  “It’ll be all right if Madge comes home for dinner, won’t it?” she asked Coventry. “Cook won’t mind? Mrs. Winters won’t mind?”

  Coventry shrugged as he opened the door for the two girls. He gave Lily a small reassuring smile. For all her confident spending, for all her claiming of the Winters’s accounts, she was still a child in an older woman’s house; unsure of the rules and anxious not to offend. When Lily checked with him what she might or might not do, Coventry felt a tenderness that he thought he had lost long ago. She was like an orphan placed in a strict foster-home. She might be Mrs. Winters to the saleswomen when she ordered a hundred pounds of embroidery work. But at home she was Stephen’s nobody-wife and of negligible importance.

  “When’s it due then?” Madge asked, eyeing Lily’s distended stomach with trepidation.

  Lily giggled and leaned back against the seat as Coventry eased the car out behind a horse-drawn delivery van, and then bumped slightly on the tram tracks as he overtook it.

  “May,” she said. “First week in May, only another two months. Golly, I can’t wait. I feel like a balloon. I haven’t even seen my feet for months.”

  “And then what? Will you try and get back to work?”

  Lily shook her head. “No. He’ll never let me work on the stage while I have a small baby,” she said in an undertone. “It’s all different for me, Madge, I can see that now. I thought at first that I could get my own way, that I could marry Stephen and it would be all right for me. But I can’t work. Not when I have the baby. He wouldn’t allow it. But what I can do is drawing room singing, and concerts in concert halls.”

  Madge’s eyes widened. “Proper singing?”

  Lily nodded. “Charlie’s been teaching me. He says my voice is good enough. I even sing little bits out of operas now! Think of that! He says I’m good enough to sing in concerts. And concerts are posh. Stephen doesn’t object to concerts. Besides, you don’t do seasons like theatre. You just do one and then it’s over. And I wouldn’t tour either.”

  Madge nodded enviously. “And I was pitying you for missing the panto,” she said. “Precious little money, same show night after night and no work afterwards.”

  “Are you out of work now?”

  Madge nodded and drew her thin winter coat around her. “As usual,” she said. “All the pantos close at the same time, it’s too early to start the summer shows, even the clubs don’t pick up until after Easter. I hate this time of year. I never have enough money and I’m always afraid I’m never going to work again. I was just looking for a little present for my mum when I saw you. I’m going home to Southampton until they start auditioning for the summer shows. My mum can get me work waitressing in a restaurant.”

  “Waitressing!” Lily exclaimed. She put an arm around Madge’s shoulder and gave her a hug. “Poor little Red Hot Baby!”

  Madge pulled herself away, bridling at the sympathy. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll wait tables for two months but then I’ll be in a show. I’ll be back on the stage and I’ll be singing solo. Two months from now and you’ll be up to your eyes in nappies. A year from now and you’ll be pregnant again. A year after that and you’ll be pregnant again and your waist will have gone and you’ll have varicose veins. I know who I’d rather be!”

  Lily said nothing, but let Madge move away from her.

  Coventry, turning the wing mirror to see her face, saw her pallor and the way her bottom lip trembled like a child’s.

  • • •

  The last month of Lily’s pregnancy passed in a blur of fatigue. She still got up to see Stephen off in the mornings but she went straight back to bed after he had left and only dressed in time for lunch with Muriel. In the afternoons Charlie came and played the piano for her, every afternoon at two o’clock without fail.

  “As long as I can hear the piano playing then there’s no cause for concern,” Muriel reassured herself as she sat in Rory’s room with a small fire of rationed coal burning against the dismal April weather. Rain poured against the octagonal tower windows as hard as sleet. The sea was grey with white heaving crests. Muriel listened to the piano and Lily’s faultlessly clear voice, richer in tone and deeper in intensity. When the piano playing stopped for an hour at a time Muriel did not let herself worry. “A man like that, an attractive man like that, would hardly desire Lily as she is,” she told herself. “So broad in the beam and so tired, her skin so pale and dark shadows all around her eyes. He comes to sit with her out of sympathy, and because he sees her talent. We should be grateful that he comes to take her out of herself. If it were not for him I think she would spend the whole day in bed.”

  Stephen was edgy and bad-tempered with everyone but Charlie for all of April. A national miners’ strike was threatening and the government had called on all loyal citizens to volunteer for new units of the regular army. Stephen, reading this, had flung down the newspaper in disgust. “Volunteer!” he exclaimed to Charlie. “Again?”

  Charlie, seeing the way Stephen’s hands trembled and the pallor around his mouth, slapped him on the back. “Not you!” he said, and his voice was instantly reassuring. “You’ve done your share, old man. You’ll never have to serve again.”

  Stephen had nodded his head. “I have,” he repeated. “I have done my share. They couldn’t make me serve again. Could they?”

  “All nonsense anyway,” Charlie said comfortingly. “Politicians! What do they know?”

  “Nothing!” Stephen agreed. He beamed at Charlie with sudden warmth. “Stay to dinner, old man! A chap gets tired of a houseful of women. Stay to dinner!”

  “I’ve got no dinner jacket!” Charlie protested.

  “Oh, what the hell!” Stephen poured them both another whisky. “We never change for dinner these days, do we, Lily? The days when we would dress for dinner and then go out are long gone!”

  So Muriel and Lily ate their dinner in their afternoon dresses—“So scruffy!” Muriel thought—and Charlie and Stephen in their lounge suits laughed and talked together. They had a wide acquaintance in common from the Trocadero Club, and a whole set of private jokes which neither Muriel nor Lily could understand or enjoy. At nine o’clock Charlie said: “Good heavens, I have to run, I’m working tonight,” and Stephen looked like a little boy anxious to be taken out on a treat.

  “You coming down tonight, Stephen?” Charlie asked casually as Muriel rang for his overcoat.

  “I should say so! I could come with you now, actually.”

  Muriel, watching Lily, saw Lily’s small patronizing smile. Lily knew that Stephen wanted to enter the Trocadero with Charlie. He wanted to spend the evening at Charlie’s table where the girls gravitated to the man who could get them work at the Kings Theatre, and who was, in addition, the most attractive man in Portsmouth.

  “I have to go home to change into my black tie,” Charlie warned. “But if you don’t mind waiting you can come with me.”

  Stephen jumped up and kissed Lily in passing, on the forehead. “I’ll come at once!” he said. “Can’t keep the audience waiting!”

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Winters,” Charlie said to Muriel. And he winked at Lily and took her hand. “Go to bed,” he said softly, almost inaudible under the noise of Stephen getting his coat and hat. “You look exhausted. Go to bed now, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Lily looked up at him, her eyes warm with affection. “Tomorrow at two.”

  • • •

  The night of 3 May, Lily woke from a deep sleep with a strange wrenching pain in her belly. She lay for a little while, wat