Fallen Skies Read online

  He nodded and smoothed the thick hair of his moustache. He stepped forward and took up the two flat hairbrushes from the little plinth of the pier glass. He brushed his hair, smoothing it back from his face, admiring the shine on it.

  “A hero,” he said again softly. “And now it’s over and I’m going to have the life I deserve. The life a hero deserves. My country owes it to me. My family owes it to me. My wife—” He broke off at the thought of Lily’s continual intransigence. “She’ll have to learn,” he said. “She’ll have to learn the drill. Good drill can make a man do anything. She’ll have to square-bash. She’ll have to knuckle down. I’ll knock her into shape.”

  He nodded at his own reflection, and his mirror-image smiled in agreement at the thought of breaking Lily’s independent spirit and remaking her into a wife fit for a hero. “I’ve been lax,” he said. “Damned lax. But it’s all going to change.”

  He put down the brushes, straightened his tie and went from the room. His heavy confident tread marched down the stairs, pausing outside his father’s room. Stephen knocked and put his head around the door of the sickroom.

  “Good morning, Father,” he said pleasantly. “All well?”

  Nurse Bells bustled forward. “Mr. Winters!” she said. “This is a nice surprise! Yes, we’re very well this morning. We’ve had a good breakfast and we may sit up by the window later on.”

  Stephen looked past her to the man in the bed. He found his father even more repugnant now the man was recovering speech. He had preferred his corpse-like silence to the continual struggle for movement and the gurgling battle towards expression. The man started now: “Gl . . . gloo gloo . . .”

  “He’s saying good morning!” Nurse Bells interpreted confidently. She nodded, beaming at the old man. “Very good!”

  “Got to go to work,” Stephen said clearly. “I can’t spend all day doing nothing. Someone has to earn the money to keep the house going.” He looked critically at Nurse Bells as if she were an expensive luxury which he might well reduce, but she was beaming at Rory, who was struggling to find another word.

  Stephen stepped back and shut the door and ran down the stairs to the front door. As he went past the day nursery the door opened and Lily came out. He was pleased to see she was without Christopher. Already Nanny Janes had fractured their unity.

  “Good morning, darling,” Stephen beamed. He stopped and brushed his lips against her cold cheek. “Must dash. I’m late. Coventry’s waiting.”

  “I don’t want her,” Lily said in a swift undertone. She laid hold of Stephen’s lapels and looked up at him. “Please, Stephen,” she said. “I’ll do anything. Let me keep Christopher. Don’t make me give him to her.”

  Stephen looked down into Lily’s white frightened face. “But my darling!” he said gently. “We agreed! Of course he has to have a nanny! You’re not losing him! You’re just making sure he is brought up properly. You can’t care for him yourself, and keep up your singing and see your friends, and get back to normal! Of course he has to have a nanny!”

  “I’ll give up singing,” Lily said instantly. “I’ll never sing again if you don’t want, Stephen. I’ll do anything you ask. Anything.” She hesitated and then nerved herself to step closer, to slide one hand inside his jacket to his shirt front. She fingered the buttons of his shirt, intimately, as if she desired him. She looked up, her eyes dark with her fear of losing her son. “Anything,” she promised.

  Stephen, radiant, detached himself from her clinging grasp. “Of course you must keep up your singing,” he said generously. “Especially when you are doing so well! Let’s just give it a trial period, eh, Lily? And if, after a month, you don’t want to keep her on, then she can go. All right?”

  Lily followed Stephen downstairs. “If I don’t want her after a month she can go?” she repeated, breathless with anxiety.

  Stephen nodded. He rang the bell and Browning brought him his greatcoat and his hat. Lily took them from the parlourmaid and waved her away. Stephen let his wife hold his coat for him and pass him his hat with a sense of delicious triumph. She had never waited on him before. Always she had leaned on the newel post and watched him helped into his coat as if it were some bizarre ritual constructed to serve his vanity. Now she stood as humble as a servant and waited to see if he wanted his umbrella.

  “I should like to have my things moved back into my bedroom,” he said. “Tell Browning, will you, darling?”

  Lily handed him his briefcase with her eyes downcast. “Of course,” she said obediently.

  “And we’ll go out tonight,” Stephen said. “See the show at the Regal, maybe go down to the Troc and listen to Charlie.”

  Lily thought of Christopher sleeping in his cot without her to watch over him. She thought of him waking in the night and finding himself in a strange room with a stranger at the side of his bed, strange arms holding him and a bottle forced into his mouth instead of being allowed to nuzzle lazily at the sweet-smelling warmth of his mother’s breast.

  “Yes,” she said tightly.

  Stephen kissed the top of her head, opened the front door, and ran lightly down the steps to the waiting car.

  “ ‘Victory is mine, saith the Lord,’ ” he remarked to Coventry. “She’s well and truly beat.”

  • • •

  The summer month of June—the traditional month for warfare—was the month of Stephen’s campaign of reparation against his wife. He was thinking, unconsciously, of the absurd ten-million-pound penalty the Allies had sworn that Germany should pay for starting the war, for losing the war. He was thinking of the conversations in estaminets behind the lines when men had sworn that all German factories should be packed up and moved wholesale to England and France, that the German prisoners of war should be individually tried as murderers and rapists and hanged for their crimes. That all the German soldiers should be kept in squads of work parties until every piece of shell, every coil of barbed wire had been picked clear from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean. Nothing was too bad for a defeated enemy.

  In Stephen’s battle against Lily he wanted to see her pay for every little slight he had suffered since his marriage. He wanted her to pay for every light-hearted moment when her natural joy bubbled up. He wanted her to pay for making his house a place where you could hear music, and slamming doors, and running feet on the stairs, and the doorbell ringing with callers. He wanted her to pay for being a child of the peace, while he was still locked in the war. More than anything else, he wanted to punish her for bringing home a baby and calling him Christopher.

  But nothing defeated Lily. Stephen kept her away from Christopher every night by insisting that they go dancing, that they dine out, that they go to one theatre after another. Lily danced all night, ate hugely at late supper parties, greeted actress-friends and singers with delight, got up on stage at the Troc to sing ragtime at three in the morning and still was out of bed at six to give Christopher his morning feed.

  Stephen started to give long and tedious luncheon parties at home, inviting senior clients and their wives for interminable meals of overcooked meat and heavy puddings which Lily had to arrange. But when the men joined the ladies in the drawing room he would find them clustered around Christopher, who would be kicking his bootees on the sofa, and Lily would laugh and say she had just brought him downstairs for a moment, not more than a moment, but he would stay and stay.

  At the weekend Stephen insisted that he and Lily drive out into the country for walks, leaving Christopher in the nursery at home. Lily never demurred. She would put on her hat, kiss her son goodbye and be waiting for Stephen in the hall. He could not fault her. She would walk as long and as far as he insisted. They were caught in a sudden thunderstorm one day three miles from the car and Lily never complained. But the second she was home she skipped up the stairs to the nursery and Stephen heard Christopher’s loud coos of greeting and Lily’s delighted half-sung replies.

  He had moved into her bedroom as he had promised, but it was Li