Fallen Skies Read online

  Rory, who was left to sleep from nine at night until eight in the morning, was always wakeful until the early hours of dawn. He was hungry too, and on Thursdays Lily and he feasted like children raiding a larder on all the things they liked best and then washed it all down with two bottles of stout.

  “Good?” Lily asked him, her mouth full of biscuits.

  Rory nodded, the muscles of his neck responding more and more easily.

  When they had finished their feast, Lily swept up the crumbs and folded up the paper bags to burn on the drawing room fire when no-one was watching. Rory stopped her with a shaking hand.

  “All right,” he said very slowly, his mouth working on the words, his throat thick. “Nurse Bells—good sort.”

  “Say again,” Lily commanded.

  “Nurse Bells—a good sort.”

  “Oh! Good sort!” Lily exclaimed. “She won’t tell that we’ve been picnicking?”

  Rory slowly smiled, the warmth coming to his eyes and then slowly spreading across his face as the recalcitrant muscles moved. “No,” he said carefully.

  Lily beamed. “We’ll do it again, next Thursday,” she promised. She leaned forward and patted his cheek. “Got everything you want till the morning?”

  Rory nodded. “Good night.”

  By the time Stephen came up the stairs Lily had washed her face, cleaned her teeth and was in bed with the lights out and her eyes firmly shut.

  It was no defence against him. He always took her on Thursday nights without her consent, but without her denial. Stephen’s desire was always irritated by Thursdays when Lily radiated confidence and his son had enjoyed free run of the house for the whole afternoon. Lily lay still and let him do what he would without encouragement. She would not even put her arms around his back as he moved on her. Stephen pulled back before his climax and spilled his seed on her nightdress. Lily pulled the wet patch away from her body without even opening her eyes, and went to sleep at once.

  She had learned the knack of detachment, she had learned that skill, which most women of her class and generation knew: of enduring sex with her husband without letting either desire or repulsion arise. She lay as still as a corpse while he took her, she turned her back on him when he had finished. She was never wakeful, she was never distressed. She had learned the knack of going far from him.

  It was Stephen who lay awake watching the ceiling. He felt as if in all his life, in the trenches, in shellholes, cradling a dying man and retching himself for fear, that he had never felt as lonely as he did now: with a wife who lay beneath him like a bolster while he made love to her, utterly untouched by him; and a child who had stolen the affections of his home. He watched the moonlight on the white ceiling and listened for the church clock. It struck midnight and then one, then two, before he slept. Then he dreamed.

  In his dreams he was far from Portsmouth. He dreamed of a leave that had been granted to his battalion in late May of 1917. They had five days’ leave and everyone was going to Paris. Stephen and Coventry were going behind the lines to stay at Little England. Perot was haymaking, scything the hay in the field since the haymaking machine was broken and there was no way to get the spare part he needed. Stephen and Coventry stripped down to their breeches; each took a scythe and worked alongside the man until it grew dark and the big yellow moon came slowly up, and Juliette called to them from the lit doorway of the little farmhouse.

  They ate a thick rabbit stew and drank red wine. After dinner Perot shambled up the stairs to his bed and Coventry went to his sleeping quarters in the barn. Stephen and Juliette sat together drinking the last of the wine, either side of the table.

  When the bottle was finished Stephen stood and took her hand. She looked up at him. She had clear honest eyes like an English girl, like the best of English girls. Stephen said, “Juliette, I love you. I want to marry you,” and watched her smile.

  She rose from her seat and he put his arms around her. She was wearing an old skirt and a thin white blouse and he could feel the warmth of her breasts as he held her close. His hand slid up from her waist and nervously touched the underside of her breast. She was still smiling. Stephen bent and kissed her mouth, her neck, and then down to the open neck of the shirt. She smelled deliciously of cooking and haymaking, of the open air and the warm earthy smell of an aroused woman.

  His hand cupped her breast and he felt the nipple harden under his palm. Her hand came around his neck and held him close. Stephen, a virgin, trembled with desire; but then his education as an English gentleman held him back. He broke free from her.

  “No,” he said gently. He shook his head and touched her cheek. “No,” he said. “I would be a very beast if I touched you now, with things so uncertain. Juliette, forgive me . . .” He broke off. She was watching him with a little puzzled smile. She did not understand him at all.

  “I want you to be my wife,” he said again. “I want you to marry me.”

  She nodded lightly and reached for him, but he put her hand aside. “I want it to be right for us,” he said in his school boy French. “I want us to wait until we are married.”

  There was a flash of something, perhaps laughter, in her eyes but she shielded them with lowered lids, nodded solemnly and leaned her forehead against his shoulder.

  “When the war is over,” Stephen said, “you’ll come home with me and we’ll marry in England and buy a farm in England. Your father and your mother could come too and we could farm it together. I don’t want to go into Father’s office. I don’t want to live in Portsmouth. We’ll buy a lovely little farmhouse and it will be just like here. We could buy somewhere in Kent and grow apples and pears.

  “They call it the garden of England, it’s beautiful there. Or perhaps we could grow vines and make wine.” He sat down on the bench and drew her on to his lap. “You’ll see,” he said. “There’s going to be a big push this summer. But the English will win, we’re bound to win, and the war will be over. Then you and I will marry.”

  She nodded.

  “Or we could marry now!” he suddenly exclaimed. “The padre could do it. And then if anything happened to me you’d be an Englishwoman. You’d have a pension and the army would take care of you. You could go to my home and Mother would look after you. That’s better! We’ll marry at once.”

  “No,” she said gently.

  Stephen broke off and looked at her. “Why ever not?” he demanded. “You’d be an Englishwoman then, not a Belgian. Think of that, Juliette!”

  She nodded gravely at the thought. “I want to be married when the war is over,” she said softly. “In the church. With my friends there.”

  “Yes,” Stephen said thoughtfully. “Of course you do. A proper wedding in peacetime.”

  Juliette nodded. She did not tell him of her utter certainty that the Allies would lose the war and that the last thing she wanted was English citizenship under a German occupation. She would have been his mistress while the farm was safely behind English lines, she would never be his wife. If the Germans came forward, as her father and sister were certain they would, then she would take a German husband, as any sensible girl would do, and a strong German man would come and help with the farming and caress her after dinner. She was a survivor, not a patriot.

  She smiled and stayed on Stephen’s lap until they were both sleepy. Then he kissed her again and she went upstairs to bed. She undressed quickly and slipped between rough cool sheets. She hitched up her nightshirt and slid her hand down between her legs and satisfied herself quickly, gently. She reached orgasm thinking of a man who would take her with confident passion, perhaps without her consent, a man nothing at all like Stephen. She chuckled at the folly of the romantic Englishman who thought he would marry, who thought that his doomed army would win, and fell easily asleep.

  Stephen turned over in his marital bed, breaking into his dream, and cuddled closer to Lily’s warmth. They had been good days, that leave at the farm which he called Little England. At night they could hear the constan