Fallen Skies Read online

  John was openly delighted that his old friend was well again, and pointed to the easing of the office work now they had their partner back. He was full of plans again, speaking of the possibility of opening a free legal clinic. Once a day he rang Rory and once a week he came round to the Winters’s home and had lunch with him. Stephen could say nothing.

  He could not complain aloud, but he felt that his father’s return to work had reduced him once more to the status of the junior partner. He was once again the young Mr. Winters. He could not say that with his father in touch with office affairs he felt constantly on the defensive, as if his father might catch him out in some error. He feared the comparison between his own begrudging pedestrian style and his father’s bright sympathetic grasp of facts. He could not say that it was a misery to him that his father was recovering and growing in strength, and that he could foresee the day when Coventry would drive them both to work every morning, home at lunchtime and then home again in the evening; and the quiet easy journeys alone with Coventry would be lost. His privacy in the back of the big Argyll car would be gone. His silent comradeship with Coventry would be destroyed. It would no longer be his car and his driver. They would both belong to his father, paid by him and commanded by him and Stephen would once again have nothing more than the mean status of the younger son.

  The office would once again be his father’s domain, Stephen would fall from being the bright leading light of the place to the least favoured son of a talented man. Rory’s easy charm would win the clerks and the receptionist to his side as it had already won Smedley. His disability would earn their pity, his courage would earn their admiration. Watching his fight back from paralysis and his return to life they would forget Stephen’s battle to come home from the deathly trap of the Ypres salient. They would forget that Stephen, not Rory, was the hero.

  It was worse at home. Nanny Janes complained that Christopher’s routine was repeatedly interrupted by Mr. Winters, who would send for the baby whenever he heard him crying. Nanny Janes could not blame Lily, who was generally out of sight when the order was delivered by Browning, or Sally, or Nurse Bells. But privately she believed that the mother and the old man were working together to undermine her authority in the household and that the baby was sent for by the old man to reunite him with his mother, against the proper disciplinary system. The chauffeur, Coventry, was undoubtedly on their side. He was always there to fetch in the pram when Christopher should have been left outside. He was always quick to run up the stairs and carry old Mr. Winters down to the drawing room for tea with Charlie and Lily, and then Mr. Winters would send for the baby and Nanny Janes dared not refuse him. Lily she could intimidate by will power and the threat of a complaint to Stephen. But Mr. Winters was the senior male in the household, he was its head. Now he was well again she supposed that he was her employer. Her well-learned habits of deference meant that she dared to bully Lily, but she was helpless against a gentleman.

  Stephen planned what he would say to his father, planned to request icily that the older man leave the nursery alone. He knew how to hurt, he thought he could imply that Rory was an old maid, meddling where he was not wanted. But Rory’s sharp intelligent look at him when he spoke of Christopher silenced him at once. Rory knew that Stephen did not love his baby and Stephen thought guiltily that Rory knew why. He feared that his father knew that Stephen had always been jealous of his brother, and that jealousy was alive all over again, even though his rival was nothing more than a blond-headed moppet of three months, gurgling and smiling in his pram. Stephen knew what he could say to put his father in his proper place: back to silence and loneliness. But he feared his father’s acute response. He feared him too much to speak.

  Muriel was as silent as her son over the changes in their lives. If she resented her husband’s presence opposite her at the lunch and dinner table she never said. She shuddered once when Rory’s hand misjudged the distance to his mouth and he spilled his food. She shot a swift pained look at Stephen, but she made no complaint. Muriel was too obedient a wife to voice her distaste and her fear at her husband’s recovery. Her training as a lady had been too thorough for her ever to speak disagreeable truths aloud. If it had been left to her and Stephen, Rory would have died in that stuffy room, attended by the best of nurses, supervised by the finest specialists and surrounded by the most expensive goods that money could provide. They would have spared no expense or trouble to make his last days comfortable. They would have prepared for him an impressive funeral with carriages of mourners, principal and secondary, and a heap of flowers later delivered to the hospitals. Both Stephen and Muriel would have been sincerely grieved at their loss and consoled only by the orderly charm of the funeral, the repast and the will.

  What neither of them could bear was his slow repellent crawl back to health. Neither of them could bear his half-state of part-paralysis. Sometimes his hands shook and he could not control them. At every meal time Lily tucked his napkin under his chin like a baby. Privately and only to themselves Muriel and Stephen saw him as a cripple. He disgusted them.

  But Lily was happier than she had been since her marriage. She sang: in the drawing room as practice; on the stairs unconsciously; and in the bath for joy. Rory was getting better, Muriel had ceased to criticize, Stephen was reduced to a silent uneasy presence and Nanny Janes had lost her iron control over Lily and her son. Lily could have Christopher with her whenever she wished. She simply had to pretend that she was fetching him for Rory, and Nanny Janes had to do as she was bid. As the days grew sunny and hot in mid-July, Rory asked to be wheeled out in the afternoons at the same time as Christopher and Nanny Janes took their walk. After a couple of afternoons a new routine was established. Charlie would arrive after lunch as Coventry returned from taking Stephen to the office for the afternoon. Coventry would lift Rory into the wheelchair and push him along the seafront while Charlie pushed Christopher’s pram and Lily strolled between pram and wheelchair, holding her son’s little hand and chatting to her father-in-law. The utter vulgarity of Charlie Smith strolling down the promenade, pushing a pram, was glaringly apparent only to Muriel. The distaste she felt at seeing Lily blithely strolling beside her son’s pram and chatting to Rory in his wheelchair was shared only by Stephen. But they could not speak of it.

  At tea time they all returned and then the doorbell would start ringing. Lily’s friends from the show at the Kings would call in for tea to fill the slack time between the afternoon matinée and the evening show. One afternoon the chorus girls descended in a chattering noisy bunch, another time Madge Sweet and her boyfriend, a saxophonist from the Trocadero Club, called. Often Charlie would play, Lily would sing, Teddy would play tenor sax and the haunting seductive summons of the saxophone would drift up the silent stairs of number two, The Parade and out through the open windows to the street.

  “It’s nigger music,” Muriel said in an angry whisper to Stephen before dinner one day. “I half expected a crowd to gather and throw pennies through the window.”

  “I’ll speak to her,” Stephen promised. But that evening at dinner Rory had said he enjoyed the music that afternoon and would Lily make sure to ask Teddy again.

  Muriel and Stephen exchanged a look of silent resentment, and said nothing.

  Muriel had thought that Lily’s stage friends would clash with the ladies and gentlemen of the charity concert set who had started to visit Lily at home. She had maliciously anticipated a social freeze from Lily’s new circle, and had gone so far as to caution Lily that she could not mix her theatre friends with the social world. Lily’s look of blank incomprehension had whetted Muriel’s appetite for social disaster. The girl had refused to be warned, but if she tried to put Lady Drew next to Madge Sweet at the tea table there would be serious social consequences and Lily would never sing at a charity concert again. Smugly, Muriel waited for the steady flow of callers in good cars to stop.

  But she was wrong. The rigid divide of her girlhood between gentry and the rest had bee