Fallen Skies Read online

  There were three upstairs rooms in the same configuration as the downstairs space: one on each side of the house that matched the store room and parlour and one large room that matched the kitchen, looking out over the fields.

  “Now this would be your nursery,” the farmer said, opening a door at the front of the house. It was piled high with junk: enamel bowls with the bottoms holed, a washstand with the china basin missing, anonymous tea-chests, a bookcase empty of books, a bedstead on its side, a pile of carefully darned linen.

  “The main bedroom,” the farmer said, indicating the room over the parlour.

  The room had windows over the front garden and backwards over the fields. It smelled hauntingly of cow dung. A large double bed and a matching wood wardrobe took up much of the room but could not overwhelm the view of fields and woodlands and the gently rising hills. From the front-facing window Stephen could see the blue of the horizon and the glint of sea.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  The farmer double-checked, as if to see what Stephen was describing, and then realized he was looking at the unprofitable fields and the distant hills.

  “It is that,” he confirmed. “And that’s our land, almost as far as you can see. It’s a great thing that, to be able to look out of your window on a morning and see your own land stretching away. Not many businessmen can say that.”

  “No,” Stephen said with deep feeling.

  “And this is another bedroom, with enough space for you to put a bathroom in,” the man improvised rapidly.

  The walls were less stained with damp because of the chimney from the kitchen range which bulged along the wall. There was a single bed and a small chest of drawers with a little flyspotted mirror.

  “You could make it into a big bathroom,” the farmer suggested. “Or a bathroom and a bedroom beside it. It’s a big room. One sweet, they call it, don’t they? It’s the size of the kitchen downstairs, don’t forget.”

  Stephen nodded, still dazed by the view from the windows, hazy with his sense of returning to a safe haven, of finding Little England again, untouched and undamaged, despite the war, despite the time when he ran his own madness into the kitchen and spattered the clean walls with fistfuls of blood.

  The man led the way downstairs. There was a pot of tea on the kitchen table and Lily was sitting stiffly and silently, drinking from a china cup with Christopher on her knee. Coventry was standing in the doorway, his cap under his arm. It was to Coventry that Stephen spoke as soon as they came into the kitchen.

  “It reminds me of there,” he said. “Doesn’t it? Isn’t it exactly like there?”

  Coventry smiled slightly and shook his head.

  “It is,” Stephen urged him. “The house is even built the same, or nearly. And the fields, and the whole atmosphere . . .” He broke off.

  Coventry smiled his distant smile.

  “You do remember,” Stephen said. “Isn’t it like that . . . that place?”

  Coventry smiled again and nodded slightly, as if he were agreeing from mere politeness. Stephen did not press him any further. He drew back the wheelbacked chair from the table and sat down. Without speaking, the farmer’s wife put a mug before him and poured tea. Stephen checked her before she could add milk. He added four spoonfuls of sugar and drank it black and strong. Lily glanced at him in surprise. When she poured him tea at number two, The Parade, Stephen had milk and no sugar at all.

  Christopher kicked his little feet and cooed, the farmer’s wife went back to the range and leaned her broad hips against it. The farmer drew out a chair and sat on Stephen’s left.

  “Would you be interested in buying?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Stephen said simply.

  Lily jumped at that and looked to Coventry but he was watching the red tiled floor beneath his boots. He looked deaf as well as mute.

  “Yes, I would,” Stephen said. “Is anyone else interested in it?”

  The man nodded. “My neighbour would buy the fields tomorrow. He would rent them off you, if you ever thought of not farming yourself, but just owning land. And there are scores of people who would buy the farmhouse on its own. City people from Portsmouth. They’re attracted by the price because we’re in a hurry to move. We want to join my daughter, in Bristol.”

  Stephen nodded. “Have you accepted an offer?”

  The farmer nodded. “Nothing definite,” he said. “I’ve been tempted, but I want to sell it as a working farm. To someone who will keep it as a farm. Someone like yourself, Sir, who knows good land when he sees it. Someone who would buy it as an inheritance for himself and his son.”

  “What sort of price?” Stephen asked. He was breathing a little fast, Lily noticed. She was watching him as if she had never seen him before. She could not imagine what fancy had taken hold of him. She thought he must be planning to buy the farm for a client, or as some business investment. But there was some brightness, some wildness about Stephen that she had never seen before.

  The farmer looked at Stephen carefully, assessing Lily’s clothes, the chauffeur, the Argyll parked in the stable yard, the fine lawn of the baby’s smock and the perfect embroidery.

  “It would be four thousand pounds for the whole farm,” he said. “That’s with all the stock, that fine herd of cows you saw, all the machinery—that’s a tractor and a thresher, harrows, ploughs, you won’t need to spend another penny to move in tomorrow. All the furniture in the house, even the curtains at the window. Four thousand pounds lock stock and barrel.”

  Lily gasped. Even Stephen looked dashed. “That much?” he asked.

  The farmer nodded emphatically. “I could get half as much again selling separately,” he said. “But I’m not prepared to do it. It’s a working farm, it deserves a man to farm it. Our boys died for places like this. It’s a little bit of England, it is. I feel that they died to keep it safe, and it’s my job to pass it on to the next man.”

  Stephen nodded, his eyes never leaving the man’s face. “I am that man,” he said suddenly. “I’ll buy it from you.”

  The farmer hesitated. “It’s a fair price . . .”

  “I know it is.”

  “With all the stock.”

  Stephen nodded and stretched out his hand. “Let’s shake on the deal!” he said. “Four thousand pounds for the whole farm.”

  The farmer reached his hand out across the table. “Four hundred pounds down, and the rest on completion,” he said quickly. The two men shook.

  33

  LILY WAS SILENT UNTIL they were in the car and driving back up the bumpy track.

  “I didn’t know you planned to buy it,” she said. “I thought you were just looking around it. Who is it for?”

  “For me,” Stephen said. “For us.”

  “What?”

  “It’s what we need,” he said urgently, and then the words came spilling out. “It’s what we’ve needed from the beginning. We needed a place of our own. I shouldn’t have taken you to live in my mother’s house, we should have had our own place, to organize how you liked. Well, we can get that right now. It’ll be the most wonderful place for Christopher to grow up in, he’ll have a real country childhood. Now that my father is better, they don’t need me at home. They don’t need me at the office either.

  “I never wanted to be a lawyer, Lily. I always wanted to do something else. And ever since Belgium I’ve wanted to live in the country. I wanted to be a farmer. I could see then what I really needed, the sort of life I wanted to live. It’s like a vision, Lily. It’s like a vision. I should have done it the moment I was demobbed. But it’s not too late. We can start again. It’ll be the very thing for us.”

  “I can’t live there!” Lily exclaimed. She had felt an instant repugnance for the dirty yard and the worn kitchen. “It’s filthy.”

  Stephen waved the objection away. “It needs a good clean, and a bit of money spent on it. But it’s a sound little house and wonderful land. You heard what he said. We’d make it our house together, Lily.