Fallen Skies Read online

  Stephen beamed as he saw her, and then he turned towards Coventry. “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked, his voice warm with laughter. “They’re all damned whores. Every one of them, as tricky as a barrel of monkeys.”

  “Go,” Coventry said very, very softly to Lily. “Go.”

  Like a bird watching a snake, Lily took one sideways step to the door, never taking her eyes from her husband’s smiling face.

  “Got any tea?” he asked Coventry. “Got any biscuits?”

  Coventry made a small inviting gesture to the fireside chair and Stephen stepped forward into the room. Lily pressed back against the wall to let him pass. She had a sudden realization that he could hardly see her, he could hardly see her and the baby. He simply was not there in the little room with the sea lapping outside and the foghorn calling through the mist. He had slipped away and was once more the man they had forced him to become in the trenches, a man beyond feelings, beyond fear. A man whose principal pleasure was his friendship with his batman, whose joy was a cup of stale tea, and whose habit was daily murder.

  Lily took another silent step towards the door.

  “Kettle’s on,” Coventry said comfortably. “Want some rum, Captain Winters?”

  “As a chaser,” Stephen said. “I don’t like ’em mixed.”

  There was a small step up to the door. Lily had to move into the room to skirt the angle of the open door. As she stepped forward Stephen turned his head a little towards her. Lily froze again. The revolver in his hand was shiny and well-oiled, he held it as one might hold a favourite pen. It fitted his hand.

  “Go,” Coventry said, his voice a whisper.

  Lily felt for the door jamb behind her with her free hand, her other hand clutching Christopher to her heart. She stepped backwards, up the little step, and felt under her bare feet the cold wood of the outside staircase. Even then she hesitated, for just a moment; fearing for Stephen, fearing for Coventry, fearing for them both and for the madness that the war had forced on them.

  “Go,” Coventry said softly. “We know our duty.”

  She closed the door and crept down the steps. She felt that at any moment that Stephen might erupt into madness, he could be down the steps and barring her way in two strides. She crept bent-kneed over the shingle, bruising her feet and stumbling on the wet stones. She got into her car and put Christopher on the passenger seat beside her. He stirred in his sleep and opened his eyes, as blue as her own. She turned the switch to start the engine.

  The engine turned over but it did not fire. Lily gritted her teeth and tried again. She knew that the sound of the engine might be the very thing that broke Stephen’s fantasy of being back at Ypres in a God-given lull from the shelling. If he remembered where he truly was, and what she knew, he would come after her and the baby with the loaded revolver in his hand.

  She switched the car right off, and then tried it again. The engine turned over for a moment and then died. The arrow of the temperature gauge on the bonnet was pointing to red, the car was overheated and the sea mist was penetrating the engine, soaking the points and the plugs with cold damp air. Lily had her foot down hard on the accelerator, flooding the engine with too much petrol. She gave a soft sob, moved the spark lever to the start position, paused, and then turned on the engine again.

  The engine suddenly fired, Lily pressed the accelerator, took off the handbrake, slipped it into gear and eased forward. She switched on the headlights and glanced fearfully over her shoulder. Even now, if Stephen came down the steps and jumped into the Argyll, he could catch her. There were long stretches of deserted road between here and home. There were a thousand places where his more powerful car could overtake and then block her way. There was that little shaking bridge over the sea where he could ease forward and nudge Lily’s smaller lighter car towards the edge and then through the frail wooden rail into the deep fast-flowing current.

  Lily drove carefully forward. There was an open gateway at the end of the estuary where she could rejoin the track. But at the very bend at the edge of the beach the wheels stuck for a moment in sand and the engine stalled.

  In the silence the foghorn was very loud. A couple of sea birds called into the darkness.

  And then Lily heard it—very clearly—two revolver shots. First one . . . and then the other . . . very sharp, echoing over the dark water and scaring the roosting sea birds up in a screaming pale cloud which circled the little harbour once, twice and then slowly settled again, calling and preening, crying and scolding. Then there was silence; the complete silence of absence, the silence when someone has gone. Lily knew then that Coventry had done his last act of service for the man he loved.

  The war for both of them was finally over.

  TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE

  FALLEN SKIES

  FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Discuss the D. H. Lawrence quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover that opens Fallen Skies. How does this epigraph relate to the novel’s title? How have the skies fallen for Stephen and Lily?

  2. Stephen is first attracted to Lily because she reminds him of the time before the war. “She looks like there had never been a war”. He thinks she will help him forget the atrocities he witnessed and committed. Why do you think his marriage to Lily fails to clear his conscience and erase his nightmares? Were his expectations of her unrealistic?

  3. “A solitary rebel, [Lily] pretended that the war, which overshadowed her childhood and drained it of joy, did not exist”. Do you think Lily’s efforts to ignore the war and its aftermath helped her to survive difficult times or failed to prepare her for reality?

  4. Coventry and Rory are literally silenced as a result of their wartime experiences. Discuss each man’s muteness and eventual recovery. What do you think helped each man to reclaim his ability to speak?

  5. Does Stephen’s relationship with his brother, Christopher, seem to surpass sibling rivalry? How has Stephen let his envy become completely out of control? Do you think Muriel and Rory played any part in exacerbating the tension between their two sons?

  6. Discuss the way marriage is portrayed in the novel. Was there evidence of any happy unions? What are your feelings about the divorce laws and the understanding regarding sexual relations between husband and wife? How do you think Lily’s story may have developed if the novel took place today?

  7. Do you think Charlie’s decision to not marry Lily because of his injury was a chivalrous one? Do you think they could have been happy together without lovemaking and children? What do you think Charlie could have done to redeem himself once Lily married Stephen?

  8. Discuss Lily’s reaction to her mother’s death and then, later, her reaction to her baby’s disappearance. Do you think she was hysterical? How do the two events act as bookends to her relationship with Stephen? How has she grown and matured in the interim?

  9. Discuss the beliefs about sex among the upper class in the novel. Muriel claims that “A lady does not enjoy it. . . . Bad girls are the same as prostitutes”. Stephen is also pleased that Lily seems to dislike sex. How do these beliefs affect Lily and Stephen’s marriage? How does the power dynamic develop given this understanding?

  10. Do you think that what Charlie and Lily shared could be considered an affair? In the absence of physical union, does a strong emotional connection still constitute infidelity? Where should the line be drawn?

  11. “People live on islands . . . alienated from each other by a thousand rules of conduct”. How has a strict adherence to good manners affected some of the characters in the novel? When has unflinching conduct aided them? When has it hurt them? How did Lily learn to use it to her advantage?

  12. Both Charlie and Stephen came out of the war forever altered. Whose ailment do you think was more unendurable? Are they comparable? Is either man capable of living a fulfilling life? Do you agree with John Pascoe that “perhaps it was easier for those . . . who had never come home”?

  13. World War I is sometimes idealized as a battle of suffering by the b