Fallen Skies Read online

  He parked the car alongside the houseboat and followed Stephen up the rickety gangplank. The houseboat had been long grounded. Its main structure was boat; but a permanent roof had been built on top, and what had once been the engine room and below decks was now a two-roomed cabin. Stephen went in first; the unlocked door opened directly into a small living room. There was one dining chair drawn up to a little table before the fire and one easy chair at the hearthside. Through the doorway beyond was the other room, Coventry’s bedroom, with a box for his clothes and a camp bed, as they had used in the estaminet behind the lines.

  Coventry came in behind Stephen and drew down the blinds and shut the door before he struck a match to light the oil lamp. Stephen sniffed at the smell of burning oil with relish. There was a little coal-burning range and a kettle filled with water set beside it. The fire was laid with newspaper twists and driftwood sculpted into pale monstrous shapes by the ceaseless working of the sea. The two rooms were cold and damp with the tang of the sea fret. Coventry set a match to the bleached wood and shook half a scuttle of coal on top. Stephen sat in the easy chair and watched as Coventry moved silently around the room, fetching the mugs, the teapot, the tea caddy and the sugar.

  “Got any biscuits?” Stephen asked.

  Coventry reached into a cupboard and brought out a tin. Stephen beamed as if his own home—luxuriously equipped, warm and carpeted, and filled with delicacies—were a lifetime away. “Oh, good show!”

  While the kettle boiled, both men bent down and unlaced their shoes and put them to one side. The weather had been dry for days and both Stephen and Coventry rode in a car, walking only for pleasure. But they felt their socks with anxious attention, and put their shoes alongside the range so that they could warm through. Stephen undid the belt from his trousers and carefully put it within reach, over the back of his chair.

  “There now,” he said. “That’s comfortable.”

  The kettle whistled and Coventry made the tea. Once again he made fresh tea on top of the dregs of the old, and the brew was sour and stewed. Stephen watched him as he measured four spoonfuls of sugar into each mug, poured the tea, stirred it vigorously clockwise and then passed the mug to Stephen. They each took a stale biscuit and ate in silence.

  “She’s like water,” Stephen said thoughtfully. “I feel as if I could wash in her and I’d be clean. I feel that if I had her, if she loved me, I would be like I was before it all. I can get back to the world that I had—if I can have Lily.”

  • • •

  “You were late last night,” Stephen’s mother said pleasantly at breakfast. “It was midnight before I heard you come in. Did you have a good time?”

  “I went over to Hayling Island and had a brew with Coventry,” Stephen said from behind his paper. “Drove myself home. But if you want to go anywhere this morning Coventry can drive you. He’ll be in at nine to take me to the office. He’s coming over on the ferry.”

  “I’m going to the hairdresser at eleven,” Muriel said. “I don’t need the car before then. Will you be home this afternoon?”

  Stephen put down the newspaper and buttered a second slice of toast. “I’ve got a client at three but I should be home by four,” he said. “Another wartime marriage on the ropes. Should be fairly straightforward.”

  “I’m having some people round for tea. I thought you might like to meet them.”

  Stephen grimaced. “A hen party? I’d rather not!”

  Muriel looked at her son across the table. “I should like you to be here, dear,” she said. “You’re not meeting anyone nice of your own age. Lady Philmore is coming with her daughter, and Mrs. Dent with Sarah, and Mr. and Mrs. Close with their two girls. You won’t be the only man. Mr. Close is very pleasant. You’ve met him before. He edits some kind of defence journal in London, I believe.”

  “Lots of girls,” Stephen observed neutrally.

  Muriel smiled at him serenely. “There are lots of girls. And they don’t all dance in the chorus at the Palais. You should meet some of them.”

  Stephen raised an eyebrow. “Has David been gossiping?” he asked.

  Muriel’s smile remained bright. “Never you mind. My staff work has always been excellent. I shall expect you home at half past four.”

  Stephen finished his cup of tea and stood up, tossing the linen napkin down beside his breakfast plate. “I shall report for duty, as required,” he said. “Is Father awake?”

  At Muriel’s nod he left the room and went up the stairs to the master bedroom. The old man was having his breakfast. The nurse was spoon-feeding him boiled egg. At every spoonful she gently wiped the twisted side of his face where the runny yolk spilled out and ran down his chin. Stephen looked without emotion at the wreck of what had once been his father. “I’m off to work,” he said clearly.

  The nurse rose and went to take the breakfast tray away.

  “Don’t bother, this is just a flying visit.” He went closer to the bed and leaned towards his father. The grave eyes started at him. “Business is good,” Stephen said. “I’m interviewing for a new clerk today, an extra one. There’s a lot of buying and selling of houses going on, plenty of conveyancing work, Endless divorce work.”

  One dark eye blinked like a roguish wink.

  “I’ll give them your best,” Stephen said. “They ask after you every day. I always tell them you’re as well as can be expected.” He turned to the nurse. “That’s what you’re supposed to say—isn’t it? ‘As well as can be expected’? Or do you say ‘doing nicely’?”

  The nurse smiled. “He’s doing very nicely,” she said. “Very nicely indeed, aren’t you, Mr. Winters?”

  “That’s good,” Stephen said with a cold smile. “I’ll remember to tell them that he’s doing nicely. I’ll tell them that he’s lying there like a corpse with his breakfast running down his face and doing nicely.” He left the room and went downstairs.

  Coventry was waiting at the foot of the stairs with his peaked chauffeur’s hat under his arm.

  “To the office then,” Stephen said. “And then come back and take Mrs. Winters to the hairdresser for eleven.”

  Coventry nodded, opened the front door and followed Stephen out down the steps.

  “If she were here with me I don’t think I’d be so damn cruel,” Stephen said thoughtfully as he got into the back of the car and Coventry walked around to the driver’s door. “If she were here with me I wouldn’t feel so bloody. When I’m with her I feel like it’s all over. I feel it’s finished at last. Sometimes I even feel as if we might have won.”

  He broke off as Coventry slammed the door and started the car. “It would be fun to send back the car for her to go to the hairdressers,” he said. A smile lit up his face and made him seem boyish for a moment. He could not think of any other reason for a woman wanting a car than to go to the hairdressers. “It would be fun to see her riding around in it on her own,” he said. “Lily in the back of my car with some decent clothes and a ring on her finger, going to the hairdressers. That would be a sight to see!”

  • • •

  Stephen’s working day was slow and tedious. He had his father’s office—a tacit acknowledgement that his father would never come back to work. His father’s partner in the firm, John Pascoe, had the office opposite. He was an elderly man, nearing retirement. He would have been replaced by his son Jim three years ago, but Jim had gone over the top at Loos in 1915 and run into that acrid gaseous mist and never come back. After months of delay and false hopes and bureaucratic muddles over Paskoe or Pascoe or Paske the War Office had regretfully decided that Jim Pascoe would never sit behind his father’s desk. John Pascoe had grown more grey and stooped since Jim had been missing. He once had the bad form to ask Stephen if it was not—really now—not too bad out there. “The conchies now, and the pacifists, they make it out as seven sorts of hell. But it wasn’t like that really—was it?”

  Stephen had looked at him with silent hatred. But the public school, officer code of never co