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
mplaining, never telling tales, kept him dumb.

  “Jim wouldn’t have suffered,” Mr. Pascoe asserted. “In an attack you scarcely know what’s going on, do you? The excitement of it? And everything?”

  Stephen thought of the first day at Loos when the British poisonous gas had been fired into a clear beautiful autumn morning and drifted slowly slowly back on the wind, like the veil of a whorish bride, to sink into the British trenches and blind and choke the soldiers who were waiting for the order to run forward into barbed wire, which was still perfectly intact, towards guns, which were still expertly manned. Everyone had known that the weather was wrong for the attack, that the wind would blow the gas back towards the British. Everyone had known that it was morally wrong to use gas, that gas was banned from warfare. Everyone knew that the attack would fail and that men would die for nothing. But the HQ staff let it go ahead because they wanted to see the gas, and because the chain of command was so slow and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to cancel an advance even though it was bound to fail. A thousand deaths here or there made little difference—and anyway, that is the nature of war.

  Stephen started to say that Jim died a hero. That he would not have suffered. That when you run forward, stumbling through the churned earth towards the bright flashes of cracking fire with the shells whining above you and the sudden earth-shaking crump of them landing near you, then you go joyfully: for your country, for freedom, for your God. But his stammer choked on the lies and all he could do was to shake his head, shake his head like a broken doll and say: “He d . . . he d . . . he d . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” John Pascoe had said quickly. “I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  They never spoke of the war again.

  “Busy day?” Pascoe asked now, opening his door at Stephen’s footstep on the stairs. The office was a twisted old building in Old Portsmouth, the most ancient part of the town. The streets were cobbled, they glowed an eerie shadowy blue from the gas lighting at night. The office floors went up and down and there were little turns and extra stairs in every corridor. It was not an efficient building but it suited the firm’s Dickensian style.

  “Not very busy,” Stephen said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  John shook his head. “I’ve got a paternity suit you might like to look at,” he said. “I think we’ve got a good case. She’s a respectable girl, and the man sounds a bit of a cad.”

  “All right,” Stephen said. “Shove the file over later on.”

  He worked on letters all the morning, dictating replies to his clerk. They would be typed and posted in the afternoon. The clerk had only one arm. Stephen kept his eyes turned away from the pinned sleeve. The man’s job had been done by girls while he was away at the Front, but Stephen had insisted that men take the jobs when they returned, though they were not paid at the pre-war rate. Stephen kept the cheaper women’s wages and gave jobs back to men. He did not like women in the office. He did not like their high frivolous voices answering the telephone. He thought it unsuitable that a spinster should read the divorce cases with their detailed adulteries and abuses, and he would never have employed a married woman whose place was at home.

  In the afternoon, after a leisurely lunch with John Pascoe at their usual table at the Dolphin Hotel on the High Street, he saw Mrs. Shirley Walker, whose husband had beaten her, buggered her, and finally run off. She had no evidence and no witnesses either for the beatings or buggery.

  “Did you tell no-one?” Stephen asked gently.

  She was pale with distress at having to tell the secret, and to a stranger. She was as guilty as if she had been the abuser. She shook her head.

  Stephen stayed silent for a few moments, hoping the quiet of his room and the measured judicial tick of the clock would calm her. He was sleepy and quiet himself. On Tuesdays at the Dolphin Hotel it was stew with dumplings and he felt full and satisfied.

  “May I ask,” he said softly,” is there any especial reason why you wish to divorce your husband? Do you wish to remarry?”

  She shook her head again and blew her nose into a damp scrap of plain handkerchief. Stephen assessed her looks. She would have been a pretty girl at her marriage in 1914. Since then she had given birth to one child and watched it die in the flu epidemic at the end of the war, and then her soldier-husband had come home and knocked the hope out of her. She was pale, underweight and miserable. In these competitive times she would not be remarrying. There were thousands and thousands of widows far prettier than her, looking for men to replace those who still lay in the mud.

  “What I suggest is that we note that your husband has abandoned you and that you divorce him for desertion in seven years from now.”

  Her pink-rimmed eyes leaped to his face. “Why can’t I divorce him right now?”

  Stephen hesitated. “I am sorry to say that you have no grounds for divorce.”

  She looked dumbfounded. She gestured to the notes Stephen had made of her stilted account of her marriage. “But he hit me, and he did . . . that.”

  Stephen nodded. “Unfortunately we have no proof. If he were to deny it in court then it would simply be your word against his.”

  “But he’s been with other women!” She was becoming angry now, there were red spots on her cheeks.

  Stephen sighed. “Adultery by the husband is not grounds for divorce.”

  “I thought it was.”

  “If a wife is adulterous, then that is a ground for divorce. But if a husband is adulterous then there has to be some offence to aggravate his adultery. And we have no evidence of anything else against your husband.”

  “It doesn’t seem right, that.” She was dissatisfied. She got up from the chair. She had a small brown handbag, worn at the seams, and an umbrella with an ugly synthetic handle. Stephen thought of Lily’s light grace. “I’m no further on than I was.”

  “You cannot have an immediate divorce as the law stands,” Stephen said. “But we can get you a divorce in seven years’ time if Mr. Walker does not return.”

  “That’s not right,” she said. “That’s not fair. All through the war I worked in the dockyard. I painted the ships. I was a painter. Long hours I worked and precious little pay. What do I get for serving?”

  Stephen looked at her with sudden dislike. “I don’t think anyone came out of the war very well,” he said sharply. “But the women did better than most! They stayed at home in perfect safety after all!”

  He saw the rebellion in her face flare, and then bank down. “Thank you very much, Sir,” she said.

  He saw her from the room with as much courtesy as if she had been a lady and then took his hat and his soft tailored greatcoat from the coatpeg in the corner and ran down the stairs to where Coventry was waiting for him by the car. Stephen’s earlier calm had deserted him and did not return on the short journey home. He felt rattled by the woman’s ugliness and her sordid story, and he did not want to attend his mother’s tea party which was in full swing when he entered the drawing room.

  “What’s wrong, Captain Winters?” Marjorie Philmore said blithely. “A penny for your dark thoughts!”

  They had trapped Stephen between two girls, Marjorie and Sarah, on the sofa, a small table before him with his tea cup and plate and a napkin on his knee.

  “Just business worries. A poor woman came to see me today to divorce her husband. He’s a bit of a brute.”

  “How horrid!” Sarah exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. “How absolutely horrid!”

  “Can’t she dump him?” Marjorie asked. She was “fast,” Stephen noticed. She wore an outrageously short skirt and silk stockings. He knew, with weary prescience, that after tea she would take a cigarette holder out of her sequined clutch bag and insist upon smoking a cigarette in his mother’s drawing room. Stephen, who never smoked except in his own room, or in his study, would have to watch her puffing ostentatiously, but not inhaling, while his mother tried to look as if she were not anxious about the smell on the curtains.<
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  “I think divorce is possible,” he said dryly. “I am advising her.”

  “How horrid!” Sarah said again. “Do you have to do all sorts of ghastly things, Captain? As a lawyer? All sorts of horrid quarrels?”

  “Some.”

  “Oh, do tell!” Marjorie said. “Really steamy divorces with shocking evidence? Do you employ private detectives or do you snoop around hotels yourself?”

  “Marjorie darling . . .” Lady Philmore said indulgently. “She’s such a flapper,” she said to Muriel. “Such high spirits!”

  “I rarely take cases of that nature,” Stephen said icily. “We are an old-established and very respectable firm. We choose our clients rather carefully.”

  “Stuffy of you!” Marjorie exclaimed. “I should simply adore to be a lawyer and stand up in court and say, ‘May I assist your memory?’ and ‘Would you call yourself a respectable woman, Mrs. Bloggs?’ Are you really vile to witnesses, Captain? Or do you look at them with your lovely smile and get them to tell you everything?”

  “Unfortunately, although women are now admitted to the bar, it would be some years before you could qualify. I don’t think you would make a good lawyer, Miss Philmore.”

  “Call me Marjie! Everybody does!”

  “Thank you.”

  “More tea, Stephen?” Muriel asked.

  “No thank you, Mother. I am sorry but I have to leave you. I promised to drop some papers around to John Pascoe. Will you excuse me, Mother? Ladies? I have so enjoyed meeting you.”

  Stephen rose from his seat on the sofa and the parlour maid had no choice but to move the heavily laden table and let him escape. Marjorie put a hand on his arm.

  “Come back after you’ve played postman and we’ll go out for drinks,” she invited. “I know a quite wonderful place round the back of Palmerston Road. A real dive!”

  “I am sorry, I have an appointment for dinner. Perhaps another time.”