Fallen Skies

What would be your choice?

I know which one I would do …

Above them the winking chandelier sparkled as they turned and circled the floor. Stephen’s colour slowly came back to his cheeks. Lily sang nonsense songs, as a mother would sing to a frightened child:

When you dood the doodsie with me,

And I did the doodsie with you.

The music stopped and Lily spun around and clapped the band. They bowed. The band leader bowed particularly to Lily.

‘Miss Lily Valance!’ he announced.

Lily flushed and glanced at her mother. The older woman nodded her head towards the bandstand. Lily obediently went up to the band leader, her hand still on Stephen’s arm.

‘Miss Lily Valance, the new star of the Palais!’ the band leader announced with pardonable exaggeration.

‘Wait there,’ Lily said to Stephen and hitched up her calf-length dress and clambered up on to the bandstand.

‘“Tipperary!”’ someone shouted from the floor. ‘Sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary!”’

Lily shook her head with a smile, and then stepped to the front of the stage. ‘I’ll sing “Danny Boy”.’

The band played the overture and Lily stood very still, listening to the music like a serious child. The dining room fell silent as Lily lifted her small pale face and sang.

She had a singing voice of remarkable clarity – more like the limpid purity of a boy soprano than a girl singer from a music hall. She sang artlessly, like a chorister practising alone. She stood with both her hands clasped loosely before her, not swaying nor tapping her feet, her face raised and her eyes looking outwards, beyond the ballroom, beyond the dockyard, beyond the very seas themselves, as if she were trying to see something on the horizon, or beyond it. It was not a popular song from the war, nor one that recalled the dead – the mugs who had gained nothing. Lily never sang war songs. But no-one looking at her and listening to her pure poignant voice did not think of those others who had left England six years ago, with faces as hopeful and as untroubled as hers, who would never come home again.

When the last note held, rang and fell silent the room was very quiet, as if people were sick of dancing and pretending that everything was well now, in this new world that was being made without the young men, in this new world of survivors pretending that the lost young men had never been. Then one of the plump profiteers clapped his hands and raised a full glass of French champagne and cried: ‘Hurrah for pretty Lily!’ and ‘Sing us something jolly, girl!’ then everyone applauded and called for another song and shouted for the waiter and another bottle.

Lily shook her head with a little smile and stepped down from the stage. Stephen led her back to their table. A bottle of champagne in a silver bucket of ice stood waiting.

‘They sent it,’ Mrs Pears said, nodding towards the next-door table. ‘There’s no need to thank them, Lily, you just bow and smile.’

Lily looked over obediently, bowed her head as her mother had told her and smiled demurely.

‘By jove, you’re a star!’ Stephen exclaimed.

Lily beamed at him. ‘I hope so!’ Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling. ‘I really hope so!’

The waiter brought the round flat glasses for champagne and filled one for each of them. Lily raised her glass to the neighbouring table and dimpled over the top of it.

‘That’ll do,’ her mother said.

Stephen grinned at Mrs Pears. ‘I see you keep Lily in order!’

She nodded. ‘I was a singer on the halls before I met Mr Pears. I learned a thing or two then.’

‘Ma goes with me everywhere,’ Lily said serenely.

‘Nearly time to go home,’ Mrs Pears said. ‘Lily’s got a matinée tomorrow. She needs her sleep.’

‘Of course!’ Stephen nodded to the waiter for the bill. The two women stood up and drifted across the dance floor to fetch their wraps from the cloakroom while Stephen paid.

He waited for them outside, on the shallow white steps under the big glass awning. Coventry drew up in the big grey Argyll motor car, got out, walked around to open the back door and stood, holding it wide. Stephen and Coventry looked at each other, a long level look without speaking while Stephen lit a cigarette and drew in the first deep draw of fresh smoke. Then the doorman opened the double doors and the women came out, muffled against the cool of the May evening. The men broke from their silent communion and stepped forward. Stephen licked his fingers and carefully pinched out the lighted ember of his cigarette, and raised his hand to tuck it behind his ear. Coventry shot a quick warning glance at him, saying nothing. Stephen exclaimed at himself, flushed, and dropped the cigarette into one of the stone pots that flanked the steps.

He helped Lily and her mother into the luxurious grey-upholstered seats of the car and got in after them. Coventry drove slowly to the Highland Road corner shop and parked at the kerb. Mrs Pears went into the dark interior of the shop with a word of thanks and goodnight as Lily paused on the doorstep, the glazed shop door ajar behind her. Stephen thought Lily was herself a little commodity, a fresh piece of provender, something he might buy from under the counter, a black-market luxury, a pre-war treat. Something he could buy and gobble up, every delicious little scrap.

‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’ Lily said, like a polite child.

‘Come out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Coventry can drive us along the seafront.’

‘Can’t. I’ve got a matinée.’

‘The next day then, Sunday?’

‘If Ma says I can.’

‘I’ll call for you at three.’

‘All right.’

Stephen glanced shiftily towards the darkened shop. He could not see Mrs Pears in the shadowed interior. He leaned towards Lily. Her pale face was upturned to look at him, her fair hair luminous in the flickering gas lighting. Stephen put his hand on her waist. She was soft under his tentative touch, unstructured by stiff corsets. She reminded him of the other girl, a girl long ago, who only wore corsets to Mass on a Sunday. On weekdays her skin was hot and soft beneath a thin cotton shirt. He drew Lily towards him and she took a small step forward. She was smiling slightly. He could smell her light sweet perfume. He could feel the warmth of her skin through the cheap fabric of her cocktail dress.

‘Time to come in, Lily,’ said her mother’s voice immediately behind them.

Stephen released her at once.

‘Goodnight, Captain Winters. Thank you for a lovely dinner,’ said Mrs Pears from the darkness inside the shop.

The door behind Lily opened wide, and with a glance like a mischievous schoolgirl, she waved her white-gloved hand and went in.

Stephen sat beside Coventry for the short drive home, enjoying the open air of the cab.

‘Damned pretty girl,’ he said. He took a couple of cigarettes from his case and lit them both, holding the two in his mouth at once. The driver nodded. Stephen passed a cigarette to him. The man took it without taking his eyes from the road, without a word of thanks.

‘Pity about the mother,’ Stephen said half to himself. ‘Fearfully respectable woman.’

The driver nodded, exhaled a wisp of smoke.

‘Not like a showgirl at all, really,’ Stephen said. ‘I could almost take her home for tea.’

The driver glanced questioningly at Stephen.

‘We’ll see,’ Stephen said. ‘See how things go. A man must marry, after all. And it doesn’t matter much who it is.’ He paused. ‘She’s like a girl from before the war. You can imagine her, before the war, living in the country on a farm. I could live on a little farm with a girl like that.’

The cool air, wet with sea salt, blew around them. It was chilly, but both men relished the discomfort, the familiar chill.

‘There are plenty of girls,’ Stephen said harshly. ‘Far too many. One million, don’t they say? One million spare women. Plenty of girls. It hardly matters which one.’

Coventry nodded and drew up before the handsome red-brick house. In the moonlight the white window sills and steps were gleaming bright.

‘You sleeping here tonight?’ Stephen asked as he opened the car door.

The driver nodded.

‘Brew-up later?’

The man nodded again.

Stephen stepped from the car and went through the imposing wrought-iron gate, through the little front garden, quiet in the moonlight, and up the scoured white steps to the front door. He fitted his key in the lock and stepped into the hall as his mother came out of the drawing room.

‘You’re early, dear,’ she said pleasantly.

‘Not especially,’ he said.

‘Nice dinner?’

‘The Queens. Same as usual.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘No-one you know, Mother.’

She hesitated, her curiosity checked by their family habit of silence and secrecy. Stephen went towards the stairs.

‘Father still awake?’ he asked.

‘The nurse has just left him,’ Muriel said. ‘He might have dozed off, go in quietly.’

Stephen nodded and went up the stairs to his father’s bedroom.

It was dark inside, a little nightlight burning on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. The fire had died down, only the embers glowing dark red. Stephen stood inside the door waiting for his eyes to get used to the darkness. Suddenly, he felt his chest constrict with terror and his heart hammered. It was being in the darkness, waiting and straining to be able to see, and knowing he had to go forward, half-blind, while they could watch him, at their ease, in safety; watch him clearly against the pale horizon, and take Their time to put the cross-sight neatly in the centre of his silhouette, and gently, leisurely, squeeze the trigger.

He put his hand behind him and tugged the door open. The bright electric light from the landing flooded into the room and Stephen shuddered with relief. He loosened his collar and found his neck and his face were wet with the cold sweat of fear. ‘Damn.’

He could see now that his father was awake. His big head was turned towards the door and his sunken eyes were staring.

‘I hate the dark,’ Stephen said, moving towards the bed. He pulled up a low-seated high-backed chair and sat at his father’s head. The sorrowful dark eyes stared at him. The left side of the man’s face was twisted and held by the contraction of a stroke. The other half was normal, a wide deeply lined face.

‘Took a girl out to dinner,’ Stephen said. He took his father’s hand without gentleness, as if it were a specimen of pottery which had been handed to him for his inspection. He hefted the limp hand, and let it fall back on the counterpane. ‘Music hall girl,’ he said. ‘Nothing special.’

With an extended finger he lifted one of his father’s fingers and dropped it down again. There was no power in any part of the man’s body.

‘You’re like a corpse yourself, you know,’ Stephen said conversationally. ‘One of the glorious dead you are. You’d never have been like this but for Christopher, would you? Mother told me – she handed you the telegram, you took one glance at it and fell down like you were dead.’

There was complete silence in the room except for the slow ticking of the mantelpiece clock.

‘You wouldn’t have dropped down half-dead for me, would you?’ Stephen said with a hard little laugh. ‘Not for me! One of the white feather brigade?’ He raised his father’s hand, casually lifting the limp index finger with his own. Then he dropped it down again. ‘Who would ever have dreamed that I’d come home a hero and Christopher never come home at all?’ He smiled at the wide-eyed, frozen face. ‘You do believe I’m a hero?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you?’

Stephen heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs and he got up from the chair and smoothed the counterpane. ‘Sleep well.’ He went quietly out of the room.

‘Goodnight, Mother,’ he said.

She was going to her bedroom opposite. ‘Are you going to bed now?’

‘I’m having a brew with Coventry,’ he said.

She smiled, containing her irritation. ‘You two are like little boys having feasts after lights out. Don’t leave cigarette ends around, Cook complains and it’s me who has to deal with her – not you.’

He nodded and went down the stairs, through the baize door at the head of the basement stairs and down to the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. It was the only place in the house that smelled of life. His father’s bedroom smelled like a hospital, the drawing room smelled of cold flowers and furniture polish. But down here there were mingled smells of cooking and soapsuds, tobacco smoke and ironing. The range was still hot and Coventry had a kettle on the top. On the wide scrubbed kitchen table drawn up before the range was a battered tin teapot and two white enamelled mugs. Coventry poured the tea, added four spoonfuls of sugar to each cup and stirred them each ritually, five times, clockwise. The two men sat in comfortable silence, facing the kitchen range. They hunched up their shoulders, they wrapped their hands around their mugs. They sat close, shoulders, forearms and elbows just touching, huddled as if they were still in a dug-out. They did not speak; their faces were serene.

Lily, dressed in cotton pyjamas, leaned against the window frame and watched the moonlight reflected on the shiny slates of the roofs opposite.

‘He’s ever so handsome,’ she said.

Helen Pears, turning down the bed and slipping a hot water bottle between the cold sheets, grunted non-committally.

‘Don’t you think he’s handsome?’

‘Get into bed, Lil. You’ll catch your death of cold.’

Lily left the window unwillingly. Helen drew the thick blackout curtains on the lingering yellow moon.

‘He was a hero in the war,’ Lily claimed. One of the girls had read about him in the newspaper. He captured a farmhouse and killed all the Huns.’

Helen held up the covers, Lily slid into bed reluctantly and Helen tucked her up like a child.

‘Did I sing well?’

‘Like a bird.’

‘They liked me, didn’t they?’

‘They loved you.’

‘Will you sit with me till I’m asleep?’

‘I’ve got a bit of sewing to do, I’ll sit in my chair.’

Helen fetched her sewing and sat in the basketweave nursery chair under the gaslight. She was darning Lily’s stockings, her face screwed into tired lines. When Lily’s dark eyelashes closed, Helen put her work away and turned down the light. She paused for a moment in the darkness, watching her sleeping daughter, as she had done for the long years of Lily’s babyhood and childhood. ‘Goodnight,’ she said very quietly. ‘Goodnight, my dearest. Sweet dreams.’

Chapter Three

Lily had been stage-struck from babyhood when she would drape herself in her mother’s old feather boa and traipse around the little flat above the shop, singing in her true little voice. Against all the odds Helen Pears had forced the corner shop into profit and saved the money to send Lily to ballet school and to a singing teacher. Scrimping on the household bills and hiding money from her husband, she had managed to get Lily a training which had been good enough to win her a place in the chorus of the Palais, owned by the Edwardes Music Halls of Southsea, Bournemouth and Plymouth. It was not what Helen Pears had wanted for her daughter, but it was the best she could provide. And it was the first step in moving the girl away from the narrow streets and narrow lives of Portsmouth.

Lily might have been a dancer in the chorus line for ever, if she had not caught the eye of the musical director, Charlie Smith, in the first week of rehearsals.

‘Here, Lily, can you sing?’ he asked during a break in one of the sessions. The dancers were scattered around the front seats of the darkened theatre, their feet up on the brass rail that surrounded the orchestra pit, drinking tea out of thermos flasks, eating sandwiches and gossiping. Charlie was picking out a tune on the piano.

‘Yes,’ Lily said, surprised.

‘Can you read music?’

Lily nodded.

‘Sing me this,’ he said, tossing a sheet of music at her.

Charlie started the rippling chords of the introduction. Lily, her eyes still on the song sheet, walked to the orchestra pit, stepped casually over the brass rail and leaned against the piano to sing.

There was a little silence when she had finished.

‘Very nice,’ he said casually. ‘Good voice production.’

‘Back to work everybody, please,’ the stage manager called from the wings. ‘Mr Brett wants to see the greyhound number. Just mark it out. Miss Sylvia de Charmante will be here this afternoon. Until then please remember to leave room for her.’

Charlie winked at Lily. ‘Buy you lunch,’ he said.

The girls climbed the catwalk up to the stage and got into line, leaving a space in the middle for the soloist.

‘She’s got a dog,’ the stage manager said dismally. ‘A greyhound thing. Remember to leave space for it. Madge, you’ll have to move stage left a bit. Lily, give her a bit more room.’

‘What does the greyhound do?’ Charlie demanded.

‘Bites chorus girls, I hope,’ Mike, the SM, said without a flicker of a smile. ‘From the top, please.’

They ate lunch in a working-men’s café in one of the little roads near the Guildhall Square. Charlie drank tea and smoked cigarettes. Lily ate a bread and dripping sandwich and drank milk.

‘Disgusting,’ Charlie said.

Lily beamed and shamelessly wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

‘Would you like to be a singer?’ Charlie asked. ‘Want to be a star?’

‘Course,’ Lily said. ‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Not very old, are you?’ Charlie asked. ‘Seventeen? Eighteen?’

‘I’m seventeen and a half.’

Charlie grinned. ‘I could get you a spot. We’re an act short. We need a girl singer. But something a bit different. Want to do it?’

Lily gaped for a moment, but then shot him a quick suspicious look. ‘Why me?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Why not? Someone’s got to do it. Who else is there?’

‘Madge Sweet, Tricia de Vogue, Helena West.’ Lily ticked the names of three of the other five dancers off her fingers. ‘They can all sing.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve heard them all. They all sound like someone else. They’re all “in the style of” … I’ve got something else in mind. An idea I’ve had for a while. D’you want it or not?’

Lily grinned at him. ‘I told you already,’ she said. ‘I want to be a star. Course I want it.’

‘Bring your ma here to see me this evening,’ Charlie said. ‘I have my tea here too.’

Back at the theatre, Charlie found the director talking on the stage door telephone, dictating a telegram to Miss Sylvia de Charmante at the Variety Theatre, London, due on the eleven o’clock train from Waterloo and still not arrived. Charlie took him gently by the elbow. ‘Lily Pears, in the chorus, I want her to try the song I told you about,’ Charlie said persuasively. ‘You said we could give it a go. There’s no-one else available and a big gap in the second half.’

William Brett flapped an irritated hand and said, thank God there were still some people who wanted work – and what more could he do to get that overpaid spoiled damned prima donna out of her hotel bed and down to Southsea for rehearsals?

Charlie nodded and drifted across the stage and down the steps to the orchestra pit to play a few soft chords.

‘Places please, dancers,’ the stage manager said with infinite patience from the prompt corner. ‘I shall walk Miss Sylvia’s steps and you can dance around me.’

‘Will you sing soprano as well?’ Charlie asked.

The SM scowled at him. ‘Like a bleeding canary if that’s what it takes to get this show on the road,’ he said dourly.

Lily waited till the afternoon tea break to tell the girls that she was to have a song in the show and then smiled smugly as they fluttered around her and kissed their congratulations. Her smile was as false as the kisses and the cries of delight. They were a company bonded by work and riven with jealousy. Lily’s luck was declared to be phenomenal.

‘I’m just so envious I am sick!’ Madge Sweet said, hugging Lily painfully hard.

‘How will you do your hair? And what will you wear?’ Helena asked. ‘You don’t have anything to wear, do you? This is your first show?’

‘I expect my ma will get me something,’ Lily said. ‘She was in the business. There’s all her old costumes in a box at home.’

The girls burst into high malicious laughter. ‘A hundred-year-old tea gown is just what Mr Brett wants, I don’t think!’ Tricia said.

‘Moth-eaten fan!’

‘Bustle and crinoline!’

Lily set her teeth and held her smile. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘You could wear your hair long,’ Madge suggested. She pulled the pins at the back of Lily’s head and Lily’s thick golden hair tumbled from the roll at the nape of her neck and fell down. It reached to her waist. ‘You could wear it with a hair band and sing a girl’s song. Alice in Wonderland type.’

‘Little Lily Pears, the child star!’ Tricia suggested sarcastically.

‘I shan’t be Pears,’ Lily said with sudden decision. ‘I’ll use my ma’s stage name. She was Helen Valance. I’ll be Lily Valance.’

‘Lily Valance! God ’elp us!’ Tricia said.

‘Dancers, please,’ the SM called. ‘The flower scene. Please remember that in front of you is a conjuror who will be taking flowers out of your baskets and coloured flags and ribbons and God knows what else. The conjuror isn’t here yet either. But leave a space for him centre stage. We don’t have the baskets yet, but remember you’ve got to hold them up towards him so he can do the trick. Have we got the music?’

‘Music’s here,’ Charlie said from the pit.

‘One out of three isn’t bad, I suppose,’ the SM said miserably. ‘When you’re ready, Mr Smith.’

Helen Pears shut the shop early to meet Lily at the stage door and walk her home. She knew her daughter was old enough to walk home alone, and there would be no men at the stage door until the show was open. But Lily was her only child and, more than that, the only person in the world she had ever loved. Helen Pears’s life had been one of staunchly endured disappointments: a failed stage career, an impoverished corner shop, a husband who volunteered in a moment of drunken enthusiasm for a ship which blew up at sea before it had even fired a shot in anger. Only in the birth of her fair-headed daughter had she experienced a joy unalloyed by disappointment. Only in Lily’s future could she see a life that might, after all, be full of hope.

Lily said nothing to her mother until they were crossing the road before the music hall. Then she breathlessly announced that she was to sing a solo. Helen stopped in the middle of the tram tracks and squeezed Lily’s hand so hard that she cried out.

‘This is your first step,’ Helen said. ‘Your first season and you’re further ahead than I ever got. This is your big chance, Lily. We’ll make it work for you.’

Lily smiled up at her mother. ‘As soon as I can earn enough we’ll sell the shop,’ she promised. ‘As soon as I earn enough I’ll buy you a house in Southsea, on the seafront, somewhere really nice.’

‘I’ll talk to this Charlie Smith,’ Helen said with decision. ‘And to Mr Brett too, if needs be.’

‘Charlie said to meet him for tea,’ Lily said, leading the way. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

Charlie was sitting at the window. He half-rose to greet them and shook hands with Helen. The woman behind the counter brought them thick white mugs of tea.

‘We can go back to the theatre and try something out,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m working late tonight anyway. Sylvia de Charmante’s music has arrived and I have to adapt it for our orchestra. We can try out Lily’s song. I’ve got an idea for it.’

‘Nothing tasteless,’ Helen stipulated.

Charlie met her determined gaze across the scrubbed wood table. ‘Your daughter has class, Mrs Pears,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to lose that.’

The theatre was very cool and quiet and empty, smelling hauntingly of stale beer and cigarettes. The rows of seats stretched back from the stage until they vanished into the darkness. The pale balcony floated in the dusty air. There was a hush in the theatre like that in an empty church, a waiting hush. Charlie’s little green light in the orchestra pit was the only illumination. Lily and Helen, crossing the darkened stage, were like ghosts of old dancers moving silently towards an audience that had vanished, called up and gone.