PHILIPPA GREGORY
Fallen Skies

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1993

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007233069

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007370108

Version: 2018–02–16

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Private Frederick John Carter of the 11th Scottish Rifles who died at Salonika, 12th September 1917, aged twenty-four

Epigraph

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Stephen’s mouth was filling with mud, wet slurry pressed on his eyelids, slid into his nostrils like earthworms. He flailed helplessly against the weight of it on his face, on his body, in his hair. He felt the silty terrible power of it pinning him down. When he opened his mouth to scream it poured into his throat, he could taste its wetness: the terrible non-taste of earth.

He choked on it, retching and heaving for breath, spitting and hawking. He was drowning in it, he was being crushed by its weight, he was being buried alive. His hands like paddles, he scrabbled against it, trying to claw a space for his face, and then he grabbed linen sheet, woollen blankets, counterpane, and he opened his eyes, clogged only by sleep, and saw the white ceiling of his home.

He whooped like a sick child, gasping in terror, rubbing his face roughly, dragging his palm across his lips, across his tongue where the dead taste still lingered. He whispered ‘Oh God, oh God,’ pitifully, over and over again. ‘Oh God, oh God.’

Then he turned his head and saw her. In the doorway was his mother, her dressing-gown pulled on over her thick cotton nightdress, her tired face set in lines of fear and … something else. He stared at her, trying to read the expression on her face: disapproval.

His bedside table was overturned, the ugly pottery electric lamp broken, his jug of water spilling into a puddle on the carpet. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was humble, ashamed. ‘I was dreaming.’

She came into the room and lifted up the table. She set the empty jug and the pieces of the bedside light on it in mute accusation. ‘I wish you’d let me call Dr Mobey,’ she said. ‘You were having a fit.’

He shook his head quickly, his anger rising. ‘It was nothing. A bad dream.’

‘You should take one of my sleeping tablets.’

Stephen dreaded deep sleep more than anything else. In deep sleep the dream would go on, the dream of the collapsed dug-out, the dream of scrabbling and suffocating, and only after a lifetime of screaming horror, the bliss of feeling the earth shift and tumble and Coventry’s gentle hands scraping the soil from his face and hearing his voice saying, ‘You’re all right, Sir. I’m here now. We’ll have you out in a jiffy.’ Stephen had wept then, wept like a baby. There had been no-one but Coventry to see his coward’s tears, and he had wiped them away with dirty bleeding hands. Coventry had dug bare-handed, refusing to put a spade in the earth. He had scrabbled in the mud like a dog for its master and then they had both wept together; like new-found lovers, like reunited twins.

‘I’ll go downstairs and make myself a brew,’ he said. ‘You get to bed. I don’t want any tablets.’

‘Oh, go to sleep,’ Stephen’s mother said irritably. ‘It’s four in the morning. Far too late for tea.’

He got out of bed and threw his dressing-gown around his shoulders. When he stood, his height and maleness could dominate her. Now he was the master of the house, not a sick man screaming with nightmares. ‘I think I’ll have a brew and a cigarette,’ he said with the upper-class drawl he had learned from the senior officers in the trenches. ‘Then I’ll sleep. You toddle off, old lady.’

She turned, obedient but resentful. ‘Well, don’t make a mess for Cook.’

He shepherded her out of the room and she shied away from him as if fear were contagious, as if terror were catching.

‘I wish you’d let me call Dr Mobey,’ she said again, pausing on the landing before she turned into her bedroom. ‘He says it’s very common. They have all sorts of things to cure nervous troubles. It’s just hysteria.’

Stephen smoothed his moustache, his broad handsome face regaining its confident good looks. He laughed. ‘I’m not a hysteric,’ he said. His voice was rich with his male pride. ‘Not me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I just get the odd bad dream.’

He turned away from her and loped down the stairs. The hall was dark but the fanlight above the front door showed him the green baize door that separated the domestic quarters in the basement from the rest of the house. He opened the door and went quietly down the back stairs.

The kitchen was light; it was warm from the kitchen range. Coventry was at the stove, warming a teapot. He looked up when Stephen entered and took him in, took him all in, with one comprehensive glance. Stephen sighed with relief at the sight of him. ‘Had a bit of a dream,’ he said. ‘Fancied a cup of tea, and here you are. Ministering bloody angel.’

Coventry smiled his slow crooked smile. As Stephen watched, he spooned five heaped spoonfuls of tea from the caddy into the teapot, adding them to the old dregs left in the pot. He poured boiling water on the stale brew and stood the pot on the range for a few moments, then took up the two mugs. He put four spoonfuls of sugar into each mug and poured a dark stream of tea from the pot. It tasted stewed, and sour from the old tea, as strong as poison and teeth-grittingly sweet. It was how it had tasted in the trenches. It was that taste which told you that you were alive, that you had come back, against all odds, from a night patrol, from a dawn attack, from a lonely dangerous sniper’s mission. The strong sweet taste of tea was the taste of survival. The taste of mud was death. Stephen sank into one of the chairs before the range and put his slippered feet against the warm oven door.

‘Good Christ, Coventry! I wish you would speak again,’ he said. ‘I wish I could stop dreaming.’ He sipped a taste of tea, the strong sour brew rinsing his mouth clean of the taste of dream-mud. ‘I wish it had never happened,’ Stephen said with rare bleak honesty. ‘I wish to Christ it had never happened at all.’

Stephen Winters first saw Lily on the stage of the Palais music hall on the opening night of the first show, 5 May 1920: her debut. He missed her solo song – he was at the bar and then in the gents. But in the can-can finale his cousin David Walters, on a flying visit to Portsmouth, had nudged him and said: ‘See that girl? Can’t half kick. Bet she’s French.’

‘Damn the French,’ Stephen said automatically. ‘Beer at five francs a glass and then someone’s peed in it.’

‘See that girl?’ David persisted. ‘Pretty girl.’

Stephen had looked, blearily, through the glass window of the bar and seen Lily dive down into the splits and then fling her head up, beaming. She looked ready to laugh for joy.

‘Oh yes,’ Stephen said, surprised. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Pretty girl,’ David repeated drunkenly.

They watched while the orchestra galloped into the walk-down and the artists came downstage and took their bows. There was something about Lily’s face that appealed to Stephen. Something he could not name.

‘I know what,’ he said suddenly to David. ‘She looks like the girls used to look – before.’

‘No! She’s got short hair. None of them had short hair before.’

‘She does, she does,’ Stephen persisted. ‘She looks like the girls used to look. She looks …’

David was cheering the star, Sylvia de Charmante, who was curtseying deeply, like a debutante at court.

‘She looks like there had never been a war,’ Stephen said slowly. ‘She looks like there had never been a war at all.’

‘Go backstage!’ David said with sudden abrupt determination. ‘If you like the look of her, take her out!’

‘D’you think she would come?’ Stephen asked. The curtain had dropped and now rose. Lily was at the end of the line; he could see her blush at the applause and her frank grin.

‘Oh yes,’ David said cheerily. ‘Heroes we are. Bloody heroes. We should have worn our medals.’

‘I didn’t think you’d got any medals. I didn’t know they gave medals for pushing papers in London.’

‘We can’t all be you,’ David said pleasantly. ‘Charging around, blowing your whistle and massacring Huns single-handed.’ He slapped Stephen on the back. ‘Let’s have a little bracer and ask the girl out,’ he said. ‘She can bring along a friend for me. They’re all tarts, these girls. She’ll come like a shot.’

He shouldered his way back to the bar and shouted for two single whiskies. Stephen downed his in one thirsty gulp.

‘Come on, then,’ David said cheerily. ‘There’s usually a stage door around the back somewhere.’

The two men pushed through the crowd spilling out of the little music hall and then linked arms to stroll down the dark alley at the side of the theatre. Further down the alley a couple were locked in each other’s arms; the woman’s hat was pushed back as they kissed passionately.

‘Dirty bitch,’ Stephen said with sudden venom. ‘I hate tarts.’

‘Oh, you hate everybody when you’ve had a drink,’ David said jovially. ‘Bang on the door!’

A hatch in the stage door opened at once. George, the stage door porter, looked out.

‘Please send our compliments to the dancers,’ David said with assurance. ‘We were wondering if you could tell us the name of the little blonde one.’

The porter looked blankly at them. A shilling found its way from Stephen’s pocket to gleam in the gaslight. George opened the door and the shilling changed hands.

‘The young one, with the fair bobbed hair.’

‘Miss Lily Valance, gentlemen.’

‘We wanted to ask her to dinner. Her and a friend.’

‘She can bring the plump dark one who was on with the conjuror,’ David interrupted.

‘Miss Madge Sweet, gentlemen.’

‘Ask them both. Shall I write a note?’

The porter nodded.

Stephen took out his card case. It had a small silver propelling pencil inside. On one of his cards he wrote in small spidery script: ‘My cousin and I would be honoured if you would come to the Queens Hotel for dinner with us. We are at the stage door.’

‘We’ll wait for a reply,’ he said to the porter.

The porter nodded and was about to go inside when a middle-aged woman, drably dressed, came down the alley behind the two men, quietly said ‘Excuse me’, and stepped between them and through the open door.

‘These gentlemen are asking for Lily,’ the porter told her.

Helen Pears turned and looked at them both. ‘My daughter,’ she said quietly.

Stephen had to remind himself that she was only the mother of a chorus girl and therefore she could not be a lady. There was no need to feel abashed. She was a tart’s mother, she was probably an old tart herself.

‘I am Captain Stephen Winters,’ he said, invoking his wartime status. ‘This is Captain David Walters. We were wondering if Miss Valance and Miss Sweet would like to have dinner with us.’

The woman did not even smile at him, she had the cheek to look him straight in the eye, and she looked at him coldly.

‘At the Queens,’ he said hastily to indicate his wealth.

She said nothing.

‘We can go in my car, my driver is waiting,’ he added.

Helen Pears nodded. She did not seem at all impressed. ‘I will tell Miss Sweet of your invitation,’ she said levelly. ‘But my daughter does not go out to dinner.’

She went inside and the porter, raising sympathetic eyebrows, shut the door in their faces.

‘That’s that then,’ David said disconsolately. ‘What a harridan!’

‘You go on, I’ll meet you at the Queens.’

‘You’ve got no chance here, not with her ma on sentry-go.’

‘I’ll give it a try,’ Stephen said. ‘Go on.’

‘Forlorn hoper!’

Stephen walked with David down to the end of the alley and waved across at Coventry, waiting in the big Argyll limousine in front of the music hall.

‘Bring the car up here,’ he called.

Coventry nodded, and drove the car up to the end of the alley. Half a dozen of the cast looked at it curiously as they went past. Stephen stood by the rear passenger door and waited.

He could see the streetlight glint on Lily’s fair hair, only half-covered by a silly little hat, as she walked down the shadowy alley, her hand tucked in her mother’s arm. They were laughing together. Stephen was struck at once by the easy warmth between them.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Valance, Miss Valance,’ Stephen said with careful politeness. ‘I must apologize for my behaviour. I was in Belgium for too long, and I’ve forgotten my English manners.’

Lily beamed at him with her open friendly smile. Her mother stood waiting. Stephen felt a frisson of irritation. The woman showed no respect for a gentleman. He opened the car door. ‘I quite understand that it is too late for dinner,’ he said smoothly. ‘But may I, at least, see you home? It is so difficult to get a cab at this time of night.’

Stephen saw the quick movement as Lily pinched her mother’s arm. Helen Pears hesitated for only a moment and then she nodded. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘We live in Highland Road.’

Helen went in first, Lily next. Stephen climbed in after them and spoke into the tube that ran from the back seat to the driver.

‘Highland Road.’

‘It’s the grocery shop on the corner. Pears Grocers.’

‘My family is a Portsmouth family too,’ Stephen said, desperate for some common ground. ‘We are Winters the lawyers.’

Helen nodded. ‘I know.’

‘Do you? I beg your pardon! I did not recognize you.’

‘We’ve never met. I saw your photograph in the Hampshire Telegraph.’

There was a short awkward silence.

‘I thought the porter said your name was Miss Valance,’ Stephen said gently to Lily.

She glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. Stephen felt desire like hunger. She was hardly a woman yet, she was still a girl with skin like cream and hair like honey.

‘Valance is my stage name,’ she said. Her voice was clear, her speech elocution-pure. ‘My real name is Lily Pears.’

The car drove slowly down Marmion Road; Stephen felt he was no further forward.

‘I wonder if you would like to come to dinner tomorrow night?’ he said nervously to Helen. ‘You and Miss Pears. And Mr Pears too, if he would like to come?’

‘I am a widow. There is no Mr Pears.’ Helen paused. Stephen saw again the quick secret movement of Lily’s gloved hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Yes, Captain Winters, thank you. That would be very nice.’

‘Shall I pick you up after the show?’

‘Thank you,’ Helen said again.

The big car slowed and stopped. Lily and her mother got out on to the pavement, and Stephen followed them.

‘I’ll say goodnight then, and look forward to dining with you both tomorrow,’ he said.

Helen held out her hand and Stephen shook it, and then turned to Lily.

He took her gloved hand in his and felt the warmth of her palm through the white cotton. She looked up at him and smiled. She smiled as if she had some secret assurance, some private conviction, that nothing bad could ever happen to her. Stephen, looking down into that bright little face, felt again the potent magic of young confidence. He had not seen a face like that since the early days, the first days of the war. The young subalterns from public schools looked like that – as if life were one easy glorious adventure and nothing would ever disappoint them.

‘Goodnight, Miss Pears,’ he said. ‘I will see you tomorrow.’

‘Goodnight, Captain Winters.’ Her voice was light and steady with an undercurrent of amusement, as if she might giggle at any moment at this game of being grown-up.

He let go her hand with reluctance, and waited by the car until the poky little door of the shop doorway had shut behind them. ‘Goodnight,’ he said again.

Coventry drove him in silence to the Queens Hotel, where he dined with David, and then got royally drunk at half a dozen of the worst pubs in Portsmouth.

Chapter Two

The dinner was not a success. Lily was overawed by the gold and crimson grandeur of the Queens Hotel dining room, Stephen was awkward in the company of women and had little to say to Lily under these formal circumstances. They had discussed the eclipse of the moon a few nights earlier; Stephen had speculated about British chances at the Antwerp Olympics; then he had fallen silent. He had nothing to say to Lily. If she had been the tart that he first thought, then he would have taken her to some cheerful bar and got her so drunk that she would go to an alleyway at the back of the pub and let him take her, with deliberate roughness, against a brick wall. But with the two women masquerading as ladies, Stephen did not know how to deal with them. He could not resist his desire for Lily, nervous as a child in the formal dining room, wary of waiters and wide-eyed at the other diners. She was cheaply pretty in her little blue cocktail dress and her frivolous feather of a hat. Her mother was as dignified as a duchess in a beaded black gown and gloves.

The waiter, sensing another hiatus in a stilted evening, removed the pudding plates and replaced them with small coffee cups, cream, sugar, and a large silver coffee pot. Mrs Pears turned her attention from the band and the dancers and poured coffee into the three cups.

‘Jolly good dinner,’ Stephen said, seeking thanks.

Mrs Pears nodded.

‘I expect it makes a change for you, from rationing.’

Mrs Pears shook her head. ‘The only good thing about running a shop is that you never go short.’

‘Oh, really, Ma!’ Lily exclaimed, thinking of the dried ends of ham joints and day-old bread.

Stephen had flushed a deep brick-red. ‘I thought … I thought … that things were dreadfully short,’ he said. ‘Th … th … that was what they t … t … told us.’

Mrs Pears’s smile was sardonic. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They would have told you that. But there would have been enough for everyone if people had shared. As it was, those who could afford it never did without.’

‘You s … s … sold from under the counter?’ Stephen demanded. ‘P … p … profiteered?’

‘I saw that Lily had shoes on her feet and food on the table. I bought her ballet lessons and singing lessons. I made my money from rich and selfish people who would rather pay a little more than do without. If you call that profiteering, Captain, then I’m a wartime profiteer. But you’d best look around at the company you’re in before you point an accusing finger at me.’

Lily’s fair head was bowed over her coffee cup. The feathers in her hat trembled with embarrassment. ‘Hush, Ma,’ she said softly.

Mrs Pears pointed one black-gloved finger at the next-door table. ‘That man is Councillor Hurt, cloth-maker. Ask him how much khaki and serge he ran off in the four years. Ask him about the greatcoats and trousers like paper. The other is Alderman Wilson, scrap metal. Ask him about the railings and saucepans and scrap given free for the war effort but then sold by him for thousands. And that’s Mr Askew, munitions. Ask him about the girls whose skins are still orange and about the shells which never worked.’ She paused. ‘We were all profiteers from the war except those that died. Those who didn’t come back. They were the mugs. Everyone else did very nicely indeed.’

Stephen’s hands were trembling with his anger. He thrust them beneath the tablecloth and gripped hard.

‘Let’s dance!’ Lily said suddenly. ‘I adore this tune.’ She sprang to her feet. Stephen automatically rose with her.

She led him to the dance floor, his arm went around her waist and she slipped her little hand in his. Their feet stepped lightly in time, gracefully. Lily’s head went back and she smiled up at Stephen, whose face was still white with rage. Lily sang the popular song softly to him:

If you could remember me,

Any way you choose to,

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.

On the left of the stage was the rickety catwalk and steps. Helen walked gingerly down and sat in the front row near Charlie’s piano.

‘Can we have some lights?’ Charlie called to a technician working somewhere backstage.

A couple of houselights came on, and one working stage light.

‘Sit down,’ Charlie said to Helen. ‘I have an idea for her.’

Lily stood at her ease in the centre of the stage. She smiled at her mother.

‘D’you know this?’ Charlie handed a sheet of music up to her.

Lily gave a little gasp of surprise and then giggled. ‘I know it!’ she said. ‘I’ve never sung it!’

‘Try it,’ Charlie suggested. He played a few rippling chords and nodded to Helen. ‘Just listen,’ he said.

The beat of the music was regular, like a hymn. Helen knew the clear simple notes but could not think of the song. Then Lily on the stage, half-lit, threw back her head and sang Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Helen felt tears prickle behind her eyes as the sounds arched upwards into the bell-shaped ceiling, and the piano accompaniment formed a perfectly paced symmetry with the rhythm and cadence of the song. It was a holy moment, like the sound of a blackbird singing in no-man’s-land. When Lily was silent and the last chord had died away, Helen found her cheeks were wet.

‘That was lovely,’ she said. She fumbled in her handbag for her handkerchief. ‘Just lovely,’ she said.

‘It’s hardly music hall!’ Lily complained. She dropped to one knee to speak to Charlie in the pit. ‘I can’t do that in front of an audience.’

Charlie grinned at her, turned and spoke to Helen. ‘Just wait a moment,’ he said. ‘Think of Lily in a chorister’s outfit. Red gown and a white surplice, white ruff.’

‘Blue,’ Helen said instantly. ‘Brings out the colour of her eyes.’

‘Blue gown,’ Charlie agreed. ‘She comes out. No-one knows what to expect. She sings like that. Just simply. Like an angel. Everyone cries. All the old ladies, all the tarts, all the drunks. They’ll weep into their beer and they’ll love her.’

‘They’ll laugh themselves sick,’ Lily said.

Charlie shook his head. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, Lily, and I know what tickles their fancy. They like their ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays and they like a class act. They like something that makes them feel pious. They love a good weep.’

Helen nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But if they heckle …’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘London maybe. Birmingham maybe. Glasgow, certainly. But not here. And not anywhere on tour. They want a good time, a good laugh and a good weep. They’ll adore her.’

‘I’m a chorus girl!’ Lily protested. ‘Not a choir girl!’

‘Not a choir girl,’ Charlie agreed. He nodded to Helen. ‘Keep thinking the ruff and the white surplice. Keep thinking Christmas cards and carols and weddings.’ He climbed out of the pit and strode up the catwalk.

‘Let your hair down,’ he said to Lily. He stood behind her and folded her sheet of music into a little fan. ‘Hold this under your chin,’ he said. He nodded to Helen. ‘Think of a spotlight, very white, and no make-up at all. Perhaps a little pale powder. No lipstick.’

He scooped up Lily’s mass of blonde hair and folded it so that it was as short as a bob.

‘Choir boy,’ he said. ‘Ain’t I a genius?’

There was a full minute of silence from the auditorium. ‘You’d never cut her hair,’ Helen said finally, outraged.

‘Bob it,’ Charlie said. ‘So it’s the same length all around. She has a side parting and it comes down to the middle of her ears both sides. We oil it back a little bit, off her face. Nothing shiny, nothing slick. Just a newly washed boy. A well-scrubbed choir boy. A little angel from heaven.’

Lily giggled irrepressibly, but stood still as Charlie had ordered her, holding her folded sheet music under her chin while Charlie held her hair in handfuls off her neck.

‘A young Vesta Tilley,’ Helen said incredulously.

‘Delicious,’ Charlie said.

‘Tasteful,’ Helen conceded.

‘And hidden oomph,’ Charlie said, looking over Lily’s shoulder. ‘She’s just gorgeous. There isn’t a public school boy in England that wouldn’t fall down and die for her. Ain’t I right?’

Helen nodded. As he sensed her agreement Charlie dropped Lily’s hair and took the mock-ruff from under her chin. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’ he asked.

She shrugged and grinned. ‘I’ve wanted my hair bobbed for ages,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘As easy as that?’

‘Ma said I had to keep it long,’ Lily said. ‘If I can have my hair bobbed I’ll sing whatever you like!’

They never rehearsed Lily’s song again. She tried it through once more with Charlie that night and he gave her the score and told her to learn the words and practise with her singing teacher. Mr Brett the director was resigned to the experiment. Charlie had been batting on for years about a choir boy number and with the conjuror drunk in Swansea and Miss Sylvia de Charmante still in London, he had neither time nor energy for an audition and an argument. Besides, Charlie Smith was rarely wrong.

‘So what are you singing?’ the girls asked in the crowded dressing room. The costumes, hung on hangers on hooks on the wall, bulged out into the room, shrouded in cotton sheets to keep them clean. Lily, as the youngest and newest dancer, had her hairbrush and comb perched on the inconvenient corner of the table, nearest to the door and overwhelmed by hanging gowns.

‘It’s a classical song,’ Lily said. ‘Charlie Smith’s idea.’

‘He’s off his rocker,’ Madge said. ‘You should speak to Mr Brett and tell him you won’t do it.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘You ought to,’ Helena said. ‘It’s not fair making you sing something no-one wants to hear. You should try “Blue-eyes”.’ She sang the chorus in a hard nasal tone, nodding at Lily.

‘Or “Walking my Girl”,’ one of the other dancers suggested. She sang the first verse.

‘No!’ someone else exclaimed. ‘That wouldn’t suit Lily, she ought to have something saucy!’

There was a gale of sarcastic laughter.

‘I can see your ma letting you do something saucy and tying your garter during the chorus!’ Susie said. ‘What are you wearing anyway?’

‘A long blue gown,’ Lily said mendaciously. ‘Charlie told Ma what I should have and she’s making it for me.’

‘You’re not going to set the town alight,’ Madge said, without troubling to conceal her pleasure. ‘A classical song and a home-made dress! Not so lucky as you thought then, Lily.’

‘Probably be dropped after the Southsea opening anyway,’ Susie said. ‘We’re running hours too long.’

Lily kept her head down and her mouth shut.

The night before the dress rehearsal Lily and her mother took a tram up to Commercial Road, Southsea, the best part of town, for Lily to have her hair cut.

‘Not a woman. No woman in the history of the world has ever known how to cut hair,’ Charlie decreed. ‘You’re to go to David’s, on Commercial Road. I’ve told him you’ll be there at seven. He’s keeping open just for you so there won’t be any men around. You can be quite private.’

Helen had frowned.

‘Come on, Ma!’ Lily had urged. ‘It can’t hurt.’

David’s shop was closed for the night as Charlie had predicted. The blinds were discreetly down.

‘Charlie Smith told me you wanted a straight bob,’ David said. Lily sat in the comfortable barber’s chair, her feet tucked up on the foot rail, looking at herself in the mirror.

‘No fringe, just the same length all around,’ she said. ‘Like a boy’s.’

David nodded and took the pins from her hair. The tumble of gold silky hair fell down. He glanced at Helen. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Don’t ask me, I could weep,’ Helen said grimly. ‘Just do it.’

Helen looked at the floor but she heard the snipping of the scissors and the soft fall of heavy hair. The floor was a patterned linoleum, smart and easy to keep clean. Out of the corner of her eye Helen could see a fallen lock of deep gold.

‘Take a look,’ David said after a while.

Helen glanced up.

Lily was stunning.

Firstly she noticed Lily’s long neck and the way she held her head. She could see the shape of her little head, her small ears. Helen walked slowly around to the front of the chair. Lily’s hair was combed smoothly to one side, just long enough to tuck behind her ears. Helen had never seen her daughter’s features so clearly, she stared at her as if she were a stranger. The clear lines of her face were exposed, the bones of her cheeks, her forehead, her nose. The curve of her mouth and her huge dark-lashed deep blue eyes. She was a beautiful androgynous object of desire. A tomboy, a romantic poet, a St Joan.

David was watching Helen’s face with a half-smile. ‘Charlie’s a clever man,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you have something a bit special here.’

Helen nodded, her eyes still on Lily’s rapt self-absorbed beauty. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’

‘What a lark!’ Lily breathed adoringly at her reflection. ‘What a giddy lark.’

Chapter Four

There were shrieks and screams in the dressing room the next day when Lily took her cloche hat off her newly bobbed head but the girls were too busy with their own worries to interrogate her. The technical rehearsal in the morning went as badly as everyone expected. The backdrops and props had been kept to the bare essentials of a touring set which would be loaded and unloaded all along the south coast; but even so there was a problem with a quick change of scene which had to be done over and over again until the crew could do it quickly and noiselessly while the comedian told jokes in front of the curtains and the dancers raced down the stone steps backstage to their cramped dressing room to change their costumes.

‘I’ll break me bloody neck on these stairs,’ Madge cursed as she scurried down the steps in her silver high heels.

They worked through the dinner break, snacking on sandwiches and tea while William Brett, with infinite and weary patience, went through the lighting cues again. One of the stage lads went out and bought hot meat pies for everyone at three in the afternoon. Lily went to eat hers in the dressing room.

‘Not in here! Not in here!’ Susie screamed. ‘Mike’ll kill you if he sees you taking hot food into a dressing room.’

Lily froze on the threshold, backed rapidly into the corridor and demolished the pie in three giant bites. They took their dinner break at four.

‘Total run through at six o’clock. I want everyone here at five thirty,’ William said. ‘And we’ll run through as if for real. I’m not stopping for anything. We open tomorrow and I want to see it as for real. No changes, no accidents.’

They went out for their tea in a dismal group to Charlie’s café. Sylvia de Charmante, who had arrived that very day from London in a gentleman’s car and a cloud of apologies, came with them, and the drunken conjuror as well. Miss de Charmante was graciousness itself, promising the woman behind the counter a complimentary ticket to the show if she could make her a cup of tea just as she liked it. Charlie sat in his usual seat like a sardonic pixie and kept quiet.

‘D’you like my hair?’ Lily finally prompted him.

He nodded briefly. ‘It’s how I thought it would be.’

Lily waited for him to say something more but Charlie only drank his tea and smiled at her. ‘Scared?’ he asked finally.

‘Petrified!’ Lily said with a quavery laugh.

Charlie grinned. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bet running on it, Lily. I’ve got a guinea on you.’

Lily’s face lit up. ‘Have you?’

‘It’s time we went,’ Charlie said to everyone generally.

The conjuror extracted a silver hip flask from his pocket and splashed a measure of dark treacly rum into his tea cup. ‘Bloody Southsea,’ he said in his rich plummy voice. ‘My God, I hate the seaside.’

Lily watched him, fascinated, as he downed a mixture of cold tea and rum. ‘Do you?’ she asked.

He glanced at her with brief interest and looked away. ‘I just said so,’ he replied with massive dignity.

The chorus girls opened the show with a charleston number, then they changed into long gowns while the comic was on, and strolled in a slow languid walk from one side of the tiny stage to the other while Sylvia de Charmante sang her first song, a mournful ballad.

Two of the girls assisted Arnold the conjuror’s first appearance and came back to the dressing room giggling about his fumbling and Mr Brett’s silent white-faced anger in the front row. Then there was a juggling act – a brother and sister team who had arrived only that morning from Dover – and then the interval.

Lily was on after the opening song from the chorus. She took her choir boy gown to the ladies’ toilet. She did not want to change in front of the other girls and endure their ribaldry when she was already sick with nerves. She sat on the toilet with her cotton camiknickers rolled up and her fists pushed into her churning stomach.

‘Oh God,’ she said miserably.

She stood up and unwrapped the precious gown from its white sheet, then the snowy surplice and ruff. She had tried them on at home and she knew she could do the fastenings. But now her fingers were trembling with nerves and she could not hook the back at all. In the end she twisted the whole gown around and did most of the hooks in front and then pushed it around to the back. The surplice was just thrown over the gown and her mother had put a single popper on the starched ruff which Lily could see in the broken triangle of mirror shoved behind a water pipe on the wall. Her face was pale, even her lips were white.

‘Oh God,’ Lily said.

She could hear the dancers clattering up the steps to the stage and then she heard the thump of the orchestra for their number. Lily’s stomach suddenly contracted with nausea and she had to pull up her gown and undo her knickers again.

Nothing came but a trickle of urine. Lily wiped herself and pulled the chain. The cistern was slow to fill. It would not flush. Lily bundled the robe to one side and put both hands down to try to button her knickers. By the time she managed it her face was flushed and the gown crumpled. ‘Oh God, I look awful.’

At least her hair was perfect. Lily smoothed it flat again, pushed it just a little more off her face. She felt as if she had been waiting in the cold evil-smelling toilet for days and days.

She heard the SM’s boy coming up the stairs and his knock on the door. ‘You in there, Lily?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘No.’

‘Three minutes.’

Lily turned to the mirror again, straightened the ruff, smoothed the surplice. She turned to the door with absolute reluctance. Suddenly she needed to pee again.

‘Oh God,’ Lily said miserably. ‘I can’t. I mustn’t! There isn’t time!’

She opened the door and peered out. There was no-one in the corridor. She tiptoed down the stairs and through the door to the wings of the stage. The girls were near the end of their number, banging out the beat. Lily went and stood behind the stage manager’s desk, trying to blend into the shadows. He glanced behind at the movement and then gave a double-take.

‘My God, you scared me to death. I thought you were a ghost. What the hell are you supposed to be?’

‘Choir boy.’

‘Charlie Smith must have gone off his head,’ the SM said bluntly. ‘Has Mr Brett seen you?’

‘Not yet.’

The man buried his face in his hands as if he could not stand the prospect.

‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘We’re all dead. But you especially are dead and buried.’

‘I feel it,’ Lily said, quite without sarcasm. ‘I wish I was.’

The girls clattered to a standstill.

‘Applause applause,’ came the weary voice from the dark auditorium. ‘No announcement at all now. Lily comes straight on.’

The girls, clearing the stage, pushed past Lily as she stepped forward. She just heard Madge say, ‘Wait a minute, what’re you wearing?’ and then she was under the dazzling hot lights and she could see nothing but Charlie’s face and his raised hand, and a quick bright nod to her and the regular sweet notes of the start of ‘Jesu, Joy …’

Lily, her mouth dry and her throat so tight that she knew she would be mute for the rest of her life, stood still with her hands clasped before her and longed for a pee.

She opened her mouth on cue, knowing no sound would come, and then she heard, as if it were someone else singing, the sweet steady notes in their ordered simplicity. ‘Jes-u, joy (wait) of man’s desir-ing (wait wait wait) holy wis-dom, lo-ve most bright …’

‘Golly,’ Lily thought. ‘It’s all right.’ It was as if her own stage-fright had moved her to a place where she could feel neither nerves nor her own body. She sang clearly and simply and her ears could hear the rightness of the sounds, and even enjoy them, as if they were being sung by another girl. As if it were not Lily Pears, sick with fear, under a burning hot spotlight, with all the Palais Dancers crowded in the wings behind her, waiting to laugh.

She sang as she had been taught, simply and clearly, and held the last note. The final chords died away like ringing bells.

‘You win a guinea, Charlie. Very nice indeed. Applause, applause, weep, weep. Next,’ William said from the darkness.

Charlie threw a grin at Lily and the drum rolled.

‘Come off,’ the SM hissed behind her. ‘Come on! Clear the stage. You’ve had your moment of glory, duckie. It’s someone else now.’

Mesmerio the hypnotist, splendid in a black tie and tails, pushed past Lily and stepped on to the stage. Lily, still dazzled by the lights, stepped into the wings and went slowly down the stairs to the dressing room. The girls, silenced by a glower from the SM, went with her like a patrol with a prisoner in their midst.

‘Well!’ Madge said, outraged, as soon as the dressing room door was shut. ‘I never saw such a performance in my life!’

‘Pie!’

‘I thought she was sweet! You were sweet, Lily!’

‘She looked more like a boy than a girl!’

‘Charlie must be off his head!’

‘Too scared to hang around the dockyard more like!’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I always thought Charlie Smith liked boys – now look what he’s done to Lily!’

Lily undid her ruff and pulled her surplice off over her head, hardly hearing them.

Helena undid the hooks of the gown for her. ‘They’re all crooked. You should have got someone to help you.’

‘I will tomorrow,’ Lily said vaguely.

‘Where did you learn to sing like that – proper singing?’

‘With my teacher.’ Lily felt a deep sleepy weariness, as if all the excitement and nervousness had drained out of her body, leaving her empty and exhausted. ‘I’ve had singing lessons since I was little.’

‘You ought to be a proper singer, opera or something.’

Lily smiled, shook her head. ‘I’m not good enough,’ she said.

She hung her gown with the surplice and the ruff on the hanger and then wrapped the sheet around them. Helena thrust her next costume towards her. It was a scarlet froth of tulle with a black tightly-laced boned bodice for the finale – a can-can. Lily stepped into it and Helena spun her around and did up the hooks at the back.

‘You all right? You’re very quiet.’

Lily’s little face was pale against the harsh cherry-red of the gown. ‘I’m fine.’

The boy knocked on the door. ‘Finale. Five minutes.’

There was a rush towards the mirror. Madge screamed for someone to do her up quick! and then the six of them burst out of the dressing room and clattered up the narrow stone steps to the wings.

Sylvia de Charmante was singing her final song. It was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Lily – last of the line in the wings – leaned back against the cold wall and gritted her teeth. She hated the song. She hated all the war songs. She hated their sentimental lushness, she hated the stupidity of men whistling them as they marched to the Front. She had taken her father’s death as an act of folly, not heroism. Alone of all the kids in the street, Lily hated the war, and disliked and blamed Kitchener when everyone else worshipped him. Lily never knitted socks and balaclavas, she never joined a gang to collect scrap paper. A solitary rebel, she pretended that the war, which overshadowed her childhood and drained it of joy, did not exist.

‘Applause, applause, weep, weep. Very nice, Miss de Charmante,’ William said from the front row. ‘Now, Sylvia, step forward. Gauze down. Lights down. Can-can backdrop down. Sylvia, you’re still bowing, taking flowers. Then you walk slowly slowly slowly across the stage and you’re gone. And we should be ready … now.’

Absolutely nothing happened.

‘Mike!’ William said very quietly through his teeth.

The SM waved frantically to the stage hands. ‘Clear the stage, we’re going up!’ he hissed. ‘Go!’

The drummer gave a long exciting roll on the drums and Charlie at the piano with the trumpeter and the two violins burst into a spirited thumping rendition of the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ – the traditional can-can music.

Lily, with Helena’s hand firmly clutching her boned waist, and her hand behind Helena’s back gripping Madge’s wrist, started marking the steps as the first girl on the stage – Susie – danced out sideways. Lily’s head went up; she loved the can-can. She grinned at the morose SM as she danced out under the hot lights, matching her kick to the others, then keeping the rhythm of the music with the low half-kicks as the line folded in on itself and Lily and Susie were face to face and then pairing off, dancing around, in pairs through the middle and into the line of the can-can again.

It was a short number. Can-can was spectacular, but exhausting. Charlie played it at the edge of safety – as fast as he dared. The girls’ screams as they kicked, or cartwheeled, or jumped into the splits, were screams of protest, not excitement. But Lily loved it. The relief at her song being over, her simple delight at being on stage and the absolute fun of the music and the dancing, and Charlie’s darkened face in the orchestra pit, kept her feet pounding on the stage. The final dance step and dive into the splits came too soon for her. Lily stayed in the splits, her head up, her face radiant.

‘Applause, applause, rapturous applause,’ William said miserably. ‘Walk down.’

The chorus girls stepped smartly up, walked forward in time to Charlie’s brisk march, took a bow and then fell back either side of the stage. In order of increasing importance the stars entered from the rear of the stage, strode forwards, took a bow and stepped to one side. Arnold the drunken magician stood in front of Lily and she could see nothing more than his back and his outflung hand inviting applause.

The curtain fell, throwing the stage into twilight. The cast formed themselves into two straight lines facing the curtain, waiting for it to rise again. They bowed. The curtain fell. The music reached a closing phrase and stopped.

It was as if the strings of puppets had been snapped. All the smiles were switched off and everybody slumped, ostentatiously weary.

‘That fool on the light had me in blue,’ Sylvia de Charmante exclaimed.

‘Darling girl, if you don’t hold your basket steady I’ll be taking ribbons off your tits, not out of your basket,’ Arnold said to Madge. ‘I can’t run around the stage after you.’

‘We were too bunched up in the can-can,’ Helena complained. ‘I was squashed in the middle.’

‘I can’t spread out any more,’ Susie replied. ‘I was half in the wings as it was.’

The curtains rose slowly, as if to signal this was work, not performance.

‘Get changed and then out here for notes in five minutes,’ William said. ‘All of you. Five minutes only.’

Lily looked towards the orchestra pit to Charlie. He was checking his sheet music and did not look up.

‘Come on, Lily,’ said one of the girls. ‘We’ve only got five minutes.’

The ‘notes’ were William’s final chance to make corrections. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. The stars he spoke to individually. Sylvia de Charmante was soothed and complimented until she consented to sit down and listen to the general comments. She even agreed to speed up ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’.

‘It can sound like a dirge otherwise,’ William said tactfully. ‘It’s the song. It’s draggy. I love the way you do it, but it needs to move along.’

He was not so tender with the feelings of the dancers, nor the jugglers, nor the conjuror.

‘Arnold, get yourself sorted out,’ he said. ‘We could see the ribbons in the baskets. It needs to be quicker.’

‘The girl must hold the basket still,’ Arnold said, looking reproachfully at Madge.

‘She will,’ William said with quiet menace. ‘Now, jugglers – I know it’s difficult on a stage raked as steeply as this one; but you’re hired to catch the bloody things, not fling them past each other into the wings.’

‘Hypnotist – very nice. Lily – very nice. Tumblers – very nice. Can you speed up the final position a bit? It’s slow.’

The tumblers nodded.

‘The walk-down.’ There was a brief depressed silence. ‘Do it again,’ William said. ‘I’m sorry, but we’ll do it again and again until it goes march-march-march. You’re trailing down like you’re off to the Somme. I want a bit of briskness. I want a bit of life. Back up on stage and don’t wander off. You’re all going to the right places but you’re taking too long. I want it quick. I want it catchy. I want you to run if you have to. Gentlemen – you can certainly run. Ladies – an elegant scuttle please. March-march-march. Let’s get a move on.’

There was a general murmur of irritation and boredom and then the cast went back up the catwalk to the stage and took their places.

‘Chorus girls, you’re in your line, in the splits. Don’t bunch up. Spread out. There’s only six of you, there’s no need to advertise it. Spread out and look like twenty.’

Lily wriggled over sideways.

‘Now, Charlie! Can we have the whole thing quicker?’

‘You can do. But it’ll be more of a gallop than a march.’

‘Gallop the bloody thing then. Let’s have the Charge of the Light Brigade, not an advance up the Menin Road. I want it to move!’

Charlie nodded to the orchestra. One, two-three, four,’ he said quickly. ‘That speed. Off we go. One, two-three, four.’

The drum rolled. The chorus line leaped to their feet, stepped briskly forward and bowed. Lily found herself almost running backwards, trying to keep time to the music and get to her place.

The stars stormed down the centre of the stage, bowed, and dashed to their positions. Only Sylvia de Charmante swayed down, serene and unruffled, at the same speed as before, smiling.

‘Thank you,’ William said. ‘Hold it there.’

Lily waited with malicious anticipation for Sylvia de Charmante to receive one of William’s pithy criticisms.

‘Much, much better,’ he said. ‘That’s the speed. That’s fine. Sylvia, you were gorgeous. Just a tiny bit faster to the front and the audience will have longer to see you. You’re lost at the back of the stage, we don’t know you’re there. Come downstage quicker and you have all the time in the world in the spotlight taking your bow.’

Lily eyed William with growing respect.

‘Ok then, we’re done,’ William said. ‘Over to you, Mike.’

The SM came out from the wings, his shirt blotchy with sweat. ‘Tea matinée tomorrow at three,’ he said. ‘Everyone here by two thirty. Any problems with costumes, see Mary in wardrobe straight away. Two thirty tomorrow. Goodnight everybody. Well done.’

Lily went back to the dressing room and found her hat and coat. The hat had fallen off the peg to the floor and was dusty. Lily brushed it absent-mindedly and pulled it on her head. She wanted to see Charlie.

She went back up the stairs to the stage. The crew were tidying up and the SM had gone from his corner. Lily stepped out on to the stage and looked out into the darkness. With the stage lights dimmed she could see the auditorium. Immediately below the stage were the stalls. Each seat had a little bracket where a tray for drinks or tea could be clipped. Lily tried to imagine the seats filled with people talking, laughing, drinking and flirting.

At the back of the theatre was the bar with a half-glass partition to separate the drinkers and promenaders from the seated audience. Lily would have to sing clearly and loudly enough to be heard over their chatter and the shouting of orders. Above them was the circle, and behind the circle seats, the circle bar with waiter service. Lily looked up at the vaulted ceiling painted blue with white and pink clouds and a yellow sunburst in the middle. She breathed in the smell of the theatre – stale cigarette smoke, cold air, the smell of emptiness where there had been a crowd. It smelled of magic. Anything could happen here.

Lily stepped forward, holding out her arms as she had seen Sylvia de Charmante do, as if to embrace an adoring crowd. She bowed with immense dignity as if she were overwhelmed with praise. When she came up she was smiling for a shower of bouquets.

Chapter Five

Helen walked Lily to the theatre for her debut at the tea matinée and then went around to the front of the house and treated herself to a ticket in the circle. Lily had been weepy with nerves and Helen had smiled calmly and told her to fear nothing. Only now that the stage door was closed behind her daughter could she acknowledge how anxious she was feeling. She sat in the little seat and ordered tea. She had not treated herself to such an outing in years but when the tea tray came, and the sandwiches, and the slice of cake, she found her mouth was so dry that she could taste nothing.

Charlie Smith came out with the orchestra, looking handsome and young in his black tie and tails. Helen smiled down at him, knowing he could not see her, willing him to help Lily in performance as she knew he had helped her in rehearsal. So much depended on the girl doing well. Not just the financial investment – all those saved shillings and pennies through all the hard years – but Lily’s whole future. Helen could not see a way for Lily to escape from the backstreets of her home unless her talent could carry her away, far away, to distant music halls and perhaps even theatres. Lily might be one of the prettiest girls in Portsmouth but that was not enough. She had to be seen, she had to be perceived as a talented girl, an exceptional girl. If this chance did not work for her she would be behind the counter of the Highland Road grocery shop for life. Helen put her tea tray to one side. She could not bear to think of Lily working a twelve- or fourteen-hour day, six days a week, to earn a wage that would barely feed her.

The first half of the show passed with frightening speed. Helen stayed in her seat for the interval, then the houselights went down, Charlie slipped into his place at the front of the orchestra and opened the second half with the chorus girls’ number. Helen barely saw them. The girls dashed off stage and then there was a brief silence and the measured beautiful beats of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ started and the spotlight shone down on Lily.

At the first note Helen relaxed. It was flawless. Lily’s pale gold hair and pale face were luminous in the spotlight, her voice as clear as an angel’s. Helen let the music wash over her, freeing her from anxiety. When the last note came and Lily held it clearly, without a quaver of nerves, Helen found that she was shaking with sobs, crying very softly for joy in her daughter’s talent, and pride.

Helen went backstage after the performance with her face calm and powdered. She gave Lily a swift hug at the stage door and promised to collect her after the evening show. She did not think Lily would need a chaperone, the song was not one likely to attract the rougher sort of man, nor even an idle gentleman. But that night, at the stage door, waiting for Lily, were Stephen and David. Helen Pears realized then that Lily’s choices for her future were wider and more hopeful than she had ever imagined.

For the next week Stephen divided his time between his work at the family legal practice, and thinking of Lily. He went to see the show twice more. He liked her singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, but he hated her dancing the can-can. When she was on the stage he did not look at her or at any of the girls but glared around the bar at other men. If anyone had passed a comment about her, he would have hit him.

After the show he would wait beside the big Argyll with Coventry at the wheel for Lily and her mother and drive them home. He took them out to dinner a second time, at the fish restaurant just off the seafront. He persuaded Lily to try oysters – which she thought disgusting. He ordered lobster in hot butter for her.

Helen let him take Lily for a drive along the seafront in the afternoon, but not out into the countryside. The early May weather was promising. Stephen wanted a picnic. He wanted to sit with Lily in a hayfield and watch larks in the sky. He wanted to lie back on a tartan rug and sleep for once without dreams. He wanted to look from Portsdown Hill across half of Hampshire without planning in his mind where he would put a machine gun post to defend the summit, or calculate how long it would take to dig a good deep trench across those quiet fields.

The hayfields were pale watery green, starred with thousands of wildflowers, rich with butterflies and busy with nesting birds. It was a different world, a different countryside from the lands that had been his home for two and a half years. He could not believe that fields could sprout such different crops as purple vetch and white clover here, and shell cases and dead men over there. The long flat Flanders plain must have been green and growing once. He could not imagine the Menin Road verged with primroses, wet with bluebells. It was another world. There could be no connection between that place which he had left far, far behind him, and this Hampshire, in this spring of 1920 when Stephen fell in love.

He did not know how to court her. Lily’s bright light was for everyone. She smiled with equal radiance on him, on Coventry, on Charlie Smith, on a passer-by who asked her for directions to Clarence Parade. The joyous expectancy of Lily’s smile was a universal currency. Anyone could buy. Stephen longed to ration her.

She loved his car. She learned to enjoy the comfort of a ride home instead of the walk to the tram stop and then the cold wait. She liked to walk into a restaurant on his arm. But the smile she gave a waiter for pulling out her chair was no less grateful than the smile she gave Stephen for paying the bill. She had no sense of money, he could not buy her. If he gave her a bouquet of hot-house roses, sugar pink in tight sweet buds, she would exclaim with pleasure; but she would be just as delighted with a primrose in a pot from Charlie Smith.

She had no sense of status either, and Stephen was uncomfortable with Lily’s blithe belief that the only reason she had not met his mother and visited his house for tea was because his father was so ill that they never entertained.

Mrs Pears understood the situation perfectly, and Stephen feared her dark knowledgeable glance. She knew very well that he was using Lily to amuse himself while he settled to the urgent peacetime tasks of repairing the family business and choosing a girl from his own class for marriage. Mrs Pears held the line against him like a veteran gunner at a salient point. He feared that she would poison Lily against him, abuse him behind his back even though she ate his dinners. But then he realized that Lily was not someone whose mind you could poison. If you said something disagreeable or spiteful, Lily would look at you, rather wide-eyed and surprised. If it was a funny piece of malice – and he had heard Charlie Smith compare Sylvia de Charmante to a Jersey cow in season – then Lily would scream with laughter and then cram her palm against her mouth to muffle helpless giggles. But if she heard spiteful talk, without the sugar of wit, Lily looked somehow anxious – as if it were her own reputation under attack. And then she would look puzzled and ask one of her frighteningly candid questions – ‘Do you dislike him then?’

Stephen learned that Mrs Pears would not oppose him directly. She would bide her time and watch him. When he escorted them home he could hold Lily’s hand in the shadowy darkness of the car. But always Mrs Pears waited in the shop while he said goodnight to Lily on the doorstep. In the ten days while he drove Lily home, and out along the seafront, and paid for expensive dinners, he never even kissed her goodnight.

It was Lily who brought matters to a head. ‘I shall miss you, Stephen,’ she said easily. They were taking tea at a café in Palmerston Road. Mrs Pears had unbent so far as to allow Stephen to take Lily out to tea without a chaperone. Lily had eaten a hearty tea: sandwiches, tea-cakes, scones and a handsome wedge of chocolate cake. ‘Oh, that was divine!’ she said.

‘Don’t they feed you at the theatre? Go on, you can have another slice.’

‘D’you think I dare? No! The waitress is looking at me. She’ll think I’m a starving Belgian. I won’t! But I’ll have another cup of tea.’

As she poured her tea, her earlier sentence suddenly struck Stephen.

‘Why should you miss me? I’m not going away.’

Lily beamed at him. She had a little smudge of chocolate cake at the corner of her mouth. Stephen longed to lean forwards and wipe it off with his napkin. ‘No, but I am. This is a touring show. We go to Southampton next Monday.’

For a moment he felt nothing, as if her words were the whine of a bomb which would rock the ground with a dull terrifying thud a few moments after the incoming shriek. ‘Going? But when will you be back?’

Lily gazed upwards in thought. ‘Um. July,’ she said finally. ‘We’re touring the south coast from here to Plymouth. Misery, misery! How will I ever get enough to eat in Plymouth without you!’

Stephen said nothing. He could imagine only too well how Lily would be wined and dined in Plymouth.

‘Is your mother going?’

Lily shook her head. ‘She can’t get anyone to mind the shop. Well, she could get Sarah. But she doesn’t really trust Sarah to manage on her own. So she has to wait until she can get Clare – but she’s a school teacher, so she can’t come until the school holidays and even then …’

‘Never mind that now! How will you manage, on your own?’

‘I’ll be all right! I’ll be with the other girls in digs. The company books ahead for us, you know. It’ll be just like being here. Same show. Same work. The only thing that will be different is I shan’t have you to buy me lovely teas!’

Stephen could feel a shudder starting up through him. He felt very cold. He felt like smashing the table and shouting at Lily, or at the waitress, or at damned Helen Pears for her careful – no, her suspicious – chaperonage of him and then her feckless way of letting her daughter draggle off all around the south coast with God knows who.

‘You’ll be lonely.’

‘Oh no.’ Lily had been looking out of the window at the people walking by. ‘Stephen! D’you see that woman in that most extraordinary hat! I hope it’s not a new fashion. It’s enormous!’ She glanced back at him and noticed his dark glower. ‘Oh, sorry! No, I won’t be lonely. Some of the girls are nice, and Arnold is all right when you get to know him, and the jugglers are really good fun. Charlie Smith is quite wonderful. It’s a nice company. It’ll be fun going from one town to another, all together. We’ll travel by train, you know. Arnold is going to teach me how to play poker. And Henry – that’s Mesmerio – says he’ll teach me how to hypnotize people! It’ll be good fun. And who knows, someone might see me and like me!’

‘What?’

‘A producer or a director or a manager. Someone might be on holiday and spot me! It could happen. Charlie says it could happen. And then I’d be off to London!’

Stephen nodded slowly. ‘So I won’t see you until July,’ he said.

Lily smiled at him happily. ‘No.’

Stephen nodded at the waitress and paid the bill. ‘Let’s drive back along the seafront,’ he said.

Coventry was parked on the other side of the road, watching for them. But as Stephen took Lily’s arm to guide her across the road a man shuffled forward on a ramshackle home-made wheelchair, a tea chest on little castors.

‘Sir!’ he cried. ‘Captain! D’you remember me?’

Stephen turned. The man was a pitiful sight. His legs had been amputated at the thighs and his trousers were pinned neatly over the stumps. He was wearing an army greatcoat which had been roughly cut to blazer-length to keep his chest and shoulders warm. Around his neck he had a large placard reading: ‘Old soldier, Portsmouth Battalion, wife and three children to support. Please help.’

‘Captain! I can’t remember your name but you were in command of us at Beselare. D’you remember, Sir? I lost my legs there. We got stuck in the shellhole and couldn’t get out? D’you remember we were there all night with the shells going from one side to another like bleeding birds? And Corporal Cray bit through his tongue to stop himself screaming?’

Stephen had shrunk back against Lily. His mouth was working but he could get no words to come. ‘D … d … d …’

‘D’you remember you gave me morphine from my field pack and joked with me? And we had nothing to drink. D’you remember how hot it was that long day?’

Stephen was blanched white. He stared at the crippled man as if he were a ghost.

‘Oh, go away!’ Lily said roughly.

Stephen swallowed his stammer in surprise.

‘Go away!’ Lily said brusquely. ‘Go down to the British Legion and get some work you can do with your hands. You should be ashamed of yourself, begging in the street.’

‘I can’t get work, missis …’ the man said. ‘There’s no work for men like me.’

‘Then your wife should work and you could keep house,’ Lily said swiftly. ‘You’ve no right to clutter up the shops with your stupid little trolley and your horrible stories.’

‘They’re not stories,’ he blustered. ‘They’re true. Every damned word! And if you think they’re horrible you should have been there yourself. There were things I saw over there which would make your dreams a terror to you for the rest of your life.’

‘I’m too young,’ Lily said sharply. ‘It wasn’t my war. I was too young. So don’t tell me about your nightmares because it’s nothing to do with me!’

She pulled Stephen towards the car away from the veteran.

‘You’ve got no pity!’ he shouted at her back. ‘No pity! We died for you and your sort. Out there in the mud. We died for you!’

Lily turned back. ‘I don’t care!’ she shouted. A tram rang its bell and came rumbling between them. ‘I don’t care!’ Lily yelled over the noise of the tram. ‘It wasn’t my war, I didn’t ask you to go, I didn’t ask anyone to die, and I don’t want to know anything about it now!’

Coventry was holding the door. Lily flung herself inside and Stephen followed her.

‘Just drive!’ Stephen forced the words out. Coventry nodded and set the big car in motion. Stephen looked out of the back window. The crippled soldier had gone. He turned to Lily as if he could scarcely believe her.

‘My G … God, Lily, you were angry.’

‘I hate the war,’ Lily said fiercely. ‘All the time, all the time I was a girl if there was anything I wanted to do, or anything I wanted to have it was always “no” – because there was a war on.

‘I was twelve when it started. My dad went rushing off the first moment he could and got himself killed. And now, all the time people want to hear the war songs, want to go on and on about what it was like before, and how it was better then. Well, it’s my time now. And if it isn’t as good as it was then – well, at least it will be as good as I can have.

‘I’m sick of all the old soldiers and sailors and the charities. I’m sick and tired of it. All my childhood we were fighting the war, no-one would talk about anything else, and now it’s over people still want to go on and on about it. I want to leave it behind. I want to forget it!’

Stephen said nothing. Coventry drew the Argyll up at the edge of Southsea Common and the seafront promenade. Coventry got out of the car and stood by the bonnet. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, looking out to sea.

The silence went on.

‘D’you think I’m selfish?’ Lily asked suddenly.

‘I think you’re wonderful,’ Stephen burst out. He felt a great wave of relief. ‘I’ve never heard anyone talk like that before. It wasn’t my war either, you know. I felt as if I never knew why I was there. But I just had to stay and stay and stay there. Whatever it was like. My brother, Ch … Ch … Christopher – he wanted to go. He volunteered.’ He took a breath. ‘But I l … left it to the very l … last moment. They’d have con … conscripted me if I hadn’t gone. They called me a c … a c … a coward. Someone sent me a f … a f … a feather.’ His stammer had escaped his control. He bared his lips, straining to make the words come. Lily watched him with wide scared eyes. Stephen struggled and then shrugged. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ he said.

Lily shook her little head. ‘Well, I don’t want to know. I don’t know whether it should have happened. I don’t know whether you should have been there. I don’t care. It’s over now, Stephen. You don’t have to think about it any more.’

Stephen reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking slightly.

‘You d … don’t want to know about it?’

Lily shook her head. ‘Why should I?’ she asked coldly. ‘It’s past. It’s long gone. I want to live my life now. I don’t care about the past.’

Stephen exhaled a long cloud of smoke. The tension was draining away from his face. He was staring at Lily as if she had said something of extraordinary importance. As if she had the key to some freedom for him.

‘It’s over,’ he repeated as if he were learning a lesson from her.

Lily smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said. ‘It’s finished and gone. You’ll never have to go back there. You don’t have to even think about it. I never want to hear about it from you or anybody else.’

Stephen drew a deep breath. ‘Let’s have a look at the sea.’ He opened the door and got out. Coventry dropped his cigarette and opened the door for Lily.

‘We’ll just walk for a little,’ Stephen said.

Lily’s hat lifted off her head precariously with the offshore breeze. They walked along the promenade and then stepped off the low wall on to the shingle of the beach. Ahead of them was the short white fist of the pier extending out into the sea. The little theatre and amusement parlour at the end of the pier were being repainted white for the summer season of Vaudeville shows. They could see the ladders and the workmen. Lily pulled off her hat and held it in her hand as they walked. Stephen slid his arm around her waist, Lily leaned against his shoulder, comfortable with his closeness.

‘I shall miss you,’ she said as if it were a new thought. ‘I shall miss you while I am away.’

Stephen paused, turned her towards him, leaned down and kissed her on her smiling lips, held her body close to his for the first time and sensed her slightness, the roundness of her breasts against his chest, the warmth of her face against his. He smelled the warm clean female smell of her, the scent of her hair. He kissed her, pressing his lips on hers and then licking the corner of her mouth, tasting that little provocative smudge of chocolate. He was excited by her rejection of the war; he felt elated as if she could set him free from his nightmares, free from his sense that the war could never end while he, and all the men scarred like him, fought it and re-fought it in their dreams. And she was warm like that other girl had been, and soft, like that other girl had been. And her skin smelled of desire.

Lily stayed still, her feet shifting slightly on the shingle for a few moments, struggling with her discomfort. She felt stifled and claimed and overpowered. She let him hold her for a little while with a sense of confused courtesy, as if she should not rebuff him, not after their sudden slide into intimacy. He had trusted her with a confidence; she could not pull her body away roughly. So she let him hold her, resenting the weight of his body against hers, tense against the insistent closing of his arms. Then she felt the disgusting touch of his tongue on the corner of her lips, and the smooth scented brush of his moustache, and she shuddered with instinctive revulsion, and stepped back, her gloved hand up at her mouth rubbing her lips. ‘Don’t!’ she said breathlessly. ‘You shouldn’t …’

Stephen smiled. He felt very much older and more experienced than Lily, who had been a little girl at school when other women had forced him to war. ‘Was that your first kiss?’ he asked.

‘Yes!’

He chuckled, ‘I will give you very many more than that, Lily, my lovely Lily.’ He drew a breath. He felt daring. He saw himself through Lily’s eyes, handsome, wealthy, powerful. He gave a little excited laugh, freed by Lily’s rejection of the past, by Lily’s hatred of the war. ‘I will give you many more kisses,’ he promised recklessly. ‘Many, many more. I will marry you. I am prepared to marry you, Lily. So what d’you say to that?’

Lily’s face was blank with surprise. Her hand fell to her side and the little smudge of chocolate was very dark against the whiteness of her skin. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I never thought of you like that. I’m very sorry. I must have been very silly. But I’m much too young. And you’re much too old, Captain Winters. I am sorry.’

They said nothing, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension. Stephen flushed slowly, a deep dark red. He felt deeply, horribly snubbed by Lily. All of their days together and their treats together were shaken and remade into a new, offensive pattern. He had been a sugar daddy, a patron – while he had thought himself an acknowledged lover.

‘Lily,’ he said and he reached out his hand to draw her back from her sudden enmity, from her sudden girlish rejection.

Wobbly on the shingle in her little shoes, Lily stepped quickly back, out of his reach. The sea, a few yards away, washed in and out, sucking at the pebbles of the foreshore, a nagging ominous sound, like distant gunfire. Lily looked frightened, ready for flight. Stephen was filled with a bullying desire to smack her. She had led him on with her prettiness and her provocative respectability and now she shrank like some virgin child from his touch. She did not understand that she was compromised by his dinners, that she had been bought by his little treats. She was cheating on the sale. He wanted to grab her and pinch her. He wanted to hold her with one arm and rummage inside her pretty jacket. He wanted to rub her breasts and pinch her nipples. He wanted to strip away Lily’s delicacy and thrust his hand up her skirt. She was not a lady, whatever she might like to pretend, she was a chorus girl. If it had been dark he would have grabbed her and slapped her face. Frustrated by daylight and chaperoned by the people walking on the promenade, Stephen stared at Lily with a desire very near to hatred.

‘I should like to go back to the theatre now, please,’ Lily said in a very small voice. ‘I should like to go.’

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