Fallen Skies. Philippa Gregory

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 –