Fallen Skies. Philippa Gregory

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