Fallen Skies. Philippa Gregory
other is thinking. It’s creepy. I never liked him like that. I never gave him reason to think I liked him like that.’ Her voice quavered slightly. ‘I didn’t lead him on. He’s too old. How was I to know that he didn’t know that he was miles too old?’
Helen tucked Lily’s little hand under her arm. ‘Now that’s enough,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re getting yourself all upset over nothing. As you say, he’s old enough to look after himself. He’s made you an offer. You’ve said “no”. That’s an end to it.’
The wires above them hummed and the tram clattered around the corner and stopped beside them. It rocked as they clambered on and sat on the scratchy seats.
‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to say yes?’ Lily turned to her mother. ‘You don’t think he’s a catch?’
Helen Pears hesitated. Charlie smiled knowingly at her, enjoying her dilemma before Lily’s open-faced honesty.
‘He is a good catch,’ she said cautiously. ‘If you were a girl without talent then you couldn’t do better, Lily, and that’s the truth. If you didn’t have me behind you, and the shop, and Charlie here to help you with your work, then you’d have done well to have him. He’s not a bad sort. He’s a gentleman and his wife would be a lady wherever she came from.
‘But you don’t need to marry, not while you’ve got me.’ She took Lily’s gloved hand in her own and squeezed it. ‘Why, you’re just starting out,’ she said. ‘Who knows how far you’ll go?’
‘We’re off to Southampton next week anyway,’ Charlie said. ‘And I want you to try a new song. Not in the show, but I want you to rehearse it with me while we’re on tour. There might be an opening in Portsmouth when we get back and I’ve got an idea.’
‘What do I have to do now?’ Lily demanded. ‘Go bald? Scalped?’
‘Worse than that!’ Charlie winked at Helen. The conductor came towards them and chinked the large brown pennies in his dirty hand.
‘Fares please!’
Charlie paid for them all. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. ‘This is my stop. I’ll see you at the matinée, Lil. Sleep well, and don’t bother about it.’
He leaned forward and patted her face. Lily looked up at him and smiled like a trusting child. On impulse Charlie bent and gently kissed her forehead. ‘Little Lil,’ he said tenderly.
The tram stopped and he jumped down to the pavement. Lily raised her hand to him in farewell. Her face was scarlet.
Neither woman saw the car parked in the shadows at the end of the street. It had followed the tram on its short journey.
Coventry turned to Stephen sitting beside him in the passenger seat.
Stephen shrugged as if in answer to a question.
‘I just wanted to see her safe home, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I’m a damn fool, I know.’
Coventry went back to his silent contemplation of the dark street.
‘Can we go to your place?’ Stephen asked suddenly. ‘Go and have a brew? It’s early yet.’
Coventry nodded and started the engine. They took the eastern road out of town, past the lounging heap of Eastney Barracks, an ominous pile of heavy red brick with two marines guarding the gates. Stephen’s hand went up to the salute out of habit, and then he checked himself with a laugh.
Beyond the town the car picked up speed. They drove on a low flat road alongside the harbour. The tide was out, and over the mudflats the reflection of the moon chased alongside them. There was a mist rolling in from the sea and somewhere out in the Solent a foghorn called into the lonely darkness. The road raced over a low wood bridge built on piles driven into the chocolate-coloured mud. Stephen glanced inland and saw the black outline of the roofs of Portsmouth houses against the dark sky. There were concrete gun emplacements all along the coast road, and ugly tangles of barbed wire still despoiling the beach. Stephen looked at the mat of wire with a hard face.
‘She’s like water,’ he said suddenly. ‘She’s like a cold glass of clean water. She’d take the taste of mud out of my mouth.’
They turned right on the main coast road, driving east towards the rising moon. It was nearly full, a blue-silver moon, very close to the earth, the craters and pocks on the asymmetric face very clear. The light was so bright that the yellow lamps of the Argyll barely showed on the road ahead. On the right of the road were the flat marshes of Farlington running down towards the sea, and a pale barn owl quartering the sedges and rough grass. On the left was a patchwork of little fields growing vegetables and salty hay.
‘Very bright,’ Stephen said uneasily. ‘Very bright tonight.’ Then he shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter now,’ he reminded himself.
They drove a little way, and then turned right, south to the sea. There was a small village and then a darkened water mill. Coventry slowed the Argyll and drove past an old toll-gate pub. The inn sign creaked in the wind, the paint all blistered away from the picture of a sailing ship. The mist was coming inshore, rolling in from the sea. Ahead of them was a low narrow bridge joining the island to the mainland. Beneath the mist, the sea, closing from both sides, washed and sucked at the wooden piles of the bridge. Coventry slowed and drove carefully over. Stephen watched the wet mudflats on either side of the car where they gave way to sedge and shrubs and reeds. A sea bird, disturbed in its sleep, called once, a lingering liquid call, and then fell silent. The mist batted against the headlights, fluttered in ribbons on the windscreen.
‘Can you see?’ Stephen asked.
Coventry nodded. He had lived on Hayling Island all his life. He had known this road before the summer visitors came, when it was a mud track for the fishermen and there was no bridge to the mainland, only a ferry. He drove unerringly through the flickering mist to the south of the island where it jutted out into the sea and the waves broke all day and all night on the ceaselessly shifting shingle beaches. They turned right along the seashore. Only one road, a sand track, ran west. At the westernmost point of the island was a solitary inn where you could take the ferryboat which plied across the narrow harbour from Southsea. In summer, people took pleasure trips to Hayling Island for the day, to picnic on the wide beaches and play in the sandy dunes. In the evenings the ferries crossed from one side to another in a constant stream, the women’s sunshades and pretty dresses reflected in the harbour water and in the quiet evening air you could hear people laughing.
The foghorn moaned. Sand from the high dunes on their left had drifted over the road and Coventry leaned forward to see his way in the mist. The road was pot-holed and the Argyll lurched when one wheel dropped into a rut. Stephen and Coventry were smiling, enjoying the darkness and mist, the bad road, the discomfort.
On the right of the road was an inlet of still water, a little harbour off the main tidal reach. Dimly in the mist loomed the outlines of houseboats – three of them – pinned in the shallows by little white-painted staircases stretching from the shore. One was a pretty holiday home: there were empty pots waiting for geraniums on the steps. Furthest out, and the most ramshackle, was a grounded houseboat stained black with marine varnish and with no lights showing. It was Coventry’s. He had gone from it in a dull rage when he had been conscripted, knowing that his father could not survive without his earnings, knowing that the houseboat was icily cold in winter and damp all the year round. His father had died in the winter of 1917 and they had not allowed Coventry home in time to be with him. The old man had died alone, wheezing with pneumonia. Coventry had arrived for the funeral and then returned to the Front to serve as Stephen’s batman.
He parked the car alongside the houseboat and followed Stephen up the rickety gangplank. The houseboat had been long grounded. Its main structure was boat; but a permanent roof had been built on top, and what had once been the engine room and below decks was now a two-roomed cabin. Stephen went in first; the unlocked door opened directly into a small living room. There was one dining chair drawn up to a little table before the fire and one easy chair at the hearthside. Through