Fallen Skies. Philippa Gregory
be friends again.’
Stephen shook her hand firmly, as if she were a young clerk at his office. ‘That’s grand,’ he said. ‘And now – would you like a farewell dinner, Mrs Pears? Lily? To say goodbye to the Queens Hotel before you conquer the south of England?’
Lily glanced at her mother and then nodded. ‘Divine!’ she said, using Sylvia de Charmante’s favourite word of praise. ‘Too, too divine!’
Stephen called for her at the grocery shop on Sunday morning. Mrs Pears had agreed that they might all go out for a picnic. Coventry had a large hamper in the boot of the Argyll, and a spirit stove, a tea kettle, a silver teapot, and a complete tea service.
‘On a Sunday, darling?’ Muriel had asked her son. ‘Such an odd day for a picnic. I don’t think it’s quite the thing.’
‘She’s going away tomorrow, Mother, if she doesn’t come now I don’t know when she’ll be free again. And I’ve longed for a picnic in the country for weeks. The forecast is good for tomorrow. And if you don’t tell anyone – who’s to know?’
Muriel had sighed and said nothing more. The tea party to introduce Stephen to young women of his own class had been a total failure. He had hated them all. And Muriel, watching them over her tea cup as they postured and preened, had hated them too. Marjorie had obviously studied the magazines to learn how to be a Modern Girl and was both shocking and vulgar. Sarah had been sickeningly sentimental. Stephen, trapped on the sofa between two versions of post-war womanhood, had looked uncomfortable – even angry. He must wonder, Muriel thought, what it was all for – those long two and a half years away – when he comes home and finds girls like Marjorie and Sarah as the best that Portsmouth can offer, his father a cripple, and the house silent with grief. She sighed.
She was still grieving for her oldest son, their heir. Christopher had marched off to war believing that it would be an adventure like a Boys’ Own story. They had all thought that then. It sounded like madness now. But in the first heady days of 1914 there had been a sort of wild carnival atmosphere as if the boys were going away on some delightful crusade. The newspapers had been full of pictures of handsome young men smiling and waving, and the journalists had written that England would reclaim her power and her strength with the British Expeditionary Force. There had not been a war since the Boer war – and the faraway privations of that struggle were quickly forgotten. The Germans were behaving like animals in Europe and should be abruptly stopped. Everyone knew that the British soldier – Tommy Atkins – was the finest in the world.
People were bored of peace. All the rumblings and discontent in the country, all the eccentricities and oddness of the young men and women would be blown away when they had their chance to be great. The newspapers said it, the clergy blessed it in the pulpits. Everyone believed that a war – a good romp of a quick war – would somehow set them up, would unite the nation, cleanse it. The country needed a war, they told themselves. They were a fighting nation, an imperial nation. They needed to prove themselves again.
Christopher had been in the Officer Training Corps at school and joined the Reserve Army after school. He believed it was his duty to go and – more than that – he had thought it the finest adventure possible. He had volunteered and been commissioned at once. His father and he went down to the tailors Gieves, on the harbourside, and ordered his uniform in a joyous male shopping trip which had ended in the Dolphin Hotel with a bottle of champagne for the hero. He had looked wonderfully handsome in khaki. He had been very fair with clear pale skin and light blue eyes. He looked like a boy off to boarding school when he leaned out of the train window and waved his new cap with the shiny badge and shouted goodbye.
He died within seven weeks, during the first disastrous battle that they would later call the first battle of the Somme, when they had to distinguish it from the second, then the third and then the fourth: battles fought again and again, over the same ground, now layered with dead like some strange soft shale rock.
Muriel learned to be grateful that Christopher had died early. He had never known trench warfare and the souring of courage and hope that seemed to happen in the mud. She was glad that her fair-headed son had never come home alive with lice and shaking with nerves. She was glad, afterwards, that it had been quick for him, that she had never had to listen to him screaming from nightmares or found him huddled under his bed, soaked in sweat, keening with terror. Christopher had ridden out like a hero and was gone for ever, before she had time to miss him. She had not even finished knitting his gloves.
Stephen had been totally different. He had resisted recruitment to the very last moment. The news of Christopher’s death had come and his father had dropped where he stood, as if a bullet had found his heart. But still Stephen would not go. His father had been able to move his hand then, his right hand, and he had written Stephen a note, the only thing he ever wrote. It read: ‘Now, your turn.’ Stephen had completely ignored it.
His godfather had written to him that it was his duty to go, and that he would be cut from the old man’s will if he did not volunteer. It was no empty threat. The old man had a large house in Knightsbridge. Stephen had secretly enjoyed the knowledge that it would one day be his ever since Christopher’s death had left him as sole heir. But even that threat did not move him from his refusal to go. One painful evening after dinner Muriel had told him that she was convinced that it was her duty to let him go, and his to leave. She had read in the paper that a woman’s service to her country meant sacrifice. She was ready to sacrifice him. A popular daily paper was minting medals for women who sent their sons to war. Muriel recognized the rightness of the award. A woman could do nothing, could give nothing – but she could let her son go. Muriel had tears in her eyes when she told Stephen that she was convinced that he must leave. But nothing would make him go.
It was only when it became apparent to him that conscription was coming, and that no fit young man would escape, that he could either volunteer as an officer or be conscripted as a soldier, that he went down to the town hall and signed on. He went without telling his mother of his intention, and he came back with a face like a servant.
There was no joyous backslapping trip to Gieves with his father. His father’s hand had lost its strength; he could not write. He nodded at the news, but Stephen had no praise from him. There was no singing on the train which took him and the other surly late volunteers to London. There were no optimistic promises about being home by Christmas.
When she was clearing out his room, after he had gone, Muriel found an envelope tucked at the back of the drawer for his socks. There was no letter, but it was not empty: there was a white feather in it. Someone had posted a white feather to her son. She looked at the postmark. It was posted in Portsmouth, their home town where they had been well-known and respected for generations. Someone had troubled themselves to discover Stephen’s home address and post him a white feather. Someone had seen his reluctance to fight and named him as a coward.
Muriel had thought then that Stephen would never forgive any of them. When he had come home on leave with his face white and tight, slept for days and wallowed in the bath, eaten as if he were starving, but never once smiled at her nor at his father, she knew she was right. She asked him in the new humble voice that she was learning to use to him, measuring the extent of her misjudgement, ‘Is it very, very bad, Stephen? I’ve seen photographs and it looks …’
He had looked at her with his broad handsome face hardened and aged to stone. ‘You have sent me to my death,’ he said simply, and turned away.
Muriel moved restlessly around the sitting room. Stephen had been proved wrong. He had not died, he had come home; and now he had a new life to make. He had his work to do, and he would find a suitable wife, he should have a child, a son to continue the family. It was Muriel’s job to find a girl who would bring some life into this quiet house where the old man upstairs lay in silence and grieved for his brightest lost son.
The girl, the right girl, must be somewhere among Muriel’s many acquaintances. Muriel would make the effort, she would give tea parties, lunch parties and even dinner parties. She would put aside her grief and her longing for silence and fill the house with women and girls so that Stephen could take his pick. He would meet a girl and like her, and the threads