Stephen shrugged. “You are to say nothing. We agreed that. And the other people do not matter. They did not give their names, you will never see them again. They are not witnesses. No-one of any importance saw anything. And I shall deny it.”
Lily grasped the arms of the chair as if she were falling. “Now hang on a minute,” she said.
Stephen shook his head and smiled at his handsome reflection. He crossed to the wardrobe and took out a fresh, perfectly ironed shirt and pulled it on. He unbuttoned his fly, facing Lily, and half-dropped his trousers to tuck in his shirt. Lily saw the silk of his underpants and the bulge of his penis. He was half-erect. He stood before her like that for a moment. Lily fell silent at once.
Stephen tucked in his shirt and did up his trousers with a smile. He chose a new tie from the dressing table drawer.
“Poor darling, you must be starving,” he said in a quite different voice. “No lunch! I tell you what—let’s go mad and splash out. I’ll take you to tea at the Ritz! They probably have some dancing. Let’s go and have tea at the Ritz!”
Lily hesitated.
“I’ll wait downstairs while you change,” Stephen offered. “Wear your very best frock, Lily. You look rather crumpled.”
Lily got to her feet. Her pretty summer dress was soiled where she had knelt on the pavement. The heel of her shoe had kicked out the hem and the skirt was bedraggled. Stephen gave a little loving chuckle. “You look like a mad thing. No-one would believe a word you said,” he told her. “A mad little waif and stray. Smarten up, darling, you’re not fit to go anywhere like that!”
He went from the room and shut the door behind him. Lily could hear his confident step marching down the corridor. Obediently, she opened the wardrobe and changed her dress for a blue linen outfit with a matching jacket and a little flowery hat. She looked at herself in the mirror as if only her own prettiness could be trusted in this world of shifting evidence.
Downstairs Stephen was chatting with the concierge, leaning against the man’s polished desk. He said something that made the man laugh and then passed him a coin. The man palmed it and threw Stephen a half-salute.
“He says there’s a wonderful show at the Lyndhurst,” Stephen said, joining Lily. “Let’s go on to it after tea.”
Lily looked at the concierge, at the receptionist clerks who had seen Stephen stumbling into the hotel like a blinded soldier. None of them glanced towards her, no-one hid a smile. Stephen, offering her his arm, guiding her confidently across the marble floor, was glossy with well-being. Anyone looking from his smooth confident smile to Lily’s strained pallor would see a charming worldly man with a nervous young wife.
The doorman held the door for them and whistled for a cab. Stephen slid him a coin, the doorman tipped his hat with a smile. Lily sat beside Stephen in the cab and watched the streets and the faces of people sliding past the window. Nothing was real; not the busy streets, not Stephen’s glowing confidence. Lily longed for her mother and the old world of certainties where her mother had kept her safe.
Tea at the Ritz was a success. Lily regained her colour and she and Stephen danced. The show was good and they had dinner at a restaurant on their way home. In the night Stephen reached out for Lily, while he was half-asleep. Lily rolled over to the extreme edge of the bed to avoid his touch. Stephen settled on his back and slept deeply. Lily lay awake, watching the lights moving along the ceiling.
Stephen dreamed. He was at the start of it once more. They disembarked at Calais but under the bright lights of the dockside Stephen had no sense of foreign soil. There was too much to do—the men to order to the waiting railway carriages, the stores, the equipment, the roll call. It was not until he climbed over the legs of his fellow officers to his window seat that he had a chance to look out into the darkness and try to sense this strange country where his brother had died.
It was dark and quiet. A thick honey moon skimmed the tops of trees, highlighted hedges. The train clattered swiftly through the backs of darkened villages. Stephen caught a glimpse of station names, of small back gardens trimmed into bare tidiness. When they moved into the open countryside he saw fields and hedges, the broad gleam of a river. The road, running alongside the railway, was as straight as the railway track. A Roman road, Stephen thought sleepily, going to Rome. Running far away from the destination of the railhead, at the end of the line. “How I wish I was on it,” he said aloud carelessly.
“Do what, old man?” someone asked drowsily.
“Nothing.”
It was nothing, the wish to be walking down the road with a light holiday pack on his shoulders and that jolly amber moon laying a striped shadow across the road from one slim poplar tree to the next. It was nothing, his dream of going into a little roadside bar and drinking a cold beer, sitting outside at a little metal table and watching some old man ride by on a wagon full of straw pulled by a plump spoiled horse. Nothing.
Stephen dozed with his face against the cold hardness of the window, his teeth juddering when the train crossed points. He was not yet soldier enough to sleep through everything.
The train went too fast for him. He wanted it to travel slower, to take time for the dawn to catch up with them so that he could see the quiet fields and the grazing cows showing palely through the morning mist. He wanted to idle along the embankments and see the flowers growing in the coarse grass. He wanted to travel at walking pace so that he and the men could drop down from the high wagons and stroll beside the train, picking flowers, picking fruit, winding bindweed into garlands.
Someone kicked his foot. “You’re groaning, old man,” he said. “Keeping me awake.”
“Sorry.”
Stephen wanted the train to ride forever under the round sovereign moon across the pale landscape intersected with dark hedges and high etched trees and dotted with dark contented farmhouses. He wanted to sit forever gazing out of the window as the landscape loomed close and then slid by. He wanted never to arrive. He wanted never to arrive.
A few hours later and he was awakened by a dark raw rumble which sounded like thunder very low and very close. And he knew that he had been asleep and dreaming. And that they were at St. Omer station, and that his war had begun.
He awoke with a jerk and with that familiar falling feeling in his belly—terror. For a second he lay, his eyes raking the room from one corner to another, with no idea where he was. There had been so many rooms in his two and a half years. So many billets, so many little corners where he had slumped and slept, his exhaustion overwhelming his fear. He put his hand out and there was Lily, quiet and warm beside him.
Stephen sighed as his terror bled away from him. It was over. He need never dream of that quiet journey again. He would never again travel home on leave and then back to the Front thinking each time that this would surely be his last. This time he would surely die. This time, if nothing else, his sheer choking terror would block his throat and kill him.
He moved closer to Lily’s sleeping warmth. He need fear nothing, he told himself. The war was over. He would never make that journey again. No-one would ever make him go.
But it was no use. Stephen had no faith in the future. They broke his will when they sent him to the Front, and then again when they released him to go home and then again sent him back. He learned, in some deep and frightened place, that he could not stop them from sending him where they wished. They could send him to the trenches. They could send him forward into uncut barbed wire to face skilled machine gunners. Nothing he could do would stop them. He could not even say “no.” His face twisted, Stephen gathered Lily into his arms, put a firm hand over her mouth, and plunged himself without warning into her body, battering himself against her inert dryness, forcing himself inside her. Only when he reached release did he tear away from her and let her go. Only then could he sleep again. He slept without dreams.
• • •
“I don’t know about you, but I’d like to leave,” Stephen said baldly the next morning at breakfast.
>
Lily waited.
“It’s the noise, and everywhere so crowded. It’s not like it used to be, I’m sure. Before the war I can remember coming up to town and parking the car outside the theatre and just strolling in. It’s so rushed now, and crowded everywhere.”
Lily buttered a slice of toast.
“Even here—” Stephen broke off and looked around the dining room with dissatisfaction. “How long have we been here? Three days? Four? They don’t remember our name, they don’t give us the same table every time. I tell you, Lily, before the war we would have had a table reserved with flowers on it after the first meal, and a waiter who greeted us by name. It’s not like it used to be.”
An American tourist came into the dining room and a table of Americans yelled and hooted in greeting. Stephen scowled. “I’m not a spoil sport, I like a bit of fun like the rest of them. But I tell you, Lily, before the war people wouldn’t kick up larks before breakfast, not in a good hotel.”
“D’you want to go home?” Lily asked, as if it were no business of hers whether they went home early or stayed the whole week.
Stephen’s hand holding out his tea cup shook slightly so the china cup rattled. “Yes,” he said. “I want to see . . .”
He hesitated. Lily looked up, wondering what he would say.
“I want to see Coventry,” he said.
• • •
Coventry met them with the car at the town station. He loaded the bags on to the luggage rack of the Argyll. Lily got into the back seat and leaned against the cushions. The porter took a tip from Stephen, touched his cap and wheeled his barrow away. Coventry and Stephen did not greet each other with words. They exchanged one long unspeaking look, like lovers, parted for a prolonged painful absence.
“Everything all right at home?”
Coventry nodded, and then jerked his head to where Lily sat in the back of the Argyll. He raised an eyebrow.
“All right,” Stephen said. “London was dreary. Full of Yanks. They win Wimbledon, they win the Americas’ Cup and they think they own the place. Noisy. Not what it used to be.”
Coventry smiled gently and held open the door for Stephen. As Stephen got in he brushed slightly against Coventry’s shoulder and put his hand momentarily on Coventry’s hand.
Coventry looked at him in comfortable silence.
“Good to be home,” Stephen said.
16
MURIEL WAS WAITING FOR THEM IN THE HALL. At the sound of the car drawing up she threw the front door open herself and met them on the doorstep.
“How good to see you back! Lily! What an exquisite hat! I can’t wait to see the rest of your clothes. What a lovely jacket!”
She led them into the drawing room and they sat in their usual places.
“Nothing much has happened here at all,” Muriel said, pouring tea. “Your father seems a little better, Stephen. We have a new nurse, her name is Nurse Bells—just like the whisky! She seems to think that he is improving. She’s here now, I’ll introduce you later.”
Muriel nodded to the parlourmaid, who passed Lily a plate of sandwiches. Lily took one and left it on the side of her plate. Stephen took several and ate heartily.
Muriel talked easily of Portsmouth gossip: the increase in cyclists around the Canoe Lake, tomorrow’s baby show in Victoria Park and the news of her friends, while stealing covert glances at Stephen and Lily. Lily was pale and looked strained. Stephen had never looked better. In the four days he seemed to have filled out and tanned. His moustache seemed thicker, darker. His eyes were bright, his face shiny with well-being. He was like a groomed horse at the peak of fitness, Muriel thought. She nodded to the maid, who passed him more sandwiches. Stephen ate like a hungry boy on his first day home from boarding school.
Lily’s yellow hat made her face sallow. There were dark smudges of fatigue under her eyes and her smile was strained.
Honeymoon nerves, Muriel thought. She didn’t think Lily would have the spirit to stand up to Stephen but if they ever quarrelled his wife would find Stephen a hard man to challenge. Muriel remembered the fights between Stephen and Christopher when they were little boys. Christopher, two years older, was only slightly bigger and heavier. He would always win a scrap with Stephen and Muriel would hear his polite over-educated voice demanding: “D’you submit? D’you say pax?”
Stephen, grounded beneath his brother, would cry “Pax! Pax!” and Christopher would get up off him and turn away, thinking that the quarrel was fairly ended. Then Stephen would fling himself against his brother’s unsuspecting back and push his face into the rose bushes or, even more unfairly, wait until they were going to bed and push him down the stairs. Stephen could bide his time all day until he saw an opportunity for revenge.
Muriel did not envy his wife their natural conflicts. There would be nothing for Lily to do but to submit to Stephen’s will.
Muriel nodded to Browning the parlourmaid to refill the teapot. Lily’s new suit was charming and the hat—though hardly a hat at all, just a slice of straw and ribbon—was pretty. Stephen must have spent a large sum on his new bride, and this had to be a good sign, Muriel assured herself. She did not ask why they had come home early. There were so many unasked questions in the house already that Muriel was accustomed to discreet silence. Under the comfortable pretext that the young people needed their privacy, and that if Lily wished to confide in her, she would make the first move, Muriel let her son return early from his honeymoon with the girl he had insisted on marrying without demanding an explanation.
Besides, whatever had passed between them, Stephen had won. You only had to look at him to see that. Muriel was disinclined to know what battle had been fought, on what ground, and how badly Lily had been hurt. She told herself that she was showing commendable delicacy in not probing. In truth she rather feared this newly prosperous newly confident Stephen. She wanted to believe that his handsome veneer came from satisfied love. She did not want to hear anything from Lily that contradicted the picture of Stephen’s new happiness.
“Now I’ve a surprise for you,” she said when tea had finished. “I hope you like it. I have moved you two into the bedroom above your father’s. It’s a lovely room with the tower window that you like so much, Lily. I’ve had it redecorated as well!”
“That’s very good of you, Mother!” Stephen said.
“The little room opposite I thought you could have as a dressing room,” Muriel suggested. “And the other bedroom I thought we might convert to another bathroom. You could have your own suite of rooms up there.”
Mother and son said nothing, waiting for Lily to speak. “Thank you,” she said.
“That’s a jolly good idea, Mother,” Stephen said. “But I imagine it’ll be an awful lot of bother.”
“I’ve spoken to two plumbers and they both think they can do the majority of the work within a week. It shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Excellent,” Stephen said. “Let’s see it.”
The three of them went towards the stairs. Lily glanced at the letter rack in the hall. In it was one of Madge’s pale purple envelopes with Lily’s new name written boldly across it in purple ink. Lily started to reach for it.
“Do you want your post now?” Muriel hesitated.
“We’ll look at it later, when we come down,” Stephen decreed.
Lily obediently turned to the stairs and went up ahead of them. Stephen smiled a satisfied little smile at his mother and stood back for her.
They went past the sickroom on the first floor without stopping and up the stairs to the matching room above it. It had been Christopher’s room. When he had died Muriel had taken the advice of her friends and cleared the room at once. Too many women she knew had left the cricket bat in the wardrobe and the pictures of school football teams on the wall. When a dead son’s goods were sent home from France and unpacked on his cold bed his mother clung to the small collection of trivial things. A kind letter from the commanding officer, his kit bag. A bundle of letters in which
he lied about his fear and the censor blacked out whole sentences which he now would never explain. A book, a souvenir German bullet, some Belgian lace found in his pocket, perhaps bought to send home. A handful of francs. The mothers left with this boxload of rubbish found they could throw away nothing. It was all they had left of their sons. The school reports, the silver cup for rifle shooting, a couple of small-sized snaps of him at school, a drawing he had done when he was six. They kept everything, and the bedrooms of the missing boys became their shrines.
Muriel had cleared the room on the very day that the letter confirmed Christopher’s death. While the family doctor called in specialists to see her husband, Muriel boxed up all Christopher’s clothes, his outgrown school uniform, his school books, his reports, his letters home requesting money and cakes. She ordered one of the maids—they had three in those days—to take them all down to the garden and tell the gardener to burn them. A thin column of smoke went up from the little garden at the back of the house as if Muriel were burning up the last of her joy. As if everything that was normal and right about their life should be destroyed in one day on a pyre which burned from midday till dinner time. And when it was all gone a wind got up from the sea. When Muriel went out to see that the work had been done, even the ashes had been blown away and scattered. Christopher’s body was never found. He had been blown away, just like his things.
Since then it had not been Christopher’s room but the best spare bedroom. No-one had stayed in it. The house was too quiet and too unwelcoming for anyone but day visitors. Stephen had thought of moving into it when he came home out of uniform. But he was used to his smaller room which overlooked the back garden and the dark moving slab of sea which filled the tower windows disturbed him.
Muriel had made it into a pretty room, a feminine room in pale butter yellow and blue. The wallpaper was sprigged flowers, the curtains, a yellow and blue glazed chintz, were swagged back with wide ribbons. The bedcover and the cushions on the bed were decorated in matching fabric as were the window seat cushions. Lily went at once to the window. “Perfect,” she said. She smiled at Muriel and there was a glimpse of the old joyful Lily in her smile. “Divine,” she said. The floorboards were still bare and the bed was the only furniture in the room except a large dark wood wardrobe.