Fallen Skies. Philippa Gregory

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      ‘Lots of girls,’ Stephen observed neutrally.

      Muriel smiled at him serenely. ‘There are lots of girls. And they don’t all dance in the chorus at the Palais. You should meet some of them.’

      Stephen raised an eyebrow. ‘Has David been gossiping?’ he asked.

      Muriel’s smile remained bright. ‘Never you mind. My staff work has always been excellent. I shall expect you home at half past four.’

      Stephen finished his cup of tea and stood up, tossing the linen napkin down beside his breakfast plate. ‘I shall report for duty, as required,’ he said. ‘Is Father awake?’

      At Muriel’s nod he left the room and went up the stairs to the master bedroom. The old man was having his breakfast. The nurse was spoon-feeding him boiled egg. At every spoonful she gently wiped the twisted side of his face where the runny yolk spilled out and ran down his chin. Stephen looked without emotion at the wreck of what had once been his father. ‘I’m off to work,’ he said clearly.

      The nurse rose and went to take the breakfast tray away.

      ‘Don’t bother, this is just a flying visit.’ He went closer to the bed and leaned towards his father. The grave eyes stared at him. ‘Business is good,’ Stephen said. ‘I’m interviewing for a new clerk today, an extra one. There’s a lot of buying and selling of houses going on, plenty of conveyancing work. Endless divorce work.’

      One dark eye blinked like a roguish wink.

      ‘I’ll give them your best,’ Stephen said. ‘They ask after you every day. I always tell them you’re as well as can be expected.’ He turned to the nurse. ‘That’s what you’re supposed to say – isn’t it? “As well as can be expected”? Or do you say “doing nicely”?’

      The nurse smiled. ‘He’s doing very nicely,’ she said. ‘Very nicely indeed, aren’t you, Mr Winters?’

      ‘That’s good,’ Stephen said with a cold smile. ‘I’ll remember to tell them that he’s doing nicely. I’ll tell them that he’s lying there like a corpse with his breakfast running down his face and doing nicely.’ He left the room and went downstairs.

      Coventry was waiting at the foot of the stairs with his peaked chauffeur’s hat under his arm.

      ‘To the office then,’ Stephen said. ‘And then come back and take Mrs Winters to the hairdresser for eleven.’

      Coventry nodded, opened the front door and followed Stephen out down the steps.

      ‘If she were here with me I don’t think I’d be so damn cruel,’ Stephen said thoughtfully as he got into the back of the car and Coventry walked around to the driver’s door. ‘If she were here with me I wouldn’t feel so bloody. When I’m with her I feel like it’s all over. I feel it’s finished at last. Sometimes I even feel as if we might have won.’

      He broke off as Coventry slammed the door and started the car. ‘It would be fun to send back the car for her to go to the hairdressers,’ he said. A smile lit up his face and made him seem boyish for a moment. He could not think of any other reason for a woman wanting a car than to go to the hairdressers. ‘It would be fun to see her riding around in it on her own,’ he said. ‘Lily in the back of my car with some decent clothes and a ring on her finger, going to the hairdressers. That would be a sight to see!’

      Stephen’s working day was slow and tedious. He had his father’s office – a tacit acknowledgement that his father would never come back to work. His father’s partner in the firm, John Pascoe, had the office opposite. He was an elderly man, nearing retirement. He would have been replaced by his son Jim three years ago, but Jim had gone over the top at Loos in 1915 and run into that acrid gaseous mist and never come back. After months of delay and false hopes and bureaucratic muddles over Paskoe or Pascoe or Paske the War Office had regretfully decided that Jim Pascoe would never sit behind his father’s desk. John Pascoe had grown more grey and stooped since Jim had been missing. He once had the bad form to ask Stephen if it was not – really now – not too bad out there. ‘The conchies now, and the pacifists, they make it out as seven sorts of hell. But it wasn’t like that really – was it?’

      Stephen had looked at him with silent hatred. But the public school, officer code of never complaining, never telling tales, kept him dumb.

      ‘Jim wouldn’t have suffered,’ Mr Pascoe asserted. ‘In an attack you scarcely know what’s going on, do you? The excitement of it? And everything?’

      Stephen thought of the first day at Loos when the British poisonous gas had been fired into a clear beautiful autumn morning and drifted slowly slowly back on the wind, like the veil of a whorish bride, to sink into the British trenches and blind and choke the soldiers who were waiting for the order to run forward into barbed wire, which was still perfectly intact, towards guns, which were still expertly manned. Everyone had known that the weather was wrong for the attack, that the wind would blow the gas back towards the British. Everyone had known that it was morally wrong to use gas, that gas was banned from warfare. Everyone knew that the attack would fail and that men would die for nothing. But the HQ staff let it go ahead because they wanted to see the gas, and because the chain of command was so slow and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to cancel an advance even though it was bound to fail. A thousand deaths here or there made little difference – and anyway, that is the nature of war.

      Stephen started to say that Jim died a hero. That he would not have suffered. That when you run forward, stumbling through the churned earth towards the bright flashes of cracking fire with the shells whining above you and the sudden earth-shaking crump of them landing near you, then you go joyfully: for your country, for freedom, for your God. But his stammer choked on the lies and all he could do was to shake his head, shake his head like a broken doll and say: ‘He d … he d … he d …’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ John Pascoe had said quickly. ‘I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

      They never spoke of the war again.

      ‘Busy day?’ Pascoe asked now, opening his door at Stephen’s footstep on the stairs. The office was a twisted old building in Old Portsmouth, the most ancient part of the town. The streets were cobbled, they glowed an eerie shadowy blue from the gas lighting at night. The office floors went up and down and there were little turns and extra stairs in every corridor. It was not an efficient building but it suited the firm’s Dickensian style.

      ‘Not very busy,’ Stephen said. ‘Anything I can do for you?’

      John shook his head. ‘I’ve got a paternity suit you might like to look at,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve got a good case. She’s a respectable girl, and the man sounds a bit of a cad.’

      ‘All right,’ Stephen said. ‘Shove the file over later on.’

      He worked on letters all the morning, dictating replies to his clerk. They would be typed and posted in the afternoon. The clerk had only one arm. Stephen kept his eyes turned away from the pinned sleeve. The man’s job had been done by girls while he was away at the Front, but Stephen had insisted that men take the jobs when they returned, though they were not paid at the pre-war rate. Stephen kept the cheaper women’s wages and gave jobs back to men. He did not like women in the office. He did not like their high frivolous voices answering the telephone. He thought it unsuitable that a spinster should read the СКАЧАТЬ