The Silent Stars Go By Read online

  With a glance at Margot, her mother said, ‘He’ll soon open up. Shall we ring for tea?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Margot. ‘Whatever you’d rather.’

  She was determined not to show that she cared.

  Later

  After nursery tea, Margot was sent upstairs – as she always was as a child – to unpack and rest before it was time to dress for dinner. She was to sleep in her old bedroom, the one which she had once shared with Jocelyn and was now Jocelyn’s own. Once upon a time – was it really only three years ago? – her side of the room had been a mess of stockings, powder compacts, toast crumbs and illustrated weeklies. Now her bed stood neatly made and impersonal. Jocelyn’s possessions had colonised what had once been Margot’s territory; her books on the shelves, her clothes in the drawers, her old ragdolls still lounging on the windowsill next to Margot’s ballerina music-box and the pot-bellied piggy bank that said A PRESENT FROM SCARBOROUGH across its back. As always when she came home, Margot was oddly pleased to see that her influence was still present. There was only so much one could take to a cubicle in a boarding house. In the drawers of the dressing table, there were old hair-grips and scrapbooks, pressed flowers from dances, and half empty bottles of perfume. Old clothes still lay folded in her chest of drawers. There was even – somewhere – a lock of James’s hair, and his first little outfit, hidden away with old diaries and love letters from Harry, letters she couldn’t bear to take with her to Durham.

  Harry.

  She would have to reply to him. Otherwise she would turn up to church on Christmas Day and there he would be.

  She sat down on the bed. Jocelyn, who had come up behind her with the other case, said, ‘I think it’s going to be rather a queer Christmas this year. Our first real one since the War – with everyone here, I mean.’

  ‘Has Mummy been completely sick-making over it?’ Margot said. ‘Stephen home and all that.’

  Last Christmas Stephen had still been in Belgium, awaiting his discharge. James had been a cross, colicky child, who screamed when held by anyone except Mother or Doris. And there’d been the influenza, their father so busy, rushing around visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved. It had been a rather awful sort of Christmas all round.

  And then Cecil Carmichael at the Willows had put a bullet through his brain. Nobody knew exactly why.

  There’d still been food shortages, everything so expensive, none of the boys home yet, and a sort of dull, miserable exhaustion. It had been a bitterly cold Christmas too, five inches of snow and frozen pipes, which later burst. The boarding house was cold too, of course, but there was nothing quite like the cold of home. Vicarages, Margot’s mother said, had a particular sort of cold to them; big, draughty old rooms, high ceilings, too many bedrooms, threadbare carpets and never enough money to light the fires.

  This Christmas...

  ‘When’s Stephen coming?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Not till the twenty-third,’ Jocelyn said.

  ‘Does he still write to you? He doesn’t to me.’

  Jocelyn shook her head. ‘Mummy hears from him now and then, I think. Not as often as she’d like.’

  Margot didn’t reply. She was fond of her brother. She didn’t like to think that he was unhappy.

  Jocelyn, watching her, said, ‘Harry’s home for Christmas.’

  ‘I know,’ said Margot. ‘He wrote to me.’

  ‘Oh!’ Jocelyn’s surprise was comical. ‘Are you two writing? I thought...’

  ‘No,’ said Margot carefully. ‘His mother cabled me in February when they found out he was alive, and then she wrote me a long letter when he got back to England. And he wrote when he got out of hospital. But I didn’t write back. And then he sent me a letter saying he was going to be here for Christmas and shouldn’t we talk?’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t. I haven’t replied. I know! I know! But what could I say? How could I tell him about – about James, in a letter ? Harry nearly died. He had pneumonia and exhaustion and heaven knows what else. His mother was probably reading his letters to him.’

  ‘But after he got out...’

  Margot was quiet. Then, ‘I didn’t know how to,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear it if he... if...’

  ‘But James was... well, he’s as much Harry’s child as yours, isn’t he?’ said Jocelyn.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But nobody thinks like that, do they? The girl is the one whose honour is defiled or whatever rot they spout. The boy is just being a boy. Father’s practically a saint, and if even he doesn’t think like that, I don’t very well see how Harry is supposed to.’

  She stood up abruptly, went across to her suitcase and began pulling out clothes. ‘Gracious, this house is cold!’ she said. ‘I’m going to put on another petticoat.’

  Jocelyn did not reply.

  Father

  Father.

  Margot’s father was a small, mild-mannered man, his hair thinning, his eyes blinking behind wire-rimmed spectacles. He looked like the sort of clergyman who spent his days chasing butterflies or writing monographs on Roman coins. In fact he was one of the hardest workers Margot had ever met.

  His life was spent rushing from meeting to crisis to service to bedside. He was universally loved, both by the poor of his parish and the Churchy Ladies who called him the poor dear vicar, and worried about how tired he looked. He had been rather a distant figure in Margot’s early childhood – her two gods had been Nana and Mother – but as she grew older she’d begun to wonder if perhaps they might have been good friends, the two of them. Her father spoke a lot of sense sometimes. She had grown up not thinking very much about him, and now she was beginning to dimly feel what she had lost.

  Because she had lost it. The business with James had buckled her family bonds out of shape entirely. Her mother wasn’t just her mother any more, she was now also the mother of Margot’s son, and their every interaction was weighed down by that knowledge. And her father...

  She avoided her father whenever possible.

  In a house where all the laundry was sent out by her mother, it had been impossible to hide her condition for long. Margot’s knowledge of the facts of life had come from Stephen and a boy he’d brought home from school called Tucker, and nobody had mentioned that bleeding had anything to do with it. After two missed bleeds, it was her mother who had confronted her with the possibility of a baby. Her mother who had taken her to the doctor – not a local doctor, but a clinic in York. Her mother who had sat tight-lipped and furious through the consultation, then taken her back on the train and broken the news to Father.

  Margot’s memory of it was like vertigo, like a waking nightmare. Oh no oh no oh no oh no. Not this. Not now.

  The look of shock on her father’s face when he was told the news was one she would carry with her to the grave. He had not looked like that when War was declared. When baby Charlotte had died. It was as though he had been attacked. As though the very bedrock of his family was crumbling. He had stared at her, and then he had said, ‘My God, Margaret. How could you be so stupid?’

  ‘I –’ Margot had stammered. ‘I – I didn’t think—’

  ‘That much is evident,’ he’d said. He’d sat down, rubbed his hands over his face, and stared at her bleakly through his fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said, and he’d shook his head.

  ‘This is going to take some forgiving,’ her mother had said.

  Margot could not remember making a decision about the baby and what to do about it. She had known, of course, that this could happen, but she had always assumed that Harry would be there. She had imagined cabling him the news, and Harry rushing back to marry her. Harry would not let her face this alone.

  But Harry was missing in action. He’d been gone for a month now.

  He was almost certainly dead.

  ‘Perhaps we could both live here?’ she had suggested rather feebly, and h
er parents’ expressions had been a picture.

  ‘I really don’t think that would be best, dear,’ her mother had said. Then, ‘Don’t you want a life for yourself? A husband, a family.’

  And Margot had agreed that she did.

  Oddly, nobody had suggested giving the baby up. Her father had worked with several orphanages in his long career, and had said mildly, ‘Not an orphanage, I don’t think,’ and Margot had said, ‘No,’ in relief.

  It was only later, presumably after some private conversation between her parents, that Margot’s mother had told her what the arrangement was to be.

  It had all turned out to be surprisingly easy to manage. Nobody had been very shocked when she left school. Since the telegram about Harry and the realisation that she was in trouble, she had given up any pretence at school work. Her weeping fits and absences had been treated at first with sympathy – she wasn’t the first pupil to lose someone in the War – but her mother’s announcement that Margot was going to Durham for a secretarial course and a new start had been greeted with undisguised relief.

  Nor had anyone raised any questions when her mother made it discreetly known that she was expecting again and going to a maternity home for the last three months of her confinement. Her mother was in her forties after all, exhausted with the running of the household, and after what had happened with Charlotte... No, nobody was very surprised.

  With the help of her stays – thank Heaven for corsetry – Margot had kept her condition hidden until the beginning of the summer hols. Then they had left – her mother to stay with an aunt, and she to the mother and baby home with other similar unfortunates.

  She could not remember being asked her permission. She supposed she could have refused, but then what would have been the alternative? The idea of supporting herself and a baby, alone, at seventeen, was impossible.

  Her overwhelming feelings had been panic and shame, and the desperate, miserable sense of a nightmare from which she could not wake.

  But somehow her father’s reaction had been one of the worst memories of all. After that, she had avoided the vicar when she could and on occasions when they were in the same room, she spoke to him as little as possible. Her father was famous throughout the parish as a good Christian man. He forgave drunks and tramps and fallen women and the men who tried to steal the lead from the church roof.

  But he couldn’t forgive her.

  The Impossibility of Writing a Simple Letter

  The Vicarage

  Church Lane

  Thwaite

  North Yorkshire

  19th December 1919

  Dear Harry,

  Thank you for your letter. I am sorry I did not write before. I did not know what to say.

  Margot stared at this for a while. Even to herself it looked feeble. She screwed it up and threw it into the waste-paper basket. Then she dipped her pen into the inkpot, and started again.

  Dear Harry,

  I would be very pleased to see you when you are home for Christmas. I was so pleased when I found out you weren’t dead.

  Now she sounded like an aunt congratulating him on passing the School Certificate. It didn’t convey at all the mess she’d been in when the cable had arrived. And two pleaseds was poor style.

  She screwed up the letter and hurled it into the basket. Then she dipped her nib into the inkpot again.

  Dear Harry,

  She stopped. What did she want to say to him exactly? If she couldn’t be honest...

  She would have to say something.

  I am so sorry. I have behaved unforgivably. I cannot tell you why in a letter.

  I would be very glad to see you.

  Was glad too indifferent? She remembered the love letters she had written to him as a sixteen-year-old, and winced.

  Please let me know when would be convenient.

  Now she sounded as though she were arranging a visit from the sweep. But what else could she say? She couldn’t gush.

  She stared at the letter, then dipped her pen slowly in the inkpot for the last time.

  Yours

  Yours what?

  Yours,

  Margot.

  There.

  Harry

  Harry Singer had arrived in Margot’s life with an explosion when she was fifteen years old.

  His mother had moved to the village with her children at the start of the summer – an exciting event at the best of times. His father was a general practitioner who had been forced out of retirement by the War and sent to a military hospital. The family home had been shut up and Harry’s mother had moved the family to Thwaite.

  Harry was a long, rangy boy in his late teens, with dark, floppy hair and a perpetual sense that he was about to grow out of whatever clothes you put him in. He wasn’t exactly handsome, though he certainly wasn’t ugly either. Nice-looking, her mother said, and that was perhaps closer to it. He had an attractive face. He was someone you could sit next to and be sure of having a good time. Someone who would talk about books, and make your little sister a daisy-chain, and sub you an ice cream, and even talk to the most awful of Father’s Churchy Ladies and look like he was enjoying himself. There was something about him... a confidence. A happiness. He was happy, in himself and in his place in the world. To Margot, who knew very few young men beyond Stephen’s awkward schoolfriends and the boys from church, this was immediately appealing. Happiness. What a gift.

  This was 1916, and the ranks of eligible young men were thinning. This was not so much down to the machine-gun as to the recruiting sergeant: anyone vaguely eligible over the age of eighteen had disappeared into a world of army camps and letters from the Front.

  It had been love at first sight.

  She’d been standing just inside the church door, helping her mother hand out the hymn books. And the new family had walked through the door.

  Harry’s mother, dressed in fox-fur and an expression of tight-lipped anxiety. His sister Mabel, a gangly fourteen-year-old in a hideous magenta coat. Pricilla – Prissy – a little thing of twelve, all in pale peach. And then...

  Harry. Her Harry.

  She remembered the easy expression on his face as he’d looked round the church. How he’d smiled, and how her friend Mary beside her had said “Oh!” so comically. And then – oh Hallelujah! – he’d looked up.

  And seen her.

  She remembered the almost comical jolt as he looked at her. It was a physical reaction – like the clown at the circus when he turns and sees the mess his fellows have made of the floor. It made her want to laugh out loud with happiness. That was how she remembered him. A simple bringer of joy.

  Her father was shaking his mother’s hand. The Churchy Ladies were twittering excitedly. Harry slipped behind Prissy and came up to her.

  ‘Hullo,’ she’d said, idiotically.

  And he’d said, ‘Hullo.’

  And they’d both started to laugh.

  A Morning Walk

  How strange to be back home! There were lamb chops and tapioca pudding for dinner. Afterwards, they all went and sat in the drawing room. Jocelyn curled herself up on the sofa by the fire with her knitting, and their mother sat beside her, writing Christmas cards and sighing, ‘Goodness, wouldn’t I like to strangle whoever invented Christmas cards! They mustn’t have been a vicar’s wife, whoever they were.’

  Ruth and Ernest, thrilled to be together again after so long, sprawled themselves out on the hearthrug, whispering secrets and giggling.

  James was brought down for half an hour after dinner, dressed in a grey romper suit and his nicest green jersey. He cried ‘Mummy!’ in delight when he saw Mother, and ran across to her. She lifted him onto her knee and he buried his face into her neck with obvious pleasure.

  Father said, ‘Now then, old man,’ and James allowed himself to be lifted up and tipped upside down, just as they all had as children.

  ‘Have you been a good boy for Doris?’ Father asked, and he
said, ‘Good boy! Good boy!’

  Father turned him upright and kissed him. James laughed out loud in delight.

  He stayed with their parents for a good ten minutes, watching Ernest and Margot with wary eyes. Margot tried not to show that she minded, and after a little persuasion, he allowed her to read him The Tale of Two Bad Mice and Ernest to demonstrate his new yo-yo tricks. It was like this every time she saw him after an absence, Margot reminded herself. He would soon forget his shyness and they’d be friends again. But it didn’t make it any easier.

  Her bedroom was icy and her dreams were restless, full of Harry Singer telling her she was a coward and a traitor and an unnatural mother, and James crying because he didn’t want to be left with her. It was late when she woke, she could tell by the lightness of the room. Jocelyn was still sleeping in the other bed. From where she lay, she could hear Ruth and Ernest squabbling on the stairs, James shouting about something in the day nursery and Edith, the cook-general, singing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ as she mopped the hall.

  Breakfast was still laid out in the dining room. Margot helped herself to a cup of cold tea and a plate of kedgeree and ate it with her father’s newspaper crossword for company. She was rather good at crosswords. People thought if you were pretty that meant you weren’t clever. People always thought of plain-looking Jocelyn as the ‘clever one’ and Margot as the ‘pretty one’ (or the ‘trying one’ – so difficult for the dear vicar). But Margot had always been third or fourth in her form, which was about where Jocelyn had usually ended up.

  Breakfast over, she wandered off in search of her mother. She wasn’t in the drawing room, or – apparently – the kitchen. Had she gone out? No, there she was, in the garden, cleaning out the henhouse.

  They had started keeping chickens during the War, like everyone else. Margot had been fourteen when war broke out. In those days, they’d a cook, a maid, Nana of course, and a man who came once a week to look after the garden. Now there was just Doris and Edith. Every time Margot saw her mother, she looked busier, more tired, and sort of worn-thin and limp-raggish. Today she was kneeling on the grass, wearing a coat that must be ten years old at least, mucking out the nest box. It was rather disconcerting.