Home > The Silent Stars Go By(3)

The Silent Stars Go By(3)
Author: Sally Nicholls

 ‘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?’

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