Home > The Silent Stars Go By(4)

The Silent Stars Go By(4)
Author: Sally Nicholls

 ‘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 her 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.

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