Delusion Page 3

  And all this time I was only thinking about myself, she realized with a pang of guilt. Worrying about my own feelings and future, when Hector was planning to go off to fight, maybe to die. Of course Hector wasn’t going to ask me to marry him.

  Mum, being a mum, knew exactly what she thought. “No! I absolutely forbid it. I understand how you feel, but you’re just barely of age, and there’s no point in being cannon fodder when you can leave the work to us. How on earth do you expect us to do our jobs if our children aren’t safe?”

  “They killed my brother,” Hector said between gritted teeth. “I know he’s not really, but we’ve been together for so long. Ever since that night at the orphanage when he took my hand, I’ve taken care of him.”

  Phil noticed that Hector’s nails were torn and bleeding, and she realized he must have been digging through masonry all night, looking for Stan.

  “I’ve been thinking about joining up for a long time. Now I’m sure,” he said with grim resolution. “Mum, Dad, I’m sorry, but you can’t talk me out of this, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth . . .” Dad said, and hugged his adopted son tightly.

  There was a terrible heavy silence. Then with a visible effort, Fee said with forced brightness, “I, for one, will love being in the countryside. We all have to fight the war in our own way. The only way I can fight it is by pretending it isn’t happening. By pretending as hard as I can that England is still the lovely tranquil land of bluebell woods and sheep fields it has always been. Hector, I’m awfully proud of you. I’m proud of you all.”

  She flung her head down on the kitchen table and burst into tears. When her golden red hair fell forward, Phil saw a small bloody handprint on the back of her sister’s neck. Fee might hate the war, but she’d been out there too amid the death and despair. That was the mark of some little child she’d comforted, one who had perhaps lost her house, her family, at the very least that childhood certainty that the world is a safe and loving place. Phil’s faint contempt for Fee’s pacifist nature vanished. Fee might not have shaken her furious fist at the German bombers, but that was only because she was too busy looking down to care for the smallest victims.

  Did Hector propose before he left?” Fee asked as they sat in the train, watching their beloved city recede in a cloud of fog and smoke.

  “Thank goodness, no. What with everything going on, I might have said yes without noticing.” Phil thought he’d been close, though, and might have, had she given him a little encouragement. He’d taken her hand in a very formal manner and promised he’d return to her. Not just return, but return to her, which by extrapolation sounded very like a commitment. Then he seemed to wait, but she’d said nothing remotely binding in return, just a stoic, maternal plea that he be safe.

  He laughed at that. “If I wanted to be safe, I’d be with you in Sussex.”

  Piqued, she said, “When the Germans come, they’ll probably parachute right into Weasel Rue. No doubt I’ll see more action than you will.”

  He’d kissed her then, promised to write every day, shouldered his duffel, and marched resolutely from the Hall of Delusion.

  Now her joking words came back to her.

  “Fee,” she said, still staring after London, “it’s only a matter of time before the Germans invade us. Do you think it’s possible they could come through our part of Sussex?” There was a strange gleam in her eye. “Not that I want them to, of course, and it stands to reason they’d come through far to the north of us. But they might, mightn’t they? If they do, we need to be ready. Even out here we can help win the war.”

  Fee turned deliberately away from distant London, now little more than a sooty smear in the sky, and looked out over the placid, rolling sheep-dotted hills. She knew her sister would have willingly stayed in London through every bomb Germany could lob at them, but she was frankly relieved to have all that horror out of sight. Not so much for her personal safety as to save her from the overwhelming, crushing pity she felt for her fellow man even under the best of circumstances. She still didn’t know how she’d gotten through last night. Adrenaline and some vital essence stolen from her stoic sister, no doubt. She knew she was a coward, but she could never, never go through that again. That little girl who’d lost everyone she loved had clung to her as if she’d never let go . . .

  “I think we’re doing our part simply by being here, Phil. We’re freeing up Mum and Dad and Geoff to do what they have to do. You know what Milton said.”

  Phil gave her a withering look. “Of course I don’t.” She loved her sister, but really, poetry was the limit.

  “‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

  “Bugger standing and waiting. What do you think a German with a bayonet would do to you if you stood and waited? What we need to do is find a way to help the local Home Guard.” She had an inspiration. “We can do the same thing Mum and Dad and Geoff are doing—right here in England!”

  “How?”

  “I don’t quite know yet, but I’ll talk with the Guard. Sussex is between the coast and London, so there’s bound to be a huge auxiliary force. Old men and invalids, to be sure, but still, they’ll know how to organize. Forget about being a Land Girl. Who wants to hoe mangelwurzels when they can be fighting!”

  “You can’t exactly box the Germans,” Fee pointed out.

  Geoff, a conscientious big brother, had tried to make sure his sisters’ virtues would remain intact for exactly as long as they wanted them to, and had done his best to teach both to box. Fee had only sighed at her gloves, but Phil had taken to it like a bantamweight Beau Jack and repaid Geoff for his pains by regularly trouncing him (but only, he always said, because he was too much of a gentleman to fight back).

  “If I can hang upside-down in a straitjacket with a hundred blokes trying to see up my skirt, I can do anything.”

  Then, as she often did when agitated, she took a pair of handcuffs from her purse, clamped her hands together behind her back, and practiced her escapes, much to the consternation of a trio of nuns who shared their compartment.

  Fee sighed. Her dreams and daydreams had always been full of wildflowers, butterflies, and long rambles over moors. All, of course, with an as-yet-unknown Someone at her side. She’d brought along her entire collection of Jane Austen, and if she could only manage to hurt herself rather badly and then be saved by a dashing romantic young lord, like her heroine Marianne Dashwood, life would be perfect. She was just enough of a realist to know this probably wouldn’t happen, but rereading Sense and Sensibility in a pastoral setting would be nearly as good. As long as she never, ever had to hear another bomb falling . . .

  A genial conductor told them theirs was the next stop, and the girls pressed their noses to the window for a look at their new home.

  “Oh!” Fee said with delight. “It’s out of Shakespeare, or Hardy!” She was literary, but not architectural, and knew only that the little village was picturesquely lovely. “And the yellow roses! How are they still blooming this late?” She wandered away from the station, abandoning her luggage. “Do you see the little dragons in the ironwork of the streetlights? Oh, I can almost forget . . .”

  Phil looked the village over with a critical eye. “Those roses should be dug up and potatoes planted in their place,” she said. “And do you see a single shelter? These lights are pretty,” she owned, “but they ought to be out by now.”

  “It’s still an hour until dusk, at least,” Fee said.

  “All the same, the air raid warden will want to know about it. Better safe than . . .” But sorry seemed too inadequate a word after the carnage she’d witnessed the night before, and she let her platitude drift away.

  It was such a small town that they were surprised to see more than fifty people debouch from the train, cheerful groups of women, whole families shepherding children. “Did the entire town go on vacation?” Phil asked. “There can’t be that many people in all of Bittersweet.”

  “This
way, please,” someone called out, though Phil and Fee couldn’t see who spoke. The crowd made its unhurried and disorganized way to a motor lorry and two open farm carts. When the masses scrambled in, the girls could see they were being directed by a small, sharp sparrow of a woman in a floral chintz dress and Wellingtons. The breeze blew her dress up a bit, and Fee nudged her sister. “Did you see? Bloomers!”

  “Don’t dilly-dally,” the woman chirped at the group. “Got to get the lot of you settled so you can be up with the sun. ‘A bushel before sunrise’ has always been my motto, and it’s served me well so far. Step lively now, the hops won’t wait.”

  “I’m ever so sorry,” Fee said, “but we’re looking for Weasel Rue Farm. We’re to stay with...oh, I can’t remember what her married name is, but she used to be a Miss Merriall.”

  The little woman cocked her head and peered at them with her very bright eyes. “You’ll be the theater girls. I must say you look it.” They weren’t sure what she meant by that but decided to take it for a compliment. “Weren’t there supposed to be four of you? I only agreed to take you because I thought there’d be a pair of boys to help with the hops and the apples.”

  “Hector joined the army,” Phil said, “and Stan...he...just last night . . .” She leaned into Fee and gathered enough strength to say stoically, “Stan died in the bombing.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” the woman said, though her eyes wandered over the people loaded into the wagons, and it was evident she wanted to get back to her own business as soon as possible. “I’m Mrs. Pippin, that’s Miss Merriall as was. No one troubled to tell me your names.”

  “I’m Phil,” she said. “Philomel, really, but who could stomach that.”

  “Quite,” Mrs. Pippin said.

  “And I’m Phoebe, but everyone calls me Fee. That’s with an F-e-e, not a P-h-o-e, because if you just wrote Phoe, who on earth would know how to say your name? They’d call me phooey.”

  “Have you got surnames?”

  “Of course. Albion.”

  “Good. I had a notion you might really be my sister’s children. I always feared the worst when our Rose ran off to London.” She gave them a very canny look. “The dear knows what goes on backstage.”

  (“She speaks as if backstage were a code name for a brothel,” Fee whispered to her sister later that night.)

  “Well, there’s bound to be one bad apple in the barrel, I always say,” Mrs. Pippin went on.

  “Oh, no, Miss Merriall isn’t a bad apple!” Fee insisted. “She’s our wardrobe mistress, and she can sew anything in about half an hour, and you can’t imagine how useful that is when your father decides at the last minute it would look better for a ballerina to be cut in half than a flamenco dancer.”

  All Mrs. Pippin said was “Mistress, humph! No truck with mistresses at Weasel Rue.”

  (“Can you imagine dear, plump, dowdy Miss Merriall being anyone’s mistress?” Phil asked when they were alone.

  Fee sighed and said doubtfully, “Perhaps there are some men who’d find her...comfortable.”)

  “Come along, girls,” Mrs. Pippin said. “The stationmaster will see your things are sent on. For now bundle into the cart, and I’ll drop you off at the farm before I unload this lot.” She gestured with absolute disdain to the chattering band in the back.

  They climbed up next to Mrs. Pippin and were off with a flick of the reins.

  “What a charming village,” Fee said, preparing to gush.

  “Half the drains are bad. The houses haven’t been updated since the Old Earl’s time.”

  An Old Earl implied a Young Earl, and Fee immediately had romantic designs on him. “Does he live very close by?” With petrol rationing, any possible love must be within a five-mile radius. Unless the Pippins had a spare bicycle, in which case Fee could stalk her prey as much as ten miles in clement weather.

  “The Old Earl’s been dead and gone these forty years and more. Died at Mafeking.”

  “His descendants then?”

  “Not a one. Don’t know as he had any children.”

  Fee frowned, then brightened, one sort of romance replacing another. “It must be a lovely estate, though. Who lives in it now?”

  “There is no estate. There was a castle, once, but it’s gone.”

  “Ruined, you mean?” Ruins were, if anything, more romantic than stately homes, particularly, she imagined, by foggy moonlight. Even if your only company was Jane Austen and dreams.

  “I mean gone, every brick. Weasel Rue is the largest house you’ll find for twenty miles.”

  While Fee wondered how a castle could simply vanish, and then, following her expertise, pondered how she’d go about making it vanish, Phil quizzed Mrs. Pippin about the local Home Guard.

  “Home Guard? What on earth do we have to guard? Here in Bittersweet there’s just hops and apples and sheep. We’re at the back end of everything. Mr. Hitler wouldn’t dream of coming here, and if a bomb fell accidentally, it would take one look at the place and turn around again.” She nickered to the horses to speed them along, her hands tight on the reins, her jaw set.

  (“She called him Mister,” Fee said to Phil when they curled up in bed to discuss the day. “Do you think she’s—”

  “Never. If Hitler came near her hops, she’d eat him alive. Don’t you remember what she said about German beer? ‘It tastes like piss from an asparagus-eating pig.’ Now that’s patriotism if I ever heard it.”)

  “There’s no war here,” Mrs. Pippin said at length. “The war is for them out there. Folks who stay in Bittersweet never have to worry about such blights as wars. Bittersweet’s safe.”

  Before long they turned down into a navel of land between gently rolling hills and got their first look at Weasel Rue.

  Chapter 3

  Look at it, sprawled like a sleeping dragon,” Fee said.

  It was an old golden stone building without a single pretense to any architectural style. Someone had built part of the house when they had money, and added another wing when they had more. Bits jutted out here and there when some feature of geography or habit made it easier to put a kitchen at odd angles rather than move the pigsty. It was a large house, or rather a long house, winding, as Fee said, in a serpentine fashion, and it was very much a farmhouse, with chickens and geese promenading on the grass and an omnipresent yet strangely pleasant scent of manure in the air.

  Phil shook her head. “Impossible to defend,” she said when Mrs. Pippin hopped down. “Why on earth didn’t they build it on a rise like anyone sensible?”

  “It’s nestled,” Fee said. “I like it. It feels safe and cozy.”

  “Lots of things feel safe that aren’t,” Phil said sharply. “The Hall of Delusion felt safe.”

  There were several flocks of sheep barricaded within the thorny hedgerows that divided the gentle hills. “From inside the house it must look like you’re in a boat being tossed on waves of sheep.”

  “Really, Fee, aren’t you taking it a bit far? It’s just a nice farmhouse.”

  Fee sighed. She never quite gave up trying to sway her prosaic sister.

  “You get yourselves settled. My son Algernon will show you to your room. I’ll be back in a jiff after I get this lot squared away.”

  “What are they all here for?” Phil finally managed to ask. “Are they evacuees?”

  “Heavens, no! Do you think I’d saddle myself with all these beastly Londoners for good? No, these are just hop pickers here for a few weeks. They come from the East End of London every year.”

  “And they all stay here?” Phil asked. The farmhouse was large, but not large enough for fifty or more people.

  “They stay in the hopper huts, and thank the lord my grandfather had sense enough to build them far away from Weasel Rue. Londoners are worse than tinkers, and though I forbid it, they seem to have a bottomless stash of gin. If they drank cider or beer like any civilized person, I wouldn’t mind, good wholesome beverages that they are, but I don’t trust them that drink hard
liquor. Now, scurry inside, and I’ll be back in an hour. There’s always one that balks at the earth closet and has to be told it’s that or a bucket and you better not dump it in the open. I’ve known sows cleaner than Londoners.”

  “My,” said Phil as she watched Mrs. Pippin lead the caravan away, “I never knew I was worse than a sow, and a sot to boot.”

  “She can’t stand London,” said a low-pitched voice from the farmhouse door, making them start. They turned and saw a young man, not much more than twenty, with tight-curling chestnut hair cut short and a tall, lithe body. “Can’t stand any place other than here, really. Are you the magician girls?”

  “We are,” Fee said, intensely interested by what little she could make out in the doorway’s shadow. “And we haven’t brought an ounce of gin, so we hope to win her over.”

  “You don’t stand a chance unless you’ve lived here all you life. She never really loves anyone unless they can claim five generations in Bittersweet. Lucky for her social life, not many people move away.”

  “Her sister did.”

  “Yes, and as far as I know they’ve never spoken or written since, until she asked if you two could stay for a while. It was like that with me, when I left. Not a letter, like I stopped existing.”

  “Oh, were you in London? Maybe you saw our show?” Fee always felt she had a better chance of captivating a man if he’d seen her in her body-hugging sequins. Appearances shouldn’t matter to true love, but she was quite sure they did anyway.

  “I was only there briefly, on my way to army training. But don’t stand out there with the dew about to fall. Get your things and come in. I’m Algernon.”

  There was a brief awkward pause as they waited for him to come and help them, but he just stood in the threshold, smiling, waiting, and at last they hefted their bags. He slipped into the house just before them, holding the door at least, and they trudged in, weary from the trip, and the terror and work of the night before. Inside, it was impossibly peaceful, dark, and warm, with a succession of fading prints and more recent photographs of monarchs lined up as if they were Mrs. Pippin’s own ancestors.