Delusion (3 page)

“Where’s Stan?” Phil shouted. The shriek and boom of the bombs was muffled now. Even the end of the world couldn’t last forever.

“He was outside during the performance,” Fee said, her eyes widening. “You know how he hates watching the shows.”

Almost before Fee had finished, Phil was dashing past her family and up the stairs. Fee was right: though Stan enjoyed quiet training, he could never stand to watch the magic onstage before an audience. No one knew quite why, but when the show started, he would either wait outside the theater, letting his crystal ball run like a pet over his body, or more likely, take a walk down to the nearby Thames.

Phil opened the stage door and entered the disappearing world.

The Luftwaffe didn’t bother using flashing strobes where a blazing holocaust of incendiary bombs would do. They created terror not with chill breezes and subtle sound effects but with craters and corpses, screaming and explosions. And they removed the world Phil knew not with trickery and illusion but with the brute force of physics, leveling building after building, reducing the world inexorably to atoms.

She could hear bombs falling somewhere far away, but for the moment there were no planes overhead. The theater had been spared, but the dress store three buildings away had suffered a direct hit and was utterly gone. The café beside it was rubble, and the bookstore next door was still standing but with one wall blown off and the roof crumbling. Down the road was a deep pit with a charred bus dangling on its lip, and the entire row of buildings across the street was on fire. Farther away she could see masonry skeletons of buildings that had been gutted by the concussive force.

“Stan!” she screamed, but everyone was screaming for someone.

Geoff came up behind her. “Phil, don’t be a fool. There might be more bombers on the way.”

“Stan was out here. He always walked by the candy store.” It too was engulfed, exuding a sickening burnt-sugar smell. “It’s gone. He’s gone!”

She staggered into the chaos, to tear through rubble looking for Stan, to weep helpless tears and curse the Germans when a second wave of bombers came in after nightfall, following the trail of fire across London they’d blazed earlier.

All around London, millions of citizens were rallying. Their fear fled quickly, replaced by anger and then at last by something far more useful: grim, stubborn determination, a rocklike resolution to endure.

Soon Phil’s family joined her on their devastated street, and the Albions began to account for the fallen and treat the survivors. Fee found Phil a few hours later with rills of tear tracks running down her sooty face, sitting on a curb, exhausted with work and weeping.

“I can’t find Stan anywhere,” she said as Fee collapsed beside her. She sniffed, then sneezed from the mortar dust hanging in the air. “He’s gone, Fee. Our little brother is gone.”

When they dragged themselves, wild-eyed and shell-shocked, in for breakfast at noon, Dad and Mum told the girls they were being sent to the countryside, someplace nice and safe.

“Not bloody likely!” Phil replied. “I’m not running away.”

She had a barrage of further objections ready, but before she could lob a single volley, her parents revealed their own astounding news.

“We meant to tell you last night anyway,” Dad said. “Hush, that’s only part of it. It’s been in the works for ages and was going to be our big surprise after your show.” He bowed his head. He’d been so proud that the Albions had been chosen for such a great—if dangerous—honor, but there could be no celebration now that little Stan was gone. Still, it made what he had planned all the more imperative. “We’re joining the army,” he said.

“What, the Home Guard?” Phil asked. Popularly known as Dad’s Army, it was mostly made up of men too old to go to the front. They trained as best they could with limited support and hardly any weaponry against the day Germans would land on English soil.

“Pah! I mean the real army, a special division—but hush!” He looked around with staged drama. “It is top secret! Winnie—Mr. Churchill, that is—was most insistent that no one outside of the squad know of its existence. But of course I except fellow Albions, and Albions by association.” He nodded to Hector. “We are accustomed to keeping secrets.”

Phil was so used to her father overacting that she didn’t take him very seriously, until he said, “We are joining the Magic Squad.”

He leaned precariously on the back two legs of his chair, arms folded, and waited.

“You mean, to entertain the troops?” Phil asked dubiously.

“We mean nothing of the sort,” said much more practical Mum. “It is a unit comprised of illusionists and stage technicians and painters and engineers whose job will be to deceive the Germans.”

“And the Italians, and the Japs, and whoever else dares to threaten dear old England,” Geoff said, jumping to his feet. “Any one of us can make a building disappear with a few tricks of light. Just think bigger. Imagine making a whole railroad disappear when the bombers come in! Or creating a false battalion of tanks to divert the panzers! Or those tricks we do with liquid nitrogen—we could make an entire town believe it was under a gas attack. Just think what trickery and illusions could do to help win this war!”

Until that moment, Phil had been able to see nothing beyond mangled bodies, spilled blood by inferno’s light, collapsed apartments where families were trapped, crushed, maybe still alive, for a while. Most of all, she saw a small empty space where Stan was supposed to be. And against all that, her own paltry efforts, the pull of her small muscles, the insignificance of her comfort. Now, suddenly, she saw how she could use her own unique skills to make a difference. How clever of the army to see how the Albions could be put to use. Above all else, Phil needed to be useful. She could see it now—how to turn a destroyer into a fleet of innocent fishing ships, how to hide an entire canal. If she could create illusions onstage, she could do them in the theater of war!

“When do we start?” she asked eagerly.

“
You
start for a farmhouse in Sussex by the next train,” Dad said. “We head for parts unknown shortly thereafter.” Oh, how he wished he had implemented the plan just one day sooner!

What followed was an epic battle that Phil fought valiantly, though she knew she was defeated from the outset.

She’d been allowed almost absolute freedom in her seventeen years; she didn’t see why now all of a sudden her parents got protective. If she could stay out until midnight while a Shakespearean roué friend of the family introduced her to Tom Collins, why couldn’t she parachute into France and dazzle the Germans with her illusions?

Her parents returned a flat no.

“The Auxiliary Territorial Services then,” Phil insisted. If she couldn’t join her parents and brother, at least she could join the armed forces in some capacity. She simply had to do something useful in this war.

“You’re too young.”

“I’ll stay in London and keep volunteering. Or I’ll work in a munitions factory. Anything! It isn’t fair that you three get to save England while Fee and I get shipped to some comfy country retreat.”

“Oh, I daresay it won’t be all that comfy,” Mum said.

Phil’s eyes lit up. “Oh Mum, do you mean the Land Army! It won’t be fighting Germans, quite, but if I could be a Land Girl, then at least I’ll free up some fellow to go and fight them for me.” She didn’t know a thing about plows or cows but had seen the posters featuring staunch, hardy girls in clingy khaki jodhpurs and even clingier forest-green sweaters.

“You can’t be a Land Girl at seventeen, Phil,” Ma said gently. “You’re still a child. You have to be kept safe.”

“But—”

“You’re
my
child,” Mum said. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”

“What about you, Mum?” Fee asked. “What are we going to do if anything happens to you?”

“Nothing will happen to any of us,” she said with that facility for lying that all parents learn once their children develop the power of speech. “But our country is in danger, and we must go where we are most needed.”

“Precisely, which is why I should be allowed—”

“Enough!” Dad said brusquely. “Miss Merriall was kind enough to arrange for lodging for the four of you...I mean three . . .” There was a terrible moment of silence, then Dad found the strength to go on. “It’s at her sister’s farm, a place called Weasel Rue.”

He unfolded a worn map and searched Sussex. “The town’s called Bittersweet. Apples and hops, farm country. Where is the ruddy thing?” His finger wandered over the map, to no avail. “Well, it’s not on the map, but Miss Merriall assures us it’s there. You’ll be expected to work a bit, no doubt, but it is a well-to-do establishment, and you’ll be safe there.”

Safety was exactly what Phil did not want. She wanted privation and hardship, to feel like she was giving something of herself for England.

“If it’s all the same to you,” she sniffed, “I’m going to pretend to be a Land Girl.”

She was brought out of her own sulky egoism by Hector’s ragged voice. “I’m joining up, too.”

Dad sighed. “I understand how you feel, Hector, but you’re simply too young.”

“I’ve been considering it for a long time, ever since I turned eighteen. Last night cinched it.”

Phil looked at Hector in amazement. Until that moment she’d always thought of him as a boy, although he was a year her senior. Now, miraculously, he was a man, full-fledged, and she did not know whether to be proud of him or tell him he was a young fool.

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.