Home Sweet Home (24 page)

‘Is that so?'

Declan had a way of sounding amused that made her feel he knew she wasn't telling the truth.

He could also read expressions, or at least he could most certainly read hers. The last thing she wanted to do was to betray what she had done. Neither did she wish him to see how confused and despairing she was. It was Declan she had feelings for, but how to define those feelings: was he a friend? A lover? A father figure?

She felt so confused. Loving Declan the way she did was akin to hero worship. Sometimes he seemed far beyond her reach, a mature man not a boy – not like Ed. In his own way, Ed loved her. She knew that, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't feel the way about him as she felt about Declan.

Despite the age difference and the short time they'd known each other, it was Declan she wanted. Why, oh why, had she been so rash as to give in to Ed not once, but twice? There might have been a chance of Declan being the man she would spend the rest of her life with, but what if she did become pregnant? Oh, how she wished she hadn't given in last night.

Taking Frances by surprise, Declan placed two fingers beneath her chin, gently turning her to face him.

‘Take it from me, Frances. Ed is a nice guy, but you're both young. You've made the right decision. Don't marry him. Things will change between you once you start growing up. Marriages break up. You deserve somebody better.'

She shivered at the feel of his fingers on her chin: so warm, so firm. Their eyes locked together, neither wishing to break the hold in case the time wasn't right or something bad might happen if they discontinued.

‘I can understand Ed wanting to marry you. If I was his age, I'd want to marry you too.'

‘I don't think you're old,' she blurted out. ‘I'd marry you.'

For a moment, he said not a word, an unreadable look flashing into his eyes before he took a deep breath and it was gone. ‘Old enough. But I like what you say.'

He paused again, his eyes flickering as he studied her face. She loved it when he did that. It was as though he were touching her with his mind; impossible though it sounded, it felt real.

‘Have you ever been in love?' The question seemed to lodge in his eyes.

‘Well,' she said, ‘have you?' She met his direct look with her own.

Fleetingly, it seemed as though he might admit that he had. Just when she thought she was going to hear something interesting, he threw back his head and laughed. ‘Only a beautiful young woman with young men falling at her feet could ask a question like that.'

Frances frowned. ‘Am I beautiful?'

She wanted him to say that she was. If he did, she would never forget him saying it, purely because nobody else had ever told her so. Even Ed had only ever told her she was pretty.

His smile was slow. His eyes twinkled. ‘You know you are.'

She shook her head. ‘No, I don't. But perhaps I do now. You still haven't told me whether you've ever been in love.'

He shrugged. ‘I think you want to hear me say that I've never been in love until the moment I met you. If I did, it wouldn't be true.'

It was difficult not to let her true feelings flood over her face, so she turned away.

‘I can see you're disappointed in me,' he said, that languid smile still on his tanned face. ‘But that's the way I'm made. I speak the truth and if there's no truth to tell, I don't make it up.'

Frances looked down at her hands, feeling guilty she had not yet alighted from the Jeep. If she didn't hurry there would be no tea left to buy. Everything took so long nowadays.

‘I have to go.'

‘I think you should.'

There was something about his tone that made her want to see his expression, if only to confirm to herself that he wasn't making fun of her.

‘Goodbye, Captain O'Malley.'

He raised one eyebrow. ‘So formal?'

‘We've only just become friends.'

‘We might become much more. Who knows what the future may bring?'

His smile was sardonic. This was one of those times when he made her feel like a little girl.

‘I don't know anything about you. You could already be married for all I know.'

His smile widened and he laughed. ‘Remind me to tell you my life story some time. It includes the fact that I am very much a bachelor, though I quite like the thought of being married. Somebody warm lying beside me.' His honesty made her feel as though she were blushing from head to toe.

‘I may wait around to take you home, though only if you want me to.'

She nodded before alighting. ‘If you like.'

The queue for tea and sugar was long, just as she'd expected it to be. A hubbub of noise was going on around her, and yet she barely heard it. In her mind she was hearing Declan's voice and seeing those deep sea-green eyes. She couldn't believe he was merely a father figure to her. Although she could barely remember her father, she couldn't believe this feeling was the same as she'd felt for him. What she felt for Declan made her blush without warning. Dreaming of him in the middle of the night, she'd wake up tingling all over. He moved something in her, something that had never been moved before. So would he ever become something more to her? Her lover even?

With a pang of resolve, she promised herself that he would be. Wishing wasn't enough. Praying might be, though not in St Anne's or any of the other churches in and surrounding the village of Oldland Common.

Her thoughts were taken back to the magical time she'd spent in the Forest of Dean. The friends she'd made used to write prayers and place them into the trunks or between the roots of oak trees. She'd asked them why they did it. They'd told her the prayers were to the gods and goddesses of the woods.

‘The old gods,' said Merlyn, one of the girls she'd befriended there.

The turmoil she felt inside made her feel both exuberant and sick, completely different to how she felt about Ed.

Ed! He'd be very hurt indeed if he knew that she fell asleep at night dreaming of Declan and not of him. But there was no comparison between the two of them; one was a grown man who made her feel more special than she'd ever felt in her life. Ed was just a boy, and anyway they were finished.

The conversation the previous evening had centred round Charlie being in hospital. Presuming Frances's silence was due to her worrying about Charlie, nobody asked her awkward questions or intruded into her thoughts.

Bettina Hicks came round to give comfort and talk about life in general. She helped herself to a slice of carrot cake freshly made that morning. ‘With sugar in short supply, isn't it a good job carrots are so sweet?' she said after swallowing her first bite. ‘Moist too.'

Frances managed to agree, although she thought the cake sickly, and anyway, she was wondering about Declan O'Malley; how did he really feel about her? Was he serious or just toying with her infatuation?

‘How's that young man of yours?' Bettina asked.

The question took Frances by surprise. ‘I don't have a young man.'

She went back to hemming the leg of a new pair of pyjama trousers Ruby had run up from one of her father's old pyjama jackets.

‘Don't you? I must have been mistaken. What a shame. Never mind. No doubt it won't be long before you find yourself another sweetheart.'

‘I don't know that I want one. I'm quite happy by myself,' Frances returned tersely. She couldn't help feeling awkward beneath Bettina Hicks's steady gaze.

‘I'm not sure I believe you. Young people should enjoy themselves as often as they can. Best grab today in case tomorrow never comes. That's all we can do with life and more especially when there's a war going on. All we can do is pray.'

Frances thought of the times she'd been in church singing hymns and reciting the Lord's Prayer along with the rest of the congregation. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn't imagine the Christian god having much patience with something as trivial as a young girl's desire. He surely had more important things to worry about nowadays. Getting rid of Herr Hitler, the German Chancellor, had to be top priority.

Her ears pricked up when Ada Perkins was mentioned. Bettina Hicks was asking her about Miriam. ‘I understand she's run away.'

Frances confirmed that this was so. ‘Ada doesn't know where she's gone,' she added, glad of the change of subject matter.

Bettina shook her head. ‘Ada must be worried sick.'

‘I doubt it,' said Stan. ‘She's got a different philosophy to the rest of us. If somebody wants to go off and live their own life, then so be it. Every fledgling has to fly the nest sometime.'

Bettina turned her pale blue eyes on Frances. ‘So Ada's keeping well?'

‘Yes. She's fine.'

The conversation and attention turned away from her. Uncle Stan reported on his latest conversation with Mary. ‘Apparently something big is going down.'

Frances was no longer listening. Mention of Ada had opened a window in her mind.

At first she thought herself foolish to even think of doing what her friends over in the forest used to do when they wished for something in particular. By bedtime she had changed her mind.

Ruby did not come up to bed straight away, so Frances moved swiftly. Rummaging in the top drawer of the bow-fronted chest in which they kept just about everything, she found what she was looking for.

To her great relief, her old school exercise book had a plentiful supply of unused pages. She also had a very handsome fountain pen that she'd been given for Christmas, and there was a bottle of ink on the dressing table. A stool that fitted snugly underneath the dressing table was pulled out. The exercise book was opened at a blank page. The fountain pen was filled with ink from the bottle. She even had a piece of blotting paper just in case the pen dripped ink on to the polished surface.

With firm intent, she bent her head over the exercise book. Briefly she hesitated. Over in the Forest of Dean with her old friends, she'd written notes to the gods of the woods and hidden them in the hollows of old oak trees. Ada Perkins had also told her that the oak groves had been the temples of the old gods.

‘The druids were their priests,' she'd told her. Frances had seen the other kids push notes into the hollows of trees. Sometimes their prayers were answered. They were mostly things to do with their families: a mother giving birth to her next baby without dying, a father finding a job before he drank them all into the workhouse – not that such things existed any longer.

As she thought about what to write, she looked out of the window over the back yard. Ruby had seen Miriam Powell, the granddaughter of Ada Perkins, stuffing written prayers into the gaps between the bricks of the old outhouse.

She could see the outhouse now from her bedroom window, its grimy bricks, the paint peeling from the door. It held an old-fashioned toilet, no longer used since a quarter of the back bedroom had been turned into an indoor bathroom. She wrinkled her nose at the thought of it. Perhaps the gods of the forest had been affronted by the use of an outside privy instead of a tree. It couldn't be right to do that, especially seeing as it housed the old smelly toilet and a whole lot of insects and spiders. It had to be a tree, more specifically an oak tree, a sacred oak tree in a sacred grove.

Frances thought about it. She certainly would not be doing as Miriam had done. Her only problem was finding a sacred oak hereabouts. There were plenty of other kinds of trees and even oak trees, but not circled in a grove as they were in the Forest of Dean.

Frances turned away from the scene outside the window, the rows of vegetables, the fruit trees now in blossom and the outhouse where gardening tools were now kept and strings of onions and leeks hung from the ceiling to dry.

Bending low over the book she began to write.

Dear lady of the forest, please bless my cousin Charlie. He's not a first cousin, only a second cousin, but I love him very dearly. Please do your best.

She signed it ‘Frances Sweet' in a florid hand. She didn't usually try so hard to make her letters elaborate, but this was a special occasion demanding she take extra care.

Once the note was blotted, she folded it into four just as she'd seen the kids in the forest do. Now all she needed was an oak tree, and the only one she could think of was in the middle of a field up behind the abattoir. It wasn't a grove but it would have to do. She only hoped it had a nice hole in it where she could post her prayer. She would go there tomorrow.

Lying in her bed at Stratham House, Bettina tried counting sheep, but sleep eluded her. Was it her imagination or had she detected something different in Frances Sweet?

She sighed. She wasn't sure why the girl had said she had no sweetheart when Stan had told her about the American boy she was seeing. Frances wouldn't be the first girl to have fallen for a foreign soldier and would not be the last. What concerned her was that nobody else had noticed the change in her and nobody seemed to know about the American officer who picked her up from the bus stop. If they did, they were saying nothing. Of course, Ruby would say he was just a friend and so would Frances, for that matter. Still, it wasn't really any of her business.

Sighing, she turned over in bed, dragging one aching joint after another. In time she might mention it to Stan, but for now she would keep her mouth shut – just in case she was very much mistaken.

Walking along West Street was not the smooth, straightforward affair Frances had expected. She chastised herself for forgetting that there would be more people around today because the bus would be running into Kingswood. There was a queue waiting outside the pub where the bus stopped and a few others on their way there.

Everyone was taking advantage of the prospect of shopping for things they couldn't get in the village store, their ration books clutched tightly in their hands.