Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 (28 page)

‘Well done! I say, you have cottoned on very quickly. I don't suppose you spent much time with that ghastly husband of yours rolling round in fits of glee, eh? Bet not. Fascists do take themselves so
very
seriously, don't they now? Added to which, the female beauties of the same inclination are too damn' busy looking after their faces to crease 'em up in smiles et cetera. So besides developing a look as if one has this most ghastly smell
sous le nez
you will have to learn to grow an iron face as well. Not a smile must pass the lips, let alone a laugh be heard. All helps with the disdain. The Colonel tells me you didn't have much to do with the other lot, that one was rushed away to one's wing whenever it was time for them to roll out the old Swastika. All helps, doncher know, if they can't remember who the hell the beast was married to – not that they'll recognise you when you're done here. No, once
you are done here, the horrid little housepainter will be extending a personal invitation to you to join him at one of his ever-so-lovely rallies, that I promise you.'

Cissie smiled, stubbed out her now finished cigarette and immediately lit up a fresh one, selected from an expensive-looking gold case.

‘Does one know what one's letting oneself in for?' she enquired, staring at Poppy over the flame of her lighter as she lit her smoke. ‘One does know this ain't all fun and games. One's going to be mixing with a particularly nasty set, and not just mixing with them – one's going to be living amongst them. One's going to have to think like 'em, talk like 'em, and I'm sorry to say behave like 'em too. No going back, doncher know. These people worship Mr Hitty, the horrid little housepainter. Just as they worship power. It's their aphrodisiac, d'you see? They want to kill the weak, those who disagree with them, and those whom they consider not ethnically pure. Everyone is to be pure, blond, and Teutonic, preferably – and this includes everyone living in this poor old country of ours, so I'm for the high jump, and that is certain. So one's not playin' games here, doncher know. This is serious stuff.'

‘I know,' Poppy had replied. ‘I'm well aware – but thank you all the same. I may not know exactly what I'm letting myself in for, but I know enough.'

‘Course you do. Jack will have given you a rundown. Good at that, the Colonel. One of the best in the game. Not a bad picker, either.'

Again Cissie had regarded Poppy over the end
of her cigarette holder, this time with visible approval.

‘First things first,' she had then said. ‘If we're burying Poppy Tetherington we have to give you a whole new background. From now on you're to be Miss Diona de Donnet. Norman family doncher know. Came over with William the Conk – family stayed on in Dorset where they got given a damn' great chunk of land – and so on. It's all in here. Read, learn, inwardly digest, then burn it.'

Cissie had handed Poppy a file, which contained everything she would need to know about her new persona.

‘One last thing, my dear,' Cissie had enquired as Poppy began to look through its pages. ‘One last thing before we get down to work. Why you doin' this? You doin' this for you? Or our country? For your parents? For whom? Because there's always someone one's doing it for.'

‘I know I'm not doing it for me, Miss Lavington, no. At least I don't think so.'

‘Good, because it won't work, you know. If one's doin' it to get back at someone. A husband say. However beastly a chap.'

‘And I'm not doing it to get back at my husband. Who as it happens was a very beastly chap.'

‘So why you doin' it then?'

Poppy thought for a moment.

‘I think I'm doing it, Miss Lavington, because it has to be done.'

Madame Moisewitch, Poppy's next teacher, had not been so easy to win over. A diminutive, dark-haired woman with a tightly corseted rounded
figure, her natural demeanour was one of aggression. She seemed to be waiting to pounce on anyone or anything that crossed her path, and this stance was made all the more apparent since it emanated from a pair of cat-like green eyes. Otherwise Madame's features would have been unremarkable until you noticed her hands and feet, which were most beautifully elegant.

‘Young woman,' Madame had said, taking a round-the-houses tour of her new pupil, whom she now looked up and down as if she were a horse trainer inspecting a yearling with four bad legs. ‘I fear you are to be my first failure. The way your head pokes forward – no good. The way you keep staring at your feet. The way your feet splay. Have you never been to ballet class? Is this what it is?'

‘Sorry, Madame,' Poppy had replied. ‘But no. No, I never attended ballet class, only ballroom dancing.'

Madame snorted lightly.

‘Ballroom,' she said, as if it was a swear word. ‘Diaghilev was not the choreographer of ballroom dancing. Nijinsky did not dance ballroom dancing. The Russian Ballet did not come to this country and change everything with a display of
ballroom dancing
.'

‘I am so sorry, madame, I did not mean to upset you. I was just trying to demonstrate to you how very ignorant—'

‘My dear,' Madame Moisewitch said, interrupting impatiently. ‘There is very little point in being sorry, young lady. The damage has been done. And well and truly so. So what is it that happened to you? You fell downstairs, perhaps.' Madame
had been round behind Poppy at this moment, which disconcerted her even more. ‘You fell out of a tree, fell off your pony, missed the chair or some such. You certainly must have done something like this.'

‘I fell down the nursery stairs.'

‘Good. I see. That explains this perfectly ghastly posture. Had God intended us to slouch he would have given us bows for backbones, instead of the spine. Straighten up. You will never impress if you look as if you have been humping coal bags on your back. Your weight is on your left foot entirely. Your back is round. Your head sticks out on its neck. We shall have to proceed at once to the
barre
where we shall start exercises. Please take these ballet shoes and wear them. We must start at once. I do not want you to be my first failure. But unless there is a large miracle, it seems this is what you are destined to become. My very
first
failure.'

Oddly enough, the lessons with Madame were the most difficult part of Poppy's transformation. She had never considered herself to be the most graceful of creatures, but conversely nor had she seen herself as the clumsy, lumbering and gauche giraffe that Madame seemed to see her as. She was duly humbled, and the lessons began.

Naturally Poppy could not help wondering why it was completely necessary to start to train as a classical ballet dancer when she had understood that her future occupation as an agent was destined to be one of infiltration – until the day she realised she had actually, physically, changed.

It was early one afternoon, as she dressed before walking back across the room containing the
dreaded
barre
with its wall of mirrors, that Poppy caught sight of herself, and stopped. Never one to stand and admire her own image, none the less she could not help but be arrested by what she saw. In order to check that her eyes were not deceiving her, she walked slowly on while never taking her eyes from her mirrored image.

Gone was the old Poppy, the young woman with the terrible posture and the untutored walk, and in her place was the person she was groomed to become – Diona de Donnet – upright, poised, graceful and above all disdainful. She also appeared to have grown a good two or three inches, having worked non stop on what Cissie insisted on calling her
internals
, as well as doing her very best to improve her posture and carriage. Poppy continued to stare at herself, for the first time becoming convinced that she did indeed seem to have shed her old self and begun to put on a whole new persona. Diona de Donnet was becoming a fact, not a figment of Cissie's imagination.

To her further delight, Madame seemed inclined to agree, since when Poppy went to wish her farewell until her next lesson the older woman suddenly embraced her, putting both her hands to Poppy's cheeks and kissing her most affectionately.

‘I had abandoned hope last month,' she confessed. ‘I was about to wave the white towel. Then I see how hard you try and I also see suddenly there is progress. Then – look! Today! What is it that happened? The miracle we pray for. This wonderful miracle Miss Cissie, and I, Madame Moisewitch, always pray for with our pupils. Pray
God that you do all of you what you can, that you make everything you have to do happen as it should, as we want, and that we will all succeed against this terrible evil.'

When Poppy saw the look in her teacher's eyes she realised the weight of the responsibility she was carrying. There was no need to ask Madame Moisewitch what she meant. They both knew.

Billy was living in paradise. Major Folkestone, having taken a shine to the lad, wasted no time in loading all sorts of responsibilities on to his young shoulders, the most important being fire and pane watching. There was actually little risk of fire thanks to the iron military-style discipline imposed on the occupants of Eden Park, but there was a very real risk of enemy planes passing overhead. Even with a total blackout, since the place was now a top security site there was always the chance that someone might betray its whereabouts, with the result that a surprise enemy raid could blow the whole place and its inhabitants to kingdom come.

Later there would be two heavily camouflaged ack-ack guns positioned strategically in the parklands, but at the moment the only defence came from the soldiers' rifles. So Billy took his duties very seriously indeed, and when it was his turn to go on watch up on to the roof he dashed, with notebook and pencil in one hand, and binoculars swinging from his neck. There he would sit watching the skies until, weary to the point of collapse, and hardly able to keep awake, he would stumble downstairs again to pass out in his cottage bedroom.

But Billy was quite alone in his new and exciting boy's paradise, for certainly no one else living in Eden Park, despite the resolutely cheerful faces they presented to the world, felt anything but dread when they contemplated the future. Outwardly they laughed and joked, and made light of everything, while inwardly they all felt, but never said, that while Chamberlain was in power they did not have a hope of winning. The most common phrase being heard all over England was ‘we will win despite our government' until the day that Chamberlain resigned, and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, at which point, with the warmer weather, the long, bitter winter, so filled with grey despair, seemed at last to be over.

It had been an especially bitter winter, despite the war's seeming to have been put on hold for the last months of the old year.

The Phoney War
the newspapers had dubbed it, as if it was all some kind of practical joke, so it was only when Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and Holland, followed by Belgium and Luxembourg, that everyone suddenly realised that the war – the real war – for which they seemed to have been preparing for so long, was well and truly upon them.

Everyone at Eden Park listened to Churchill's speeches on the radio, standing up as they did so, as if standing to sing the National Anthem.

We shall defend our island home – and outlive the menace of tyranny
, Marjorie would repeat to herself as she went about her work, fortified by the power
of the words and the profound confidence of the man speaking them.

‘We
shall defend our island home …'
she would repeat out loud in the evenings as they were making ready for bed, loud enough for Billy to hear and immediately finish what was now their motto.

‘And outlive the menace of tyranny!'
the call would echo back to the room where Kate and Marjorie were climbing gratefully into their warm beds.

‘Not that I know much about tyranny,' Marjorie said to Kate one night. ‘At least I know a bit – having been to Mrs Reid's school. If Hitler's anything like Pet and Uncle Mikey then Billy and I will be out there with every weapon we can lay our hands on if he dares try and set foot on these shores.'

‘My father's a dictator,' Kate said wistfully, sitting up in her bed and pulling the bedclothes up over her knees. ‘So I know a little about people like Hitler.'

‘How's Robert?' Marjorie wondered, changing the subject, and she turned round the photograph of Robert that Kate kept by her bed to take another look. ‘He really has got film star looks.'

‘Oh yes, he's a star all right.' Kate laughed. ‘He doesn't need to be in films.'

‘He's even more handsome in his naval uniform.'

‘Don't you think everyone looks good in uniform, though, Marjorie? Even Major Folkestone—'

‘Who's not exactly the most good-looking of blokes,' Marjorie murmured. ‘Kind though he might be.'

‘He looks good in his uniform, though.'

‘You couldn't possibly be getting a crush on Major Folkestone, Kate?' Marjorie teased. ‘Isn't he a little old for you?'

‘I'll tell you who I
have
got a crush on,' Kate said, dropping her voice. ‘Have you seen that man who rides about the place on that big white horse?'

‘Grey actually,' a solemn voice came from the doorway. ‘Horses can't ever be white. They're called grey, white horses are grey.'

‘Thank you, Billy.' Marjorie rolled her eyes at Kate and sighed. ‘Now go back to bed.'

‘I want to hear about Kate's crush.'

‘Perhaps Kate doesn't want to tell you.'

‘Kate?' Billy wondered, opening his big brown eyes as wide as he could as he smiled at his beloved.

‘It isn't anyone, Billy,' Kate said tactfully. ‘I was only teasing. Trying to make Marjorie jealous.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Yes, Billy,' Marjorie assured him. ‘Now go back to your bed or you'll be too tired for your watch later.'