Romeo Blue (12 page)

“Oh, Miss Elkin,” I said. “This may sound odd but you know that Mr. Bathtub still loves my mother, even though he isn’t married to her anymore. It’s a bit of a mess.”

“Oh, Felicity, I was hoping, that’s all. You know. It would be nice,” she said.

“My aunt says that some people only love one partner in their lives,” I said. “She says those people are like Canada geese. They marry for life. If they lose that partner, they won’t accept anyone else. They often spend the rest of their lives alone.”

Miss Elkin looked suddenly brisk and impatient and she hurried away into her house.

It was quite festive when our guests arrived. I had gone outside and picked dried flowers and branches of berries and turning hydrangeas for all the rooms. Aunt Miami was dressed up in her rose silk gown and she floated about the house in a swirl of fabric. I put on my new plaid taffeta frock, the one that seemed to make Derek blush and look at the ceiling. (Perhaps the green and red colors bothered him.) It was almost evening when the great dark car pulled up outside. We went out to help Big and Little Bill carry their baggage into the house. They had brought all sorts of things, like a small film projector and briefcases that Mr. Stephenson (Little Bill) wouldn’t let anyone carry. We had a lovely dinner in the dining room and we sat there making jokes and laughing.

Mr. Stephenson had sort of a sad face with a little scar by his mouth. He and Big Bill were quite good friends and they both adored Winnie and Danny. As we passed round Auntie’s special mashed potato casserole, Big Bill wanted to know about the portraits of Captain Bathburn and his family on all the walls of the dining room.

“Every night, that family watches us having our dinner,” I said, taking a great bite of gravy and potato. “I should imagine they must be terribly hungry after all these years.”

“Our Flissy is very outspoken,” said The Gram. “If you think she’s reserved and still very British, well, think again.”

“But she’s completely quiet when it comes to certain things,” said Uncle Gideon in a soft voice.

“That’s wonderful,” said Little Bill, smiling. “Of course she is.”

I looked down at the tablecloth. It was The Gram’s very best one. There were angels and lilies and butterflies woven into the creamy white, polished fabric. Butterflies. Yes, I was quiet about everything. Perhaps too quiet. I remembered the hot iron rolling over the invisible ink on the paper, the words, foggy and blurry, coming up out of nowhere. Derek’s father too seemed to circle round my thoughts, casting his own moving shadow. As I watched the candles burning in their silver holders, a terrible thought fluttered through my mind. Was Derek’s father the Gray Moth?

Just then Derek kicked his foot against mine, saying, “Flissy’s a trooper. She knows how to keep a secret.” I looked up at him and smiled. Then my eyes fell back to the tablecloth and I counted the butterflies repeated and repeated in the weave of the pattern all across the table.

After dinner Big and Little Bill played a special game of dominoes while Derek and I looked on. They used the old carved whalebone dominoes that had once belonged to Captain A. E. Bathburn. Big and Little Bill took the game terribly seriously and tried to beat and outfox each other every step of the way. Derek and I were sent off to bed before the game was finished and Big Bill and Little Bill were both still gnashing their teeth at each other in a jovial sort of way when I had to say good night. I was sad to go because they had been quite good fun, really, but The Gram was very firm about bedtime and school and all that rot.

“He isn’t called Wild Bill for nothing,” Mr. Stephenson was just saying as my foot hit the top step. “He’s thrown caution to the wind this time. I’ve got you now, for sure, Wild Bill.”

It was hard to sleep with the lights on downstairs, with the laughter and jokes and the sweet tobacco smoke that drifted up the hall. Soon Aunt Miami came in from her date with Bobby Henley. She had gone out after dinner and her skirts rustled in the darkness as she laid her cold, silky coat on the chair next to my bed. It brought with it the smell of the outdoors and the chill of an evening out and all that I was missing as I lay there, pretending to sleep.

Auntie moved round the room in the darkness like a ghost. Finally, I heard her bed sag as she climbed in. All the beds in the house had once belonged to the captain’s family. They were called rope beds and they didn’t have box springs as modern beds did. Instead, under the mattress there were ropes to hold the mattress up, which you tightened every night with a key that went into a keyhole in the bedpost. You turned the key and the ropes tightened. Uncle Gideon told me that was where the saying
sleep tight
came from. Because it was too dark and Auntie didn’t want to wake me, she didn’t tighten the ropes as she usually did and so her mattress would slump a bit that night.

Lying there, hearing Uncle Gideon roaring and laughing away, I could tell Little Bill was now beating Big Bill, whose title in Washington was Major General William Donovan. The Gram had got on the side of Big Bill and was offering him advice. But it was no use; Little Bill triumphed. When it was over, they had Nescafé coffee and talked about how the troops overseas loved this new instant coffee and how it was much easier for the army cooks to prepare. I could hear the tinkling sound of coffee cups against china saucers and it was a lovely, cozy noise, one I was used to in England. But then The Gram said, “Well, I think they are all asleep now and we can go on up and begin.”

Upon hearing those words, I am sorry to say I sat bolt upright in bed. Auntie was already asleep across the
room. Her form had become a dark mountain of blanket folds and peaceful breathing. I blinked my eyes. The door to our room was open and the light from the hall fell across our rug in a comforting, homey way, but I was not to be comforted. Not tonight. I intended to listen to all that was said, every word.

In a while I heard them climb the stairs without speaking. I saw them walk silently past my room, Mr. Donovan carrying his projector and briefcase. Mr. Stephenson was carrying a box and some papers. I waited. The Gram led them into the gymnasium. And then she closed the door. Then I heard only Auntie’s breathing and the silent shifting of Captain Bathburn’s old house.

Soon, I climbed from my bed and tiptoed out of the room. In the hall I stood in my nightdress, looking at the crack of light under the door. The Gram always complained that this house didn’t have enough closets. There wasn’t any place to put our clothes. Uncle Gideon then would say, “Well, back in 1854, they didn’t have very many clothes, Mother. You had a good suit or a good dress and an everyday outfit and that was all.”

“Well, Miami would have surely perished back then without her enormous wardrobe,” The Gram would answer. “That daughter of mine has more fancy dresses than the Queen of the May!” I was thinking about closets
just then because there was a closet in Derek’s room. It was long and narrow and covered in pine paneling and led to a second door, which opened onto the gymnasium. It was a shared closet but we called it a secret passageway. I needed to be in that passageway right now with the door slightly ajar. I needed to walk right into Derek’s room while he slept and wake him up.

Anyone who has ever been in love before with someone as dashing and moody and charming and changeable as Derek Blakely would know that it would be very hard indeed to enter his room while he slept. Wasn’t it improper? Winnie would surely scold me when she came back. Would Derek growl at me for waking him? Would he think me dreadful? I felt shy and awkward and nervous and yet at the same time I felt itchy and jumpy and jittery and absolutely certain I needed to go in that passageway. Now.

And so I did what all British children do when they are in a pinch. I closed my eyes and I plunged ahead. I turned Derek’s doorknob and I stepped quietly into his moonlit room. I shut the door behind me.

I stood in the center of the room. In the moonlight, Derek’s face on the pillow looked to be made of porcelain or marble, polished and fine like a statue of a beautiful sleeping boy. I wished then that all his troubles would be
gone, that the father he loved would truly be his real father, forever and ever, so that Derek no longer would feel an emptiness, a loss, and a longing. “Derek,” I whispered. “Derek, wake up.”

I cannot imagine what Derek thought when he opened his eyes, with the moon’s light falling across the room in a long, dreamlike shaft and me standing in the midst of it in my white nightdress. Derek looked at me and I looked back at him in a very shy way. “I’m dreadfully sorry to disturb you, but we absolutely must go in your closet immediately,” I said. Then I threw my hand over my mouth and said, “Oops, I mean, what I mean is, um, I have to hear what is going on in the gymnasium just now. They’re all in there, Derek. They’ve got the movie projector with them. Get up, would you? I mean, I do hope you’ll excuse me but I need to look from your closet door into their room.”

Wrapped all in silence, Derek slipped out of bed, in an almost magic way, as if the statue of the sleeping boy had suddenly come to life. He was wearing the cowboy pajamas that The Gram had made for him for Christmas. It had been my idea. The Gram and I had found the flannel fabric at the dime store in Bottlebay. I had picked the tan fabric with red-and-white horses and cowboys wearing ten-gallon hats. The Gram could sew anything. I had helped her stitch the buttonholes. I had learned to do that in school in England.

Derek moved without a sound across the room. He
went right for his closet door, opened it gently, and we both crawled down the long space to the other door, which was already open a crack.

My heart sank as we sat there together on the floor, looking into the dark gymnasium and listening to the rattle and click of the film as it ran through the projector. On the screen in the long room, the film brightened, halted, and became shadowy and dark and then brightened again. There was a German soldier, an officer walking towards the camera. His face flickered by. He was getting in a car. A Nazi flag fluttered behind him.

Mr. Stephenson said, “Okay, now, this is Colonel Helmut Ludswig, a Gestapo officer, who will be taking over as head of the prison on February second. And as you can see, it’s rather remarkable. We were quite excited when we realized how much he resembles you, Gideon, with the exception of the mustache, of course. You’ll start growing your mustache soon, I hope?”