Romeo Blue (30 page)

Then there was a knock on my door. I had hoped it would be Derek with an explanation but instead it was Winnie.

“Oh, poppet,” she said, “you are all upset. I am so sorry, darling. Knowing about Gideon and what happened has taken a terrible toll, hasn’t it? Won’t you come downstairs and make a cake with me? Remember when we used to make cakes together?”

“I’m dreadfully tired,” I said.

“Too tired to decorate a cake?”

“Possibly,” I said.

“Come on,” said Winnie. “Just for a little while.”

“I’d rather not.”

Then pity came to melt me. My mother had such a hopeful and strained look on her face.

“Oh, perhaps, but I won’t stay long,” I said.

And so I went down to the kitchen with Winnie and we started to mix up cake batter. I didn’t say much as we worked. We had only a little sugar in it. But we
did have plenty of eggs since Miss Elkin’s chickens produced so many. We saved the powdered sugar for the icing.

I knew the cake would be lovely. Winnie had once wanted to be a baker of cakes years ago. She had planned to have a shop full of pastel-colored biscuits and cakes with roses and ribbons of sugar. She had planned to name it Winnie’s Wonders, and once, she had even picked out the perfect little shop near Kensington Gardens in London.

When we came to decorate our cake, I finally spoke. I asked for a butterfly on the top.

“What kind of butterfly?” Winnie said. “A monarch?”

“No, a Mazarine blue,” I said, looking up at her.

Winnie looked startled. Then she closed her eyes.

“Mazarine blue is a pretty color, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, it is a deep, layered sky blue, a blue with depth and variation, almost a magical blue. What made you bring up the word
Mazarine
?”

I sat down at the table where we had been creaming powdered sugar into the butter. “I saw it in a book called
A Season of Butterflies
,” I said. “My father wrote me a note before he left. He told me to look in that book. And I found this between the Mazarine blue butterfly pages.” I showed Winnie the paper with the drawing of a radio and the words,
If all has gone well, remind everybody to listen to the radio!

Winnie stepped backwards. She looked down at his message and squeezed her eyes tightly closed for a moment, as if to shut out everything in the world. Then she reached for the paper and crumpled it in her sugary hands.

The contract from Doubleday, Doran for Mr. Henley arrived that next week and Derek helped me sign the papers. I wrote my name on the line at the bottom,
Ms. Felicity Bathburn Budwig
and then I crossed it out and wrote
Mrs. Felicity Budwig Bathburn
. I did not want to rock the boat. If the editors thought me a Mrs., I would be a Mrs. We put a date on the thing and folded it up and sent it back.

“Perfect. Mr. Henley will be ever so pleased,” I said, smiling at Derek. And then a shadow drew across my mind, like a dark camel crossing a desert slowly. Yes, our troops were doing splendidly in North Africa. They had sent the famous German general Rommel turning on his heels. But there had been casualties. There were always losses. Still Mr. Henley did not seem like the kind of person who would die. He seemed more the type to end up in a prisoner-of-war camp, like Mrs. Boxman’s brother. I imagined Mr. Henley would have all these stories to tell us about it when he came home. And yet The Gram whispered with Winnie in the parlor when Mr. Henley’s name was mentioned. And Winnie took a deep breath and shook her head.

Derek and I decided to write a letter to Mr. Henley that day.

Dear Bobby,

Please, please write to us. Miami is so worried. She sobs and cries on the telephone. She’ll be home for a visit in a couple of weeks. And you are to have a book of your poems published! In a few months
Oh Morocco!
will be out on bookshelves all across America. Let us know, if you can, how you are.

Love,
Flissy, Derek, and all the Bathburns

“I am not a true Bathburn,” said Derek.

“Of course you are, Derek,” I said.

“But it’s not official,” he said.

“Where did you go when you disappeared?” I said. But Derek turned away and would not answer me.

The amazing arrival of daffodils and hyacinths and violets was not the usual happy Bathburn celebration because we had not heard from Mr. Henley or Danny and we did not know whether my daddy-uncle had died in France from his gunshot wounds. We were always afraid of a telegram or an official letter from the government. But we were not the only ones. Mr. King at King’s Hardware had lost his son in the Pacific in February and in the window of his house there was a flag with a gold star. The gold star was a terrible thing to see and I always looked away.

Winnie was in her room upstairs a lot now, and at night I could hear her pacing the floor back and forth. And finally, on a warming day later in April, she set off walking along the shore past the White Whale Inn and beyond. I wondered where she was going. I had seen those letters arrive for her from Mr. Fitzwilliam. I was uneasy about her visiting him. I did not know what her intentions were. I wondered even if I could trust her at all and so I am sorry to report that I followed her.

When she climbed the rocky path towards the big, dark, granite house, I stayed back among the wild rosebushes. Then I too climbed the path into the garden. I
passed the mossy angel statue standing among drifts of purple honesty and yellow forsythia. The angel was now standing upright, her face lifted towards the sky.

I did not knock on the door but went to the windows of the drawing room and peered in. There the huge, black marble fireplace seemed to stare back at me with its vacant eye. The room was empty at first and then Winnie and Mr. Fitzwilliam walked in. Mr. Fitzwilliam swung his arms about, pointing to everything. Out here in the garden the air was full of birdsong and the sounds of spring so I could not hear their words. Mr. Fitzwilliam leaned down and looked up into the fireplace chimney. Then he pointed up into it and Winnie did the same. She got down on her knees and peered up into the chimney. When she stood up again, she had dark soot on her hands. She tried to dust the soot away, but her hands remained ashen and stained.

Then Mr. Fitzwilliam opened a closet and showed Winnie the contents. They walked round the room and he did the same on the opposite side. What were they talking about? It seemed very strange and left me a bit rattled. Finally, they went on to the atrium.

I went over to the side of the house and carefully peered in those windows too, keeping to the wooden frame and the edge of the glass. I could see clearly from there Mr. Fitzwilliam’s face, which looked to me to be rather stunned and charmed at the same time. And there was Winnie, a short distance away, standing among
thousands of butterflies. They fluttered all about her, the mapwings and the monarchs and the hairstreaks and the lacewings and the swallowtails. Winnie’s arms were stretched out almost like butterfly wings as she turned round and round and round.

I did not discover that Winnie was listening to my father’s shortwave radio upstairs by herself until one late afternoon when I was running the Hoover vacuum down the hallway upstairs. I had unplugged it and was just outside Winnie’s closed door. She was always shutting her door, especially near four o’clock. Now I leaned my head against the door and I could hear a radio playing inside, music and then an announcer. I knew it was a British station because I recognized the accent, the words, the tone. It pulled on my heart in a faint old way. I remembered listening with Winnie and Danny to the wireless in London, Winnie and Danny dancing sometimes round our flat to the music. Often I would dance with them too.

Sometimes I did not think about things at all, I just rushed forwards, as if the earth and sky were pulling me. And so all of a sudden I turned the door handle and walked into Winnie’s room. She was on her bed, gluing something into a book.

There on the desk was Gideon’s old shortwave radio.
He had all sorts of shortwave operators’ manuals in the library and build-it-yourself wireless kit manuals. I had spent so much time in my father’s library that there was little I did not know of him. As I looked at Winnie, I realized she was listening to that wireless, hoping for a message from Gideon or Danny. “Winnie, why didn’t you tell me you had started to listen to the shortwave radio?”

“Oh, poppet,” said Winnie, “you’ve scared me. Sometimes you won’t come in at all and other times you startle me by barging in. You are acting so strangely. I do not know you anymore.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Gideon sent the note to
me
, didn’t he? That meant he wanted me to listen too! Why do you keep things from me? Why did you leave me here and not explain two years ago? Why did you drop me off and not tell me even about Gideon? My father! And what were you doing at Mr. Fitzwilliam’s house? What was he hiding in his chimney? Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing all along in Europe? It was just as if you lied to me! I loved you, Winnie, and you lied to me,” I shouted and cried and I would not stop. No, I could not stop.

Winnie sat there shaking and then she rushed towards me and tried to hug me, but I pushed her away. “Oh, poppet, you’re a child. It wasn’t for you to worry about the shortwave station.”

“I am not exactly a child, Winnie. Can’t you see that?”

She looked at me for a long time with a sad face. Then she said, “We often used that station for messages. We had friends at that station, you see, but it’s too late. Things didn’t go well. No not at all. You didn’t need to know about that radio station because there won’t be any message. You don’t need to listen with me.”

“Why not?” I shouted. “Why can’t I listen too? It’s worse not knowing and not understanding. I don’t even know what you and Danny had really been doing in France before you were arrested. You’ve never told me.”

“Oh, how could I have been so stupid? I am such a fool,” said Winnie. “Of course you can listen to the shortwave with me. I didn’t know how you felt. We will all listen. Even if it comes to nothing. We’ll listen to nothing, then, together.”

“And what about Mr. Fitzwilliam?” I shouted. Every bit of me was shaking. “What were you doing at his house? Don’t you care that he hurt Derek and me? You were looking for something in the chimney. What were you doing there?”

“No, darling. Mr. Fitzwilliam is selling that house. He was showing me the chimney and the closets and all the rooms. It’s for sale. That’s all.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling dreadfully foolish. “I didn’t understand that.”

“And you were following me?” Winnie said, smoothing my hair.

“I didn’t realize,” I said.

My mum hugged me then and I let her. “Poppet,” she said. “Forgive me. I’ve been a coward. Sometimes the bravest people can be the biggest cowards. I could not face telling you about Gideon being your father. It would have been such a shock to you and we would be leaving you right after that. It seemed better for you to grow used to the Bathburns first. And then they would tell you. It was dreadfully difficult for me to even bring you here. We wanted to keep you. But the war interfered. My work interfered. I saved so many children and all the while I was neglecting my own child.” Winnie began to cry and I cried too. The old lace curtains puffed and fluttered in the open window and I cried and my mother held me.