Spying on Miss Muller (4 page)

There was a new frosty note in Old Rose's voice. “Children, children. This is not the way to behave. Get into orderly lines, girls at the front, boys at the back.”

Too late. We were squashed together in the shelter like bananas in a bunch and we were mingling. Mingling in our pajamas. They were under our coats, of course, but still we were in our pajamas. It was the most astonishing part of the whole astonishing night.

Old Rose was standing on the big Red Cross box now, tottering a bit, holding on to Miss Gaynor's shoulder. Her face was flushed with fury. “Mr. Atkinson, control your boys.”

And then, with a little hiss and a squeak, the basement lights went out.

There was a moment of silence and the noise doubled. The boys surged closer to us and we surged closer to them. There was more mingling than any of us had ever dreamed of.

In the dark it was hard to tell boy boarder from girl boarder, except by the feel of the coats. Ours were woolen, soft and prickly. Theirs were Burberrys, smooth, slick raincoats.

“Who's this?” I asked, my fingers slithering across the lapels of someone's Burberry.

“It's Curly Pritchard. Who's this?”

“Jessie Drumm.”

“Hiya, Jessie.” He grabbed me and tried to kiss me, but I turned my head so he got my ear. Curly Pritchard was in my geography class. He was a twerp and a sneak. Just my luck to get him.

“Where are you?” he growled. “What part of you was that?”

“I'm gone,” I told him, stepping back on somebody's toes.

Teachers' flashlights clicked on and roamed across the mass of pushing, trampling boarders. None of us was daft enough to put on
our
flashlights and spoil the first good, dark mingling we'd ever had. Even the little first and second formers were giggling and singing, “We're gonna hang out the wash on the Siegfried Line, Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?”

Old Rose's voice shrieked through the noise, accompanied by the all-clear, which was still wailing outside. Either it was supposed to go on a long time, or it was stuck.

“I will not have this,” Old Rose screamed. “This is a serious, life-changing experience.”

It surely was. Us and the boys.

“Each one of you climb onto a bunk and stay there,” Old Rose shouted.

From out of the dark a boy's voice called, “Lie down quietly. One boy and one girl to each bunk, please.”

Old Rose sounded as if she was having a conniption fit. “Who said that? Mr. Atkinson, I demand to know which of your boys made that ugly suggestion. I want him severely punished.”

“I'm sorry, Miss Rose. I have no way of ascertaining,” Mr. Atkinson said.

“Boys.” That was Mr. Bolton. “Please remember you are gentlemen.”

And then Mr. Guy. “Come on, boys, relax. Let's behave.”

His flashlight slid across a scene that looked like the Saturday-night dance at the Palladium without music.

I caught a glimpse of Ada next to me. “Isn't this great?” she said. “It's the first good thing Hitler's done in the whole war.”

Another flashlight swung in our direction, and for a miraculous second I saw Ian McManus right in front of me. I was looking into his eyes. He was looking into mine. I was closer to his beauty mark than I'd ever been before. My heart turned over and my stomach, too. If my stomach acted up on me now, I'd never forgive it.

And then Ian's face came forward, or mine did. Our gas mask cases that hung from our shoulders banged together with a metallic thump. Our noses bumped, but not enough to hurt, and Ian kissed me.

That kiss was right on target, but so fast and so light we could have been two butterflies meeting in midair. It was wonderful, but skimpy for a first kiss.

I didn't step away. Maybe there'd be a repeat that would be even more romantic. Ian might take my face in his hands and say, “I've been wanting to kiss you since the first time I saw you at the Pride of Erin dance when we were both in lower second.”

He said nothing like that.

“Oh, cheese. Wouldn't you know it,” he muttered, because right then the lights sparked and came on again.

Our eyes were still locked in love.

I smoothed my hair. I was so glad I didn't have cold cream on my face—or worse, the potter's-clay mask for pimples that Phyllis Hollister wore every night and offered to share. She'd wiped hers off on the way down here, but I noticed that some clay was still stuck under her chin and in her ears. I'd have died if Ian and I had been this close and I'd had potter's clay in my ears.

I smiled at him, but he looked embarrassed and stepped behind Curly Pritchard.

Old Rose was booming in her most Shakespearean voice, “Girls, are my eyes deceiving me? Is this conceivably possible?” She was back on the Red Cross box, and the hairs on her fur coat stood straight out like a mad dog's. “Never did I expect to see my girls—my Alveara girls—behaving in such a shocking manner.

Cowed, we stepped back and perched on the edges of bunks, while the boys, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, looked nervous.

“First- and second-form teachers, Miss Hardcastle, Miss Gaynor, Miss Müller, the air raid is over. Bring my girls back to the dormitories.” Old Rose paused. “Now.”

We streamed awkwardly toward the stairs. Half of us had forgotten or lost our suitcases.

“Never mind, never mind,” Old Rose called when Nancy Eden started back for her case. “The staff will gather up your belongings later.”

Pearl Carson, for some reason, seemed to have also lost her coat.

Lizzie Mag and I had been separated. She was way up the line ahead of me, but I couldn't wait to give her my news. Maureen was in front of me. I tapped her shoulder. “I was kissed,” I whispered. “Pass it on to Lizzie Mag.”

Maureen gave me an over-the-shoulder arched-eyebrow look. “That's no news,” she said. “Lots of us were kissed.”

I felt like telling her my kiss was from Ian McManus and the other kisses were ordinary. But I didn't. And then I couldn't stand not to tell and I said, “Ian McManus kissed me.”

“You're joking,” Maureen said. “Lucky.”

Miss Müller stood at the bottom of the steps with Nursie. I didn't want to look at her. Inside my head I asked, Where were you? Where were you really?

I had one foot on the bottom stair when Nursie caught my arm. “Jessie Drumm, are you all right?” She felt my forehead and frowned.

Miss Müller smiled at me and said, “It was a frightening experience, Nursie. None of us is all right.”

I gave her my coldest glance. Don't even talk to me, I thought. Don't be my friend.

Nursie was peering closely into my face. “You're very flushed, Jessie. I want to see you in dispensary in the morning. Is your stomach bothering you?”

Thank heaven the boys were out of hearing. Imagine her mentioning one of my body parts like that. Of course I'd been to the dispensary and had had more than my share of milk of magnesia. So Nursie knew all about my weak intestines, as she called them. She patted my shoulder. “Morning dispensary,” she said again.

“Yes, Nursie.”

I was looking down at Miss Müller's black beaded slippers and then at old Boots, who had shuffled off to the side. I could see his heavy brown shoes clearly. They were thick with wet mud, and the bottoms of his pajamas, too. I remembered that right in front of the steps next to his caretaker quarters there was a dip where muddy water collected after it rained. It rained just about every day, so that mud puddle was always there.

If Miss Müller had gone to Boots's quarters as she'd said, gone in, shaken him awake... I looked again at her black slippers. They were dry and there wasn't a bit of mud on them. Even that part of what she'd said wasn't true. She hadn't gone near Boots's quarters. She had been up on the roof all the time, and of course old Boots wouldn't contradict her. He wouldn't even have heard what she'd said.

“I'll check on you girls later, back in the dorm,” Miss Müller said.

I didn't answer.

We tripped up the stairs and along the corridor, everyone talking a mile a minute. Nobody seemed to notice that Lizzie Mag and I weren't joining in.

“Can't you be quiet, you monsters?” Miss Hardcastle asked, but not as forcefully as she usually does. “You all did well tonight. I'm proud of you.”

“It was fun,” Maureen said.

“It wasn't fun for everyone,” Miss Hardcastle said. “Those bombs did damage somewhere in Belfast. I expect people were killed.”

That made us settle down.

“Do you think they came over Belfast by mistake?” Maureen asked. “Like they were heading someplace else and got lost?”

“I doubt that very much,” Miss Hardcastle said.

 

When we got back to the dorm, we gathered in Lizzie Mag's room. For a little while we talked in hushed voices.

“I suppose some people
were
killed,” Lizzie Mag said. “How awful.”

Maureen, who was checking her lipstick in the mirror, said: “Somebody grabbed me and kissed me and put his hand here.” Her fingers fluttered between her chest and her dangling gas mask.

“It's nice that you're so worried about people getting killed, Maureen,” I said.

She gave me a surprised Arcs de Triomphe look. “What's the point in thinking about such awful things when there are such good things to think about?” she said.

“Maybe the person who grabbed you had a cold and he was looking for one of the handkerchiefs in your bra,” Ada suggested. “Maybe he needed to blow his nose.”

“Jealous, jealous,” Maureen said. “And Jessie was lucky too. Ian McManus kissed her, remember?”

I could feel my face getting hot.

“Was it great?” Ada asked.

It was half a relief and half a disappointment when Miss Müller called from the front of the dorm, “Is everyone in bed?”

“Almost, Miss Müller.”

We scampered.

“It's about five in the morning,” she said. “The planes have all gone.”

“The German planes?” Ada asked, as if Miss Müller had thought it had been English planes bombing us. For once Ada's sarcasm didn't irritate me. Miss Müller had it coming.

“Try to get some sleep,” Miss Müller said. “They won't be back tonight.”

“She should know,” Maureen's whisper was loud enough for us to hear. For Miss Müller to hear, too.

“Good night,” Miss Müller said firmly.

I heard the little sliding sound her slippers made on the linoleum floor as she went to her room.

“Miss Müller,” I called out. “Did you take Boots back to his quarters? You went and got him when the air raid started, didn't you? Didn't you?” I asked, repeating it in the same kind of sarcastic voice Ada had used.

There were a few seconds of silence; then Miss Müller said, more sharply than she had ever spoken to me before: “He went back by himself, Jessie. Old Boots is deaf, not blind.”

“Yes, thank you. I know that,” I said. My heart was thumping. I lay in the darkness that was total except for the ceiling glow from Miss Müller's lamp. I'd had my first air raid tonight, and my first kiss. I remembered Ian's lips, so soft and dry. They'd made me tingle. I was tingling now.

Tonight I'd had my first real suspicions about Miss Müller, too. I shuddered a bit and turned over in bed.

T
HEY LET US SLEEP
an hour later than usual the morning after the air raid. I heard first bell, saw my emergency case where I'd dropped it in the middle of the floor when we came back last night, and remembered everything. I lay thinking about my mother and father. Were they all right? Oh, please, they had to be all right.

“Are you awake, Jess?” Lizzie Mag called.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Did all those things really happen?” she asked, and her head bobbed up over the top of the partition that divided our cubies. We could do that if we stood on our dressers.

“I think so,” I said.

She and I walked to the bathroom together carrying our soap dishes and towels and our still-warm hot-water bottles.

“When are you going to tell Maureen and Ada about Miss Müller?” Lizzie Mag whispered.

“After school, I guess. There'll be no time before, not to give them the details. We could still start the spy watch tonight.”

Some of the girls from the other dorms were in the bathroom already, all buzzing about the air raid.

A list of names and dates was pinned to the bathroom wall. Three of us were supposed to break the skimming of ice and bathe in one of the cold tubs every morning, so as not to waste water. My name was on for this morning, but I checked to make sure no one was looking, then crossed it off and pulled the plug.

Bengie stood at one of the washbasins. Usually we tried to avoid prefects. They tended to be bossy, and they were supposed to make us stick by the rules. But when we saw Bengie today, we crowded around her. The prefects had a radio in their sitting room and could get the BBC news.

“Did you hear anything about the air raid, Bengie?” The big cave of the bathroom made our voices hollow, as if we were talking through a pipe. The damp air smelled of disinfectant, Monkey Brand soap, and the hot-bicycle-tire smell of water that's been rumbling around in a dozen hot-water bottles all night.

“Thirteen people got killed,” Bengie said.

We gasped. Thirteen people. How awful to think we'd been enjoying ourselves when people were dying.

“The Germans dropped six bombs,” Bengie went on. “Most of the damage was done on the Shore Road.”

“Do they think someone in Belfast guided the planes?” Lizzie Mag asked.

Bengie snorted. “If somebody did, he did a bad job. The bombs were probably meant for the shipyards, and they missed by a mile.”

Lizzie Mag's eyes met mine in the mirror. The blue lights were off for daytime, so we looked normal—not great but normal.