Spying on Miss Muller (7 page)

We were never allowed back in our rooms between breakfast and assembly. “The maids must be free to do their jobs without interruption from you girls,” Old Rose said.

I didn't think I'd ever been in the dorm alone before.

We're not like those maids, I thought, making a face at myself in the mirror. They were free. My diary. I got down on my knees and felt for it under my dresser. There was no private place in the dorm. Boarders weren't supposed to have secrets, that's why.

My fingers touched the small leather book and pulled it out. Hard to tell if anyone else had done this, even checked on me every day because I wrote every day. How awful. I opened the diary, flipped through the pages. Ian McManus's code letters jumped out at me: I'M, written like that. Those smart, horrible maids had probably decoded it by now. “I'M walked behind Ada and me to French class. He's had his hair cut short and he looks adorable.” How embarrassing. Why had I written such a dopey thing?

I didn't have a code name for Daddy. There he was on almost every page, my thoughts about him, my rage. Last weekend I'd written in my diary, sitting here on my bed the night I got back to Alveara. “Went to Swatragh with Daddy. We were supposed to be going to see the Curragh bands. He left me in the car while he went into the pub to meet Jamie Ruck. I waited and waited. I read two stories from the new
Girls' Crystal,
my favorite magazine. Good thing I brought it. He didn't come back for more than an hour. ‘Sorry, darlin',' he said. ‘Jamie and I had important business to conduct.'

“He always gets so highfalutin when he's like that. I started to cry because I was so mad at him and nothing I say to him does any good. It's hopeless. ‘What's the matter, darlin'? Sure there's no need to cry.'

“ ‘We've missed the bands,' I said, though I didn't care that much about hearing them. I was crying over him. But he's right. Crying is hopeless, too. Sometimes I don't love Daddy at all. I hate him.”

I closed the diary and ran my fingers over the gold-leaf lettering of my name on the outside. My mother had given the book to me for Christmas. Maybe she thought writing things down in it would help. But it didn't if the maids were reading it. Tears stung my eyes. “What's the matter, darlin'? Sure there's no need to cry.” I pushed the diary under my pillow. It wasn't safe there, either. It wasn't safe anywhere.

I took my brush off the dresser and tugged it through my hair, watching the blur of myself in the mirror, tugging and tugging. And those awful maids spreading the story that Miss Müller's father was a Nazi. As if everyone wasn't against her enough, me included. My brush strokes got slower and slower. The silence of the dorm pressed against my ears. Of course if her father
had
been a Nazi, and she really had a picture to prove it, then the idea of her being a spy was even easier to believe. My heart began pumping and the milk of magnesia taste was mysteriously back in my throat. Should I go and look for myself? Should I?

I peeked around the door of my cubie. No one was there, and all I could hear was the normal sound of the lavatory running in the bathroom. It was the one in the third stall, the one that had no seat, the one that gurgled day and night. Not another noise anywhere. I'd never have a chance like this again.

As I tiptoed up the corridor, I thought, sneak, sneak. Peek, peek. But then I thought, there's a war on. My cousin Bryan's fighting in France. Last night Belfast was bombed.

Here was the door to Miss Müller's room. I'd been this far before, but never inside. We weren't allowed in teachers' rooms, for some unexplained reason.

“In case of hanky-panky,” Ada explained.

“What's hanky-panky?”

“Oh, you know,” Ada said grandly, the way she did when she was pretending to be smarter than us, but she wasn't really.

It must be the same kind of reason Hillary's mum doesn't want her alone in a train carriage with a man, I thought vaguely. Well, not the same, but something for parents to worry about.

I turned the knob. The door opened.

Miss Müller's bed wasn't made. Girls had to make their own in the mornings, but the maids did the teachers'. The maids obviously hadn't come to this dorm yet.

On Miss Müller's dresser was the picture of her and her mother. I'd seen it lots of times in plain sight when I came to her door. Sarah Neely had told Hillary the other one was behind it.

I went quickly across the cubicle and picked up the wooden frame.

In the distance I heard talking. The maids were heading this way, free to do whatever they wanted to do. I could hear the swish, swish as they dry mopped the corridor.

Quick, quick, Jessie.

There was something behind the first picture. That much of Hillary's story was true. My fingers poked at it, got hold of the edge. A German soldier stared out at me from the second photograph. His uniform had a high collar and pouchy trousers, and he wore knee-high black boots. I knew what that uniform was. We booed soldiers wearing it when we saw them on the Pathé newsreels, goose-stepping in line, holding their arms up stiff in the Nazi salute. I looked closely at the picture. There was a swastika on a band around the soldier's arm.

I swallowed down the sour magnesia taste and turned the photo over. The back was covered with spidery writing in German, but Miss Müller was a good teacher and I could read what it said. “To my dear daughter Daphne. Honor the Fatherland. August 1938.”

The maids had come as far as Maureen's room now. The young-sounding one, who was probably Sarah with the pimples, was saying, “She's still at the knitting. And would you look at all the dropped stitches! It'll be a lucky fellow that gets
this
balaclava.”

They were hooting and laughing. Probably they laughed like this over my diary. I wished I could stick their heads in their buckets of soapy water till they blubbered for mercy.

My fingers were shaking so much, it was hard to slide the picture back behind the other one and set the frame on the dresser.

The maids were going into Lizzie Mag's room. Bridget, the older, gravelly-voiced one, was talking. “Now here's a wee girl I'm sorry for. That last letter from her ma was terrible altogether.”

I stood, turned to stone. Now was my chance to get away without being seen, but I couldn't move. They'd read Lizard's letters. How could they? Lizzie Mag was so private with her letters. She never shared them the way the rest of us did, standing in a huddle, reading them out loud. Mummy knew not to mention Daddy's problem when she wrote to me. All the dorm would know if she did.

Lizzie Mag whispered to me once why she didn't share hers. “They're too sad, Jess. I cry when I read them. They need to be only for me.”

I hugged her. I understood.

Now the maids knew. I bet they didn't cry. There was no way to have a secret in Alveara.

Sarah was talking again in a tired, superior voice. “It makes you thankful to have a regular ma and da, so it does.”

“Pass me that Mansion polish, Sarah girl,” Bridget ordered, and gave a great sigh. “The mother angry all the time about the father leaving her and going off with that... what did she call her, Sarah?”

“I forget. But it's a young girl, anyway. And then him writing to this sweet thing here and telling her he's leaving the ma, but he isn't leaving
her.
That she's his own darlin' daughter. Ach sure, he would say that. Telling her he'll be back for her as soon as the war's over.”

Bridget gave another sigh. “Mark my words, it'll be a tug-of-war and her in the middle. Give that mirror a wee skite of a wipe,” she ordered Sarah.

I could hear the squeaking of the duster across the glass. Sarah was warbling an old ballad at the top of her voice: “There's a spot in me heart that no colleen may own.”

Silently I opened Miss Müller's door and tiptoed away. Neither of the maids saw me.

I
RAN ACROSS
the quad to assembly hall, jumping the puddles and drifts of wet, slippery leaves. The rain had stopped but the oak trees dripped showers of ice water, catching me just as I ran beneath them. My blouse was wetter than the other one had been. I didn't care. Too many thoughts jumbled in my head. That picture! I still couldn't believe it.

In the corner closest to the gym, eight members of the Officer Training Corps in their khaki uniforms were marching. The voice of Mr. Guy, the OTC officer, carried across to me. Mr. Guy was particularly handsome in his OTC uniform. Everyone in uniform looked handsome, Maureen had said, and then paused. “Well, not everyone. Someone small and round like Mr. Bolton shouldn't join up. He's not the right shape.”

“We'll tell him,” Ada had said. “He'll probably be glad for the advice.”

But Mr. Guy looked like a film star in his uniform—Tyrone Power, maybe.

“Right turn. Atten...tion!” he called.

Usually there were about twenty sixth-form boys out for morning drill, but this was no ordinary day. I was surprised there were any, since we were an hour behind ourselves this morning. The quad clock said ten minutes to ten instead of ten minutes to nine, the way it did during assembly on other mornings. But in another way I was surprised there weren't more, after last night. If I were a boy, I'd have been begging to be in the OTC preparing to go fight the Germans. All these sixth formers would graduate in June, and then they could enlist in the British army.

“It's not fair to girls,” Ada had said, and we agreed. But nobody listened to us.

Inside assembly they were singing the closing hymn. Darn! I shouldn't have talked so long to Nursie, otherwise I might have made it.

“Lord dismiss us with thy blessing,” drifted out through the doors, along with the squeak of violins from the school orchestra. It would be as much as my life was worth to try sneaking in there now. I slowed down.

Greta Ludowski was sitting on the wide steps, one of her books underneath her to keep her bottom off the wet bricks. I slowed even more, went up a couple of steps, and leaned on the railing beside her.

Actually, I didn't want to have to talk to her, or even stand next to her, but it would have looked funny if I didn't, since we were the only two there. I had things to think about and sort out in my head. How would I face Miss Müller now that I knew about her father? I'd be able to think as much as I wanted, though, because Greta wouldn't talk much. She hardly ever did. The trouble was, even being in her company made me uncomfortable.

Greta had come to Alveara last year. The night before she was to arrive, Old Rose had called us into her sitting room. To be called into Old Rose's sitting room was the scariest thing in the world and we were biting our nails, wondering what we'd done. Mean Jean was holding hard to her silver crucifix, and lots of us were doing the Catholic business of crossing ourselves and rolling our eyes heavenward for help and consolation. When we found out Old Rose just wanted to tell us about a new girl, we crossed ourselves again with the relief of it all. She told us about Greta in her best Shakespearean voice.

“This poor girl has been through such dreadful experiences,” Old Rose said. “After her parents got her out of Poland, she was sent by circuitous routes to live with an elderly aunt in County Antrim. The aunt, a Mrs. Wachpool, asked the school governors to make an exception in Greta's case and allow her to board here. As you probably know, we have never had a Jewish student before. Because of her religion Greta will always be excused from prayers and from assembly,” Old Rose concluded—which was why Greta was sitting outside on the steps now, of course.

“Did her parents get out of Poland, too, Miss Rose?” Lizzie Mag had asked in a frightened little voice.

Old Rose had spread her hands. “As far as anyone knows they're still there. Which bodes no good. Being Jewish is perilous wherever the Nazis are in power.”

We'd sat quietly, thinking about Greta who was to come and her terrible situation.

“Do you think maybe they were killed, Miss Rose?” That was Mean Jean Ross, her hushed whisper reminding us all of the worst possibility. Mean Jean loved to come up with the worst possibility.

Old Rose lowered her voice. “That is conceivable. But we must never, never intimate to Greta that we suspect such a contingency.”

We'd talked about it in the dorm afterward, sitting on my bed, vowing to be friendly as could be with Greta. She was to be in Sleeping Beauty dorm, but we'd still see her in Long Parlor and the Common Room. We might even have her in some of our classes.

“And we'll never never imitate that we suspect...” Maureen began in a chilling, mournful voice.

“It's intimate, intimate,” Ada said, irritated. “Honestly! Can't you ever get anything right, Mo?”

“Intimate.” Maureen pursed her mouth and crinkled up her Arcs de Triomphe. “Wait a second.... I thought intimate meant like... you know... with a boy.”

“Heaven save us.” Ada had flopped back on the bed.

But we promised one another that we'd be careful with Greta, and loving and understanding, too. We'd listen and console.

“It will be like part of our war effort,” Maureen said.

The trouble was, Greta didn't want our love and understanding. She didn't want to tell us anything about her ordeal or get our opinions or even say bad things about the Germans. She kept to herself, moving silently, staring into the distance. At first we thought maybe she didn't know English very well, and we spoke slowly and loudly to her. “Greta—would—you—like—to—play—rounders—with—us—on—the—lawn?” We stopped that way of talking when we found out she used better English than most of us—definitely better than Maureen, as Ada said.

“She wants to be left alone,” Lizzie Mag told us. “She's hurting too much.”

“Suffering from emotional disturbance” was the way Old Rose put it.