The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (23 page)

When they kissed in Jack’s room, or when they kissed outside on her sloping roof, or when his hand stroked her bare arm, she would close her eyes and think of poetry.

She knew more about Byron than Jack did. She knew that when he was eight years old, Byron had loved a girl so much he would sit for hours gazing at her. He felt sorry for the girl’s sister, for not being as pretty as she was.

Years passed. He never saw this girl. Then he heard that she had married someone else, and it hit him like a thunderbolt. He nearly choked on the news.

To the astonishment of all of those around him.

Later, when he was still a teenager, Byron fell in love again — with an older girl, one of a superior class, named Miss Chaworth. Again, he loved her with his own profound madness. Only, one day he overheard her talking to a friend. She said, with a sneer, “Do you think I could care anything for that
lame
boy?”

Meaning Byron with his twisted foot.

Again, years later, his mother said to Byron, “I have some news for you.”

“Well, what is it?” Byron said.

“Take out your handkerchief first,” she suggested. “For you will want it.”

“Nonsense.”

“Take out your handkerchief,” she insisted.

He did so, holding it up for her to see.

“Well, what is it?”

“Miss Chaworth is married!”

The strangest expression crossed his face, and he returned his handkerchief to his pocket, exclaiming: “Is that all?”

“Why,” said his mother, “I expected you would have been plunged in grief!”

Byron did not reply and, after a moment, changed the subject.

So, when Madeleine and Jack lay side by side on his bed — with the door open, at Federico’s insistence, and with Federico complaining his way through a pasta in the kitchen — staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that Jack had stuck to his ceiling (so that they corresponded to the signs of the zodiac), and Jack explained that, as an Aries, he had courage, fire, and fertility, Madeleine would laugh, but as she laughed,
she would smile to herself, and think,
Behind that bravado you’ve been hurt, haven’t you? Over and over, by girls in the past. You’ve loved with intensity and passion, and have learned to hide your heartache, learned to press your handkerchief back into your pocket and pretend that you are okay.

And she would look at his legs in their blue jeans, wondering which one was lame. Then frown slightly in confusion, remembering neither was.

On the street, she’d approach Jack from behind, touch his shoulder, and he’d turn around with that expression he got when he saw her these days. It was startled, embarrassed, happy, bold, and uncertain all at once. She liked him when she saw it, she felt a rush of fondness, and then, maybe seeing her fondness, he would relax and start talking.

He did talk a lot.

In that way, he was like Byron.

I’ll miss him
, she thought sometimes,
when I go home.

But they could email.

Speaking of email, her friend Tinsels was taking a while to reply. But that was not a surprise. Tinsels was always floating around in pools reading books, or else out riding horses. She hardly ever checked email, and when she did, she forgot her password, or how you opened Gmail, and she’d often fling computers across rooms, demanding tech support. “I am
endearingly hopeless
with technology,” she liked to say.

Eventually, Tinsels would figure it out and reply.

As for Jack, the disbelief in his chest was like brooms jostling in a closet. That’s how much it confused him. He kept thinking of things to make the smile dazzle across Madeleine’s lovely face: He’d bring her raspberry slices from Fitzbillies, or a takeaway coffee with a peppermint chocolate resting on the lid. He found her a second-hand bike
basket and secretly attached it for her. The smile would come, and deep in his mind, somewhere behind the toppling brooms, he would whisper to himself in wonder: “She actually likes me.”

The words seemed to play on a chime bar.

She talked a lot about her life before, and her chin lifted in the air as she remembered. She’d skated and paraglided. She’d been expelled from boarding schools for running away on weekends. Her dad has always been angry about the running away: He sometimes wouldn’t talk to her for weeks. He must be
furious
right now, she said, sounding nostalgic.

But when her father wasn’t angry, she explained, it was like a light seemed to shine from inside him. People would turn and look at him when he passed. He was good at life, she said. In one night he could give a speech at a reception, play pool, get drunk, do a multi-million-dollar deal, go dancing, come home, and start again. He never got hangovers. It was true he was always busy, but he never stopped thinking of ways to entertain her and her friends. He’d climb up behind the puppet show to explain to her how the strings worked. Or, at the start of a meal, he’d shove something up his sleeve like lightning ready for a trick that he would play to entertain her, seven courses later, at the end of the meal.

“
Seven
courses?”

“It was a degustation,” she explained.

Jack felt like he had to run to keep up with Madeleine’s conversation.

Definitely, he had to be funny. The way she laughed at his jokes, it was like she was catching on to them with both hands and holding tight. Sometimes, her eyes seemed to move around his words, searching for the humour, and he thought it was like she was sizing up a shredded old tissue to see if she could use it for an origami rose.

It didn’t always work. Once, he was quoting lines from the movie
Monsters, Inc.,
which she hadn’t seen, and she was falling about laughing, and he told her how he and Belle used to have this thing where
they’d look at each other and shout, “Mike Wazowski!” — the name of a character in the movie — and Madeleine laughed even harder.

Then she stopped suddenly and reflected. “That’s not actually funny,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I guess it’s not.”

“I mean, I can see how it was funny at the time, but here? Now? It’s not.”

“You’re right,” he apologised.

She had those bright eyes, that way of twisting her foot, and often when they’d just sat down somewhere, she’d be jumping up again ready to go. She was always looking around, waiting for something.

He thought maybe she was waiting for her dad to come and whisk her away, and he worried about this. He’d dig his nails into his palms as a wish to the stars that Madeleine’s parents would never get back together.

He felt quite guilty about that.

It seemed unlikely, though, after all this time, that the dad would suddenly turn up. So that was a comfort.

Madeleine and Jack were not always together.

Madeleine spent time with her mother too, and reading. She was reading about Isaac Newton these days.

Also, although Jack did not know this, she rode her bike to the broken parking meter to send letters to Elliot Baranski.