The Romeo and Juliet Code (7 page)

Suddenly, I stopped short. I noticed for the first time that under piles of newspapers and magazines in the far corner was a piano, one of those great black shiny ones shaped like the continent of South America on three legs. I went over to it and I saw that the lid of the piano, the part that covered the keys, was nailed shut with great big nails driven into the wood. I’d never seen a piano nailed shut before. I was just reaching out to feel the lid and the places where the nails had gashed and scarred the wood when, suddenly, Uncle Gideon stood up. He had been sitting deep behind a pile of books and I hadn’t seen him. “Please!” he shouted out, “Please stay away from that piano. Don’t touch it and don’t go over there again.”

I backed away towards the door.

“Oh, I am sorry, Fliss,” he called after me. “I didn’t mean to bark. I don’t bark usually. You must know that by now. I was just angry for a moment. I was caught off guard. It’s not you,” he said. “I’m not angry at
you
.”

I hurried out of the room and ran down the hall to the dining room. I found a big, high-backed stuffed chair and I turned it round to face the wall. I sat staring at the wallpaper.

“Flissy?” Aunt Miami said. “Are you there?”

I hadn’t realized she was also sitting in the room in another high-backed chair. I never knew what to expect in this house. I very much wanted to go home. Now more than ever. So I didn’t answer her. I turned my head away, tracing the tangled vines on the wallpaper. All the vines were covered with thorns, and the roses seemed squeezed and confused among the leaves.

Miami kept saying, “Flissy, are you okay?”

Finally, I said, “I was only looking at something in the library, but it bothered Uncle Gideon.”

“Ah,” said Miami, “the piano.”

“Yes,” I said. “Why is it nailed shut? Why was he so angry?”

“Oh, Flissy,” said Miami, “you are too young. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I
would
understand,” I said, standing up and stomping about.

“You would?”

“Yes,” I said. “Truly.”

“Well, my brother Gideon is a wonderful pianist. He can play anything and everything. But he doesn’t want to play the piano anymore. So he nailed it shut.”

“Why?” I said.

Miami shook her head. She leaned over and tugged on my braids twice. She touched the end of my nose three times. Then she simply got up and left the room.

Most eleven-year-old girls are terribly posh and in England some of them even go round to parties and dance with lovely boys from Eton. My chum Lily Jones knew an eleven-year-old girl who wore lipstick in secret and had her toenails painted fire engine red. I wanted to be one of those girls; that’s what I told Wink. But Wink wasn’t listening. He was crying instead because there were so many secrets here, and everything seemed so odd, making him feel like a bear without a country. He felt he didn’t belong anywhere. I rocked him in my arms and I said, “There, there, Wink, don’t cry,” and soon I was crying too, because Wink’s tears always went straight to my heart.

I was not sure about anything anymore. As summer drew on, I was not sure what would happen in September with my education. Normally, in England, most eleven-year-olds had taken the Eleven Plus Test. If you failed, you had to go to Secondary Modern and learn how to be an automobile mechanic or something like that. But my school had closed because of the war and so no one had taken the test. Most children had been sent to the country to be away from the bombing anyway. I was one of the last ones to leave, except for my chum Lily Jones and her little brother, Albert. They were still in London because their mum was afraid to send them off.

I heard The Gram say earlier this morning in the hall before I got up, “Well, Miami, at least he’s no longer contagious. We must be grateful for that.”

Now I took a peek out my very-high-up windows and I could see the postman rounding a hill, so I took off like a bomber ripping down the stairs and flying out on the porch till The Gram called out, “Flissy B. Bathburn, where are your British manners?”

I wanted to get there before my uncle Gideon did. I wanted to see if we got another letter in an airmail envelope. Uncle Gideon was already in the ocean, having a morning swim. I could see him bobbing up and down in the cold water like a lonely seal, so I ran extra fast to get there first. The postman looked very awake this morning and handed me another letter from Portugal addressed to Uncle Gideon. Another one.

Uncle Gideon was out of the water in a flash, and most of the time he was terribly hard to get out of the water. Usually, The Gram would look out the window at Gideon in the sea and she’d say, “Bathburn is in the bathtub again.” Then she would call out, “Gideon, out of the water now, dear. You’re going to freeze or wrinkle up like a prune!”

Today, Uncle Gideon was already drying off. He zipped over to the postman and me. “Flissy, I’ll have that. NOW!” he said, pulling the letter away from me. Then, when he had the letter firmly in his hands, he cheered up again and said, “Oh, Flissy, forgive me. But as you can see, it
is
addressed to me. Are you all right? What do you say, Fliss?”

“It’s from Danny,” I said again. “I know it.”

“Nosy as a rule, are they, the British?” said Uncle Gideon, pretending to steal my nose, holding his thumb between his two fingers and waving it round trying to trick me.

“Not at all,” I said. “Not normally.”

I sat down on the last wooden step and stared out at the sea. It was calm today like a quiet mirror, like the long mirror upstairs above the marble-top chest of drawers in The Gram’s room. When I had been up in that room yesterday, I had seen a framed photograph sitting there of Gideon and Danny and Miami when they were children. I had opened a top drawer, hoping to find a picture of Captain Derek, but all I found was Winnie and Danny’s wedding photo stuffed way at the back. It showed them standing on a white English chalk cliff with the sea below, Winnie’s bridal dress blowing about and Danny holding on to the corsage on his lapel. Both of them looked so happy. I turned the photo over and on the back it said,
“Mother, I’m sorry, you know that. I could never have imagined any of this. Miss you all. Love, Danny.”

I leaned my head against the railing, and Uncle Gideon hurried past me on the sandy steps. How was I going to read that letter? How was I going to see either letter when he always locked the door to that room? Suddenly, I wished that I wasn’t a child anymore because no one ever tells children anything. Children are just supposed to guess at things, and that’s very confusing because some children might guess wrong. They do in school all the time. I remember when Jillian Osgood guessed how many wellies were standing in the hall at school and she was off by two dozen.

Perhaps there would be a moment, I decided, when Uncle Gideon might forget to lock the door, just once. Just once. And then I hurried up the steps to tell Wink what I was thinking, because I didn’t want Wink to feel left out and sad and full of curiosity because of unanswered, mixed-up questions.

On the way up to my room, I was just hurrying past Captain Derek’s door when I spotted a folded piece of paper sticking out from under it. At first I thought I had imagined it as I ran past, and I had to stop and back up, like the Packard screeching into reverse when The Gram went down the wrong street in Bottlebay. A piece of paper? A note?

I quickly reached down and snatched it up and I couldn’t wait to open it. So I did.

It said,
An answer to your questions, YES. YES. AND YES
.

“Flissy dear, Miami is making Romeo cookies. Would you care to help?” The Gram called from the kitchen. That kitchen in Bottlebay, Maine, was always as noisy as the sea, with pots banging and water hissing through the pipes and a teapot whistling with no one tending to it and glasses clinking and people talking. Someone was always in that kitchen poking about, making something. Once in the middle of the night, I slipped down the stairs and heard The Gram and Uncle Gideon whispering in the pantry together. Their voices sounded rapid and anxious. “Well, I’ll be making a phone call to Donovan’s office in the morning when everyone goes out, okay?” Uncle Gideon said. Another night, I heard him whispering to The Gram, “And what do we do about Flissy when the war is over?”

“Pop round, Fliss,” called Uncle Gideon now. “Isn’t that what you Brits say over there? ‘Pop round.’ We need an icer. Are you a good icer?”

“What’s a good icer?” I said.

“Someone who’s willing to put pink goop all over those silly Romeo cookies,” said Uncle Gideon, rubbing his hands together.

“Oh, I’m ever so good at biscuits,” I said.

“Biscuits?” said Uncle Gideon.

“Yes, they’re sweet and sugary and you put them in the cooker and they come out all crisp and warm and you eat them with tea,” I said.

“A cooker?” said Uncle Gideon. “A cooker is a hot day around here. We say ‘Lovely day. It looks like it’s going to be a cooker. Would you like a cookie?’”

“Oh, but that’s silly,” I said.

“Oh, well, Fliss, we’ll never get things straight, will we? But we’ll keep trying, won’t we? Stiff upper lip and all that,” said Uncle Gideon, running his finger into the pink icing. The Gram swatted his arm, and he pulled his finger out of the icing and licked it anyway.

Then he got suddenly serious and said, “Flissy, can you smile for me? You haven’t smiled much. You have such a lovely smile. Do you know that?”

I turned my head away.

“She misunderstands your jokes, Gideon. He’s very kindhearted,” said The Gram to me, “really and truly.” Uncle Gideon just stood there with a dab of pink icing on the end of his nose, his folded hands resting on the table before him.

I tasted part of a cookie. Then I started to help Aunt Miami dribble pink, pink, ever so pink icing all over the Romeo cookies. They were all shaped like hearts. And it wasn’t Saint Valentine’s Day. It was a sunny day in July. And it was going to be a cooker.

The whole time I was smooshing that pink goop all over those hearts, I was thinking about Captain Derek and the note he wrote back to me.
Yes, Yes, and Yes
was all it said. But that was all it needed to say. Yes, Uncle Gideon cheated at Parcheesi. I thought so. Even though he seemed cheerful and sweet and was making Wink a new bear bed. Even though he was right about Frances Hodgson Burnett having written a ripping good story for children. And yes, Uncle Gideon was hiding something from me.

I just kept smearing pink on all the Romeo hearts, and the whole while I was thinking about Winnie and Danny. I wanted to explain to all the Bathburns how wonderful they were. I wanted to say that Winnie and Danny were so very intelligent. Winnie could embroider anything and faster than lightning and she could read a whole book in a day, while it was taking me two weeks to finish
A Little Princess
. And Winnie could speak three languages with a lovely accent. Someone came to our flat to make sure her French accent was perfect. The woman was called a coach. Danny was like that too with French, German, and Italian. They met at a posh university in England called Oxford and they studied things like that. And if I should ever talk with an American child who would say that I do not have parents at all, I would show them the photo of Winnie and Danny and me walking across the body of the Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex County, England.

We had just finished the last Romeo heart and there wasn’t enough icing and so it only covered half a heart, and Uncle Gideon made a joke about it being a halfhearted sort of Romeo, and Auntie got her revenge by taking a wooden spoon still covered in pink icing and smooshing it on Uncle’s cheek and then he began to chase her with a sifter full of flour, and they ran out onto the porch and down the steps towards the sea.

The Gram rolled her eyes at me. “Can you believe that girl is thirty-two years old? You wouldn’t know it, would you,” she said. Then she went on preparing a tray with two teacups and a pot of tea and a plate of Romeo hearts and two napkins. Then she lifted the tray off the table and handed it to me, saying, “Flissy dear, take this up to Captain Derek, will you? And cheer him up if you can. He’s been a bit sick.”