The Romeo and Juliet Code (8 page)

Take a tea tray to Captain Derek? How could I ever do that? I’d been here a whole month and a half and I’d never laid eyes on him. I had no idea who he was at all. After all this time, I had become, well, scared and rather shy to meet him.

British children are usually very brave. I saw many, many of them getting on trains in London, saying good-bye to their mums and dads, going alone to the countryside to get away from the bombs. And yet most of them didn’t cry. They kept a stiff upper lip, as Uncle Gideon would say, trying to pretend to be British. One day, Uncle Gideon had on a fake handlebar mustache and a silly riding jacket and he was horsing about in the library, teasing Auntie and me with his fake British accent, pretending he was on horseback and that he was going off hunting and all that nonsense. I did finally laugh, but only because I couldn’t help it. I did hope Captain Derek was more sedate.

I set the tray down for a moment and I tucked Wink under my arm and then I picked up the tray again. I just wasn’t going to go up there without Wink. So I climbed the stairs with the tea tray rattling in my arms, and with every step, I was thinking about that nice, big, fat Mr. Winston Churchill, our prime minister, who was keeping Britain strong and safe. Danny told me that he said to the British people as the war began, “People will say of the British joining the war, this was our finest hour.” Or something like that. But it wasn’t my finest hour just now. I was very nervous, not having ever met Captain Derek properly, and so was Wink.

I tried to imagine what a sea captain would look like as I approached the dark wooden door. I could hear jazzy, sad music as usual coming from in there and I thought I could smell medicine again and it was all a bit spooky and ever so strange.

I knocked lightly on the door. “Captain Derek?” I called out. I could only hear that song playing and the words clearly,

When the clouds roll by

and the moon drifts through

When the haze is high

I think of you.

I think of you.

When the mist is sheer

and the shadows too

When the moon is spare

I think of you.

I think of you.

“Captain Derek?” I called again. I turned the doorknob and stepped into the very dark room. The curtains were drawn across the windows. I looked at the bed and there was someone in it, but the blankets were pulled up over that someone’s head. It looked like Captain Derek had died and someone had covered him up the way they do with dead bodies. Hearing the sorrowful music and looking at the bed with the body in it all covered up, I thought I might faint, even though Uncle Gideon was always saying, “Fainting is fake, no one ever really faints. They just throw themselves on the ground to get attention.”

“Captain Derek,” I said and I set the tray on a little table by the bed. “I brought you some tea.” I forgot to mention the biscuits, but he didn’t answer anyway. I was about to call out to The Gram when a foot moved under the blanket. I saw it clearly. “Captain Derek,” I said, “what did you mean by ‘Yes, yes, and yes’? Would you care to say?”

“No,” said a voice, “not now. Please leave.”

“But we’ve got some nice things to eat, some sweets and a pot of English tea.”

“Sweets?” said the voice.

“Yes, lovely sugary things. Cookies.”

“Hand me one, then,” he said.

And I put a Romeo heart on the pillow and I saw some fingers snatch it down under the covers. Then I heard some munching and crunching. “I’ll have another,” he said.

“Come out and say hello first,” I said.

There was a long pause and suddenly the covers began to roll and shudder and I began to feel all quivery and nervous, and Captain Derek sat up straight and the covers fell back and there he was, sitting up before me.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said. And I closed my mouth quickly and almost bit my tongue.

There was Captain Derek and he was not an old man with a beard or even an adult at all. Captain Derek was a boy near my age, with brown hair and a kind of nice face, rather handsome, as Winnie would say.

“
You’re
Captain Derek?” I said. “But you’re a child like me!”

“I’m twelve,” he said. “And I’m not a child.”

“But why are you called a captain?” I said.

“Because I
am
a captain to them,” he said, pointing to a pile of metal soldiers lying on the rug. “I don’t play with them anymore
ever
. Really. I
used
to be their captain. That’s all. And anyway, why are you carrying around a bear? Isn’t that for little kids?”

“Oh, he’s not really just a bear,” I said. “He’s special. He’s Wink. I know it’s terribly strange. But he’s quite lovely and worth all the strangeness.”

“Do you always have that funny way of talking?” Captain Derek said.

“Well, to me,
you
have a funny way of talking. You sound very American,” I said.

“No, I don’t. I sound normal. You sound different,” he said.

“I suppose I am very different,” I said. “I’m British and I am planning on going home soon. I don’t belong here at all.” I sat down on a chair next to the bed, and I let go of Wink and he fell to the floor. Poor Wink always ended up being dropped somewhere and having to make do with staring at the underneath side of a chair.

Derek leaned against the pillows in his bed and reminded me of the handsome boy in the poem “The Land of Counterpane.”

When I was sick and lay a-bed

I had two pillows at my head.

“Do you always listen to music?” I asked.

“Yes, I love jazz and I love this song called ‘I Think of You.’ It’s my favorite. Gideon likes it too. But none of that matters because I’m not going to get out of bed ever again.”

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Why not?”

“Because of this.” He picked up his left arm and he dropped it on the tray and it rattled the teacups and knocked a Romeo cookie onto the floor. “You see this arm. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s paralyzed. I can’t feel it at all. That’s because I’ve had polio.”

“Oh, well,” I said, “you’ve got the other one.”

“That’s not the point. I can never join the army now. They’d never have me. And soon enough everyone will be joining the army. America will join the war and I want to be a part, but now I can’t.” Derek lay back down and covered his head with the blanket.

“Captain Derek,” I called, “do come out and talk.”

“No,” he shouted, “go away. Turn up the music and go away.”

And so I gathered up Wink and we stood there listening to that song playing over and over again and then we walked downstairs. We went out on the porch and sat down on the swing. I looked out at the gray, rumbling, anxious sea, a sea full of secrets and questions. And I pushed the swing with my feet, back and forth, back and forth, in and out of the shadows.

Aunt Miami and I had just picked a bouquet of wild roses and had brought them into the house. She was arranging each stem in a vase on the table. “These are so lovely, but they won’t last long. They fade in an afternoon,” she said in a very wistful way, glancing up at herself in the long mirror over the mantel.

“Auntie,” I said, “about Derek. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Oh, Flissy,” she said, turning round. Her eyes were not exactly blue but, rather, violet. “We didn’t want to frighten you, because polio is quite contagious. We hoped Winnie and Danny would leave you here. We didn’t want to give them any reason
not
to. And it’s fine now. Derek is all better.”

“But his arm will never be all better, and he won’t come out of his room. He won’t even get out of his bed,” I said.

Miami went to the window and stood with her back to me.

“But why didn’t Winnie and Danny tell me anything about Derek before I got here?” I said. “They didn’t know there even
was
a Derek.”

“Well, yes, twelve years ago, you know, there was a great rift among the Bathburns.”

“What is a rift?” I said.

“A great big terrible tear in the fabric of this family,” she said.

Just then, The Gram stopped at the doorway. Her face looked cloudy as if she was wearing a dark veil over her eyes. She shook her head back and forth.

“You’re wandering into trouble, Miami. Come to the pantry immediately. I need some help cleaning out the icebox,” she said.

After that, silence covered the room like fog, like the fog we got in the mornings here, drifting over the point. I sat down with Wink on the sofa. I had my arm round him because I knew how he was feeling. “There, there, Wink,” I whispered. “There, there.”

In the newspaper, I had seen photographs of people in Europe carrying suitcases, long lines of them leaving one country for another because of the war. They were called refugees and they didn’t belong anywhere either. Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else’s shoes.

It was already early July, and it was hot and windy and I spent a lot of time wading about alone in the sea. No one came to the house at all or rang up on the telephone. Sometimes, I would see Uncle Gideon taking his very long walk, but otherwise no one left the house much. The beach was empty a lot of the time because The Gram said everyone went to the other side of the point, where the ocean had bigger waves. Uncle Gideon had Wink’s bed all cut out, but he hadn’t had time to put it together yet, so it lay about in the library, looking like a big puzzle on the table.

The house and the Bathburns were also a puzzle to me, but at least now I had found Derek, though things had not improved with him at all. He had not put one toe out of his room or even out of his bed (except for trips to the loo), as far as I could tell. It was my job to bring up his tray of food every day. Every morning, I would set the tray down on the table across the room and say, “If you would like breakfast, Derek, it’s here on the table.”

He would peek out from the covers and say, “Bring it over here, please.”

Then I would say, “No.”

And he would say, “Yes.”

And I would say, “No.”

And he would say, “Yes.”

And then Uncle Gideon would pop his head in the door and say, “Oh, Derek, there you are! I was wondering where you were. Fliss was too, weren’t you, Flissy? We were sure you’d be outside on the beach by now, looking for old bottle caps like you used to do. Remember all those wonderful green ones you found last year?”

After Uncle Gideon had left, I would look over at Derek and whisper, “Uncle Gideon got another letter from my Danny. I know it, but he never lets me see them and he never admits who the letters are from. Do you think that strange? And do you know anything about the piano downstairs with those dreadful nails locking it shut?”

Derek would shake his head against the pillow and say, “I’ve never seen or heard Gideon play that piano. Flissy, you are stirring up the soup around here.”

“Am I?” I said.

I often thought Derek’s face looked rather dashing as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t have to do anything all day. He just lay there listening to music. He told me at least twice that he could never go and ask a girl for a spin on the dance floor. I said it was rubbish. And then he said, “You mean garbage.” And I decided all Americans were natural-born teasers and I told Wink so too.