And Both Were Young (19 page)

Esmée stuck out her lip and drew Gloria and Sally aside to read them her latest epistle from André, who was at school in Villeneuve.

After tea the term marks were read out in Assembly Hall. Flip was third for her class with Solvei Krogstad first, and Maggie Campbell second. Then there was a scramble to change for dinner, and when they got down to the dining room the huge fireplaces at either end were blazing and there was a big lighted Christmas tree in one of the bay windows. There was chicken for dinner, and all kinds of unaccustomed delicacies, and the tables were lit by candlelight, and Erna and Jackie called to Flip to come and sit with them so she didn’t have to stand miserably around looking for a vacant seat as she used to do whenever there were unsupervised tables. All through the meal they sang Christmas carols in all languages. As each group started a carol of its country, the others would try to join in, sometimes just humming along with the tune, sometimes picking up the words of the chorus. And the big room was full of warmth and light and happiness and Flip wanted to push back her chair and go about the room and hug everybody.

If it could just be like this always, she thought.

After dinner the faculty gave their annual play. They had written it themselves and in it they were all inmates of an old ladies’ home. They had chosen girls from the different classes to be matrons and maids. Liz Campbell, Maggie’s sister and one of the older girls, was the nurse, and convulsed them all by telling Fräulein Hauser she was just pretending to have a sore throat to get out of her walk. Kaatje van Leyden with a
black wool wig and a uniform borrowed from Miss Tulip was the matron and scolded Madame Perceval for not making her bed properly and having untidy drawers. The girls took off the teachers and the teachers took off the girls and the audience screamed with laughter during an all-too-brief half hour.

Then, while the actors got out of costume, there was a wild game of musical chairs played by the entire school, from the youngest to the oldest. Flip astonished herself and everybody else by being left by the last chair with Gloria, who had got there by the simple method of pushing everybody else out of the way, but finally Flip sat down in triumph while Gloria sprawled, defeated, but grinning, on the floor.

Then the phonograph was turned off and Mlle Desmoulins, the music teacher, took her place at the piano. They sang more Christmas carols and the school song, during which Martha Downs and Kaatje van Leyden went about quietly turning out all the lights until the room was lit only by the fire and the candles on either side of the piano.

Mlle Desmoulins started playing
Auld Lang Syne
and
Gaudeamus Igitur
, and the girls all crossed their arms and joined hands, making three big circles, one within the other, and sang in gentler voices than they had used all evening. And it did not seem strange to Flip, standing between Erna and Solvei, that tears were streaming down Erna’s cheeks and her mouth was trembling, so that she could scarcely sing, nor that there was a quaver in Solvei’s usually steady voice.

As they were getting ready for bed Erna turned to Flip and said with serious eyes, though her voice was bantering, “Flip, do something for me, will you?”

“Okay, what?”

“When you say your prayers tonight please pray that I
won’t have to go home for the spring holidays. I know they won’t let me stay with Jackie, but please pray that I can at least stay at school.”

“Okay, Erna,” Flip said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll pray for it. But I’ll pray that the holidays won’t be as bad as you think they will, too, if you don’t mind.”

“It won’t do any good,” Erna said, “but go ahead and pray for it.”

On the first day of the Christmas holidays Paul drove over with Monsieur Laurens to get Flip. He would not come into the school but waited outside, standing tall and straight beside the car, and as ready to flee as a mountain chamois. Most of Flip’s classmates were standing with her in the hall, surrounded by coats and parcels and suitcases, and when they heard Monsieur Laurens tell Flip that Paul was outside they all made excuses to drift toward the window.

“What a dream boy,” Flip heard Sally whisper to Esmée. “How did Flip ever get to know someone like that?”

“He must be younger than he looks,” Esmée whispered back, and Flip repressed a grin.

Jackie and Erna came over to say good-bye to her. “Have wonderful hols, Flip,” Erna said, shaking hands with her.

And Jackie squeezed her arm and whispered, “See you next year, Pill. Your Paul looks divine!”

Smiling and happy, Flip followed Monsieur Laurens to the car.

Paul took her up to her room in the gate house. It was a tiny cupboard of a place across the hall from Paul’s room, painted a soft blue, with immaculate white curtains at the
window. It was so small a room that the four-poster bed took up the entire space; there wasn’t even space for a bureau or a chair, and Flip was given a carved sea-captain’s chest in the hall in which to keep her things.

“And remember, don’t close your door, Flip,” Paul warned her. “The room’s so small I guess you wouldn’t want to, anyhow, but the latch is broken and you can’t open the door from the inside.”

“I’ll remember,” Flip promised.

As soon as Flip was unpacked she changed out of her uniform and into her ski clothes. Madame Perceval, who had stayed at the school until the majority of the girls were safely off on their various trains, had arrived, and they spent the day skiing. They took a funicular up the mountain and skied until dark, stopping at an inn for lunch. Then, at Flip’s favorite time of day, when the sky was an intense green-blue and the bare branches of the trees were a delicate filigree against it and the first stars began to tremble above the mountain, they skied back to the gate house.

“Are you having a good time, Flip?” Paul asked anxiously. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s wonderful!” Flip assured him. “I’m having a
beautiful
time.”

After dinner she brought her sketch pad and pencil downstairs with her and sat in front of the fire, idly sketching Paul and Monsieur Laurens. Monsieur Laurens was easy, with his peaked eyebrows, his long thin nose, and his pipe, and his slippers run down at the heels, but she could not caricature Paul.

“Let me see,” Paul said.

She showed him the pad. “I can’t do you,” she told him. “I can do your father, but I can’t do you. I can’t do Madame either. Why is it, Madame, that I can’t do you and Paul?”

Madame Perceval did not answer the question. Instead she said, “Someday you must try a real portrait of Paul. I’ll let you use my oils.”

“Oh, would you, Madame!” Flip cried. “I’d love to try. Paul would make a wonderful portrait. Would you really sit for me, Paul?”

Paul grinned rather shyly. “If you’d like me to.”

“Come on out in the kitchen,” Madame said, “and we’ll have a snack. And then it’s time for you two to be in bed, holidays or no holidays.”

After Flip was in bed, Paul crossed the hall and knocked on her open door.

“Hello,” Flip whispered.

“Are you sleepy, Flip,” Paul asked, “or shall we talk for a few minutes?”

“Come and talk.”

Paul had his eiderdown quilt wrapped around him and he climbed up onto the foot of the bed and sat at her feet.

“You look like an Indian chief,” Flip said, laughing.

Paul laughed, too, and then sighed. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“Me, too,” Flip said.

She kneaded her feet against her hot water bottle and pulled her blankets up under her chin and the moonlight came in the window and the snowlight and the room seemed very bright and cold. She burrowed into the pillows and Paul wrapped his eiderdown tightly about him so that only his face and a lock of dark hair showed, and they giggled with pleasure
at being there together, warm and comfortable and awake, with all the days and nights of the holidays stretching out before them.

“I’m hungry
again
,” Paul whispered.

“I am, too,” Flip whispered back.

“Are you hungry enough to do anything about it?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” Then, after a moment, Paul whispered, “Flip—”

“What?” She turned toward him, and gently his lips brushed against hers.

“I can talk about anything with you,” Paul said, and again his lips touched hers. “I know you care about me, and that you understand how I feel about not—about not remembering.”

The feel of Paul’s lips still tingled against hers. “Some day you’ll remember.”

“Will I? The way you remember your mother?”

She put her hand lightly on the softness of the down quilt that covered his shoulders. “You know, Paul, you’ve made remembering my mother a good thing. I think of her, now, and it still hurts that I’ll never see her again, but remembering is, well, it’s a privilege. You’ve made me realize that.”

“Tell me, then,” Paul urged. “Tell me some more of the good things you remember. What was she like? Was she like Aunt Colette?”

Flip shook her head. “No. And—yes. I mean, they both make you feel you can be and do more than you think you can. And they both make you feel they can make everything be all right. Or at least bearable. They don’t look a bit alike—Mother was very blond, but her hair was soft and curly, not a
bit like mine, and her eyes were like women’s eyes in Renoir paintings, soft and dark and tender. And she laughed a lot, and it sounded like spring. She told me lots of stories, and we read aloud together.”

“Go on,” Paul said. “Tell me something else. I think maybe, maybe hearing you tell about your mother might help me to remember. When you talk about her I get what feels like flickerings at the edges of my mind.”

“Well—” Flip thought for a moment. “She really did have a way of turning things around and making them all right. Once when we were spending the summer with my grandmother in Goshen, one of the houses in the center of town burned. The sirens went off in the middle of the night. The firemen—they’re all volunteers—got everybody out before anybody was hurt, and Mother took all the kids—there were four of them—home with us, and there they were in our kitchen, in their nightclothes, and Mother was feeding them sandwiches and cocoa, and making them all laugh, and they stayed with us, oh, for weeks, until they could get in their house again. I was little, maybe five, but I remember the way they all stopped being frightened the night of the fire just because Mother was there and they knew she’d make everything all right. They were alive, and their parents weren’t hurt, and—” she stopped as Paul raised his hand.

Then he shook his head. “For a moment I thought I remembered . . . but it went away. Go on. Please.”

“In the morning she used to come in to wake me, and her hair would be all around her, like a cape. Father painted her and painted her. She was about the only grown person he ever painted. He’s never painted Eunice. Only sketches. I’ll
show you a picture of her tomorrow. Mother, I mean. And she took me to movies and plays and concerts and museums. On weekends and holidays we played together like two kids.”

Paul did not respond, and Flip looked over the moonlight and there he was, sound asleep, his mouth a tiny bit open. She crawled out from under the covers and shook him gently. “Paul. Paul. You’d better wake up and go to bed.”

He rolled over sleepily and slid off the bed, and stood there, clutching his eiderdown, and swaying as though he were still asleep. “Good night, Flip. Thank you.” He bent down and kissed her again, then crossed the hall to his room.

Flip clambered back under the covers and put her feet against the warmth of the hot water bottle. She still felt the gentleness of his lips against hers as she slid into sleep.

A few days after the holidays began Flip and Paul were skiing alone. Madame Perceval had gone to spend the day with some friends in Ouchy, and Monsieur Laurens was deep into his book. Flip and Paul, their skis over their shoulders, had climbed a good distance up the mountain and were preparing to ski down when a voice behind them called, “Paul.”

They turned around and Flip saw the dark man with the too-brilliant black eyes.

“Paul,” he said again.

Paul stared at him blankly.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked.

“No,” Paul said.

“Alain, are you sure you don’t know me?”

“What do you mean?” Paul said. “My name is Paul Laurens. What do you mean?”

“Your name is Alain.” The man took a step toward them and Paul pushed Flip back a little. “Your name is Alain Berda. Are you sure you don’t know me?”

“Why should I know you?” Paul demanded.

“Because I am your father, Alain,” the man said.

For a minute Flip thought Paul was going to fall. All the color drained from his face and if he had not been holding on to Flip’s arm, he could not have remained standing.

“No,” he said. “No. You are not my father.” And his voice came out as hoarse and strange as Flip’s had on the morning she woke up with laryngitis.

“I know it’s a surprise to you,” the man said. “You are happy where you are and you don’t want to remember the past. But surely you must remember your own father, Alain.”

“You are not my father,” Paul repeated firmly.

Now the man came a step closer and Flip felt as though she were going to be sick from distaste and loathing of him. She put her arm firmly about Paul. “If Paul says you aren’t his father that’s that. Good-bye.”

The man smiled, and when he smiled, his face seemed even more frightening than when he was serious. “Perhaps you’re thinking that I’m a shabby sort of person to be your father, Alain, but if I’m shabby it’s because of the months and years I’ve spent searching for you.”

“How did you find me?” Paul asked, and his voice was faint.

“I heard that a child answering to my lost son’s description might be in a boarding school in Switzerland. You can imagine the months I’ve spent searching all the Swiss schools. I have spent hours watching the boys in the school up the
mountain. I even looked at the girls’ school down the mountain, hoping perhaps to come across someone who might have known you. That is when I first saw this young lady here.” He nodded at Flip.