And Both Were Young (22 page)

During the remainder of the holidays Madame Perceval took Flip and Paul on skiing expeditions every day. Once they got on the train in the morning and traveled all day. Flip was beginning to feel more at ease on her skis than she was on her own feet. When she put on her skis her clumsiness seemed to roll off her like water and her stiff knee seemed to have the spring and strength that it never had when she tried to run in a relay race or on the basketball court or on the hockey field. Flip and Paul grew brown and rosy and the shadows slowly retreated from Paul’s eyes and Flip looked as though she could be no relation to the unhappy girl who had moped about the school and been unable to make friends. Now when they met other young people on their skiing expeditions she could exchange shouts and laugh with them, safe in her new security of friendship with Paul, confidence in her skiing, and Madame Perceval’s approval and friendship. She tried not to think that someone new would be taking the art teacher’s place at school.

“By the way, Flip,” Madame Perceval said once. “When the question comes up at school about the ski meet, don’t mention my part in the surprise. Just say that it was Paul who taught you to ski.”

“All right, Madame,” Flip said, “if you think it would be better that way.”

“I do.” Madame Perceval looked after Paul, who had skied on ahead of them. “After all, the credit is really Paul’s anyhow.”

In the evenings after dinner they sang Christmas carols. Flip had taught them her favorite,
The Twelve Days of Christmas.
She had loved it when she was very small because it was such a long one, and when she was told that she could choose just one more song before bedtime, that would be it. So she loved it for its memories and now for its own charming tune and delicate words, from the first verse

On the first day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
A partridge in a pear tree . . .

to the twelfth verse when all the twelve gifts are sung with a glad shout.

On Christmas Eve Georges Laurens stirred himself from his books and they all went out and climbed up the mountain and brought home a beautiful Christmas tree. Flip and Paul had been making the decorations in the evenings after dinner, chains of brightly colored paper, strings of berries and small rolled balls of tinfoil, and Flip had carefully painted and pasted on cardboard twenty delicate angels with feathery wings and a stable scene with Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus, the kings and shepherds, and all the animals who gathered close to keep the baby warm. When the tree was trimmed they sang carols, ending up with
The Twelve Days of
Christmas.
Paul took Flip’s hand and threw back his head and sang.

On the twelfth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Twelve drummers drumming
Eleven pipers piping
Ten lords a-leaping
Nine ladies dancing
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five gold rings,
Four calling birds
Three french hens
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree!

On Christmas morning they sat in front of the fire and opened their presents. Paul saved his gift to Flip till the last and then held out the small square box shyly. Flip opened it and lifted out of pale blue cotton a tiny silver pear on a chain.

“I couldn’t find any of the gifts from the carol,” Paul said, “but this is a pear from the tree the partridge was in.”

Flip looked up at Paul’s eager face and her own was radiant. She wanted to say something to express her happiness but she couldn’t, so she just flung her arms wide as though she wanted to embrace them all.

“Why, Miss Philippa,” Georges Laurens said, “I never realized before what a little beauty you are. We should have Christmas every day!”

“Do you like the pear?” Paul asked.

Flip, her eyes shining, whispered, “More than anything.”

Toward the end of the holidays Flip persuaded Paul to stop off at the school chalet one day when they were skiing at Gstaad. She felt that perhaps it wasn’t very nice of her to want to show Paul off, but she couldn’t help wanting it.

“The really nicest ones went home for the holiday, which is too bad,” Flip told him. “Gloria’s all right. Oh, and I think Maggie and Liz Campbell stayed and they’re awfully nice. Maggie’s in my class and she’s always been polite and everything, not like some of the others, and Liz is two classes above. Jackie and Erna and Solvei are the ones you’ll like best, though. You’ll have to meet them when they come back.”

“Erna’s German, isn’t she?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” Flip answered quickly, “but Jackie Bernstein’s father was in a German prison near Paris for six months until he escaped and Erna is Jackie’s best friend. And you’ll like Erna anyhow because she’s going to be a doctor too.”

“Well,” Paul said, “let’s get this business at Gstaad over with before we worry about anything else. The important thing is for you to get used to the snow conditions at Gstaad before the ski meet.”

The trip to Gstaad went off very well. Flip was so preoccupied with putting Paul at ease that she forgot to be shy and awkward herself and astounded the girls by making jokes and keeping up a rapid stream of talk at the dinner table. And she and Paul kept having to remember that they mustn’t talk about skiing, or let on that they weren’t returning by train but had left their skis at the Gstaad station.

On the last night of the holidays Madame Perceval came up to say good night to them, and sat beside Paul on the foot of Flip’s bed.

“It’s good night and good-bye, my children,” she said. “I leave on the five thirty-two, tomorrow morning, and Georges will take me to the train and be back before you’re awake.”

“Couldn’t we see you off?” Flip begged.

“No, dear. I don’t like leave-takings. And in any case it’s best for you to be fresh and have had a good night’s rest before you go back to school. Work hard on the skiing. Paul will help you on weekends, though you don’t need much help anymore, and I expect to hear great things of that ski meet. So don’t disappoint me. I know you won’t.”

“I’ll try not to, Madame,” Flip promised, and she knew that both she and Madame Perceval meant more than just the skiing and the ski meet.

“Paul,” Madame said, “take care of your father and take care of Flip. I’ll keep in touch with you both and maybe we can all meet during the spring holidays. Good night, my children. God bless you.” And she bent down and kissed them good night and good-bye.

After the Christmas holidays, the exciting and wonderful holidays, there seemed to be a great difference in Flip and her feeling toward the school. As she ran up the marble staircase she no longer felt new and strange. She realized with a little shock that she was now an “old girl.” Almost every face she saw was familiar and the few new ones belonged to new girls who had replaced her as the lonely and the strange one. She stopped at the desk where Miss Tulip was presiding as she had on the day when Flip first came to the school with her father
and Eunice. Miss Tulip checked her name in the big register and handed her a letter. It was from her father.

“Oh, thanks, Miss Tulip,” she cried, and slit it open.

“My darling Flippet,” she read:

I told you not to worry if you didn’t hear from me for a week or so while I was traveling. I did get you off that one post card while I was in Paris having twenty-four hours of gaiety with Eunice and now I am in Freiburg in Germany and will be traveling about for a month or so around here and across the border in Switzerland. It seems a shame that I will be so close to you and not be able to come to you at once, but I missed so much time while I was in the hospital with that devilish jaundice that I must work double time now to try to make up. However, I
think
I may be able to manage to be with you for your ski meet. I shall try very hard to make it. I want to see you ski (but, darling, don’t worry if you don’t win any prizes. The fact that you have really learned to ski is more than enough) and I want to see your Paul. I don’t know where I shall be during your Easter holidays, but wherever it is I promise you that you will be there too and we’ll sandwich in plenty of fun between sketches. And don’t expect much in the way of correspondence from me for the next few months, my dearest. You’ll know that I am thinking of you and loving you anyhow, but my work often makes me unhappy and tired and when I stop at night I fall into bed and it is a great comfort to me to know that you are warm and fed and well cared for and that you have learned to have fun
and be happy. I know that it was difficult and I am very proud of my Flippet.

With the letter he enclosed several sketches and Flip thought that Madame Perceval would have liked them—except the ones he had done of his twenty-four hours in Paris with Eunice. Flip crumpled the Paris sketches up but put the others carefully in the envelope with the letter, slipped it into her blazer pocket and started up the marble stairs just as a new group of girls came into the hall and started registering with Miss Tulip.

On the landing she bumped into Signorina. “Have good holidays, Philippa?” the Italian teacher asked her.

“Oh, yes, thank you, Signorina, wonderful! Did you?”

“Lovely. But it is good to get back to our clean Switzerland. So we have lost our Madame Perceval. I shall miss her.”

“Yes,” Flip said. “Yes, Signorina.”

Erna and Jackie came tearing up the stairs. “Hello, Signorina! Hello, Flip!”

“Pill,
mon choux
, it’s good to see you!” Jackie cried as Signorina went on up the stairs. “When did you get here? Isn’t it wonderful to be back?”

“Flip,
meine Süsse
!” Erna shouted.

Perhaps it was not wonderful, but neither was it terrible.

A group of them congregated in the corridor, since Miss Tulip was downstairs and could not reprimand them. They all talked at once, laughing, shouting, telling each other about the holidays. Gloria could not wait to show them the black lace and silk pajamas Emile had sent her for New Year, nor to tell them about Flip’s visit to the school chalet with Paul.

“You should
see
Pill’s boyfriend,” she shouted, “you should just
see
him!”

“That child? We saw him,” Esmée said in a disinterested voice.

“Out the window the day the hols began? Don’t be a dreep, Es. He’s no child. You’re just jealous. Pill brought him to the chalet for lunch, and he’s dreamy, positively dreamy, isn’t he, Sal?”

Sally grinned and nodded. “He really is. I never thought Pill had it in her. She must have a whopper of a line after all.”

“All I can say is hurrah for Flip,” Maggie Campbell said. “I’d hate to see Esmée get her claws into someone as nice as that.”

Esmée turned angrily toward the laughing Maggie but Jackie broke in. “I went to six plays and two operas. What did you do, Esmée?”

Esmée announced languidly, still with a baleful eye on Maggie, that she had gone out dancing every night and worn a strapless evening gown.

“Strapless evening gown, my foot,” Jackie whispered inelegantly to Flip. “She’d look gruesome in a strapless evening gown.”

Solvei had spent the holidays skiing with her parents. “I bet
I
could teach you to ski, Flip,” she said.

Oh, horrors, Flip thought. What shall I do if she really wants to try?

Later that evening Erna pulled Jackie and Flip out of the common room and onto the icy balcony, whispering, “I have something to tell you, but it’s a secret and you must promise never to tell a soul.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Flip said, thrilled to be included in a secret that Erna was sharing with Jackie.

“Jure et crache,”
Jackie said, and spat over the balcony, imitating the tough boys on the city streets.

Erna was satisfied. “Well, it’s something I learned during the holidays,” she started. “Maybe you know it already, Flip. It’s about Madame Perceval.”

Jackie grabbed Erna’s arm. “Don’t tell me it’s the story of Percy’s past!” she almost shrieked.

Erna nodded. “You’re
sure
you won’t tell anybody?”

“I said
jure et crache
, didn’t I?” And Jackie spat over the balcony again. Unfortunately in her excitement she had not seen Miss Tulip walking below, and the matron jumped as a wet spray blew past her face.

“
Who
is up on the balcony!” she exclaimed.

“Please, it’s only us, Miss Tulip,” Jackie called down meekly.

“I might have known it,” Miss Tulip said, craning her neck and looking up at them. “Naturally it would be Jacqueline Bernstein and Erna Weber. And
with
Philippa Hunter. I am sorry to see you keeping such bad company, Philippa. Get back indoors at once, girls, or you’ll catch your deaths of cold, and you may each take a deportment mark.”

They retired indoors, Erna sputtering, “The old hag! On the first day after the hols too. No one else would have given us a deportment mark.”

But Jackie was giggling wildly. “I spit on her! I spit on Black and Midnight.” Then she said seriously, “Percy would never have given us a deportment mark for that. I don’t know how we’ll ever get on without her. School won’t be the same. Go on about what you were going to tell us about her, Erna.”

“I can’t in here. They’d see we were having a secret and all come bouncing about. We’ll have to wait till Gloria goes to brush her teeth,” Erna said, looking around as a girl with beautiful honey-colored hair curling all over her head opened the glass doors and came into the common room, glancing diffidently about her.

“Can you tell me—” she started.

Gloria, anxious to prove that
she
was an old girl, went dashing across the room to her. “Hello, are you a new girl? The seniors’ sitting room is on the next floor, just over the common room.”

“I’m Miss Redford, the new art teacher,” the girl said, smiling warmly. “I was looking for someone by the name of Philippa Hunter.”

“Oh. That’s me. I mean I.” Flip stepped forward and Gloria retired in confusion.

“Oh, hello, Philippa. Could I speak to you for a moment?”