“That is an outrageous silhouette,” Sally heard a familiar voice behind her cut through the music and rabble of the party. “Hackney’s getting a bit avant garde in his old age, isn’t he?”
“Roger!” Sally stared, stunned. “My god, Roger, I haven’t seen you in ages!” She dropped her voice lower. “I thought you’d all gone on holiday.”
“Oh. We did,” Roger said, his voice lilting the way it did whenever the conversation turned to a ticklish subject. “But we’re back now! Just in time for the spring collection debut. Could I get you a drink?” he offered, clearly trying to change the subject.
“No, I already had one,” Sally lied. “Where did you go?” she asked, dropping her tone as low as she could make it and still be heard over the music. “Are you all right? Where’s James?”
“I really can’t talk about it,” Roger demurred. “But we’re fine! Truly. It wasn’t anything like… that.” “That” being any number of possibilities in this town. “And I expect James is off pouting somewhere.” Roger glanced around to see if James was anywhere in earshot. “I took too long catching up with Cilla.”
“Should you be talking to me then?” Sally teased.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Roger chuckled with a resigned shrug. “I heard you opened your own chemist shop while we were gone. Not doing housecalls anymore then? Has Sally Boyle gone legitimate?”
“By all appearances,” Sally said. She opened her purse, took out a business card, and handed it over. “You can still get all my old products though.”
“Sally’s Interplanetary Travel Agency. Oh, that’s terribly clever! Wellington Wells does love its euphemisms, doesn’t it?”
“I knew you’d get it! Here, have some samples.” She reached into her tiny handbag and dug out a couple of her rocket-shaped pill bottles. “I know you two don’t really go on “trips” anymore since you started working for Dr. Faraday, but none of these will last more than a few hours so they shouldn’t get you in too much trouble.” She handed them over.
Roger took the bottles and his false smile grew into a real one, delighted by the novelty of them. He held one of the bottles between his finger and thumb and made a little blast-off noise, trailing it through the air in a launch arc. “These are fantastic! How did you ever think of these?”
“Oh, I… I used to be in rocket club,” Sally admitted. “When I was a kid. I thought maybe I could hurl myself off into space one day if I knew how the rockets worked. It was silly,” she preempted. “As if they’d ever let a girl near real rockets.”
“Nooo, that’s not silly at all. I always wanted to go to space too.”
“Really?” Sally asked.
“Well, not so much space itself so much as other planets, but yes! There’s so many fascinating cultures here on Earth, but imagine how much stranger and more magnificent they must be on entirely different planets,” he said wistfully. “I had meant to travel after I graduated from school. It’s a bit of a tradition in my family, to get some experiences after your education. But then the war happened and I never finished.”
“Is that why you learned so many languages?” Sally asked.
“The useful ones, yes,” he said. He said it with good humor, but his tone had an undercurrent of salt. “I wanted to be an adventurer. French, German, Spanish, those would have carried me through most countries. The more obscure languages, the dead ones, I learned those so I could read ancient texts for myself. One loses a lot of nuance in other people’s translations.”
Sally never would have guessed that Roger had ambitions like that. She knew he was well-educated, but she always imagined him as the boy getting reprimanded all day for talking in class. She found it difficult to envision him being studious about anything. He knew all those languages, yes, but she assumed it was just something he had a knack for and had fashioned into a party trick. He made for easy company because he kept things light and fun and always showed rapt interest in whoever he was talking to. It gave one the impression there wasn’t too much going on under that sailor hat of his, that his world existed externally and he had no interior. It made sense up until this moment because Sally figured you’d have to be simple and satisfied like that to end up with someone like James. Otherwise, Roger should be bored to tears.
She wondered now if he wasn’t. She herself had always thought she’d use her education, her chemistry, to escape Wellington Wells and yet here she still was, trapped as ever. Sally wondered if Roger, who wasn’t from the town originally, felt he had made a mistake in settling down here. Being a houseboy had to pale in comparison to where he’d thought he’d be in life by now. If he was discontent, he hid it well.
“Do you…” Sally hesitated. It was a deeply personal question and she wasn’t sure they were good enough friends for her to be asking it. She decided to chance it anyway. “Do you ever regret staying in Wellington Wells? After the war?”
Roger’s eyebrows furrowed into confusion for the briefest second before he caught himself. In that twitch, Sally thought he was looking more sharply at her than thinking about his answer, like she’d surprised him not with the question itself, but by being the one who was asking it. That was fair, Sally supposed. She too cultivated an appearance of flighty agreeableness, unburdened by complicated thought. Maybe he caught a glimpse of the depths she wasn’t expected to have in that moment too.
“No. Of course not,” he said breezily, but there was a tinge of gravel to his voice as if his answer caught on a corner on its way out.
Sally backtracked quickly to spare him. “Oh, obviously not! I don’t know why I asked,” she said, shaking her head as if to knock such a silly thought loose from it.
“Would you like to dance?” Roger asked abruptly, trying to change the subject again.
Sally felt way too heavy and off her center of balance for that. Someone might twist right into her too. “I’d love to, but my feet are killing me,” she deflected. She took a quick scan of the party. “Annie looks like she’s hoping someone will ask her to,” she said, subtly pointing to a woman leaning on the wall and trying to look available.
“I’d better go rescue her then,” Roger said, accepting Sally’s gracious exit and already turning to escape. “It was lovely to see you again.”
“Cheery bye,” Sally said, contemplative.
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