The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  On Tuesday afternoon Mrs. Bryant dispatched me to clean the windows in the library. There were six of them, stretching floor to ceiling, the upper panes far out of reach, but I had learned not to question my duties. I was kneeling by the first one, wearily rubbing the glass, when a voice said, “Hello.”

  I jumped to my feet, afraid I had been caught in yet another crime, and found myself facing the girl who had interrupted Mr. Waugh. Her pale skin only made her eyes look larger and darker. Several strands of thick brown hair had escaped her Alice band, and a greyish stain marked the bodice of her tunic. When she stepped closer, I saw that she favoured her right leg. “I’m Miriam,” she said, holding out her hand. “You’re Gemma, aren’t you?”

  “How did you know?” No one had used my Christian name since I left Yew House.

  “You told us the day you arrived. I agree with what you said about the third servant. People shouldn’t be punished for no reason.” She was still offering her hand. Slowly I held out mine. “You’re cold,” she said. “You poor thing.” She began to rub my chilly fingers with her warm ones.

  “I’m a working girl,” I said quickly, wanting to fend off any misunderstanding.

  “I know.” Her brown eyes didn’t waver. “I’m sorry you have to work so hard. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I can’t do gym”—she gestured towards her leg—“so I have library duty. I check to make sure the books are in alphabetical order. It’s just something to keep me busy.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen, nearly fourteen. I was ill for a year, and then I did badly on arithmetic. That’s why I’m older than the other girls. How old are you?”

  When I said nearly eleven, Miriam nodded and said she thought so. “It would never do to have a working girl in Primary Six. You seem very good at sums.”

  So even my being moved up two years—how pleased I had been when Miss Bryant broke that news—was part of her scheme. But Miriam’s smile dulled my dismay. “I am good at sums,” I said, “but in other subjects I’m falling further behind every day. I’ll never catch up.”

  “Yes, you will. The holidays are nearly here, and you’ll see, everyone slacks off. I’ll help you. Now we’d better get back to work. Mrs. B. often comes to check on me. She knows I’m easily distracted.”

  I wanted to ask more questions: Why would she be at Claypoole in the holidays? Would she really help me? But she limped away to the far corner of the room and set to work as if alone; I followed her example. I was polishing the fourth window when the door opened quietly. Mrs. Bryant liked to steal around in the hope of catching wrong-doers. Miriam and I both curtseyed.

  “Back to work, girls.” Smiling silently, she observed our handiwork before offering advice. “Goodall, it will go faster if you pull out all the books that are out of order first. Hardy, has no one taught you to clean windows? The edges must be done thoroughly. You’ll need a kitchen stool for the upper ones. But even with a stool,” she added, “you are too small. You should not have been given this task.”

  She uttered this last remark as if some stranger had sent me to the library. After making a note on her clipboard, she told me to finish the current window and go and clean the music room. As soon as the door closed, I whispered to Miriam, “Will you really help me catch up?”

  “Yes, but please don’t talk now. You’ll get us both in trouble.”

  If sorrows never come singly, perhaps that is also true of acts of kindness. That evening Cook summoned me to put the food away. It was a task normally performed by older girls, and I felt additionally persecuted when she handed me a tray of eggs and led the way to the larder, a locked room at the back of the kitchen. But as I set the eggs on the shelf, I smelled a familiar fragrance. There sat a steaming bowl of stew.

  “Look what you found,” said Cook. “The idea of giving a girl your age nothing to eat all day. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  She stepped out of the room. As the door closed behind her my heart began to race—the larder was no bigger than the sewing-room—but I perched on a crate of onions and tried to eat slowly. My uncle had told me that prisoners or castaways when rescued often ate too fast and became sick. The stew was a standard at the school, and the regular girls complained about the turnips and greyish meat, but I savoured every mouthful.

  Miriam’s description of the holidays proved correct. The Bryants disappeared to their house in the nearby town of Coldstream, and most of the other teachers left to visit relatives and friends. Several of the working girls, including the dreaded Findlayson, also went home. The rest of us were allowed to mingle more freely with the few regular pupils, like Miriam, who stayed at the school. Ross organised the spring-cleaning every morning. Later in the day, if it was fine, she made up teams for rounders and hockey. While these games were in progress Miriam and I would sit over our books in the common room. She was not a great scholar, but she was a patient teacher and made sure that I understood each lesson. She forced me to recite the two Shakespeare sonnets they’d studied in English until I was word-perfect. When she was satisfied with my efforts she showed me the scales she knew on the piano.

  In return I tutored her in arithmetic. She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2, or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls. Mrs. Harris had told her she was stupid so often that she had given up trying to work through even the simplest problem and instead guessed wildly, expecting to be wrong. I tried to be as patient with her as she was with me.

  Sometimes as we studied, Ross loitered nearby, and once when we were doing long division I asked her to join us. I knew from watching her attempts to double a recipe for Cook that she struggled with both reading and arithmetic. “I did this stuff ages ago,” she said, but she sat down at the table. Miriam slid over a page torn from her notebook and a pencil. I set a problem, 132 divided by 11, which I knew they would both find hard. Miriam managed to take 11 from 13. Ross chewed the end of the pencil.

  “Come on, Ross,” I said smugly. “What’s the first step?”

  “I don’t need to learn your stupid baby sums.” Flinging down the pencil, she ran from the room.

  “Good riddance,” I said as the door banged behind her.

  But Miriam’s eyes grew wide. “She scares me.”

  From my first day at the school Ross had dominated my life. She bullied me in small ways, telling me to hurry up, not to be such an idiot, and she protected me in large ones. I had never stopped to wonder what I had done to earn her attention, nor whether she might want anything in return. Now I assured Miriam that there was nothing to worry about; like the rest of us, Ross hated Miss Bryant; she had even tried to run away.

  “I remember that,” said Miriam. “She looked so hang-dog when the police brought her back. Still, people don’t always say what they mean.”

  “So,” I prompted, “eleven from thirteen leaves two?”

  Miriam too had lost her mother, although not until the summer she was four. I envied her her hazy memories of being sung to sleep and of tending some tall blue flowers in the garden. Since then she had been brought up by her father, a livestock auctioneer. They lived in Galashiels, the town I had seen from the train.

  “All the farmers say that if anyone can get you a fair price for a cow it’s Goodall. He likes cattle more than children.”

  He had enrolled her at Claypoole when she was eight, the autumn after she broke her leg. She’d been visiting a farm with him when a horse kicked her.

  “I hate horses,” I said. “Big, stupid animals. Did it hurt?”

  Miriam smiled. “I like that you hate them too. Half the girls here are horse-mad. At first it didn’t hurt much more than the time I fell off the garden wall, but it got worse each day instead of better.”

  Her father, she explained, was afraid of doctors—he insisted they�
�d killed her mother—and he hadn’t taken her to one until she finally collapsed on the stairs. “He felt terrible when they showed him the X-ray. I was on crutches for four months.”

  She went home only twice a year, for a week at Christmas and two weeks around her birthday in July. Don’t you mind? I asked, but she said no. The house was freezing, her father was mostly gone, and she’d come home from her first term at Claypoole to find that her beloved spaniel, Spencer, had been put to sleep. She looked so sad as she said this last part that I told her one of Mrs. Marsden’s stories about a selkie, a seal-woman. “She had brown hair and brown eyes like you,” I said. “Her name was Selina and she applied to be a housekeeper to a man with one daughter.”

  Miriam was almost four inches taller than me, and three years older, but most of the time I forgot these differences, and I was sure she did too. One evening, though, when I described my aunt and how she’d gradually banished me from the family, Miriam suggested she might be jealous. “Like Titania with Oberon,” she said. We had been reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  “Jealous? What could she be jealous of? I didn’t have a changeling boy, or anything else she wanted.” I scratched my calf, wiped my forehead. How could Miriam be so mistaken?

  “I’m only guessing,” she said calmly. “As you get older, Gemma, you’ll understand things that don’t make sense now. Think how much you’ve changed since you left Iceland. You’re going to change that much again in the next ten years.”

  She had never before pointed out my youth, and I was stung. “I’ll be older soon,” I said. “My birthday’s next week. Tell me the things I don’t know.”

  Miriam patted my knee. “Don’t be grumpy. I’m just saying that people’s feelings aren’t like arithmetic; they don’t always add up. As for telling you, I don’t know if I can. Some things you can learn from other people and books; some you have to live through. I’ll never know what it’s like to live in Iceland and have feet and feet of snow.”

  She said all this so nicely that I stopped being upset and told her about the “No man is an island” sermon my uncle had been working on when he died. “He said words are the stepping-stones between one person and another. Sometimes they’re under water and you have to wait for them to surface again.”

  “I like paddling,” said Miriam. Then she quizzed me about Puck’s role in the play.

  The next week, when the Bryants were away and Ross had the other girls playing hockey, I led Miriam to the working girls’ bathroom. “There’s something I want to show you,” I said. While she laboured up the stairs I ran ahead to pull my suitcase from beneath the bed. For a moment I was terrified that my precious photographs would be gone—my penknife had been stolen the week after I arrived—but I reached into the lining, and there they were. I took only the one of my uncle and mother together. Downstairs Miriam was leaning on a basin, breathing hard. I asked if she needed her inhaler.

  “No, I just took the stairs too fast.” She had by now explained to me about her asthma and how, when an attack came, it felt as if a giant hand was squeezing her chest. The inhaler helped loosen the hand.

  “How pretty your mother is,” she gasped. “And your uncle looks as if he’s just about to laugh. You can see they’re brother and sister, can’t you?”

  I had not dared to look at the photograph since I came to Claypoole. Now, gazing over Miriam’s shoulder, I saw my uncle’s kind smile, my mother’s bright eyes, and behind them the azaleas in bloom. “Do you have a picture of your mother?” I asked.

  “It’s on the wall above my bed in Galashiels. When I go there in July I’ll bring it back to show you. We’d better go downstairs and look busy.”

  Despite her dreaminess Miriam was good at remembering that we had to be careful. She set off towards the library and I carried the photograph back to its hiding place. No one could ever replace my uncle, but as I slipped the suitcase under the bed I cherished the confidence with which Miriam had spoken of a shared future. That evening in the common room she handed me a small package. “Happy birthday, Gemma.”

  When I removed the wrapping paper I found a pocket guide to Scottish birds.

  “Sometimes you’re not quite sure what a bird is,” she said shyly. “I thought this would help and that the other girls wouldn’t try to steal it.”

  “Thank you. It’s exactly what I wanted.” I told her then about my favourite book, Birds of the World, and how I had had to leave it behind at Yew House. “But this is much more useful,” I added.

  Miriam still worked in the library over the holidays and she had persuaded Mrs. Bryant to let me assist her after I finished my other tasks. We were alphabetising the history section one afternoon when she asked if I knew about Cecil.

  “Who’s Cecil?” I said.

  “The Mintos’ younger son. He died in the Second World War.” When she first arrived at Claypoole, she went on, there had been several sightings of a young man in a bloody uniform wandering the lower corridors. She herself hadn’t seen him until last year, when she’d discovered him in this very room, sitting in a chair by the window, reading. She pointed to the window in the far corner. I asked if he’d said anything and she said no. “He just smiled at me, and went on reading.”

  “So how did you know he was a ghost?”

  “I didn’t. He was wearing ordinary clothes, a white shirt and dark trousers, and I thought he was someone’s brother, visiting the school. But one minute he was turning a page and the next there was just the book, lying on a chair.”

  I reached for a history of the Tudors, and asked what he’d been reading, and whether she’d seen him again.

  “Kim. It’s a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Sometimes I get this feeling that he’s waiting for me, and I come here and find him. But that hasn’t happened in months.” She held up a biography of Oliver Cromwell with a portrait of a long-faced, unsmiling man on the cover. “This could be my father,” she said.

  “He looks cross, but finish telling me about Cecil. Does he ever talk to you?”

  Miriam slipped the book into place. Then she fussed with her Alice band in a way that made her hair stick out even more. “I’m worried you’ll think I’m balmy,” she said.

  I was about to tell her what had happened in the sewing-room, but something cautioned me not to, almost as if the figure itself had appeared to tug my sleeve. “I don’t think you’re balmy,” I said. “What does he say?”

  “Ordinary things. Last summer we spoke about how warm it was and how nice it would be to have an ice cream. He likes strawberry; I prefer vanilla. Another time he talked about being on the convoys; how he’d seen whales and icebergs. He said when a submarine showed up on the radar everyone on the ship held their breath.”

  “Didn’t he die on a ship?”

  “Yes.” Miriam blinked slowly. “But it seemed rude to mention he was dead. Like asking a grown-up how old they are.”

  I stepped over to the fiction shelves H–N. When I pulled out Kim, the gold-edged pages were covered with dust. “Did you read it?”

  “I tried. I waited until I thought he must be finished and then I borrowed it but I got stuck after twenty pages. Maybe you could read it and tell me the story.”

  Before I could slip the book into my tunic pocket Miriam began to briskly straighten volumes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door inch open.

  In all our conversations I never spoke of Mr. Donaldson; I could not bear to voice the enormity of what I’d done. Then, on the last day of the holidays, it was unusually warm, and Ross sent me to weed the herbaceous border on the lower terrace. Miriam came to help. A cuckoo was calling nearby, sweet and insistent. We both called back, and it fell silent. As I dug up a dandelion, I told her how the maid at Yew House had believed that dandelion milk cured warts.

  “I should tell my father,” she said. “He has warts. I don’t mean to be nosy, Gemma, but I can’t help wondering what you did to make Miss Bryant so cross.”

  I could easily have offered a small fib�
�I’d been cheeky, or untidy—but, to my amazement, the words I had thought myself so reluctant to utter were bubbling forth. I told her the whole story, beginning with Mr. Donaldson’s visit to my aunt and his advice to me and then describing how I had found the box and taken it to him for safekeeping. When I described what had happened with the letter, Miriam exclaimed.

  “Oh, Gemma, anyone could have told you that Mr. Milne is Miss Bryant’s slave. Cook would have posted the letter. Miss Bryant has something on her too, I don’t know what, but she enjoys having little secrets.”

  I had been braced for Miriam’s censure, but the news that there had been a safe way to send the letter was more than I could bear. I drove my trowel into the soil until she pointed out that I was uprooting a primula. “There must be something I can do,” I said, restoring the dishevelled plant. “Mr. Donaldson shouldn’t lose his job because of me.”

  “Start weeding,” said Miriam, edging away.

  Suddenly Miss Bryant was standing over us. For several minutes she watched in silence from behind her large dark glasses. I crawled along the border, piling up the weeds in small heaps. Miriam tugged at a shoot of willow herb.

  “Stand up, girls.”

  We did, offering awkward curtsies to her black stare. Her blue dress with its white collar and belt was like one my aunt had worn the previous summer.

  “I have been observing the two of you,” she said, “and I see that you’ve formed an unhealthy relationship. Goodall, your father is not paying for you to fraternise with working girls. Tomorrow you’ll move into Form One. Miss Seftain will coach you on what you’ve missed. Your father will be pleased that you’re catching up with your age group at last. Hardy, this border will be finished before you re-enter the school. Be sure to dig up every inch of dandelion root so they don’t grow back.”

  A few weeks ago I would have told her that I was due in the kitchen at four. Now I bobbed my head and resumed my digging. I did not dare to watch as she led my friend away, but I took some small satisfaction in leaving, unmolested, a piece of each dandelion. Let the plants grow back, boisterous and yellow.