The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  We passed a sign for the village of Birsay. Nearby stood a red sandstone ruin, several storeys high. “Not every pianist drinks,” I said, though my only evidence was the music teacher at Claypoole, who had played even “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” in a restrained fashion. “With winter coming,” I persisted, “Nell needs indoor hobbies.” He wasn’t, I noted gladly, suggesting that either she or I leave Blackbird Hall.

  “She can collect stamps. Make papier-mâché animals. Learn to cook. Practise cartwheels. Here we are. The Brough of Birsay.”

  He pulled onto the verge and pointed to an island a few hundred yards offshore. From this angle, with its sheer cliffs and smooth, grassy top, it resembled a lopsided cake with a single candle, a lighthouse just visible in the centre. At the side nearest Birsay the cliffs sloped down to the sea in a tumble of rocks and seaweed. A causeway, wide enough for a small cart, ran between the island and the mainland.

  “We’re going to see the puffins,” Mr. Sinclair announced. “At least I hope so. Sometimes they’re shy.”

  He slung the knapsack over his shoulder and led the way down the rocks and onto the causeway. I followed, trying to avoid trampling on the limpets and barnacles. Halfway across something caught my attention. A seal, drifting in the bay, was studying me with large dark eyes.

  “Hello,” I said, waving. “I hope you catch a hundred delicious fish.”

  “I don’t think you need worry about that,” said Mr. Sinclair. “I’ve never seen a thin seal.”

  As we continued walking, the seal dove and reappeared a few steps later. In this fashion it accompanied us across the causeway, finally disappearing only when we reached the shore. We climbed up the rocky beach and found ourselves standing amid low ruined walls. The island had been the site of a church and a monastery, Mr. Sinclair explained, and perhaps a farm.

  “The Vikings had a settlement here,” he said, “and then the Picts. Or was it the other way round? Sometimes I think about how calmly we speak about different colonizers when I hear people talking about the war. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the worst thing for civilisation if the Germans had won in 1918. Hitler would never have come to power. Europe wouldn’t have been torn to shreds. We’d all be listening to Wagner and reading Thomas Mann.”

  “Are you a pacifist?” We were walking around a ragged stone rectangle, the outline of a building. Inside the grass was thick with daisies.

  “No. I’m too much of a coward. I used to come here as a boy. Once Roy and Seamus and I lost track of the time. We had to wade back across the causeway.”

  “If I knew about these things,” I said, bending to examine the wall, “I’d be able to tell by the kind of mortar when this was built.”

  We left the ruins and walked up over the grass, following the southern rim of the cake as it gently rose. At its highest point, the cliffs fell uninterrupted to the rocks below. To the south, across the bay, Mr. Sinclair pointed out the tower of the Kitchener Memorial. Lord Kitchener had been on a mission to Russia in June 1916 when his boat sank off the island. We sat down in a sheltered spot a few yards from the crumbling cliff top to eat our picnic. At our backs wild thyme grew in clumps and a tiny four-petal yellow flower. Before us birds rose and fell, riding the air currents, scarcely moving their wings. A skua soared twenty or thirty feet and drifted down. Half-a-dozen fulmars circled and another, smaller bird with arched wings.

  “They don’t seem afraid of us,” I said. “Do you think that’s a kittiwake? The darker one.” I wished I had brought Miriam’s bird book.

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a kittiwake from a corn-crake. A puffin is one of the few birds I can recognise. We’ll have to look it up when we go home.” He leaned back on his elbows, following the birds. “Did you ever read that passage in Milton where the bad angels are tumbling out of heaven like falling leaves? I had to memorise it at school. I can’t remember half the boys in my class, but I can still remember those lines.”

  “We only did the sonnet about blindness.” I was thinking how easily he had used the word home.

  “Did your uncle, the archaeologist-minister, talk about souls?”

  While his attention remained on the birds, I had the luxury of studying him unobserved. His head was tilted back so that his wavy hair touched his shoulders; I counted five silvery threads among the brown. His eyelashes were dark and surprisingly straight; his ear, the nearest one, was as neatly curved as a cowrie shell. “I don’t think you can be a minister,” I said, “and not mention souls, but he wasn’t the kind of person who told people what to do.”

  Hearing my own words, an odd feeling came over me, not as if someone were walking on my grave but as if I were walking on someone else’s. I was suddenly aware that I had been only a little older than Nell when my uncle died. How did I know what kind of person he was? A bird flew by so close that I could see the red rims around its eyes. “I’d love to come here with someone who knows about birds,” I said.

  “I am sorry,” Mr. Sinclair said, “not to be that person. But you can watch them without knowing what they are. My father used to tell a story about a man who loses his soul and, after many travails, gets it back in the form of a seagull. Then, of course, he has to be careful of cats and hunters. I worry that with television people will forget the old tales.”

  “Nell and I are going to study island history this autumn. Perhaps we can write down some of the stories.”

  I followed the arc of a small white bird and hoped he would say something more definite about the future, but he was rummaging in the knapsack. “So,” he said, “you really have no family. No long-lost cousins? No distant aunts, or geriatric great-uncles?”

  “I do have cousins”—the white bird was gone, whether up or down I wasn’t sure—“but I haven’t seen them since I was ten, and even then they hated me.” Daringly, like the birds, I flung myself on the air currents. “This is the first time I’ve had a home since my uncle died.”

  Mr. Sinclair held out a pair of binoculars. “And is that boy, Todd, part of what makes it home?”

  “Thanks to you”—I took the binoculars—“I hardly know him. It’s Nora who asks me to their house. Besides, he’ll be going back to university soon.” For a moment through the lenses I saw nothing but sky. Then a bird appeared, and another.

  “How deftly she fails to answer my question. You should be a barrister.”

  “Why did Coco get so upset at the party? One minute she was busy being a mermaid, the next she was furious.”

  Suddenly the sky was gone; a navy blue shirt filled the lenses. Lowering the binoculars, I saw that Mr. Sinclair was on his feet, moving towards the edge of the cliff. “Do you know,” he said, “that there are people who can’t go near high places not because they’re afraid of heights but because they feel such a lure to jump?”

  “I’m not afraid of heights—at least not usually—but I don’t want to jump either.”

  “Fearless Gemma.”

  I wanted to tell him all the things I was afraid of: forgetting my uncle, being confined in a small, dark place, leaving Blackbird Hall, not going to university, being cursed, his departure. Instead I said, “So do they believe they can fly, like Peter Pan?”

  “I’m not a member of that particular tribe, but I’m guessing that it’s about some kind of irresistible urge, the same one that draws people towards excess and ruin. Happily most of us never experience it. My sister did. Life didn’t feel real unless she was on the edge and then—again I’m only guessing—being on the edge was almost too painful to bear.”

  As he spoke, Mr. Sinclair took another step towards the cliff top. “Please,” I said. “Come and sit down.”

  “Do you wonder why I’m not married? Why I haven’t produced an heir?”

  “Servants always gossip about their masters, but it’s none of my business. Mrs. Pirie, at the post office, thinks you know the Queen.”

  “Everyone in London knows the Queen.”

  A bird flew by so close that its wings s
eemed almost to brush his hair. “Would you like a sandwich?” I said.

  “Spoken as if to a four-year-old. Yes, I’d like a sandwich.”

  To my relief he stepped back and sat down again. As I handed him the sandwich, I noticed little beads of sweat on his upper lip. I pointed out another skua and then what I thought might be a razorbill. The sight of the birds rising and falling and rising again was almost hypnotic.

  “So that’s what I am,” said Mr. Sinclair. “Your master?”

  “No, because that suggests you control every aspect of my destiny. You’re my employer. You give me money. I provide a service.”

  “Like having lunch with me. Are you here now because I’m your employer?”

  “I don’t remember you giving me a choice.”

  He laughed. “And a good thing too. If I had, you’d have said something disparaging about how you’d seen puffins before. Or that you needed to prepare lessons.”

  “I’ve never seen a puffin. Where are they anyway?” I recalled the puffin pictured in Birds of the World with its burrow and its vivid beak.

  “They’re on the east side of the island, or they used to be.” His mood had shifted again, like the day itself, and whatever darkness had drawn him to approach the cliff top was gone. We watched the birds and ate our sandwiches. I asked about being in the RAF: Had he felt like a bird?

  “Not for a second, but I wasn’t dashing around in a Spitfire. I was one of seven men crammed into a Lancaster bomber. It was cold and noisy and you could smell the engine. The best moments were coming back in the early morning, seeing the countryside laid out—fields and cows and little villages and church spires—and knowing exactly where the landing strip was. I felt supremely lucky. I doubt birds feel that way.”

  “Could you see people?” On the rare occasions when a plane flew over Blackbird Hall, Nell and I always stopped what we were doing to wave.

  “When we came in to land.”

  He poured us both more lemonade and asked what countries I would like to visit. Iceland, I said, and he said, naturally, and after that? Remembering the long-ago lyre-bird, I said Australia for the fauna, and Italy for the history. Then I asked the question back.

  “Russia for the culture,” he said. “And Iceland, to see you.”

  He spoke lightly, but I felt myself blush. Muttering something about the lighthouse, I scrambled to my feet and set off towards it. Todd was right, I thought bitterly. Only a feudal overlord would joke about such matters. Away from the cliff top the ground was hummocky. Several sheep, scarcely pausing in their grazing, stepped out of my path. Gradually, as my cheeks cooled, so did my anger. It was just the way Mr. Sinclair talked, I thought. Without looking, I knew he was following me. The lighthouse, no taller than a two-storey house, was painted like a sailor suit in blue and white.

  “It hasn’t changed in thirty years,” he said, coming up beside me. “And out there”—he waved towards the endless Atlantic—“is what our ancestors called the Far Islands: their version of Paradise. The place we sail to after death. They smell of apple blossom all year-round.”

  “I found a book of old Orkney maps in the library,” I said. “One showed the last great auk on an island called Papa Westray. Another showed a man in a coracle, heading towards the edge of the world.”

  “Oh, I remember that. He looks quite cheerful, doesn’t he?” Mr. Sinclair took off his jacket, spread it on the grass, and sat down. “The summer before the war our father took Roy and me on a tour of the lighthouses that Robert Louis Stevenson’s father built on the west coast of Scotland.”

  I too spread out my jacket and sat down. Overhead an invisible lark unspooled its thread of song. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was one of my uncle’s favourite books,” I said. “He thought everyone had to struggle between the good and bad parts of himself.”

  Mr. Sinclair lay back. I noticed again how dark his eyelashes were. “Coco got drunk at the party,” he said, “because the Gypsy told her something she didn’t want to hear.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She came and asked me about it, and I told her it was true.”

  “You lied to her. That makes you as bad as her.”

  “I agree, but anyone who believes that some random Gypsy holds the key to the future—especially a Gypsy who bears me a grudge because I wouldn’t give her family more winter grazing—is an idiot. If there were a way to find out the future, wouldn’t we all know it?”

  I was about to say that nothing justified a lie—truth beareth away the victory, my uncle used to say—but even as I formed the words I remembered that I too had wanted to be one of those idiots who consulted the Gypsy. To cover my confusion I lay back and closed my eyes. Nearby I could hear the bees buzzing in the little yellow flowers; farther away the sea pounded on the cliffs below. I pictured us as the lark must see us: a man and a girl, lying on the grass a few feet apart, on an island shaped like a cake.

  “You’re cross,” he said. “You think I behaved despicably.”

  A shadow crossed my face. I felt his breath on my skin but still I did not open my eyes. “It was despicable—deceiving Coco—but mostly I’m embarrassed because I wanted to have my fortune told.”

  “You’re brave to admit it, Gemma, when I’m ranting away. Do you know why I misled her?”

  Behind closed lids I considered the question. “You wanted to find out something about her,” I ventured.

  “What a veritable Sherlock Holmes you are. And do you have any theories as to what that something might be?”

  An idea appeared in some distant corner of my brain, but I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bring it into focus. “No. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “At the risk of sounding vain,” he said, “I had begun to notice that Coco seemed very enamoured of me on very brief acquaintance. I was flattered—lovely golfer worships curmudgeonly banker—but I couldn’t help wondering if her attentions were entirely to do with my charms. So when she asked me if what the Gypsy told her was true—that Blackbird Hall was about to be seized by bailiffs—I said yes. What you saw, what I’m afraid everyone saw, was the effect of that information. Coco was a gold digger. I’m not proud of my deception, but I was in danger of committing a stupid male mistake.”

  Something touched my forehead, fleetingly. Then he lay back down beside me.

  In a minute or two I heard his breathing change. I do not know how long I lay there, thinking over what he had said, before I too drifted away. When I woke, a sheep was grazing nearby. Mr. Sinclair was still asleep. As I watched him, his eyelids twitched restlessly; perhaps he was dreaming of flying. I stood up and circled the lighthouse. A few yards ahead a lapwing, with its unmistakable little crest, ran across the grass, dragging its wing. It was too late for chicks, but I followed anyway and then, remembering that birds often feigned injury to lead predators away from their nests, walked in the opposite direction. I soon found a depression in the grass. The nearby eggshell was intact save for an opening the size of a match head; the chick must have extricated itself, like Houdini. One more for my collection with Nell.

  “Gemma, Gemma.”

  Cradling the eggshell in my palm, I hurried back around the lighthouse. Mr. Sinclair was on his feet, holding my jacket. “Why didn’t you wake me? We’ll be caught by the tide.”

  Almost running, we headed over the grass towards the ruins. The egg slipped from my grasp. Soon we had a clear view of the causeway. At either shore it was still above water, but in the middle, for a distance of about fifty feet, it was already submerged. I stopped in dismay.

  “We’ll be fine,” Mr. Sinclair said. “It can’t be more than knee-deep.”

  “No. Let’s wait until the tide turns. We’ve got water, food, warm clothes. Please. We’ll go and see the puffins. It’ll only be a few hours.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and bent down so that his eyes were looking directly into mine. “Last time,” he said, “the water was much higher and I was only a boy and we made it safely across.
Do you think I’d suggest we do this if there were any danger?”

  I wanted to say that I loved the sea but that water had taken first my father, and then my uncle. They hadn’t been able to breathe water, and Miriam hadn’t been able to breathe air. That the young man in the library had warned me against causeways. That I had heard of people falling into the sea and dying instantly of shock, even in summer. I blurted out only this last.

  “You won’t even get wet,” he said. “I’ll carry you.”

  He reached out his hand. Slowly I took it, surrendering to his warm grasp. No longer running, we moved through the ruins hand in hand and climbed down over the rocks to the shore and the causeway. My heart began to thrum.

  “Come on,” said Mr. Sinclair.

  We reached the first lapping of water, and before I knew what was happening, he bent down and picked me up. I had no choice but to put my arms around his neck, and then, not wanting to see the rising tide, I buried my face against his chest. I could feel him walking slowly and steadily. Only once did the water splash my legs.

  Then he was no longer walking. Were we sinking? Drowning? His arms tightened around me, I felt his breath in my hair and, at last, his face seeking mine.

  chapter twenty-two

  There was no bacon the next morning, nor anything else. The house had, once again, deflated. Even before Vicky spoke, I knew that Mr. Sinclair was gone. Soon after she and Nell returned from Kirkwall someone had telephoned, asking to speak to him, and later he had spent nearly an hour on the phone. “Heaven knows how much that cost,” she remarked. She had kept his supper in the oven, and when he came to retrieve it, he had said there was no help for it: he must leave on the morning plane.

  “He said to tell Nell he’ll be back for the harvest,” she said.

  Under cover of pouring cornflakes, I asked if she thought he really would return.

  “Who knows?” She was making her list for the greengrocer’s van and I saw her write the word lard. “Last week he said he was daft to live in London but then he goes back and forgets all about us. Maybe things will be different now Nell is older.”