“Are you telling me how to do my job? Get out of here before I make you.”
I glared back at him, wishing, like David, I had five smooth stones. “What kind of farmer are you that you want to kill your cows? I’ve been saving my wages. I’ll pay for the vet. Just give me the phone number.”
Seamus took a step towards me and I took a step towards him. I had not fought anyone since my first year at Claypoole, but I knew now that the best way to hurt a man was to aim below his belt; my height made that easy. I clenched my fists in readiness.
“Gemma, go back to the house. I’ll deal with this.”
I turned, and there, standing on top of the bales of hay, twenty feet above the floor of the barn, was Mr. Sinclair.
Seamus stopped moving. Like the sky the day before, his eyes seemed suddenly veiled. All expression left his face. Even in my fury, I felt a flash of sympathy. I knew, only too well, what it was like to have one’s life controlled by other people. He worked seven days a week taking care of the land and the livestock and yet, like me, he remained at the mercy of Mr. Sinclair’s whims.
An hour later Nell was tracing a map of Scotland, struggling with the jagged west coast, when we heard a car pull up. From the schoolroom window I saw a man climb out of a Land Rover and Mr. Sinclair stepping around the house to meet him. When I went to fetch lunch for Nell and me—I couldn’t sit at the same table as Seamus—Vicky handed me a note:
Calves will recover. Vet says feed twice a day this week & keep warm & dry. Next week start to wean.
I had never before seen his handwriting, and I studied the brief sentences as if there might be words hiding beneath the words, a volume of feeling coiled in the casual ampersands. I would never have let Nell get away with the poorly formed rs, the hastily looped ys.
That night as I lay in bed, trying to read myself to sleep, I heard a knock at my door. “Come in,” I called, moving over to make room for Nell.
The door opened a crack. “Gemma, get up. Put on your dressing-gown and slippers.”
In the hall Mr. Sinclair waited, fully dressed. He motioned to me to follow. We went down the corridor and through the door to his part of the house. He closed it behind us and, I could not help noticing, turned the key. We stepped through another doorway. Later, when I saw the room by daylight, I realised that the furnishings were, by the standards of the house, quite ordinary, but on that first evening the Indian rugs, the books, the armchairs, and the sofa glowed with a golden light. Mr. Sinclair stood before me, holding out his hands; his finger, the one he had sprained changing the tyre, was still a little crooked. Then I understood that he was waiting for me to place my hands in his. I did.
“How old are you?” he said.
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen.” He shook his head. “People will call me a cradle snatcher.”
“Is that worse than being a gold digger?”
“Yes, because I should be old enough to know better. I would not want anyone, especially you, to say that I had taken advantage of you.”
I felt as if I were back on the Brough of Birsay, standing on the edge of the cliff, the wind at my back, the birds, silver and black, soaring, and, just for a moment, everything in my life, even the losses, made sense because everything had been bringing me to this room.
“People will say things whatever we do,” I said. “As long as we don’t.”
“Little sphinx. Don’t you wonder if what the fortune-teller told Coco is true?”
I said that I did. “Claypoole seemed fine and then, from one day to the next, it was bankrupt. Now Blackbird Hall is my home, so if you’re going to sell the house I need to know.”
“And what will you do then?”
He was looking at me searchingly. Suddenly I understood that he had not brought me here to tell me that he had heard my secret messages, that he wanted nothing more than to spend his days at Blackbird Hall with me, going on expeditions. How stupid I was to have granted that notion a moment’s purchase. No, he was trying to break the news that the house, and its occupants, were about to disappear.
“I’ll have to find another job,” I said, “one where I get board and lodging. Vicky will give me a good reference. But nowhere will be as nice as here.” I spoke these last words so softly that I was not sure he heard them.
“And won’t you be angry with me, Gemma, if I evict you from your home, like a cuckoo?”
“Cuckoos can’t help it and I suppose you can’t either. What will happen to Nell? I hate to think of her lost in some school, being bullied and scolded. She needs someone to be patient with her.”
“As you have valiantly been. You’ve done wonders with her, and I will make sure that no one undoes your good work.”
Years ago Dr. White had described my walking to the hospital as valiant, and that too had ended in disaster. Why did I always need to be valiant? Why couldn’t I have a home, like other people? If only my uncle hadn’t gone skating on that February day. If only Miriam hadn’t forgotten to breathe. If only Miss Bryant hadn’t run out of money before I could take my exams. And now, added to all those other losses, was the loss of Mr. Sinclair. I had cherished the hope that, despite our many inequalities, he had understood me: the stealthy cyclist. Quite gently, he had taken that away. Save for his hands holding mine I would have run back to my room.
“And what about me?” he said. “What should I do if I lose my home and my job?”
“You? What do you have to worry about with all your posh friends? Even if you can’t be a banker, you can bale hay and give advice. You’ll have to have fewer parties, and Nell won’t have as many new clothes, but you won’t starve.”
He laughed, a little unsteadily. “That’s what I love about you, Gemma. You’re so dauntless, you go directly from A to B. Whereas all my life I’ve gone from A to B by way of G.” He kissed me and pulled me down beside him into an armchair. “Why have you been ignoring me? Ever since I came back you’ve behaved like I was a leper. What did I do to deserve such treatment? I haven’t dared speak to you.”
“You went away.” It was true but it sounded like something Nell would say. I made another attempt. “You’re older than me, you have a fancy job, a wardrobe full of suits, but that day we went to the Brough of Birsay you spoke to me as if we were equals—not employer and employee. Then the moment we got back you became all-important and busy. You couldn’t take five minutes to tell me you were leaving, like any friend.” I felt him shift in the seat beside me, about to speak, but there was no stopping now. “And then you just show up again, with no warning, and you expect me to be thrilled. I have a life too. It doesn’t begin and end with your comings and goings. How would you feel waiting day after day for someone who seems to have forgotten you exist? I may be your employee but I have opinions, thoughts, feelings.”
Before I could say more his arms were around me. I could feel him shaking with what, after a few seconds, I recognised as laughter. “So you waited for me,” he said, “day after day. And day after day I was working as hard as I could, struggling to get back to you.”
The house was not in any danger, he told me. He’d let everything go before he sold the estate, but it wouldn’t come to that. “I didn’t mean to tease you, but I didn’t know if you cared for me, if you would care for me even if I weren’t your employer. To you it probably seems like the natural order of things that I own Blackbird Hall, but this house, everything, was always going to be Roy’s. At school he won the same prizes our father had; in the war he won the medals. Then he drove his car off the road and my parents were left with me, the second-rate son. No prizes, no medals, not even a good degree. I only got a two: two.”
He laughed again, giddily, as if he were opening presents very fast. “Nobody gives a damn about these things—two: one, two: two—but my father behaved as if the heavens had fallen. Being an orphan, Gemma, you don’t know what it’s like to have someone looking over your shoulder, judging everything you do. And when they’re not there, you do the j
ob for them: tell yourself, over and over, that you’re not good enough. I left university determined to prove myself, and I did, but in a world my parents didn’t understand, or give a ha’penny for. Once I sailed into Stromness on a friend’s yacht. The first thing my father said to me was that the Sinclairs weren’t show-offs. For a decade I only came here for funerals. By the time I realised what was happening to Alison it was much too late.”
“Whatever you did or didn’t do for Alison,” I said, “you have a second chance with her daughter. Nell can be happy, she can do the things she wants to do.”
“She can,” he said gently. “All I’m saying, Gemma, is please don’t put me on a pedestal. I’ll have farther to fall. I own Blackbird Hall and you work here, but it could easily be the other way round. When I saw you this morning, standing up to Seamus, not caring that he was twice your size, I knew you were braver than I could ever be.”
I started to protest—I hadn’t been brave; I’d been angry—but he interrupted. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I had to go back to London. I’m forty-one years old and I’ve got used to doing what I please, not consulting anyone, but I never meant to take you for granted.”
“I forgive you,” I said and, miraculously, I did. The hard rock of anger that had stood between us since I saw him sitting on the bench under the trees rolled away.
He kissed me and slipped his hand down the front of my nightdress. I still had limbs, organs, feet, eyes, but the only part of my body I could feel was the few square inches where his hand pressed against my skin. I willed him to go on but suddenly he grew still; his hand was gone.
“No,” he said. “This is going to be different, totally different.”
He lifted me off his lap to one side of the chair, stood up, and walked to the fireplace, the window, the door, the window again. “I feel,” he said, “like I’m about to jump out of a plane.”
He stopped walking and stood before me. “Sweet girl. How I wish I was your age and knew what I know now. You must go back to bed. I promise there’ll be no more coming and going without consulting you.”
“And no more lies?” I said. “About money, or what you’re doing, or anything else.”
“And no more lies,” he agreed. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
As I made my way down the corridor I saw a light on in the downstairs hall. From the kitchen came the faint clink of metal and china. Some other nocturnal wanderer—Vicky? Seamus?—was making a cup of tea.
chapter twenty-three
The next morning the calves ate and stood without trembling. We had lessons as usual, and again I carried our lunch to the schoolroom; Seamus needed not to see me for a few days. After we ate, I was reading to Nell from Anne of Green Gables when Mr. Sinclair put his head round the door. Might he have the honour of our company? We could go to Stromness to explore the harbour and find a tearoom.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Nell.
“Does that suit you, Miss Hardy?” He made a little bow.
“I’d be delighted, Mr. Sinclair.” I bowed in turn. “And if I could steal ten minutes to do some shopping that would be super.”
And that was the pattern of the days that followed. Mr. Sinclair did whatever he did in the morning, the afternoons were devoted to Nell, and in the evenings, after dinner, we went for a walk or I tiptoed down the corridor to his sitting-room. Several times I caught Vicky looking at me askance, and I longed to explain, but I had no words for what was happening, for those long nightly conversations in which I told him about my aunt and Miriam and life at Claypoole and he told me about studying at Oxford; the three years he had worked in Paris; his life in London. Our conversations included many other topics, momentous and trivial: Were those stout leather buttons on men’s cardigans attractive? Did animals have souls? What was the perfect picnic? Were men and women essentially different? Who invented the fork? Which was better: a reef knot or a bowline? I told him about Miss Seftain’s interest in space travel and the names and fates of the various dogs, mostly mongrels, who had orbited the earth: Belka, the squirrel, Strelka, the arrow. He told me about diving among the wrecks at Scapa Flow and seeing the stateroom of one of the German ships. We talked, it seemed, about everything. And night after night these conversations ended in passionate kisses from which, eventually, we separated. Then one evening as Vicky left for her choir practise she announced that Mr. Sinclair had spent most of the day on the phone.
“He’ll be off again soon,” she said. “Mark my words.”
That night when I knocked on the door to his rooms there was no answer. He was not in the library, nor the billiard room, nor his study, nor the garden. I had never known him to go to the farm so late. And surely, I thought, he would not have gone down to the sea without me. At last I returned to his door and knocked again, a brisk, bold rap that belied my feelings. As I stood staring at the swirling grain of the wood, I remembered standing outside Miss Bryant’s study, watching my tiny self in the brass doorknob, waiting to cross the blue carpet and be chastised. Then the door opened and Mr. Sinclair was looking down at me, his eyebrows drawn, his forehead furrowed. Behind him, from his sitting-room, came a burst of furious music.
“Gemma, what’s the matter?”
“Where were you? You disappeared.”
“No, I didn’t. Here I am.” He drew me inside. In the sitting-room, he turned down the record player and poured me a glass of red wine. First a drink, he said. Then I must tell him what was wrong. I had only tried wine a few times and did not care for the taste. Now I drank it as if it were medicine and blurted out Vicky’s claim.
Mr. Sinclair nodded. “She’s right,” he said, his voice as calm as if we were discussing his choice of shirt. “I can’t do all my work by mail and phone.”
“But”—I stared at the beautiful red and blue rug, trying to keep the fleur-de-lys pattern in focus—“what about me?” If I was about to lose everything, then what did I have to lose by asking the ultimate question?
“Gemma, I need to earn a living. I can’t stay here and I can’t take you to London as things are now.”
“So what can we do? Is there nothing to be done?” The fleur-de-lys blurred. Everyone, I thought, slips through my fingers.
I could feel Mr. Sinclair’s eyes searching my face. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a long time. “There is one thing we can do,” he said slowly. Then he uttered a four-word question that I had read in dozens of books but which neither of us, in all our conversations, had ever mentioned. The words scattered to the corners of the glowing room. Once again I pictured the two of us from the point of view of a lark, standing in this room, in this house, surrounded by the farm, the island, the incessant sea.
He knelt at my feet. “Will you?” he said again. His eyes, looking up at me rather than down, were boat-shaped. I allowed myself to sail in them towards the edge of the known world.
I set down the empty wine-glass. “On one condition,” I said. “Actually two.”
“Two!” His teeth gleamed in the light. “She drives a hard bargain.”
I held up my fingers. “One, I get to go to university. I have to pass the exams, but if I pass, then I get to go.”
“I’ll even help you study, but no going off to a hall of residence. You have to live with me.” His dark eyelashes fluttered. “And what is two on this dreadful list?”
“Nell won’t be sent away to boarding school, unless she wants to go.”
“Gemma. How could your parents have known that you would turn out to be like your name?”
“They didn’t. Gemma was my uncle’s choice. My parents gave me another name.” I reached down to help him to his feet.
“What is it?”
The name was there, waiting, but everyone who had ever known it was dead. “I’ll tell you,” I said, “the night we’re married.”
I expected him to argue, but an expression akin to relief came over his face. “I’ll tell you my secrets then too. I have done things I’m not proud of, th
at might make you like me less.”
I thought of Coco and of all the women who had surely come before her; he had told me about some of them: a secretary named Lydia, a debutante named Henrietta. I thought of what Nora had said about how he used to be a hellion, of the ways he had failed his sister and his parents. And I offered the words Miriam had drilled into me that first Easter when she was helping me catch up with my lessons.
“ ‘Love is not love,’ ” I repeated, “ ‘which alters when it alteration finds, or bends . . .’ ” But the next line was gone; even conjuring up Mrs. Harris’s beady gaze did not bring it back.
“Something about tempests, I think,” said Mr. Sinclair. “So there is nothing that could change your feelings for me? Swear to me that is so, Gemma.”
Looking at the face I had first glimpsed by the light of a torch and was now licenced to look at freely, I saw emotions that I couldn’t name. Just for a moment I pictured the boy in the raspberry canes, bending over Drummond with a tortured expression. But the boy was a stranger; why should I understand his feelings? Now I had to believe that what drew Mr. Sinclair’s mouth tight, what darkened his eyes, was some mysterious aspect of adult affection that I would soon understand.
“I swear,” I said, “but you must swear too. I’ve done things which I regret.”
“Sweet girl, what on earth could you have done that you regret?”
“Don’t treat me like a child. I may be younger than you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a past, haven’t made mistakes.”
He began to promise that he would never again treat me like a child but I interrupted. “You’ll break your promise a hundred times. Please swear the one thing I want. That you won’t allow anything, any secret, to change your feelings for me.”
“I will,” he said, “be constant as the northern star.”
The Flight of Gemma Hardy Page 23
