The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  It was the most felicitous of oaths. I told him then about my parents and how they had survived their long engagement by looking at the North Star, the one thing, despite the eight hundred miles between Scotland and Iceland, that they reliably had in common. When I finished, he told me about a day during his boyhood when he and Alison had been playing on the beach. Suddenly half-a-dozen rocks had come whistling out of the sky.

  “We thought the Germans were coming, but we carried home a couple of the smaller pieces and our father explained that what we’d seen was a meteorite falling.” From the mantelpiece he retrieved a piece of dull black rock the size of his thumb. When he laid it in my palm it turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. “A token of my affection,” he said, “until I can give you a ring.”

  Then he asked if there was anyone whose permission he should ask. Briefly I thought of Miss Seftain and how she had teased me about marriage as we walked across the frozen grass. “No,” I said.

  “So there are no obstacles,” he said jubilantly.

  He picked me up and kissed me and I stopped thinking about rugs, or stars, or larks, or anything except my body measured by his.

  Save for the strangely heavy rock under my pillow, the next day everything seemed just the same: breakfast, hens, calves, lessons, lunch, a walk, reading. After tea, however, when I was labelling her drawings, Nell skipped into the schoolroom and said Uncle Hugh wanted us in the library. I brought a book, thinking he might ask her to read. But as soon as I saw Vicky, seated in an armchair, knitting, I knew that once again we were standing on the cliff top. It had not occurred to me that our nocturnal conversation would bring changes so soon. Don’t say anything, I wanted to say.

  Was it my thoughts or his own doubts that made Mr. Sinclair move his feet awkwardly, lean one way and then the other, push back his hair and look out of the window before turning to face three women whose combined ages totaled a little more than fifty? Just for an instant, I cherished the hope that he was about to propose an outing to Kirkwall or agree that Nell could, at last, have piano lessons.

  “I want you both to know, to be the first to know”—his eyes flickered towards one bookshelf, then another—“that Gemma and I are going to be married.”

  Nell flung her arms around me. “Hurrah. I’ll have an aunt.”

  As we embraced, I saw Vicky’s ball of red wool rolling away across the floor. She was looking at me wide-eyed, one hand pressed to her chest, as if to still the inner turmoil, but by the time Nell had stopped jumping up and down she was on her feet, ready to shake hands with Mr. Sinclair and kiss my cheek. “I do congratulate you both,” she said. He too, I saw, had registered her coolness; indeed, he had expected it. How could his twenty-seven-year-old housekeeper be expected to welcome the news that he was marrying his eighteen-year-old au pair?

  “When are you getting married?” clamoured Nell. “Can I be a bridesmaid?”

  “No—there won’t be any bridesmaids.”

  “What about a cake? A white cake with a bride and groom on top.”

  “No,” Mr. Sinclair said again. “We’re not going to make a fuss.”

  Vicky stood up and announced that she had a pie in the oven. I stood too and told Nell we must tidy the schoolroom before supper.

  “Wait,” said Mr. Sinclair. “We have to talk.”

  “We can talk later, after Nell’s in bed. Or you can help tidy the schoolroom.” I held out my hand to Nell.

  “But you’ll have dinner with me?”

  “Nell has supper in half an hour. I eat with her.”

  “We’re engaged,” he said. “Surely that makes a difference?”

  “As little as possible, if I have any say, which the last ten minutes suggest I don’t.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair. “We’re having our first quarrel. I’m sorry. I should have asked you before I told Vicky and Nell.”

  “You should have.” Hand in hand with Nell, I left the room.

  Later that night, after she was asleep, we sat together in the library. Now that our relationship was public, there was no reason to hide away in his room. Vicky, I knew, was safely visiting friends, and Seamus was out wandering the fields, or bowed over his mantelpiece, but I left the door ajar, a signal that everything was above-board. Mr. Sinclair apologised again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just so used to being in charge.” Then he added that he had applied for a wedding licence. We would be married in the registry office in Kirkwall next week.

  “Next week?” I exclaimed. “Besides, I thought we’d be married in a church.”

  “I’m sorry, Gemma. If your uncle were alive that would be different, but I don’t want to lose one more day. If you like we can be married again in a church. People quite often have two ceremonies.”

  His eyes were glowing and I said yes to everything, agreed to everything, even though a part of me still wanted nothing to change, or to change more slowly. But it was too late for that. We had jumped off one cliff, and when we were married, there would be another cliff to fall over, farther, faster.

  The next morning Vicky behaved as if the previous day’s conversation had never occurred—the weather was awful; would I be sure to give the hens more shells—but I caught her studying my waistline. Before I came to lunch, I took off my pullover and tightened the belt on my trousers. I was not one of those sudden girls, like Mrs. Marsden.

  For all her silence to me, I soon discovered that Vicky had spread the word. When I ran into Nora, polishing the piano in the hall, she dropped the duster and seized my hands.

  “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” she said. “You and Mr. Sinclair getting married. What a slyboots you are. Who’d have thought of him marrying one of us? It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Todd will be on the floor when I tell him.”

  “Thank you,” I said, uncertainly.

  “Oh, I’m forgetting myself.” She swung our hands, smiling. “Congratulations. I hope you’ll be very happy and not forget your old friends.”

  “Of course I won’t.” But even as I spoke, I knew that my days of playing games in Nora’s living-room were over.

  Her smile fading, she released my hands. “The thing I can’t help wondering, Gemma, is do you really love him? Money isn’t everything, and he’s so much older. Won’t you miss having fun?”

  How could so few sentences contain so many insults? Last week I would have told her it was none of her business; did she really love her gullible fiancé? Now, as the future Mrs. Sinclair, I did my best to conceal my anger. “I think we’ll suit each other fine,” I said, handing her the fallen duster and hurrying away.

  After lunch I sat down and wrote to Miss Seftain, telling her that, much to my surprise, I was going to be married next week. “It’ll be a small ceremony in Kirkwall,” I wrote, “just in the registry office. Later I hope we’ll have a proper church wedding and you can come. Don’t worry! I still plan to go to university. Mr. Sinclair says he’ll help me take the exams and apply.” Before I could change my mind, I addressed the envelope and fetched Nell. Together we bicycled to the village and she slipped the letter into the pillar-box. I heard the soft sound of it landing, already as far from me as if it had travelled a hundred miles.

  That evening, sitting on the bench under the beech trees, Mr. Sinclair told me we would be married at the registry office at 11 A.M. the following Monday. We would catch the afternoon flight to Edinburgh.

  “Why would we go to Edinburgh?” I asked. Above our heads the white scar left by the broken branch shone, and all around us the wind was shaking the plants and trees.

  “For our honeymoon, Gemma. People don’t just come back to the house where they’ve been living as though nothing has changed. Wouldn’t that feel odd to you? Vicky and Nell wondering what we were up to?”

  “Everything feels odd. How long will we be away? I have to make plans for Nell.”

  Then he explained, as if it had been understood all along, that we wouldn’t
be coming back. We would go directly on to London. His house was in a neighbourhood called Holland Park. It had four bedrooms, a garden; there were shops and restaurants nearby. Of course I knew he was needed at his office, but I had pictured us spending a few more days on the island. And then my visiting him in London, getting my bearings, before Nell and I moved there, irrevocably.

  “But I won’t know anyone,” I said. “And what about Nell?”

  “I have to work. All this”—he gestured towards the house in front of us, the fields behind—“costs a pretty penny. It’s not Seamus’s fault, but every year the farm loses money. As for Nell, she can come too, if that’s what you want.”

  “Isn’t it what you want? Your sister’s child, your only relative. And don’t”—I raised my hand—“say I’m too young to understand.”

  “Touché. I was going to say I’m too old to understand.” He planted a kiss near my ear. “You’ve done wonders with her, but she should go to school, have friends her own age. And if you want to go to university you’ll have to study. You won’t be lonely, I promise. I have lots of friends. You already know Colin and Jill.”

  But they don’t see me as a friend, I wanted to say; they see me as the au pair. All the items on my list were still true—I was a girl with no money or obvious talents; he was a middle-aged man with both—and in London there would be new entries.

  As we spoke, the rustling in the branches overhead had been growing louder; the leaves too were having a conversation. Now Mr. Sinclair looked up. “My great-grandfather planted these trees on his wedding day,” he said. “Heaven knows the secrets they could tell. Come, let’s walk.” Arm in arm we began to circle the house, dodging the croquet hoops that still dotted the lawn.

  “I know you love this place,” he said. “It’s one of the many bonds between us. And we’ll come here often. But if we stayed now it would be hard for our friends and neighbours. By going away we give them time to get used to our new situation, and you and I get a chance to practise being in the world together.”

  “Vicky thinks we have to get married,” I said.

  “We do, but not for the usual reason.”

  We passed the fountain, and I caught the musty smell of the basin full of water after the recent rain. Tonight Seamus’s window was dark. Was he lurking in there? Or walking the cliff tops towards some secret tryst? I could not imagine any possible world in which he would welcome the news that I was the future mistress of Blackbird Hall. The wind was still rising, rushing past the house, rushing past us and the flowers in the garden, the grass in the fields. I heard a sheep bleating and, for a few seconds, the sound of Vicky’s radio. Around the corner came a small white figure, moving over the lawn towards us. Even as I gasped I recognised Nell.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, letting go of Mr. Sinclair and hurrying to meet her.

  “I couldn’t sleep.” She threw her arms around me. “I couldn’t find you.”

  “I went for a walk with Uncle Hugh. Vicky was nearby.”

  She pushed her head against me. “Mummy went for walks,” she said in a muffled voice. “She went for a walk the night she died.”

  I felt Mr. Sinclair beside me, his hand on my arm, squeezing.

  “Did she?” I said gently. “Do you know where she went?”

  “She said she was going to the river, but sometimes she said that and changed her mind. Sometimes she came back smelling of smoke from the pub. But she didn’t smell smoky that night.”

  The wind tangled my hair across my face. Mr. Sinclair’s grip tightened. There was another question, something else he wanted me to ask. “Did she go alone?” I suggested.

  “She wouldn’t let me come.” Nell spoke more loudly as if rehearsing an old argument. “He said the same when he brought her home. Not the same,” she corrected, “but that she’d said the same to him.”

  I felt Mr. Sinclair’s breath hot against my ear. “Ask her who ‘he’ is.”

  I did.

  “You know,” Nell said. “We see him all the time, with the cows.”

  For a moment I had no inkling who she meant. Then, even as I heard Mr. Sinclair whisper, “Seamus,” I understood.

  chapter twenty-four

  I took Nell back to bed with me, and in the morning she was propped up beside me, reading. “You slept in, lazybones,” she said. As we washed and dressed, she chattered away. She could hold her breath for forty-nine seconds; she was going to give her doll, Cilla, a new name. What did I think of Lulu? Or Dusty? When I asked if she remembered coming out to the garden the night before, she said yes, it was so windy she had wanted to pretend to be a pony. “I wanted to trot around,” she said, “and toss my mane.” Before I could ask further questions, she added that she’d been thinking about what to wear at the wedding and she’d decided on the pink dress with smocking that Vicky had made her for Easter. What was I going to wear?

  In all my daydreaming about the future I had, oddly, given this question no thought; now it drove out everything else. Even for a simple ceremony my Sunday skirts and blouses were too ordinary. Indeed every garment in my wardrobe seemed limp and unappealing. I recalled the turquoise dress Coco had worn to the dance, and ruined in the rain. Might one of the guest room wardrobes contain a dress that would serve? But I was much smaller than Coco, and I shrank from wearing a dress whose history I didn’t know. What if, unwittingly, I chose something Alison had worn right before her accident? Then I remembered the dress Matron had given me as a farewell gift. It had belonged to a prefect, one of the most elegant girls at Claypoole. I had never so much as tried it on, but I pictured the lustrous paisley fabric transforming me into a forest bride.

  As soon as lessons and lunch were over I went to my room. The dress, when I lifted it down from the back of the wardrobe, was as pretty as I recalled, the delicate pattern of leaves and flowers conjuring up a lush jungle where a lyre-bird might sing. But when I pulled it over my head I could tell at once it was too large, and the mirror revealed a lost cause. The bodice gaped, the sleeves dangled, the hem drooped. Worst of all, the green gave my skin an olive tinge. I looked exactly like what I was: an orphan in a borrowed dress.

  Silence greeted my knock at Mr. Sinclair’s door. He must, I thought, be out in the fields, or meeting with a neighbour. I was almost back at the far end of the corridor when the lock clicked. I turned to see him standing in the doorway. He was wearing the clothes he had worn the night before, his shirt crumpled, his trousers creased.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I’m fine,” he said abruptly and then, as if remembering our relationship, came forward to kiss me. His eyes, I noticed, were red-rimmed and bloodshot.

  “Hugh,” I said. “May I call you Hugh?”

  “What else would you call me? Now out with it. You’re bursting with something.”

  I repeated Nell’s question. “I know the dress is meant to be a secret from the groom but I can’t ask Vicky for help.”

  His forehead grew smooth. “I’m an idiot,” he said. “Of course you must have a dress. We’ll go and buy one this afternoon.”

  “But you can’t see it, not until our wedding day. That’s bad luck.” My uncle had officiated at many weddings, and I remembered the lore.

  “I will drive you to the best shop in Kirkwall, hand you my wallet, and then take myself off to read the paper at the pub. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

  Startled by his alacrity, I hurried to my room to change—even to buy a dress I needed to look respectable—and then to the kitchen to ask Vicky to mind Nell. She looked up from the shell she was carefully threading with wire. “Of course,” she said. “She can help me sort the stamens. You’ll be needing new outfits now.”

  Again I glimpsed a hidden meaning. “I don’t need new outfits in general,” I said. “I haven’t grown in three years, but I do want to look nice on Monday.”

  Vicky’s expression softened. “I suppose you do. Will you pick me up a pair of tights, medium, not too light?”


  Between morning lessons and my sartorial distraction, there had been no opportunity to ask Mr. Sinclair—Hugh—about our encounter with Nell the night before. Now, once we were safely through the gate, I said I didn’t understand why he had wanted me to question her. “And what did she mean about Seamus? Was she saying he was there when Alison died?”

  “That’s what it sounded like, but I’ve asked her about that night over and over and she’s never mentioned Seamus before.”

  I had always assumed Nell was afraid of Seamus—like me she tended to avoid him—but perhaps her avoidance signalled a more complicated relationship. “So were Seamus and Alison friends?” I said.

  “Not really. Remember our bargain, Gemma. On our wedding night we’ll tell each other our secrets.”

  For the rest of the journey he beguiled me with talk about the farm, and a client in Edinburgh he was hoping to meet on our way south. I remembered the lapwing on the Brough of Birsay, feigning injury to lead me away from the nest, but I followed uncomplainingly. Our conversations, which I had thought so free and far-ranging, had, I’d begun to notice, certain boundaries. Hugh did not care to talk about his sister, or the war, or, save for odd stories, his childhood. He pulled up outside a shop near the cathedral—“the only place on the island to buy a dress”—handed me sixty pounds in crumpled notes, and told me he would be in the lounge bar of the Kirkwall Hotel.

  As I stepped into the shop, a wave of perfume transported me back to that time when I had still accompanied my aunt on shopping expeditions. And there behind the counter, as if memory had conjured her, was a woman whose blond hair was coiled around her head in exactly the same style as my aunt’s. She was talking to a customer in a neat shirtwaist dress. Neither of them noticed me and I ducked behind a rack of jackets. I was looking at the price tags—one was thirty pounds, the next thirty-five—when I spotted a girl cleaning a mirror. I made my way over.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a nice dress.”

  In the mirror the girl studied my pleated skirt and flowery blouse. “Do you have a particular occasion in mind?” she said.