The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  Finally he let out a deep sigh. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Then we’ll talk. Will you do this for me, Gemma?”

  I must have said yes.

  We drove north, the way we had come, and then turned onto the road to Stromness. Cursed, cursed, said the windscreen wipers. In the middle of nowhere, he pulled into a lay-by and turned off the engine. The rain pinged on the roof. He came around to my door with the umbrella. We followed a path across a field to a large grassy mound. He had brought me to Maes Howe, the chambered tomb that Mr. Johnson had mentioned on the ferry and that the island history described as a major Neolithic monument. A pathway led between the remains of the ramparts. At the foot of the mound a stone doorway, maybe four feet high, opened into a stone passage.

  “Why are we here?” I said.

  “To show you something.”

  “I don’t like small spaces, especially small dark spaces.”

  “Nor do I.” He guided my hand inside his jacket. Through his shirt I felt his heart knocking against his ribs. I had not looked at him directly since Seamus spoke; now I saw how pale he was beneath his harvest tan.

  “Come,” he said. “Let two scared people enter the tomb.”

  Slowly, stooping, he led the way along the passage. I followed, keeping my head down, counting each step until, at the twenty-fourth, the low roof disappeared and I straightened. I began to make out that I was in a room, roughly square, large enough to hold a couple of dozen people. Three of the walls had windowlike openings into further darkness. The only light came down the passage, and the ceiling rose, bowl-shaped. Mr. Sinclair led the way to a block of stone beside one of the openings. Not taking my eyes off the passageway, I sat down. He sat down a few yards away on another block of stone. If someone closed the door we would be buried alive.

  “If there is any hope of your understanding what I am about to tell you,” he said, “then it’s in this place.”

  He did not ask if there was any hope, and I could not have answered.

  “One day the autumn I was ten,” he went on, “Seamus and another boy and I cycled here. My history teacher had asked me to copy the runes carved on the corner-stones”—he gestured in the gloom—“and while I was writing them in my notebook Seamus and Ted blocked the passage with hay bales. Afterwards they swore they’d only meant to leave me for five minutes, but a neighbour offered them a lift home on his tractor and they lost track of the time. I had no food or water; no way to budge the bales. I called for help until I was hoarse. I was sure I was going to die but that first I would go mad. Finally I passed out.”

  I had not thought of the sewing-room in years; now I saw the towering shelves of linen, the black gremlin of the sewing-machine. Had anyone come to him in the darkness? I wondered. Then sympathy was swept away by anger. What did this story of thirty years ago have to do with anything?

  “Seamus and Ted were punished—they had to muck out the byre for a month—but for them it was just a joke gone awry. For me, it was the day that changed my life. I had discovered what I most feared. And my father had discovered I was a coward. He was the one to drag the bales away. When I came round he was standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got no backbone, Hugh.’ ”

  I heard his raincoat rustle, the fabric shifting as he moved.

  “The war was my chance to prove him wrong. I spent the last four years of school imagining myself following Roy into the RAF, saving London, fighting off the Huns. At last I was eighteen. Seamus’s birthday was the week before mine, and we went together to Kirkwall to enlist and have our medical exams. A fortnight later I met the postman in the village and he handed me an envelope. I’d been chosen by lottery to be a Bevin Boy.”

  “So you were both Bevin Boys?” Beneath my coat, in my wet dress, I shivered.

  “No. Seamus was accepted by the RAF. I persuaded him to swap. What he said at the registry office was true. For nearly two years, everywhere but here, I was Seamus Sinclair and he was Hugh Sinclair.”

  While he explained how they had managed the exchange—letters, documents, blurred photographs—I stared down the passageway to where the rain was splashing on the grass. Behind his locked door he had been hiding not someone, or something, but himself. But how could he hide? I remembered all the friends and neighbours who had come to the house to greet his return. “I don’t understand,” I said. “When the war finished, weren’t you always meeting people who knew you as Seamus?”

  “Not often, and when I did I said I’d decided to go by my first name of Hugh.”

  “So how”—I pictured Seamus’s steely gaze—“did you persuade him?”

  “I offered him his heart’s desire.”

  “Alison.”

  “Alison,” he agreed.

  “But,” I burst out, “she wasn’t yours to offer.”

  “That was the problem. I promised that if he took my place in the mines, I would do everything I could to persuade Alison to marry him, and to ensure that our father gave permission. And I gave him three thousand pounds I’d inherited from an uncle. I had no choice, Gemma. I knew if I was sent underground I would go stark, raving mad. When I was Nell’s age there was a woman who used to push a wheelbarrow around the village, talking to herself. Once our football hit her house and she ran out screaming that a bomb had fallen. My mother said she’d been the best dancer on the island until her husband drowned.”

  My teeth were chattering so hard I cupped my cheeks to quiet them.

  “And Alison,” he continued, “liked Seamus. When you asked if they were friends I should have said they were more than friends. She was always following him around, trying to join in our games. I thought they’d be happy together. In ’45, I came back, not covered with glory but free of shame, and Seamus came back, the farm-boy who had dug his way through the war. But he wasn’t bitter; he was hopeful. He started working for my father, and in the holidays, when Alison was home from school, they were inseparable. I was off at university but whenever I wrote to her, I sang Seamus’s praises, and I told my father, without explanation, that I owed him my life.”

  I did not look at Mr. Sinclair, I did not need to, but in my mind’s eye he was changing, falling from that pedestal where, heedless of his warnings, I had placed him. “Is Seamus Nell’s father?” I said.

  “I wondered that—they were lovers on and off for years—but Alison was blue-eyed, like Seamus. As long as she was riding, she didn’t want to marry him, or anyone. And he seemed happy to work on the farm and act as her groom. After her accident, though, he became a reminder of what she loved and couldn’t have.”

  “Did Vicky know?”

  Once again his coat rustled. “She knew Seamus was wild about Alison; everyone did. As for the rest, I think she guessed there was something amiss, but Seamus kept his word, until today. After you left he said he couldn’t forgive himself for not taking Alison to the hospital that night. Of course he had no idea it was different from all the other times. Poor Seamus.”

  Gazing up at the dark ceiling, I remembered the evening I’d seen him leaning against his mantelpiece, shaking with grief. He too blamed himself for the loss of the person he most loved. “So he warned you yesterday, didn’t he?” I said. “That was what he was telling you at the hay barn.”

  “I thought it was just drunken ranting. That he’d sleep it off and we’d be on the plane to Edinburgh by the time he woke up. I was an idiot.”

  I knew he was asking for forgiveness, but I was too busy redrawing my map of the last few months, marking the new shoreline. “Have you ever told anyone else about you and Seamus?”

  “You’re determined, aren’t you, to get to the bottom of my box. I told Caroline, the woman I was engaged to.”

  “And she broke it off?”

  “No.” He gave a bitter laugh. “She could hardly wait for me to finish the story, to get back to talking about her wedding dress and where to have the reception. I was the one who couldn’t stand it.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me? You
promised you wouldn’t lie to me, but all you’ve done is tell me lies.”

  “Gemma, Gemma, you have everything back to front. It’s because I admire you—your honesty, your boldness—that I couldn’t bear to tell you. I did try to let you know that there were things in my past I wasn’t proud of, but it was more than twenty years ago. I am still the same person who carried you over the causeway, who loves you, who wants to marry you. You swore nothing would change your feelings.”

  Mr. Sinclair kept talking, apologising, explaining. I stared down the passageway to where the rain fell on the grass.

  “I’m freezing,” I said.

  At once he was standing over me, his hand outstretched. It was his hand I had seen first, before his face, as he struggled to change the tyre, and now, in the dim light, I saw his pale palm reaching towards me. I had only to put my hand there, surrender myself to his warm grasp, and everything would follow—a home, a family, university—but for how long? I recalled how easily my aunt had demoted me from beloved cousin to impoverished outsider. I stepped over to the passage and, lowering my head, walked towards the rainy light.

  Mr. Sinclair stumbled behind me. As I crossed the field, he held the umbrella over me at an awkward angle. In the car he started the engine, the windscreen wipers, the heater. “Which way should we go?” he said in a low voice. “We can’t go back to Blackbird Hall, and we’ve missed the plane. Besides, you need dry clothes.”

  “I have them in my suitcase. I want a room at the Kirkwall Hotel, where you stayed with Coco.”

  “Not with Coco,” he corrected. “No, that would be horribly awkward.”

  “Somewhere else, then.”

  As we drove back to Kirkwall, I pulled my coat closer and tried to make a plan, but my brain, like my body, was frozen. The only future I could conjure involved immediate necessities: a hot bath, dry clothes, a bowl of soup. The rain was slackening, and in the fields the sheep and cows had begun to scatter. Periodically Mr. Sinclair said something. We would catch the plane tomorrow; we would be married in London. I did not bother to reply.

  He stopped outside a small hotel on a side street near the harbour. I waited in the car. Presently he came out to report that he had got us two rooms, unfortunately on different floors. In the doorway of my room, he set down my suitcase and put his hands on my shoulders. “Please, Gemma,” he said. “It’s not as if I have another wife, or a mistress, or a child. I did something wrong when I was eighteen.”

  “And when you were forty-one. I need to take a bath.”

  “You poor darling, you mustn’t catch cold. Take a bath, then come downstairs and we’ll have lunch.”

  I hung up my limp dress, put on my dressing-gown and slippers and, locking the door behind me, went down the corridor to the bathroom. I ran the bath hot and, once I was in, made it still hotter until my skin flushed. I was almost sorry when the shivering stopped; it had been a distraction. Back in my room a sheet of paper lay beneath the door:

  G, I’ll be waiting downstairs in the bar. H.

  As I dressed in trousers and a sweater, I saw that it was nearly two o’clock. I had expected by now to be married for three hours, to be on a plane approaching Edinburgh and a hotel room with a large, snowy bed. This room, with its single bed and single-bar electric fire, was barely larger than my attic room at Yew House. The only window overlooked a drab side street.

  From our first meeting, when I had glimpsed his gorgeous shoes, I had known that Mr. Sinclair and I were unequal in the world’s eyes, but I had allowed myself to believe that he regarded me as an equal. And the foundation of that belief was that he would never lie to me. Coco was prettier, more accomplished, wealthier, but he had lied to her; to me he told the truth. Truth beareth away the victory. In the street an old car clattered by. He had sworn to me on the northern star and at the same time he had told me that the stars were falling.

  I went to my suitcase and took out the photograph of my uncle. He had helped me before in times of trouble, guiding my behaviour with Nell, soothing my anger. Silently I asked him what I should do. He eyed me steadily, kindly, unhelpfully. I wrote a note—Mr. S., headache, taking a nap. G—and slid it under the door into the hallway. Fully dressed, still holding the photograph, I climbed into bed. Nora had said our marriage was like something out of a fairy tale—a scullery maid marrying a prince—but now it was my feelings that seemed like a fairy tale.

  I slept, or at least I left one level of consciousness, and returned not to Blackbird Hall but to the rooms and corridors of Claypoole. I had not been happy there. I had worked endlessly and led a severely restricted life, but I had had my alliances, I had grown, and, especially in the last years, I had been able to study. Now in my dream state I was, once again, bending over the polishing machine in the corridor outside Miss Seftain’s classroom. Soon I would leave the sharp orange smell of the polish and go inside, and we would continue translating The Metamorphoses. Daphne would change into a laurel, Leda into a swan. Mr. Sinclair had changed from an eagle to a mole. Even in sleep I was aware of his knock at the door, his voice calling my name.

  Miss Seftain had not replied to my letter announcing my marriage, there had not been time, but now in her classroom, as we bent over Ovid, she said, “Would you want to marry someone twenty years younger than yourself?”

  And I said, “But that’s absurd. Someone twenty years younger than me wouldn’t even be born.”

  “Exactly.”

  Then, in the way of dreams, I was in another classroom—this one belonged to Mr. Donaldson—staring at a map of the British Isles. Each county was a different colour and Mr. Donaldson was standing behind me, clicking his yellow teeth. “Don’t you want to know about yourself, Gemma,” he said, “before you become somebody else?” Before I could summon the answer I slipped away into a deeper sleep.

  I awoke to the sound of a car in the street, the dull light of late afternoon, and in my brain not a plan but an imperative.

  PART IV

  chapter twenty-five

  I stayed in the ladies’ toilet until I felt the ferry gather speed and knew we had passed beyond the harbour wall and that Mr. Sinclair could no longer march up the gangplank, or row furiously after us. In the lounge I found a bench in a poorly lit corner, away from the few other passengers. But he would not need informants to guess my route. On the previous day I had continued to claim a headache and remained in bed. Now I calculated that he was unlikely to knock on my door before nine. I had got up while the sky was still dark and washed, dressed, and stolen out of the hotel at top speed. Only when I reached the main street had I allowed myself one swift backwards glance and there, in the dark facade of the hotel, was a single window glowing directly above mine. I had yearned then to run back, and hurl myself into his arms. Instead I had taken a firm grip on my suitcase and made my way to the taxi rank outside the Kirkwall Hotel. The taxi driver had told me that this was the only ferry from Stromness today. “Getting an early start,” he had said, and I had nodded, speechless.

  As soon as the ferry reached open water it began to pitch from side to side. I had not eaten since the day before, and now even my old friend became my enemy. I sat in the corner of the lounge, clutching my book, trying not to breathe in the smells of oil, cigarettes, wet wool, and rusty metal. Several times I almost ran back to the ladies’.

  At last the noise of the engine slackened, the pitching subsided, the ferry docked. As soon as I stepped onto the pier—it was still wet from yesterday’s rain—my stomach calmed. After five minutes I was ready to take my second taxi of the day, to Thurso. I asked the driver to let me off at a café. The windows were streaming with condensation, and inside several men in overalls were clustered around a table near the door; two women and a baby were seated in a corner. The waitress told me to sit wherever I liked.

  “Good crossing?” called one of the workmen.

  “A bit rough.”

  “Try a bacon roll,” he urged.

  Cautiously I ordered a cup of tea and,
when I had drunk it without ill effect, followed his advice. The waitress brought the roll on a plate, the white china webbed with grey like those I had washed so often at Claypoole. As I began to eat I was struck by the notion that this roll was the only thing that gave me a place in the world. When the plate was empty, I would, once again, be homeless. I longed to order a second roll, and a third.

  The men left in a noisy bustle and the women’s conversation was suddenly audible. “A voice like a corn-crake,” the one with her back to me declared.

  “Three years in a row,” said the other, “we’ve given her a retirement present and the next Sunday, there she is, back in her seat, belting out the hymns.”

  “Well, we all know Jean will be singing at her own funeral.”

  I looked at them, drinking their tea, complaining cheerfully while the baby dozed. Soon they would leave the café and go home to their houses with doors and beds and cookers. What would they say if I went over and said I was running away from my fiancé, and homeless? Did either of them need a maid? Or a nanny? I would work for bacon rolls and a place to lay my head. I pictured their smiles turning upside down, their nervous glances at their handbags, the baby.

  When the waitress brought my bill I asked if there was a bus station in Thurso; buses, I’d heard, were cheaper than trains. “Indeed there is,” she said. As she drew a map on a paper bag, she remarked that they didn’t get many visitors this late in the year. Quickly I invented a fictitious cousin, a walking holiday in Inverness. “I hope it stays fine for you,” she said. I thanked her and, with my handbag over my shoulder, my suitcase in hand, stepped into the street.

  The bus station turned out to be nothing more than a large garage presently occupied by a man meticulously sweeping around the oil stains on the floor. He looked up long enough to tell me that the bus to Inverness left in an hour. I bought a newspaper and perched on the wall of a nearby house. After the ferry and two taxis, I had thirty-six pounds in my purse, a fortune to me, but until I found a job, I would need to pay for every night of sleep, every mouthful of food.