The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  “What an awful story,” I said. My voice came out high and squeaky.

  “Yes,” said Isobel, suddenly matter-of-fact again. She helped herself to another piece of shortbread. “I can’t help thinking he’d still be fine if he’d been able to go on teaching, but the doctor says that’s daft. His brain is deteriorating. It’s not to do with jobs, or moods. Our dad was going that way when he died of pneumonia.”

  As she spoke, a black cat appeared around the corner of her armchair and came over to inspect me. “What beautiful eyes she has,” I said, offering my hand.

  “He. Alfred was Henry’s cat. Sometimes I take him with me to Bonnyview. He seems to cheer Henry up.”

  “Could I visit him? For five minutes?”

  “He won’t have a clue who you are.”

  “I’d just like to say thank you. You know how it is when you’re young. You never thank anyone.” I tried not to sound desperate. Alfred, obligingly, offered his belly.

  “Och, well, I suppose it can’t do any harm. Visiting hours are from two to four. You’ve missed today, but you could pop in tomorrow. In fact, if I know you’re going, Findlay and I might skip a Saturday and get caught up in the garden.”

  “I’ll definitely go.” With a final pat to Alfred, I stood up. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of Mr. Donaldson. It’s so long since I saw him.”

  “Even if you remembered him perfectly you might not recognise him.” She left the room and returned with a framed photograph of herself, Mr. Donaldson, and a man I guessed was her husband, smartly dressed, standing in the sunlight beside an oak tree. “This was sports day at Henry’s school in Edinburgh. His house won three cups, and all the parents were coming up to thank him. Remember this when you see him tomorrow.”

  I promised I would. She told me how to find Bonnyview and wrote down the name and address. On the doorstep she said, “Even if Henry doesn’t know you from Adam I’m glad you came. Especially because you were at that school where everything went wrong. Did you know the girl who accused him?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, moving down the path. “She must have been in a different form.”

  I asked about rooms in three small hotels and took one in the third and cheapest. Sitting on the bed with its cheap slippery sheets, trying to focus on my Latin textbook, I went over and over the conversation with Isobel. I had longed to tell her that I was the wretched girl but that the real culprit was my aunt. But tomorrow I would have the chance to tell Mr. Donaldson. I pictured him saying he forgave me, leading me to a small room, pointing to my box tucked away on a shelf. And then, as I pored over its contents, I would know, beyond doubt, that I had once been someone’s daughter.

  Bonnyview was a large red sandstone house that might, at first glance, have been mistaken for the home of a prosperous family. At second glance the bars at the windows, the lack of curtains, the high stone wall around the garden and the locked gate, all suggested an institution. I had arrived at one-thirty and, after peering through the gate and seeing no one, I resigned myself to leaning against the wall, holding the bunch of daffodils I had brought, my bag at my feet. No other visitors joined me, and I was still standing there alone when, at exactly two o’clock, a stout elderly man, wearing a uniform not unlike Archie’s, opened the gate.

  “You’re very punctual,” he said. “Those may not be allowed.”

  “The daffodils? Why not? I brought them for Mr. Donaldson.”

  “Some of the patients eat them. They’ll tell you inside if they’re okay.”

  As I walked up to the black door I felt as if I were ten years old again. On a small desk in the hall were a bell and a notice saying VISITORS RING BELL. It emitted a forlorn tinkle. While I waited I studied the pictures of boats that hung around the room. I was examining a schooner when I heard footsteps and turned to see a nurse with a broad, dimpled face approaching.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. Who are you here to see?”

  “Henry Donaldson.”

  After ascertaining that I didn’t know where the lounge was, she told me to follow her. As I did, down first one corridor, then another, I confessed that I wasn’t sure I would recognise Mr. Donaldson.

  “I’ll introduce you,” she said. “Are you one of his former pupils?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Nurse’s intuition. When I was a girl he taught for a year at the high school. He had a reputation for being able to get anyone through their exams, until I came along. Here we are.”

  The large glassed-in room, an addition to the old house, looked onto the garden. Seated singly or in small groups, a couple of dozen elderly men and women were reading, knitting, talking, dozing. The nurse led me over to a man seated alone at a small table, laying out rows of cards.

  “Henry,” she said, “you have a visitor. Say hello.”

  “Hello.” He did not look up from his cards.

  “Good luck. Here, let me take those. Look, Henry,” she said, raising her voice. “She brought you some lovely daffs. I’ll put them in a vase in the dining-room.”

  “Couldn’t they go in his room?”

  She shook her head. “He’ll see them at supper.”

  With a pat to my shoulder, she was gone. I was left alone with Mr. Donaldson. Still he did not raise his eyes from the cards. Watching his hands, I saw on the little finger of his left hand a gold ring. All at once I recalled how sometimes, when he was writing on the blackboard, the ring had sent a flash of light darting around the classroom.

  “Mr. Donaldson,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to come and see you. I couldn’t get here before.” He put a queen of hearts on a three of clubs, then added a seven of spades. “I’m terribly sorry that I got you in trouble.”

  Isobel was right. I would not have recognised him, not because he was stooped and gaunt but because his affect was so changed. Suddenly he spoke, and I saw that his yellow teeth were just the same. “Open your books to page fifty-three,” he said. “We’re going to practise long division.”

  I stared at him uncertainly. He had not even glanced at me and his hands were still moving over the cards, but it was the first hint that perhaps, dimly, he recognised me. I sat down opposite him, and took out my algebra book and my notebook. I found the chapter I’d been studying and set the open book on the table beside the cards.

  “The first problem is about square roots,” I said. “I don’t understand it, sir.”

  His hands paused. He looked at the book, looked again, then gathered the cards into a deck and slipped them into his pocket. “Let me see.” He read over the problem silently and began to explain it, step by step. I wrote in my notebook. At last he sounded like the man I remembered. “Well done,” he said genially when we had completed the problem.

  “Mr. Donaldson,” I said, “I’m Gemma Hardy. I’m the girl who got you fired.”

  “Gemma Hardy.” He had said the words “square root” with more interest.

  I reached out and took his hand, the one with the gold ring. Behind his smudged glasses, I glimpsed his red-rimmed eyes. “I have to go soon,” he volunteered. “I’m going to Fort William today.”

  I understood that the journey was imaginary but I saw my chance. “I’ll help you get ready. Let’s go to your room. You’ll need a coat and scarf.” Still holding his hand, I urged him to his feet. We began to make our way across the lounge. Mr. Donaldson spoke to no one and I followed his example, only apologising when he brushed someone’s newspaper.

  We were in the corridor when we met another nurse, a younger woman pushing a trolley. “Henry,” she said, “where are you off to?”

  “We’re just fetching a book from his room,” I offered. “He’s been helping me with a couple of maths problems.” I flourished my textbook.

  “Oh, that’s nice. He’s in room eight, second corridor on the left.”

  Now that I knew where we were going, I urged Henry along more purposefully. The room would not be large. Surely if my box were there, I would f
ind it. The door of number eight stood open. Inside, it looked heartbreakingly like a dormitory at Claypoole—three single beds, three bedside tables, three chests of drawers—but the bars at the windows spoke to a grimmer purpose. In one corner was a cupboard.

  “Which is your bed?” I said.

  Mr. Donaldson sank down on the one in the middle. He seemed suddenly tired by the prospect of his nonexistent journey. I bent down to check the bedside table, and then under the bed. “Which is your chest of drawers?” I asked, and he pointed to the one nearest the window. All along I had pictured the box just as it had been when I handed it over years ago. Now it occurred to me that he might have transferred the contents, perhaps to several large envelopes. I searched the drawers, hoping for the crackle of papers amid the neat stacks of underwear and socks, pullovers and shirts. Then I turned to the cupboard, which was divided into three sections.

  While I was doing all this Mr. Donaldson sat vacantly on the bed. I returned at last from my fruitless search. His brain was the one place I couldn’t open.

  “Do you know who I am?” I said.

  “The cleaner?”

  “No, I’m Gemma Hardy, one of your pupils. Years ago I gave you a box to take care of. Do you know where it is?”

  “You can plot square roots on a graph,” he said. “The curve flattens as the numbers get higher. They get farther and farther apart.”

  “Please, this is very, very important.” Like the nurse, I realised, I was raising my voice, as if volume might reach him when all else failed. I knelt down in front of him, putting my hands on his bony knees. After all these years I had found him, and yet almost every trace of the person I remembered was gone.

  Mr. Donaldson looked down at me in a puzzled way. “Did you drop something?”

  “I’m asking you a question.”

  “I used to ask a lot of questions. That’s part of being a teacher.”

  “You were a very good teacher. You helped lots and lots of people. Now, please, can you answer just one question for me.”

  “You have to be patient,” he said. “Sometimes it takes me a while to find the answers.”

  Slowly, clearly, I explained again who I was and about my box. Then I stayed kneeling, willing him to understand, to remember, to answer. At last, in a low voice, he began to speak.

  “You were my downfall. Or to be exact that woman who claimed to be your aunt was. I was no match for her innuendoes. If you’d been a boy maybe it would have been different.” He sighed. “Or maybe not. I kept your box and when I was booted out, I brought it with me. Not the box, the contents. I kept them in my room at my sister’s, with my books.” He glanced around. “They wouldn’t let me bring my protractor and compass here, not even my slide rule.”

  “Do you remember what was in the box when you emptied it?”

  “So many questions. You should be a teacher. There were some photographs, a recipe for fish pie—it sounded nice—a diary, bundles of letters, a couple of shells, a piece of rope tied in a knot, some dried flowers. I’m afraid that the shells may have got broken.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Do you forgive me?”

  “I do. None of this would have happened if I’d been a more competent adult. Even at—”

  “Henry, what on earth is going on?”

  A woman in a uniform I hadn’t seen before stood in the doorway, her eyebrows pinched in a frown; a little gold watch was pinned to her chest. I scrambled to my feet.

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I was pestering Mr. Donaldson about an algebra problem—I have my exams next month—and he thought he had a book here that would help.”

  “Oh, dear.” She made a clucking sound. “He does go off on wild-goose chases. All our books are in the library, just to the left of the lounge. That’s the place to look. But I’m not sure if Henry can be of much help these days.”

  “We’ll take a look,” I said, “before I go and catch my bus.”

  I led him down the corridor to the room called the library. There were three bookcases full of tattered paperbacks, a table, and a couple of chairs. Mr. Donaldson sank into one of them. He got out his pack of cards and began to lay them out in orderly lines. I sat down opposite him and, before I could forget, wrote down the contents of the box that might or might not still exist.

  chapter twenty-nine

  By the time the bus pulled into Aberfeldy, the evening smoke was rising from the chimneys and the streetlights were glowing. I was glad that no one knew of my return and that I could walk alone back to Weem, past the poplars, silent on this windless night, and slip into the dark house. In the kitchen I stopped to eat a slice of toast. Then, avoiding the creaking boards that Robin and I had mapped one afternoon, I climbed the stairs. In my room I went at once to the chest of drawers and the photograph of my uncle and mother. After all my failures their laughing faces were unchanged. I was staring at them, wonderingly, when the door of my room opened.

  “You came back.” The legs of Robin’s favourite red pyjamas pooled around his feet.

  “I told you I was only going away for a couple of days. What are you doing up?”

  “Everyone says that.” He never spoke of his mother directly, but her absence, I guessed, had been presented as a matter of days and, with no explanation, commuted to years. He swung back and forth on the doorknob. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  I sat down on the bed to untie my shoes. “Yes and no,” I said, tugging at the laces.

  “Those are like up and down.”

  “I was looking for a person and I found him, so that’s the yes.” The knot loosened. “But he was keeping some things for me and he doesn’t have them anymore.”

  “So they’re lost.” He let go of the doorknob and approached. “Can we look for them?”

  On the bus I had asked myself this over and over. Of course Isobel might have already destroyed the contents of the box, but it was also possible that she had not yet looked through her brother’s papers, or that if she had, she had not recognised the letters and dried flowers as mine. Why should Mr. Donaldson have anything that belonged to that wretched girl? The thought that my parents’ final words might be so close and yet out of reach was tormenting. Was there a law that could compel someone to give you back your property when they didn’t know they had it? As the bus drove over the hills and moors, I had pushed these questions round and round my brain.

  Robin studied me anxiously. “Can we?” he repeated.

  “I’m not sure. But I am sure that you must go back to bed. Granny will be upset if she finds you gone.”

  He patted my knee, hitched up his pyjamas, and padded away.

  At breakfast the next morning Marian asked if I had had a nice time with my friend in a way that made it easy to say yes and change the subject. Did we need potatoes? As for Archie, he was unusually brisk when we went over Catullus. I shouldn’t try to be too poetic, he scolded. Above all I must start timing myself. It was no good doing one brilliant translation when the exam required three. He made no mention of my trip.

  The exams were now less than a month away and I had a strict timetable for studying, but whatever had begun with my visit to the minister was not answered by my meeting with Mr. Donaldson; indeed, it was growing at an alarming rate. If I couldn’t have my box back—and the more I thought about approaching Isobel, the more that seemed impossible—then I needed to see the land from which it, and I, had come. As I played tiddlywinks, as I washed dishes or hung out laundry, as I worked on maths problems or memorised irregular verbs, I pictured a village of brightly coloured houses beside the sea with geysers and glaciers, puffins and whales. I pictured knocking on the door of a house and being welcomed as a long-lost granddaughter. I pictured meeting someone who resembled me the way Archie resembled Hannah—with the same hands, or hair, or little toes.

  In making the journey I faced almost as many obstacles as the skalds in their small boats; the first was my lack of a passport. I asked Marian if, by any chance, she knew h
ow to obtain one, and she said the post office had forms. She had got one for Robin last summer, just in case they suddenly had to go to Rome. The next day I bought some stamps I didn’t need and, while the postmistress was counting my change, picked up a form. Later in my room I discovered that the questions, like those on the hotel application, were fraught with unexpected rocks and whirlpools. Besides money and a photograph, I needed a birth certificate. For the first time since leaving Yew House, I sat down and wrote to my aunt. The first version of the letter read:

  Dear Mrs. Hardy,

  I wonder if you remember me, your late husband’s niece. You sent me to the dreadful Claypoole School when I was ten. Even the hard-hearted headmistress said she’d never seen a guardian show less interest in her ward. I hope you will not be disappointed to learn that I am still alive and making my way in the world . . .

  I tore up the page and wrote, as politely as I knew how, begging her to send my birth certificate and enclosing a stamped envelope addressed to Miss Harvey, c/o MacGillvary. I did not dare to use my real name for fear Archie would notice, but I trusted that my aunt would not study the envelope. In the days following my trip, he had gradually forgiven me and, as if sensing the turn my thoughts had taken, had begun to speak of Iceland more often. Why not go there this summer? Two could travel more cheaply than one, he added, turning a page of Ovid. It would be a reward for my exams.

  “I may not deserve a reward,” I said, but I could feel the smile spreading across my face. I had never before coveted something so expensive. In Pitlochry I had learned that money could be turned into almost anything, but that clothes and books and watches were not so easily turned back into it. In all his wonderful stories Ovid had forgotten to write about the ultimate alchemical substance.

  I knew that in talking about Iceland I was encouraging Archie, but not, I thought, in an inappropriate way. He was Hannah’s brother, my tutor, we were friends. Then one evening, walking back from Aberfeldy, I glimpsed a couple on the grass beside the Black Watch Memorial. “Jamie, don’t,” the girl said, her voice signalling the opposite. “Come on,” the boy said softly. “You know you want to.” Their two shadows merged again.