The Flight of Gemma Hardy (16 page)

As I retraced my steps across the rainy farmyard, I understood that the snowdrops in the hall, the gleaming grand piano, the rooms with their beds made and fireplaces stacked with peat, were all just in case Mr. Sinclair decided to visit. The house was always waiting for him. In the library my book lay on the table; the fire burned evenly. I went over to one of the windows and pressed my hand to the cold glass. My uncle had told me that the Romans made glass out of sand. The next day I had lit a fire in the sandpit, hoping to produce a pane, or even a few droplets, and ended up with a mess of blackened sand. Now, watching the rain smash down, I wondered if I would ever have a home again.

As if my thoughts had summoned him, my uncle appeared—not, of course, on the windswept grass but in my brain. He had faced the same problem of an intractable child when he came to Iceland. I pictured him, whether from my memories or his stories I couldn't say, rolling coloured balls over the rough ground. I had knelt behind a wall, watching, and then I had come over to roll a ball too. And he had talked, telling stories in a language that I didn't understand but in which the underlying message was clear: this man wished me well.

The library was, as Vicky had said, mostly stocked with histories and old novels, but upstairs in the schoolroom I found what I needed:
Pippi Longstocking
. When I was Nell's age I had loved the story of the adventurous girl who slept with her feet on the pillow and could lift a horse over her head. I carried it down to the library, left the door ajar, and began to read aloud. I stopped after twenty minutes, when Pippi was making pancakes.

“Go on.”

“Only if you come and sit down.”

“And Tinker?”

“And Tinker.”

Nell sauntered in and perched on the chair opposite. Tinker took up his position on the floor beside her. “You didn't say
please
,” she said. Her trousers were splattered with mud.

“I forgot,” I said. “Please. Can you read?”

“None of your beeswax.” She drummed her heels on the rug; Tinker flicked open one yellow eye and closed it again. “Go on. What happens next?”

“I'll make a bargain with you,” I said slowly, improvising. “I'll read to you for an hour every afternoon, anything you want. In exchange you'll do lessons every morning.”

“Except Sunday. How do I know you'll keep your word?”

“How do I know you'll keep yours? I'll swear on Tinker's head. If I don't read to you one afternoon then you don't have to do lessons the next day.”

She leaned forwards so that her hair swept the rug. I watched uncertainly, wondering if I should offer further bribes. Then a small hand emerged through the curtain of hair to rest on Tinker's head. “I swear,” she said. “Now you.”

“You have to tell him not to bite me,” I said, standing up.

“Maybe.” She giggled. “Be a good dog, Tink.”

I knelt down and cautiously reached out my hand. “By Tinker's head,” I said, “I swear to read for an hour a day if Nell will do her lessons every morning, except Sunday.”

Then I announced we would begin that day. As I read, Tinker slept and Nell listened, her face mirroring whatever was happening to Pippi. When the clock struck, I closed the book, fetched us both elevenses, and led the way to the schoolroom. The next day Nell knocked on my door and asked what she should wear to church.

chapter seventeen

O
ne day, one bargain, did not, of course, resolve all difficulties. Nell had never learned to concentrate, and sitting still, even for twenty minutes, was a struggle. She knew the alphabet but could read only a few words haltingly; when she wrote her own name the
l
s threatened to topple; her arithmetic depended on her fingers. Her table manners were terrible. She was cheeky and thoughtless. She hated to take baths or wash her hair. Some days we had trouble getting through ten minutes of lessons, and the weather raged inside and out. But over the next weeks and months she gradually became a better pupil and I became a better teacher. Together we tackled sums, reading, writing, grammar, tracing, nature, history, geography. Sewing I left to Vicky. Scripture I ignored.

By late March the grass was greening, and along the garden wall the jasmine and crocuses were in bloom. Leaves began to unfurl on the beech trees; one was copper, one green. Robins, blue tits, sparrows, chaffinches, wagtails, and thrushes came and went in the garden but no blackbirds. When I asked Vicky, she said a few years ago a pair had nested in the copper beech, but they weren't common. “The first Mr. Sinclair named the house on a whim. I doubt he knew a blackbird from a crow.” Lambs started to appear, and Seamus had Tinker working in the fields with the other two collies. I had long given up locking my door, and in the mornings Nell would climb into my bed to turn the pages of one of her books and invent a story. We got up at seven-thirty, had breakfast, fed the hens, and collected the eggs. She was surprisingly fearless about slipping her hand under a broody hen. I followed Miss Seftain's advice—we exchanged letters once a fortnight—and made sure to start lessons at nine every morning and keep to the timetable I had pinned on the wall beneath the schoolroom clock. Like Miriam, Nell gave up easily in the face of difficulties, but when properly praised, she redoubled her efforts.

In the garden shed I discovered a brand-new child's bicycle: a Christmas gift from Mr. Sinclair. When I asked why she never used it, Nell said she couldn't be bothered, which I guessed meant she didn't know how. In the course of an afternoon, with me running back and forth across the grass holding the saddle, she mastered the skill and was thrilled. Another bike, for guests, Vicky said, was only a little too large for me. I lowered the saddle, and we started going on expeditions.

I took pleasure in all this, and in Vicky's praise: “Mr. Sinclair won't believe his eyes.” I began to long for a visit from our mysterious employer. Several photographs hung in the library, and Nell had pointed out her uncle to me. In one picture he was playing badminton; in another he was walking on a beach with two men and a woman; in a third he was sitting on the bench under the beech trees, a book in his lap. The pictures were small, and all I could see with certainty was that Mr. Sinclair had dark hair, square shoulders, and good taste in white shirts. Nell said that he always beat her at Monopoly and, she added with a sly glance, he often let her stay up late. Besides regular lessons I had introduced a regular bedtime.

In the evenings, after Nell was asleep, I sometimes kept Vicky company while she made her shell flowers. The pink and white shells came not from the cove but by mail from Glasgow, and she sold the resulting bouquets in a shop in Kirkwall. She offered to teach me the skill, but after I broke three shells in a row, she put me in charge of the green raffia that covered the stalks. While she worked, making little holes in the shells and attaching wires and stamens, she told me she had lived all her life on the island with only two brief visits to the mainland. Her parents, both deceased, had worked for the Sinclairs. Seamus and her two older brothers had grown up with Mr. Sinclair and his older brother, Roy, who had died in 1953.

During one of these conversations I finally learned the meaning of the phrase Bevin Boy. In 1943, Vicky explained, Lord Bevin had declared that more coal was needed to fight the war; one in every ten men who enlisted was chosen by lottery to go down the mines. “Seamus wanted to be in the RAF, like Mr. Sinclair,” she said, “but he ended up a Bevin Boy. At least it kept him safe.”

No wonder he had cursed my innocent question. I was still shuddering at the idea of spending hour after hour underground as she described how her parents had spent the war in dread of a telegram. “If someone was wounded, or worse”—she reached for a clump of stamens—“that was how the news came. We'd see a motorbike coming down the road and we'd hide behind the curtains, hoping it wouldn't stop at our house.” She had been too young to understand the first time the bike stopped, in June 1943, but not the second time, in April 1944. “My poor mother,” she said. “Still I hardly knew my brothers, and the war was exciting. When a convoy was coming into Scapa Flow, you could feel the air buzzing even in our wee village.”

I recognised another strange phrase, this one spoken by the young man in the library at Claypoole. What was Scapa Flow? I asked, and Vicky said it was the harbour below the south island. The German fleet had been held there in 1919, until they sank their own ships. Then in 1939, just before she was born, a German submarine stole into the harbour and torpedoed the HMS
Royal Oak
. Afterwards the Italian prisoners had built a barrier to protect Scapa Flow.

“Oh, I know about the prisoners,” I said. “The person who first told me about the Orkneys said one of the prisoners had a beautiful voice and married an island girl.”

“Who was that?” said Vicky.

I could easily have said something vague—a neighbour, a friend—but for some reason I answered with Audrey's full name.

“Audrey Marsden!” Vicky dropped her little hammer. “Where on earth did you run into her?”

“She used to cook for a neighbour, near Perth.”

“I always wondered what had happened to her. She was one of those girls who had to leave the island suddenly. I see her mother sometimes in Kirkwall.”

“Suddenly?” She had given the word special weight.

“She was expecting.”

“You mean”—I hesitated—“she had a baby? We always called her Mrs. Marsden, but she never mentioned a husband, or children.”

“Well, her husband wouldn't have the same surname, would he?” said Vicky. “It's not many women who can make Alison's choice and have a child on their own.” She held up the flower, the four pink shells glowing on the end of their green stalk.

Later that night, lying in bed, I pictured Mrs. Marsden's neat bun and respectable clothes. Could someone who looked like that secretly have a baby? I remembered her saying that orphanages were dreadful places. Then I found myself thinking about Drummond and Ross. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps their sudden departure from Claypoole was connected to Drummond lying down with the boy, between the raspberry canes.

I
spent many hours in Vicky's company, but we did not exactly become friends; her duties as housekeeper set her apart, and we both had our areas of reserve. While I dodged questions about my past, she was reluctant to talk about Nell's mother, although the first time I asked, she did give a brief biography. Alison was one of those girls who can ride almost as soon as they can walk; she got her first pony when she was four years old and later, at boarding school near St. Andrews, she competed in gymkhanas. When she came back to the island, her parents had bought her a stallion named Mercury. One evening, Vicky said, she'd been taking a shortcut across the fields when this huge grey horse loomed out of the mist. She had screamed, and Mercury had nearly thrown Alison.

Which was what finally happened. One day the horse came home alone; Alison was found hours later. At first they had thought she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, but after nearly a year and several operations, she could walk with a stick. Without her horse, though, she couldn't stand the island. She had moved to Glasgow and started leading a different sort of life, singing in pubs, who knew what else. After Nell was born, her parents wouldn't speak to her.

I would have liked to ask about Nell's father, the man who wasn't in the picture, but Vicky was already hurrying to the end of her story, describing Alison's death. “They said it was heart failure, that the painkillers had weakened her heart. Nell was alone with her at the time. A neighbour spotted the milk on the doorstep.”

I was still saying how awful as Vicky stood up to check on her scones. A few days later, when I asked why Alison hadn't sent Nell to school, she said she didn't know, and that was her answer to the next question, and the next.

O
n evenings when I did not sit with Vicky or plot my lessons or take refuge in the library, I sometimes cycled into the village to visit Nora. A skinny girl of eighteen, Nora had been working at Blackbird Hall for two years and still sang as she mopped the floors. She often talked proudly about her older brother Todd, who was at university in Aberdeen, but when I asked if she had any plans to leave the island, she shook her head. “Why would I want to do that? Besides,” she added, “I'm engaged.” Jock worked at the smithy and they were, Nora smiled, in no rush. Her first invitation to me was, I knew, prompted by Vicky, but soon it was understood that most Saturdays, if the weather wasn't too ferocious, I would bicycle to the village to play cards or dominoes with her and Angus and their parents.

Still, despite my success with Nell, my small social life, the solace of being near the sea and earning money, I sometimes found myself restless. My life was infinitely happier than it had been at Claypoole, but except for the odd trip to Kirkwall, I was mostly confined to a large house and a small village. I was on an island on an island. At Claypoole I had been sustained by the hope that once I left the school and became an adult, everything would change. Now what could I hope for? I would pace up and down the corridor with its empty bedrooms and the locked door at the end and wonder if I would ever be able to take my exams and go to university. Once again I envied the birds. A shearwater, according to my bird book, could fly to Iceland and back and scarcely notice.

E
aster brought a lavish chocolate egg for Nell but no sign of Mr. Sinclair. My eighteenth birthday passed unmarked, even by me; I recalled the date only the following day. Primroses and violets appeared beside the road and the lambs grew sturdier and butted heads in the fields. A few of the hens were left to sit on their eggs, and soon downy chicks darted around the farmyard. Then, in mid-May, the ferry went on strike. Seamus and Vicky complained furiously. The eggs and cheese, destined for mainland markets, piled up in the dairy. “And if the dispute isn't settled soon,” Vicky said, “we won't get summer visitors.” Or at least not many, she added. The planes were still flying. Playing in the garden with Nell and walking to the village, I found myself scanning the sky.

As the days lengthened, Nora organised a group of boys and girls from the village to play rounders in a field near the church. Thanks to the holidays at Claypoole, I was better than most of the girls; I couldn't hit the ball far, but I was a fast runner and a good fielder. One evening in early June, a Tuesday, I showed up to find that Todd had arrived home from Aberdeen. The ferries were still on strike, but he had talked his way onto a fishing boat. He was, like Nora, tall and thin, and everything he wore—his shirt, his jeans, his shoes—had a hole in it. I was on his team, and when we won, he said it was all due to my fielding. Then he produced his accordion, and everyone gathered to sing and drink tea or homemade beer. I didn't know most of the songs but I liked sitting there, being part of the group, laughing and joking about stupid things.

When I got up to leave, Todd followed me outside. While he rolled a cigarette, I asked him about university. What was it like? Was everyone very brainy? Did he spend every minute studying? Fine, no, no. As I launched into my fourth question, Todd said, “Shut up,” and, leaning forward, pressed his mouth against mine. After a moment, several moments, he stepped back. “Watch yourself,” he said, and disappeared inside. Dazed, delighted, I retrieved my bike and set off towards home. Perhaps it was to make those feelings last a little longer that I did not turn on my light but relied on the faint glimmer of the sky to reveal the strip of macadam that led back to Blackbird Hall.

Until his kiss Todd had simply been Nora's older brother, nice enough looking, good on the accordion, refilling his glass with home brew once too often. His main virtue had been his attendance at university. Now I remembered his occasional glances, his soulful singing. I longed to see him again, to ask more questions; my life had suddenly expanded. I rounded a corner to find the road blocked by a car. Beside it knelt a figure, a man. I stopped and dismounted.

“Hello,” I said. “Can I help?”

Something clattered to the road. “Damn. I didn't see you.”

He had the island accent mixed with something else. “I'm sorry,” I said. “Bicycles are very stealthy. I need to get a bell.”

“Stealthy.” He snorted. “You need a light.”

“You mean I need to use it.” I had bought a new battery for my light in Kirkwall the week before. Now, pleased by my foresight, I unclipped it and knelt beside him, aiming the beam while he wound up the jack and struggled with the nuts and then lowered the jack and struggled some more.

“You're kind not to comment that I clearly have no idea what I'm doing,” he said. “I haven't changed a tyre in years.”

“I've never changed one, though I did manage to mend my first puncture the other day.” From the safety of the darkness beyond the torch, I glimpsed brown hair and a smear on one cheek, oil or mud perhaps. I could tell by his voice that he was older—a man, not a boy.

“It isn't rocket science. Where are you heading on your stealthy bicycle?”

“Blackbird Hall. It's not far from here.”