The Flight of Gemma Hardy (31 page)

“I don't see how.”

“Don't wrap those.” She pointed to two bowls. “I'm going to photograph them. Pauline knows the headmaster of the school. We'll get his advice.”

While she went to the house to fetch her camera I turned to wrapping egg-cups. Through the window I could see Weem Rock and the hills beyond; above the tree line the sun shone on a white farmhouse. For the first time since I'd caught the ferry, I glimpsed a future that extended beyond Oban. I would never get my life with Mr. Sinclair back, but perhaps I could find a way forwards. When Hannah returned she photographed the bowl. Then, before I knew what was happening, she took a photograph of me. I was kneeling beside a box, holding a plate, gazing up at her.

T
he next time Archie visited George he stayed to talk to me about our reading. The word
saga
, he explained, meant both history and story, and the authors, mostly writing in the thirteenth century, had made use of facts when it suited them. The saga we'd read was part of a group that featured skalds, or poets.

“They're not like our poets,” Archie said. “They don't simply sit around composing. They go out and slay dragons and fight off rivals.”

“Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't sit around,” I said. “They were always tramping across the moors. And several poets fought in the First World War.”

“You're right. But no dragons. Grant me that.” He smiled.

In the opening pages of the saga, Thorstein, the father of the heroine, has a troubling dream. He is standing outside his house and a beautiful white swan is sitting on the ridge-pole. Somehow Thorstein knows that the swan is his daughter Helga. While he stands watching, an eagle, with black eyes and claws of iron, flies down from the mountains and perches beside her on the roof. The eagle is chattering happily to the swan when a second eagle arrives from the south. The two birds fight to the death and both fall off the roof. The swan remains alone and dejected until a third bird arrives from the west. He and the swan fly away together.

Archie commented on how effectively the dream foreshadowed the events that followed. I argued that it made it seem as if Helga had no choice; she was doomed not to marry the man she loved. “If everything's been foreseen,” I said, “how can she act otherwise?”

“That's a very old question,” said Archie. “Hannah would say that the problem is that Helga obeys her father. If it were up to her she would have stayed true to Gunnlaug and never have married Hrafna.”

“But it's hard to overcome the customs of your country.” At Claypoole, when all the girls turned on a single victim, no one had dared to intervene. “I think the real problem is Gunnlaug,” I went on. “He promises to return in three years to marry Helga, but he's so taken up with his success at the English court that he can't be bothered. He's not worthy of her, yet he causes all this trouble.”

“ ‘Things learned young last longest,' ” quoted Archie. “I hope not.” A tremor passed over him, and I wondered again what lay behind his choice to be a rural postman.

“Me too,” I said. We turned to other aspects of the story.

Later, as Archie was buttoning his jacket, he remarked that many Icelanders could trace their family back a thousand years. “Hannah and I don't even know the name of our great-grandfather.” He presented me with our next reading project:
Njal's Saga
.

For the rest of the evening, I kept thinking about Archie's parting comment. My uncle had never mentioned my father's family, but perhaps there were still people in Iceland who were in some way related to me, and who knew it. Perhaps even now my grandparents were floating in a hot spring, wondering about their Scottish granddaughter.

H
annah was as good as her word. She spoke to Pauline, and Pauline spoke to the headmaster. He agreed to let me sit the preliminary exams in February and the Highers in May, and to lend me the necessary textbooks for English, algebra, trigonometry, history, Latin, and French. Archie volunteered to coach me in Latin, and Pauline offered to lend me her Shakespeare. So my future, for the next few months, became clear. I would stay in Aberfeldy until May. Then I would go in search of Mr. Donaldson. Between Robin and my studies, my days were full. Only at Marian's urging—you've been cooped up for weeks—did I decide one bright, cold Sunday in December to walk up the hill to the white farmhouse I had seen from the pottery window. With a couple of sandwiches in a knapsack, I followed the path up through the beech trees to the little spring at the foot of Weem Rock. According to Hannah, St. David's Well had long been a resting place for travellers, perhaps a sacred site. I knelt down to dip my hand in the clear, cold water and watched the leaves at the bottom stir.

From the well the path traversed the hillside, climbing steadily. Soon the beeches gave way to conifers and birches. These too were beginning to thin when I caught sight of a stone house set back from the path. The roof had fallen in but the walls were intact. Who had lived in such a lonely place, I wondered, and why were all the windows barred? The house looked too grand to be a shepherd's cottage. Hoping to discover some relic of the occupants, I stepped inside, but there was only a rusty saucepan and a couple of empty tins buried in the nettles. On the hearthstone lay a small pile of mossy bones. Some animal—a sheep or a fox—had crawled in here to die. If I had found a ruined house near Ballinluig, I thought, that might have been me. I hurried back to the path.

Another hundred yards brought me out of the woods to a field of sheep. I sat on a fallen tree to eat my sandwiches. Nearby a crow was strutting back and forth. Tomorrow, I thought, I would take Robin to the library to look for a bird book. When the crow came close, I threw him a piece of bread. Mistaking my gesture, he took wing. As I followed his flight, I saw that on all sides leaden clouds were massing on the hilltops. Even as I took in that the day had changed, I heard a pattering sound, as if thousands of little feet were running over the hillside. The wind sprang up and pellets of hail the size of barley stung my face. I ran to shelter beneath the nearest pine tree. The air was a commotion of white. Suddenly, out of the whiteness, I heard a voice, shouting.

“Mr. Sinclair,” I shouted back.

I stared at the driving hail, dumbfounded. All the miles, all the hours, all my efforts had not yet driven him out of my brain.

Within ten minutes the sky was clear and the hail was already melting into the grass, but I decided to give up on the farmhouse and go home. I was again on the path, passing the ruined house, when I heard the solid tramp of someone approaching at a good pace. Archie came into view, striding along with a shepherd's crook much like the one Seamus had carried. His dark green jacket hung open, and a red tartan scarf was wrapped jauntily around his neck. He could have been a Roman centurion, I thought, conquering Britain at four miles an hour. When he caught sight of me, he neither waved nor smiled but somehow it was clear he was pleased.

“Jean,” he said. He stopped a few yards away and stubbed out his cigarette. “Did the hail get you?”

It was not his fault, I thought, that he didn't know my name. “I sheltered under a tree. One minute the sun was shining; the next I couldn't see across the field.”

“Hill weather. You never know what it will do. Did you hear me shouting to Thor? Urging him on.” He waved his crook with mock ferocity.

“I thought I heard something. There's a ruined house back there.”

“It belonged to the Menzies family. The story goes that they built it for one of their daughters, who went mad. She lived up here with her minder. It was a nice house, quite civilised except for the bars at the windows.”

“Did they visit her?”

“What would be the point of putting her halfway up a hill if they were going to visit? No, I think it was a case of out of sight out of mind. That was how they dealt with undesirable relatives in those days.”

“Why did she go mad?”

He cocked his head. “She's caught your interest, has she, the mad-woman on the hillside? I'm afraid we know almost nothing more about her. This was well before the First World War. George claimed her fiancé jilted her at the altar, but that's just local gossip.”

He began to ask about my Latin homework, but all I wanted was to be alone with my thoughts. “I have to go,” I said. As I stepped forward, Archie's eyebrows rose. Did he think I was about to hit him? Embrace him? At the last moment he stepped aside and I hurried past.

The trees were still dripping from the hailstorm, and several times on the muddy path I almost fell. If anyone had done the jilting it was I. But Mr. Sinclair would not go mad. He had discovered, long ago, what would topple his sturdy mind. Not a woman but a small, dark space. From under my feet a pheasant started up with a whir of wings, barely clearing the bracken. Unlike Helga, I thought, I did have a choice. I could try to find Mr. Sinclair, and unless he had radically altered his life, that would not be hard. Or I could stop looking for him in phone calls and hailstorms. Why had I left if I was going to carry him with me every step of the way? When I reached St. David's Well again I knelt down and put my right hand in the water. Silently I vowed to forget him. And then, to make the oath more binding, I said the words aloud.

“By this sacred place I vow to forget Mr. Sinclair.”

F
or Christmas, Archie gave me a history of the Vikings and at midnight on New Year's Eve he kissed my cheek and announced that he really was giving up smoking. A few days later I was playing cards with Hannah and Pauline after our weekly supper when Pauline remarked that Archie seemed to spend all his time at the MacGillvarys' nowadays.

“And we know why,” said Hannah with a nod in my direction.

“We're reading about Iceland,” I protested. “And he helps with my Latin. It has nothing to do with me.”

Hannah made a shushing motion and put down a jack and a queen. “We'd be glad if it did. I don't like to see Archie turning into a crusty old bachelor.”

“Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?” I said. “You're always complaining about people who think a woman can't manage without a man. Why should it be different the other way round?”

“Quite right,” said Pauline. “Of course it isn't different, but the people we love are different. Archie is Hannah's beloved brother. We want him to have companionship.”

I discarded a nine and ten of clubs. “Archie ought to have been a skald,” I said lightly. “An Icelandic poet, travelling the world and making poems.”

“It's funny the two of you being so interested in Iceland,” said Hannah. “If I were going to study another country I'd want to go south, to the Mediterranean. Sunshine.”

“And olives,” added Pauline.

“In Iceland,” I said, “the sun hardly sets in summer, and there are huge flocks of Arctic terns, and geysers, and hot springs. They're much more civilised than we are. They were writing the sagas when we were in the Dark Ages.”

“You'll have to go there one of these days,” said Hannah.

Fumbling my cards, I said I couldn't play.

The moon was out and I insisted that I did not need a lift back to Weem. I had made the journey so many times that often I scarcely noticed the landmarks, but tonight my footsteps echoed in the empty streets, and as I approached Wade's Bridge the river glinted in the moonlight. I had not thought of Archie, with his bachelor routines, as being susceptible to female company, and even if I had, I would not have thought of myself as that company. All those feelings had come to an end as I sat in the gloom of Maes Howe listening to Mr. Sinclair. Every month I was surprised when my body declared its secret life. And there was no evidence that Archie found me attractive. His kiss on New Year's Eve had been less warm than Hannah's, and when we talked it was mostly about our reading. I knew what passion was, and this was not passion. If he was interested in me it was only because he had confused my enthusiasm for Iceland with something else.

Beside the road the stiff-branched poplars stirred in the breeze. Avoiding Archie was not, given my friendship with Hannah and Pauline, and his with George, an option. What I must do, I thought, was tell the truth: that I needed to study for my exams. We would translate Latin in a businesslike way, but there would be no more lively discussions of romantic sagas.

I let myself into the house and climbed the stairs. In the upstairs hall a low murmur of voices stopped me. Perhaps Marian and Robin were discussing a dream. No, the voices came from George's room. He had never spoken to me or, as far as I knew, to Robin, but now, alongside Marian's light musical tones, I heard a darker, deeper voice.

chapter twenty-eight

R
obin's birthday was the last Saturday in January. Together we iced the cake I had baked and wrote
Happy Birthday Robin
on top. Cautiously he pushed five red candles into the icing. Marian had invited the neighbours with children close to his age, and while the grown-ups chatted, I organised Robin and his guests to play hunt the thimble and pin the tail on the donkey. The first he enjoyed, but at the sight of the blindfold for the second he fled under the nearest table and had to be coaxed out again. We had just sung “Happy Birthday” when Archie arrived. He apologised for being late and, with a small bow, handed Robin a package. Robin carried it over to where I sat near the window.

Nell had opened presents gleefully, flinging paper into the air, but Robin insisted that we peel back each piece of Sellotape and carefully unfold the brown paper. Inside was a slender, homemade book, the pages sewn together. On the cover was a drawing of Wade's Bridge with a boy standing on the parapet and the words
Robin's History of Aberfeldy and Weem
. Archie was talking to Marian, but I saw him glance over, waiting for Robin's reaction, and for mine.

“Archie made a book for you,” I said. “Look. It's all about your home.”

Inside the book each double page had a picture on one side—the Black Watch Memorial, the town square, the Birks, the inn where Bonnie Prince Charlie might have stayed—and on the other a little story. “Pretty,” said Robin, pointing to the picture of the Birks. Robert Burns sat beneath the trees, pen poised over a notebook.

“It is pretty,” I said. “I'll read it to you before bed.”

The other adults insisted on seeing, and the booklet was passed around, to much admiration. Archie explained that Hannah had helped him with the pictures. “That's you,” he said to Robin, pointing to the boy on the bridge, “though of course you must never climb up on the parapet.”

“I won't,” Robin promised fervently.

Later, after the guests had gone and we were washing up, Marian remarked that the book must have taken Archie weeks. “Such a formal man,” she added, “but he has a warm heart.” I wondered if she too thought that Archie had designs on me.

That evening I drew up a plan of study for the next month. I had always felt superior to the girls at Claypoole who couldn't keep straight Iago and Othello, a hypotenuse and a diagonal. All the books I'd read, all the lessons I'd sat through, were still waiting, I was sure, in some unvisited corner of my brain. But the last few weeks had shown me how much I'd forgotten. I would have to practise writing essays, doing translations, memorising the complexities of nineteenth-century history. The only subjects that came back effortlessly were algebra and trigonometry. Looking over my list of dates and goals, it occurred to me, for the first time, that I might sit the exams and fail.

The next morning as I read about the three pigs, Robin protested that I was going too fast. I began again. Again he said, “Too fast, Jean.”

“I'm sorry. I'm worried about my exams.”

“What's an exam?” He placed a small hand on my knee.

“You have to answer questions about something, say, English history, in a certain period of time, and you only have one chance to give the right answer.”

“Horrid,” he said. “Let me help.”

“I wish you could, but you're too young.”

“No, we can read your books. I want to.”

Beneath his wide-eyed gaze I considered his suggestion. Surely, I thought, it would do no harm if instead of reading about pigs and rabbits we read about Gladstone and Disraeli. If we made charts and pictures of historical events. If we made lists of vocabulary words for French and Latin. Marian, when I explained my plan, said fine but no violence. And so our mornings began to include my studies. While he understood almost nothing, Robin turned out to be unexpectedly helpful. “That's different from last time,” he would say, when I recited the dates for the repeal of the Corn Laws or conjugated a verb, and he was almost always right.

At Pauline's suggestion I had asked the headmaster of the school if I could sit in on the Form V classes during my free afternoons, and so I became a pupil again. The other girls and boys, only a year or two younger than me, often seemed more childish than Robin, but I was glad to have the teachers' guidance. One Monday, after Latin, I was sheltering from a sudden shower with two of the girls: Joan and Margaret. As we lingered in the doorway, trying to decide if the rain was lessening, Joan said wasn't I the girl the postman had found half-dead in a ditch. I said I was and repeated, for only the second or third time, the story about my aunt in Inverness, and getting ill on the bus.

“And the lezzies took you in,” said Margaret.

“I work for Mrs. MacGillvary.” I scarcely knew what I was saying.

“The lesbians,” said Joan, gleefully. “The dykes.”

“My dad says Hannah ought to have been a bloke,” said Margaret.

I walked blindly into the rain. It was none of my business. It made no difference. But once again I had failed to understand the people around me. At Claypoole there had been crushes between girls, but I hadn't thought of these feelings as having a place in the adult world. I had never said the word
lesbian
, seldom seen it written. Just down the road from Honeysuckle Cottage was a bungalow shared by two women; the flat above the chemist's was shared by two girls. Were all these women in love? A tractor was grinding towards me and I stepped onto the verge to avoid being splashed. As I started walking again, I recalled those evenings of television and music, when I had felt myself so much a part of their household, and all along they had been secretly wishing me gone so that they could get into one of those double beds and put their arms around each other.

The next day, going over my Virgil translation with Archie, I kept making mistakes. Finally he said, “Jean, you knew the subjunctive last week.”

“I'm sorry. Could we take a break?”

He nodded and said why didn't he make us some hot chocolate. By the time he returned with two steaming mugs I had realised that I couldn't ignore my new knowledge. As he handed me a mug and sat back down, I asked how long Hannah and Pauline had been friends.

“I couldn't say. Eight years? Ten? They met at university. Did I put in enough sugar?”

“Just right. At school yesterday a couple of girls were talking about them.”

Archie held his mug chest-high between both hands and regarded me steadily. “There's a story,” he said, “about Queen Victoria that won't be on your exams. Her ministers wanted to make homosexuality illegal for both men and women, but no one knew how to explain to the queen that some women liked each other, and so the law was passed only against men. Most of our neighbours are probably like Queen Victoria. That doesn't stop them from being fond of Hannah and Pauline.”

“But—” I stopped, not knowing what I wanted to say.

Archie raised his chin. “You're not going to tell me that, after all they've done for you, you disapprove of my sister and her beloved?”

“No. Of course not. I just feel so stupid. There I was, living in their house, trying to be the ideal guest, with no notion that they shared a room.”

“Well, it's not my job to speak for two eloquent women. Three,” he added with a nod at me. “But they had long debates. Hannah wanted to tell you. Pauline worried it would put you in a difficult situation.”

“Did you ask Marian to give me a job?”

He inclined his head. “You were working so hard to make a home for yourself, and they didn't know how to tell you that they needed their privacy. Then you spoke to me in the square, and the next day, when I came to read to George, Robin was hiding under the table.”

“So you saved my life twice.”

“I wouldn't say that. Hannah will tell you I'm thick as a brick when it comes to humans. But that first day when I carried you to the van you kept begging me not to go to the police.” He gestured around the room. “This seemed better.”

“This is better.” I looked at him in his armchair, his long legs stretched out before him, his long narrow feet in their thick green socks. “Do you think,” I said, “one can ever know another person?”

I meant the question in a very particular sense, but Archie wriggled his toes at the opportunity to wax philosophical. “For the most part,” he said, “I'm not bothered about whether I know other people. What worries me is do I know myself?” Two philosophers, he went on, one French, one Scottish, had pursued this question. René Descartes claimed that a person was a
res cogitans
, a thing that thinks. David Hume had a different view. When he went looking for a self he found nothing there, just a mass of sense impressions.

Finally I interrupted. “Please,” I said, “don't tell Hannah and Pauline about the girls at the school. Can we say that I guessed and asked you?”

“We can,” said Archie.

It seemed oddly fitting that, as he left, the first snow was falling. In the morning I woke to find the muddy fields and leafless trees white and pristine. Robin and I made a snowman in the garden with a carrot for a nose and currants for eyes. Later we went tobogganing by the river, and he proved surprisingly fearless. “Another turn, another turn,” he kept saying. That evening, I made my way to Honeysuckle Cottage. As soon as the three of us sat down to supper, I said, looking from Pauline to Hannah, that I owed them an apology. “I'm sorry you felt you had to keep a secret in your own home.”

“Thank you,” said Pauline, bobbing her head.

“We appreciate your saying that, Jean,” said Hannah.

I had thought they might talk about when they understood their feelings for each other, what it was like to live in a town with few hiding places. Instead Pauline launched into a story about a salesman who'd come into the chemist's that day, then Hannah commented on the kale we were eating; our conversation followed its usual orbits. But when Hannah got up to fetch dessert she placed her hand on Pauline's shoulder, a gesture I had seen her make dozens of times, and smiled at me.

T
he snow stayed for a week and melted the day the preliminary exams began. Marian had rearranged her pupils so that I had the necessary mornings and afternoons free, and she and Robin helped with last-minute studying. When the results came, and I turned out to have got five As, they both applauded. Under the headmaster's supervision, I wrote to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews universities, asking to be considered for late admission in mathematics, and received provisional acceptances from Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

Snowdrops gave way to catkins, catkins to pussy willow; aconites sprang up in the garden, and crocuses, scilla, and forsythia soon followed. The geese began to fly north. On my walks I saw oystercatchers and lapwings. Soon the swallows would return. I studied. I took care of Robin. I visited Pauline and Hannah. I ignored the voices that came from George's room. When Archie invited me for a walk, or once a drink, I found a reason, usually Robin, to refuse.

I was doing a good job, I thought, of keeping everything on an even keel when one Saturday afternoon Hannah invited me to accompany her to Pitlochry. My dread of the town had receded, and I accepted with alacrity. We loaded the car with fruit bowls and drove out of Aberfeldy past the caravan site and the distillery. In the village of Strathtay, Hannah showed me the house where Archie had rooms. A few miles farther on, we had just passed a field of cows when she pointed to an oak tree beside the road. “That's where Archie found you.”

The tree, with its broad trunk and still dead leaves, was gone in an instant, but I felt an odd twinge at seeing the place where I had almost died.

The shop that sold Hannah's pottery turned out to be opposite Newholme Avenue, the site of my false address. I helped her to carry in the bowls and said I'd go for a walk while she talked to the manager. As I passed the milk bar and the electrical shop, I was struck by the difference having money made. I could stroll into any one of these establishments and, even if I didn't make a purchase, be treated politely. I turned up the road to the church. I was gazing across the grassy knoll at the faded red door when I heard a tapping sound. The elderly man with the little white dog was approaching.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you by any chance know where the minister lives?”

“Och, aye, lassie. See the house with the black gate.” He raised his walking stick to clarify my destination.

Before I could reconsider, I walked over, opened the gate, and knocked on the door. Almost immediately it was flung open by a freckle-faced girl only a little older than Nell. When I asked for the minister, she called over her shoulder, “Dad. Someone wants you,” and ran off down the corridor.

A man of about thirty, fair skinned, slender, the opposite of Mr. Waugh, appeared. His half-moon glasses were perched on the end of his nose and in one hand he held a pen. “Good afternoon,” he said with a kindly smile. “Would you like to come in?”

“Last October I sought sanctuary in your church and someone took my suitcase.”

“Oh,” he said, removing his glasses altogether. “You're the girl who slept in the church. I'm sorry that you didn't knock on my door then.”

“I didn't think of it. Or if I did, I was afraid you'd be angry.”

His eyes crinkled. “My dear, almost everyone, including my wife, would tell you that my sermons are dull as ditch water, but I've never turned away anyone in need. I'm glad to meet you at last. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

He reminded me so piercingly of my uncle that I could barely speak. “Someone's waiting for me,” I managed.

“Well, let me get your suitcase. I have it tucked away in my study.”

As he headed down the corridor, I thought how much of my suffering—the gloomy church, the hotel managers, the odious jeweller, the meat paste—had been unnecessary. All I had had to do was knock on this door.