The Flight of Gemma Hardy (33 page)

“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 find 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

B
y 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.

A
t 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 how 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.

As I crossed the bridge, I ran my hands along the parapet in order to feel something—anything—other than longing. If the self was a mass of sensations then I could be rough granite, soft moss, the smooth concrete seams between the stones. But what I was longing for was not Archie. I did not want to lie on the grass with him and let him put his hands inside my clothes. And he, I was convinced, did not want that either. When he touched me, to take a cup of tea or retrieve a book, his touch was no different from Marian's. But I also remembered my journey from Kirkwall: how easily things could go awry, how quickly people became predators. It would be good to have a protector in that country, where I no longer spoke the language or knew the customs. I began to allow Archie to utter sentences like, “When we go to Reykjavik we must visit the cathedral.” I began to make remarks about visiting Thingvellir, going to see the hot spring.

A
week passed with no word from my aunt. I was on the point of writing again, when one day during lunch the phone rang.

“Gemma?” I heard Marian say. “I'm afraid there's—”

“Wait,” I called. Knocking over my chair, I ran to the hall.

“Hold on,” said Marian into the receiver and then to me, “A woman is asking for Gemma.”

As she retreated to the kitchen, I said, “Hello. Who is this?”

“Who is
this
?”

From the first syllable I recognised my aunt, her voice hoarse, as if she were about to cough. “Aunt,” I said. “This is Gemma.”

“That woman didn't seem to know who you are.”

“Did you find my birth certificate?”

“I want to talk to you. I'll be expecting you this Saturday.”

“I work,” I said. “How would I even get to Yew House?”

“I'll send someone to fetch you. Be ready at two o'clock.” And she was gone before I could protest, or ask if the same person would bring me back.

I stood in the hall until my heart slowed. In the kitchen Marian and Robin were finishing their tomato soup and debating what Robin should plant in his garden this year. Did he remember the nice big radishes he had grown last year? Yes, but he didn't like the taste of them. I ate my soup quietly until there was a lull in the conversation.

“That was my aunt,” I said. “She always calls me Gemma after my mother. I'm going to visit her on Saturday afternoon.”

“What a pretty name,” said Marian.

For several months I had contrived not to notice that Aberfeldy was less than thirty miles from Yew House; they were long country miles, over the hills, and no one, in my hearing, had mentioned Strathmuir. Now every night my dreams carried me back there, and during the day stray memories ambushed me: my aunt, in her gown, sweeping off to the party on Christmas Eve, my aunt driving past as I walked to and from school, my aunt siding with Will when he hit me over the head with
Birds of the World
, my aunt at Perth station telling me to be good. But I was not, I reminded myself, returning to that life. No one could shut me in the sewing-room. Louise and Will had surely left home, and Veronica, if she was still there, was too self-absorbed to be anyone's enemy.

Still, adult reason could not entirely quell childhood fears. On Saturday morning I woke at six and wrote a note to Marian:
If I don't return this evening please tell Archie to contact Mrs. Hardy at Yew House, near Strathmuir, Perthshire. Tell him to come and get me at once.
Once again I safety-pinned money and Marian's phone number into my pocket. There was a phone box in the village, I remembered, not far from the school.

I was eating my cornflakes when Marian came into the kitchen, her hair unbrushed, her cardigan unbuttoned. “Jean,” she said, “I hate to ask but I need a favour. George had a bad night. I just spoke to Dr. Grady and he's coming this afternoon. Is there any chance you could take Robin with you to see your aunt? He gets so upset on these occasions.”

I started to refuse. Then I took in the shadows under her eyes, the lines bracketing her mouth, and suddenly it seemed like a good idea. Robin's presence would protect me not just from kidnapping but also from what I dreaded still more: being changed back into my younger self. “Of course,” I said. “I hope he won't be bored.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” One line of worry disappeared from her forehead as she hurried from the room.

Robin, when I announced our plan, was less enthusiastic. “Must I?” he said. Grudgingly, he helped me gather up some cars and colouring books. At five to two we went outside to wait for the mysterious chauffeur, and at five past two a black car turned into the lane and came to a halt. A woman climbed out, wavy brown hair reaching to her shoulders, a blue sweater reaching to midthigh, jeans tucked into boots. As she started towards me, I recognised Louise, still carrying her Lares and Penates proudly before her.

“Gemma?”

“How do you do.” I stepped forward with outstretched hand.

“Not too bad.” She gave me a hearty shake, as if we were business acquaintances. “You've grown, and you're prettier than I expected. Remember how we used to tease you by singing, ‘Skinny ma linka long legs, big banana feet'? You'd run to the toilet whenever we started up. Who is this?” She nodded at Robin, who was standing behind me, clutching the gate.

“This is Robin. I'm his nanny. Robin, this is Louise.”

Louise gave a hoot of laughter. “Heavens, for a moment I thought he was yours.”

Robin stared at her. Who was this large, loud woman? We climbed into the back of the car, leaving her alone in the front. As she drove through Aberfeldy, past the Birks, and up the hill, she told me that Veronica was spending a year in Paris. “She's meant to be working on her French but she's mostly studying fashion and flirtation.”

“What about your brother?” Even now I did not care to say his name.

“Don't ask.” She gave a theatrical groan. “He's in London, spending money like water. His big plan, you may remember, was to play football for Scotland, which he had a snowball's chance in hell of actually doing. Now he's an apprentice at an insurance company. Hopefully someone's around to fix his mistakes.”

“And what about you? Are you still living at Yew House? How are your horses?”

“Gosh, I haven't ridden in years. I'm the assistant manager at a hotel in Edinburgh. It suits me. Lots of people coming and going, always something new.”

I stared at her profile, my aunt's plump cheeks, my uncle's straight nose. It was easy to picture her behind the counter of a hotel, scowling at my application form.

“I've been coming home at weekends,” she went on, “to deal with Mummy.”

“Look,” Robin exclaimed. Two Highland cows, with their curving horns and shaggy heads, were peering over a wall.

“You can draw me a cow later,” I said. “What's there to deal with?”

“Cancer. But I'd give ten to one she'll see the decade out, and the next one too. Those doctors don't know how tough Mummy is.”

Her tone was so jolly that it took me a moment to grasp that my aunt was gravely ill. Years before at Perth station I had cursed her. Now, like the rain that fell on the Welsh hills and bubbled up, eight thousand years later, in the hot springs of Sulis, my curse was finally coming true. But I felt little sense of victory.

“Will and I were always telling her not to smoke,” Louise continued, “but she wouldn't listen. What's so strange is that she's had this bee in her bonnet about talking to you. She went on and on about it. I even contacted that school: Clayfield, Claymoor. When it turned out to be closed, I didn't know what to do. I was thinking of putting an ad in the
Scotsman
when your letter came. It's as if you knew we were looking for you.”

“I had no idea. I thought your mother was going to marry Mr. Carruthers.”