The Flight of Gemma Hardy Read online

  “If only I had more players like Will,” he said, leaning back in the chair, “we’d win the season. The rest of you spineless wonders should take a leaf out of his book. That tackle he made in the first quarter was bloody brilliant.”

  My cousin, I realised, was pretending to be his football coach. I watched in fascination as he squared his shoulders and praised himself. It had never occurred to me that Will had an imaginary life. When he began to talk about making the Scotland team, my amusement escaped in a gust of laughter. He jumped to his feet, looking wildly around. Perhaps he thought his play-acting had summoned his father’s ghost. Then he spotted me behind the curtain.

  “What are you doing here, spying on me, you miserable little twerp?”

  Before I could answer he seized my arm. “Don’t you know that we all hate the way you sneak around, pretending to be such a Goody Two-shoes? All you do is scrounge off us. You eat our food, sit on our chairs, you pee in our toilets, and you don’t do one thing to earn your keep. Even the dogs are more useful than you are. Everything you’re wearing”—he jerked the sleeve of my cardigan—“belongs to my mother, and that means it belongs to me.”

  “And your sisters,” I said, in the interests of both accuracy and anger.

  His fingers pressed tighter. “So you ought to say thank you every morning when you get dressed, every time you sit down to eat, every time you—”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Master Will, most brilliant of humans, best of football players. You didn’t even make the junior eleven.”

  I got no further before he let go of my arm, grabbed Birds of the World, and brought it down, two-handed, on my head, as if he were trying to break the book in half. I fell off the window-seat, landing hard on my hip. I cried out and, as Will’s foot found my ribs, cried out again.

  “What on earth is going on here?”

  From my position on the floor, my aunt towered over her son, and they both towered over me. “Wretched girl, stop making such a row.”

  “Will hit me.” For once—both my fall and Will’s blows had hurt—I didn’t care about telling tales.

  “She was spying on me. I came in here to think about Daddy and she made fun of me. I tried to tell her how much she owed him. If it hadn’t been for him she’d still be wandering around on some iceberg, eating seal blubber. And she said she was glad he was dead.”

  At this, despite the pain, I jumped up, kicking and punching, trying to reach his eyes. “You liar. I never said anything like that. You are the one who forgets your father. You behave as if he never existed, as if he wouldn’t hate your muddy sports and your pathetic jokes about beer. You don’t care about anyone but your fat, stupid self.”

  A thread of snot dangled from Will’s nose and his eyes bulged. He shoved me hard, and I again fell to the floor.

  “You poor boy,” said his mother. “I don’t know what your father was thinking when he brought such a minx into our home. Please, darling, don’t exert yourself further. I will take care of punishing Gemma.”

  She stepped out of the room and returned a moment later with Betty, the maid. “Lock her in the sewing-room,” she commanded. “She’ll stay there until she is sorry for her bad behaviour.”

  Betty was a hefty girl, and I was slight and unaccustomed to fighting, but at the news that I was to be shut in I struggled with all my might, kicking her ankles, even sinking my teeth into her hand. I had almost pulled free when Will, ignoring his mother’s remonstrations, joined in. The two of them dragged me from the study, down the corridor, and up the stairs. Gleefully they thrust me into the sewing-room, and slammed the door.

  The only sources of light in the small room were a single window, far above my head, and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The window, close to dusk on this overcast day, made little difference, and the light switch was outside, in the corridor. In the gloom the sewing-machine glinted, black and malevolent, and even the tall shelves, stacked with sheets and towels, had a threatening air. Mrs. Marsden always kept the door open when she sewed and still complained about the chill. I sat down and tried to calm myself by picturing the birds I had just been studying, but I could not summon even a modest fairy-wren. For five minutes, perhaps ten, I managed to pretend that I was sitting there by choice. Then my hand reached for the doorknob, and in an instant, I was on my feet, pounding on the door, crying for help.

  At last footsteps approached. “Be quiet,” said my aunt. “You won’t be allowed out until you prove you are sorry. To attack your cousin like that.”

  “It was his fault. He hit me first.”

  The only answer was the sound of her footsteps retreating down the corridor. “Please, ma’am,” I cried. “Don’t go. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good. I never meant to insult Will.”

  I am not sure what else I promised—in my desperation I was shameless—but nothing made a jot of difference. Her footsteps continued unfaltering, fainter and fainter, towards the stairs. I heard them no more. In the shelves, among the linens, something moved. A figure stood there, tall and gaunt. It stepped towards me.

  chapter two

  The story of my parents was, according to my uncle, a tale of heroism and true love; to my aunt, an example of stupidity and stubbornness. They had met in 1943 when my mother, Agnes, a WRNS, was posted to Iceland, and my father, a man who had grown up in the shadow of glaciers and geysers, was working on the new docks in Reykjavik. After only four months Agnes had returned to Scotland, but they had kept faith, sent letters, and made romantic arrangements that involved looking at the North Star. They had planned to meet after the war, but then my mother found herself back in Edinburgh, taking care of her father, who had had a stroke. My uncle described the tall, stern house near the Botanical Gardens, and their small, stern parents.

  “They could have hired a nurse,” he told me, “but our mother wouldn’t hear of strangers in the house. She was never the same after Ian’s death.”

  My uncle was already married and in his first parish in Aberdeen; he hadn’t known of my father’s existence for nearly a year. Then a church council meeting brought him to Edinburgh. On the second day of his visit he had insisted Agnes take a walk with him in the Gardens.

  “Even to get your grandmother to consent to that was a tussle. What if something happens? she kept asking. It was then that I began to realise what your mother’s life was like and why she was so pale. The only times she left the house were to do the shopping, or fetch the doctor, or go to church. It was May and the azaleas were in full bloom. Agnes kept going from bush to bush, smelling the flowers, exclaiming.”

  My uncle and I were walking too, along the track that led to the footbridge over the river. It was a still afternoon in early autumn, and nothing seemed to move except the two of us, and the sheep, grazing in the nearby fields. We stopped in the middle of the bridge. My uncle leaned over the railings and I looked through them.

  “The summer before the war,” he went on, “my father took us fishing on Speyside. Ian and I were hopeless, but right from the start, Agnes had the knack. She could find the fish when no one else could. She told me how one day when she wasn’t on duty your father took her out in his boat and showed her the schools of herring. ‘They made their own waves,’ she said. I should have walked her home from the Botanical Gardens right then, and put her on the next boat to Iceland. Look.”

  A heron was standing in the shallows, head hunched, waiting for its prey.

  My parents wrote faithfully, and eventually, in 1946, three months after my grandfather’s funeral, my father travelled to Scotland. They were married in my uncle’s church. He asked if I knew what radiant meant, and when I shook my head he explained it meant giving out light, like the lamp in the sitting-room that was shaped like a lady wearing a crinoline. That was how my mother had looked on her wedding day. My father too. They had sailed to Iceland that night. From her new home my mother wrote wonderful letters. She had fallen in love with the country and with my father’s small fishing village. Sh
e learned Icelandic and made a garden among the rocks. She and my father had come back to Edinburgh only once, in 1948, so that I could be born in a Scottish hospital.

  “The last time I saw her,” said my uncle. “She couldn’t have been happier.”

  I was born in April, and that summer, when I was still too young to crawl and the seas were calm, my mother and I often went out in my father’s boat. I pictured the two of us in the bow, watching the waves while my father in the stern cast his nets. But one day the following spring, shortly after my first birthday, we stayed home and went for a walk instead. My mother slipped on some seaweed and, protecting me, hit her head on a rock. She picked herself up, brought me home, made a cup of tea, and took two aspirin. By the time my father returned, there was a lump the size of a hen’s egg on the back of her head, but she insisted she was fine, just tired. My father put me to bed and made supper. In the morning she didn’t wake up.

  For the next two years I lived with my father; a neighbour minded me while he fished. Then one pleasant August afternoon he didn’t come home. The neighbour said he must have found an enormous school of fish. He was following them, filling his nets; he would be back tomorrow. The next afternoon I saw the blue hull of his boat rounding the harbour wall. I ran to meet it, but the man at the tiller was a fisherman from the next village. When he stepped ashore, I hurled myself at his knees, demanding my father. He knelt down so that his face was level with mine and said something that made no sense. My father had drowned.

  I came to meet the boats the next day, and the next, and the next. Whatever the weather, I insisted on going down to the harbour. I ran up to each man in turn. Surely one of them would be my father. Several times I tried to stow away on a boat, but I was always discovered. If only I was allowed to look, I knew I could find him.

  I am not sure how many days or weeks later a strange man arrived, speaking in a language I didn’t understand. I hid in terror behind the neighbour. She showed me a photograph that stood on my mother’s chest of drawers and pointed first to the man in the photograph, then to the man standing a few feet away. “Your uncle,” she said.

  Later he told me that as a boy he had once tamed a fox cub and that the process of befriending me was similar; mostly he sat and waited for me to approach, or did things—sang, played bowls—that he thought might interest me. Then one day my uncle and the neighbour explained that I was going to a place called Scotland, where he and his family lived. I would have a brother and sisters, an aunt. The next day we packed, and the day after that we drove to the city and boarded a boat bigger than any I’d ever seen.

  The voyage took two days, and I spent every minute of daylight on deck, hoping to see my father, his head or his arm, even a sea-boot, above the waves. When my uncle asked me to come to meals, I explained why I couldn’t. He had found a sailor to translate for us, but the man’s English was uncertain; it took several exchanges before my uncle understood. Then he sat down beside me to scan the watery horizon. Sometimes, for a minute or two, a seal or a cormorant raised my hopes.

  I wept bitterly when land appeared. For the first time I believed my father was dead. Worse was to follow. As we drove along streets of grey buildings, it dawned on me that we were leaving the sea behind. I remember little of the drive to Yew House. We stopped several times for petrol or food and once for me to go behind a wall. The mossy stones were not so different from the ones at the back of our house.

  Every trip I had ever made had begun and ended with the sea, but as the sun set, we drove into a small village with no water in sight. My uncle pointed out his church.

  “No,” I said: my first English word.

  We drove along a narrow road between fields of black-faced sheep and up a drive lined with rhododendrons, shadowed by beech trees and firs. How dreary it seemed, closed in with trees, how silent without the sea to sing a lullaby.

  I still cherished some small hope that this was only temporary; my uncle had come to visit me; now I was going to visit him. But when we reached the stone house at the top of the drive and my uncle led me past a rowan tree and through the front door, I knew I would never see my father again, never walk down to the jetty to greet the fishing boats and laugh at the crabs scuttling over the rocks, never see the beady-eyed gulls waiting to pounce on fish scraps, never watch the snow fall day after day after day.

  I was inconsolable, and this, surely, was the beginning of my difficulties with my aunt. I howled every time she approached. I refused to talk to her, or to my cousins. I spoke only with my uncle. He neglected his own children to teach me English and that winter nursed me through first measles and then tonsillitis.

  Gradually I forgot my Iceland home, forgot my father and our village that was almost part of the sea. I went to school, played with my cousins, dogged my uncle’s footsteps, and enjoyed his praise of my reading and writing and sums. I had a home, and a family. It had taken me almost a year to understand that with his death, I had, once again, lost both. The true nature of my relations with my cousins and my aunt, like the branches of an elm in winter, became clear.

  chapter three

  When I opened my eyes I was looking not at the sewing-machine and the shelves of linen but at the sloping ceiling of my attic room with its mossy paint. I was still blinking cautiously as Mrs. Marsden appeared at the foot of my bed.

  “You’re awake,” she said. “What a fright you gave us. Dr. Shearer was here and he thinks you had some kind of fit. You kept talking to him in some strange language and trying to put on your shoes.”

  The notion of my doing and saying things of which I had no memory made me dizzy all over again. “I don’t remember any fit,” I said. “I just remember my aunt telling me to be quiet and being left alone in the cold and dark. She knows I hate being shut in. How could she be so cruel?”

  “Cruel,” exclaimed Mrs. Marsden. She had turned on the light and it shone on her fair hair, which was as usual pulled into a tight bun. “What nonsense. Your aunt gives you a home, food, and clothes. Without her you would be in an orphanage.”

  “At least there would be no one to say I’m worse than a dog. All the other children would be orphans too, and when people were stupid or unkind, they’d be punished.”

  Mrs. Marsden shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Orphanages are dreadful places. The children have no toys or books or drawing things. They work all day and are scolded for the smallest fault. You know how clumsy you are and how you take half an hour to lay a fire because you’re daydreaming. You would always be in trouble. Now lie still and don’t talk while I go and tell your aunt that you’re awake.”

  Who would I talk to? I wanted to say, but even this brief conversation had exhausted me. I was happy to lie back and close my eyes. Mrs. Marsden was right—I didn’t know the first thing about orphanages—but I couldn’t go back to being the docile girl who had allowed Will and Louise to bully her. As I drifted towards sleep I vowed I would no longer let myself be treated like an unpaid servant.

  When I awoke again a man with cavernous nostrils and gold-rimmed glasses was bending over me, one hand wrapped around my wrist. “Well, young lady,” said Dr. Shearer, “how are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “You didn’t seem fine last night.” He held up his hand and made me count fingers. Then he asked the names of the queen—Elizabeth II—and the prime minister—Harold Macmillan—and where I lived. I answered quietly, not quarrelling with the simple questions; Dr. Shearer had been a friend of my uncle’s and, on his rare visits to the house, always greeted me kindly. Once in the autumn when I was walking home from school he had stopped in his red sports car to give me a lift. “Hold on,” he had said, and then we were flying down the road, past the fields of startled cows and sheep. When we skidded to a halt in front of Yew House, he had said I was the perfect passenger.

  “Can you sit up?” he asked now.

  I tried, but little dots appeared before my eyes. Gently he told me to lie down again.
Could I tell him what had happened? I described my encounter with Will, how he had attacked me, how my aunt had taken his side and locked me in the sewing-room. “It was freezing and she wouldn’t even turn on the light.”

  “Heavens, Doctor,” said my aunt from the doorway. “You’d think I was an ogre. She flew at Will like a wildcat only because he reminded her of how much she owes our family. I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t make sure that Gemma understands that she won’t have the same advantages as her cousins. She will have to work for her living as soon as she’s able.”

  She came into the room and stationed herself at the foot of the bed. It was as if a peacock had invaded the nest of a sparrow. Everything about her—her hair, her pullover, her lipstick—was too large and vivid.

  “She might go to university,” ventured the doctor. “She might marry.”

  My uncle had always spoken as if all four of us would go to university. Now my aunt acknowledged, grudgingly, that this was possible. “But she’s a plain little thing, and bad tempered to boot. Even if she finds a husband, she’ll have to work, like Betty.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Dr. Shearer. “Betty has a good head on her shoulders. If she hadn’t left school at fourteen, she’d have made a capable nurse. Many women make their own way in the world nowadays: teaching, working in offices. Gemma will have the advantages of your example, and a thorough education.”