The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  Footsteps ascended—already I was getting to know Hannah’s heavy tread—the door opened and she reappeared, carrying a plate of toast and a glass of milk. “I forgot to ask your name,” she said, setting them on the bedside table.

  In the first moments of consciousness I might easily have forgotten my new identity. Now I announced myself as Jean Harvey. While I ate, taking the small bites Hannah urged, she sat in the armchair. She asked if I had been to Aberfeldy before and when I said no she told me that the town was on the river Tay, ten miles west of the main road between Perth and Pitlochry. After all my travels I had ended up less than thirty miles from Yew House.

  “We moved here four years ago,” she went on. “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I read the solicitor’s letter. I’d never even spoken to my cousin, just Christmas cards, and here he was leaving me Honeysuckle Cottage. He thought it would be good for my work.” She gestured towards the paintings. “And it is. We turned the garden shed into a pottery.”

  “I like the delphiniums,” I offered shyly.

  “Juvenilia,” said Hannah, pushing back her hair. “But there is something that interests me about the blue. The nasturtiums look like they might be about to eat you.”

  I asked if Pauline was an artist too, and Hannah said no; she worked at the local chemist’s. When the toast was gone, she helped me out of bed and across the landing to the bathroom. I stared in amazement at the circles round my eyes, my thin cheeks. I could have been twenty. Even thirty. What would Mr. Sinclair think if he could see me now? I turned on the hot tap and my face disappeared in a cloud of steam.

  For the rest of the day I dozed and looked out of the window at a row of fir trees tossing in the wind. Soon after five I heard voices in the room below, then quick, light feet on the stairs and a tap at the door. If Hannah was an angular heron, the woman who entered was a plump wren. Her hair was curly, her cheeks pink, her figure a neat hour-glass.

  “I’m Pauline. How are you feeling?”

  “Better, as long as I don’t try to do anything.”

  “That’s your body’s way of making sure you stay in bed. You were so ill that you lost consciousness. But you’re young. You’ll be up doing the Highland fling in no time. Can you tell me what happened? Can we telephone your family?” From behind spotless spectacles her green eyes studied me with concern.

  I tried to come up with an answer and then gave the best possible one: tears.

  “There, there,” said Pauline. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Would you like something to read?”

  When I nodded, she disappeared and returned ten minutes later with a stack of books: an Agatha Christie, a Georgette Heyer, a book about Highland Perthshire, and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. I had read this last at Claypoole, and I seized it with delight. In the midst of so much turmoil Haggard’s dramatic story remained unchanged.

  The next morning I begged Hannah to let me get up. At first she said not without consulting Pauline, but when I persisted, she said what harm could it do so long as I promised to go back to bed the moment I felt poorly. She brought my clothes, which had been washed but not ironed. I dressed slowly—I was weaker than I had expected—and, keeping firm hold of the banister, descended the stairs.

  “In here,” Hannah called. I stepped through the nearest door and found myself in a smaller, cosier version of the kitchen at Blackbird Hall. Hannah was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. “Sit, sit,” she said as she stood. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “The traditional invalid’s reply.” She aimed her chin at me. “Really?”

  I confessed that I had counted the stairs, and that when I moved too quickly everything blurred. As I spoke something nudged my leg. A black Labrador was gazing up at me with soulful eyes. I stroked her glossy head.

  “Emily, don’t be a nuisance. She’s called after Emmeline Pankhurst and, like her namesake, I’m afraid she can be pushy. You’re light-headed. We’ll ask Dr. Grady about that when he comes by. For now let’s get you some breakfast.”

  “There’s no need,” I said, meaning the doctor. But Hannah was already at the stove. As she stirred the porridge, she said the town was lucky to have a doctor, a dentist, and almost everything else one might need: shops, a school, a cottage hospital, and a library. “And of course,” she added, “our famous Birks.”

  “Birks?” At Claypoole the girls had often called each other a stupid birk.

  “Birch trees,” said Hannah, gesturing towards the window, although there were none in sight. But the Birks of Aberfeldy, she explained, was a gorge just outside the town where the Falls of Moness tumbled down the hill. Robert Burns had immortalised the place in a song. “When you’re better,” she concluded, “we’ll walk up there. It’s lovely at this time of year.” She set a bowl of porridge on the table and again reminded me not to eat too fast.

  I had worried that, now that I was upright, I would have to give an account of myself, but Hannah announced she was going to her pottery. “If you need anything, come and find me.” Then she left me in the company of Emily and two cats, one calico, one grey. Under their combined gazes, I ate the porridge slowly, avoiding the lumps.

  When I had finished, I washed the bowl and the saucepan and set out to explore. Downstairs, besides the kitchen, there was a small room with a cluttered desk and bookshelves and a living-room with a view over the garden to the hills. The stairs went up the middle of the house to a landing where they divided. To the left four more stairs led to my room and a bathroom; to the right were two more bedrooms, each with a double bed and a fireplace. The one with the carelessly made bed and hastily drawn curtains I guessed to be Hannah’s. In the other room the books were stacked neatly on the bedside table, the clothes folded on a chair.

  I fetched King Solomon’s Mines and lay down on the sofa in the living-room. With the grey cat at my feet and Emily asleep on the hearthrug, I too soon drifted off. I woke to a hand on my forehead.

  “Jean,” said Hannah, “this is Dr. Grady.”

  “How do you do, young lady. You gave us quite a scare.”

  With his flyaway hair and prominent Adam’s apple, Dr. Grady looked like a man in a hurry, but he set down his bag and, talking all the while to Hannah, examined me in a leisurely fashion. “I was in that pool just below the big willow tree—take a deep breath, good girl—when I felt a tug on my line. Bend forward.”

  His stethoscope, to my relief, revealed nothing untoward. All I needed was rest and food. “But if you rush around,” he said, “you could end up with pneumonia. You must take it easy for the next week. If that’s all right with you, Hannah,” he added.

  “Of course,” she said. “Jean will just lounge around with the cats.”

  And that was what I did. I read and dozed and played with the animals. I gave little thought to the future. Whenever I told myself I must make a plan, I fell asleep. As for the past, I did my best to pretend that the events of the last few months had never occurred, but whenever the phone rang, I seized a book or played with a cat until the call was safely answered. Happily my hosts seemed to notice nothing. My strength began to return, and soon I was helping with household chores. On my fifth day I was making apple crumble, trying to peel the apples in a single sweep, when a man with the same long nose and chin as Hannah stepped into the kitchen without knocking.

  “Hello,” he said. “You look a hundred times better.”

  As he helped himself to tea, I did my best to thank Archie. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “If I’d given up smoking, like I vow to do every year, then I’d never have found you. I stopped to roll a cigarette, and there you were. I was afraid you were dead.”

  Cigarettes were Archie’s sole vice, at least in his own eyes. Three years ago he had followed Hannah to Aberfeldy and taken rooms a few miles away in the village of Strathtay. He rose at six, winter or summer, took a cold shower every morning, and was a vegetarian. His postal route took him around the valley, to many
small farms and hamlets. Last spring he had produced a pamphlet about the early road builders in this part of Scotland. At supper he asked if I’d seen Wade’s Bridge. When Hannah said not yet, he explained that General Wade was an English general who had come to Scotland in the eighteenth century and built 240 miles of roads and forty bridges, including the one in Aberfeldy.

  “Was that before or after Bonnie Prince Charlie?” I said. I could tell from the shift of Pauline’s shoulders and the pointing of Hannah’s chin that this was a familiar topic, but if Archie had held forth on the manufacture of toothbrushes I would have urged him on; I was so glad he was not asking difficult questions. While he and Hannah squabbled about Bonnie Prince Charlie, I looked from sister to brother. In Archie’s case the bony nose and long chin combined to create a remarkable handsomeness.

  As we ate the stew, his portion made with vegetables, the conversation turned to their neighbour Hamish, who, whenever a car backfired, dived for cover. “He thinks we’re still fighting the war,” said Pauline, and Archie said he’d stopped driving up to the house for fear of alarming him. After supper I excused myself to bed. I fell asleep to the sounds of their conversation, hoping I was not the subject, fearing I was.

  The following morning Hannah was at the kitchen table. After the first day she had left my porridge on the stove and gone to her pottery. But today she was waiting. I moved to the stove, dumb with apprehension, and lifted the saucepan onto the hot burner. She was going to tell me to leave and I was going to have to pretend that that was fine. Once again I would sleep in a pew, or worse, and stand beside the road while cars sped by.

  “Jean, forgive me, but I must ask you some questions. You’re living in our home, but we know almost nothing about you. Obviously something happened that sent your life off the rails, and obviously you don’t want to talk about whatever that was. You’re not the kind of person who would normally be wandering, penniless, in the rain.”

  The heat of the stove beat against my face.

  “Did you run away from home, or school?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me how you came to be lying by the road near Ballinluig?”

  “Not really. It involves too many other people.”

  “Is someone looking for you?”

  “I don’t know, but if they are, they don’t deserve to find me.”

  “Did you commit some crime, or unkindness, that led to your present situation?”

  Turning to face her, I dropped to my knees. “I swear I didn’t. I did do things I’m not proud of, but nothing criminal. As for unkindness—” Mr. Sinclair’s face appeared before me. “There are people who might claim I’d been unkind, but whatever I did, I believed was necessary.” While I delivered my speech, the cats had sauntered over and were arching against me, purring. They forgave me, but did Hannah?

  “For goodness sake, get up.” She half-rose, as if to help me. “That’s what we told Archie. Pauline and I both see how considerate you are. Whatever you’ve done, you’re not a bad person.”

  On the stove the porridge began to bubble. I jumped to my feet and seized the saucepan.

  “But our neighbours,” Hannah continued, “are asking about the girl who nearly died in a ditch. Yesterday a woman came into the chemist’s and said she’d heard that you’d lost your memory and didn’t even know your own name. Someone else claimed you’d run away from school and asked if we’d notified the police. So you need to come up with a story about your origins and stick to it. You can try it out on us.”

  She went off to the pottery, her mind seemingly set at ease. My own was in disarray. Alone at the kitchen table I gave myself a lecture. Why on earth would Hannah and Pauline want to take me in? They had been more than kind, nursing me back to health, dressing me—Pauline was almost my size—and feeding me. I must make a plan, before they asked me to leave. But first I needed to invent a history that was plausible and not too interesting, something people would gossip about one day and forget the next. Oddly this did not feel like lying, any more than calling myself Jean Harvey did.

  As I chopped vegetables for soup, I gave myself a dead mother and a father who lived in Edinburgh and had recently remarried. I would hint at a difficult stepmother, a second family. But how had I come to be wandering the roads of Perthshire with no possessions? Perhaps I’d been going to stay with an aunt in Pitlochry. Then I remembered the woman who had accosted me outside the church. Pitlochry was too close, too small. Questions might follow. Who was my aunt? Where did she live? Between one carrot and the next I moved her to Inverness.

  So then what happened? I had been on the bus and something I’d eaten had disagreed with me. I had had to get off in a hurry at Ballinluig, and in my confusion had forgotten my luggage. I’d phoned the bus company but no one had seen my suitcase.

  Over lunch, after Hannah had praised the soup, I rehearsed the story. “Not bad,” she said. “But why aren’t you going to see your aunt, now that you’re fit again?”

  “I can’t bear to leave you and Pauline and Aberfeldy.”

  She shook her head. “You can do better than that.”

  “My aunt just lost her job—she’s a hairdresser—and she’s going to have to move into a smaller flat. She doesn’t have room for me.”

  “That might work. Let’s try it out on Pauline this evening.”

  I did.

  “Your poor aunt,” said Pauline. “And what does your father do?”

  “A teacher?”

  “No. And he’s not a postman either.” Pauline frowned. “I see him working in a big shop in Edinburgh. Maybe Jenners?”

  That was the name of the department store, I recalled, that I had visited so long ago with my aunt and of which the shop in Kirkwall had reminded me. I had a sudden vision of myself in the middle of a lofty hall, transfixed by the sights and sounds and perfumes. Yes, that would be a perfect place for my imaginary father to work.

  The following day I accompanied Hannah into town. She pointed out the library, the butcher’s, the chemist’s where Pauline worked, and the bank. In the main street she stopped every few yards to greet someone and introduce me. “This is Jean Harvey. She’s staying with us while she finds her feet.” Then I would smile and say that I was much better, thanks to Hannah’s cooking.

  When we got home I said, “No one asked me anything. Why did I need a story?”

  “Jean, we live in a polite town. They’re not going to pester you to your face, but they’ll all be buying aspirin now, asking Pauline. And when I return my library books this afternoon they’ll be round me like wasps to a glass of beer. The next time you go into town someone will mention Edinburgh. Or make a joke about Jenners. Or say what a shame your aunt lost her job.”

  That was exactly what happened. The following day the woman at the newsagent remarked that I must miss the big city. And the day after that the butcher said how lucky I was that Archie had found me. “A young lass couldn’t ask to meet a nicer family than the Watsons.”

  In the days that followed I gave up all thought of leaving. I took on more of the household duties: I filled and raked the stove, walked Emily up the hill, carried bags of clay to the pottery, cleaned and shopped. I even ventured to make supper, which Hannah, whose job this normally was, particularly appreciated. I still wanted to go to Oban, to find Mr. Donaldson, but the days were getting shorter and colder, and I dreaded travelling without money. If I could stay in my blue room through the winter and get a job, then I could save money for the spring. One day, when I was helping Hannah wedge the clay, I confided that I was keeping an eye on the help-wanted advertisements in the window of the newsagent.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Hannah. “What are your skills?”

  I pushed down on the cool, damp clay. “Mathematics, teaching small children, feeding hens and calves, cleaning. I can polish a floor until it shines like a skating rink. And my cooking is coming along.”

  “Indeed it is. And you forgot reading; you’re a great reader. Pauline se
es people all day long. She can ask around if anyone needs help.”

  Outside the window a female blackbird was fluttering disconsolately above the empty bird table. “That would be super,” I said.

  On Saturday, when I ran into Archie outside the greengrocer’s, I explained that I was looking for a job. “If you hear of anything on your rounds,” I said, “housework, babysitting, teaching, will you let me know?”

  Archie took his cigarette out of his mouth. “I will,” he said.

  He was on his way to the library and I fell in beside him. As we crossed the square I asked how long he had been a postman.

  “Six years.”

  “What were you before that?”

  “How old do you think I am?” For a moment he almost smiled. “I was a student. I studied classics, not a subject that leads to a host of jobs.”

  “But why a postman? Wouldn’t you rather work in a bookshop, or a library?”

  “No. I like being out of doors, seeing the sky, having time to think. I’m not a great one for people, all that chitchat about weather and health and whose dog did his business in the street. I’d rather follow my own thoughts.”

  “You make it sound like they’re something separate from you,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever have that feeling? Some thoughts you know where they come from, but others could have come from Mars. Or Kirkwall.”

  At the mention of the familiar town I startled. Had I let something slip while I was unconscious? But no, Archie wore his usual intelligent frown; it was just the first example that came to mind. We had reached the library, and without waiting for an answer, he stubbed out his cigarette and swung through the door. I was tempted to follow him; to say yes, I did know what it was like to have uninvited thoughts show up in my brain. Did he have any suggestions as to how to get them to leave? But already he would be absorbed in his beloved books.