The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [1]
Long before Veronica’s remark, even before my uncle’s death, I would have said that the only thing I shared with my oldest cousin was an address: Yew House, Strathmuir, Perthshire, Scotland. At fourteen, Will was a thick-necked, thick-thighed boy who for the most part ignored me. Sometimes, when he came upon me in the corridor or the kitchen, an expression of such frank surprise erupted across his face that I could only assume he had forgotten who I was and was trying to guess. A servant? Too small. A burglar? Too noisy. A guest? Too badly dressed. I had seen the same expression on my uncle’s face when he watched Will play football, as if he were wondering how this hulking ruffian could be his son. But their blue eyes and long-lobed ears left no doubt of their kinship. My uncle had once shown me a photograph of himself with his brother, Ian, who had died in his early twenties, and my mother, Agnes, who had died in her late twenties. “Thank goodness she was spared the Hardy ears,” he had said.
With Louise and Veronica, however, I had a history of affection. Until last summer the three of us had attended the village school, walking the mile back and forth together. Although Louise was two years older, I had often helped her with her arithmetic homework. I had also endeared myself by giving her my turns on Ginger, the family pony, an act of pure self-interest that she took as a favour. But in July my aunt had announced that her daughters, like their brother, would go to school in the nearby town of Perth. Suddenly they had other friends, and I walked to school alone. Meanwhile the dreaded Ginger had been sold, and Louise now had her own horse. She had tried to convert me to her equine cult by lending me Black Beauty and National Velvet. So long as I was reading I understood her enthusiasm, but as soon as I was in the presence of an actual horse, all teeth and hooves and dusty hair, I was once again baffled.
As for Veronica, who was only six months my senior, she and I had been good friends until she too developed alien passions. Now she was no longer interested in playing pirates, or staging battles between the Romans and the Scots. All her attention was focused on fashion. She spent hours studying her mother’s magazines and going through her wardrobe. She refused to wear green with blue, brown with black. Any violation of her aesthetic caused her deep distress. When my aunt bought a suit she didn’t approve of, Veronica retired to bed for two days; my appearance, in her sister’s cast-offs, was a kind of torture. Her father had teased her about these preoccupations in a way that held them in check. Without him, she too had become a fanatic.
Despite these changes I had, until the previous week, believed that Louise and Veronica were my friends, but the events of Christmas Eve had forced me to reconsider. For as long as I could remember, the three of us had spent that afternoon running in and out of each other’s bedrooms, getting ready for the party given by the owners of the local distillery. Last year I had drunk too much of the children’s punch and won a game that involved passing an orange from person to person without using your hands; I had been looking forward to defending my victory. But on the morning of the twenty-fourth, when I had asked Louise if I could borrow her blue dress again, my aunt had paused in buttering her toast.
“What do you need a dress for, Gemma?”
“It’s the Buchanans’ party tonight. Don’t you remember, Aunt?”
I jumped up to retrieve the invitation from the mantelpiece