The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [112]
“Nor do I.” He guided my hand inside his jacket. Through his shirt I felt his heart knocking against his ribs. I had not looked at him directly since Seamus spoke; now I saw how pale he was beneath his harvest tan.
“Come,” he said. “Let two scared people enter the tomb.”
Slowly, stooping, he led the way along the passage. I followed, keeping my head down, counting each step until, at the twenty-fourth, the low roof disappeared and I straightened. I began to make out that I was in a room, roughly square, large enough to hold a couple of dozen people. Three of the walls had windowlike openings into further darkness. The only light came down the passage, and the ceiling rose, bowl-shaped. Mr. Sinclair led the way to a block of stone beside one of the openings. Not taking my eyes off the passageway, I sat down. He sat down a few yards away on another block of stone. If someone closed the door we would be buried alive.
“If there is any hope of your understanding what I am about to tell you,” he said, “then it’s in this place.”
He did not ask if there was any hope, and I could not have answered.
“One day the autumn I was ten,” he went on, “Seamus and another boy and I cycled here. My history teacher had asked me to copy the runes carved on the corner-stones”—he gestured in the gloom—“and while I was writing them in my notebook Seamus and Ted blocked the passage with hay bales. Afterwards they swore they’d only meant to leave me for five minutes, but a neighbour offered them a lift home on his tractor and they lost track of the time. I had no food or water; no way to budge the bales. I called for help until I was hoarse. I was sure I was going to die but that first I would go mad. Finally I passed out.”
I had not thought of the sewing-room in years; now I saw the towering shelves of linen, the black gremlin of the sewing-machine. Had anyone come to him in the darkness? I wondered. Then sympathy was swept away by anger. What did this story of thirty years ago have to do with anything?
“Seamus and Ted were punished—they had to muck out the byre for a month—but for them it was just a joke gone awry. For me, it was the day that changed my life. I had discovered what I most feared. And my father had discovered I was a coward. He was the one to drag the bales away. When I came round he was standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got no backbone, Hugh.’ ”
I heard his raincoat rustle, the fabric shifting as he moved.
“The war was my chance to prove him wrong. I spent the last four years of school imagining myself following Roy into the RAF, saving London, fighting off the Huns. At last I was eighteen. Seamus’s birthday was the week before mine, and we went together to Kirkwall to enlist and have our medical exams. A fortnight later I met the postman in the village and he handed me an envelope. I’d been chosen by lottery to be a Bevin Boy.”
“So you were both Bevin Boys?” Beneath my coat, in my wet dress, I shivered.
“No. Seamus was accepted by the RAF. I persuaded him to swap. What he said at the registry office was true. For nearly two years, everywhere but here, I was Seamus Sinclair and he was Hugh Sinclair.”
While he explained how they had managed the exchange—letters, documents, blurred photographs—I stared down the passageway to where the rain was splashing on the grass. Behind his locked door he had been hiding not someone, or something, but himself. But how could he hide? I remembered all the friends and neighbours who had come to the house to greet his return. “I don’t understand,” I said. “When the war finished, weren’t you always meeting people who knew you as Seamus?”
“Not often, and when I did I said I’d decided to go by my first name of Hugh.”
“So how”—I pictured Seamus’s steely gaze—“did you persuade him?”
“I offered him his heart’s desire.”
“Alison.”
“Alison,” he agreed.
“But,” I burst out, “she wasn’t yours to offer.”
“That was the problem. I promised that if he took my place in the mines, I would do everything I could to persuade Alison to marry him, and to ensure