The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [114]
Mr. Sinclair stumbled behind me. As I crossed the field, he held the umbrella over me at an awkward angle. In the car he started the engine, the windscreen wipers, the heater. “Which way should we go?” he said in a low voice. “We can’t go back to Blackbird Hall, and we’ve missed the plane. Besides, you need dry clothes.”
“I have them in my suitcase. I want a room at the Kirkwall Hotel, where you stayed with Coco.”
“Not with Coco,” he corrected. “No, that would be horribly awkward.”
“Somewhere else, then.”
As we drove back to Kirkwall, I pulled my coat closer and tried to make a plan, but my brain, like my body, was frozen. The only future I could conjure involved immediate necessities: a hot bath, dry clothes, a bowl of soup. The rain was slackening, and in the fields the sheep and cows had begun to scatter. Periodically Mr. Sinclair said something. We would catch the plane tomorrow; we would be married in London. I did not bother to reply.
He stopped outside a small hotel on a side street near the harbour. I waited in the car. Presently he came out to report that he had got us two rooms, unfortunately on different floors. In the doorway of my room, he set down my suitcase and put his hands on my shoulders. “Please, Gemma,” he said. “It’s not as if I have another wife, or a mistress, or a child. I did something wrong when I was eighteen.”
“And when you were forty-one. I need to take a bath.”
“You poor darling, you mustn’t catch cold. Take a bath, then come downstairs and we’ll have lunch.”
I hung up my limp dress, put on my dressing-gown and slippers and, locking the door behind me, went down the corridor to the bathroom. I ran the bath hot and, once I was in, made it still hotter until my skin flushed. I was almost sorry when the shivering stopped; it had been a distraction. Back in my room a sheet of paper lay beneath the door:
G, I’ll be waiting downstairs in the bar. H.
As I dressed in trousers and a sweater, I saw that it was nearly two o’clock. I had expected by now to be married for three hours, to be on a plane approaching Edinburgh and a hotel room with a large, snowy bed. This room, with its single bed and single-bar electric fire, was barely larger than my attic room at Yew House. The only window overlooked a drab side street.
From our first meeting, when I had glimpsed his gorgeous shoes, I had known that Mr. Sinclair and I were unequal in the world’s eyes, but I had allowed myself to believe that he regarded me as an equal. And the foundation of that belief was that he would never lie to me. Coco was prettier, more accomplished, wealthier, but he had lied to her; to me he told the truth. Truth beareth away the victory. In the street an old car clattered by. He had sworn to me on the northern star and at the same time he had told me that the stars were falling.
I went to my suitcase and took out the photograph of my uncle. He had helped me before in times of trouble, guiding my behaviour with Nell, soothing my anger. Silently I asked him what I should do. He eyed me steadily, kindly, unhelpfully. I wrote a note—Mr. S., headache, taking a nap. G—and slid it under the door into the hallway. Fully dressed, still holding the photograph, I climbed into bed. Nora had said our marriage was like something out of a fairy tale—a scullery maid marrying a prince—but now it was my feelings that seemed like a fairy tale.
I slept, or at least I left one level of consciousness, and returned not to Blackbird Hall but to the rooms and corridors of Claypoole. I had not been happy there. I had worked endlessly and led a severely restricted life, but I had had my alliances, I had grown, and, especially in the last years, I had been able to study. Now in my dream state I was, once again, bending over the polishing machine in the corridor outside Miss Seftain’s classroom. Soon I would leave the sharp orange smell of the polish and go inside, and we would continue translating The Metamorphoses.