The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [116]
When the waitress brought my bill I asked if there was a bus station in Thurso; buses, I’d heard, were cheaper than trains. “Indeed there is,” she said. As she drew a map on a paper bag, she remarked that they didn’t get many visitors this late in the year. Quickly I invented a fictitious cousin, a walking holiday in Inverness. “I hope it stays fine for you,” she said. I thanked her and, with my handbag over my shoulder, my suitcase in hand, stepped into the street.
The bus station turned out to be nothing more than a large garage presently occupied by a man meticulously sweeping around the oil stains on the floor. He looked up long enough to tell me that the bus to Inverness left in an hour. I bought a newspaper and perched on the wall of a nearby house. After the ferry and two taxis, I had thirty-six pounds in my purse, a fortune to me, but until I found a job, I would need to pay for every night of sleep, every mouthful of food.
Holding the newspaper as a shield, I searched my life as if it were one of Nell’s puzzles where the aim was to find the six parrots hidden in a tree. Was there someone I had overlooked who would take me in? To my surprise the first person that came into view was Miss Bryant. I pictured myself knocking on her door, then I pictured her dismay at the sight of me, followed by—and this was oddly distressing to contemplate—her helplessness. She no longer had jobs at her command, hotels asking for working girls. She would have no choice but to take me in herself, or send me away.
Who else? I thought. Dr. White had always been kind, but I was not sure he would smile if I appeared, unexpectedly, at his surgery. With Ross I had long lost contact. Matron, in the Lake District, was too far away. As for Miss Seftain, with her sister in Dunblane, she herself was a guest on sufferance. Besides, how could I explain, after my last letter, why I was fleeing my marriage? The secret was not mine to tell.
And even if I could, in veiled terms, hint at my reasons, I had only to remember Mr. Sinclair’s voice as he talked on and on outside my door the night before—love, a mistake, years ago—to know that she would never understand. There was no obstacle to the marriage that had not, unbeknownst to me, been there all along.
“That’s mine.”
Two boys were playing hopscotch on the pavement. The lanky, dark-haired one reminded me of Nell. If she was following the timetable I had left she would—I checked my watch—be sitting at the kitchen table reading while Vicky made lunch. I had given her a story for each day we were apart. Today’s was about a goat who lies to his master and gets his sons into trouble; I imagined Nell giggling at the goat’s bad behaviour. Then I recalled our parting of the day before. I could not afford to think of Nell any more than of Mr. Sinclair. Quickly I returned to the newspaper. A blurry photograph of the Thurso school football team stared out at me. As I read down the list of matches—Inverness, Aberdeen, Wick, Ullapool—I remembered my dream of the previous afternoon. Mr. Donaldson, he was the hidden parrot. Years too late I could apologise for the wrong I had done him, and retrieve my box. At long last I could read the papers my parents had left me.
Other passengers began to seat themselves on the wall; the bus arrived. The conductor helped me lift my suitcase onto the rack behind the driver. As we drove out of town, I thought, just for a moment, of crying, “Stop! Stop!” I could still get off and go and wait by the ferry until Mr. Sinclair arrived the next day. But no, a man who would sell his sister, who would ask another man to go down a mine for him, who would lie and take advantage of his wealth—that was not the man I wanted to marry.
The bus was draughty and the seats hard, but in Inverness,