The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [124]
“I’m sorry. I’m going to be sick.”
“Bloody hell. Hang on.”
He pulled over. Still holding my bag, I scrambled out of the cab. I had taken only a couple of steps before I doubled over. Everything I had eaten at the recreation ground flew out of my mouth. Presently I heard Grant’s voice.
“I need to be on my way. Are you well enough to come along?”
My body answered for me.
“You’re in Ballinluig,” he said. “You can maybe get a cup of tea at the garage. Here’s a little something. Good luck, Jean.” He handed me two coins and was gone.
When I was well enough to stand upright again, I put the half-crowns carefully away in my pocket. I was on the edge of a village of a few dozen houses. I saw signs for the garage Grant had mentioned, and a shop. At the former a man in greasy overalls told me that I couldn’t shelter there. “Damned Gypsies,” I heard him say under his breath. In the shop a woman kept her arms tightly folded. No, she didn’t serve tea. No, I couldn’t wait there. When I stepped back into the road the houses on the other side tilted alarmingly. I leaned on the window-sill and put my head between my knees.
Behind me the shop bell rang. “I told you, you can’t stop here.”
I felt too ill to get another lift and yet this village was the worst place to be stranded. There was no church, no library, not even a bus shelter where I could wait to recover my strength. The feeling of being on fire was gone; instead my teeth were chattering. One house had a rowan tree outside like the one at Yew House and I knocked on the door. The curtains at the window twitched but no one answered. At the next house a woman said she was sorry and closed the door before I had uttered a word.
Back in the road I leaned against a parked car and waited for someone else to shout at me. The rain had closed in and the hilltops were shrouded in mist. My mind was as grey and empty as the sky. Everything I wanted—love, a slice of toast, a warm bed, a job, my suitcase—was far, far out of reach. I was gazing vacantly in the direction of the main road when I noticed a flash of colour: a red telephone box. One evening at Blackbird Hall Vicky had reported that someone phoning Mr. Sinclair had reversed the charges; it was a way, she explained, to make a phone call with no money. I knew the number, I thought. I could phone. Explain that I was in this place called Ballinluig, ill, penniless. And then Mr. Sinclair would rescue me. One of the passing cars would suddenly be his. I would be warm, dry, safe. I bent over, wrapping my arms around myself, trying to stop shivering. I heard Mr. Sinclair repeating the number over and over, as if he knew my plight and was urging me to phone.
Suddenly there was a different voice, the voice that had led me to Miriam years ago, that had warned me about the causeway. I had not heard the young man since I left Claypoole. Now he was saying something about cows.
“Go to the cows, Gemma. The cows will help you.”
When the bout of shivering passed, I raised my head and looked around. On the far side of the main road was a field of brown and white cows and a smaller road winding away into the countryside. Perhaps the cows would have some kind of shelter where I could rest. My own species had proved hopeless. Why not try another?
chapter twenty-six
What I saw first was not her face but three hollows, one at the base of her neck, one above each collarbone. Each could have held a small egg, a robin’s perhaps.
“You’re awake,” she said. “Can you sit up and drink some lemon barley water?”
With her help I managed both. She turned my pillow and another part of her came into view: two hands, large for a woman, no rings. I sank back against the pillow, so relieved to be in a bed that I did not care where it was, or how I’d got there. But as the woman kept talking, I grasped that her name was Hannah. Her brother, a postman, had found me lying near the road. When he couldn’t rouse me, he had brought me here, to the house she shared with her friend, Pauline, in the town of Aberfeldy. At the unfamiliar name I at last raised