The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [127]
His stethoscope, to my relief, revealed nothing untoward. All I needed was rest and food. “But if you rush around,” he said, “you could end up with pneumonia. You must take it easy for the next week. If that’s all right with you, Hannah,” he added.
“Of course,” she said. “Jean will just lounge around with the cats.”
And that was what I did. I read and dozed and played with the animals. I gave little thought to the future. Whenever I told myself I must make a plan, I fell asleep. As for the past, I did my best to pretend that the events of the last few months had never occurred, but whenever the phone rang, I seized a book or played with a cat until the call was safely answered. Happily my hosts seemed to notice nothing. My strength began to return, and soon I was helping with household chores. On my fifth day I was making apple crumble, trying to peel the apples in a single sweep, when a man with the same long nose and chin as Hannah stepped into the kitchen without knocking.
“Hello,” he said. “You look a hundred times better.”
As he helped himself to tea, I did my best to thank Archie. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “If I’d given up smoking, like I vow to do every year, then I’d never have found you. I stopped to roll a cigarette, and there you were. I was afraid you were dead.”
Cigarettes were Archie’s sole vice, at least in his own eyes. Three years ago he had followed Hannah to Aberfeldy and taken rooms a few miles away in the village of Strathtay. He rose at six, winter or summer, took a cold shower every morning, and was a vegetarian. His postal route took him around the valley, to many small farms and hamlets. Last spring he had produced a pamphlet about the early road builders in this part of Scotland. At supper he asked if I’d seen Wade’s Bridge. When Hannah said not yet, he explained that General Wade was an English general who had come to Scotland in the eighteenth century and built 240 miles of roads and forty bridges, including the one in Aberfeldy.
“Was that before or after Bonnie Prince Charlie?” I said. I could tell from the shift of Pauline’s shoulders and the pointing of Hannah’s chin that this was a familiar topic, but if Archie had held forth on the manufacture of toothbrushes I would have urged him on; I was so glad he was not asking difficult questions. While he and Hannah squabbled about Bonnie Prince Charlie, I looked from sister to brother. In Archie’s case the bony nose and long chin combined to create a remarkable handsomeness.
As we ate the stew, his portion made with vegetables, the conversation turned to their neighbour Hamish, who, whenever a car backfired, dived for cover. “He thinks we’re still fighting the war,” said Pauline, and Archie said he’d stopped driving up to the house for fear of alarming him. After supper I excused myself to bed. I fell asleep to the sounds of their conversation, hoping I was not the subject, fearing I was.
The following morning Hannah was at the kitchen table. After the first day she had left my porridge on the stove and gone to her pottery. But today she was waiting. I moved to the stove, dumb with apprehension, and lifted the saucepan onto the hot burner. She was going to tell me to leave and I was going to have to pretend that that was fine. Once again I would sleep in a pew, or worse, and stand beside the road while cars sped by.
“Jean, forgive me, but I must ask you some questions. You’re living in our home, but we know almost nothing about you. Obviously something happened that sent your life off the rails, and obviously you don’t want to talk about whatever that was. You’re not the kind of person who would normally be wandering, penniless, in the rain.”
The heat of the stove beat against my face.
“Did you run away from home, or school?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me how you came to be lying by the road near Ballinluig?”
“Not really. It involves too many other people.”
“Is someone looking for you?”
“I don’t know, but if they are, they don’t deserve to find