The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [134]
“Thank you. I came across the leaves pressed between the pages of my dictionary and decided to use them as a mould. Next spring I want to do the same with flowers: daisies, daffodils, columbines. Archie said you’re keeping him company in his reading.” She looked up from her wrapping. “He was wondering why you aren’t at university.”
Before I could stop myself, I burst out that I was dying to go to university. I wanted to study mathematics, or classics. “I like both, but people say in pure maths you reach a point where you can’t understand what the numbers are doing. Classics seem safer.”
“Why should you suddenly not understand numbers? That sounds like something male teachers say to girls. But if you do decide on classics, I’m sure Archie would tutor you. Have you done your exams?”
“No. My school closed down before I could take them.”
In all the weeks I’d known Hannah this was the most I’d told her about my past. I could see, by the way she carefully stopped watching me, that she had registered the fact. “Closed down?” she said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. You can still do the exams.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Don’t wrap those.” She pointed to two bowls. “I’m going to photograph them. Pauline knows the headmaster of the school. We’ll get his advice.”
While she went to the house to fetch her camera I turned to wrapping egg-cups. Through the window I could see Weem Rock and the hills beyond; above the tree line the sun shone on a white farmhouse. For the first time since I’d caught the ferry, I glimpsed a future that extended beyond Oban. I would never get my life with Mr. Sinclair back, but perhaps I could find a way forwards. When Hannah returned she photographed the bowl. Then, before I knew what was happening, she took a photograph of me. I was kneeling beside a box, holding a plate, gazing up at her.
The next time Archie visited George he stayed to talk to me about our reading. The word saga, he explained, meant both history and story, and the authors, mostly writing in the thirteenth century, had made use of facts when it suited them. The saga we’d read was part of a group that featured skalds, or poets.
“They’re not like our poets,” Archie said. “They don’t simply sit around composing. They go out and slay dragons and fight off rivals.”
“Wordsworth and Coleridge didn’t sit around,” I said. “They were always tramping across the moors. And several poets fought in the First World War.”
“You’re right. But no dragons. Grant me that.” He smiled.
In the opening pages of the saga, Thorstein, the father of the heroine, has a troubling dream. He is standing outside his house and a beautiful white swan is sitting on the ridge-pole. Somehow Thorstein knows that the swan is his daughter Helga. While he stands watching, an eagle, with black eyes and claws of iron, flies down from the mountains and perches beside her on the roof. The eagle is chattering happily to the swan when a second eagle arrives from the south. The two birds fight to the death and both fall off the roof. The swan remains alone and dejected until a third bird arrives from the west. He and the swan fly away together.
Archie commented on how effectively the dream foreshadowed the events that followed. I argued that it made it seem as if Helga had no choice; she was doomed not to marry the man she loved. “If everything’s been foreseen,” I said, “how can she act otherwise?”
“That’s a very old question,” said Archie. “Hannah would say that the problem is that Helga obeys her father. If it were up to her she would have stayed true to Gunnlaug and never have married Hrafna.”
“But it’s hard to overcome the customs of your country.” At Claypoole, when all the girls turned on a single victim, no one had dared to intervene. “I think the real problem is Gunnlaug,” I went on. “He promises to return in three years to marry Helga, but he’s so