The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [138]
That evening I drew up a plan of study for the next month. I had always felt superior to the girls at Claypoole who couldn’t keep straight Iago and Othello, a hypotenuse and a diagonal. All the books I’d read, all the lessons I’d sat through, were still waiting, I was sure, in some unvisited corner of my brain. But the last few weeks had shown me how much I’d forgotten. I would have to practise writing essays, doing translations, memorising the complexities of nineteenth-century history. The only subjects that came back effortlessly were algebra and trigonometry. Looking over my list of dates and goals, it occurred to me, for the first time, that I might sit the exams and fail.
The next morning as I read about the three pigs, Robin protested that I was going too fast. I began again. Again he said, “Too fast, Jean.”
“I’m sorry. I’m worried about my exams.”
“What’s an exam?” He placed a small hand on my knee.
“You have to answer questions about something, say, English history, in a certain period of time, and you only have one chance to give the right answer.”
“Horrid,” he said. “Let me help.”
“I wish you could, but you’re too young.”
“No, we can read your books. I want to.”
Beneath his wide-eyed gaze I considered his suggestion. Surely, I thought, it would do no harm if instead of reading about pigs and rabbits we read about Gladstone and Disraeli. If we made charts and pictures of historical events. If we made lists of vocabulary words for French and Latin. Marian, when I explained my plan, said fine but no violence. And so our mornings began to include my studies. While he understood almost nothing, Robin turned out to be unexpectedly helpful. “That’s different from last time,” he would say, when I recited the dates for the repeal of the Corn Laws or conjugated a verb, and he was almost always right.
At Pauline’s suggestion I had asked the headmaster of the school if I could sit in on the Form V classes during my free afternoons, and so I became a pupil again. The other girls and boys, only a year or two younger than me, often seemed more childish than Robin, but I was glad to have the teachers’ guidance. One Monday, after Latin, I was sheltering from a sudden shower with two of the girls: Joan and Margaret. As we lingered in the doorway, trying to decide if the rain was lessening, Joan said wasn’t I the girl the postman had found half-dead in a ditch. I said I was and repeated, for only the second or third time, the story about my aunt in Inverness, and getting ill on the bus.
“And the lezzies took you in,” said Margaret.
“I work for Mrs. MacGillvary.” I scarcely knew what I was saying.
“The lesbians,” said Joan, gleefully. “The dykes.”
“My dad says Hannah ought to have been a bloke,” said Margaret.
I walked blindly into the rain. It was none of my business. It made no difference. But once again I had failed to understand the people around me. At Claypoole there had been crushes between girls, but I hadn’t thought of these feelings as having a place in the adult world. I had never said the word lesbian, seldom seen it written. Just down the road from Honeysuckle Cottage was a bungalow shared by two women; the flat above the chemist’s was shared by two girls. Were all these women in love? A tractor was grinding towards me and I stepped onto the verge to avoid being splashed. As I started walking again, I recalled those evenings of television and music, when I had felt myself so much a part of their household, and all along they had been secretly wishing me gone so that they could get into one of those double beds and put their arms around each other.
The next day, going over my Virgil translation with Archie, I kept making mistakes. Finally he said, “Jean, you knew the subjunctive last week.”
“I’m sorry. Could we take a break?”
He nodded and said why didn’t he make us some hot chocolate. By the time he returned with two steaming mugs I had realised that I couldn’t ignore my new knowledge. As he handed me a mug and sat back down, I asked how long Hannah and Pauline had been friends.
“I couldn