The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [145]
I understood that the journey was imaginary but I saw my chance. “I’ll help you get ready. Let’s go to your room. You’ll need a coat and scarf.” Still holding his hand, I urged him to his feet. We began to make our way across the lounge. Mr. Donaldson spoke to no one and I followed his example, only apologising when he brushed someone’s newspaper.
We were in the corridor when we met another nurse, a younger woman pushing a trolley. “Henry,” she said, “where are you off to?”
“We’re just fetching a book from his room,” I offered. “He’s been helping me with a couple of maths problems.” I flourished my textbook.
“Oh, that’s nice. He’s in room eight, second corridor on the left.”
Now that I knew where we were going, I urged Henry along more purposefully. The room would not be large. Surely if my box were there, I would find it. The door of number eight stood open. Inside, it looked heartbreakingly like a dormitory at Claypoole—three single beds, three bedside tables, three chests of drawers—but the bars at the windows spoke to a grimmer purpose. In one corner was a cupboard.
“Which is your bed?” I said.
Mr. Donaldson sank down on the one in the middle. He seemed suddenly tired by the prospect of his nonexistent journey. I bent down to check the bedside table, and then under the bed. “Which is your chest of drawers?” I asked, and he pointed to the one nearest the window. All along I had pictured the box just as it had been when I handed it over years ago. Now it occurred to me that he might have transferred the contents, perhaps to several large envelopes. I searched the drawers, hoping for the crackle of papers amid the neat stacks of underwear and socks, pullovers and shirts. Then I turned to the cupboard, which was divided into three sections.
While I was doing all this Mr. Donaldson sat vacantly on the bed. I returned at last from my fruitless search. His brain was the one place I couldn’t open.
“Do you know who I am?” I said.
“The cleaner?”
“No, I’m Gemma Hardy, one of your pupils. Years ago I gave you a box to take care of. Do you know where it is?”
“You can plot square roots on a graph,” he said. “The curve flattens as the numbers get higher. They get farther and farther apart.”
“Please, this is very, very important.” Like the nurse, I realised, I was raising my voice, as if volume might reach him when all else failed. I knelt down in front of him, putting my hands on his bony knees. After all these years I had found him, and yet almost every trace of the person I remembered was gone.
Mr. Donaldson looked down at me in a puzzled way. “Did you drop something?”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“I used to ask a lot of questions. That’s part of being a teacher.”
“You were a very good teacher. You helped lots and lots of people. Now, please, can you answer just one question for me.”
“You have to be patient,” he said. “Sometimes it takes me a while to find the answers.”
Slowly, clearly, I explained again who I was and about my box. Then I stayed kneeling, willing him to understand, to remember, to answer. At last, in a low voice, he began to speak.
“You were my downfall. Or to be exact that woman who claimed to be your aunt was. I was no match for her innuendoes. If you’d been a boy maybe it would have been different.” He sighed. “Or maybe not. I kept your box and when I was booted out, I brought it with me. Not the box, the contents. I kept them in my room at my sister’s, with my books.” He glanced around. “They wouldn’t let me bring my protractor and compass here, not even my slide rule.”
“Do you remember what was in the box when you emptied it?”
“So many questions. You should be a teacher. There were some photographs, a recipe for fish pie—it sounded nice—a diary, bundles of letters, a couple of shells, a piece of rope tied in a knot, some dried flowers. I’m afraid that the shells may have got broken.”
“That doesn’t matter. Do you forgive me?”
“I do. None of this would have happened if I’d been a more competent adult. Even at—”
“Henry, what