The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [181]
Mr. Sinclair nodded. “This is going to sound strange, but I had the feeling recently that you were in danger. A few months ago a minister in Pitlochry told the police you were safe and I stopped searching for you. But last week I dreamed we were back on the Brough of Birsay, standing on the edge of the cliff, watching the birds. Suddenly you announced you could fly. You kept moving closer and closer to the edge.”
He had dreamed about me, I realised, the night before I visited Archie. “Did you cry out to me?” I asked.
“Not then, not in the dream, but after Vicky phoned, I stood there in my study, begging you to wait.” He made a little noise and gazed down at his hands. “Were you looking for your father’s family?”
“I was. And I found a cousin, Berglind, who’s like Pippi Longstocking, strong and cheerful, and an aunt, Kristjana, who is blind but has second sight.”
“And did they call you by your Icelandic name?”
“Fjola Einarsdottir. Hallie, the woman who helped me, told me that it means ‘the violet daughter of he who fights alone.’ ”
“Fjola,” he said, muddling the syllables as I had.
Back in his room at Blackbird Hall I had said I would tell him my Icelandic name on our wedding night. And, I now recalled, I had promised that nothing he had done could ever change my feelings. I remembered how insistent he had been in exacting the promise and how confidently I had made it, even—my cheeks burned—quoting Shakespeare. Useless to say that I had imagined he would confess to a mistress, or two; I had given my word, and I had broken it, like Gunner with Helga. I was thinking how to frame my apology when Mr. Sinclair said, “Excuse me.” With a click of his seat belt, he disappeared down the aisle.
Alone, I closed my eyes and let the roar of the plane carry me back to Helgafell. On that windswept mountain I had heard Mr. Sinclair cry out and I had answered him. Yet here he was sitting beside me, and my feelings were hidden away in a small dark room. My mother had made custard; my father had tied knots; despite their differences they had married and had a child. My uncle had married my aunt to save his brother’s child. And Seamus—but I did not know how to finish that thought.
Ast. Love.
Perhaps—I had only just become a daughter—I was not yet ready to be a wife. Perhaps being a wife was not the only choice. Once a year, if the sky was clear on the winter solstice, the sun shone down the passageway of Maes Howe to the back wall. I opened my eyes to see an air hostess approaching.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could we have two glasses of champagne?”
When Mr. Sinclair returned I looked at him fully for the first time since he had sat down. I saw my own tiny silhouette in each of his pupils, and the creases in his forehead that mimicked his eyebrows. I saw the hollow above his upper lip where sweat gathered when he worked in the sun. He had been my age, a little younger, when the summons came to be a Bevin Boy; now he was more than twice my age. I watched as my hand touched his cheek. He seized it and kissed my palm.
“Here you are.” Two tall slender glasses filled with golden, bubbling liquid appeared before us.
“My first champagne,” I said.
“Does this mean—?”
“It means”—I raised my glass—“that I’m going to make a speech. I promised that I wouldn’t let anything change my feelings for you and I broke my promise. I didn’t mean to. I told myself you were no longer the same person, but that was a convenient sophistry.” The last phrase gave me particular pleasure and I saw him register my pleasure. “Of course you were. My friend Miriam—”
“The girl with asthma?”
“The girl who was my friend. She told me that I would only understand certain things when I was older. I didn’t believe her until I met Nell. And even then I didn’t understand that I would go on changing. That life”—I waved at the rows of seats where our fellow travellers read or slept—“would change me. Since we parted I’ve learned that I too am capable of stealing and lying. I’m sorry I was so unforgiving.