The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [32]
“Back to work, girls.” Smiling silently, she observed our handiwork before offering advice. “Goodall, it will go faster if you pull out all the books that are out of order first. Hardy, has no one taught you to clean windows? The edges must be done thoroughly. You’ll need a kitchen stool for the upper ones. But even with a stool,” she added, “you are too small. You should not have been given this task.”
She uttered this last remark as if some stranger had sent me to the library. After making a note on her clipboard, she told me to finish the current window and go and clean the music room. As soon as the door closed, I whispered to Miriam, “Will you really help me catch up?”
“Yes, but please don’t talk now. You’ll get us both in trouble.”
If sorrows never come singly, perhaps that is also true of acts of kindness. That evening Cook summoned me to put the food away. It was a task normally performed by older girls, and I felt additionally persecuted when she handed me a tray of eggs and led the way to the larder, a locked room at the back of the kitchen. But as I set the eggs on the shelf, I smelled a familiar fragrance. There sat a steaming bowl of stew.
“Look what you found,” said Cook. “The idea of giving a girl your age nothing to eat all day. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
She stepped out of the room. As the door closed behind her my heart began to race—the larder was no bigger than the sewing-room—but I perched on a crate of onions and tried to eat slowly. My uncle had told me that prisoners or castaways when rescued often ate too fast and became sick. The stew was a standard at the school, and the regular girls complained about the turnips and greyish meat, but I savoured every mouthful.
Miriam’s description of the holidays proved correct. The Bryants disappeared to their house in the nearby town of Coldstream, and most of the other teachers left to visit relatives and friends. Several of the working girls, including the dreaded Findlayson, also went home. The rest of us were allowed to mingle more freely with the few regular pupils, like Miriam, who stayed at the school. Ross organised the spring-cleaning every morning. Later in the day, if it was fine, she made up teams for rounders and hockey. While these games were in progress Miriam and I would sit over our books in the common room. She was not a great scholar, but she was a patient teacher and made sure that I understood each lesson. She forced me to recite the two Shakespeare sonnets they’d studied in English until I was word-perfect. When she was satisfied with my efforts she showed me the scales she knew on the piano.
In return I tutored her in arithmetic. She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2, or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls. Mrs. Harris had told her she was stupid so often that she had given up trying to work through even the simplest problem and instead guessed wildly, expecting to be wrong. I tried to be as patient with her as she was with me.
Sometimes as we studied, Ross loitered nearby, and once when we were doing long division I asked her to join us. I knew from watching her attempts to double a recipe for Cook that she struggled with both reading and arithmetic. “I did this stuff ages ago,” she said, but she sat down at the table. Miriam slid over a page torn from her notebook and a pencil. I set a problem, 132 divided by 11, which I knew they would both find hard. Miriam managed to take 11 from 13. Ross chewed the end of the pencil.
“Come on, Ross,” I said smugly. “What’s the first step?”
“I don’t need to learn your stupid baby sums.” Flinging down the pencil, she ran from the room.
“Good riddance,” I said as the door banged behind her.
But Miriam’s eyes grew wide. “She scares me.”
From my first day