The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [53]
“No, but I need to talk to you.”
“Give me five minutes—no, ten—and I’m all yours.”
She closed the door in my face; some rules had not changed. Again I sat on the wall. This time I watched a thrush sampling the berries on a nearby holly-bush, spitting out some, eating others. My lack of a watch had turned me into a good judge of time. Just when I thought ten minutes has passed, Miss Seftain reappeared wearing, to my amazement, trousers. No teacher, to my knowledge, had ever worn them within the school grounds. She suggested we walk around the terraces. Mr. Milne still kept the lawns immaculate, but the flower-beds year by year had grown more rampant and now, in the dead of winter, were choked with stiff brown stalks. Only the snowdrops, with their tender white flowers, were in bloom. Miss Seftain nodded vaguely when I pointed them out. A tree was real when Ovid described it, not when it grew outside her window.
“So talk to me,” she said, and I needed no further invitation to pour out my fears.
When at last I stopped she said, “I’d like to help you, Hardy, but I’m in difficult waters myself. Claypoole has been my home for fifteen years, and finding a job in the middle of the school year is tricky at the best of times. It looks as if I’ll be moving in with my sister and her husband, neither of whom is thrilled at the prospect. I doubt many people will leap to employ a sixty-one-year-old classics teacher with an extremely poor record of university acceptances.”
“You’re a super teacher.”
She produced her lipstick and, between applying it first to her upper lip, then her lower, said that she was a good teacher for girls like me but that she had little talent for stupid girls. “It’s like trying to plough very hard earth. I just can’t get the information into their brains.”
Thinking of Cook’s sister, I suggested she might get married.
“Married?” She threw back her head and laughed merrily. “Do you know who would marry me? Some man of eighty who had lost his wife and wanted a housekeeper. And do you know who a man my age would marry? Some woman of thirty-eight who was tired of working. Nearly fifty years after we got the vote that’s still the way the world works. If anyone’s going to get married it should be you.”
“Me?” It was as if the frozen grass had turned suddenly red.
She hummed a few bars of “Here Comes the Bride,” and then, seeing my face, laughed. “I’m teasing, Hardy. I hope you’ll fend off suitors until after university. So do you have any idea what you might do?”
When I explained my utter lack of a plan, she asked if I liked children. “Child-care often comes with board and lodging.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hate most of the girls here. I used to like my cousin Veronica before she became daft about fashion. Isn’t there something else I could do? I want to go to university.”
“Someday,” said Miss Seftain. “Right now you need a job that will give you shelter, food, and clothing. If you don’t want to work in a hotel then, I think, looking after children is your best bet. A nice, honourable family,” she mused, “could be the making of you. Of course a horrible one could make your life misery.”
“In which case I’d leave.” A jackdaw had joined us and was walking on the grass nearby, taking its own constitutional.
“May you always be so redoubtable, Hardy. Have you noticed a magazine on the table in the front hall called The Lady? It has advertisements for au pairs and nannies, even the odd governess, though they’re out of fashion. Is that a crow?”
“No, a jackdaw. See how it’s partly grey and partly black? People say they’re very intelligent. You can tame them.”
“Not me,” said Miss Seftain.
As if it understood, the jackdaw took wing.
I had never, during all my years of dusting, felt tempted to open The Lady—both the name and the decorous covers promised tedium—but that night instead of doing homework I went