The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [55]
“Well, if you apply for more jobs, come to me. I can include a brief reference. By the way,” she added, and I guessed that this was the real reason she had emerged, “I wrote to your aunt when I wrote to the other parents. She has not replied. I’ve never”—her bony forehead quivered—“known a guardian to show less interest in a ward.”
She walked off down the shining corridor, leaving me to stare after her. Everyone was changing before my eyes.
That night I dreamed I was back in my room at Yew House, listening, as I had on so many evenings, to the noises from below. Then, suddenly, I was downstairs, peering around the sitting-room door. My aunt lay sprawled on the chintz-covered sofa, in the arms of Mr. Carruthers. Around them pranced Louise and Veronica, wearing party clothes. I crossed the corridor to my uncle’s study. He was at his desk, writing.
“Why, Gemma”—he smiled—“you’re just in time to help with my sermon.”
“But my aunt, do you know what she’s doing?”
“With Mr. Carruthers? Of course. She never much cared for either of us. And it’s worse now that you’re growing up and I’m dead. Tell me what to say after islands and stepping-stones?”
I suggested life belts. “Yes,” he said, “we can rescue each other.” While I stood beside him, he wrote down everything I said. Then the door burst open and Will was standing over us, his neck bulging.
“You’re not my father,” he shouted. “You’re not my father.”
And I was shouting back, until Findlayson shook my shoulder.
The next day a blue envelope addressed in neat, rounded handwriting lay on the hall table. Once again ignoring my duties, I carried it over to the pigs. Even while I held it in my hand, I whispered, “Let someone want me. Let someone want me,” as if the contents could still change. At the sight of me the pigs, several generations on from the original Heidi and Thumbelina, rushed to the trough, only to fall back when they realised I had no food. I sat on the fence to read.
Blackbird Hall
Near Tingwall
The Mainland
The Orkneys
Tel. Tingwall 235
28 January 1966
Dear Miss Hardy,
Sorry for the late reply. Let me tell you the situation. We live in the northeast part of the main island (though you may not know the islands—your letter doesn’t say). Besides the house and the farm we, my brother and I, have in our care an eight-year-old girl. Nell’s mother died last year, and since then she’s been running wild. There’s no father in the picture. I don’t have time to keep her company or supervise her lessons. If you are still free, I offer you a tomboy for a pupil and more weather than any person should have to deal with. This is a lonely place—except for the birds!—and whoever comes here needs to be forewarned. You are obviously very young but perhaps Nell will like that. She ran away from the nice woman we found to mind her in the autumn.
I propose a three-month trial. If you can, please telephone to make the arrangements. Of course we will advance your fare for the train and the ferry. I am authorised to pay you five pounds a week plus board and lodging.
Kind regards,
Vicky Sinclair
Surely, I thought, it was another good omen that the house was called after one of my favourite birds. But who did the wild girl belong to, I wondered, and who had done the authorising? From behind me came a grunt. I put the letter in my pocket and stood up to scratch Thumbelina the Second. “I’m going away soon,” I told her. She put her trotters on the edge of the trough and reached her wet snout towards me. If pigs could talk, I thought, we could not understand them.
No one was enthusiastic about my job. Miss Seftain called the Orkneys a godforsaken place. Matron said Nell sounded like a troubled child. Cook said, “For heaven’s sake, Hardy, why would you want to mind some brat in the back of beyond?” Dr. White still hoped I could take my Highers and apply for university. But no one could deny—I had had two more polite rejections—that I had no alternative. Miss Bryant told me to come to her study after six,