The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [6]
“Even to get your grandmother to consent to that was a tussle. What if something happens? she kept asking. It was then that I began to realise what your mother’s life was like and why she was so pale. The only times she left the house were to do the shopping, or fetch the doctor, or go to church. It was May and the azaleas were in full bloom. Agnes kept going from bush to bush, smelling the flowers, exclaiming.”
My uncle and I were walking too, along the track that led to the footbridge over the river. It was a still afternoon in early autumn, and nothing seemed to move except the two of us, and the sheep, grazing in the nearby fields. We stopped in the middle of the bridge. My uncle leaned over the railings and I looked through them.
“The summer before the war,” he went on, “my father took us fishing on Speyside. Ian and I were hopeless, but right from the start, Agnes had the knack. She could find the fish when no one else could. She told me how one day when she wasn’t on duty your father took her out in his boat and showed her the schools of herring. ‘They made their own waves,’ she said. I should have walked her home from the Botanical Gardens right then, and put her on the next boat to Iceland. Look.”
A heron was standing in the shallows, head hunched, waiting for its prey.
My parents wrote faithfully, and eventually, in 1946, three months after my grandfather’s funeral, my father travelled to Scotland. They were married in my uncle’s church. He asked if I knew what radiant meant, and when I shook my head he explained it meant giving out light, like the lamp in the sitting-room that was shaped like a lady wearing a crinoline. That was how my mother had looked on her wedding day. My father too. They had sailed to Iceland that night. From her new home my mother wrote wonderful letters. She had fallen in love with the country and with my father’s small fishing village. She learned Icelandic and made a garden among the rocks. She and my father had come back to Edinburgh only once, in 1948, so that I could be born in a Scottish hospital.
“The last time I saw her,” said my uncle. “She couldn’t have been happier.”
I was born in April, and that summer, when I was still too young to crawl and the seas were calm, my mother and I often went out in my father’s boat. I pictured the two of us in the bow, watching the waves while my father in the stern cast his nets. But one day the following spring, shortly after my first birthday, we stayed home and went for a walk instead. My mother slipped on some seaweed and, protecting me, hit her head on a rock. She picked herself up, brought me home, made a cup of tea, and took two aspirin. By the time my father returned, there was a lump the size of a hen’s egg on the back of her head, but she insisted she was fine, just tired. My father put me to bed and made supper. In the morning she didn’t wake up.
For the next two years I lived with my father; a neighbour minded me while he fished. Then one pleasant August afternoon he didn’t come home. The neighbour said he must have found an enormous school of fish. He was following them, filling his nets; he would be back tomorrow. The next afternoon I saw the blue hull of his boat rounding the harbour wall. I ran to meet it, but the man at the tiller was a fisherman from the next village. When he stepped ashore, I hurled myself at his knees, demanding my father. He knelt down so that his face was level with mine and said something that made no sense. My father had drowned.
I came to meet the boats the next day, and the next, and the next. Whatever the weather, I insisted on going down to the harbour. I ran up to each man in turn. Surely one of them would be my father. Several times I tried to stow away on a boat, but I was always discovered. If only I was allowed to look, I knew I could find him.
I am not sure how many days or weeks later a strange man arrived, speaking in a language I didn’t understand. I