The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [7]
Later he told me that as a boy he had once tamed a fox cub and that the process of befriending me was similar; mostly he sat and waited for me to approach, or did things—sang, played bowls—that he thought might interest me. Then one day my uncle and the neighbour explained that I was going to a place called Scotland, where he and his family lived. I would have a brother and sisters, an aunt. The next day we packed, and the day after that we drove to the city and boarded a boat bigger than any I’d ever seen.
The voyage took two days, and I spent every minute of daylight on deck, hoping to see my father, his head or his arm, even a sea-boot, above the waves. When my uncle asked me to come to meals, I explained why I couldn’t. He had found a sailor to translate for us, but the man’s English was uncertain; it took several exchanges before my uncle understood. Then he sat down beside me to scan the watery horizon. Sometimes, for a minute or two, a seal or a cormorant raised my hopes.
I wept bitterly when land appeared. For the first time I believed my father was dead. Worse was to follow. As we drove along streets of grey buildings, it dawned on me that we were leaving the sea behind. I remember little of the drive to Yew House. We stopped several times for petrol or food and once for me to go behind a wall. The mossy stones were not so different from the ones at the back of our house.
Every trip I had ever made had begun and ended with the sea, but as the sun set, we drove into a small village with no water in sight. My uncle pointed out his church.
“No,” I said: my first English word.
We drove along a narrow road between fields of black-faced sheep and up a drive lined with rhododendrons, shadowed by beech trees and firs. How dreary it seemed, closed in with trees, how silent without the sea to sing a lullaby.
I still cherished some small hope that this was only temporary; my uncle had come to visit me; now I was going to visit him. But when we reached the stone house at the top of the drive and my uncle led me past a rowan tree and through the front door, I knew I would never see my father again, never walk down to the jetty to greet the fishing boats and laugh at the crabs scuttling over the rocks, never see the beady-eyed gulls waiting to pounce on fish scraps, never watch the snow fall day after day after day.
I was inconsolable, and this, surely, was the beginning of my difficulties with my aunt. I howled every time she approached. I refused to talk to her, or to my cousins. I spoke only with my uncle. He neglected his own children to teach me English and that winter nursed me through first measles and then tonsillitis.
Gradually I forgot my Iceland home, forgot my father and our village that was almost part of the sea. I went to school, played with my cousins, dogged my uncle’s footsteps, and enjoyed his praise of my reading and writing and sums. I had a home, and a family. It had taken me almost a year to understand that with his death, I had, once again, lost both. The true nature of my relations with my cousins and my aunt, like the branches of an elm in winter, became clear.
chapter three
When I opened my eyes I was looking not at the sewing-machine and the shelves of linen but at the sloping ceiling of my attic room with its mossy paint. I was still blinking cautiously as Mrs. Marsden appeared at the foot of my bed.
“You’re awake,” she said. “What a fright you gave us. Dr. Shearer was here and he thinks you had some kind of fit. You kept talking to him in some strange language and trying to put on your shoes.”
The notion of my doing and saying things of which I had no memory made me dizzy all over again. “I don’t remember any fit,” I said. “I just remember my aunt telling me to be quiet and being left alone in the cold and dark. She knows I hate being shut in. How could she be