The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [86]
“Stop, stop,” Coco shouted. Both her hair and her turquoise gown were darkened by rain, and her fins hung limply by her sides.
First one couple, then another halted uncertainly. So did the musicians.
“Don’t you know you’re dancing on board the Titanic? Everything you see here belongs to the bank. You’ll get a bill in the morning for your food.” She wheeled around to address the musicians. “When you get paid—if you get paid—hold the notes up to the light.”
I searched the room for Jill, but she and Colin must have slipped away during the song. Mr. Sinclair appeared beside me. He had been standing, unobserved, in the shadow of the curtains. “Take Nell to bed,” he said quietly. “She doesn’t need to see this.”
But Nell had let go of my hand and was walking the length of the room, a small black figure. She stopped in front of Coco, a cat confronting a mermaid.
“You should take two aspirin,” she said, “drink a big glass of water, and go to bed.”
“Who the hell do you—”
I did not hear the rest of her sentence. All I saw was Coco’s raised hand. Then I was running. Mr. Sinclair and I reached them at the same time. While he restrained Coco, I put my arms around Nell.
“Time to read Horace Goes Hunting,” I said. “After midnight cats turn into little girls.” For once she followed without argument.
In bed Nell fell asleep almost instantly, but my mind was racing. Might Blackbird Hall, like Claypoole, be about to go bankrupt? Everything seemed safe and prosperous—we had meat for lunch six days a week; the peat fires were stoked high—but then that had been true at the school too. Except for the dwindling number of pupils everything had seemed the same. Perhaps Mr. Sinclair had confided in Coco, or perhaps the mysterious fortune-teller had told her something. What was it she had said in the garden the other night? Something about how he had muddled an investment? Nell sighed and shifted in her sleep. What would become of her, and of me, if we had to leave the island? From the corridor came a wild cry, followed by footsteps. A few minutes later a car drove away, and a few minutes after that the same car, or a different one, returned.
The next morning I came downstairs to find Nora and Vicky mopping the library floor. No one else was around. Mr. Sinclair had driven Colin, Jill, and Coco to the airport. The Laidlaws had gone home, taking Rosie and Dale, whom they knew from Edinburgh, with them. “The house is so quiet,” Nell said, and I agreed. I forced myself to go through our timetable: reading, spelling, copying, sums, nature. Nell drew portraits of various guests, and we labelled them and put them up around the schoolroom. But all the time I was listening for a car, a footstep, a voice that didn’t come. What if he had decided to take a plane too and was already gone? But why should that matter when in a few days, a few weeks at most, he would be anyway? He had never, as an adult, lived at Blackbird Hall. I had pretended to be a good teacher, entirely dedicated to my pupil; now I would have every opportunity to make real on the pretence.
chapter twenty-one
All day the silence persisted. Only Seamus’s Land Rover and the greengrocer’s van used the track. Even the sheep and cows seemed subdued, and the swallows, nesting under the eaves, twittered faintly as they came and went. At last, when I could no longer stand it, I went to the kitchen on the pretext of making Nell a bedtime treat of hot chocolate. Vicky was at the table, sorting eggs. Now that the ferry strike had ended we were again sending them to the mainland twice a week. As I set a saucepan of milk on the stove, I said that Nell had been asking after her uncle’s whereabouts.
“I’ve not an inkling,” said Vicky. “He drove off this morning without a word.”
“Did he take his things?” I had turned from the stove to watch her, as if her face might tell me what her words wouldn’t.
“No. With the girls’ suitcases there wasn’t an inch of space.”
“So he’ll be back,” I said. “I can tell Nell she’ll see him again.”
“Maybe.” Vicky held up two eggs, one brown, one white,