The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [90]
“Are you a pacifist?” We were walking around a ragged stone rectangle, the outline of a building. Inside the grass was thick with daisies.
“No. I’m too much of a coward. I used to come here as a boy. Once Roy and Seamus and I lost track of the time. We had to wade back across the causeway.”
“If I knew about these things,” I said, bending to examine the wall, “I’d be able to tell by the kind of mortar when this was built.”
We left the ruins and walked up over the grass, following the southern rim of the cake as it gently rose. At its highest point, the cliffs fell uninterrupted to the rocks below. To the south, across the bay, Mr. Sinclair pointed out the tower of the Kitchener Memorial. Lord Kitchener had been on a mission to Russia in June 1916 when his boat sank off the island. We sat down in a sheltered spot a few yards from the crumbling cliff top to eat our picnic. At our backs wild thyme grew in clumps and a tiny four-petal yellow flower. Before us birds rose and fell, riding the air currents, scarcely moving their wings. A skua soared twenty or thirty feet and drifted down. Half-a-dozen fulmars circled and another, smaller bird with arched wings.
“They don’t seem afraid of us,” I said. “Do you think that’s a kittiwake? The darker one.” I wished I had brought Miriam’s bird book.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a kittiwake from a corn-crake. A puffin is one of the few birds I can recognise. We’ll have to look it up when we go home.” He leaned back on his elbows, following the birds. “Did you ever read that passage in Milton where the bad angels are tumbling out of heaven like falling leaves? I had to memorise it at school. I can’t remember half the boys in my class, but I can still remember those lines.”
“We only did the sonnet about blindness.” I was thinking how easily he had used the word home.
“Did your uncle, the archaeologist-minister, talk about souls?”
While his attention remained on the birds, I had the luxury of studying him unobserved. His head was tilted back so that his wavy hair touched his shoulders; I counted five silvery threads among the brown. His eyelashes were dark and surprisingly straight; his ear, the nearest one, was as neatly curved as a cowrie shell. “I don’t think you can be a minister,” I said, “and not mention souls, but he wasn’t the kind of person who told people what to do.”
Hearing my own words, an odd feeling came over me, not as if someone were walking on my grave but as if I were walking on someone else’s. I was suddenly aware that I had been only a little older than Nell when my uncle died. How did I know what kind of person he was? A bird flew by so close that I could see the red rims around its eyes. “I’d love to come here with someone who knows about birds,” I said.
“I am sorry,” Mr. Sinclair said, “not to be that person. But you can watch them without knowing what they are. My father used to tell a story about a man who loses his soul and, after many travails, gets it back in the form of a seagull. Then, of course, he has to be careful of cats and hunters. I worry that with television people will forget the old tales.”
“Nell and I are going to study island history this autumn. Perhaps we can write down some of the stories.”
I followed the arc of a small white bird and hoped he would say something more definite about the future, but he was rummaging in the knapsack. “So,” he said, “you really have no family. No long-lost cousins? No distant aunts, or geriatric great-uncles?”
“I do have cousins”—the white bird was gone, whether up or down I wasn’t sure—“but I haven’t seen them since I was ten, and even then they hated me.” Daringly, like the birds, I flung myself