Coming Attractions: THE FLIGHT OF GEMMA HARDY

No matter what is written, blurbed, or said about a new book, it’s only upon reading those first few pages that I know if I will sink in. So, how nice to be able to present that most important part of an about-to-release book—unadorned—the first chapter. 

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

“Fate has not been kind to Gemma Hardy. Orphaned by the age of ten, neglected by a bitter and cruel aunt, sent to a boarding school where she is both servant and student, young Gemma seems destined for a life of hardship and loneliness. Yet her bright spirit burns strong. Fiercely intelligent, singularly determined, Gemma overcomes each challenge and setback, growing stronger and more certain of her path. Now an independent young woman with dreams of the future, she accepts a position as an au pair on the remote and beautiful Orkney Islands. But Gemma’s biggest trial is about to begin…a journey of passion and betrayal, secrets and lies, redemption and discovery, that will lead her to a life she’s never dreamed of.”

Chapter One

We did not go for a walk on the first day of the year. The Christmas snow had melted and rain had been falling since dawn, darkening the shrubbery and muddying the grass, but that would not have stopped my aunt from dispatching us. She believed in the benefits of fresh air for children in all weather. Later, I understood, she also enjoyed the peace and quiet of our absence. No, the cause of our not walking was my cousin, Will, who claimed his cold was too severe to leave the sitting-room sofa, but not so bad that he couldn’t play cards. His sister Louise, he insisted, must stay behind for a game of racing demon.

I overheard these negotiations from the corridor where I loitered, holding my aunt’s black shoes, freshly polished, one in each hand.

“In that case,” said my aunt, “Veronica and Gemma can walk to the farm to collect the eggs.”

“Oh, must I, Mum?” said Veronica. “She’s such a—”

The door to my uncle’s study was only a few feet away, across the corridor. Hastily I opened it, stepped inside, and shut out whatever came next. Not long ago this room had been the centre of the house, a place brightened by my uncle’s energy, made tranquil by his concentration as he worked on his sermons, but last February, skating alone on the river at dusk, he had fallen through the ice, and now I was the only one who spent any time here, or who seemed to miss him. Just inside the door was a pyramid of cardboard boxes, the remains of my aunt’s several recent purchases. But beyond the boxes the room was as he had left it. His pen still lay on the desk beside the sermon he’d been preparing. At the top of the page he had written: “Sunday, 15 February a.d 1958 . No man is an island.” A pile of books still sat on the floor next to his chair; the dead coals of his last fire crumbled in the grate. To my childish fancy, the room mourned him in a way that no member of his family did, certainly not my aunt, who dined out two or three times a week, played bridge for small sums of money, and since the season started, rode to hounds whenever she could. At breakfast that morning, she had said I must no longer call her aunt but Ma’am, like Betty the housemaid.

Setting the shoes on the floor and, trying not to imagine how Veronica had finished her sentence—such a copycat? such a moron?—I read over my uncle’s opening paragraph. “We each begin as an island but we soon build bridges. Even the most solitary person has, perhaps without knowing it, a causeway, a cable, a line of stepping-stones, connecting him or her to others, allowing for the possibility of communication and affection.” As I read the familiar phrases I pictured myself a small, verdant island in a grey sea; when the tide went out, a line of rocks surfaced, joining me to another island, or the mainland. The image  bore no relation to my present life, neither my aunt nor my cousins wanted any connection with me, but I cherished the hope that one day my uncle’s words would prove true. Someone would appear at the other end of the causeway.

I stepped over to the bookcase and pulled down one of my favourite books: Birds of the World. Each page showed a bird in its natural habitat—a puffin with its fat, gaudy beak, peering out of a burrow, a lyre-bird spreading its tail beneath a huge leafy tree—accompanied by a description. Usually I read curled in the armchair beside the fire, conjuring an imaginary warmth from the cold embers, but today, not wanting to signal my presence by turning on the light, I settled my self on the window seat. Pulling the heavy green curtain around me against the draughts, I flew away into the pictures.

Long before Veronica’s remark, even before my uncle’s death, I would have said that the only thing I shared with my oldest cousin was an address: Yew House, Strathmuir, Perthshire, Scotland. At fourteen, Will was a thick-necked, thick-thighed boy who for the most part ignored me. Sometimes, when he came upon me in the corridor or the kitchen, an expression of such frank surprise erupted across his face that I could only assume he had forgotten who I was and was trying to guess. A servant? Too small. A burglar? Too noisy. A guest? Too badly dressed. I had seen the same expression on my uncle’s face when he watched Will play football, as if he were wondering how this hulking ruffian could be his son. But their blue eyes and long lobed ears left no doubt of their kinship. My uncle had once shown me a photograph of himself with his brother, Ian, who had died in his early twenties, and my mother, Agnes, who had died in her late twenties. “Thank goodness she was spared the Hardy ears,” he had said.

With Louise and Veronica, however, I had a history of affection. Until last summer the three of us had attended the village school, walking the mile back and forth together. Although she was two years older, I had often helped Louise with her arithmetic homework. I had also endeared myself by giving her my turns on Ginger, the family pony, an act of pure self-interest that she took as a favour. But in July my aunt had announced  that her daughters, like their brother, would go to school in the nearby town of Perth. Suddenly they had other friends, and I walked to school alone. Meanwhile the dreaded Ginger had been sold, and Louise now had her own horse. She had tried to convert me to her equine cult by lending me Black Beauty and National Velvet. So long as I was reading I understood her enthusiasm, but as soon as I was in the presence of an actual horse, all teeth and hooves and dusty fur, I was once again baffled.

As for Veronica, who was only six months my senior, she and I had been good friends until she too developed alien passions. Now she was no longer interested in playing pirates, or staging battles between the Romans and the Scots. All her attention was focused on fashion. She spent hours studying her mother’s magazines and going through her wardrobe. She refused to wear green with blue, brown with black. Any violation of her aesthetic caused her deep distress. When my aunt bought a suit she didn’t approve of, Veronica retired to bed for two days; my appearance, in her sister’s castoffs, was a kind of torture. Her father had teased her about these preoccupations in a way that held them in check. Without him, she too had become a fanatic.

Despite these changes I had, until the previous week, believed that Louise and Veronica were my friends, but the events of Christmas Eve had forced me to change my mind. For as long as I could remember, the three of us had spent that afternoon in Louise’s bedroom, getting ready for the party given by the owners of the local distillery. Last year I had drunk  too much of the children’s punch and won a game that involved passing an orange from person to person without using your hands; I had been looking forward to defending my victory. But on the morning of the twenty-fourth, when I had asked Louise if I could bor- row her blue dress again, my aunt had paused in buttering her toast.

“What do you need a dress for, Gemma?”

“It’s the Buchanans’ party tonight. Don’t you remember, Aunt?”

I jumped up to retrieve the invitation from the mantelpiece where it had stood for several weeks and held it out to her. “Yes,” said my aunt, “and who is this addressed to? The Hardy family. That means Will and the girls and me.” She reached for the marmalade. “You’ll stay here and help Mrs. Marsden. You can start by doing the washing-up.”

“Anyway I won’t lend you the dress,” Louise added. “You’d just spill something on it.”

If she had sounded angry I would have argued, but like her mother, she spoke as if I were barely worth the air that carried her words. With- out further ado the two of them turned to talking about where they would ride that day. Abandoning my toast, I marched out of the room.

Mrs. Marsden, the housekeeper, was the only member of the house- hold whose behaviour towards me had not changed after my uncle’s death. She continued to treat me with the same briskness she had al- ways shown. She had arrived in the village the year after I did and rented the cottage on the far side of the paddock. Then my aunt had an operation—she  can’t have any more babies, Louise announced cheerfully—and during her convalescence Mrs. Marsden had become a fixture at Yew House. She had grown up in the Orkneys and could, sometimes, be lured into telling stories about the Second World War, or seals and mermaids. Helping her, I told myself, was infinitely prefer- able to being a pariah at the party.

But as I watched Louise and Veronica trying on dresses, ironing, and doing their hair, I had felt increasingly left out. Although Mrs. Marsden’s own wardrobe consisted of drab skirts and twinsets, she was regarded as an excellent judge of fashion, and the two girls ran in and out of the kitchen, asking which necklace? The blue shoes or the black? When I momentarily forgot myself and seconded her in urging the blue, Louise did not even glance in my direction, and I saw her nudge Veronica when she thanked me. Suddenly I was no good even for praise. By the time they came in to display themselves one final time, I was peeling chestnuts for the stuffing and determined not to utter another word, but that didn’t stop me from staring.

In the last year Louise, as visitors often remarked, had blossomed.

She carried her new breasts around like a pair of deities seeking rightful homage. Privately I called them Lares and Penates, after the Roman household gods. Veronica was, like me, still flat as a board, but her lips were full and her hair was thick and wavy. In their finery, with their glittering necklaces and handbags, the two sisters could have been on their way to the Lord Mayor’s Ball. That Louise could scarcely walk in her high heels, that Veronica had applied so much of her mother’s rouge that she seemed to have a fever, only heightened the transformation.

“You both look very nice,” pronounced Mrs. Marsden. “The green is most becoming, Louise. Veronica, your hair is lovely.”

I was reaching for another chestnut as my aunt sailed in, wearing blue velvet. “My gorgeous girls,” she said, putting an arm around each. She was still praising them when Will appeared. At once she released her daughters. “My dashing young man.”

None of them seemed to notice that my uncle was missing. The pre- vious year, when I wasn’t passing oranges and playing games, I had watched him as he danced. Later, from memory, I had drawn a picture of him, looking like a Highland chieftain in his kilt and sporran; it had stood on his bookshelf until my aunt threw it on the fire. Now he was gone, and all they could think about were their fancy clothes. In my fury the knife slipped from the chestnut into my finger. My gasp drew a flurry of attention.

“Hold your hand above your head,” ordered Mrs. Marsden. “Move the chestnuts,” said my aunt.

“Bloody idiot,” said Will, snickering at the double meaning.

His sisters made noises of disgust until my aunt hushed them. “Let the dogs out last thing,” she told me. “And be sure to leave on the porch light.”

Heels clicking, skirts swishing, they disappeared down the corridor.

Mrs. Marsden bandaged my finger and said she would finish the chestnuts. She must have felt sorry for me because she told a story about an Italian prisoner of war who had been brought to the Orkneys in 1942 and fallen in love with a local girl. He couldn’t speak English, so he courted her by singing arias. After the war he was sent back to Naples. “We all thought we’d seen the last of him,” said Mrs. Marsden. “But a year later Fiona heard a familiar voice. She looked out of her bedroom window and there he was, kneeling in the road, singing and holding a ring.”

By seven-thirty everything that could be prepared for the next day’s dinner was ready. Mrs. Marsden untied her apron with a flourish and wished me Merry Christmas.

“Where are you going?” I said stupidly. “Home. I have to get ready for tomorrow.”

“Can’t you stay?” I imitated Veronica, opening my eyes wide and clasping my hands. “We can play cards, or watch television. You could have a drink.”

Mrs. Marsden stopped buttoning her coat at my second sugges- tion—she did not have a television—but at my third she continued. On several occasions I had overheard my aunt complaining to her that a newly purchased bottle of gin or sherry was almost empty. Once Mrs. Marsden had rashly retaliated by mentioning Will. Now she told me not to talk nonsense and picked up her handbag. With a creak of the door she was gone.

Alone I tried to settle to patience at the kitchen table, but I could not keep my attention on the cards. When Will’s rowdy friends came over, the house seemed small, but now the empty rooms stretched around me, too many to count. And the dogs, the affable but dull William and Wallace, were no help. I put the cards away, let them out, and shut them in the cloakroom. Taking advantage of my solitude, I made a hot water bottle and climbed the stairs to bed.

Until last summer my bedroom had been next to Louise’s. Then, on the pretext of redecorating, my aunt had moved me to the maid’s room under the eaves. In the warm months I had enjoyed my eyrie, sitting for hours looking out at the treetops, and daydreaming. But in winter the ice on the inside of the windowpane thickened by the day. “Heat rises,” my aunt said when I asked for an electric fire. I had learned to undress, pull on my pyjamas, and jump into bed at top speed. There my teeth chattered until the sheets grew warm and I could lose myself in the pages of a book. Even this pleasure was often curtailed by my aunt’s command to turn off the light. I would lie in the darkness, lis- tening to Louise and Veronica talking, Will playing his radio.

On Christmas Eve I had tried to enjoy the luxury of reading undis- turbed, but the house was full of other, more sinister sounds: rustling, gnawing, pitter-pattering.  That weekend the newspaper had reported the abduction of a girl from her home in Kinross. Even in the murky photograph it was obvious that she was the opposite of me, fair-haired, rosy-cheeked, the sort of child anyone would want. Still a villain might make a mistake, especially in the dark, and William and Wallace were notoriously friendly.

Picturing my bedside lamp like a beacon signaling my solitude, I set my book aside and switched it off. At the first sign of an intruder I would run down the back stairs and hide behind the curtains in my uncle’s study. The idea of being trapped in my small room made my stomach ache. In the darkness, the noises at first grew even louder, but after a while, when there was no breaking glass, no footsteps, I forgot to listen for my kidnapper and turned to more realistic fears. I knew from my uncle that in Scotland one could go to university at seven- teen, and I had come to think of this as the age at which I would, magi- cally, become an adult. But how was I going to endure the next seven years, and how, when I left Yew House, would I earn my living? In

Veronica’s comics girls ran away from home and discovered long-lost relatives and unexpected talents. I had none of the former and doubted the existence of the latter. I was good with numbers, could recognise most common birds by flight and song, was capable of passionate attachments and of daydreams so vivid that my immediate surroundings vanished, but I was hopeless at sports, had crooked handwriting; I could not act, or play an instrument,  or cook, or sew. The fires I laid smoked. I could swim but had twice failed my life-saving exam. Lying there on Christmas Eve, clinging to my hot water bottle, I had under- stood more urgently than ever before that I was alone in the world.

Finally I had climbed out of bed and made my way downstairs. In the sitting-room  the Christmas  tree drooped  beneath  its burden  of balls and tinsel. Around the base lay a pile of presents. I knelt down and read the labels. Present after present was addressed to Will, or Louise, or Veronica. Near the bottom I came upon a single, hard, rectangular package: “To Gemma from her cousins.”

The next day I had feigned a cold and remained in bed, coming down only to watch the Queen on television. Why should I play audience while my cousins opened their many gifts, and pretend gratitude for whatever dreary book my aunt had bought me? Even in this thought I gave myself too much importance.  When I finally opened the package on Boxing Day I discovered a book about horses; Louise had received two copies for her birthday.

Now,  a  week later,  alone in my uncle’s  study, I listened to the leaves of the holly tree scratch against the window and turned  the pages of Birds of the World. Each picture suggested a place I might some day visit—a steamy forest filled with tropical flowers—or reminded me of one I dimly remembered—a snowy landscape with matching white birds. I imagined myself wrapped in furs rather than the curtain, padding across the ice towards an albatross or a snow eagle. Suddenly the study door flung open. Will appeared, loutish in his brown sweater and corduroy trousers. His game of cards with Louise must have ended. In my hiding place, he didn’t notice me as he shambled over to his father’s desk and sat down.

“If only I had more players like Will,” he said, leaning back in the chair, “we’d win the season. The rest of you spineless wonders should take a leaf out of his book. That tackle in the first quarter was bloody brilliant.”
My cousin, I realised, was pretending to be his football coach. I watched in fascination as he squared his shoulders and praised him- self. It had never occurred to me that Will had an imaginary life. When he began to talk about making the Scotland team, my amusement escaped in a gust of laughter. He jumped to his feet, looking wildly around. Perhaps he thought his play-acting had summoned his father’s ghost. Then he spotted me behind the curtain.

“What are you doing here, spying on me, you miserable little twerp?” Before I could answer he seized my arm. “Don’t you know that we all hate the way you sneak around, pretending to be such a Goody Two- shoes? All you do is scrounge off us. You eat our food, sit on our chairs, you pee in our toilets, and you don’t do one thing to earn your keep. Even the dogs are more useful than you are. Everything you’re wear- ing”—he jerked the sleeve of my cardigan—“belongs to my mother, and that means it belongs to me.”

“And your sisters,” I said, in the interests of both accuracy and anger.

His fingers pressed tighter. “So you ought to say thank you every morning when you get dressed, every time you sit down to eat, every time you—”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Master Will, most  brilliant of humans, best of football players. You didn’t even make the junior eleven.” I got no further before he let go of my arm, grabbed Birds of the World, and brought it down, two-handed,  on my head, as if he were trying to break the book in half. I fell off the window seat, landing hard on my hip. I cried out and, as Will’s foot found my ribs, cried out again.

“What on earth is going on here?”

From my position on the floor, my aunt towered over her son, and they both towered over me. “Wretched girl, stop making such a row.”

“Will hit me.” For once—both my fall and Will’s blows had hurt—I didn’t care about telling tales.

“She was spying on me. I came in here to think about Daddy and she made fun of me. I tried to tell her how much she owed him. If it hadn’t been for him she’d still be wandering around on some iceberg, eating seal blubber. And she said she was glad he was dead.”

At this, despite the pain, I jumped up, kicking and punching, trying to reach his eyes. “You liar. I never said anything like that. You are the one who forgets your father. You behave as if he never existed, as if he wouldn’t hate your muddy sports and your pathetic jokes about beer. You don’t care about anyone but your fat, stupid self.”

A thread of snot dangled from Will’s nose and his eyes bulged. He shoved me hard, and I again fell to the floor.

“You poor boy,” said his mother. “I don’t know what your father was thinking when he brought such a minx into our home. Please, darling, don’t exert yourself further. I will take care of punishing Gemma.”

She stepped out of the room and returned a moment later with Betty, the maid.

“Lock her in the sewing room,” she commanded. “She’ll stay there until she is sorry for her bad behaviour.”

Betty was a hefty girl and I was slight and unaccustomed to fighting,but at the news that I was to be shut in I struggled with all my might, kicking her ankles, even sinking my teeth into her hand. I had almost pulled free when Will, ignoring his mother’s remonstrations, joined in. The two of them dragged me from the study, down the corridor, and up the stairs. Gleefully they thrust me into the sewing room, and slammed the door.

The only sources of light in the small room were a single window, far above my head, and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The window, close to dusk on this overcast day, made little difference, and the light switch was outside, in the corridor.  In the gloom the sewing machine glinted, black and malevolent, and even the tall shelves, stacked with sheets and towels, had a threatening air. Mrs. Marsden always kept the door open when she sewed and still complained about the chill. I sat down and tried to calm myself by picturing the birds I had just been studying, but I could not summon even a modest fairy wren. For five minutes, perhaps ten, I managed to pretend that I was sitting there by choice. Then my hand reached for the doorknob, and in an instant, I was on my feet, pounding on the door, crying for help.

At last footsteps approached. “Be quiet,” said my aunt. “You won’t be allowed out until you prove you are sorry. To attack your cousin like that.”

“It was his fault. He hit me first.”

The only answer was the sound of her footsteps retreating down the corridor.

“Please, Ma’am,” I cried. “Don’t go. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good. I never meant to insult Will.”

I am not sure what else I promised—in my desperation I was shame- less—but nothing made a jot of difference. Her footsteps continued unfaltering, fainter and fainter, towards the stairs. I heard them no more. In the shelves, among the linens, something moved. A figure stood there, tall and gaunt. It stepped towards me.

Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Higlands and has taught at several American writing programs, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She lives in Cambridge and is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College.  The Flight of Gemma Hardy is published on January, 24^th. 2012.