The Flight of Gemma Hardy Read Free Page B

Star. They had planned to meet after the war, but then my mother found herself back in Edinburgh, taking care of her father, who had had a stroke. My uncle described the tall, stern house near the Botanical Gardens, and their small, stern parents.
    â€œThey could have hired a nurse,” he told me, “but our mother wouldn’t hear of strangers in the house. She was never the same after Ian’s death.”
    My uncle was already married and in his first parish in Aberdeen; he hadn’t known of my father’s existence for nearly a year. Then a church council meeting brought him to Edinburgh. On the second day of his visit he had insisted Agnes take a walk with him in the Gardens.
    â€œEven 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œThe 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