To invite Amy to stay at Linden Drive for the half-term holiday was Alison’s idea. What she had heard of Amy’s efforts to look after Nesta made her think that she would be a good friend for her daughter, perhaps a friend for life. She wanted to have Amy as an ally. She also wanted to make it easier for Nesta to put the Ormingat episode right to the back of her mind.
‘It’s part of the healing process,’ she said to Matthew when she broached the subject with him. ‘We are Earth people now. We must try to make it as if Ormingat had never existed.’
‘Can you mean that?’ said her husband, appalled at the idea. ‘We can, and probably should, cease to talk about Ormingat, but if I live to be a hundred I shall never forget that this is not where I truly belong.’
He looked at Alison a long time before adding, ‘The hurt of losing my homeland will never really go away. There is no healing for that.’
‘It hurts me too,’ said Alison, ‘but we had no choice. You must see that. Now we have to be practical – for Nesta’s sake if not for our own. It’s over. We were clearly told that we had lost all possibility of returning when our ship left without us. So live for the day, Maffaylie. Or if a day is too long, live for the hour.’
Matthew smiled, aware that Alison had unconsciously used his Ormingat name. She was accustomed to hiding her deeper feelings, but occasionally the mask slipped and she gave something away.
‘And if the hour is too long, Athelerane?’ he whispered, his hand in hers.
‘Oh, Matthew,’ said Alison, shaking her head. ‘I am still muddled. But time will straighten things out in our mind. If we can’t quite manage to be what we now are, we must pretend, and go on pretending. There is nothing else for it.’
‘I sometimes wonder if our people really are finished with us,’ said Matthew pensively. ‘I mean, for all we know they could be keeping an eye on us from somewhere. You’d think they’d be bound to wonder how much we have given away.’
‘That’s pure speculation,’ said Alison firmly. ‘Some ideas are best left well alone.’
‘What did your mom say? Did she say you could come?’ said Nesta eagerly.
She had arrived at school before Amy and waited anxiously at the gate for her friend to arrive. Now the two of them were walking into school together and Nesta could hardly wait for Amy’s reply.
‘She said yes. But she’s being very formal about it. She’s going to send a card to your mother thanking her for the invitation. I think it’s her way of checking up on me, but I don’t mind. And it might not be. She likes sending cards to people.’
‘Well, there’s no harm anyway,’ said Nesta. ‘It’s not as if you were running away or anything.’
After she had said this she blushed, recalling how just a week ago she had been a runaway herself. She’d got off very lightly. Mom had taken her back to school on the Tuesday, made excuses for her, and made sure that the episode would be put behind her.
The teachers all knew, of course, but had been asked not to make any reference to Nesta’s absence. Mrs Powell had already had to deal with the bullying that Nesta had suffered in her first year at the school, and she was by no means certain that this had not been behind the girl’s absconding. The Boston story sounded far-fetched to her. But ‘least said, soonest mended’ was an axiom she could go along with.
The two girls reached the cloakroom and sat down on the form beneath the rack, their shoulders resting against the coats.
Amy had made up her mind to say something. ‘I’d like to tell my mum that you stayed in our garage those three nights.’
Nesta looked horrified. ‘It’s all over and done with,’ she said. ‘No point in dragging it up now. Why do you want to tell her?’
Amy ran her fingers through her wiry hair and bit her lip before answering.
‘I feel rotten about it,? she said. ‘I felt proud at first at getting away with it, but it seems like cheating somehow. Especially when Mum’s being so nice about the holiday.’
Amy did not tell her friend that her mother had not been so happy at first, but had been persuaded to feel sorry for that ‘poor girl who ran away because she didn’t want to go to America’. Mrs Brown had never been out of England, and had never wanted to go abroad. ‘My own country’s good enough for me.’ Her own country, her own family, her own little world . . . When the police had come looking for Nesta, she readily believed that Amy knew nothing about her friend’s whereabouts.
Nesta grasped Amy’s arm tightly. ‘It’ll never happen again,’ she said. ‘Soon we’ll be able to forget it altogether. It wasn’t all that serious, was it? Not in the end. I came home and everything was all right – and my mom and dad didn’t go to Boston. But if you go telling your mother about it now, it’ll just all start up again. Just for me, Amy, please let’s pretend it never happened.’
‘What about when I come to your house for half term?’ said Amy. ‘Won’t your parents be asking questions about me hiding you?’
‘No,’ said Nesta. ‘That’s the best of it. They know all about it. I even made them promise not to split on you. We wiped the slate clean. And we are never to mention it again.’
Amy still looked doubtful. Her own code of conduct required everything to be open and above board. One day she would play hockey for the county and she already had the attitude of a true sportswoman. But loyalty ranked high too. To tell might be a breach of her loyalty to Nesta.
‘Just as long as you know I’m not happy about it,’ she said. ‘But for your sake, I’ll keep quiet.’
After school on Friday, the twelfth of February, Nesta and Amy boarded the bus to Linden Drive. Amy had a large holdall ‘packed for the holiday’. True it was only a few miles from home, but it felt exciting. It was not quite the same as camping out in the garage at Amy’s house, but both girls felt that it would be really good fun.
‘My brother lent me his PlayStation,’ said Amy, ‘and loads of games.’
She already knew that computer games were not part of the Gwynn household: Nesta sometimes complained about her parents not being ‘with it’. So Jack’s games machine would be quite a novelty.
‘Mom won’t let me have a telly in my bedroom,’ said Nesta, ‘because she says Mrs Jolly might be able to hear it and not like the noise. But there’s a portable in the kitchen. We can play with it in there.’
By the time the bus reached the corner of Linden Drive, they had thought of dozens of things to do in the week’s holiday, including the history homework that Mr Fielder had maliciously set them. There was a list of fifty famous dates to be matched up on a worksheet, going all the way from the Roman invasions to the major events of the twentieth century. ‘I doubt if you’ll want to be gallivanting in this sort of weather,’ he had said, smiling sardonically. ‘This’ll be a nice little indoor game for you.’
Nesta had felt as if he looked especially at her as he rolled out the word ‘gallivanting’, but that could have been imagination!
It was raining heavily when they got off the bus. Mrs Gwynn was waiting for them, holding her huge golf umbrella.