It was the first time anyone had done that to Polly. She should have asked Nina about it, she thought wryly, as Seb’s face met hers and their noses seemed to get tangled up. It was not much fun. She wondered whether to wriggle loose, but Seb was breathing heavily and passionately and seemed to be enjoying it so much that it brought Polly’s annoying soft-heartedness out. She stood there and let him lay his mouth against hers, and tried to decide if you kept your eyes open or shut them, and in the end she settled for one of each. What a funny thing to invent to do! she thought. What do people see in it?
“I’ll send him packing if you like,” Granny said when Polly came in pretending nothing had happened. “I didn’t before because I thought he might cheer you up.”
“I’m quite cheerful!” Polly protested. She was ashamed that Granny should offer to manage Seb for her. But Granny was right about her not being cheerful. The time in Bristol seemed to have bitten deep and it took her a long time to get over it. She found it hard to concentrate on anything, even when she was back at school that autumn.
Nina was still into boys. It was, as Fiona said, a lifetime’s obsession with Nina, but Nina was still quite up to running various other crazes side by side with boys.
That term Nina’s craze was protesting. Women’s Rights, Vivisection, Oppressed Ethnic Minorities – Nina went on a march for each one and found a new boyfriend on every march. She was always trying to make Fiona or Polly march too. Consequently, they both thought it was a demo of some kind when Nina came rushing up to them one morning calling, “Are you two coming to the Town Hall or not?”
“What are we protesting?” asked Fiona.
“Moron!” said Nina. “Where’s your memory? We said we’d meet that boy from Stow-on-the-Water there!”
Polly and Fiona had clean forgotten Leslie. Fiona said Leslie had just been having them on. Polly thought it might have been a joke too, but she was suddenly seized with pleasure at the thought of seeing Leslie again. She pointed out to Fiona that three people waiting an hour on the steps of the Town Hall didn’t look nearly as silly as one, or even two. So in the end they all three went.
They approached the Town Hall expecting to feel foolish. But, to their astonishment, Leslie was there. He was standing waiting on the step – a surprising sight in every way, for he was dressed in a spruce grey suit like other Wilton College boys, with a Wilton tie, and his mass of curly fair hair was smooth and short and neat. His skull earring had been replaced by a small gold sleeper.
He was quite as surprised to see them as they were to see him. “There! And I made sure you’d forget!” he said.
After that, they all stared at one another awkwardly, until Fiona, who also had pierced ears, remarked on his sleeper. “Doesn’t Wilton allow earrings?” she asked.
“No way!” said Leslie. “Rules about everything. But I wanted to keep my options open, as you might say. No one’s made me take it out yet. Where is there to go in this town?”
The ice was broken and they went to the Blue Lagoon for chips, talking busily. The girls wanted to know what Wilton College was like inside. Leslie told them it was all made of concrete, got up like a church, with pointed arches, and cold as the grave. “Except Hall – that’s pink marble and done Roman,” he said. Lessons were easy, though all the teachers were mad. The most difficult part was getting on with the other boys.
“Half the time they make me feel like an old man,” he said. “Maybe you grow up quicker being brought up common, the way I am, but it gets me down, the way they all laugh at me.” Seeing how concerned Polly was looking, he said, “It’s OK – nothing I can’t handle – just stupid. Because of me playing the flute. Joke of the century, because my name’s Piper.”
“But I thought—” Polly began. Fiona at once kicked Polly’s ankle and leaned forward to change the subject.
Leslie, however, smoothly changed the subject himself. “Did you know you were famous in our school?” he said to Polly. “Everyone says our Head Boy’s in love with you. Leroy – know him? He’s got a photo of you up in his study. I’ve seen it. It’s awful, but it’s you, definite. Can I say I know you? It’ll do me no end of good with the crowd.”
Polly found Fiona and Nina staring at her, awed. “Oh, Seb,” she said gruffly. “Yes, I suppose I do know him. And so do you know me, so you might as well say.”
“Thanks,” Leslie said. He was obviously grateful. “Now I’ve got a real touch of class!” he said.
Fiona and Polly got up to go soon after that. Nina said, “I’ll be along. I need the Ladies’. You lot go.”
“Why did you kick me?” Polly asked as they walked back to school.
“Broken home of some kind,” Fiona said. “I saw the look come on his face. I know it from you. Sometimes I can see you think, ‘God! Someone’s going to ask!’ Nice, isn’t he – Leslie? Do you really know the Head Boy of Wilton?”
“I know Seb Leroy,” said Polly. “I didn’t know he was Head Boy.”
Nina did not come back to school that afternoon. Neither, Polly suspected, did Leslie. The next day it was all over Manor Road School that the Head Boy of Wilton College was in love with Polly Whittacker. People kept coming and asking Polly if it was true. Polly got very gruff about it. But it did make her feel more kindly towards Seb.
The day after that, a parcel came for Polly, addressed in strange writing. In it were several cassette tapes – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms – and a note in small, fat writing:
Tom thought you might like these. He says throw them away if you don’t. We gather he didn’t kill you that eventful night, or someone would have tried to sue him by now. Our show is still on the road – just about. Ann and Sam send love.
Yours, Tan Thare (alias Ed)
Almost on tiptoe, in case Mr Leroy found out, Polly borrowed Fiona’s radio-cassette player and listened to the tapes. She got so addicted to them that Granny promised her a cassette player for Christmas. And Mr Leroy did nothing. Polly relaxed, and then relaxed further, from a tension she had not known she had. Suddenly she could concentrate again. A week after the tapes arrived, she got out her map and the story called Tales of Nowhere for the first time in months, and began to compose a long, careful narrative.
It turned out a bit different from the way she had planned it. Remembering how scornful Mr Lynn had been at her borrowing from Tolkien, Polly decided to let her imagination take her where it would. All she knew at the start was that it was an account of how Hero came to be Tan Coul’s assistant, and then their quest together for the Obah Cypt. The result was that the story got huge. Small extra stories sprouted off it everywhere, giving detailed histories of every character who appeared. Hero herself became a king’s daughter who had to run away from home because of the machinations of her beautiful but evil girl-cousin. Tan Coul found her wandering in disguise and made her his assistant, thinking she was a boy. From there it became an epic. Polly was writing at it most of that school year, almost until her fourteenth birthday, on and off, with numerous interruptions from real life.
Seb was one of the interruptions. Polly was continually trying to get rid of Seb, or at least evade his grabbing and kissing her. She was ashamed to ask Granny to help. But each time she tried, Seb got so upset, so humble and miserable, that Polly got soft-hearted and did not send Seb packing after all.
“I don’t know how Nina does it!” she sighed more than once to Fiona. Nina was always sending people packing, except, perhaps, Leslie.
Leslie kissed Polly too, at Fiona’s Christmas party, a soft, moist kiss which Polly preferred to Seb’s grabbing and hard-breathing kind, even if it was not so valuable. Leslie was turning out to be a great kisser of people. It was around then that Fiona took to calling him Georgie-Porgie. And he seemed to be surviving Wilton rather well. Polly asked Seb how Leslie was doing, and Seb rather loftily admitted that Piper was a popular little beast.
More tapes arrived for Polly at Christmas, With love from the Dumas Quartet, in Ann’s writing – Britten, Chopin,
Elgar. Ann had put her address at the top, which Polly carefully kept. She was going to need that. There was another parcel of tapes a month later, this time from Sam – Fauré, Handel, Haydn.
“Going through the alphabet, isn’t he?” Granny remarked. “What does he do when he gets round to Webern? Go back to Bach?” She, like Polly, had no doubt who the tapes were really from.
Polly finished her huge narrative during the summer term. The day after she had finished it, she went round with the oddest mixture of feelings, pride at having got it done, sick of the sight of it and glad it was over, and completely lost without it. By the evening, lost-without-it came out on top, and she began to make a careful copy in her best writing.
That too suffered interruptions. Polly was put in the athletics team again, and she was also a courtier in the school summer play. This was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Polly was much struck by the similarity of its plot to her own story of Hero and Tan Coul. She would have given a great deal to act the part of Viola, but that went to Kirstie Jefferson, and Polly consoled herself by going on copying her story.
Shakespeare, she discovered, borrowed plots for his plays from all over the place – so there, Mr Lynn! Her story was all her own. The longer she spent copying, the more she admired it. Some parts were really good. The part, in particular, where Tan Coul is wounded in the shoulder and Hero has to dress the wound. She strips off Tan Coul’s armour and sees “the smooth, powerful muscles rippling under the silken skin of his back”. Wonderful! Polly went round whispering it admiringly to herself. “The silken skin of his back!”
She was still wonderfully pleased with that bit when she finished copying it at last. Oh, well done! Polly packed it in a vast envelope addressed to Ann, with a note asking her to give it to Tom. I seem to have lost his address, she wrote, to fool Mr Leroy. For the same reason, she got Fiona to write Ann’s address and post it for her. Then she waited for signs of applause and admiration from Mr Lynn.
Nothing happened for quite a while. And when it did, it was clear Mr Lynn felt strongly on the matter. He had risked writing himself. Maybe this was because he was far away. Or maybe not. The postcard was from New York. It had two words written on it.
Sentimental Drivel. T. G. L.
Polly stared at it in outrage. She could barely believe it.
“What’s up, love?” asked Granny.
“Oh nothing. Only one of the famous Lynn postcards,” Polly said bitterly. “I hope he treads on his cello.”
She went to school, furious. That day she went without lunch so that she could put the money in Granny’s telephone jar. Granny worried a lot about the size of her phone bill. Polly walked home in the afternoon, still furious. He can’t have gone off hero business! she kept thinking. What’s the matter with him? He used to like it! He told me he was hooked on it. What’s wrong?
Seb crossed the road and tried to walk beside Polly.
“Oh stop bothering me!” Polly snapped.
“Polly! That’s not like you!” Seb said in a huffy, pleading way.
At this, Polly was angry enough – and hungry enough – to turn round and say, “Yes, it is like me! You just don’t know what I’m like. I told you to stop bothering me. Go away and don’t come back for a year. I’m too young!”
Seb stood and stared at her. He was even angrier than Polly was, and fighting so hard to control it that for just a moment he almost looked like Mr Leroy. Like Mr Leroy, he said, “You’re going to regret that.” Then he walked away.
Polly went home without another thought for Seb except a mild relief that he seemed to have been sent packing at last. She put her lunch money in the telephone jar and dialled Mr Lynn’s number.
She was answered by the robot, sounding a bit old and scratched these days, but she had been expecting that. “Polly,” she said crisply. “What the hell do you mean – sentimental drivel?” And slammed the phone down again.
Again it was some time before anything happened. During that time Polly had been taken out of the Hurdles and put in the Relay and the 400 Metres, and asked to be a sailor as well as a courtier in the play. Also during this time Ivy kept telephoning to tell Polly all about her new lodger, Kenneth Curtis. She had had a couple of girls before that and had not got on with them. Kenneth, she wanted Polly to know, was different. “It’s quite platonic,” she said, “but I feel so peaceful now. I think I may have got my hands on a little happiness at last.” She wanted Polly to come round at least for a visit.
“Don’t you,” said Granny.
At last, the Saturday before Polly was fourteen, a letter arrived from London. It was in the spiky, flowing writing of Sam Rensky.
Dear Polly,
Tom wishes you, for some reason I can’t understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs – backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair.
This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don’t. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.
Yours ever, Sam.
This, if possible, made Polly angrier still. She hurled the letter in the bin and stormed off for a walk. And, having walked some way in that direction, she decided angrily that she would, in spite of Granny’s advice, go and visit Mum. Poor Ivy. She did so deserve a little happiness.
“Good heavens!” Ivy said, opening the door to her. “I never expected your grandmother to let you near here. Well, come in, now you’ve come.”
It was not very welcoming, but Polly went in and followed Ivy to the kitchen. The new lodger was sitting at the table over the same sort of substantial breakfast that Ivy used to give David. He was a stringy, quiet little man, with not very much hair brushed over to make it look more.
When he saw Polly, he jumped up with such violent politeness that his chair fell over.
“Sit down, Ken,” Ivy said soothingly. “She’s only Polly.”
Ken sat down guiltily. He had, Polly noticed, a mole on the side of his nose with a tuft of hair growing out of it. A vision came to her of how Ken would look on a beach. But Ivy seemed to like him well enough. She and Polly sat and chatted until Ken had finished eating. Then Ivy sent him to the living room to look for the newspaper Polly could see on the other chair.
When Ken had shuffled off, Ivy said, “You haven’t quarrelled with her too now, have you?”
“No,” said Polly. “Of course not!”
“You do quarrel with people,” said Ivy. “It’s your besetting sin, Polly.” Polly opened her mouth to protest, then shut it, almost with a snap, like Granny. She let Ivy go on, “But don’t think you’re going to come back here. It wouldn’t do at all. I can’t have Ken upset.”
When Ken came shuffling back to say there was no paper in there, Polly got up to leave. He looked puzzled. Polly said goodbye to Ken politely, because it was not Ken’s fault, and left. As she walked back to Granny’s house, it began to seem to her that she knew what Tom meant. She had Ivy’s example to show her that there were ways of thought that were quite unreal, and the same ways went on being unreal even in hero business. Her first act on getting in was to rescue Sam’s letter and shake the tea leaves off it. Her second act was to get out her own first copy of the huge narrative and look at it carefully.
She found she knew exactly what Tom meant. She writhed. Oddly enough, it was all the bits she had been most pleased with that now made her writhe hardest. She would have torn it up – except that it had tak
en such months to write. She wondered what she could do to show Tom she understood now. The book of tickets she was supposed to be selling for Twelfth Night caught her eye, piled on a heap of other notices from school.
She hesitated. Was it worth risking more reprisals from Mr Leroy? “Why not?” she said. “He probably won’t come.”
Without giving herself time to regret it, she wrapped the tickets in all the other stuff – notices about uniform, the price of dinners, Sports Day, the Swimming Bath Appeal and choir practice – and stuffed the lot in an envelope. Perhaps Mr Leroy would think it was a bundle of waste paper. She addressed the bulging envelope to Old Pimply Back at Sam Rensky’s address and went daringly out and posted in herself.
No one except Granny came to Twelfth Night Polly looked carefully on all three nights, but it was so. She just had to accept it. Granny enjoyed the play anyway, although sitting in the draughty hall gave her sciatica. She could scarcely move the next day. But she vowed she would all the same, even on crutches, come to Sports Day later that week.
“You don’t have to come to everything, Granny!” Polly protested.
“I’m the only family you’ve got who cares enough to come, and I’m coming!” Granny said.
She was so firm about it that Polly did not argue any more then. But when Sports Day turned out to be cold and drizzling, Polly had another try at persuading Granny to stay at home. Granny turned warlike on her. She gave Polly the stare which unnerved men in offices and she said, “I know my duty, Polly. Don’t argue. I shall wear my fur coat and carry my umbrella and I shall be there to watch you win. Let’s say no more about it.”
So very fierce was she that Polly was seriously alarmed when Granny did not turn up that afternoon. There was, in spite of the rain, quite a large crowd of parents, teachers, and brothers and sisters of competitors spread round the field. Polly kept hoping she had missed Granny among the rest. But Granny and her fur coat were very recognisable, particularly together, and the umbrella was even more so, since it was very large and made in green and white triangles. Look as she would, Polly could not see that umbrella.