Fire and Hemlock

  “Should I go home?” Polly asked Fiona while Fiona was helping her put her hair into a tail with an elastic band.

  “Perhaps the bus she was on broke down,” said Fiona. “Or she may be behind some big people. Let’s go round the field and look.”

  They toured the field with Fiona’s plastic mac across them both to keep their track suits dry, but no fur coat or green and white umbrella could they find. Polly was grateful she had a friend like Fiona. Fiona was entirely sensible and soothing. Polly’s stomach felt queer, and she kept saying to herself, If Mr Leroy’s done something to her now, I shall go to Hunsdon House and kill him! I really shall!

  “Go home after the Four Hundred, if you must,” Fiona said as they stood in the drizzle, jumping from leg to leg to keep warm. “You ought to win the Four Hundred first.”

  Polly took off her track suit and went heavily to the start with the rest of the runners. She knelt, knees and knuckles wet, with the rain feeling like pins and needles falling on her arms and legs, and took a last worried look round the field. And the umbrella was there at last, in the distance near the gate. Granny was under it, but she was not holding it. Mr Lynn was holding it over both of them.

  The gun went and Polly got left at the start. She thought that, in the circumstances, it was pretty speedy of her to come third. But her speed in the race was nothing to the speed with which she covered the distance from the finish to the gate, frantically tearing the elastic band off her hair as she ran. It wound itself up in her hair and she only got it off just as she arrived at the umbrella.

  Granny was holding it alone now. Mr Lynn had gone.

  “Tom was here – surely he was!” Polly cried out.

  “Put something on, Polly. You’ll catch your death,” said Granny. “Yes, he was here, but he had to go. The quartet’s just off to Australia. He left you this.” She held out a paper.

  Polly dropped the elastic band all trammelled in fine silvery hair and slowly took the paper. Rain pattered on it. The drawing on the paper bulged and blurred from tears Polly was determined not to let go of. “How’s your sciatica?” she said while she waited for her eyes to clear.

  “Not too bad, thank you for asking,” Granny said.

  Polly could see now. It was a drawing of a kangaroo wearing glasses, and he had made it look really quite like him. And Mr Leroy had won – hands down. “He thinks I’m just a child!” Polly said angrily.

  “Well you are,” said Granny.

  5

  “Harp and carp, Thomas,” she said,

  “Harp and carp along with me,

  And if you dare to kiss my lips,

  Sure of your body I will be.”

  THOMAS THE RHYMER

  Polly stirred and shifted her shoes around on Granny’s bedspread, remembering the desolation of that Sports Day. After that, Polly had seriously set herself to grow up. She had worked at it all that next year. Granny had been quite sympathetic, but just a little sharp about it, rather like she was over Sports Day.

  “Don’t wish your life away,” she said. It became almost a motto of Granny’s. Don’t wish your life away. Polly stirred uneasily again. Because, it seemed to her, she might have done precisely that. Wished her life away. She had only a year left of those second, hidden memories. After that, her memory ran single again, and disturbingly blank and different.

  For instance, the memory she had thought was her real one told her that she had met Seb for the first time at that party of Fiona’s two years ago. The hidden memory insisted that was nonsense. She had known Seb since she was ten. And he had turned up again the summer after that Sports Day, quite soon after she had told him to leave her alone.

  “I don’t think you were angry with me. I think it was about something else,” Seb said, standing on Granny’s doorstep with a box of chocolates.

  There was enough truth in that to make Polly soft-hearted again.

  And the single memories did not contain Leslie at all. Polly was astonished that she could have forgotten someone like Leslie. Leslie was a well-known figure all over Middleton. Wilton College did not seem to be able to contain him like it contained its other boys. Leslie was always out and about, as furiously in pursuit of girls as Nina was of boys. Naturally, he and Nina came on a collision course fairly often, but Polly saw a fair amount of Leslie too. So did Fiona, although she got tired of him quite soon. She said she had other fish to fry and a lot of leeway to make up on Nina – which was fair enough, since Fiona was now rather better-looking than Kirstie Jefferson – and she said Leslie was flimsy. She called him Sexy Leslie and Georgie-Porgie, and she said it was a wonder Wilton didn’t expel him. Polly thought it was a wonder too. He was almost never in the place. Granny said it must be because Leslie was so good at playing the flute. She said the school would want to keep him for that – that or he had the devil’s own luck and cunning.

  Polly thought the second part was the true bit. But then she heard Leslie play the flute. It was at a Christmas concert in Wilton College. Leslie bet Polly and Nina they would not dare go. So they dressed finely and went. In Nina’s case this meant green hair – Nina’s Mum had long ago given up trying to control the way Nina looked – and an arrangement of shiny orange-and-black fishnet which made most of the heads in the pink marble Hall whip round to look.

  Leslie stood forward on the platform, with the lighting glinting charmingly on his hair and his demurest look, and he played the flute. The music soared among the pretend Roman pillars, teasing, trilling, coaxing. Polly was entranced. She had not known Leslie had it in him. He seemed to have the gift of keeping your attention on him too. Until Leslie had finished, Polly did not look at anyone else.

  Then, during the much duller violin-player, she saw Seb in the audience. Seb was around all that year, Polly’s hidden memories told her, doing Oxford and Cambridge entrance first, and then plunging round Middleton on a motor bike, bored. Both memories lost sight of him then, for nearly two years, until he turned up at Fiona’s in his last year at London University.

  Seb was sitting across the Hall from Polly. Laurel was with him. It gave Polly quite a jolt to see Laurel. She hung her head and looked across at them through her hair, and hoped and hoped that Nina’s finery would not cause Seb to turn like everybody else and notice her. She somehow could not bear the thought of going near Laurel, or talking to her, and yet she felt a good deal of squeamish curiosity about her. She let her hair dangle and stared.

  Laurel was beautiful. Polly saw that now, where she had not seen it when she was ten. With her pearly-pale face, big eyes and dark eyebrows in the clouded pale hair, she was quite staggering. She looked young and slender too. She could have been the same age as Nina. Seb was leaning over Laurel, being very attentive.

  Laurel was obviously the kind of person who needed attentiveness. Polly was glad Seb was too busy to see her, and irrationally annoyed about it at the same time. She seemed to hover between the two feelings all the rest of the concert.

  Afterwards, Laurel went up to talk to someone near the platform, taking Seb with her. Polly and Nina left without Seb seeing them.

  “Hideous place,” said Nina. “Stuffy old people. But wasn’t Leslie fabulous! I’d no idea Mozart was such sexy stuff!”

  Inevitably after that, Nina got a craze for Mozart and borrowed all Polly’s tapes.

  Next time Polly saw Seb, she meant to say casually that she had seen him with his stepmother at the concert. But she forgot, because Seb started to talk about Thomas Lynn. “Old Tom’s doing quite well in Australia,” he said. “Funny, because no one thought he would make anything of that quartet. He was always supposed to be such a fool.”

  From then on, every time Polly saw him, Seb seemed to make some remark or other about Mr Lynn. He always referred to him as “old Tom” in a disparaging way, and made it clear that he himself thought Mr Lynn was not up to much, but he did let fall, all the same, continuous little drops of information. Polly was thirsty for them. No letter had ever come to her from Austr
alia. Seb was her only source of information and she drank the drops up greedily.

  “Of course he was always hanging around the house when I came to stay as a kid,” Seb said, “and he was quite nice to me – I suppose he was bored – so I mustn’t get at him. He gave me quite a good camera once.”

  Another time Seb told Polly, “I remember the row there was when old Tom decided to take the cello up professionally. Laurel and he split up over it. Of course everyone agreed with Laurel. ‘Thundering away on that stupid great fiddle for money,’ everyone said. ‘You don’t need the money.’ And he said in that daft way of his, ‘It’s not for money,’ and stuck to it. My father says old Tom always was as obstinate as six mules tied head to tail.”

  Most of the things Seb told Polly, however, were more recent than this. Polly vividly remembered the fine spring day when Seb remarked to Polly that old Tom had been flat broke at the time of the funeral and heavily in debt when he had to give the pictures back. “Trust him to make a mistake like that!” said Seb. “There can’t be many people who’d walk off with a Picasso by accident!”

  Polly flinched at Seb’s churring laugh and said she did not feel well. She went home to Granny’s to sit in her room and stare at her Fire and Hemlock picture. Stolen too. And Mr Lynn flat broke and still sending her books from all over the country. Then she got out her stolen photograph and looked at that. Now she knew Leslie, the boy in it was less like him. When it was taken he was – or had been – the same age Leslie was now. And of course I never met him, she thought. I was as superstitious as Granny in those days!

  That seemed to make keeping the photograph much less of a crime. She decided to hang it on her wall opposite the Fire and Hemlock picture. I might as well have all my crimes on view, she thought as she hammered in the nail. But holding the photograph, ready to hang it on the nail, brought back to her suddenly that odd scene she had overheard while she was stealing it. Mr Leroy talking bullyingly to Mr Lynn, and her feeling that Mr Leroy seemed to own Mr Lynn. And they had not been in the house, Polly was sure of that now. They had been in London or somewhere, and she had somehow got tuned in to their talk. And why would Mr Lynn himself never talk about the Leroys? Not that he ever talked about himself much.

  Thoughtfully, Polly hooked the little oval frame on the nail. Mr Lynn would not stay in Australia for good, she knew. The Leroys would want him. For good or ill, that was nevertheless a cheering thought.

  Granny noticed the photograph the next time she came into Polly’s room. “That’s a new one,” she said. She went up to it and looked. “Hm,” she said. “He looks to have been a nice lad. I’ll give him that at least.”

  “Give who that?” said Polly.

  “Your Mr Lynn, of course,” said Granny. “I thought that’s why you had it.”

  “No. I had it from superstition,” Polly said. She could not believe Granny was right. People changed as they grew old, that was true, but the difference between Mr Lynn and the boy in the photograph was more than that. Polly thought of photos she knew – Granny as a girl, Dad as a boy. Granny as a girl had a recognisable bright snap to her face, and Dad, now Polly knew what he was like, had, even in those days, the gleaming, shifty smile she had seen in Bristol. The boy in the photograph did not have the same look as Mr Lynn at all. It was as if he was going to grow up in a different direction, a careless, light-hearted direction, into someone more like Leslie Piper.

  Polly thought for a while. Then she carefully drew and cut out a tiny pair of paper glasses. She unhooked the photo and laid the glasses on the boy’s face. They were too big. Still, Polly pushed them into place with her fingernail and then, with a nailfile, gently tipped them to the right familiar angle. Then there was no doubt.

  “Perhaps it’s Mr Piper,” said Polly. But it was not. The boy was definitely Thomas Lynn. “Oh, heavens!” Polly cried out. “However young did they get him?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. She had not meant to say that, not out loud, not even in her head, and Mr Leroy could well have overheard. She added carelessly, “Anyway, he’s gone to live in Australia now, so why bother?”

  But she did bother. Now she thought, she realised that Seb, whenever he gave her news of old Tom, had seemed to know exactly whereabouts in Australia he was. Next time she saw Seb, she asked innocently, “Does Mr Lynn write to your parents a lot, then?”

  Seb laughed, “Old Tom? Laurel says he’d rather do anything than write a letter!”

  That, Polly knew, was not true, but she guessed that Seb was telling the truth as he saw it. In that case—She was left with a strong feeling about Mr Lynn that seemed to be foreboding. It was something she had known almost from the moment she had met him, but it seemed only now to have come up to the surface. Once it had, it would not go. It ran through everything, the way superstition ran through Granny. It seemed to get worse through the rest of that year, like a thunderstorm gathering, through the summer term, through exams and Sports Day, even through Polly’s fifteenth birthday, gathering like a cloud.

  Soon after her birthday she got a letter from Ann.

  Dear Polly,

  We’re back! And there’s something we want to show you. Tom says there’s a pub called the Mile-and-a-Half out on the London Road, where we could have lunch and then perhaps go on an outing of some kind. Next Saturday would suit us, about twelve-thirty. Don’t bother to let us know, unless you can’t make it. If you can’t, we’ll try again.

  Best wishes, Ann

  P.S. Ed says bring a friend of yours for him. He loves blind dates.

  Needless to say, this letter threw Polly into a near-frenzy of excitement. Yet it was an odd kind of excitement, more like the kind you feel when you get what you expected for your birthday. Polly knew that, somehow, all through the gathering cloud of foreboding, she had been expecting this, saying to herself, It’s getting to be nearly time they were back, without quite knowing she had been. When she first opened the letter, she felt Ah, yes! like a relief.

  All the same, the frenzy was real too. It was all she could do not to let the excitement flow over into her invitation to Fiona. But she managed to say, in the right casual way, “I’ve got rather a good date for us next Saturday. Are you interested at all?” It was not that Fiona would have minded, but Polly would have. The pride that had risen up in Bristol rose up now, and she could not bear anyone except Granny to know how important this was to her.

  She was determined to look her best. She washed her hair twice that week. She tried on outfits, earrings, and shoes, and rejected them, and then tried them on again, until Granny said, “Lord, Polly! I’d rather share a house with Nina! What’s wrong with blue denim? Better that than overdressed any day.”

  Granny was right. Polly put on her newest jeans and realised it at once. Hero’s clothes. She looked at herself anxiously in the mirror, rejected the green top on superstitious grounds and decided on the plain white. Leslie had once said she looked almost Swedish with her hair. Did she? She was quite tall, but not willowy, not any longer. She had become rather plump lately. And even if she went without food from now to Saturday, there was not time for it to show. She would have to settle for being plump and pretty – she was pretty, she knew that. But she would have given her ears – and then hidden the blank spaces under lots of hair – to look as beautiful as Laurel.

  Then on Saturday morning Fiona rang up to say she had gone down with chicken pox. “But that’s something only children get!” Polly cried out in her dismay.

  “If it is, it missed me,” Fiona said snappishly. “And you might show a little sympathy. I itch all over and I feel lousy. My face looks awful! I’m sorry about the date, but he’d take one look and pass out. Ask Nina.”

  Polly could not endure the thought of Nina making a pass at Ed, or gushing about the sexiness of Mozart. She told herself that Nina was bound to be busy anyway and went alone.

  6

  They’ll shape me in your arms, lady,

  A hot iron at the fire,

  But hold me f
ast, don’t let me go,

  To be your heart’s desire.

  TAM LIN

  The Mile-and-a-Half was right on the edge of Middleton, almost out in the country. It sat at the back of a forecourt that was overshadowed by a mighty old tree.

  The quartet were sitting at a table in the shade under the tree. Tactful of them, Polly thought. She had been all prepared to pretend to be eighteen.

  Before she reached the table, she realised there were six people sitting round it. While she took that in, she was noticing that the quartet were all very brown and healthy-looking after Australia. Tom, lounging back in his chair, had new glasses and his hair was bleached quite fair from the sun. His green shirt made him look particularly brown. The fifth person, sitting beside him, was Mary Fields. The sixth, sitting with his back to Polly, was, astonishingly, Leslie.

  “Leslie!” Polly said, coming up behind him. “Is there anywhere you don’t turn up?”

  Leslie turned and grinned. There were welcoming cries of “Hello, Polly!” Ed sprang up, very trim and curly, and found her a chair. Sam unfolded upwards, beaming, like a long brown streak. Ann jumped up and hugged Polly. Ann’s eyes were very clear and bright, and she had a dark pink dress on that showed she was the brownest of the four. Leslie advised Polly to try a pork pie. Mary Fields smiled and said, “Hello, there!” By the time Polly was settled with a glass of fruit juice, two pork pies, a cheese roll, crisps, pickled onions and a cherry on a stick, she was feeling really happy. Really she was, she told herself. Tom had done nothing but smile briefly from beside Mary Fields.