Fire and Hemlock

  At the time, this had meant nothing to Polly. She had thought about nothing but not letting Seb down, and she had been quite startled by how very pleased Seb’s father had been to see her. “Well now, this is clever of you, Sebastian!” he had said, more than once. Polly had not wholly cared for Seb’s father, his ragged grey hair, his yellowing teeth and the loose, dark pouches under his eyes. “Clever, Sebastian, clever!” he said, and his loud, chesty laugh dissolved into the cough it reminded her of. Laurel had almost glared when Mr Leroy said this. She had smiled, and she had talked softly and charmingly to Polly, but Polly could tell Laurel was not pleased, not pleased at all.

  It had been obvious enough for Polly innocently to ask Seb about it in the street afterwards.

  “Yes, I knew she’d object,” Seb said, “so I didn’t tell her.”

  “Why? Did she want you to marry someone else?” Polly asked. “I suppose you’re her heir, aren’t you? She must have had other plans for you.”

  Seb gave a loud, hacking laugh, quite unlike his usual well-controlled churring. “Plans!” he said. “Inherit from Laurel! I’ll be lucky! I’m only a half Leroy anyway. My mother was as ordinary as you are.” Then he became serious and put his arm round Polly, which was a thing he very seldom did in the street. “The fact is, Pol, I’m in a fairly tense situation with Laurel. Laurel and my father used to be married before, you see, before my father met my mother.”

  “And Laurel doesn’t get on with your mother?” Polly guessed.

  This made Seb laugh again. He churred this time, long and amused. “My mother’s dead. She died nearly nine years ago.”

  “Oh,” Polly said, stricken and embarrassed. She had been thinking of the way Ivy hated Joanna, and she wanted to kick herself for being so self-centred. She could tell Seb was upset. He was almost grinding her against him. Yet she could tell he was laughing at her too. She was too confused to ask any more.

  That was puzzling, Polly thought now, marching home to Granny’s, and it was even more puzzling how pleased Mr Leroy had been to see her. She shuddered. If there was one thing she was sure of now, it was that Mr Leroy had it in for her. So what was going on? She ran through her memories, across the jolt where she had done God alone knew what, and on into the plain, single four years beyond. Back and forth. There was always that jolt, then such a difference: Mr Leroy glad to see her, and Seb behaving as if he had never met her before that party of Fiona’s.

  Polly well remembered first seeing Seb at that party. Fiona said Seb had gatecrashed it. She had seemed rather surprised that Polly had not come across Seb before. Seb had made straight for Polly. Polly had looked at him, tall, smooth-haired, with his air of self-possessed slight scorn for other people, and Seb had seemed immediately familiar, although Polly had never, as far as she knew, set eyes on him before. They had fallen easily into conversation. Which was, Polly had thought then, just how she had always thought it should be. It had surprised her later that something so much as it should be should turn out to be so unexciting.

  This made Polly laugh now, a short jolt of laughter. Unless, she thought, Seb and Mr Leroy had forgotten too. So many people had – Granny, Ivy, Nina, Leslie. But she could not believe that Mr Leroy had forgotten. Seb, on the other hand – Seb had always been on her side in a way. Perhaps Seb had forgotten too, in which case there was no point in asking Seb anything.

  So who else was there to ask?

  Polly turned into her own road, where Hunsdon House stood blocking one end, facing the fact that there was almost no one else to ask. Thomas Lynn, if he had ever existed, had been so separate from her everyday life that it had been an easy thing to slice him out of it – as easy as Granny filleting plaice for Mintchoc. Except that he had not been separate at all. Almost everything Polly did in those five years went back to Mr Lynn somehow. The four years after that had been formless and humdrum years. Polly had done things, true, but it had all been without shape, as if she had been filleted away from her own motives and the things which gave her shape.

  Granny looked at Polly when she came in. “Have you fetched it out yet?”

  “No,” said Polly.

  She spent the whole night packing, and going round and round in those memories. And she did not understand. Quite apart from the truly strange things she now remembered – which she thought she must partly have imagined – Mr Leroy had been so determined to stop her seeing Thomas Lynn that she knew it had been important to go on seeing him. Yet it was equally clear that Tom himself had been trying to freeze Polly off. Which put a stop to everything rather, didn’t it?

  It did not stop Polly trying at least to remember Ann Abraham’s address, or Sam Rensky’s. And she could not. They were not left out of her mind with a jolt, like the space between her double and single memories. They had simply faded, as things do that you have not paid much attention to. She wrote letters to them both, all the same, in the course of the night, and addressed them after a fashion, hoping that the post office might just manage to deliver them. But she was not going to post them in a box at the end of a road which also held Hunsdon House. She packed them to take to Oxford too.

  Granny looked at her again in the morning. “What set you off?”

  “A book,” said Polly.

  Mr Perks and Fiona arrived in Mr Perks’ car, and Fiona helped Polly load her things into a boot and back seat already crammed with Fiona’s things. Though Fiona and Polly were at different colleges, they were sharing a tiny flat this year. Fiona was in great excitement about it. She did not seem to notice anything wrong with Polly.

  Granny plainly did. She looked at Polly again as she reached up to kiss Polly goodbye. “Take care,” she said. “And if a book set you off, a book may help again when you’ve fetched it out of you. Try it. Goodbye. And don’t forget to write.”

  2

  O first let pass the black, lady,

  Then let pass the brown,

  But quickly run to the milk white steed—

  Pull you his rider down.

  TAM LIN

  Polly posted her sketchily addressed letters in the first box she came to in Oxford. Then there seemed nothing she could do but hope for a reply.

  A week passed, during which she and Fiona arranged their flat. One tiny room was Fiona’s and also the dining room. The other was Polly’s and doubled as the living room. There was a kitchen like a cupboard and a bathroom they shared with tenants upstairs. They saw tutors, went to lectures and libraries, worked, read. Friends of both of them poured in and out. The flat’s main luxury was a telephone in the dining-Fiona’s room. It rang constantly, mixing with the sound of Polly’s tapes and Fiona’s records. And all of it passed Polly like a show of shadows on the wall. The only things which were real were the people and events going round in her head.

  Round and round. Thomas Lynn had befriended a little girl at a funeral. I wonder if I embarrassed him even then, Polly thought, trotting round holding his hand, obviously adoring him. No. She knew she had amused him. But later she had become less amusing and, in the end, plain embarrassing. He had shown her she was. And she had replied by doing something…

  Unless I simply made him up, she thought. Ivy could be right. It seemed so much the sanest explanation. But would you make up the smell of an old anorak, or the feel of a large hand squashing your face against it? Would you make up resistance against you in the muscles of an arm you were hugging? Polly squirmed at that. It was so much the way Nina had hugged Leslie’s arm, with Polly standing there like Mary Fields had done. Double purpose. You showed him you had a nice bosom, and you showed the onlooker the arm was yours to hug. Small wonder Mary had made a catty remark!

  Oh! Polly thought. Why aren’t all girls locked up by law the year they turn fifteen? They do such stupid things! It was that same year that Fiona had run away to Germany after a German businessman her father happened to bring home one evening. If only, Polly thought, she had done something so pointless herself! But she had done something so harmful that it had expu
nged Thomas Lynn from her own mind and from the rest of the world as well.

  The second week brought no letter from Ann or Sam, but a letter came from Seb. It was long and quite amusing. Seb had written it – or the half of it that Polly read – in stages during a court case he was working on. He said that he was beginning to regret choosing to be a barrister, and he still wanted Polly to marry him at Christmas. Polly had barely patience to read this far. “I ought to send you packing,” she said, holding the letter but not reading it any more, “considering the way I feel.” But that seemed mean and unreasonable. Nothing had really changed. Seb had done nothing except – Polly now knew – become devoted to her from the time she was thirteen. Or maybe even from the moment she had asked him about pop groups nearly two years before that. Polly had not the heart to break with Seb, but she had not the heart to reply to his letter either.

  Instead, she recollected that Oxford was not so far from the Cotswolds, and looked up Mary Fields in the telephone directory. And there she was. Old Elmcott Farm, Elmcott.

  Polly put the directory down and shrank away. She could not face Mary. She thought of Mr Leroy as she had last seen him, grey, with dark hanging skin under his muddy eyes, and she knew she did not dare do anything which might alert Mr Leroy. Then, at the beginning of the third week, she said to herself, “Was this the creature that once called itself an assistant hero? And why should Mr Leroy bother? Aren’t you safely engaged to his son?” She waited till Fiona went out, then dialled Mary Fields’ number.

  She was taken aback, all the same, when Mary answered. She had not realised that Mary’s voice was so clipped and horsepersonish. Or that she would remember it so well.

  “I’m interested in a horse I believe you have,” Polly said cautiously and found, on listening, that her own voice had got clipped to match Mary’s. “A horse called Lorenzo that once belonged to a circus.” And now she’ll tell me he’s dead long ago, she thought.

  To her surprise, Mary said, with more than a trace of eagerness, “Do you want to buy Lorenzo? He is for sale, as it happens.”

  Lorenzo was unridable, of course. Polly grinned, thinking of the amount of her student grant, dwindling fast in the bank. “I was wondering about it,” she lied. “But I’d heard he was rather wild.”

  “Oh no. He’s quite a sedate old thing these days,” Mary said, also lying, Polly was ready to bet. “Who told you he wasn’t?”

  “The previous owner,” said Polly. “Mr – er – Mr—What was the name?”

  “Sebastian Leroy,” said Mary.

  “Who?” said Polly.

  “Sebastian Leroy,” Mary repeated, “used to own Lorenzo.”

  He did? Like my left thumb! Polly thought. “Oh – er—” She heard her voice falter and picked herself up. “Now, that’s very odd. The person who told me about Lorenzo was called something else. What was it now? Lynn. That’s it. Thomas Lynn.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know who he can be,” Mary said coldly. “Do you want to buy the horse, or are you simply pumping me about my boyfriends?”

  “I—” said Polly.

  “In that case, get off the line,” said Mary. “I’m expecting the vet to ring any moment.”

  Polly put the receiver down quick, hoping Mary would not ask to have the call traced. I don’t believe this! she thought. Seb! As a child, she had gone about expecting to meet giants and dragons round every corner, and they had disappointingly never seemed to be there. But they were there all the time, in the person of Seb. Had she been afraid of the wrong Mr Leroy all these years? Oh, no, she thought. I can’t think that ill of Seb. But, from what Mary said, it did seem as if Seb had not only bought Lorenzo, but had also taken the obvious steps to get Mary on his side and make her keep her mouth shut. But Mary had not denied knowing Thomas Lynn – quite. Boyfriends, she had said, in the plural.

  “So what am I to think?” Polly said aloud.

  The answer seemed to be: think of any other line of inquiry which might just be separate from the Leroys. Polly thought, for the next few days, in libraries, among friends, with a pen in her hand trying to write an essay on Keats. “As though of hemlock I had drunk,” wrote Keats. Me too! Polly thought, and could not go on with the essay. She went for a walk instead by the river, in a mild, windy drizzle, thinking, thinking, and the result of the thinking was that she went on walking through the drizzle until she came to the bus station, where she got on a bus to Stow-on-the-Water.

  This is a mad thing to do! she thought, staring out of the bus window. There was brown ploughed earth on either side, soaking in the drizzle, and a few sad seagulls trying to feed off the earth. Not so different from the first time she had come that way, heroically swooping from hedge to hedge in the horse-car, and yet there was all the world of difference. The bus passed the end of Mary Fields’ lane, billowing the hedges in a cloud of spray. Autumn was late this year. Trees that were still green, or dingy brown, wept leaves into the air soberly. Stow-on-the-Water, when the bus rumbled into it, was a bleak yellow colour, and the tarmac of the market square was black with wet.

  Polly got off the bus and walked straight into the shop of Thomas Piper Hardware. It was clean and quiet and smelled of paraffin. The striplights were on against the dark of the day. The only person there was Edna, doing sums at the cash desk.

  Polly went round the shelves and found some light bulbs, which the flat seemed to need all the time, and a shiny red colander. She found a garlic-crusher too and took that, because Fiona kept saying she wished they had one. Then, with these things, she approached the cash desk.

  Edna looked up and smiled, friendly to the tips of her fluffy hair. “Awful weather,” she said.

  “Terrible,” Polly agreed. “They’re saying it’s the wettest October on record, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, it is,” said Edna. She laid an orange plastic bag on the desk and took Polly’s purchases, ready to pack them in it. She began to ring the prices up on the till, but slowly, obviously ready to chat. “We’ve been warned about flooding,” she said, “and what to do if the river bursts its banks. We’re right down near the river here, you know.”

  Polly looked at her, liking her, and resolved to go about this carefully and reasonably. “It must be frightening,” she said. “I’ve never lived near a river. Where I come from – Middleton – we never get any floods.”

  “Do you come from Middleton?” Edna exclaimed. Her face lit up. “My son used to be at school in Middleton. Leslie Piper. But I don’t suppose you’d know him, would you?”

  “You’re never Leslie’s mother!” Polly exclaimed in return.

  That was enough to open Edna up. She could hardly talk fast enough, about Leslie and Leslie’s good looks and his amazing talent as a flute-player. She told Polly how good Leslie was to her, and how clever, and how much she had worried and inquired to find the right school to send Leslie to. And then, just as Polly was preparing to ask if Thomas Lynn was one of the people she had asked about schools, Edna’s eagerness was pushed aside by desperate worry. The worry had been there all along, Polly realised, seeing how easily it took its place in the lines on Edna’s face.

  “And then what does he do but take up with this rich married woman!” Edna said. “It’s her I blame. She must be twice his age. She should know better, even if Leslie doesn’t. And he’s always there, always dancing about after her, and can’t seem to think of anything else. I swear he didn’t pick up his flute once all summer. And that’s not right. He’s at music college and he should be studying, if he’s to earn a living from his playing, not chasing about after that rich Mrs Leroy – Oh, hello, Tom! I didn’t see you come in.”

  Polly turned round to find Mr Piper looming over her under the striplights. The white light caught his glasses, turning them to a blank glare. The lines round his mouth were more bitter than ever. He had on a wet anorak which seemed to enlarge his height, high shoulders, and huge hands, and underline everything about him that was so like Mr Lynn. Polly backed away from him. Her m
outh dried, and her heart battered so that she could barely hear him when he spoke.

  “What do you want?” he said to her. “Spying, aren’t you?”

  “Oh now, Tom!” Edna protested. “We were just chatting.”

  Mr Piper’s huge hands worked, drawing Polly’s eyes. Like a crab’s claws, she thought, horrified.

  “I heard her,” he said. “She was pumping you.” And he barked at Polly, “What are you after?”

  Polly held herself steady against a shelf of crockery. There seemed nothing to gain by denying things. “I’m only trying to trace a friend,” she said. “A Mr Thomas Lynn. Do you know him, by any chance?”

  She had a feeling that Edna might have reacted to the name, but she forgot to look, because Mr Piper took a threatening step towards her. His hands looked ready to throttle. “I do not,” he said. “Get out of here, young woman!”

  “In a second,” said Polly. “I haven’t paid for what I bought yet.” Biting down her fear, she slipped round Mr Piper to the cash desk. She fetched out her purse, feeling him towering beside her. “Do you know Mr Lynn?” she asked Edna as she handed her the money.

  But Edna was, of course, on Mr Piper’s side. “I’m afraid not, dear,” she said, and held out the orange plastic bag full of hardware to Polly.

  Then fear and failure seemed to break through a barrier in Polly. Because of Mr Piper’s uncivilised behaviour, she asked something which it would never have occurred to her to ask otherwise. She reached out for the bag, but kept her hands an inch or so from taking it. “Was there ever a giant in the supermarket here?” she asked.