“I bet it was,” said Polly. “I can’t get over Leslie being nice! And we got the name and the earring right, but he was fair-haired. I can’t get used to him not being dark and sulky.”
“Much the same with Edna – if that’s her name. No dressing gown,” said Mr Lynn.
“And no curlers,” said Polly. “But she was doing sums.”
“We got her too old-fashioned,” Mr Lynn said glumly. “We got the whole thing about twenty years out of date.”
“But it was there,” said Polly. “It is still. I can see it out of the window.”
“That’s what’s so appalling,” said Mr Lynn, hunching his shoulders in order not to look.
The waitress came back with a tray and a look which said, “Don’t blame me. This is what you ordered.” She set out two ice-cream cones, two cheese pancakes, two bright green milkshakes and an oatcake. Mr Lynn stared at it rather, but he was too shaken to protest. He took the pancakes and let Polly have the rest, and they did seem to make him feel better. At length he interrupted the snoring noise Polly was making with the bottom of the second milkshake to ask in a rather hushed way, “Mr Piper wasn’t there – why not, Polly?”
Polly looked up, into his glasses, and found a hunted look staring out at her. “It’s all right,” she said. “He’s not you. She said he was older. And she knew you weren’t when she looked properly.” All the same, she thought she would have been happier herself if Mr Piper had been there and she could prove there definitely were two of them.
Mr Lynn’s shoulders sagged with slightly unhappy relief. “Then which of us,” he said, “do you think is really Tan Coul?”
“You,” Polly said. But she was not sure at all, and she knew Mr Lynn knew.
Mr Lynn summoned the waitress back then and, very slowly and plainly, asked for a pot of tea. Polly had some Coke to wash down the oatcake. After that, they felt like facing normal life again. They went out into the square, carefully not looking towards Thomas Piper Hardware, and explored the rest of the town. The most interesting thing they found was a small book shop, which Mr Lynn dived into like a homing pigeon – no, more like a homing ostrich, Polly thought, with his long legs and the way he bent his head going in. Mr Lynn bought a stack of books for himself, and one about dragons which he insisted on giving to Polly.
“I don’t think Granny likes you giving me things,” Polly said awkwardly.
“I don’t think your Granny likes me,” Mr Lynn said. “But please take it. It keeps my mind off Edna – if her name is Edna.”
They went back to the square with their parcels. The horse-car had a parking ticket stuck to its windscreen. The waitress from the café was standing beside it. Mr Lynn looked from her to the ominous ticket. “Is this yours?”
“No, that’s from Maisie Millet. She’s traffic warden round here, not me,” said the waitress. She held out another parcel, orange plastic, with PIPER on it in black. “Edna sent her Leslie over with this after you’d gone.” Polly’s head and Mr Lynn’s turned to look at Piper’s shop. So the lady was called Edna. “You left it behind,” the waitress explained. She had decided, right from the start, that Mr Lynn was what she called “a bit in the head”. She put the orange parcel in Polly’s hand as the more trustworthy of the two. “Edna said to tell you she didn’t notice straightaway – she and Leslie were talking about you,” she said, and went back into the café.
“Polly,” Mr Lynn said in a slightly quaking voice, “what are we going to do with all these screwdrivers?”
“I don’t know,” said Polly. She gurgled. Mr Lynn gulped. They both leaned over the car and screamed with laughter.
Mr Lynn drove even more heroically on the way back. Polly could not blame him. He had a lot on his mind. But some of his manoeuvres did bring a slight taste of green milkshake to the back of her throat, and sometimes she could not prevent herself saying things like “Aren’t you supposed to drive on the other side of the road?” or “I think that driver was hooting at us.” And after he had dropped her outside her house, she did wonder if he would reach London without getting wrapped round a tree on the way.
He must have done. He wrote her a letter a week later.
The thing I hadn’t bargained for about hero business,
the important part said,
is how terribly embarrassing it is. I wished the floor would open in Piper’s shop. I squirmed. I realised in one blinding moment that when they speak of heroes having “iron nerve,” they do not mean they can spring forward and seize the bridle of a wild horse. That is child’s play – sorry, Polly, I mean quite easy by comparison really. No, what they mean by “iron nerve” is the same as “a thick skin.” You have to learn not to notice how silly you feel.
Polly thought sadly that she understood.
You meen,
she wrote back,
that you want to stop plaing hero bisnis. I do not blame you. It is up to you, just say.
She got a letter back almost at once. It was on headed paper from a hotel in Edinburgh. Evidently the orchestra was off on its travels again. Mr Lynn had written it by hand, but he had done his best to print it so that she could read it, though he had clearly been in a hurry.
Dear Hero,
I didn’t mean that at all. I just meant that being a hero took a different kind of courage than I had thought. No, I am hooked on hero business. Now I have got over squirming, I want to know if everything we make up is going to come true the same way. Must stop. This concert is being broadcast.
Tom
The orchestra continued touring about for months. Polly did not see Mr Lynn again for a long time. In fact, when she looked back over these memories, all coming alive and surging back into her head alongside the plain and normal memories she had thought she had, it surprised her to find how very few times she did see him. Just those three times in over a year. Of course, she saw him again after that, but it seemed odd, considering how well she knew she knew him. Meanwhile, he continued to write her letters and send her postcards of interesting places. Polly was the one who did not write so often. Sometimes she even forgot that hero business existed.
PART TWO
NOW HERE
andante cantabile
1
And fill your hands o’ the holy water
And cast your compass round
TAM LIN
Granny did give Polly a birthday present after all. Polly was staying with Granny the week she was eleven, because Dad was coming back to settle up who was to have what. Ivy said, “You don’t want to be in the middle of a row again, Polly,” and Polly agreed.
And a row there must have been. Both Mum and Dad forgot Polly’s birthday. The only present she had that year was the little heart-shaped pendant Granny gave her.
“I was going to wait a few years to give it you,” Granny said, “but I think you could do with it now. Take care of it. It was my mother’s.”
Polly sat with Mintchoc draped purring across her knees and turned the heart shape back and forth in the light. From some angles it looked pearly white, but as she tipped it, colours rippled through it – pale crimson, blue and deep dragon green. “What is it made of?” she said.
“Opal,” said Granny. “It’s a pity it’s opal, because opals mean tears, but you keep it and it’ll keep you. My mother always said it was the luckiest thing she had.”
“Should I wear it all the time?” Polly asked, trying to hook the thin silver chain round her neck. It got tangled in her hair and Granny had to help her fasten it.
“Not in your bath,” Granny said. “Water spoils opal.” And she told Polly that opals were really a thin slice out of a certain kind of rock, bent over a crystal to bring the colours out. If water got between the rock and the crystal, the colours went.
Polly pulled the opal heart up and managed to look at it again, squinting, with the chain cutting the back of her neck. “That’s made me see it in two lights!” she complained.
“Quite right,” said Granny. “Get out
to the bus or you’ll be late for school.”
Polly spent a lot of that summer at Granny’s too. “Not much of a holiday,” Ivy said worriedly, “but the money’s tight. I asked Maud to have you, but they’re all off to France. Even Reg offered, but I’m not having you stay with him!”
It was a lonely, sleepy summer, with the warm winds blowing dust in Granny’s garden and griming the rustling trees in the road outside. Some days Polly kept up her hero training by going jogging up and down the road. When she came to the end where Hunsdon House stood, she usually stopped and looked through the bars of the gate. You could see a curve of the drive from there, green and dark under the trees, and sometimes, when wind blew the branches aside, there was just a glimpse of the shuttered windows of the house.
“Yes, the place is all closed up and empty,” Granny told her. “They’re off on their travels again.”
When she heard that, Polly seriously thought of getting into the house. She had a longing to go up round the joints of the staircase and see the rest of the rooms up there. And there was a place beside the gate where she thought she just might be able to climb the wall. Next time she went for a run, she stopped a little short of the gate and looked at that place. It was not as easy as she had thought. Though there were two worn parts in the stones, they would only serve as footholds if she could jump high enough to hook her hands over the top of the wall first. Polly went back a step or so, gathering herself to jump her very highest.
Something made her look through the bars of the gate.
Someone was standing halfway up the drive, in the most shadowy part. It was a tall, bulky shape, standing very still. The face, looking straight at Polly, was blurred by the shade and by the bars of the gate in the way. The eyes looked smudged and big. As Polly stood, looking guiltily back, caught in the act of measuring to jump, the face somehow crystallised into Mr Morton Leroy’s, watching her sardonically.
They stood and looked at one another. Polly twisted nervously at the opal pendant round her neck. Mr Leroy just looked. It seemed to go on for an age. Polly was never sure what made her stop standing there, staring. Somehow it was suddenly over and Polly was walking soberly away down the road, knowing that Mr Leroy had nearly caught her climbing in and that she would not dare to try again now.
She buried herself in books instead. She used Granny’s ticket for the local library and got out Black Beauty, which made her cry outraged tears. She was glad Mr Lynn had bought the yellow horse. Then, trying for something for cheerful, she got out Sherlock Holmes stories and found herself wanting to shake Sherlock Holmes for being so superior. Since he played the violin and obviously looked rather like Mr Lynn, he should have behaved like Dr Watson. She wanted to shake Watson too. Then she tried Uncle Tom’s Cabin and understood why Mr Lynn had not wanted her to call him Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom was a slave. Polly read to the place where the villainous Simon Legree came in, and suddenly realised she was reading “Leroy” every time the book said “Legree”. She stopped, appalled, and took the book back to the library.
By this time she had got a reputation in the library for liking long, hard books. The librarian said to her, “Here’s a book you might like. I used to love it. There is a shortened version, but I saved you the long one. Don’t be put off if you find it difficult at first.”
Polly looked at the book. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. She wondered why Alexandre was spelled wrong, but she had seen the cartoon of The Three Musketeers. She thanked the librarian and took the book home to Granny’s. It was difficult. Half the time she was not sure what was going on, or why everyone lived in hotels, and it was full of conversations where you could not tell which person was speaking. But Polly loved it even so. From the very beginning, when d’Artagnan appears on his yellow horse, she was utterly captivated. She loved huge Porthos and the elegant Aramis, but Athos was the one she liked best. Oddly enough, despite the yellow horse and the fact that d’Artagnan was long and thin, she knew Athos was the one who was most like Mr Lynn. Athos had once been married to the beautiful, dreadful lady, and the lady was obviously Laurel.
Polly read it twice. Then she sat down and wrote a long and excited letter to Mr Lynn.
Dear Tom,
she began. That looked wrong; it was wrong. She never could think of him as anything but Mr Lynn, but she supposed she had better practise in order not to hurt his feelings. She told him all about The Three Musketeers. Then she told him all the latest ideas she had had about Tan Thare and Tan Hanivar, and the whole set of adventures for them all to have conquering the evil Cardinal Leroy – sorry, Legris.
She got a postcard back from Cardiff:
Thank you, Hero. You have given me some ideas too.
More later, T. G. L.
Granny really did not go in for reading. Polly knew that now. She said too much reading would ruin Polly’s eyes, and she taught Polly to cook to take her mind off books. Polly was not good at it. Her first sponge cake had a kind of soggy valley in the middle.
“Well, it’s nothing a blind man on a galloping horse wouldn’t see,” said Granny, “but it doesn’t look much like a sponge cake to me.”
“It’s a new kind,” Polly said, “called volcano cake. That runny stuff in the middle is the lava.”
“Oh is it?” said Granny. “Put it down for Mintchoc and let’s try apple pie instead.”
Someone had given Granny a basket of windfall apples. Granny was very good at peeling them in one entire long strip. “There,” she would say, passing Polly a heavy green curl, “throw it over your left shoulder and it’ll make the initials of the man you’re going to marry.”
Polly threw strip after strip of peeling, but they never did make anything except playthings for Mintchoc. Each one broke up and splattered about the kitchen floor into circles and lines that even Granny had to admit were meaningless. “You see? I’m not going to marry,” Polly said, secure in the knowledge she would be a hero instead.
When Polly went home at the end of summer, she found everything had been moved out of her room into the tiny room at the back. Ivy, with a duster tied round her head, was briskly and cheerfully painting the room that had been Polly’s.
“You’re in there from now on,” she told Polly, pointing to the tiny room with her paintbrush. “We’re going to take in lodgers. They’ll have to have this room because that one’s too small.”
Polly looked round the echoing empty square of her old room. The flowery paper was not quite hidden under white paint, and there were drips on the bare boards. “My folder!” she said. “With my soldiers in!”
“All through there,” said Ivy. “I put everything on the floor. You can make yourself useful by sorting your junk out.” She sat back on her heels and looked at the not quite white wall discontentedly. “It needs one other coat at least.”
The folder was there when Polly raced through to look, with the soldiers safely in it. But a lot of her other things were not.
“No, I threw all the babyish things away,” Ivy said when Polly raced back to ask. “You’re a big girl now and you don’t need them. Really, Polly, you do criticise! I’m trying so hard. I’ve just pulled myself together and taken a big step, and all I get is Where’s my dolls’ house?”
“But Dad only gave me the dolls’ house at Christmas!” Polly protested.
“And the skirting board needs two more coats,” said Ivy. “Yes, I know. Don’t bother me now, Polly.”
Later that day, when Polly had mournfully tidied what were left of her things – Mum had left the books and papers because they were grown up, and the sewing machine because that was almost real, but not much else – Ivy decided Polly needed an explanation.
“It’s like this,” she said, clutching a teacup with both painty hands. “Happiness is something you have to go out and get, Polly. It won’t come to you, not in this world. I’ve suddenly seen that I’ve been so wrong all these months, looking back to my marriage and regretting it all. I was trying to put the clock back, Polly
. Now I’m going forward again, and we’re both going to have a new, happy life. We’ll have a lodger for money, and you’ll be at the new school—”
“When are we going to get my uniform?” Polly asked. “We start next week.”
“Tomorrow,” said Ivy. “Polly, I’m going to make that room so nice! I’ve got some lovely curtains and a matching bedspread. If I make it nice enough, I can charge a lot for it. It’ll be good for us both, having someone else in the house to talk to.”
In the end, it was Granny who took Polly to buy school clothes. Ivy was too busy painting. “Don’t blame her, Polly,” Granny said. “She’s been very down, and she’s trying to pull herself up. Ivy’s got character – I’ll give her that. Try and understand.”
Polly did try to understand. She was positively saintly, she thought, not mentioning all the other things Ivy had thrown away. But she did regret her old room. The new little one was like a crowded box, and the water cistern chuckled loudly all night from a cupboard in the corner. Polly would have been very miserable in it, but for the excitement of starting at Manor Road School.
She loved it. The whole first term was like a long, long birthday party. There was a crowd of new friends, and a mass of new things to do, new ways of speaking, new ways of thinking. There was also Nina. Polly wondered how she could have forgotten how largely Nina figured in her life at Manor Road. Nina was the only other girl who came on from Junior School to Manor Road with Polly. The others had all gone to Miles End, which was said to be rough.
Nina set out to astound and shock and lead. After trying one or two other things, she came to school with a book she had found in her aunt’s house. It was called Popular Beliefs. “I’m starting a Superstition Club,” she said. “You join by having a superstition which isn’t in this book.”
Polly became a founder member of the club the same day. She had developed a habit of taking her opal pendant out from under her new school tie and twiddling it during lessons. She did it in French. The French master told her that jewellery was not allowed and she must either put it away or describe it to him in French.
Fire and Hemlock Page 11
