“Funny you should say—” Edna began. Mr Piper interrupted with a noise of irritation. “Oh, but it’s got nothing to do—” Edna began again. Mr Piper made a threatening little move. Edna said hurriedly and placatingly, “But you were ever so brave, you and Leslie – the year we first came here. That huge lunatic over in Robinson’s, throwing tins about—”
“That,” Mr Piper said scornfully, “has got nothing to do with anything! I said out, young woman!”
Polly moved back from the orange bag. “How long have you been here?” she asked Edna.
“Nine years,” said Edna. “Here’s your bag, dear.”
“That’s enough!” Mr Piper barked as Polly drew breath to ask more. “If you don’t get out this instant, young woman, I shall call the police!”
“Why?” Polly asked bravely.
Mr Piper, clearly too angry to think, said, “For pestering my wife. Sister, I mean. Now get out before I throw you in the street!”
He meant what he said, and advanced on Polly so angrily that she snatched the orange bag from Edna and went.
3
But the night is Hallowe’en, Janet,
The morn is Hallowday
TAM LIN
The bus had turned round in the square and was waiting to go back to Oxford. Polly climbed back on it and rode away through the darkening drizzle, feeling she had now come to a dead end.
Everything I try seems to go nowhere, she thought. But there was a giant in the supermarket – sort of. How odd. She tried not to think of Mr Piper. His likeness to Thomas Lynn was too appalling. And they’ve been there nine years, which puts it just about the time we invented Tan Coul. But they’re real people. We didn’t invent them. And why won’t anyone talk about Mr Lynn? People can’t just disappear off the face of the earth and everyone conspire to keep it dark. Not in this day and age.
She got off the bus, walked to the flat, dumped the orange bag in the tiny kitchen and threw herself down on the twanging old sofa. She was exhausted, but she hardly noticed. She was too busy thinking. Round and round again. And did she dare risk ringing Seb up and demanding to know? That would be blowing the gaff completely – letting Seb know she was remembering things she was not supposed to remember. Or was that a ridiculous thing to think? Seb couldn’t really be that kind of villain. Could he? Besides, she was still sure, certain, that whatever was wrong was her fault, not Seb’s.
“Polly.” Fiona came in and switched on the light. “Polly, your tutor rang to know why you missed your tutorial today.”
“What? Oh, my God!” Polly leaped up, blinking. Fiona stood there, severe in a blaze of red hair, staring accusingly. “I thought my tutorial was tomorrow,” Polly confessed.
“Good,” said Fiona. “You heard me for once. And it is tomorrow, and he didn’t ring, but I had to get through somehow. What’s the matter? You’re not eating, you’re not listening, you walk about half the night, and I don’t think you’re doing a scrap of work. Come clean. Are you in some kind of trouble over Marmaduke?” Marmaduke was what Fiona always called Seb. She did not like him at all.
“No,” said Polly. “Or not exactly.”
Fiona looked meaningly to where the pages of Seb’s letter still lay on the floor where Polly had dropped them a week ago. “Then what is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Polly. “I may be going mad. It’s something that can’t possibly happen in this day and age.”
“I’ve often noticed,” Fiona said, “that when people say, ‘This can’t happen in this day and age,’ they say it because it is happening. So what is?”
“Thomas Lynn,” Polly said, “seems to have vanished out of everyone’s mind. Sometimes I’m not even sure he existed myself. And don’t say,” she went on hurriedly as Fiona’s mouth opened, “Who is Thomas Lynn?’ or I shall scream. Everyone asks that. And I know you don’t know him, because the only time you could have met him was when you got chicken pox. That was almost the last time I saw him myself.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that,” Fiona said. “You used to talk about him. And I think I have seen him. Didn’t he come to that panto when we were Pierrot and Pierrette?”
Polly stared at Fiona and clung to the sofa, unable to believe this sudden, amazing stroke of luck. “How could you have seen him?”
“I was wanting to get to know you then,” Fiona said. “I was interested in everything you did. And on the second night of that panto you suddenly went different, as if you were inspired, and the whole panto took off with you. And I wanted to know why. So when you went racing outside afterwards, I tiptoed nosily after you and kept out of sight by the cycle sheds. He was just getting into his car with a horsey-looking girl. I was quite far away, of course, but there was enough light for me to see he was good-looking—”
“Good-looking?” said Polly. It would never have occurred to her to think of Thomas Lynn as that.
“I thought he was,” Fiona said apologetically. “And I was awed. But I think I was even more awed by the marvelling sort of way he looked at you – as if you were some kind of miracle. The girl with him looked really fed up, and I didn’t wonder!”
Polly sprang up and threw her arms round Fiona. “Oh, thank God! Fiona, you life-saver! I was going mad!” She was near laughing at the sheer little chance which had caused the Leroys to miss Fiona. They had not known one another then. Fiona’s memories would not have seemed important. But how nearly she had missed asking Fiona herself.
“Any time,” Fiona said. “After all, I wept on your shoulder enough over Hans. You were the only person who seemed to understand. It’s the least I can do. Have you written to him?”
“No,” said Polly.
“Why not?” said Fiona.
Polly did not feel equal to explaining about Mr Leroy, or her suspicions of Seb. She gave what was, after all, the main reason. “I think it would be just like you and Hans. You know – patting you on the head and sending you kindly back to England.”
“Well, I was fifteen and didn’t speak a word of German, and Hans didn’t speak English,” Fiona said. “It is exactly the same, isn’t it? Even so, if Hans had looked at me once that way, I’d have taken handcuffs with me to Germany to make sure he couldn’t send me home without coming as well. I’d have swallowed the key, quite cheerfully. Sit down and write at once.”
“It’s my turn to cook,” said Polly.
“I’ll do it,” said Fiona. “I’m sick of burned food every other night. You, my girl, are going to write that letter. After that, you are going to write your essay, which I know you have not even started—”
“I did three sentences,” Polly protested.
“Then you’ve nearly finished it, haven’t you?” Fiona retorted over her shoulder as she went into the kitchen.
Polly sat down, eased, relieved, and, she thought, almost cheerful, until she tried to write the letter. It was not that this was difficult. It had always been easy to write to Mr Lynn. It was not that. It was that she knew it would be no use. The letter would simply be written into a void. The Leroys would have thought of that.
She sat chewing her pen while scents of fried onions filled the air. She was still chewing it a while later when Fiona called, “Come and eat your nice spaghetti!”
Polly got up and went into the dining-Fiona’s room, where food was on the table.
“You’re to eat it,” Fiona said. “You’re beginning to look ill. Haven’t written, have you?”
“No,” confessed Polly. “You see, there’s something else – something that I did—”
“Bound to have been,” said Fiona. “Think of me. I wonder if Hans still walks with a limp. Eat!”
She said nothing more until Polly had managed half a small pile of spaghetti. Then, “You know,” she said, “when you said the name like you did – Thomas Lynn – it rang some other bell. What did he do for a living?”
“Played the cello,” Polly said. “He was with the B.P.O. first, but he left to form a quartet. They were trying to make
good most of the time I knew him.”
“Tough business,” Fiona said. “I wonder if he did make good, since I really do seem to have heard of him.” Seeing Polly was not going to eat any more, she scraped Polly’s spaghetti onto her own plate and began to eat it, sighing. “This makes me realise that I have truly got over Hans,” she said. “I’m hungry all the time. You know, it might be worth going and looking in a record shop, on the off chance they did a recording.”
Here was another gift from Fiona’s untrammelled memory. “Why didn’t I think?” Polly said, leaping up to do it at once.
“Sit down. The shops are shut,” Fiona said. “You do nothing until you produce an essay, even if I have to lock you up. Or why don’t you ring him up?” Polly blenched. “If you’ve got an address, you can get the number through Enquiries,” Fiona continued remorselessly. “Want me to try for you?”
Polly nodded. The phone number was in her head, printed on her brain, but it was useless to her. Mr Leroy would know the moment she dialled it. She started to give Fiona the address instead, and, as she did so, found her hand leaping to clutch the opal pendant round her neck. She stopped, realising she had caught herself in the middle of something so habitual that she had never noticed till this moment. Is this how they did it?
“Hang on,” she said to Fiona. “I’m not sure I’ve remembered it right.” Pretending to think, she leaned over with her elbows on the table and undid the catch of the silver chain. The little opal heart slid softly among her hair and chinked onto her empty plate.
“Yes, I think this is it,” Polly said, and she gave Fiona the address, right down to the postcode.
While Fiona went to the phone, Polly sprang up, busily and briskly, and piled the plates together. She carried them to the kitchen and scraped the remains of the food, and the pendant among them, into the bin. It seemed a wildly extravagant act, she thought as the lid clapped down, throwing away her one good piece of jewellery, and on mere suspicion too, but it seemed the only thing to do. Her neck felt naked without it as she went back to the dining room.
Fiona turned and held out the receiver. “Here you are. It’s ringing.”
Polly took it, and it rang and rang. Into a void, she thought. “He must have moved, Fiona. He used to have an answering machine.”
She had her hand stretched out to put the receiver back on the rest, when she heard it answered by a breathless female voice.
“Hello?”
Polly snatched the receiver back. “Hello?”
“Oh, you’re still there!” panted the voice. It was Carla’s. Polly knew it from the buoyant shrillness, and even more from the loud yelling of a child nearby. “I’m sorry,” Carla said, still breathless. “I keep forgetting his damn machine’s not working. I’m supposed to take any messages for the Dumas Quartet or Lynn Musicians. Is that who you want?”
Confirmed! Polly thought. He really exists! “Could you take a message for Thomas Lynn?” she asked, wondering if Carla could hear her through the noise. It was not just one child yelling. There were at least three. It sounded as if there was a fight going on in the background. “This is Polly—”
“Just a second,” said Carla. Her voice receded, and rose to a scream. “Shut up, will you! Stop that, or I’ll thump you as well!” It came close again and spoke normally. “Sorry about that. Poly Tours, did you say?”
The children, Polly realised, had saved her from doing something very foolish. “How many children have you?” she asked, fascinated.
“Five,” Carla said despairingly. “Can I have the name again?”
Across the room, Polly caught sight of Fiona staring with open-mouthed sympathy, and nearly laughed. “This is Polyphonic Assistants,” she said. “Will Mr Lynn be away long?”
“Mr Lynn is on tour with the quartet at the moment,” Carla said. She had gone all formal, thinking she was speaking to a firm of some kind. She recited the rest of the message she had evidently learned. “Mr Lynn asked me to inform all business callers that he is sorry that he will not be available after October the thirty-first.”
“Oh,” said Polly. “Thank you.”
“What is it?” Fiona asked impatiently as Polly slowly put the receiver back. “Married with six children, is he?”
“No,” Polly said, frowning with another, much stronger uneasiness. “At least, she didn’t say. No, it was the landlady. She said she had five children. I seem to remember Tom once telling me she had three husbands.”
“Should keep her busy,” Fiona said. “I wonder how that feels – three sets of slippers to warm, and so on. Now what?”
“I’m going to write an essay,” Polly said. “First things first. Now I’ve spoken to two people who know Thomas Lynn exists, I may actually be able to think about Keats instead.”
The essay got written, though it took Polly most of the rest of that night. After her tutorial, which went better than Polly felt she deserved, she went straight to a record shop, walking in a daze, thick-mouthed and light-headed from lack of sleep.
Two little girls, crouching on the pavement outside the shop, cut through her daze. “Penny for the Guy!” they shouted.
Polly glanced at the terrible thing they called a Guy. Heavens! she thought. The year is getting on. It must be nearly Guy Fawkes already!
She gave the girls five p. and went into the shop, a hushed temple of music where, under the clear light in the centre, she fumbled through a catalogue of records. Who wrote string quartets? Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – loads of people. Try Beethoven. Ah! Here they are! Beethoven, the Late Quartets, a whole list of performers and, among them, the Dumas Quartet. Would it have been this one they recorded after Middleton Fair? They did do it, because Seb had known of it. Polly’s teeth and spine felt the same queer pain she had felt at the Fair, as she remembered the mess Thomas Lynn had been in when they did that recording. She could have prevented that, by going with Seb when he asked her to. Seb had known what was likely to happen, definitely. He had tried to stop her going into the plywood castle.
Polly looked down to find that some pages of the catalogue had flopped over. The name leaped out at her. Cello Sonatas, a well-known pianist and Thomas Lynn, cello. She was at the counter instantly, waving the catalogue at an assistant.
“Can I have this record, please?” And I bet it’s not in stock, she thought as the assistant went away to look for it.
But he came back with it. Polly paid for it, numbly, a great deal more than she could afford. He put it in a bag and gave it her. She took it out again the moment he turned away and stared at the picture on the sleeve.
There sat Thomas Lynn, doubled round his cello in the way which had amused her in Bristol, with his head bent to listen out his music, just as she remembered. The large hand on the strings was the one she had hung on to at the funeral. His face had that look you could not argue with. It made Polly smile briefly and wonder what the photographer had tried to make him do. Take off his glasses, probably, in order to look better. Well, there was no need of that.
It gave her a huge shock to see it, even though she had expected just such a photograph, unreal lighting, black background, and all. For one thing, Fiona had been right to call Thomas Lynn good-looking. Polly, who had been thinking of him in terms of his likeness to the gaunt and unpleasant Mr Piper, now saw that they resembled one another only in the way a caricature looks like a real person. Laurel, after all, liked them good-looking – witness Leslie.
But the thing which gave Polly the greatest shock was to see that Thomas Lynn was nothing like as old as she had thought.
She turned the record over and took a bewildered look at the notes. It was a new record, out that year, so the photograph had to be fairly recent. Thomas Lynn, she read, these days recognised as Britain’s leading cellist…Yes, she thought, he had made himself that, by sheer hard work and determination, shaking himself loose from Laurel’s disastrous clutches by fierce, dogged stages, dragging the rest of the quartet up with him. When Polly first met him, sh
e suspected he must have been so bleached and drained from the struggle to get divorced from Laurel that she had taken him for an old man, as children do. But he was not, she thought, turning the record the other way again. He simply had that kind of colourless fair hair, darker than hers, which she had vaguely taken for grey. Instead of which, he was young, with a career in the making.
Until, of course, Polly had stepped in and destroyed him.
Polly put the record back in its bag and went out of the shop, stepping over the two little girls with the Guy on the way. They had the cheek to ask her for another five p.
“Get lost!” Polly told them, and marched unseeing back to the flat. There, with absent-minded industry, she dragged Fiona’s turntable and speakers through to her own room and put the record on.
It took only a few bars to assure her that Thomas Lynn was a very good cellist indeed. His playing had that drive to it which gave you the sense of the shape of the music opening out before him as he played. And he kept that drive and shape, whether the cello was grumbling against the piano, crisply duetting, or out on its own, coaxed into hollow golden song. That feeling of a pattern being made, Polly thought, that I had in the panto. Except that this was so expert and so varied that it was hard to believe that it was being done with a musical instrument in somebody’s hands.
Halfway through, Polly could hardly bear to listen to more and nearly took the record off. She knew what she had done now. But she kept it on, and turned it over, then back again to the first side, several times, while she recalled that time a month after Middleton Fair.
4
That is the path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
THOMAS THE RHYMER
As soon as she had made her decision to ask Tom, Polly’s misery gave way to a gleeful, furtive excitement. She stopped worrying about right and wrong. She did not even have to consider how to do it.
Fire and Hemlock Page 28
