Fire and Hemlock (15 page)

Polly sat sort of recovering too. Ordinary feelings began coming back like pins and needles. “It’s all true,” she said. “Except that it isn’t.”

“That’s what’s so unnerving,” said Mr Lynn. “Mr Piper, the shop. Leslie – but none of it quite like we thought. Do you think the woman’s name was Edna? I was dying to ask her, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t seem rude.”

“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 “We got the whole thing about twenty years out of date.”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.

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.