Fire and Hemlock (16 page)

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.

“It’s not jewellery! It’s lucky!” Polly exclaimed indignantly. “It used to be Granny’s mother’s!”

Nina passed her a note enrolling her in the Superstition Club on the spot.

The club became all the rage in the course of a week. Everyone joined. The rules were to believe all the superstitions in Nina’s book and to find as many more as you could. If you found ten new superstitions, you received the Order of the Black Cat, personally drawn by Nina on a page of her rough note pad. People’s blazers soon became decorated with rusty pins they had picked up, their hands black with rescuing pieces of coal, and their shoulders sprinkled with spilled salt every lunch hour. Funerals and ambulances caused hands to leap to collars, and a number of people nearly got knocked down in the street, either by not walking under ladders or by going out of their way in order to be able to say a black cat had crossed their path. Two people were found crying in the cloakrooms because they had broken a mirror. Everyone’s pockets became loaded with lucky charms, lucky bus tickets and lucky mascots. And as the club grew, a wave of superstition grew with it, mounted, and spread far beyond the club, right up to the senior end of the school, until it mixed with everything everyone did. Polly spared a little attention for music too. She had joined the choir, and enrolled for free violin lessons, because she knew next to nothing about music. She wanted to learn. Listening to Mr Lynn talking about music to Mary Fields had made her feel really stupid.

But she did not think much about Mr Lynn otherwise, even though he wrote her two quite long letters around then. One letter was a rewriting of the giant story, making Mr Piper’s shop much more like the real one they had found in Stow-on-the-Water. Polly preferred the second letter, which was about Tan Coul, Hero and Tan Hanivar hunting for treasure in some caves. Here Tan Hanivar accidentally turned into a dragon, and the other two nearly killed him before they realised. Yes, but just a bit silly, Polly thought, and put the letters away in her folder without answering them. She was really far more interested in the Superstition Club.

The club gained a mighty boost from the approach of Hallowe’en. By then everyone in the school was a quivering mass of strange beliefs. Spirits were talked of, and auras, and astral bodies, and someone saw a ghost down near the Biology Lab. And on Hallowe’en itself a magpie landed on the windowsill during School Assembly. Assembly stopped short while everyone scuffled to cross fingers, touch wood, and intone, “Hello, Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?” The Headmaster said irritable, sensible things. The magpie flew away in a frightened whirl of black and white, and nothing much happened, either lucky or unlucky.

After that, Nina said she was tired of the club. She was possibly rather frightened by its success. But it is easier to start something than stop it. The superstition simply took a new turn and became a craze for fortune-telling. The day the craze started, Polly had her fortune told three times, once by paper top, once by palmistry, and once with a pack of cards. The next day she had it done by tea leaves and I Ching. Each one came out different. They varied between “Never marry for money” from the paper top to “To take a maiden to wife brings good fortune” from the Book of Changes. Then she tried the three bowls. One was full of water, one half full, and one empty. You asked a question, shut your eyes and dipped your hand. The full and empty bowls were Yes and No. The one half full was Maybe. It became a common sight to see girls squatting like witches around plastic cups of water, breathlessly watching someone’s groping hand. Polly did it frequently. But no matter how often she tried, she always got her hand in half-full, lukewarm Maybe. She gave up and put her name down for the Prefects’ mirror instead.

The Prefects were doing a roaring trade, charging ten pence a look, and the waiting list was long. You looked in the mirror in a nearly dark room – full of other people queuing for their turns, which perhaps accounted for it – and you saw the face of someone behind your reflection who was going to Influence Your Life. Unfortunately, by this time the teachers had had enough. The Staff Room contained stacks of confiscated cards, dice, dowsing twigs, bowls and even two crystal balls. Polly was queuing for her turn at the mirror when she distinctly saw the face of the Deputy Head appear in it behind the boy who was looking at that moment. It was clear he was real. He drew back the curtains, took down the mirror and turned everyone out of the room except the Prefects. Someone who kept their ear to the door after it was shut said they were glad they were not those Prefects. And the Headmaster said, “This must stop.”

It didn’t straightaway, of course. But the frenzy seemed to be over. Nina turned her attention to the Stamp Club. Polly turned hers to the violin – or she tried to. But it was a complete disaster. She was hopeless. As soon as she had the violin in her hands, she became slow, foolish and clumsy. Long after the other learners were playing proper tunes, Polly scraped and wailed and made noises like a sea lion in distress. Strings broke under her fumbling fingers. Hairs streamed from her bow and got mixed up with her own hair. She hated practising too. She had to do it at school because Ivy forbade it at home.

“I’m not having the lodger disturbed with that noise,” she said. No lodger had yet appeared, but Ivy was always considering him as if he was there.

Soon after the affair of the Prefects’ mirror, the violin teacher suggested Polly give up the violin. “I don’t think it’s your instrument,” she said. “How about trying the flute class?”

But Ivy said, “Tootling away, disturbing the lodger! No way!”

So that was that. Polly could not bear to write to Mr Lynn about her failure, so she joined the Indoor Athletics and did not write to him at all. She was therefore very ashamed, one morning in December, to find a postcard of Bristol Suspension Bridge lying on the doormat with the other post. She picked it up and turned it over, expecting it to be from Mr Lynn. It was not. It was from Dad, addressed to Ivy and written in angry capital letters that Polly could not help reading.

“I’ll have that, Polly,” Ivy said, coming up behind Polly on her way out to work. She took it from Polly’s fingers with a snatch.

“I saw,” said Polly. “Dad wants to come back.”

“He meant you to see,” Ivy said in her stoniest way. “And he’s not coming.” She opened the front door to go out.