Fire and Hemlock (19 page)

Up to now Polly had assumed they were trying to put the fire out. But this Christmas it began to seem to her that the people might really be trying to keep the fire going, building it up furiously, racing against time. You could see from the clouds of smoke that the fire was very damp. Perhaps if they left off feeding it for an instant, it would fizzle out and leave them in the dark.

The stolen photograph had a much more ordinary look. It was slightly faded with age. Polly, from much looking at it, became certain that the bit of the house behind the grinning boy was Hunsdon House. But he was not Seb. From some angles his cheeky look reminded her of Leslie in Thomas Piper’s shop. But he had the wrong hair to be either Leslie or Seb, too fair and long and untidy for Seb, and not curly enough for Leslie. Besides, he was older than both of them. Polly decided she simply had not met him yet. She hid the photo carefully inside her school bag before she went to sleep, because Dad was using the camp bed in her room.

The days passed. “Ah well,” said Dad. “Back to Joanna again, I suppose.” He kissed Polly and left. Polly went home to Ivy and David Bragge and took her photograph with her. But she hid it in her folder with the soldiers, and hid the folder in the cupboard where the cistern glopped. She did not trust Ivy not to throw it away.

“You forgot to give David a Christmas present,” Ivy said, handing her a parcel from Mr Lynn.

Polly had not meant to remember a present for David, so she pretended to be absorbed in opening the parcel. It contained a book about King Arthur and a book of fairy stories and one of Mr Lynn’s hastiest notes. Polly supposed King Arthur was all right, but fairy stories—! Still, she was sure – without wanting to think of Mr Leroy – that Mr Lynn had things on his mind, and she tried not to blame him.

School began next day, and rain with it. For weeks Polly arrived at school soaking wet to find Games cancelled yet again and everyone depressed and coughing. The Superstition Club had vanished as if it had never been. At home there was David Bragge and his jokes to avoid, and Mum hanging lovingly over him, consulting him about everything. “What do
you
think, David?” Ivy said this so often that Polly took to imitating her secretly and jeeringly in front of the mirror in her little box of a room. “What do
you
think, David?” With it went a stupid, languishing smile. David did not speak much to Polly. They both seemed to know they had nothing in common.

Then, just before half-term, came a proper letter from Mr Lynn, thanking her for the book. It must have gone astray in the Christmas post, he said, because it had only just arrived. Do you have a hlaf trem? he went on in his bad typing. Or if not, is oyur mother liekly to visit her lwayer again? I have’ny seen yuo forages. If yuo come up to London, I promise to meet yuo at the statoin.

Ivy did indeed go and see her lawyer quite often, but she saw no reason to take Polly. “I’ve enough to buy without spending money on unnecessary jaunts,” she said. “You’ve grown out of all your clothes again.”

This was true. They spent a tiring Saturday shopping. “All dressed up with nowhere to go!” Polly said bitterly, and she gave up all hope of seeing Mr Lynn.

Oddly enough, it was David Bragge who paid Polly’s fare. Polly did not understand quite why. It seemed to happen because she met him by accident in the middle of town the day school broke up, when she was walking home with six friends. David was across the street, talking to a lady. Polly looked at them because the lady David was with seemed to be Mary Fields. She was not Mary Fields. Polly had lost interest and was turning away when David suddenly waved and came bounding through the puddles on his rather short legs – it was raining, of course.

“Hello, Polly!” he called. Polly had to stop and talk while her friends stood waiting impatiently and getting wet. “Polly,” David said earnestly, “I’ve long felt you deserved rich rewards for sanctity and forbearance and all that jazz. Is there something you haven’t got that you’d like to have? Speak up. Sky’s the limit and so on.”

Polly looked at his face carefully and saw he meant it. “I need a return fare to London,” she said. “And some spending money for when I’m there,” she added, since miracles seldom happen and it is best to get the most out of them when they do.

“Done!” cried David. “Money under plain cover this evening as ever is!” And he bounced off again, back to his lady.

He was as good as his word. He put an envelope full of pound notes into Polly’s hand that night before she went to bed. Polly had a vague feeling he expected something in return, if only she could understand what it might be, but she did not let ignorance stop her taking the envelope. She wrote Mr Lynn a hasty card and, on the day she had said, she mounted a fast train at Miles Cross Station and was rattled up to London on the morning of what proved to be the only fine day of the half-term holiday. She felt very brave and grown up, doing it, and she worried all the way in case Mr Lynn had not got her card or turned out to be doing something else that day.

To her relief, he was waiting for her on the platform, with the sun gleaming mildly on his glasses and a well-known large hand held out to shake hers. They were talking as if they had not met for five years – or only been away five minutes – before they had even got off the platform.

“Tan Coul must have some more adventures,” Mr Lynn greeted her.

Like a password, Polly replied, “And we
must
find out about Tan Audel soon. It’s stupid not knowing him.”

The horse-car, TC 123, was waiting outside, and they climbed into it, still talking. But there was a slight break in their talk as they set off and Polly discovered that Mr Lynn still drove as heroes do. It seemed to be the way he was made. They shot into the traffic, squealing on two left wheels, cut in front of a bus, tipped a cyclist neatly into the gutter, and dived between two taxis through a gap that would have been small for the cyclist. But the taxi drivers knew a hero when they saw one and sheered off, honking their horns.

Those horns were drowned in a new outburst of honking as the horse-car shot across in front of the oncoming traffic and screamed into a side street on two right wheels. Two old ladies leaped for their lives.

“Missed them!” remarked Mr Lynn. Polly was not sure if he said it with relief or regret. “The car’s feeling its oats,” he explained, realising Polly had gone quiet.

“Do – do you get killed often?” Polly said.

“Old heroes never die,” said Mr Lynn. “But I do rather surprisingly often drive the wrong way up one-way streets. I think I am now.”

They were. Somehow they missed the van coming the other way. Polly tried to take her mind off this heroic driving by asking, very casually and carefully, “Were you in Middleton just before Christmas?”

“No,” Mr Lynn said, surprised. “I was stuck here with concerts. I’d have looked you up if I had been. Why?”

“I was staying at Granny’s and I thought I saw you,” Polly said carefully.

The little car leaped from the end of the side street and heroically dived among traffic going round a large roundabout. “You couldn’t have done,” Mr Lynn said, whizzing across the front of a lorry and squealing into the next turning. “I really wasn’t there.”

“Did you see Mr Leroy at all?” Polly asked. “I thought I saw him too.”

With a jolt and scream of protest, the car stopped for a red light. “I did run into him just before Christmas. Yes,” Mr Lynn said, carefully and with just a touch of grimness. It reminded Polly of the way Dad talked about David Bragge. And he changed the subject by asking about her stay at Granny’s.

The lights changed while Polly was in the middle of telling him about Dad and David Bragge. The horse-car set off with a bellowing roar before any of the other cars had moved. There were red lights at intervals all down that road. Mr Lynn treated each one as if it were the starting block for the hundred-metre dash, screaming off ahead of all the other cars, only to rein in with a jerk as the next light turned red. It was fun. Polly began to enjoy the way heroes drove. She felt quite used to it by the time they roared into the street outside Mr Lynn’s flat and Mr Lynn parked the car by the simple expedient of knocking the rear bumper off the car in front of the only space there. “I don’t think my car likes other cars,” he explained as he knelt in the road, putting the other car’s bumper roughly back in place. “It does this rather often.”

“Perhaps it would rather be a horse,” Polly suggested.

“That must be it,” agreed Mr Lynn.

Mr Lynn’s landlady, Carla, opened the door for them before they got there. The baby from last time had grown into quite a large toddler, hanging on to Carla’s hand and shouting, but otherwise Carla was just the same. “I thought it was you,” she said cheerfully. “I heard the crash. Learn to drive, can’t you!” As they went upstairs, she shouted after them through the toddler’s yelling, “Get him to show you his collection of parking tickets. It may be a record!”

When they reached the privacy of Mr Lynn’s flat, Polly asked, feeling rather mature, “Is Carla a one-parent family?”

“Not quite,” Mr Lynn said. “I think there are several Mr Carlas. It’s rather confusing.”

“Oh,” said Polly, and felt childish after all.

Mr Lynn gave her one of his considering looks. “People are strange,” he said. “Usually they’re much stranger than you think. Start from there and you’ll never be unpleasantly surprised. Do you fancy doughnuts?”

They were excellent doughnuts, soft, sugary and fresh. Polly ate them absently, though, considering Mr Lynn in return. He was behaving cheerfully enough, but he was not happy. She knew the signs, from Ivy. There was a sort of effort going into his cheerful remarks. She could feel the pushes. She decided not to say anything about it. She knew how useless it was with Ivy when she was in a mood. But Mr Lynn was not Ivy. Without intending to, she said, “What’s the matter? Are you very miserable?”

“Yes,” Mr Lynn said frankly. “But mostly I’m worried and undecided about something. I’ll tell you about it, boring though it is, but there’s something I’d like you to do first. I’ve got quite superstitious—”

“So have I!” Polly exclaimed. And they broke off for her to tell him about the Superstition Club. When she got to the Deputy Head in the mirror, Mr Lynn gave a great yelp and began laughing properly. Polly stopped then, because she was getting unpleasantly close to telling him how she had stolen the photograph. “What did you want me to do?” she said.

“Cheer me up,” confessed Mr Lynn. “Selfish of me to drag you all the way to London for that, even though it seems to have worked. The other thing is – do you think you’d know the other heroes if you saw them? Tan Thare and Tan Hanivar anyway?”

Polly nodded. “I would. Positive.” She could see them both as clearly in her mind as she could see Ivy or Nina or David Bragge.

“Then,” said Mr Lynn, “see if you can find either of them here. Or Tan Audel, if possible.”

He plunged to his mantelpiece and brought down a roll of paper from it. After he had spread it out on the hearth rug and it had rolled up, and he had unrolled it and pinned it down with two books and a salt cellar, Polly saw it was a mass photograph of the British Philharmonic Orchestra. It was very posed. Everyone was in evening dress, facing the front, with their violins or clarinets or trumpets held out stiffly to the side.

“Yes, I know,” Mr Lynn said. “The BPO posing for Madame Tussaud’s. Rows of stuffed penguins. The conductor comes along with a big key, probably A flat, and winds us all up. Can you see any of them?”

Polly saw Tan Thare almost at once. His face leaped out at her, in spite of an unexpected beard, chubby and carefree and possibly a little dishonest, from the front row of violins. She stabbed her finger on him, crying out with surprise. “Tan Thare! It really is! I don’t like him in that beard, though.”

“Neither did most of his friends,” said Mr Lynn. “He was held down and forcibly shaved on New Year’s Eve. Anyone else?”

He sounded casual, but Polly could tell it meant a lot to him. She searched the photograph again. Mr Lynn himself came to light among the cellos, although he was not so easy to find. He seemed to have faded away into the rest of the cellists, built into the orchestra like a brick. Tan Hanivar’s long nose and gloomy face ought to be easier to find – and there he was! He was among the violins too, over to the right, behind Tan Thare. The gloomy face had a mop of dark hair above it, more than Polly had imagined, but it was definitely poor, shape-changing Tan Hanivar. Polly pointed. “Tan Hanivar. What’s his real name?”

“Samual Rensky. And Tan Thare is usually known as Edward Davies. Any luck with Tan Audel?” Mr Lynn asked rather tensely.

But Polly still did not know what Tan Audel looked like. She searched and searched the mass of faces. “Sorry,” she said at last. “I just don’t know him.”

“Him?” said Mr Lynn. “Er – have you considered, as a female assistant hero yourself, that Tan Audel might be a woman?” He sounded really nervous about it.

As soon as he said it, Polly knew he was right. “Oh, good heavens!” she said. “I never thought!” Of course Tan Audel was a woman, now she thought. She even knew, dimly, some of the things Tan Audel was famous for. She went back to the photograph, scanning the ladies in dark dresses she had been ignoring up to then, very much ashamed of herself. And there was Tan Audel at last. She was in among the set of those big violins – violas, they were called. “Here,” she said, with her finger under the strong, squarish face with strong, square, black hair. Tan Audel was not pretty. But she looked nice.