Fire and Hemlock (21 page)

Oh no! thought Polly. This is Mr Leroy’s revenge. “Do they want my fire-and-cow-parsley one too?” she asked, with a further guilty jab because of the stolen photograph hidden upstairs in the cistern cupboard.

“They haven’t mentioned that one yet,” Mr Lynn said. “It’s a photograph, so maybe it isn’t as valuable as the others. I won’t say anything about it unless they ask.”

“Thank you,” said Polly. Then, because of her relief, her mind turned round to see Mr Lynn’s point of view. “Does that mean you won’t have any money to start your quartet with?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mr Lynn said rather colourlessly.

“
All
the pictures?” said Polly. “The Chinese horse and the musicians too?”

“I can keep those two on condition I don’t sell them. But I’ve had to give the carnival picture back with the clowns. It’s fair enough. It was a mistake—”

But after all this
time!
Polly thought. She interrupted fiercely. “You’re
not
going to stop doing your quartet! Not now you’ve decided! You mustn’t!”

“Thank you for saying that,” said Mr Lynn. “That’s why I rang really. I
am
going on with it. The others have said they’ll risk it. But it means I’m going to be very occupied for quite some time, trying to get people to listen to us, and I’m not going to have time to see you, or think of hero business, or even write very much. I’m sorry.”

“I see,” Polly said miserably. “This is a goodbye call.”

“Oh no, no, no!” said Mr Lynn, but she could see it was, even though he added, “By the way, do you think an Obah Cypt is a sort of container of some kind? I see it as a small jewelled phial.”

“A little vase with a lid,” said Polly. “Carved out of one precious stone and worth a king’s ransom. It may be. What’s in it, though?”

“Something even more valuable, obviously. The water of life? The key to all knowledge?”

“Not quite. I’ll work on it,” said Polly. “Is Michael Moorcock any good?”

“We-ell,” said Mr Lynn. “You may prefer Asimov. I’ll see you. For the moment you’ll have to think of me as away on a quest for an audience.”

Polly put the phone down, full of stony, Ivy-like anger.
Curses
upon Mr Leroy! A very civilised revenge. He had stopped her seeing Mr Lynn and punished Mr Lynn for seeing her, all in one neat sweep. She knew she had broken the rules by seeing Mr Lynn, which was what allowed Mr Leroy his revenge. But it seemed so hard and horrible that her wrong-doing over the pictures should rebound on Mr Lynn.

“I’ll do something to Mr Leroy one of these days,” she said to herself. “Something quite legal this time, but quite awful.” Then she went sadly upstairs and tried to read the book of fairy stories. “Cinderella! How stupid!” Polly turned to the next story, but instead of reading it, raised her head to look at the clown picture in her mind’s eye. She could see it clearly. A man clown and a boy clown standing on a beach, rather dejectedly, so that they seemed gawky and lumpish in their pink-and-blue Harlequin clothes. Things had gone wrong for them. They could have been a hero and his assistant in disguise.

Resolutely Polly put her head down again and found herself looking at a story called ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. The title made her blink and think a bit. “It
could
be a way of saying Nowhere,” she said aloud, doubtfully. She read it, but she could not find the one true fact Mr Lynn had assured her would be there. The girl in the story was carried off by a man who was under a spell which made him a bear in the daytime. He warned her never to look at him when he was a man, but she did. Then of course he vanished to marry a princess, and she had a terrible job getting him back. Pointless, to Polly’s mind. The girl had only herself to blame for her troubles. She was told not to do a thing and she did. And she cried so much. Polly despised her.

Seb’s disco haunted Polly. Of all the things which were coming to light in this second buried set of memories, Polly was most astonished to find how things to do with Seb had haunted her from then on. At that time it was the disco. Polly did not know how to dance and she was terrified. When school started again, she was forced to consult Nina, who had just developed a craze for disco dancing. Nina took her home and instructed her. And in this way she became friends with Nina again. Nina knew about Michael Moorcock as well. She gave Polly a paperback to read. Polly did not quite get on with it. She suspected she was too young. She thought she was probably too young for discos at Wilton College too, and she quaked.

But it all came to nothing. Seb must have forgotten he had asked her. At all events, the end of term came and he did not let her know. This made it rather difficult when she next saw Seb. And she kept seeing him from then on, here and there in Middleton, usually walking with tall, high-and-mighty-looking boys from Wilton College. Should she stick her nose in the air and look offended? Or smile as if nothing had happened?

In fact, Polly did both at once, in a confused way, the first time she passed Seb. Seb replied with a sort of wave and a sort of grin, at which the other boys looked round after her and murmured things. Polly’s face went scarlet.

“That makes three strange men!” said Nina, who was with Polly at the time. She did not recognise Seb. Polly was so annoyed and embarrassed that she nearly stopped being friends with Nina again. Both of them were losing count of the times they had been friends and then not friends. This was another thing which astonished Polly. She had thought she had hardly spoken to Nina after Juniors, where in fact they dropped in and out of friendship so often that Nina went around explaining, “It’s that kind of relationship, you know.”

Whatever Nina thought that meant, Polly thought the real reason was that she and Nina were always getting out of step with one another, and only overlapped every so often. While Polly was catching up on discos, Nina had passed on to her tennis craze. When Polly took up tennis, Nina had moved on to ecology. And when Nina tried to interest Polly in that, Polly had discovered
The Lord of the Rings
and was reading it for the fourth time under her desk in Maths.

It was David Bragge, not Mr Lynn, who put Polly on to Tolkien. By then Polly had got used to David’s pink arms and his way of speaking. They had become quite friendly. It had started with the money for Polly’s ill-fated visit to Mr Lynn. It had gone on then because, after that, Polly had come in one day to find David roving round the kitchen like an irritated bear.

“The woman’s a vampire!” he said angrily to Polly. “What does she want from life? I have to account for all my movements and every half p. these days, or she says I’m being secretive!”

“Dad let her down,” Polly explained. “She wants to be happy.”

David, at this, became uneasy and contrite. “Shouldn’t say things to you about your mother, should I? Accept profound regrets and pretend it was never said. Right?”

“Yes, but Mum is difficult sometimes,” Polly said. “When she closes down.”

“Doesn’t she just close down!” said David. “You’re a sympathetic wench, Polly, you know. Understanding.”

After that, because of her being so understanding, David took to handing Polly notes secretly, to be delivered to a certain Irishman on her way to school. Mr O’Keefe was nearly always to be found leaning against the wall of the Rose and Crown. He always took the note with a huge wink and said, “Thank you, my darling.”

“Fourth strange man!” Polly said the first time she met Mr O’Keefe, since Nina was not there to say it for her.

David was rather anxious about this arrangement. To cover it up, he invented a game of elaborate compliments to Polly. “She’s growing up so gorgeous!” he would say. “The silver-haired lovely of the eighties. What will she be like later if she’s like this now? And I’m booked to be her father and give her away to some undeserving lout or other! Oh, Polly, I mourn!”

Polly supposed the compliments were meant to act like a smokescreen to distract Ivy from the notes, but they made her very uncomfortable and she wished he wouldn’t. She could see they annoyed Ivy. She found she was not looking forward to the time when the divorce was at last settled and Mum and David would be able to get married.

Halfway through the summer term, a little before Polly’s twelfth birthday, a packet came for her through the post. It was not a proper letter. It was something folded inside a typed wrap-round label.

“What’s that?” Ivy asked as Polly tore the label off. Ivy was sitting in her dressing gown watching David eat his bacon and egg.

Polly was equally puzzled. She unfolded a medium-sized poster on rather cheap paper.

“Junk post,” said Ivy. “I’d like to know where they got your address. Throw it away, Polly.”

David looked up from his dutiful eating. “It’s a languishing letter from one of her numerous admirers. Eh, Polly?”

“No it isn’t,” Polly said, grinning. “It’s from Mr Lynn.” Her eyes had found the bottom of the poster, where Mr Lynn had scribbled,

Our first decent engagement. I know I can count on you to see the joke in the name we chose. Is an Obah Cypt a kind of talisman, perhaps?

T. G. L.

Joke? Polly’s eyes leaped to the top of the poster again. Dumas? What joke?

“David, that’s not funny,” said Ivy. “Who’s Mr Lynn?”

Polly sighed. “I went to see him in London – remember?” Of course!
The Three Musketeers,
by Alexandre (spelled wrong) Dumas. In the middle of the poster Mr Lynn had helped her get the point by scribbling things beside the printed names.
Edward Davies,
she read,
alias Tan Thare, Porthos. Samuel Rensky, alias Tan Hanivar, d’Artagnan. Ann Abraham, alias Tan Audel, Aramis. Thomas Lynn, alias Tan Coul
. Polly smiled widely. It was a clever way to get round Mr Leroy. The poster must have gone out in a stack of others, so that it did not look like something specially to Polly. And it was interesting to see that Mr Lynn thought of himself as Athos too, even though he had not written it in.

“Oh, your musician friend,” said Ivy. “School, or you’ll be late.”

Out of respect for the new quartet, Polly got
The Three Musketeers
out of the library and read it again. For a while too she kept looking in
Radio Times
and the morning paper, in case there was news of magnificent concerts by a brilliant new quartet now taking the country by storm. But the Dumas Quartet never seemed to get mentioned. Since Polly could think of no other way to find out how Mr Lynn was doing, she gave up looking. She took
The Three Musketeers
back to the library and got out
The Lord of the Rings
instead, which David said was much more her kind of thing.

After she had read it for the fourth time, Polly spent the last slack week of term and the beginning of the holidays busily writing an adventure of Tan Coul and Hero, and how they hunted the Obah Cypt in the Caves of Doom, with the help of Tan Thare, Tan Hanivar, and Tan Audel. After
The Lord of the Rings
it was clear to her that the Obah Cypt was really a ring which was very dangerous and had to be destroyed. Hero did this, with great courage.

When it was done, she put it in an envelope and addressed it to Mr Lynn. Then, for two days, she did nothing with it. She was scared when it came to posting it. She thought of the way Mr Leroy had come cleaving through the crowd at the station and looked at Mr Lynn, when there was no way he could have known they were there, and she kept going cold all over. But at last she told herself it was silly to be scared. Mr Leroy had turned up by accident to put Seb on the train. She went boldly out to the High Street Post Office and posted the story there.

She came out of the post office, with the deed done, and the first person she saw was Seb, walking along the other side of the street with a crowd of tall Wilton College boys. Seb, as he always did now, gave her his sort of wave and a grin, and the heads of the other boys turned as usual to see who he was waving at. Polly stood on the steps of the post office feeling like something caught in a searchlight beam. It can’t be true! she thought. He must be here by accident! But she would have given a great deal to be able to reverse posting that letter, like playing a film backwards, and have it zoom up out of the letterbox into her hand.

For days she waiting for something awful to happen. She expected Mr Leroy every time she ran down to the Rose and Crown with a note from David. But the trouble came from Mr Lynn instead. A postcard came from Edinburgh. On the back of Edinburgh Castle it said,