Fire and Hemlock (23 page)

“Wow!” said Nina. “Mysteries! Is that all?”

“Yes, Now address the envelope,” Polly said, and dictated Mr Lynn’s address.

“Hey!” exclaimed Nina. “Isn’t that the strange man your Granny—?”

“Maybe,” said Polly, and firmly removed the envelope. She put the tickets in it and stuck it down. Leaving Nina waving her book of four tickets and bawling, “Four tickets for Friday now! Four whole tickets! Bargain of the century!” Polly took the addressed envelope away to the school hall. She peeped in and found, as she had hoped, Nina’s Mum was in there with four other Mums, sewing diamonds of colour on to Harlequin’s suit.

Polly went up to Nina’s Mum. “Mrs Carrington, do you think you could post this letter for me?” She was not going to trust Nina with anything so vital. Nina’s Mum was a good deal more reliable.

“Yes of course, dear,” said Mrs Carrington, and put the letter in her rush basket, with one corner sticking out so that she would remember it. Polly thanked her gratefully, and even went on being grateful when Mrs Carrington turned to the other Mums while Polly was going away, and said in a loud whisper, “Poor kiddy! Broken home, you know. I always try to help her.” But Polly had long known where Nina got her tendency to gossip from, and it did not bother her much. Her main feeling was triumph at the cunning way nothing of that letter now had anything to do with her.

The costumes were finished and tried on. Polly had to practise in hers because the sleeves were so long and drooping – after which Nina’s Mum had to take the costume away and wash it before the Friday performance. It was white, with enormous black bobbles down the front. When she was dressed in it for the show on the Friday, with her hair pushed away inside a black cap kept firmly in place with sixteen hairgrips, Polly spent some time in front of the mirror in the back room, admiring herself. The Art mistress had given her a white face with purple lips and had spent a long time carefully painting an enormous black teardrop just under Polly’s right eye. In the mirror Polly was rodlike and droopy at once. She could have been a bleached version of the smaller, disconsolate clown in Mr Lynn’s stolen Picasso.

She was swept away from the mirror by the two other sets of actors. The show was in three separate bits so that everyone in the Drama Society could do something. The Sixth Form were doing a one-act play about a delinquent boy in prison. The Fourth and Fifth Years were doing extracts from
The Importance of Being Earnest,
and the pantomime came last. There had been arguments about how late this made it for the Second and Third Years, but Mr Herring had insisted. He said it was traditional. But it was perhaps unfortunate that none of the three groups, or the orchestra, had really rehearsed together before that night.

Polly went to part the curtains just a tiny crack, to make sure Granny was in the audience. She was. In the middle, near the front, looking small but royal in her old fur coat. The mutter of talk from all the parents out there made Polly’s stomach squiggle.

The orchestra played the overture they had not rehearsed quite enough. A number of people behind the scenes said it was a pity someone had chosen such modern music. Somebody else pointed out that it was, in fact, tunes from
Oklahoma!
The curtains were drawn. And everything proceeded to go wrong. In the first play the delinquent boy turned out not to have bothered to learn his lines. He made them up as he went along, with such freedom and eloquence that the people acting with him just did not know what to do and simply went to pieces. Everyone would have been glad of the interval, except that no sooner were the curtains drawn than the lights failed and left the audience in darkness. In the dark, Mr Herring tried to make a speech explaining this, but the delinquent boy had so unnerved him that he said, “We’ll have you in darkness again any minute now.” The audience clapped him for that.

The lights came on again for
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but disaster is a very catching thing. The two boys playing Algy and Ernest forgot their lines. They were supposed to be strolling round a table eating cucumber sandwiches as they talked. When their minds went blank, all they could think of to do was to go on walking round and round the table, eating sandwiches. Nobody realised that anything was wrong.
“Help!”
Algy said hoarsely at last over his shoulder. The stage manager promptly put all the lights out. He said afterward it was the most helpful thing he could think of, but it caused utter confusion, because the prompter could not see to tell Ernest and Algy what to say.

The pantomime players went on, thoroughly undermined but determined to do better. Harlequin and Columbine met among the clowns. Harlequin, as he fell in love, trod on Columbine’s dress, which at once came in two pieces with a mighty ripping sound. Kirstie Jefferson, luckily, was wearing tights underneath and she managed to carry on as if this was meant to happen. Nina was so impressed by Kirstie’s coolness that she stood staring at her admiringly and forgot to go off the stage with the rest of the clowns. She was forced to loiter miserably at the back of the stage, getting in everyone’s way, until she noticed Mr Herring fiercely beckoning from the wings. Whereupon she sprinted for the wings and cannoned heavily into Polly as Polly came on. Polly reeled on to the stage like a drunk and was further put off by hearing an extraordinary noise from the orchestra, where the girl playing her melancholy tune on a violin had made a terrible mistake. It was so unlike the taped tune Polly had practised to that she fell over doing her first cartwheel. She tried to get up, but her foot was on one of her trailing sleeves and she fell flat on her back. The audience thought this was meant to happen and laughed heartily. This drowned the noise of the violinist bursting into tears.

“Never mind,” whispered Fiona Perks as Polly lay miserably at her feet. “Nothing’s broken.”

Polly gazed up at Fiona’s made-up face and thought that this was exactly the irritating sort of thing Fiona Perks
would
say. “Nothing! Only my spirit!” she retorted as she struggled to her feet.

“Wasn’t it
awful
!” she wailed to Granny afterward.

“So-so,” said Granny. “I enjoyed most of it. And it’s no more than you’d expect on a Friday.”

Granny, Polly thought, was probably the most superstitious person in the world. Even the Superstition Club at its height had not been a patch on Granny. She tried to smile. “I wish you’d come tomorrow instead. I bet we get it perfect tomorrow.”

And of course they did. Everyone was ashamed of Friday. The delinquent boy spent all Saturday learning his part. Algy and Ernest came early in order to rehearse their sandwich scene. The Science master worked on the lighting for hours, and Mrs Jefferson put Kirstie’s dress back together with tape to make sure it stayed. Even the orchestra tried to pull itself together.

The show went like a house on fire, as Nina kept saying. Nina’s parents were there that night, to her great glee. She kept going to the curtains and looking out at them, and getting in the way of all the people waiting in the wings. Polly was rather nervous. She was meanly glad when, just after the first interval, Mr Herring took Nina by the scruff of her clown suit and threw her into the girls’ dressing room.

“I was only looking!” Nina grumbled at Polly. “It’s interesting seeing everyone. Your strange man is sitting near the back. Did you know?”

Cold fear hurt Polly’s throat for a moment. “Seb? Or Mr Leroy?”Then she had a feeling that all this had happened before. “You mean my Dad?”

“No, stupid, the one you sent the tickets to,” said Nina.

“
What
!” Polly exclaimed. She shoved Nina aside and sped to the stage. The audience was rows of dim pink blobs, but she saw Mr Lynn’s glasses glinting near the back. There was no mistaking the angle of them as they sat on his nose. “
Good
heavens!” she heard herself say.

“What do you expect – if you go and send him tickets?” Nina said behind her.

Polly turned round to tell Nina to keep her mouth shut about that and found Mr Herring bearing down on them. Both of them fled back to the dressing room, Polly laughing like an idiot. She could not remember ever having been so pleased, or so flattered, or so nervous about anything in her life before. And she was sure she was going to make a worse mess of the pantomime even than Friday.

But when the time came and the orchestra started the clown music, a sort of steely goodness came upon Polly. She suddenly knew she was going to be excellent. She came drooping on to the stage exactly right, and this time the girl playing the melancholy tune on the violin got it exactly right too. Polly turned slowly through Pierrot’s first cartwheel, with her legs drooping just as they should, and she had a sudden sense, as she turned, that she was part of a transparent charmed pattern in which everything had to go in the one right way because that was the only way it
could
go. She came out of the cartwheel and went on her knees to Kirstie Jefferson, with her drooping sleeves imploringly raised. The violin sang along. And the audience began going “O-oh!” half jeering at Pierrot, but half on his side too. They went on doing it, and that was right as well. The pattern had been there always, even though they were all making it just at that moment.

Polly went through her part in it with a sort of wondering, alert stillness inside. It was right. It was even right when Kirstie laughed at her and went off with Harlequin. Polly mourned, and the clowns whirled round her, making another part of the pattern. And the audience cheered so much when Fiona Perks came and offered her pink paper heart to Pierrot that Polly felt a real gush of liking for Fiona. She swapped pink paper hearts with her, both of them laughing lovingly, like people enormously relieved about something.

As soon as the curtains closed on their last bow, Polly burst off the stage and struggled through crowds of people getting changed, out into the cold, stinging dark of the car park, to catch Mr Lynn. He was unlocking the door of the horse-car, about to get in. Mary Fields was with him. Polly slowed down and approached rather hesitantly. But they were clearly expecting her. They both turned round.

“Hello, Polly!” they both said.

“Did you like it?” Polly asked.

Mr Lynn nodded. Mary Fields said, “Oh, enormously! You were terrific, Polly. You ought to take up gymnastics seriously – or acting, for that matter. Shouldn’t she?” she asked Mr Lynn.

“Quite possibly,” he said. Polly knew he did not really agree. She thought it was because he knew there were other things she could do better than those, but she wanted to make sure.

“Frankly,” Mary said to Polly, “I wasn’t too keen when Tom insisted on coming all this way. You know the way he drives. But it was worth the sacrifice. Really.”

“Thanks,” Polly said. She did not like Mary Fields, and she could tell Mary still did not like her, but she could tell Mary was truly meaning to be generous. She smiled warmly at her, and felt the white make-up on her face crinkle. “What was wrong?” she asked Mr Lynn.

“Nothing,” he said. “It was sheer magic, mostly because of you. But do you really want to be called Pierrot?”

“A joke,” Polly explained, embarrassed because Mary Fields was standing there with her hands in her pockets, shivering. “A mixture between Polly and Hero.”

“Yes I got that,” Mr Lynn said. He laughed, and put out a hand and rubbed Polly on the top of her little black cap. “Good night, Pierrot. You were splendid. But we have to go. See you.”

Polly stood back while the horse-car started with a snarl. She watched its headlights come on like angry eyes and watched it leap into motion as if someone had kicked it in the rear. She waved a drooping sleeve after it and went in to change.

Changing took quite a while. Polly’s clothes had got scattered by numbers of people all too excited by success to be careful. By the time she had found them, everyone else had gone. Polly came out with her hair down, but still with a chalk-white face, to find the last people distantly banging car doors and shouting “Good night!” She felt dejected. She did not feel like walking all the way to Granny’s alone. Some of the roads were quite dark. But it was too late to cadge a lift now. She set off, turning left out of the school gate, under the streetlight.

Immediately there was a tall person walking beside her. Polly could see him, sideways from behind her hair, and hear his feet heavily hitting the pavement. But she could not bring herself to look properly. She knew it would be Seb. The trick with the tickets had not worked and Seb knew. Her heart banged and she walked faster.

The heavy walker beside her kept up with her. Polly could feel him waiting for her to be scared enough to look round. She put off looking, and put it off, until she came to the next streetlight, and then she could not bear not looking any longer. Her made-up face with its black teardrop turned almost helplessly towards the left. Her black-rimmed eyes met the heavy face and black-pouched eyes of Mr Leroy.

Polly rather thought she stared at him like a rabbit. Mr Leroy stared back sarcastically. His expensive coat made him look big as a bear. He smelled of fine cloth and expensive living. Instead of an umbrella this time, he was carrying one of those shooting-sticks with big rings for a handle that unfold into a seat. He swung it while they stared, gently and unpleasantly.

“You keep ignoring warnings, don’t you, little girl?” he said. “Why?”

“And
why
to you too!” Polly retorted. She was so frightened that she seemed to have gone right out the other side, into bravery again. “Why?
You
tell
me!
”