Fire and Hemlock (27 page)

The doors of the hall were shut. Polly knew at a glance that she could not get in that way. She only turned her eyes sideways to make sure, and to read the notice, and walked on without pausing, so that Mr Leroy would not know, uphill and round the side, a way she could not have found without her instinct, and arrived at a side door, which was not quite shut.

She went straight in. Nobody seemed to be about, but now she had something to guide her beyond instinct. There was music. Overhead somewhere there were thumps and shuffling. Maybe it was the wrestling. The music was coming from below. Polly went down bleak stone steps, and down more, with the music getting louder all the time. She opened a door.

Inside was a dingy green-painted cloakroom sort of place, fairly brightly lit. In the middle of it, four musicians were sitting on tubular metal chairs in front of music stands, playing. They seemed so wrapped up in what they were playing that Polly simply stood by the door, not liking to interrupt. It did not matter anyway. Her instinct had brought her to the right place.

Mr Lynn said, “Just a minute,” and stopped playing. The rest of the music broke off while he was leaning his cello on its spike against the chair and carefully laying his bow across the seat. The first violin said, “But I
swear
I got that right this t—” to Mr Lynn’s back as he went over to Polly.

“What is it, Polly?” he said, without fuss or exclamation, quite quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Now that Mr Lynn was really there, standing in front of her in shabby old jeans, with his chin covered in unshaven golden hairs and a faint, familiar scent coming off him, Polly found it hard to speak without crying. She blurted out what had happened with Dad and Joanna, and then bit her lips together hard.

“Jesus wept!” said Mr Lynn. “Lucky we happened to be here.”

Polly breathed in, then out. “And even if I
had
any money, I can’t go home.” Her voice started to jiggle about. “Mum thinks – thinks – Anyway she says I ganged up with David against her.”

“I see. Pig in the middle again,” said Mr Lynn. “Can you go to your grandmother?”

Polly nodded. Tears were pushing to get out of her eyes.

“Then don’t worry about a ticket,” Mr Lynn said. “I’ll get you one. Wait till you feel better and then we’ll see what we can do.”

Polly waited, breathing fiercely in and out. When her tears had stopped pushing and retired a little, she nodded. Mr Lynn put his large hand in the middle of her back and guided her over to the other three. They had been talking together, tactfully, in small murmurs, but they looked up with interest as Polly arrived.

“Polly Whittacker,” said Mr Lynn. “Ann Abraham, Sam Rensky, Ed Davies.” He gave one of his gulps of laughter. “I told you we were all heroes, didn’t I?”

The three faces broke into friendly, recognising smiles. They know all about me! Polly thought in amazement, looking from Ann’s frank friendliness to Ed’s twinkle, and on to Sam’s great, gloomy grin. She almost felt as if she knew them too.

“Polly finds herself stranded,” said Mr Lynn. He looked up at the ceiling. “Now, who might happen to have the times of trains to Middleton?”

There was a groan and a laugh from the other two as Ann bent down to a bag on the floor beside her.

“We wonder why Ann doesn’t trust motor transport,” Sam Rensky said.

Ann turned her face to Polly while she dug in the bag. The dark hair dangling across it was almost the same colour as Joanna’s, but nothing like so neat, and Ann’s brown eyes looked out among the strands, direct and amused, with friendly creases underneath. “I never ride with Tom if I can help it,” she explained. “It’s far too frightening.”

“Tom’s what I call a creative driver,” said Sam. “And the cello’s always allowed the best seat.”

“I was told you were his very first passenger,” Ed Davies said to Polly. “What horrible bad luck!”

Funny to think of Mr Lynn telling them all about her, Polly thought. She felt better already. Sam got up and fetched her another tubular chair from the stack by the wall. Ed took the timetable from Ann and propped it on a music stand, where he held it down with his violin bow so that they could all see it. There was a through train at six-thirty.

“That’s the one,” said Mr Lynn. “I can put you on that and still have time to get ready for the concert. I’ll phone your grandmother and ask her to meet the train.”

He went away to look for a telephone. Ann said, “Would you like some coffee?” Polly still did not like coffee, but she nodded shyly. Whereupon Ann pulled a thermos flask out of her bag and poured Polly a cupful. It was warm and dark and sweet, and Polly found it surprisingly nice.

Ed Davies said, “What
isn’t
in that bag, Ann?”

“Would you like a sandwich?” Sam Rensky said to Polly. When Polly nodded, he fished in his trouser pocket and produced a bent cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic film. Ann and Ed laughed.

“Sam always has food somewhere,” said Ann.

Sam smoothed the sandwich out and passed it to Polly. “I’m not like other people,” he said mournfully. “I have hollow legs. It’s a great trial.”

The sandwich was warm as well as bent, but it made Polly feel almost good again. Ann poured her another cup of coffee to go with it, and by this time Polly felt she knew them all well enough to explain, a bit shyly, to Sam that he was Tan Hanivar the shape-shifter and that shifting shape took a lot of energy. “I expect that’s why you’re always hungry,” she was saying when Mr Lynn came briskly back.

“Your grandmother says you’re not to worry. She’ll be at the station to meet you,” he told Polly.

“Thank you,” Polly said gratefully.

“Tom, you never told me I was a shape-shifter!” said Sam. “What’s Ed?”

“He calls music out of the air,” said Polly.

“I do! I do!” Ed said enthusiastically.

Mr Lynn gave Polly one of his blandest joke-sharing looks. “Sometimes,” he said, “it can be quite deadly.”

“Hey!” cried Ed, as everyone laughed.

“And what am I?” Ann asked Polly.

Polly saw Mr Lynn looking at her with interest. They had never yet decided what Tan Audel did. But now she saw Ann, with her square, quiet face and her deep, friendly brown eyes, Polly knew exactly what Tan Audel did. “You never give up,” she said. “But your main gift is the gift of memory. You remember everything—”

Ed and Sam exclaimed, and looked at one another in astonishment. “How did she know?”

“Knowing things is Polly’s heroic gift,” said Mr Lynn. Polly had not realised before that she had a gift herself. It was a surprising discovery. She and Ann looked at one another and laughed, Ann, with her head flung back, obviously very pleased.

After that, everyone became more sober. Ann said doubtfully to Polly, “Would you mind
very
much if we got on with our practice?”

“We agreed to give the same programme as the Hertzog Quartet,” Sam explained, “because they’d already printed all the stuff.”

“Which means doing one thing we’ve only done about twice before,” Ed said. “We’re having devilish problems with our ensemble in that one.”

“Oh yes. I didn’t mean to be a nuisance,” Polly said.

“You’re not a nuisance,” said Ann.

Everyone waited while Mr Lynn considered Polly, tipping his face until Polly looked at him, just as he had done at the funeral, to judge whether she would be all right.

“I think I will be,” said Polly. “I’ve got your book to read.”

Mr Lynn nodded. That seemed to reassure the others, and they got down to playing music again. While they were making strange whinings and plunks, tuning strings, Polly moved her chair back and got out
The Golden Bough.
But she hardly got halfway through ‘Temporary Kings’ and nowhere near ‘The Sacrifice of the King’s Son’. The practice was too fascinating. She laid the book down on the floor and leaned forward to listen and look.

The music halted as she did so. “What did I do now?” said Ed.

“Nothing,” said Mr Lynn. “Polly, for the love of the strange gods of the heroes, don’t do that to that
book!
”

Polly looked down at the book, bemused.

Ann said, “Tom, I really do think you have eyes in the back of your head now!”

“You’ve got it open, lying on its face,” Mr Lynn said. “The poor thing’s in torment.”

“One of his obsessions,” Sam said to Polly.

“Humour him,” said Ed. “So that we can get on.”

“Or I shall never send you another,” said Mr Lynn. But he looked round at Polly as he said it, to make sure she knew it was one of his half-jokes. Polly hastily shut the book and laid it down again, and the practice went on.

Of all the things Polly found she had forgotten, some six years later, this was the one she was most hurt and astonished not to have remembered. At the time, she had kept telling herself that she would never forget this afternoon. How could she have forgotten how kind they all were, without the least fuss? Even more, how could she have forgotten watching and listening while they practised, as if it was a special private performance just for her? They made it seem like that, by turning and looking at her apologetically when things went wrong, or smiling at her in triumph when the music went right.

Ed seemed the one everyone blamed when it went wrong. Polly was rather indignant about that at first. Ed was small and round and only just as tall as Ann, and she thought they picked on him because of his size. But after a while she began to realise that it was Ed himself who took it on himself to be in the wrong nearly every time one of the others made a mistake. She was pretty sure Ed was pretending, because the others all got ashamed at admitting they were wrong. Polly began to suspect Ed was really a superb violinist, despite the daft, dismayed look he kept on his face while he played.

Beside Ed, Sam Rensky’s face went through incredible contortions. It was a rubbery, long-nosed face – his nose was nearly as long as Granny’s – with a long chin like a rubber boot toe. He was as tall as Mr Lynn, but a good deal skinnier, and the violin looked like a little toy under his long chin. Above it, his face grinned, glared, pursed its lips and ran down to new shapes in ripples. You might have thought he was mad if you had not known he was living the lovely sounds he and Ed were making. Bright, sharp streaks of sound, Polly thought. If you were able to hear lime juice, it would sound like violins.

It took Polly some time before she could hear Ann’s viola at all. The composer never seemed to give it a bit on its own, and Ann did not help by keeping her face plain and straight as she played, with her jaw sort of ground downwards to hold the big viola in place. But at length Ann did have a piece on her own – Polly heard it several times, because Sam kept coming in at the wrong place – and the sound was vibrant and full, not as low as Polly expected. Ann played as precise and sweet as Ed, and there was a sort of excitement behind her playing quite at odds with the plain look on her face.

Polly probably watched Mr Lynn most – Tom, that was. She began to think of him as Tom a bit, now there were three other people all calling him Tom. Apart from that glimpse on television, she had never seen him play his cello. He sat wrapped round it in a way that amused her, with his head bent to dwell in the cello’s sound. One huge hand deftly planted itself on the strings, firmly trembled there – the trembling was something all four did – and then moved elsewhere while the bow carved sounds that thoroughly surprised Polly.

Up to then Polly had thought of a cello as an accompanying sort of instrument, deep but a little dull. Certainly Mr Lynn made it chuff and rumble at times, but that was only one of the things he made it do. He seemed to be able to make every sound, from a melodious groan to high song right up in the same range as Ann’s viola, either in a tactful undertone, or a smooth shout, or a stringy rasp. But it was the bell-like song in the middle which surprised and delighted Polly most. She liked that even better almost than the moments when Sam or Ed would gasp, “Put your back in it, Tom!” and the music suddenly widened until it seemed amazing that only four of them were making it.

I am lucky! Polly thought. Dad and Joanna seemed to be something that had happened last month, instead of only that morning. Just how lucky she was Polly gathered from their talk during the times they were all leaning forward, pointing at the music on the stands with their bows.

A lot of these times they were saying things like “Sam should be watching Ann when Ann comes in off the beat here,” or “Tom, how about starting that forte here, instead?” or “OK. Let’s take it again from D.” But they said enough round the edges of these things for Polly to gather that they had been asked to do this concert at very short notice, late last night, because the Hertzog Quartet, who should have been doing it, had all gone down with flu. They were pleased to get the chance to play, but they were all rather nervous. And but for this chance, they would have gone back to London today.

Finally they all put down their instruments and stretched. Ed said, “That’ll have to do,” and Sam said, “I’m starving.”

“Polly and I had better go,” Mr Lynn said. “Will someone look after my cello?”

Polly stood up, rather regretful. She would have liked to hear the proper concert now.

“Wait a moment,” Ann said. “Money.”

“Oh, yes. A whip-round for Polly,” Ed said. “She’ll need to eat on the train, won’t she?”