Fire and Hemlock (40 page)

There sat Thomas Lynn, doubled round his cello in the way which had amused her in Bristol, with his head bent to listen out his music, just as she remembered. The large hand on the strings was the one she had hung on to at the funeral. His face had that look you could not argue with. It made Polly smile briefly and wonder what the photographer had tried to make him do. Take off his glasses, probably, in order to look better. Well, there was no need of that.

It gave her a huge shock to see it, even though she had expected just such a photograph, unreal lighting, black background, and all. For one thing, Fiona had been right to call Thomas Lynn good-looking. Polly, who had been thinking of him in terms of his likeness to the gaunt and unpleasant Mr Piper, now saw that they resembled one another only in the way a caricature looks like a real person. Laurel, after all, liked them good-looking – witness Leslie.

But the thing which gave Polly the greatest shock was to see that Thomas Lynn was nothing like as old as she had thought.

She turned the record over and took a bewildered look at the notes. It was a new record, out that year, so the photograph had to be fairly recent.
Thomas Lynn,
she read,
these days recognised as Britain’s leading cellist…
Yes, she thought, he had made himself that, by sheer hard work and determination, shaking himself loose from Laurel’s disastrous clutches by fierce, dogged stages, dragging the rest of the quartet up with him. When Polly first met him, she suspected he must have been so bleached and drained from the struggle to get divorced from Laurel that she had taken him for an old man, as children do. But he was not, she thought, turning the record the other way again. He simply had that kind of colourless fair hair, darker than hers, which she had vaguely taken for grey. Instead of which, he was young, with a career in the making.

Until, of course, Polly had stepped in and destroyed him.

Polly put the record back in its bag and went out of the shop, stepping over the two little girls with the Guy on the way. They had the cheek to ask her for another five p.

“Get lost!” Polly told them, and marched unseeing back to the flat. There, with absent-minded industry, she dragged Fiona’s turntable and speakers through to her own room and put the record on.

It took only a few bars to assure her that Thomas Lynn was a very good cellist indeed. His playing had that drive to it which gave you the sense of the shape of the music opening out before him as he played. And he kept that drive and shape, whether the cello was grumbling against the piano, crisply duetting, or out on its own, coaxed into hollow golden song. That feeling of a pattern being made, Polly thought, that I had in the panto. Except that this was so expert and so varied that it was hard to believe that it was being done with a musical instrument in somebody’s hands.

Halfway through, Polly could hardly bear to listen to more and nearly took the record off. She knew what she had done now. But she kept it on, and turned it over, then back again to the first side, several times, while she recalled that time a month after Middleton Fair.

As soon as she had made her decision to ask Tom, Polly’s misery gave way to a gleeful, furtive excitement. She stopped worrying about right and wrong. She did not even have to consider how to do it.

It had been obvious to her, from the moment Seb first suggested it, that simply asking Tom in the normal way was no good at all. Something quite other was called for. She set about it as methodically and secretly as someone planning a crime. In the morning she went for a walk, as far into the outskirts of Middleton as she could get, where the houses began to give way to the country. There she searched the sides of the road for dead hemlock. Since the hemlock was high and flowering in the hedgerows just then, she was unlucky and had to make do with a handsome living green stalk of it. But she was lucky enough to find a large wad of greying old straw near the riding school. She took a number of hawthorn sprigs from the hedges too. These she brought home and hid from Granny as if they were things she had stolen.

Granny had a bad cold and was not very observant. She went away to lie down in the afternoon. As soon as she had, Polly gleefully grabbed up the large silver ashtray from the front room and hurried upstairs with it. There she made sure of privacy by wedging a chair under the doorknob and set about her final preparations. Remembering it four years later, Polly was amazed at the amount she had worked out and the things she knew, almost by instinct.

She took down the
Fire and Hemlock
picture and propped it against the wall at the back of her low table. She put the ashtray in front of that, so that she could stick the twigs of hedge in the crack between it and the picture. Carefully, between the twigs, she balanced the five painted soldiers Tom had once sent her. She had to use all five, because she had never been sure which two stood for Tan Coul and Hero. In front of the ashtray she stood the hemlock head, upright in a milk bottle. She put the straw in the ashtray itself, heaped as far as possible into the same shape as the burning straw in the picture, and mixed it with a few strands of her own hair. She knew it was important to mix herself and Tom together in the elements of the picture. She had it all worked out, as blindly and instinctively as a flea jumps to suck blood. She was rather annoyed that she had nothing to stand for the horse that sometimes appeared in the smoke, and she wished she could have used Tom’s blood, but her white top had been washed. Instead, she used the postcard which said
Sentimental drivel.
She did not mind losing that.

When everything was ready, Polly unhooked the stolen oval photograph and knelt down in front of the table, facing the picture, in the greatest excitement. She remembered seeing her own face, vivid, almost laughing, reflected in the glass of the
Fire and Hemlock
picture while she struck a match and lit one corner of the postcard. When that was burning, she carefully poked it among the straw and hair in the ashtray. She knelt, holding the stolen photograph, while chaffy smoke began to wreathe upwards. The photograph, she was sure, had power to bring Tom to her. Both pictures together would surely make him tell. She told herself that she did not really think it would work. But she knew it would.

Smoke poured upwards in a sudden cloud that made Polly cough, suffusing the hemlock in the milk bottle and hiding the picture entirely. There was an instant when Polly was terrified, unable to see anything but smoke. But then, with a sort of flick, she seemed to be somewhere else where she could see perfectly well. It was a room she did not know. She knew she was not really in it, because she could feel her knees pressing into the mat in her own room all through, but when Tom got up from the large sofa in the strange room and came hurriedly towards her, she knew he could see her as if she were standing there.

“Polly!” he said, quiet and horrified. “What are you doing?”

Now it had worked, Polly’s glee returned. She chuckled with it. When Tom got up, she thought she had seen a woman on the sofa too, probably asleep. She leaned cheerfully and cheekily round him to see if it was Mary Fields, and answered rather triumphantly, “I’ve come to ask you some questions at last.” The woman was not Mary. She was Laurel, Laurel asleep and looking staggeringly, heart-rendingly beautiful. Polly said indignantly, “What are
you
doing, come to that? How often do you get together with Laurel?”

“As little as I can help – hardly at all, these days,” Tom answered, whispering in order not to wake Laurel. “Polly, go away! It may still be all right if you stop now.”

“But I want to know!” Polly said. “Does Laurel own you, or something?”

“You could say that.” Tom turned to make sure Laurel was still asleep.

Polly knew he was completely miserable, but she felt no sympathy at all, only a hard kind of triumph. “Well, you should have told me!” she said. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me anything, can I?”

“I sent you enough books about it!” Tom said angrily.

“That’s not the sa—” Polly was saying when Tom moved sharply aside.

Behind him, Laurel was awake, sitting up on the sofa. “Tom?” she said like a little icy needle.

“The undying Laurel is awake,” Tom said to Polly. He said it fiercely and meaningly and she noticed that he had put one hand up to his face almost as if he was trying to shield his eyes.

Polly did not understand. Laurel said, “Tom!” again, warningly. Polly looked at her and met Laurel’s eyes. After that, Polly was only aware of Laurel and the empty tunnels of Laurel’s eyes…

Everything went a little muzzy then. Polly knew she cleared up the charred stuff in the ashtray and hung both pictures up again. Probably she tidied everything away. She must have taken the ashtray back to the living room, she supposed, because it was certainly there afterwards. She knew she was downstairs with the kettle on to make Granny some tea, when the doorbell rang. Unless that was a day later. If it was the same day, Laurel had worked awfully fast.

Anyway, the kettle was on and the doorbell rang. Polly went to answer it. It was Seb. Smiling.

“Polly, come round to the house and meet my folks. Everyone’s there. Even old Tom’s come down for the weekend.”

That, of course, fetched Polly along at once. She combed her hair, took the kettle off – like the rhyme, she remembered thinking – and went along with Seb.

There were a lot of people gathered in the room in Hunsdon House where the Will had been read. Most of them were people Polly dimly remembered from the funeral. They were having a moving-about kind of tea, sometimes sitting down with teacups, sometimes getting up and helping themselves to sandwiches or cakes from a couple of trolleys and then sitting down somewhere else. It was the kind of event you dread when you are fifteen. You know you are going to tread on a sandwich or sit on your cake. Polly would have felt quite crushed in the ordinary way, even, but this was worse. Here was Mr Leroy confusingly coming and shaking hands as if Polly was an old friend, Laurel turning round to give a nod and a gracious smile, and Tom in the distance not coming near her at all. Uneasiness grew in Polly, the way it had over Joanna in Bristol. She was not muzzy any more. Everything was quite sharp, but the uneasiness grew. Tom, typically, was sitting hunched up on the arm of a sofa, with one foot on the cushions, bending forward to talk to a Leroy Perry lady. He did not seem to know Polly was there. Polly tried to tell herself that he could have looked at her sideways, with the look almost hidden by his glasses, but she knew she was deceiving herself.

She was forced politely into an armchair by Mr Leroy. He fetched her a cup of tea and Seb gave her a plate with a sandwich on it. Polly was by then so uneasy that she wanted to scream and run away, but everything was so polite that she did not dare.

Before long, Laurel came to sit leaning sideways towards her from another armchair. Scents from her wafted across Polly’s teacup. “Polly, dear. I’ve been wanting to have a little talk with you for quite a while now. Seb tells me you may have some very strange ideas in your head about poor Tom.”

Polly tried to pull herself together. “I don’t think so,” she said bluntly.

“No, dear, but they may be, for all that,” Laurel said kindly. She smiled affectionately across the room to where Tom was hunched up, talking. “I suspect that you may have mistaken the situation quite appallingly. We’re all very fond of Tom, you know, and so sad about him.” She turned back to Polly, and Polly was aghast to see tears twinkle and brim in Laurel’s eyes. “Poor Tom,” Laurel said. “He’s going to die. In about four years now. The doctors can’t do a thing.” Her voice caught throatily and she put up a knuckle to catch the tear making its way down her face. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

Oh God! Polly thought. Is this why Tom would never talk about himself? I may have been an awful fool! In her shame and horror, she could only stammer, “Wh-what of?”

“One of those cancer things,” Laurel said sadly. “That’s why I said I’d speak to you when Tom asked me to.”

“He
asked
you to?” Polly said.

“Of course.” Laurel put a knuckle to her other eye. “Or I’d never have dreamed of saying a word. I still adore Tom. We only got divorced because he insisted on it when he heard the news.”

Oh my heaven! Polly thought. What an idiot I’ve been! Of course Laurel and Mr Leroy would want to keep an eye on Tom if they knew he was ill. It was quite possible that she had gone blundering in, mistaking the whole thing entirely. She had thought there was something supernatural – but how stupid and babyish! There was no such thing.