Fire and Hemlock (13 page)

To have something to do, Polly got out her nice dress and tried it on. There was a grease stain in front where she had dripped butter and honey despite all her care, and a muddy patch on the back where she had crouched on the pavement, afraid of the horse.

The dress did not seem as big as it had been. It squeezed her round the chest and nipped her round her forearms, and the skirt came nowhere near her knees. But since it was the only nice dress Polly had, she went and looked at herself in Mum’s big mirror, hoping it would do.

She saw a wild, gawky figure in a dress three sizes too small. Under the wrong-length frill of skirt were two thin legs with a scab on each knobbly knee. Round the scabs the knees were grey. The hands dangling out of the too-short sleeves were grey, too. The wild tails of her hair were not quite grey, but they were drab somehow and rather like snakes, and the face among the snakes had a sulky look, even though the sulky look was just breaking up into tears.

“Oh
no
!” wailed Polly, and completed bursting into tears as she fled downstairs to the telephone. Tears made white places on her hand as she dialled Granny’s number. “Granny!
Granny!
”

“What is it, Polly?” Granny’s voice said, sharp and comforting in the receiver.

“Mr Lynn’s asked me out and my nice dress is too
small!
”

There was a slight pause from the other end. Then Granny said, “Back from Europe, is he?” Polly was surprised and interested to find that Granny had been following Mr Lynn’s movements too. “Well, that’s nothing to take on about,” Granny said.

“But I’ve no good clothes at all!” Polly wailed.

“Polly!” Granny said, sharper still. “Stop howling and answer me one serious question.”

“Yes,” Polly gulped.

“Did Mr Lynn ask
you
out, or did you ask
him
?” said Granny.

“He wrote and asked – I never said a word, promise,” said Polly. “And he sent me a parcel with soldiers in—”

“All right,” said Granny. “I’m not sure I like it, Polly, but if he’s free to ask, I suppose he must want to see you. But be wary of what he gives you. Keep that to yourself, understand? Now, are you sure you want a dress? Wouldn’t a pair of jeans and perhaps a nice jacket be better?”

“Well—” Polly remembered Mr Lynn’s old anorak. “Much better. But I haven’t even got any jeans that fit, Granny.”

“I thought that was what you were asking me for,” Granny retorted. “I’ll buy you them for your birthday, Polly. I’m not made of money.”

Polly’s birthday was not till June, but it was worth having no present from Granny then, just to be properly dressed now. She thanked Granny gratefully.

“I don’t do it to be thanked,” Granny said, and rang off.

Polly went upstairs and carefully put the soldiers in her folder along with her paintings. When Ivy came home, she was waiting in the hall. “Mum, my hair needs washing.”

“I suppose it does,” Ivy agreed. Neither of them could remember when Polly’s hair was last washed. They went up to the bathroom, where they both had rather a shock. Polly’s hair hung in snakes because each piece was matted into itself, in a sort of rope, and Polly had head lice. Ivy had to go out for a special shampoo and a fine-tooth comb. But the comb would not go through Polly’s hair. “Don’t you ever brush your hair?” Ivy said, grimly dragging an ordinary comb through it.

The dragging made Polly’s head sore. Her eyes watered. “Not often.”

“Then you should!” said Ivy. “You’re big enough now, in all conscience! I don’t know, Polly – this is such a mess I think I’d better cut it all off. You’d look quite nice with it short, after all.”

“No!”
shrieked Polly. She jumped up and dragged her hair away. “Don’t you dare touch it! I like it long!”

“After all I’ve done for you!” Ivy said, losing her temper too.

“You haven’t done anything for me! You let me get lice!” Polly screamed back.

They shouted at one another for quite a while. At length Ivy gave in. “You always did have such a will, Polly. All right. But I thought you wanted it short.”

“I don’t any more,” said Polly.

It took two hours to get Polly’s hair combed, and another hour of washing after that. The water that came out of her hair was dark brown for the first two washes. Ivy washed it yet again, and combed it. Nits floated in the washbasin and had to be rinsed away.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” Ivy said at last.

“Yes,” Polly sighed. Her head ached worse than it had done with two black eyes. But she was rewarded by having a cloud of silver-fair, crackly hair, as clean as it was bright. She saw why Mr Lynn had called it lovely now. She was rather careful about combing it after that.

Mr Lynn had a new anorak. It was the first thing Polly saw when she opened the door to him. He had an altogether more prosperous look somehow.

“Won’t you come in?” she said politely.

“No thanks,” Mr Lynn said, smiling all over his face. “I want to show you my horse.”

Polly locked the front door and hid the key for Ivy and went out into the street with Mr Lynn. There was a small cream-yellow car nestling against the kerb, somewhat the shape of a teapot. He pointed to it proudly. “Like it?”

Polly laughed. The car’s number plate was TC 123. “Oh yes! A modern horse. And TC for Tan Coul.”

“Of course,” agreed Mr Lynn. “As soon as I saw the number plate, I knew I had to buy it. Hop in.” He opened the passenger door for her and Polly climbed in, feeling very grand and relaxed in her new jeans and jacket. “I don’t know what I’d have done,” Mr Lynn said, climbing in the other side, “if I’d failed my driving test. I only took it last Thursday, you see. I’d have had to call for you in a taxi. Now. Let’s see. Choke, ignition, handbrake, check mirror. Do you want to know where we’re going?”

“Nowhere, of course,” said Polly. They both laughed, Polly heartily and Mr Lynn in his guilty, cut-off gulp.

Then they tried to set off. At first the car would do nothing but plunge up and down on the spot. Mr Lynn managed to get it moving and they went down the street in a series of jumps, like a kangaroo with hiccups. “Horse very restive,” Mr Lynn apologised. “Feeling its oats.” He was rather pink by this time. He tried moving the gear lever. There was a mighty crashing sound. The car gave another leap, backwards this time, and stopped completely. “Oh dear,” said Mr Lynn, pinker still. “Polly, I’m sorry. I’m very nervous. The car knows.”

“Call it names,” said Polly. “Like you did the horse.”

“No, you call
me
names,” said Mr Lynn. “It’s my fault.”

“All right then,” said Polly. “I’ll call you Tan Coul, trainee-hero of the West, and ironmonger and Thomas Piper, axefighter and giant-killer, and horse-tamer and someone who’s going to kill dragons soon.”

This seemed to make Mr Lynn feel better. The car snarled and started with a swoop, and they swept out into the centre of Middleton. There, after a number of interesting wobbles, they raced twice round the main square before Mr Lynn could rein the car in enough to dive down the Gloucester Road. When he did, they howled swiftly out into the countryside, pausing only to miss a bus and skip the Miles Cross traffic lights.

“This car really is that horse, in a way,” Mr Lynn said as they flashed past the last limit sign at sixty miles an hour. “After you’d gone, I went back to that circus to see if it was all right. And apparently that wasn’t the first time it had gone on the rampage. They were saying it would have to be put down.”

“Oh no!” said Polly.

“Just how I felt,” said Mr Lynn. “So I had a rush of blood to the head and said I’d buy it. I couldn’t bear to think of it dead. I knew I was going to get about enough money from the orchestra’s European tour – but they wouldn’t wait that long, however much I argued. In the end I had to sell one of those pictures—”

“Not the Chinese horse!” Polly exclaimed.

“No, no,” Mr Lynn said, as shocked as she was. “That’s too beautiful. No, I sold that picnic picture, which was the one I liked least. Laurel had been more generous than I’d realised – it turns out to have been a genuine Impressionist, and it fetched quite an awesome price. So I could afford to feed the horse once I’d bought it.”

“Where do you keep a horse in London?” Polly asked.

“I don’t,” said Mr Lynn. “The circus people put me in touch with a woman who boards horses out in the country. And she discovered why I’d bought Lorenzo – I’m afraid the horse is called Lorenzo – and offered to buy him off me. That’s how I got the car. I paid for it with the money Mary Fields gave me for the horse. That’s where I thought we’d go first. You’d like to see the horse again, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Polly said dubiously. “Are we going anywhere else?”

Mr Lynn gave his gulp of a laugh. “Stow-on-the-Water,” he said rather triumphantly. “Did you know it’s a real place? I thought, if you agree, we could go there and look for hardware shops. It’s in the Cotswolds, not far from Mary Fields’ farm.”

Polly thought that was a marvellous idea.

“Good,” said Mr Lynn. “Though I know there really is no such shop, I almost believe it’s real. I can see it, and even smell the beastly smell in Edna’s kitchen if I close my eyes.”

“Don’t close your eyes,” Polly said swiftly and firmly. She had realised by now that Mr Lynn drove the way heroes drive. The little car seemed to have a surprisingly fast engine hidden under its rounded bonnet, and Mr Lynn drove it with his foot hard down to the floor, turning to talk to Polly as he drove. He did not seem frightfully particular about which side of the road they were on, and he clearly had a passion for overtaking everything else going the same way. Polly was not at all frightened. After all, Mr Lynn had driven all the way down from London without crashing. But it was clear to her that his heroic style of driving was not possible if he had his eyes shut.

“No, of course not,” Mr Lynn said with that slightly irritating meekness of his. And the car continued to nibble at hedges and swerve into the paths of oncoming lorries under a pale blue spring sky. Seagulls sat in ploughed fields on either side. Polly thought, We’re driving away to Nowhere! and snuggled down in her seat. She felt all easy and light, like you do when you stretch after sitting still, or get into your own clothes after playing dressing-up. Last term had been all wrong somehow. It was as if she had been pretending to be someone else.

“I saw you on television once,” she said. “Just for a second.”

“Oh. Did you?” Mr Lynn hunched his high shoulders. “I wish you hadn’t. I hoped I’d got away without being seen – they so rarely point the cameras at the cellos. I hate the way we look. Like a set of very neat carpenters.”

“Only for an instant. I almost didn’t,” Polly assured him. And she felt so comfortable that she added, “And I saw your – Laurel, you know – in the audience with Mr Leroy.”

“Yes, they spent their honeymoon abroad,” Mr Lynn said. “I saw quite a bit of them.”

It seemed comfortable still, but in some way it was not. Polly went on carefully, “And how’s Seb? Have you seen him?”

“No, though I was wondering if you might have done,” said Mr Lynn. “He’s at school in Middleton.”

“What, at Wilton College?” Polly asked. Seb would obviously not go to one of the ordinary schools. She felt mixed awe and scorn, because Wilton College was a very posh school indeed.

“That’s right. Now tell me about these three other heroes. Why don’t you know Tan Audel?”

“I just don’t.” Polly saw Mr Lynn was wanting to change the subject. She filed that away in her mind, along with the other things she knew about Mr Lynn and Hunsdon House. She had a feeling they were beginning to add up into something she almost understood. She humoured Mr Lynn and described the heroes. Tan Coul was the hero of the West, Tan Thare the South, and poor, shape-changing Tan Hanivar was the hero of the North.

“I like the idea of him,” Mr Lynn said. “Would you say he had a thin sort of face with a great, gloomy beak of a nose? What’s Tan Thare like?”

They decided that Tan Thare was chubby, with curly hair. But Tan Audel remained a blank to both of them. They were still trying to discover what Tan Audel was like ten miles further on, when Mr Lynn said, “Woops! Here’s the turning!” and went screaming into a narrow lane on two left-hand wheels. A signpost flashed past, saying OLD ELMCOTT. The car lifted this way and that. Mr Lynn had made some kind of mistake with the pedals, so that they were hurtling between black hedges, faster and faster.