Fire and Hemlock (22 page)

No, it’s not a ring. You stole that from Tolkien. Use your own ideas.

T. G. L.

It hurt Polly’s feelings horribly. For a whole day she hoped Mr Leroy would
get
Mr Lynn for that. For another whole day she evolved nasty schemes for getting Mr Lynn herself, by jumping on both his cellos. She could almost feel the satisfying splintering of precious wood under her shoes. On the third day she decided to have nothing more to do with Mr Lynn. Ever. On the fourth day she got another postcard, of St Andrews Golf Course this time.

Sorry,
it said.
I was v. tired in my last. Damaged my good cello.
Forgive criticism, but you used to have much better ideas on your own.

T. G. L.

When she read about that damaged cello, Polly’s mind jolted and flew to Seb passing in the street. She was appalled. I think that was my fault! she thought. But how
can
it be? She waited two days, to give Mr Lynn time to get home to London, and then telephoned his flat. It was next to impossible, she thought as she dialled the number, for Seb to appear accidentally, or even on purpose, inside the hall of her own house.

Mr Lynn’s voice spoke. “This is a recorded message,” it said like a robot. “Thomas Lynn is away on business with the Dumas Quartet. If you have a message, please give it after this recording stops. Speak on the tone.” There followed a click, and a sharp beeping.

“Oh. Er,” said Polly, totally disconcerted. “Um. Er. This is Polly. I just wanted to say sorry too. About the cello.” Then she could simply think of no more to say. She put down the telephone, feeling cheated and incomplete. She stood. Then she turned round, threw open the front door, and looked up and down the street.

It was empty. There was no sign of Seb. She seemed to have got away with it.

Mr Lynn did not reply. Instead, before Polly had time to get hurt again, a parcel of books arrived from Edinburgh. There was no letter, just a piece of paper from the book shop, saying in print:
Sent at the request of,
then a gap for the name, which someone had filled in as
Mr T. Geeling.
It made Polly giggle, both for itself and because they were both thinking of ways to cheat Mr Leroy. The books were all secondhand: Kipling’s
Kim, The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells,
The Man Who Was Thursday
by G. K. Chesterton, and
Perilandra
by C. S. Lewis.

That was the first of any number of parcels, from all over the country, sent under all sorts of versions of Mr Lynn’s name.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
from Hereford, from T. O. Massling.
The Thirty-nine Steps
from Oxford, from Mr Tomlin,
Tom’s Midnight Garden
from Birmingham, from A. Namesake, and
The Oxford Book of Ballads
from Salisbury, apparently from a Chinese person called Lee Tin. And numbers more. All through those summer holidays and the autumn term that followed, parcels of books for Polly kept on coming. It seemed as if every time Mr Lynn arrived in a new place, almost his first act was to find a book shop and get it to send Polly books under some idiotic new name.

The only trouble was that all Polly seemed to be able to do in return was to ring up the robot machine in London and tell it, “Um. Er. Polly. Um. Thanks.” And to read the books, of course.

School started again in the autumn, with Polly and Nina both feeling very mature and Second Yearish. This was the term that Nina discovered Doors – and made Polly look nervously over her shoulder for Seb every time Nina talked about them. Nina’s parents did not care for Doors either, or any of the other groups Nina listened to. They decided that Nina’s tastes were getting corrupted and contrived somehow to push her into acting. Polly always wondered how they did it. Probably it was because they were friendly with Mr Herring, who ran the school Drama Society. But Polly was fairly certain that Nina had only agreed to join the Drama Society on condition that she got a star part.

She was given the part of Pierrot, poor Pierrot, mournfully in love with Columbine who, of course, was thoroughly in love with Harlequin. It did not seem to Polly to be quite Nina’s thing. But when rehearsals first started, Nina harked back to her glorious career as King Herod in Juniors and decided she would be a great actress, after all.

“Mr Herring’s ideas are mag-ic!” she told everyone, Polly included, and so enthusiastic was she that Polly was persuaded to join the Drama Society too. She joined, and was made one of the chorus of clowns.

It soon became apparent to Polly, as she obediently did handstands and rolls with the other clowns, that Nina’s ideas and Mr Herring’s were about as different as ideas could be. Nina wanted to rant and wave her arms about. Mr Herring explained that he was wanting to put on a version of the old Italian pantomime in what he called “stylised semi-dance form”. It was not easy to stylise Nina. If she had to be mournfully in love, she thought at least she should sing.

“No,” said Mr Herring. “The whole idea is to have dumb show to music. Think of it as a sort of ballet.”

But Nina said she was sick of semi-dance. She made up a song – which owed quite a lot to Doors – which she intended to sing during the performance when it was too late for Mr Herring to stop her. Nobody thought she would dare. “Yes, I will!” Nina said. “This is it. Listen.” She balanced a chair on a desk before Geography on Tuesday morning and stood on both and sang. The chair slipped and Nina went crashing down into the project on South America. She broke the project. She also broke her glasses and sprained her ankle.

Mr Herring seized the opportunity to get rid of Nina. “The show must go on!” he said gleefully, and he made Polly Pierrot instead.

When Nina came back to school in her spare glasses, with her ankle strapped up, she took it quite calmly. “I’ve gone off acting,” she said. “I’m heavily into guitar-playing instead.” But, because of what her parents would say, she consented to join the chorus of clowns, where she annoyed Mr Herring considerably by calling advice to Polly all the time.

Polly enjoyed being Pierrot. It was quite easy to pretend to be crossed in love, because Columbine was a very pretty Third Year girl called Kirstie Jefferson. Polly and Nina much admired Kirstie. On the other hand, neither of them liked the red-haired girl called Fiona Perks, who was Pierrette. Polly did not find it at all easy to pretend to love Fiona at the end. But that was the only difficulty. As rehearsals went on, Mr Herring discovered that Polly could do flip-flops and cartwheels, and he made her do them, slowly and sadly. The part of Pierrot became strange and circus-like. Polly found she had become as enthusiastic about the pantomime as Nina had been, and she wanted to make sure Mum and David came to see it at the end of term.

“You
will
come and see it, won’t you?” she said rather often.

Ivy said neither yes or no. She was in a bad mood. She and David did not seem to Polly to be getting on very well.

“You’ll have to tell me soon,” Polly said two weeks before the performance. “We’ll be getting the tickets tomorrow.”

“Will you shut up about that!” Ivy exploded. “I’ve told you before what I feel about your school shows. Solid boredom!”

“But this is different, Mum,” Polly persuaded. “It’s not a Nativity. It’s supposed to be what pantos used to be before they started being Dick Whittington and things. It’s more of a dance. My part’s a sort of mourning acrobat.”

“Oh it’s arty, is it?” Ivy said disagreeably. “Then definitely no. I did my bit when you were in Juniors, and that’s
it
as far as I’m concerned.”

“Come on, Ivy. Where’s the old esprit de corps?” David intervened. “It won’t hurt to go.”

“You keep out of this,” said Ivy.

“I’d like to see Polly Gorgeous do her stuff,” David said unwisely. “I bet she’s terrific!”

Ivy rounded on him. “Gorgeous, is she? I’ve watched you, David. You’ve been making up to Polly on the sly for months now. You’re always trying to get her on your side. Just leave off, will you!”

David began to be seriously alarmed. He gave Polly a look which warned her not to say anything about the notes to Mr O’Keefe, and protested, “But that’s nothing but good old togetherness, Ivy! I don’t want Polly to hate me!”

“Hate you! She’d walk through fire for you these days, and you know it!” Ivy said. “Wouldn’t you, Polly?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t put it quite so high as that,” David said. “Would you, Polly?”

Polly stood there, with Ivy looking at her angrily and David pleadingly, and did not know what to answer. If she said she hated David, Ivy would be angry. If she agreed with Ivy, David would be in trouble. “He’s all right,” she said. “But what about the pantomime, Mum?”

“Don’t change the subject,” said Ivy. “Hear that, David? ‘All right,’ she said. When Polly says a thing like that, she means it. I know Polly. You’ve got her eating out of your hand, and I’m not having it!”

Polly was annoyed at having her careful answer made to mean the wrong thing. “That’s
not
what I meant!” she said. “You don’t know what goes on in my mind. Nobody does.”

“Yes I do,” said Ivy.

“Better scarper, Poll,” David said warningly.

“That’s it! Advise my daughter what to do!” Ivy said.

Polly took David’s advice and went upstairs to do her homework, where she sat against the glopping cistern instead and read
The Castle of Adventure.
It made a relief from the rather difficult books Mr Lynn kept sending, and it almost distracted her from the sound of Ivy’s voice downstairs. Eventually Ivy’s voice stopped. Then Ivy came in and sat on Polly’s bed.

“Sorry about that, Polly,” she said. “Still, it’s cleared the air and we know where we stand. Happiness depends on being honest. David’s been quite honest with me now, and we’ve settled to go away for a bit together, to get to know one another again. I’ve rung Granny, and she says she’ll have you till we get back. Would you mind terribly? We’ll be back before Christmas – promise.”

That meant they were not coming to the pantomime. Polly moved her shoulders against the cistern cupboard and sighed. “That’ll be fine, Mum,” she said nobly. “Have a good time.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Ivy said, which made Polly feel rather low. She would have liked Ivy to notice how noble she was being.

Still, it was good to go and live in Granny’s biscuit-smelling house again, and to lie in Granny’s spare bed staring up at her
Fire and Hemlock
picture. She was sure now that the picture was valuable. She was guiltily convinced it must be, since the other pictures she had chosen for Mr Lynn had one and all turned out to be worth such a lot. She was still astonished that the Perry Leroys had not come and asked to have this one back too.

At school, rehearsals became frantic and Drama Society members were allowed to miss English in order to rehearse. Nina’s Mum was helping with the costumes. She came to school almost as often as Nina in order to sew clown suits. Everyone in the pantomime and the other two plays was given a book of five tickets to sell to their relatives. Granny bought one of Polly’s.

“Of course I’ll come,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. I wish I could sell the rest for you, but all my friends are such old ladies you’d never get them to stir.” Granny’s main friends were Mrs Gold and Mrs Ormond, and they were indeed old. Granny always said, “I call one Aches and the other Pains. The rest of the people I know are just Grumbles and Moans.”

Polly, left with four useless tickets, was struck with a very daring idea. She had been longing to write to Mr Lynn. She wanted to tell him about the pantomime, and also of a new idea she had about the Obah Cypt. And here was a way of doing it without Seb getting to know.

She went to school with her tickets and a clean new envelope with a stamp on. At the end of the morning she went to where Nina was sitting on the teacher’s desk waving a book of tickets and bawling, “Two more tickets for Saturday! Two more tickets only for the greatest show on earth!”

“I’ll swop you those two tickets for my four,” Polly said. “If you’ll do me a favour.”

“Done!” Nina said. She loved selling tickets. “What’s the favour?”

“Write something on them and address the envelope for me,” said Polly.

“OK,” said Nina. She lay full length along the teacher’s desk and poised her pen expectantly over the tickets. “What do you want written?”

It felt a bit silly now Polly came to it. Polly went pink as she dictated, “I am in this. Call me Pierrot. The O.C. is an egg-shaped locket with T.C.’s hair in it.”