Fire and Hemlock (33 page)

Then on Saturday morning Fiona rang up to say she had gone down with chicken pox. “But that’s something only children get!” Polly cried out in her dismay.

“If it is, it missed me,” Fiona said snappishly. “And you might show a little sympathy. I itch all over and I feel lousy. My face looks
awful
! I’m sorry about the date, but he’d take one look and pass out. Ask Nina.”

Polly could not endure the thought of Nina making a pass at Ed, or gushing about the sexiness of Mozart. She told herself that Nina was bound to be busy anyway and went alone.

The Mile-and-a-Half was right on the edge of Middleton, almost out in the country. It sat at the back of a forecourt that was overshadowed by a mighty old tree.

The quartet were sitting at a table in the shade under the tree. Tactful of them, Polly thought. She had been all prepared to pretend to be eighteen.

Before she reached the table, she realised there were six people sitting round it. While she took that in, she was noticing that the quartet were all very brown and healthy-looking after Australia. Tom, lounging back in his chair, had new glasses and his hair was bleached quite fair from the sun. His green shirt made him look particularly brown. The fifth person, sitting beside him, was Mary Fields. The sixth, sitting with his back to Polly, was, astonishingly, Leslie.

“Leslie!” Polly said, coming up behind him. “Is there
anywhere
you don’t turn up?”

Leslie turned and grinned. There were welcoming cries of “Hello, Polly!” Ed sprang up, very trim and curly, and found her a chair. Sam unfolded upwards, beaming, like a long brown streak. Ann jumped up and hugged Polly. Ann’s eyes were very clear and bright, and she had a dark pink dress on that showed she was the brownest of the four. Leslie advised Polly to try a pork pie. Mary Fields smiled and said, “Hello, there!” By the time Polly was settled with a glass of fruit juice, two pork pies, a cheese roll, crisps, pickled onions and a cherry on a stick, she was feeling really happy. Really she was, she told herself. Tom had done nothing but smile briefly from beside Mary Fields.

“Drink the juice up quick,” Ed told her. “That’s nothing but a disguise for an illegal act. We’re celebrating.”

“We’ve got two things to celebrate,” said Ann. “Here’s the first.” She opened her handbag and passed Polly a paperback book from it.

“And the other thing is that we’ve been asked to make a record!” Sam said. He was too pleased with the news to wait any longer.

I’m glad it wasn’t worse, Polly found herself thinking.

“Fame at last!” said Ed. “Or a bit, anyway. And some money.”

“That’s marvellous. I
am
glad,” Polly said, and meant it. She looked at the book. “Good heavens!”

It was called
Tales from Nowhere
by Ann Abraham, Edward Davies, Thomas Lynn and Samuel Rensky. The cover was a smoky bluish green, with pink hints of fire to it, and across the front was the gaunt tree shape of a dead hemlock. “Who chose this cover?”

“The publisher did that,” said Ann. “We just made up the stories.”

Sam and Ed interrupted one another to tell her how they had done it. “We had to spend such hours travelling, or sitting about waiting, you see, that we got into the way of telling one another stories to pass the time. Tom started it. No, wasn’t it Ann? Anyway, it
was
Tom who said we should write them down. So we wrote them down, and read them aloud, and told one another where they stank, and rewrote them, and Tom typed them. Then Ann went behind our backs while we were in New York and sent them to a publisher. We all nearly dropped when they said they’d print them!”

They smiled at Polly proudly while she flipped through the book. “I’d love to read it,” she said. “Can I borrow it?”

“That one’s your copy,” said Tom. It may have been the first time he spoke to Polly. “We saved it for you.”

“On condition I don’t put it face down on the floor – I know!” Polly said, and managed to meet his eyes for the first time. “Thanks. Thank you all so much.” They had written their names in it, she found, now she looked properly. She was touched. It was an honour.

“Now the celebration,” said Ed. “Everyone’s glass empty? Good.”

He and Sam fetched a couple of bottles of champagne out from the shade under the table. Leslie’s eyes met Polly’s, awed. Neither of them had ever had champagne. The most Polly had ever had was a couple of glasses of red wine at a Christmas party. In fact, four years later, as she brought this up from her memory, she thought it was a marvel she behaved later on as well as she did. She remembered Ed bending over one cork and Sam’s long, curving thumbs forcing at the other. There were two swift, loud pops. Corks soared up into the tree. Sam and Ed secretively foamed champagne into Polly’s and Leslie’s empty glasses, and then turned and filled everyone else’s openly. The other people on the forecourt stared rather.

They drank toasts – to the record, the book and to Australia. By that time Polly’s head had gone a little muzzy. Probably Leslie’s had too, because he remarked that champagne seemed to act quickly. Polly remembered Ann passing round snapshots of Australia. Some of them were quite hard to focus on.

“The blurred sideways ones without heads are all Tom’s,” somebody said.

“I used to do a lot of photography,” Tom said ruefully. “I seem to have lost the knack.”

Mary Fields, who no doubt felt a little left out, Polly thought, blurrily charitable, took over the conversation then. She had been to Australia as a nurse, a few years back. She had tried to buy a horse there and someone had cheated her. Leslie and Polly were left to one another. For a while they simply smiled and lay back in their chairs. Polly remembered looking up at the big leaves of the tree and tracing the heavy skeleton of branches among them. Soaring, she thought. Like music made solid.

“How
did
you come to be here?” she asked Leslie.

“Tom asked me,” said Leslie. “To look after you.”

“I don’t need looking after,” Polly said, stabbed with annoyance. “Besides, you hardly know Tom.”

“Know him quite well,” said Leslie. “Used to come into the shop a lot – him and Mary. That’s how I got sent to Wilton. Mum asked him about schools once. He said Seb Leroy seemed happy at Wilton – what’s the tie-up between him and Seb?” But before Polly could get round to deciding how you described the stepson of an ex-wife, Leslie gave a great champagne-filled grin. “Leroy’s stepmother, now – she’s quite something!” he said, staring happily up into the tree.

“Don’t tell me you know
Laurel!
” Polly exclaimed. It rang out rather. She saw Tom glance over at them.

“Laurel asked me to tea,” Leslie said, swirling the last of his champagne smugly.

Polly’s champagne had turned into warm, thin wine. She drank it away in one long pull. “Yuk!”

And suddenly everyone wanted to leave. They were getting up, arguing where to go next. That part was very fuzzy to Polly, but she knew that the group headed by Ed and Leslie won. “It’s only just round the corner!” they insisted. Polly was preoccupied with aiming
Tales from Nowhere
at her bag. She kept missing, and only got it put away safely as they all rushed off and swept her away with them. After that, somehow, they were in a fairground.

“Of course! Middleton Fair!” Polly remembered saying. She was somewhat restored by the sharp scent of petrol and squashed grass, and bewildered again by the music battering through the sound of heavy engines. It all seemed bright and peculiar in the hot sunlight.

She found Tom beside her. “Polly,” he said. “Do you think a fairground is the best place for the two of us to be? In the light of past events?”

“Past events? Paper monsters and so on?” Polly said. A little mistily, she saw Tom nod. She had meant to behave with great dignity, but that nod assured her that they had, after all, shared a number of experiences in the past, and he knew it as well as she did. “I don’t mind,” she said. She seized his arm with both hands and hugged it. “I don’t care. I’m just so glad to see you again!”

“All the same—” he began.

Mary Fields was suddenly standing in front of them, laughing heartily. “Tom! You should see yourself! You look like father and daughter!”

Tom took hold of Polly’s hands and unwrapped them. Polly did not exactly resist, but she did not help either. “All right. We’re coming, Mary.” Mary moved off, lingering sideways, waiting for Tom. “In that case,” Tom said, pushing Polly’s hands away, “we’d better stay clear of things like the Big Wheel and the Octopus.” He moved off after Mary.

Polly followed him, not quite stopping herself making movements to take hold of him again. “Why, why, why? Tom, tell me why at least!”

Tom answered over his shoulder. “You know if you think about it.”

It was his way of running you up against silence. Polly stood where she was. Vaguely, she knew there were lines of light bulbs, red things and gold things turning, engines grinding, rifles cracking, assembled round her to the music of a brass band no one was playing. Such was her misery that she herself seemed nowhere among it all. She was no more important than the little ping-pong ball bouncing on top of a jet of water in the stall beside her.

Leslie came scouring back to find her. Tom had sent him. Polly let him seize her hand and tow her into the festivity. Pride came to her, as it had over Joanna, and she made herself violently happy, fiercely enjoying herself. It was like pushing your hand on the jet of water to hold it down. Ann went on the Big Wheel with Sam. Leslie and Ed rode the Octopus, yelling. Polly came off a roundabout and met Seb. The sky was wheeling round the dark figure, but she knew it was Seb. I think he follows me around, she thought.

“Oh hello, Seb!” she cried out, violently glad to see him.

“Hello, Seb,” Tom said from somewhere near. “Come and join us on the Dodgems.”

Someone paid huge sums of money for them all to have several turns on the Dodgems. Seb dropped out after the first go. It did not suit his dignity to be doubled up in a small red car. The rest of them drove like idiots, yelling and whooping, until the money ran out. Polly had a violent duel with Leslie. She chased him round and round the rink, with her hair flying and both of them screaming, until Leslie turned and knocked her neatly into Sam. She pursued Sam then, took time off to give Mary a hearty thump, and then went after Ann, whereupon she ended up stuck, spinning round on the spot and howling for help. Ed came and knocked her loose and she went after him like a fury. She did not go near Tom.

“Polly’s a regular Amazon!” she heard someone saying as the cars coasted to a grating silence for the last time. “I’d rather have Tom’s driving any day!”

Polly got down from the rink, a little weak at the knees, to find herself joining a laughing line, hurrying to find further enjoyments. As they streamed in and out among the stalls, Leslie shouted, “How about the Tunnel of Love?”

“No,” said Tom.

Leslie, clearly, had not been run up against Tom’s silence before. It made him blink and grunt slightly, and then turn away looking as if he did not quite know what had happened. Not that it worried him for long. Almost at once he was leading the rush towards a tall plywood fort at the end of an alley of stalls. The fort had slit windows and battlements and was painted in splashes of red and grey. A plywood Dracula stood at the entrance.

“The Castle of Horrors!” Leslie shouted. “Let’s go!”

The others, inspired by Dodgems and champagne, raced after him. Ed was shouting, as loudly as Leslie, “It’s Tan Coul’s castle! This I must see!” which made Ann double up with laughter.

Polly was behind the rest, going slower. The effort of holding down the jet of misery inside her made her chest ache. Seb caught her up from behind and put his arm round her. “There you are, Pol. Where are those fools going now?”

“To interview Dracula,” said Polly. “You come too.”

“Let’s not,” said Seb. “Let’s just you and me go in the Tunnel of Love. Come on.”

“No thanks.” Polly slithered out from under his arm. “I’m going with them. It would be rude.” Which was true, although it was just an excuse. “You come to the Castle of Horrors with me.” But Seb refused. Polly left him standing irritably in the lane of trodden grass and ran to join the others at the plywood castle.