Fire and Hemlock (12 page)

Lov Polly.

The letter was now vast. Polly had to steal one of Mum’s big envelopes for it, because there seemed no way she could fold it to fit into one of her own. She posted the huge letter quite boldly, the next time she went for fish and chips. By this time she was sure that Seb had been fooled when she pretended to promise not to see Mr Lynn. She did not think he would bother her again. And she was right in a way. It was a long time before she saw Seb or Mr Leroy again.

When school started, Polly began training seriously to be a hero.

It was not easy, and it caused a number of upheavals. The first was with Nina. Nina might have been good at ranting and pretending, but she was not athletic. She ran out of puff after once round the playground. When she found Polly had joined the Athletics Club, she was horrified. “What do you want to do
that
for?” she said.

Polly had not been so pleased with Nina since the Christmas play. “To train my muscles,” she said coldly.

“Then stop,” said Nina, “or I won’t be your friend any more.”

“All right. Don’t be,” said Polly.

It gave her a savage, free feeling to say it and then turn away, leaving Nina gaping. She made friends with two girls who were good at running instead. Nine years later Polly could not even remember their names. But she remembered very clearly how annoyed she was with her muscles. Polly tested them every night by trying to lift her bed in the air, all four legs at once, and the most she could ever get off the floor was three. Then Mum would shout to know what she was doing.

Besides, Polly said to herself, it’s not just strength that heroes need. They need courage and good skills and timing. They need something to make the adrenaline really flow. These were all things she had gathered from watching sport on television. Ivy spent a lot of time around then sitting in front of the television, just sort of staring. Polly got to watch many things that Ivy would have turned off when Dad was there.

Polly did the logical thing and asked the boys who played football in the lunch hour to let her play too. They were surprised, but they agreed quite politely. And once Polly had got the rules straight – which took her a week, during which time she played on both sides together and scored fourteen own goals – she proved to be a fast runner and a ferocious tackler, and they let her go on. Her knees were perpetually skinned and grey, and the roots of her hair grew dark with mud from heading the ball. Her only worry was that she enjoyed it so much that she was not sure it counted as training.

But it was a peculiar thing to do. Mira Anderton, the huge girl who was the school bully, took to standing beside the game and jeering at Polly.

Polly was frightened at first. Then she straightened her shoulders and reminded herself that bravery was what training was all about. She was not going to be scared of Mira. She supposed she had better fight Mira at once and get it over. Then she had second thoughts. Heroes do not fight for themselves, but for other people. I’ll wait until she does something to someone else, Polly thought. Then we’ll see.

She caught Mira pulling the hair of a little kid on the way home that afternoon. “Right!” shouted Polly, and attacked.

It was a wild success. The truth was that Mira was so astonished that a peaceful girl like Polly should suddenly go for her that she gave up almost without a fight. The little kid ran away. Mira went over backwards into a puddle, and the only thing she managed to do to Polly was give her an accidental slap in the face as she fell. Polly’s nose wept some drops of liquid. She wiped it off and looked at it as she walked away. It looked like blood to her, but it could have been adrenaline, and she was on the whole pleased at the way her training was coming on.

The trouble was, Mira had a position to keep up. She planned revenge. Two days later Polly was flying about the football part of the playground in the lunch hour as usual when she heard screams. Not just any screams either, but the yells of somebody being really hurt. She looked. She saw Mira had another girl down on the ground and was kneeling on her, banging her head on the asphalt. A fat leg in a grey sock waved feebly in time with the screams. Polly left the game and sped to the spot.

Mira got up and went for Polly as she came. Polly had just time to realise that the screaming girl was Nina, before battle was joined. It did not go on for long. A dinner lady noticed, in spite of everyone standing round to hide the fight, and the two were pulled apart after only a minute. But in that short time Polly had torn Mira’s skirt off her and made Mira’s nose bleed, and Mira had hit Polly in both eyes. Mira did some expert whining and said it was all Polly’s fault. Polly and her two black eyes were marched to the Headmistress.

All the teachers had noticed the change in Polly this term. The Headmistress thought she knew the reason. So, after the usual telling-off – which Polly stood through as stony as Ivy – she said, “What’s the matter with you at the moment, Polly? You used to be one of our nicest girls. Is there something wrong at home you’d like to tell me about?”

“No,” said Polly. It was something like the way she had deceived Seb. She meant she did not want to tell the Headmistress.

“Then why are you doing it?” said the Headmistress.

This question seemed to call for the truth. Heroes have to be honourable. “I’m training to be a hero,” Polly explained. “The adrenaline has to flow.”

“Does it indeed?” said the Headmistress. “Well, I suppose Nina
is
your friend. You mustn’t listen to all the silly ideas Nina has, Polly.” And Polly had to listen, in silent indignation, to another lecture, this one about Nina leading her astray. At the end of it the Headmistress said, “I think I’d better talk to your mother, Polly. Will you please give her this letter as soon as you get home.”

This was only the first embarrassment. Polly came away from the Headmistress to find that the rest of the school regarded her as a heroine. This is nothing like being a hero, which is inside you. This was public. People asked for her autograph and wanted to be her friend. She came out of school at the end of the afternoon surrounded by a mob of people all trying to talk to her at once. It made Polly’s head ache. Each of her black eyes was going bump, bump, bump, and swelling in spite of the stuff Miss Green had put on them. And Nina was waiting at the gate. Nina’s eyes looked odd too, because Mira had broken her glasses, but she was beaming with friendship and gratitude.

“Oh Polly, you were so brave! I was so thankful!”

Somehow Polly did not have the heart to explain. It was the first sign of an unheroic soft-heartedness in her which she later learned was part of her, and which no amount of reproaching herself seemed to get rid of. It caused her to go home with Nina, as she used to before, but she was really rather bored. Still, she stayed for tea, because it was rude not to, and came home quite late.

Ivy looked round from the television to see Polly with two black eyes, clutching a bent and dirty letter from school. “Oh, Polly! What have you been up to
now
!?”

It occurred to Polly, as she handed the letter over, that Mum always seemed to expect her to have been up to something. It annoyed her – not for now, but for all the other times in the past when she had been quite innocent. She was just going to protest about it, when her attention was caught by the programme Ivy was watching – or, rather, sitting in front of.

It was an orchestra, playing furiously, the way they do when the music is shortly going to end. The picture was sliding about, across banks of men in black coats and white bow ties, and one or two ladies in black dresses, picking up rows of stabbing violin bows, somebody’s hands banging a big drum, and the face of a man blowing a pipe sideways. Polly’s heart, and the rings round her eyes, banged like the big drum. She was suddenly absolutely sure that this was Mr Lynn’s orchestra. She held her hair back and leaned forward to see whether the camera would slide over him too.

“Oh Polly!” Ivy wailed, reading the letter. “What got into you?”

“Nothing,” Polly said gruffly, staring at the television. The picture slid to the conductor waving both arms strenuously. Back to violins working like high-speed pistons. To rows of shiny trumpets. To fingers nimbly working keys on an oboe. And back to the drum. It was going to end any second, and they had not shown any cellos at all.

“But the Headmistress says here,” said Ivy, “that she thinks you’re not happy.”

The picture slid sideways, broadening and retreating for the last chords, to show the full orchestra, banked up black and white and all hard at work, and just for an instant the screen was full of men sitting behind cellos. Mr Lynn was there, quite near the front, sawing with the rest. Polly had a full glimpse of him, neat and colourless, the way he had been at the funeral, before he melted into the big view of the whole orchestra playing the last note.

“I’m perfectly happy,” she said. “I’m training to be an assistant hero. I
have
to fight.”

“Don’t give me your nonsense,” Ivy said wearily.

The screen was showing the audience now, clapping. It was obviously a big occasion. They were in evening dress too. The announcer was saying, “Tremendous applause here from this gala audience for this performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, given by the British Philharmonic Orchestra…” The camera dwelt on rows of clapping people, and lingered across two that Polly knew. One was Laurel, wearing a green, gauzy dress. She was turning as she clapped to say something to the man beside her, and this man had bags of dark skin under his eyes, almost as black as Polly’s were at the moment. Mr Leroy.

“It’s not nonsense,” she said. “I think I may have to rescue someone.”

“Oh for goodness’
sake
, Polly!” Ivy reached forward, in exasperation, to turn the television off.

“Don’t turn it off yet!” Polly shrieked.

Ivy looked at her in surprise. “But it’s nothing interesting.”

She turned back and switched the set off. But Polly’s interruption had delayed her just long enough for the titles to start rolling up over the audience. THE BRITISH PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA… EUROPEAN TOUR… ONE: HOLLAND… Polly had time to read this far before the picture zoomed away into nothing at the back of the screen. She did not mind. She had seen enough. Mr Lynn was not in England. He had not got her letter. And Laurel and Mr Leroy were not letting him out of their sight. She felt too miserable to care what Ivy said.

“Now, listen, my girl!” said Ivy. “I’m not having this from you. You’re just like your father. He’ll make up a lie and then he’ll make himself believe it – I’ve watched him do it. And I’m not having you grow up that way. I want the
truth
. What was that fight about?”

Polly shrugged and said the thing Mum was most likely to believe. “Mira Anderton got Nina down and banged her head on the playground.”

“Oh I see,” Ivy said, mollified. “Why didn’t you say so? Well, I’d better go and tell that to your Headmistress, then.”

It made Polly feel an utter liar, but it served to get her out of trouble.

Term went on. Her black eyes got better. She decided she had perhaps been training a bit too hard, and she went at it more cautiously after that. She gave up trying to pick up her bed, but she still played football because she liked it so much. And she remained much more popular at school than she felt she deserved. She had troops of friends. One advantage of this was that she did not have time to go on being close friends with Nina. Another advantage was that Polly did not have time to be as miserable as she knew she felt underneath.

Ivy seemed to be trying to pull herself together. She surprised Polly by getting a job in the office of Middleton Hospital. Polly had to come in and get her own tea and do the shopping on Saturdays. Polly quite enjoyed that, though the house seemed very quiet.

Just before school broke up for Easter, a puffy brown bag of a parcel arrived for Polly. Ivy had left for work when the postman brought it. Polly nearly made herself late for school. It was from Mr Lynn. Inside was a ball of cotton wool, and inside the cotton wool were five rather elderly-looking plastic soldiers. Polly did not mind their old look, because she saw at a glance they had been much loved. Each of them had been carefully painted in the correct colours for the uniforms. Since two of them were Highlanders with tiny plaid kilts, Polly could see the painting had been very difficult to do. Wrapped round them was one of Mr Lynn’s badly typed letters.

Dear Hero,

Yoru lettter was waiting for me when I got back from Ureoep – sorry! – Preuoe – sorry! – the Contintinent. Im glad you liked the bokos so much, and very sorry about your disaponitment over the dollshouse. I had a front-sorry!-fort once. Iv’e no idea where it went, but I still seem to have these soldiers from it. I hope you will like them. Sorry there are’nt more.

What with caves and other heroes, there is a great deal for us to dsicuss. Can you suggest a day when I can call for you and take you out for the day? I am free the first weeek of April.

By the way, Tan Coul has mananaged to change his horse into something else. You will see what I mean when I see you.

Yrs, T. G. L.

Polly was free the first week in April too. Holidays started then. She sat straight down to write and tell Mr Lynn so. Then she looked at the clock and found she had to go to school instead. The day seemed endless. But she was home at last, and the letter was written and posted. The soldiers were put in a place of honour in Polly’s room. And the day was endless again.