Fire and Hemlock (17 page)

Polly surprised herself by screaming at Ivy. “You’re horrible! You’re hard! You’re unforgiving! He
wants
to come back and you won’t let him!” Ivy looked round at her, holding the door open, and looked for a moment as if she was going to smack Polly. Then she simply slammed the door in Polly’s face. “I hate you!” Polly screamed to the footsteps going away behind the front door. That surprised her too. She stood for a while and wondered if it were true. It did not seem to be, to her relief. Just something you shout, she thought. I’m glad.

The lodger came about a week later. He was a fattish, cheery man, full of energy, called David Bragge, who worked on the
Middleton Star
. He had been divorced too, Ivy said, and he knew how it felt. Polly was shy of him. David made jokes all the time and Polly never understood them.

She was shy of his pink, hairy arms – which she saw a lot of, because David sat watching television with his shirt-sleeves rolled up whenever he was in – and she was shy of his loud, cracking laugh. Ivy made her shyer still by making a great fuss of the lodger and cooking him huge meals.

“We shall be happy now, you’ll see,” Ivy said. Ivy did seem happy. David persuaded her to go down to the pub with him most evenings, and she seemed to like that. Polly was glad. She had a peaceful, empty house to do her homework in, which made it a good thing all round.

At school the fortune-telling craze was dying away at last. Everyone was rehearsing hard for the Carol Concert. Polly stayed late for choir practice two evenings a week. One evening she came latish out of the school gates with Nina, to find herself being waited for. A familiar figure was stamping its feet outside, looking rather withered with the cold but very glad to see her. Dad. Polly set out to run towards him, paused, and then walked up to him with both hands held out. She felt rather ridiculous, but that was the way it took her.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?” Dad asked, taking her held-out hands.

“You know I am,” Polly said. She was very conscious of Nina. Nina stood and stared a moment and then walked off with some other girls. When Nina had gone, Polly could smile. Dad smiled too, his well-known merry smile. He looked just the same, except that his eyes were more crinkled. “Have you come to meet me?” she asked.

He nodded. “Let’s go home. You’ve got a key, haven’t you?”

“Oh thank goodness!” Polly said. “It’s been so strange!”

They walked home hand in hand. Dad was obviously glad to see her. He kept looking at her and smiling. “You have grown, Polly.”

“Of course. What did you expect?” Polly said happily. “Why are you coming home? Has Joanna Renton gone off you?”

“Well you could say that,” he said, sounding rather uncomfortable. “I didn’t know you knew about her.”

“Only a bit,” Polly assured him, as if that made it all right. She was so happy that she had gone quiet all over. She felt like someone listening to great chords of music that were not to be interrupted by speaking. They walked most of the way home without saying a word, even though Polly’s mind was crowded with things she wanted to tell Dad. She could tell him all that later. As they turned into their street, she said, out of the quiet, “Now you’re back we don’t need David Bragge, do we? Will you tell him to go?”

Dad half stopped walking. “David? Is
he
there?”

They went on more slowly, and Polly felt more thoughtful than quiet. It was the first sign she had had that David Bragge was rather more than just a lodger. Still, she thought, it was bound to be all right now. She unlocked the door and they went indoors. Dad, now she saw him in the hall light, looked rather thin and threadbare. She could see one or two grey hairs glinting on his head, mixed into the thick curls Mum used to call Dad’s halo.

Mum was just coming downstairs. She stopped like a statue when she saw them. “Oh no!” she said. “Isn’t that just like you, Reg! Sneaking in on Polly’s coat-tails! What do you want this time?”

“What do you expect,” Dad said, quite mildly for him, “when you won’t answer any of my letters? Ivy, I told you I want to come back. Can’t we talk about it at least?”

“No,” Ivy said, and began to come downstairs like a statue walking.

Polly felt Dad move to back away and manage to stand still. “What’s wrong with you, Ivy?” he said. “You’ve just shut down on me. You can’t do that. You have to talk.”

“All right,” Ivy said stonily. “Talk if you must. Go in the living room and wait.”

“Why?” Dad, and Polly too, glanced at the living room. The television was on in there, and they could see one of David’s pink arms as he sat watching it.

“Because I’m going to phone your mother to come and take Polly away first,” Ivy said implacably. “I’m not having her here for you to get round. Go on in.”

Dad went into the living room, looking determined and a little nervous. He looked almost out of place there, Polly thought in some surprise. As Ivy went to the phone and dialled Granny’s number, she heard David say, with one of his laughs, “An attack of the prodigals, eh, old son?”

“Something like that,” Dad answered as he sat down. “None of your damn business, is it?”

“Oh, you knew?” Mum said to the phone. “You would! Yes, of course he’s here. And yes, I do want you to fetch her now. She thinks he’s the bee’s knees, and I’m not having it!” She put the phone down and turned to Polly. There was an unusual look on Ivy’s face, as if she pitied Polly. “You shouldn’t let people play on your feelings, my love,” she said. “In this world you get taken to the cleaners for having a soft heart. All he wanted was to get in this house, you know.”

“Yes,” Polly said dismally.

After what seemed an age, during which everyone simply waited, Granny arrived and took Polly away. Polly spent the rest of the month at Granny’s and did not go home again till after Christmas. She also stopped being friends with Nina. Nina came up to her at school the next day and said, “You’ll get into trouble. You’re not supposed to go off with strange men.”

“I didn’t,” Polly said. She could not think what Nina meant.

“Yes, you did,” said Nina. “Twice. Once with the man at the funeral and then again last night.”

“That was my Dad last night!” Polly said.

Nina was astonished. “It never was! He looks quite different!”

“He – does –
not
!” Polly shouted. She turned and walked away from Nina. But that was only annoyance, like the way she had shouted at Ivy. The real thing that made her stop speaking to Nina was the way people kept coming up to her all day, saying, “Is it true what Nina says – you come from a broken home?”

“Broken right in half,” Polly replied to each one. “There’s a hole in the middle where the garden is. You get rained on trying to go upstairs.”

She walked home to Granny’s trying not to cry. She lay in bed that night, staring at her
Fire and Hemlock
picture, and decided she would definitely climb the wall into Hunsdon House as soon as term was over. She was not quite sure what this had to do with anything, except that it did. She hoped Mr Leroy would catch her doing it. She would have liked to go for him the way she had gone for Mira Anderton. She wanted to fight someone. But Granny remarked that the house was still shut up. “They can afford to go away to the sun,” she said. “Pots of money – rolling in it.”

The sun was shining the first day of the holidays, when Polly went down the road to the big gates of the house. It was a frosty sun, melting bleakly from streaks of hard grey cloud. The big leaves of the laurel bushes overhanging the drive of Hunsdon House were fringed round the edges with frost. Polly blew on her gloves to encourage herself, spat for luck, and ran at the wall where she had measured it in the summer. It was as easy as climbing wallbars. She was up in a second, unsticking her gloves from the frost at the top of the wall, and swinging over and down. Crunch. Into dead leaves under the trees. She crept crunching forward to the front of the house.

There it was, shuttered, sad and majestic. Even so, Polly at first did not dare come out from among the trees, in case there was someone inside it.

The Perry Leroys were clearly rich enough to have the garden looked after while they were not using the house. Someone had pruned the roses and cut back the lavender hedges beyond. It made the garden seem empty and much smaller. Unless, Polly thought as she tiptoed through, it was simply that she had grown. She looked back at the blind yellow pile of the house. That still seemed big, although the garden had shrunk. A mere few steps brought her to the empty concrete oblong that should have been a pond. Remembering that something had seemed to happen to that pond before, Polly stood for a while, watching it. But it remained a frosty oblong of concrete. She went past it, through further shrubs, until her way was blocked by the wire netting round a tennis court. Now she had a choice: to go back or to cross a slope of frozen lawn towards the house.

Polly hesitated. Crossing the lawn really would bring her out into the open. She stood in the bushes and watched the house carefully. And it was empty. Lived-in houses give you a sense of life, and Hunsdon House was dead, dead as the bare twigs of the pruned roses. The part facing her was a French window with three steps leading up to it. At the bottom of the steps were the two pillars, each holding a vase. And the window beyond was shuttered and dead like all the others.

“Come on,” Polly said out loud. “Behave like a trainee-hero for once!”

She walked up the lawn towards the steps with the two vases as if she had a perfect right to be there. Under her feet the frozen grass made slow, wheezing munches, like somebody chewing ice cubes. Funny, Polly thought as her feet munched. She had remembered the steps with vases as leading up to a plain door, but they clearly led up to a shuttered window. The vases, when Polly reached them, still stood as she and Mr Lynn had left them. NOW said one, glittering with frost. HERE said the other. By stretching her arms to their very widest, Polly could rest a glove on each one. She gave each an experimental push. Then a harder pull, the other way. It was no good. She could not budge them. Either they were frozen at the bottoms or Mr Lynn was a good deal stronger than Polly. Frustrated by this, Polly went between the vases, past the hidden HERE on the left and the hidden NOW on the right, and up the steps to the shuttered window. She put her glove on the window’s frosted handle and turned it with an angry push. It opened.

Polly recoiled. “I wonder they don’t have vandals!” she said. “But I suppose they’ve locked the shutters inside.” To see if this was true, she opened the window wider and shoved at the tall wooden shutter beyond it.

It moved under her hand, folding inward a foot or so. Polly stood very still. The house felt dead, she was sure. There was nothing from the garden except a sparse twitter of birds – though when Polly looked round, she was dismayed to see her long line of footprints, green in the white grass, leading straight to the steps like a pointer. “So they’ll know I was here anyway,” she said, and slipped sideways inside, round the shutter. She left the window standing ajar. She did not want to be locked in the house.

She was in the room where the Will had been read. She knew it by the sharp, furry smell of the carpet. When her eyes got used to the dim crack of light from the window, she could see all the comfortable chairs she remembered, but not in lines now. They were arranged to make it a room for gracious living. The door to the hall was open. Polly tiptoed across to it. She felt rather silly tiptoeing, but she could not walk properly, although she could tell the house truly was empty by the smell and the feel. It was quite warm. That was what gave the carpet the sharp, unused smell. Clearly the riches which paid for the garden to be done could easily afford to keep the heating going all winter too.

The hall was a brighter dimness. Light lived in the shiny floor and in the white paint of the jointed flights of stairs going round the space and back again. And there were the Ali Baba vases, with their own faint fizz of light from the patterns on them. Polly avoided them rather – she knew they were empty, of course, but they were still big enough to hold a person – and tiptoed to the archway of the dining room. But it was too dark in there and, besides, what Polly wanted was to explore the rooms up the jointed stairs. She sped there, and up the stairs, in a light scudding of feet.

The room at the first landing was a dark hole. It felt bare. Polly could tell that the stacks of pictures had been taken away. She scudded on, up and round a joint, to the next landing, and gently opened the door there. A study of some kind, she thought. Books, leather chairs, a neat desk swam there in the twilight. But there was a bed too. And, as Polly’s eyes adjusted, she picked out posters on the walls. The Who, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and a spiky picture of an unreal landscape labelled Michael Moorcock. A boy’s room. Polly realised it must be Seb’s. She took her head out and closed the door, knowing she was spying.