Fire and Hemlock (35 page)

“I saw,” Leslie said. “I was coming along behind those cobwebs, but you were talking about me, so I didn’t call out. That’s how I got the ambulance so quick. I went back out the front way. To tell you the truth, I thought he might have been even worse hurt than he was.”

“He – he—” Polly began again.

“Needn’t have got hurt at all,” Leslie said, “if he’d stayed put. They were both after
you
, weren’t they? Must have been programmed like robots.”

“Yes,” said Polly. She had been trying to tell herself that Mr Leroy had done his usual thing of injuring both Polly and the quartet in one go, but she had not convinced herself this time. She knew Leslie was quite right.

They stared at cricket a while. “Something’s going on,” Leslie said at length, in an injured way. “I don’t understand about Tom. He kept coming into our shop, Mum said. And she said each time he came, my Uncle Tom hid out the back until he’d gone. Now, why would he do that? Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against Tom. I like him – even though he had no business warning me off Mrs Leroy like he did just now. Really angry he was, about that.”

Polly sighed. “He used to be married to Laurel. Leslie, he does know.”

“Ah,” said Leslie. “Then in that case he’s bound to think she’s bad news, isn’t he? I thought there was something.”

Granny came down then, and they had tea. Ann did not ring until two hours later, around the time Leslie was uneasily saying he would have to get back for Roll Call. “Tom’s all right,” she said. “They stitched the cuts and seemed to think it looked worse than it was. So they gave him injections and things and let him go – he refused to stay in overnight anyway. They told him he’d have to stop playing for at least a week, but he won’t hear of that either. He says if Sam could play after he ran him over, then he can record on Tuesday. We’ll have to see how he is then, I suppose. Anyway, not to worry. We’re all at Mary Fields’ place at the moment – she’s being really good with him, considering. I don’t think Tom’s stopped swearing once since we got here.”

“Well that’s that, then,” said Leslie as he got up to go.

Which was just how Polly felt too. There was a sort of flatness and finality to everything. Her jet of misery burst through the flatness like a drowning flood. She floated in it like a corpse for nearly a week. She could not even talk to Fiona because Fiona was too ill to be disturbed.

Seb came round the next Saturday while Granny was resting. Polly did not feel like seeing him, but it was not easy to tell him that. She suggested they go out for a walk, or round to Nina’s – anything not to be alone with Seb. All Seb did was to throw himself on the sofa and grin languidly at her. That meant he wanted her to go over there and be kissed, and she did not want to. “Oh, come on!” he said.

It made Polly feel she was being mean. “I’m not in the mood,” she explained, trying to sound kind.

Seb sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I hear old Tom copped it,” he said.

“What!”
Polly said.

“Didn’t a piece of the scenery fall on him at Middleton Fair?” said Seb.

“Oh yes,” said Polly. “But – isn’t he all right, then?”

“Fit as a fiddle – cello, I should say,” Seb said cheerfully. “Last heard of making a recording in London, so my informant tells me.”

Polly felt empty – stupid – with relief. “What informant? Who tells you about Tom all the time?”

“My father does,” said Seb.

Polly took herself by surprise by suddenly, violently, needing to know everything now, at once, at last. “Yes, your father keeps tabs on Tom the whole time, doesn’t he? Why, Seb?
Why?
”

Seb shrugged. “How should I know? Jealousy maybe.”

“It can’t be!” said Polly. “I know it can’t be, or he wouldn’t do something to me every time I so much as see Tom. And he does, Seb – you know he does. That can’t be out of jealousy. So why
is
it?”

“No idea,” said Seb, yawning a little. “I expect it must go back to something I was too young to know about.”

Polly cried out in frustration, “Well, can’t you guess even?”

Seb turned to look at her in astonishment. “You
do
want to know, don’t you? I’m afraid I haven’t a clue. If you really want to know, why don’t you ask old Tom? I should think he knows all right.”

“
He
won’t say,” Polly said resentfully.

“I told you he was obstinate,” said Seb. “But you must know how to get round that. There are ways and ways of asking, aren’t there? If you really want to know, you have to ask him the right way – make it impossible for him
not
to answer somehow.”

At this, Polly felt such blinding relief and gratitude that she was almost willing to go over to Seb and be kissed. But Seb swung himself up, saying he was not in the mood now, and they went for a walk instead.

And she did ask Tom, Polly knew, about a month after that – a month of hesitating and guilt and misery such as she had never known. It was an awful time all round. Fiona was still ill. The chicken pox had given her shingles and she was ill most of that summer.

Polly was thrown back on Nina’s company, and she no longer enjoyed being with Nina very much. Granny caught a bad cold. And Ivy telephoned to say that Ken was acting very secretively and she thought he was deceiving her.

“Oh, not
again
, Mum!” Polly said angrily, out of her misery.

“Yes – again,” said Ivy. “It must be destiny or something. I didn’t realise at first, because Ken’s so quiet, but do you know—”

“I didn’t mean that,” Polly said. “This is the
third time
, Mum!”

“I know,” said Ivy. “I did think third time lucky and I was bound to get a little happiness this time, but—”

“Mum!”
Polly nearly shouted. “Have you thought? Maybe it isn’t poor old Ken who’s wrong. Have you thought it may be
you?
”

Ivy made an incredulous, angry noise and put the phone down.

“And it
is
you,” Polly said into the whirring afterwards, before she hung up too.

The jet of misery, from being a flood, became a waterfall that month. Inch by inch, the strong rapids pushed Polly down. She fought the whole way, clinging, struggling, grasping at slippery thoughts, hooking her fingers desperately into ideas. She tried to stop her slide by consulting Nina.

“There’s something I ought not to do,” she said to Nina. “But if I don’t do it, I won’t understand something enough to be any good to someone. Do you think I shouldn’t do it?”

“Wow!” said Nina. She gave the rich chuckle she had cultivated to replace her giggle. “If you mean anything like I think you mean, why not? Where’s the harm? What’s wrong with finding out things?”

That was nearly enough for Polly. Not quite. She had a feeling Nina was probably talking about something else. As the last desperate ledge to cling to, she read the quartet’s book,
Tales from Nowhere.
She had not read it before, because her misery made her unable to concentrate on anything else.

But there was not the least thing in the book anywhere to help Polly. She enjoyed it, but that did not help. Sam’s stories were grotesque and far-fetched and pathetic, about some sad, twisty monsters. Ann’s were direct and spine-chilling, two ghost stories. One of them had been called ‘Fire and Hemlock’, Polly was sure of it now. Ed’s two were both SF. The first was about Martians and the other was the one called ‘Two-timer’, about the man who altered his past and ended up with double memories. Polly thought that was less good than any of the others.

Tom’s were both about the Obah Cypt. He seemed to have got obsessed with that, Polly thought. The first was a funny story which reminded Polly of the giant in the supermarket. The Obah Cypt, in this, was a thing like a coat hanger with the owner’s name on it, which kept turning up in unlikely places and getting the owner into trouble, in spite of his attempts to get rid of it, until it eventually interrupted a Royal Occasion and the Queen ordered it burned. In his second story the Obah Cypt was much more sinister. It was an evil thing, but nobody knew what it was, and it was never seen. Polly could hear Tom’s voice as she read it and kept thinking of his badly typed letters. That story pushed her finally off her ledge. She made up her mind to take Seb’s advice. And she did.

But what on earth had she done?

Four years later Polly sat on the edge of her bed and took a bewildered look at the book as it now seemed to be. Only the cover design seemed to be the same. The title was different, the stories were different, and the writers were six people Polly had never heard of. She turned to the blank pages at the front, and there were no signatures written there. The only story which seemed to have been in both sets of memories was that one—She turned to the list of contents. ‘Two-timer’ she read, by Ann Abraham.

Ann Abraham!

“But that one was Ed’s!” she cried out. “I remember – or do I?”

Slowly she turned to look over her shoulder at the opposite wall, where she had, she thought, once knocked in a nail to hang her stolen photograph on. The nail was there, all right. It held a dangle of things she had won for Athletics at school. There was no photograph. She went up close and looked, and there was not even a mark that a small oval frame might have made.

She dived for her old wooden box where her papers were kept and began pulling them out feverishly. The photo might be in there. There ought to be a folder too, containing five painted soldiers and some childish paintings of bulging monsters. There should be two more photographs, of herself and Granny looking like witches and squinting in the sun. There ought to be a map of Nowhere, lots of half-finished stories of Hero and Tan Coul, one fat finished one, and letters, postcards, letters. There ought to be a badly typed letter about a giant in a supermarket.

None of those things were there. Polly scrabbled through wad after pile of paper, flinging each to the floor around her as it proved to be wrong. Stories there were, and letters from Fiona, Dad, Aunty Maud. A whole bundle of letters from Seb.
My Pol,
said the top one,
You are being unreasonable. I only said you were bound to meet other men when you go to Oxford, and I want to be sure of you. Why not let’s get engaged?…

Polly threw these aside with an impatient noise and scrabbled on downwards. A Level certificate, O Levels, babyish stories, quite good drawings, quite bad ones, a photograph of the school doing
Twelfth Night,
school reports, her birth certificate. And she was down at the bottom, gathering grit under her fingernails. Nothing.

She sat back on her heels among the heaps of paper. “I
know
they were there! What happened?” But when had she last looked? Not for some time before her hidden memories stopped. The last time must have been when she thought she had dug out the stolen photograph and hung it on the nail. Nearly five years ago. To make sure, she ran back through the plain, single memories of the last four years. Fiona’s astonishing escapade came first, then O Levels, A Levels, and herself and Fiona doing Oxbridge entrance together. Meeting Seb. Her first year at college. She had simply thrown papers in on top and never looked. Now there seemed no sign that Thomas Lynn had ever existed. Yet even in this plain, single time there were things she could only have learned from him, like her dread of being sentimental, or hating to lay a book open face downwards. She had thought she had learned these things from Granny, and she had been wrong for four whole years. What had happened? What had she done to make him vanish so completely?