Fire and Hemlock (10 page)

Here Polly’s fingers told her again about the figure-of-eight object she was clutching. She looked down and found it was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. She scrambled up and backed against a wall behind her, holding them very carefully. It would be awful if she broke Mr Lynn’s glasses. The horse was sliding about in the broken headlights. “Look where you put your bloody feet, you fool!” Mr Lynn said to it. It looked as if he was going to make it stand still any second.

The motorist climbed angrily out of his smashed car. “I say!” he called out in a loud, hectoring voice. “Is this your damned horse? It could have killed me!”

That set the horse off again. It became all orange, rearing panic, high on its back legs, with Mr Lynn frantically leaning on the rope. He swore at the horse, then at the motorist. “No, it is not my horse,” he added. “Get out of the way!”

The horse managed to land out with a hind foot before its front feet hit the road. The motorist bolted for his life. Mr Lynn yelled at the horse that its grandfather was a donkey with venereal disease and told it to
Come off that!
And the two of them came rushing back up the street again. They trampled round in front of Polly, with Mr Lynn practically swinging on the rope. Polly could feel waves of terror coming off the horse. She had to hold both hands, and Mr Lynn’s glasses, to her mouth to stop herself screaming this time. In front of her were huge, bent, golden hind legs, stronger than she could have imagined, and a tail that lashed her face like her own hair in the wind, only harder, smelling of burning. Someone’s burned it! she thought. No wonder it’s so upset!

The next thing Polly knew, the motorist was standing beside her, watching the horse and Mr Lynn rush away down the street. “How was I to know it wasn’t his bloody horse?” he said to Polly. “He’s behaving as if he knows it.”

“Be quiet,” Polly said. Her voice was thick from screaming. “Mr Lynn’s being a hero.”

The motorist did not seem at all grateful. “Well, he needn’t have said
that
to me,” he said.

When Polly did not answer, he gave her up and went to complain to some of the people further down the street. Polly could hear him, all the time Mr Lynn was dragging the horse to a standstill, telling someone that the horse had appeared out of the blue right in front of his car and that people shouldn’t be allowed to own wild animals like that.

The horse stood still at last, orange flecked with detergent stuff, swishing its tail. Each of its legs seemed to be shaking at a different speed. Polly could see shivers chasing up and down them as she walked gently towards it. Mr Lynn was rubbing its nose and calling it soothing bad names. “You cartload of cat’s meat,” she heard him say. “Mindless dog food. They’ll eat you in Belgium for less than this.”

Before Polly had reached Mr Lynn, people at the sides of the road began crowding forward. “That’ll be them,” someone said. “Help at last!”

The horse shivered and stamped. “Keep back, can’t you!” Mr Lynn said over his shoulder.

Everyone, Polly included, prudently stopped. Two small, worried-looking men in greasy body-warmers slipped hurriedly round the broken car and came rather cautiously up to Mr Lynn and the horse.

“Thank you, sir,” said one. “Thought we’d never catch him.”

“Kid let off a firework in his stall,” said the other.

“I thought I smelled burning,” Mr Lynn answered. The horse answered too, in his way, by putting his head down and letting one of the small men feed him peppermint. Mr Lynn passed the other one the rope.

This made it clear to the motorist and to all the other people that the horse belonged to the two little men. They crowded round – at a safe distance – and called complaints. “Wild horses like that!… Ruined my car!… Panicked the whole street… Really dangerous! Ought not to be loose!… Scared my old mother stiff… No end of damage… Police…”

In the midst of the babble Mr Lynn somehow located Polly and stretched a long arm backwards to her. Polly put his glasses into his hand.

Mr Lynn thankfully put them on. He took them off again quickly. “Can’t see a thing. All greasy,” he said. On one side of him, the motorist was trying to grab his arm. On the other, one of the little men was trying to thank him. Mr Lynn was clearly embarrassed. Polly could see sweat shining on him. “Polly,” he said. “Find the back door.”

Polly looked round. There was more movement up the street, where a police car was coming whispering to a stop. “At last! The fuzz are never here when you need them!” someone said. Polly realised that she would never get to the lawyer’s by five-thirty unless they went at once.

“This way,” she said. “Quick.” She pushed Mr Lynn round the broken car and along the empty street beyond. Everyone’s voices rose to a big babble and then faded as Polly kept on pushing Mr Lynn. “The police are there now,” she explained.

“Thanks!” said Mr Lynn. He was trying to clean his glasses on a handkerchief. “Keep guiding me, or I shall be apologising to doorsteps and lampposts. I can barely see a thing without my glasses.”

This was obviously true. Polly found she had to steer Mr Lynn round three dustbins, some plastic sacks and a bicycle. His face looked odd with no glasses and his hair hanging down in front of it. It looked longer and smoother, more like a real face. But his eyes did not look fat like Nina’s did. “How ever did you see the horse?” she said.

“It was a bit big to miss,” he said in his most apologising way. Then he added in quite a different way, “But what an extraordinary thing, though! Just after we’d been talking about my horse! You’d almost think—”

“You would,” Polly agreed. “But it wasn’t the right colour to be the Chinese horse.”

“Streetlights,” said Mr Lynn as she steered him round a doorstep.

His elbow was bony and quivering rather. Polly kept her hands on it to guide him and stared up at Mr Lynn’s bewildered, naked face. She wanted to say what she had to say before he put his glasses on again and could look at her. She took in a gasp of breath. “I didn’t help at all. I was too scared.”

“You aren’t heavy enough to have stopped it,” said Mr Lynn. “You’d just have dangled.” Polly thought that was very nice of him. He finished cleaning his glasses at the end of the street and put them on. He looked up at the street name, then at his watch, and set off again much faster, in the direction they needed to go. “If it’s any comfort,” he said, “I was scared stiff too.”

“But you did something,” Polly said, rather breathless from hurrying. They turned into another street before she got her second wind.

“How did you know what to do?” she asked. “You did know.”

They swung round another corner, with Polly sort of swirling out on the end of Mr Lynn’s arm. “Laurel taught me about horses,” Mr Lynn said.

They were opposite a small park now. CLOWNS, CLOWNS, CLOWNS!!! said notices along the park fence. Coloured lights looped in the trees. JACK’S CIRCUS, read a canvas banner over the park gate. There was music, and a smell of squashed grass and of animals. Polly could just see the orange-white shine of the big tent above the entrance booth by the gate.

“
That’s
where the horse came from!” said Mr Lynn. “I wondered how—” He looked down at Polly. “Are you all right?”

“Oh yes,” Polly said drearily.

Mr Lynn slowed down and looked carefully at Polly. “Now, come on,” he said. “You must know that when heroes do their deeds in these modern times, there has to be a modern explanation. I can’t have everybody guessing I’m really Tan Coul, can I? This circus is only a disguise.”

Polly smiled gratefully, although she rather thought that it was not the circus that was the matter with her. It was the way Mr Lynn mentioned Laurel. “Anyway,” she said as they hurried on again, “you
are
a hero. Except for swearing. That may be a disguise too.”

Mr Lynn gave his guilty cut-off yelp of laughter. It was not just the way he laughed at funerals. He always laughed like that. “Call it a symptom,” he said. “Expert heroes never swear.”

“I shall be a hero too,” Polly panted. “I’m going into training from now on.”

By the time they reached the lawyer’s, it was so late that Mum was standing in the street beside a waiting taxi. She was in such a state that she barely looked at Mr Lynn. “Come
on
, Polly!” she said. “It’s rush hour and I don’t know
what
time we’ll get home! Say goodbye,” she added as she bundled Polly into the taxi. That was all the notice she took of Mr Lynn politely holding the taxi door open for her. Polly was the one who remembered to call out “Thank you for having me!” as the taxi drove away. She was rather surprised that Ivy had forgotten to remind her to say it – usually she made such a point of it – but she could see Mum was in a real state.

Unfortunately, Ivy’s state was a silent one. Polly was dying to tell her all about tea and Mr Lynn’s flat and, above all, about the horse, but Ivy sat fenced in silence as thick as barbed wire, and Polly knew better than to try to break in. The train was so crowded that Polly had to perch on Mum’s knee, and Ivy’s mood made that knee stiff and uncomfortable.

Ivy said just one thing on the train. She said, “Well, Polly, I’ve taken a step.”

And so have I, I suppose, Polly thought with a kind of dismal excitement. I saw Mr Lynn when they said not to. But all she could really think about was the unheroic way she had screamed and crouched on the pavement and given Mr Lynn no help at all.

When they got home, instead of looking in the fridge or suggesting fish and chips, Ivy sat down at the kitchen table and talked to Polly. “I suppose I owe it to you to explain a bit,” she said, sitting very upright and staring into the distance. “I went to talk to that lawyer about getting a divorce from your father. You may well ask why—”

Polly hurriedly shook her head. She knew now why she had dreaded being told about Dad. But Ivy talked anyway. Polly listened in silence, hoping she would begin feeling honoured soon that Mum was confiding in her. She told herself she felt honoured, but in fact she mostly felt shocked and awed by the way tears came and went in Ivy’s eyes without quite ever falling out and running down her face.

“You know what he’s like as well as I do, Polly. Reg has no sense of reality. Money goes through his hands like water. And if I presume to say anything, he just laughs it off and spends more money on a present to soothe me down. Presents!” Ivy said bitterly. “I want a relationship, not presents! I want happiness and sharing – not just two people living in the same house. That’s all we’ve been for years now – two people living in the same house. Your father’s so secretive, Polly. On top, he’s all smiles and laughs, but if I ever ask him what he’s really thinking, it’s ‘Oh, nothing particularly, Ivy,’ and not a word more will he say. That’s not right, Polly. He’s got no right to keep himself to himself away from me like that!”

This was already beginning to sound like one of Ivy’s usual discontents. Polly had long ago learned to dread them. Later in her life she learned to dread them much more. This time, as usual, her feelings were hurt on Dad’s behalf. She had to give up trying to feel honoured and tell herself she was being considerate instead. As Ivy talked on, she found herself thinking that Dad was
not
secretive. He just expected you to know what he was feeling by the things he said and did. It was Mum who kept herself to herself, locked away in moods.

“I know I have these moods,” Ivy was saying, a long time later. “But what can I do when I’m being rejected at every end and turn? It gets me that way. I know when I’m not wanted. It didn’t use to be that way when Reg and I were first married. We shared then. But not now.”

Polly listened, still trying to be considerate, and kept vowing privately that she would never, ever lock herself away from anyone. When she looked at the clock, she was surprised to find it was past her bedtime and Ivy was still talking. By now it was sounding just like her usual discontents.

“Well you know me – I’ve slaved and worked to make the house nice, gave up my job to have it all perfect. And I do think in return the least he could do is not walk muddy feet all over the carpets, and shut drawers after he’s opened them, and tidy up a bit sometimes. Not a bit of it. When I mention it – and I’m not a nag, Polly – he laughs and says I’m in my mood again. Then he gives me a present.
Then
what does he do? He goes straight from me to that Joanna Renton of his!”

This was new, Polly thought dully. This must be what Dad had done.

“Joanna’s not the first either,” said Ivy. “But I was a fool before and didn’t keep track of what he was doing.”

“Is – is he with Joanna Renton now?” Polly broke her long, long silence to ask.

“Yes,” Ivy said. She sounded tired. She too looked at the clock. “Oh, is that the time? Are you hungry at all, Polly?”

“No,” Polly said considerately, though she was rather. “I had a big tea.”

“Good,” said Ivy. “I haven’t got the energy to think of food, somehow. You hop along to bed, Polly. And remember when you get married not to make the mistakes I did.”

“I don’t think I will get married,” Polly said as she stood up. “I’m going to train to be a hero instead.” But she could tell her mother was not listening.