Fire and Hemlock (25 page)

Polly closed the door on David yelling that he did not send Polly that book. She went upstairs and tried to read it. But she was too upset. The book shook in her hands and she could not focus on the pages. The only thing she could seem to do was to get out all Mr Lynn’s longer letters and go through them again, first to assure herself that Mr Lynn indeed existed, and then to lay them all out as proof to Ivy. She knew Ivy would come up and talk to her. She was dreading it.

She was right. Ivy came in about two hours later. She had been crying and was carrying a letter.

“Polly,” she said, “how could you do this to me?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Polly said sulkily. “Mum, look at these letters. Mr Lynn sent them. He
is
real.”

Ivy picked a letter up and glanced at it. “Typed,” she said. “Anyone can type a letter, and it was you that typed them by the look of all those mistakes.” Before Polly could protest that there was no one she knew with a typewriter, Ivy dropped the letter back on Polly’s bed. “Tell all the lies you like in your own mind,” she said. “It’s when you tell them to me that it matters. You’ve been secretive with me. You’ve destroyed my happiness with David. You’ve made him secretive too. I can’t have it, Polly. You’ll have to leave.”

“Leave?” said Polly. She did not understand.

“Leave,” said Ivy. “It’s my only chance of mending things with David. I had this letter from your father a while ago. Read it. He wants you to live with him and Joanna in Bristol. So there you’ll go as soon as school ends. You and Reg should see eye to eye. He believes what he wants to believe too.”

Polly took the letter Ivy held out. At first she could focus on it no more than she had been able to focus on
The Golden Bough.
It swam about behind blinding, rebellious thoughts. The same thing was happening to her now that had happened to Dad two years ago. She was not secretive. Neither was Dad. But Mum was not the kind of person who listened when you told her things. So you ended up not telling her, and when Mum realised, she was hurt. And when Ivy was hurt, she shut you out completely.

While Polly was thinking these things, some parts of the letter steadied enough for her to pick out phrases:
a right to see my own daughter… very welcome in Bristol… try living with us at least…
Well Dad seemed to want her anyway.

It was settled that Polly should go to Bristol the first day of the Easter holidays. Polly packed her clothes and books in boxes for Ivy to send after her. She seemed to be packing all the rest of term, living in a house she no longer really lived in, going to a school she no longer really belonged to.

She kept looking at things and thinking, This is the last time I’ll listen to Nina discussing bras, or This is the last time I’ll have a French lesson here, or This is my last Indoor Athletic practice. She felt empty with waiting for her new life to start. But every so often, bitter thoughts spurted up into the emptiness. Everyone seemed to have hurt her, including Mr Lynn. He just thinks of me as a sort of mascot, she found herself thinking. I don’t know why I bothered to have a row with Mr Leroy about him. She was glad to be leaving. Almost the only thing she was sorry about was not going on with her new friendship with Fiona Perks.

Ivy, stony and distracted, hurried Polly to the station on her way to work. Polly was carrying the things she would need for the first week in her old duffel bag. Among those things were her stolen photograph and the folder with the five soldiers and Mr Lynn’s letters in it. She was not sure any longer that they were valuable, or quite why she wanted them, but she did not want to leave them in case Ivy threw them away.

The train went early, and Ivy had forgotten to go to the bank the day before. She had to buy Polly’s single ticket to Bristol with her credit card. “Have you got any money?” she asked Polly irritably.

“Not much,” Polly said.

“Well, you won’t need much, except on the train,” Ivy said. “Your father will be paying for you after this.”

Polly cried out, in a sudden spurt of anxiety, “But, Mum! Suppose he doesn’t want me!”

“Then you can both make the best of it,” said Ivy. “You’re not coming back
here.
” She put Polly on the train and went away without waiting to see if Polly found a seat.

It was a long journey. Polly had to change trains at Swindon. By that time she was so hungry that she bought a roll in the station buffet there. It cost nearly all the money she had. Polly had not realised food was that expensive. She ate the roll and went on reading
The Golden Bough
. She read
The Golden Bough
the whole way. At first, as the train drew out of Middleton, she had thought she felt too nervous to concentrate on it. But as soon as she read the beginning, with its strange story of the man pacing round the sacred grove waiting for the man who would kill him and take his place, she was gripped. From here the book went on a voyage of discovery through beliefs and stories Polly had never imagined before. She read as absorbedly as she had read Mr Lynn’s first parcel of books: through ‘Artemis and Hippolytus’, ‘Sympathetic Magic’, ‘The Magical Control of the Sun’, ‘Magicians as Kings’, ‘Incarnate Human Gods’, ‘The Sacred Marriage’, and it was Swindon. Then to ‘The Worship of the Oak’, ‘The Perils of the Soul’, ‘Tabooed Things’, ‘Kings Killed at the End of a Fixed Term’. Polly was about to begin on ‘Temporary Kings’ when she looked up to find she was in Bristol Temple Meads.

Dad was waiting for her outside the ticket barrier. Polly had a moment of shock when she realised his hair had gone white, nearly as white as Granny’s. Dad must have felt some of the same shock too, because he stared at Polly as if he was not quite sure it was her. But almost at once he smiled his well-known crinkled grin and wrapped her in a sinewy hug. He had gone thinner. Polly could feel.

“Ye gods!” he said. “You look almost grown up! Did you have a good journey?”

“I read,” Polly said, and showed him the book.

Dad made a face. “Heavy stuff,” he said. “Come on. We have to get a bus. Joanna uses the car to go to work in.”

On the bus Polly expected Dad to ask her about the row with Mum, or at least to want her to tell him about school. But he asked nothing at all. Instead he chatted, very amusingly, telling her things about Bristol. They had a strange accent there, he said, and the oddest thing about it was the way they put an “l” on the end of any word that ended in a vowel. And he told her a joke about the Bristol woman who called her three daughters Eva, Ida, and Norma – only, because of her accent, they came out as Evil, Idle, and Normal.

Polly laughed. All the things Dad said made her laugh, but the effect of Dad’s talk was to make Polly feel unfamiliar and shy, as if she was a visiting stranger whom Dad was politely entertaining. Well, he hasn’t seen me for years, she kept telling herself. And there was no doubt Dad was glad to see her. “It’s marvellous to have you here at last!” he said every so often. “Joanna’s going to love it.”

They got off the bus at a place where there were big, square-built houses, made of blocks of pinkish stone, all rather rich- and elegant-looking, where they walked about for a while. Polly thought at first that they were walking to the house where Dad lived, but after they had been along the same road twice, she realised they were just walking about. Dad talked happily, and they walked until it got dark and Polly started to shiver. At length Dad looked at his watch.

“I think Joanna should have recovered from work now,” he said. He took Polly to one of the square stone houses further up the street.

Dad and Joanna had a flat that was the top floor of the big stone house. Dad unlocked the door and showed Polly into a high-ceilinged hallway with clean, clean painted walls and a carpet like very clean porridge stretching away into the distance. Ornaments – painted spoons, marble eggs, shells – were placed in careful clusters on white tables along the hall, or hung in patterns on the walls.

“Oh. By the way. Take your shoes off,” said Dad. “The carpet.”

He took his own shoes off. Polly did the same and padded after Dad in her socks along the porridge carpet, feeling as strange as you did going to the house of a new friend at school. At the end of the corridor there was a white-floored kitchen which had green enamel lights, trailing green indoor plants and a white, white scrubbed table in the middle. Joanna was standing at the table, pouring hot water out of a bright red kettle onto tea in a Chinese pot. She raised her smooth, dark head to look at them, and Polly at once felt completely untidy. Everything about Joanna was beautifully neat.

“Joanna,” said Dad. “This is Polly.”

“How nice to meet you at last, Polly,” Joanna said. She said it in a cool, social sort of way, as if Polly had only dropped in for a cup of tea. But then, Polly reminded herself, she and Joanna
had
never met before. She thought at first that Joanna was actually surprised to see her – maybe she had expected a smaller girl – but after a minute or so Polly decided that the look of surprise was to do with the way Joanna’s eyes were wider open than most people’s. Joanna’s dark, pretty eyes almost strained open most of the time, as if Joanna was perpetually trying not to raise her eyebrows at something. “You’ll need the bathroom,” Joanna said to Polly. “Reg, the tea hasn’t infused. Don’t pour it till we get back.”

She showed Polly the bathroom. It was a wonderful, palatial room of gold and grey, lined with mirrors, with a grey carpet on the floor, grey-and-gold bath, grey towels, gold soap. Even the toilet paper was grey, stamped with golden flower patterns.

“What a beautiful flat this is,” Polly said awkwardly.

“Yes I like to keep things nice,” Joanna said. “Reg wants a cat, but I’ve told him we can’t. Cats make almost as much mess as children do.”

Polly started to assure Joanna that she would try very hard not to make a mess, but Joanna was gone by then. Polly used the beautiful grey loo and hoped she had used the right one. There was another thing that looked like a loo, which Polly thought was really a duvet – no, bidet, that was the word. She looked anxiously round in case she had messed anything, and went back along the porridge carpet to the kitchen, where Dad and Joanna were making polite, public sort of conversation over scented tea. Polly did not like the tea, but she politely did not say so.

Everything in the flat was neat and beautiful except the spare room. That had brooms in it, cardboard boxes, the ironing board and an old red couch that had to do as Polly’s bed. This seemed to trouble Joanna terribly. “I hope you won’t be too uncomfortable. We haven’t organised in here yet,” she said. “We don’t go in for visitors much.” And she raced around, laying out three mauve towels of different sizes, and making up the couch with lilac-striped sheets and matching blankets, while Polly hung uselessly about asking if she could help. “Oh no,” Joanna said. “This is a thing your hostess should do.”

She kept saying the same thing when Polly asked if she could help get supper. Joanna did it all, with neat, precise movements and much careful folding of tinfoil over things. Polly hung round, watching, not knowing what else to do. “We’re vegetarians,” said Joanna. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Polly did not mind what she ate. She started to say so, then thought it sounded greedy and turned it into a mumble instead. And when supper was ready, she could not help thinking, No wonder Dad’s gone so much thinner! But of course she did not say so. Dad seemed happy enough, smiling and laughing from Joanna to Polly, but after a while Polly could not help wondering at the way Joanna and Dad never said anything personal to one another. It was all polite talk, as if they were entertaining Polly. Perhaps they did not like to say anything that mattered in front of her until they were used to her.