Fire and Hemlock

“Lynn,” said Mr Lynn. “She’s very good company, Mrs – er?”

“Whittacker,” Granny said grimly. “And of course I’m very grateful if you kept her from mischief—”

“She was quite safe, I promise you,” said Mr Lynn.

Granny went on with her sentence as if Mr Lynn had not spoken. “—Mr Lynn, but what were you up to there? Are you an art dealer?”

“Oh no,” Mr Lynn said, very flustered. “These pictures are just keepsakes – for pleasure – that old Mrs Perry left me in her Will. I know very little about paintings – I’m a musician really—”

“What kind of musician?” said Granny.

“I play the cello,” said Mr Lynn, “with an orchestra.”

“Which orchestra?” Granny asked inexorably.

“The British Philharmonic,” said Mr Lynn.

“So then how did you come to be at this funeral?” Granny demanded.

“Relation by marriage,” Mr Lynn explained. “I used to be married to Mrs Perry’s daughter – we were divorced earlier this year—”

“I see,” said Granny. “Well thank you, Mr Lynn. Have you had lunch?” Though Granny said this most unwelcomingly, Polly knew Granny was relenting. She relaxed a little. The way Granny was interrogating Mr Lynn made her most uncomfortable.

But Mr Lynn remained flustered. “Thank you – no – I’ll get something on the station,” he said. “I have to catch the two-forty.” He managed somehow to haul up one cuff, and craned round the bundle of pictures to look at his watch. “I have to be in London for a concert this evening,” he explained.

“Then you’d better run,” said Granny. “Or is it Main Road you go from?”

“No, Miles Cross,” said Mr Lynn. “I must go.” And go he did, nodding at Polly and Nina, murmuring goodbye to Granny, and diving through the house in big strides like a laden ostrich. The front door slammed heavily behind him. Mintchoc came back in through her cat-flap in the back door. Granny turned to Polly.

“Well, Madam?”

Polly had hoped the trouble was over. She found it had only begun. Granny was furious. Polly had not known before that Granny could be this angry. She spoke to Polly in sharp, snapping sentences, on and on, about trespassing and silliness and barging in on private funerals, and she said a lot about each thing. But there was one thing she snapped back to in between, most fiercely, over and over again. “Has nobody ever warned you, Polly, never to speak with strange men?”

This hurt Polly’s feelings particularly. About the tenth time Granny asked it, she protested. “He isn’t a strange man now. I know him quite well!”

It made no impression on Granny. “He was when you first spoke to him, Polly. Don’t contradict.” Then Polly tried to defend herself by explaining that she’d thought she was following Nina. Nina began making faces at Polly, winking and jerking and twisting her food-filled mouth. Polly had no idea what Nina had told Granny, and she saw she was going to get Nina into trouble as well. She said hurriedly that Mr Lynn had taken her out of the funeral into the garden.

Granny did indeed shoot Nina a look sharp as a carving knife, which stopped Nina’s jaws munching on the spot, but she only said, “Nina’s got more sense than to walk into people’s houses where she doesn’t belong, I’m glad to see. But this Mr Lynn took you back indoors again, didn’t he? Why? He must have known by then that you didn’t belong.”

Granny seemed to know it all by instinct. “Yes. I mean, no. I told him,” Polly said. And she knew it had somehow been wrong to go back into the house, even if she had not made it worse by rearranging the pictures.

She thought of Laurel’s scary eyes, and the way Mr Lynn had been careful not to explain to Laurel who Polly was, and she found she could not quite be honest herself. “He needed me to choose the pictures,” she said. “And he gave me this one for my own.”

“Let’s see it,” said Granny.

Polly held the picture up in both hands. She was sure Granny was going to make her take it back to Hunsdon House at once. “I’ve never had a picture of my own before,” she said. Mintchoc, who was a most understanding cat, noticed her distress and came and rubbed consolingly round her legs.

“Hm,” said Granny, surveying the fire and the smoke and the hemlock plant. “Well, it isn’t an Old Master, I can tell you that. And Mr Lynn gave it you himself? Without you asking? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Polly. This was the truth, after all. “It was instead of a medal for life-saving.”

“Very well,” Granny said, to Polly’s immense relief. “Keep it if you must. And you’d better get that old dress off you and some lunch inside you before it’s time for tea.”

Nina was on pudding by the time Polly was ready to eat, and Mintchoc came and stationed herself expectantly between them. Mintchoc had got her name for being frantically fond of mint-chocolate ice cream, which was what Nina had for pudding. But Mintchoc liked cottage pie too.

“It was a very respectable funeral,” Polly explained as she started on her cottage pie. “Boring really.”

“Respectable!” Granny said, plucking Mintchoc off the table.

“And I like Mr Lynn,” Polly said defiantly.

“Oh, I daresay there’s no harm in him,” Granny admitted. “But you don’t go in that house again, Polly. What kind of respectable people choose to get buried on Hallowe’en?”

“Perhaps they didn’t know the date?” Nina suggested.

Granny snorted.

Later that day Granny and Nina had helped Polly bang a picture hook into the wall and hang the picture above Polly’s bed, where she could see it when she lay down to sleep. It had hung there ever since. Polly remembered staring at it while Nina clamoured to be told about her adventures. Polly did not want to tell Nina. It was private. Besides, she was busy trying to make out whether the shapes in the smoke were really four running people or only people-shaped lumps of hedge. She put Nina off with vague answers and, long before Nina was satisfied, Polly fell asleep. She dreamed that the Chinese horse from one of Mr Lynn’s other pictures had somehow got into her photograph and was trampling and rearing behind the fire and the smoke.

3 Abide you there a little spaceAnd I will show you marvels three (#ulink_821778f2-fb11-599b-a95b-45dd29e6d154)

THOMAS THE RHYMER

Polly forgot to take the picture home with her when she went back from Granny’s. Granny did not remind her. Thinking about it nine years later, Polly wondered if it was not really because Granny disapproved of Mr Lynn giving it to her. On the other hand, it could have been that Granny knew, as well as Polly did, that home was not a Fire and Hemlock sort of place.

Home had bright, flowered wallpaper with matching curtains. Polly thought, going to bed in her own room, that pulling the curtains was like pulling the walls across the windows.

When she did remember the picture, quite late that night, she opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it. Mum was in one of her moods, stony-quiet and upright, and the slightest thing would send her off into one of her long grumbles. Polly knew this, although Dad was not there to say warningly, “Quiet – you’ll have Ivy in her discontents again!” Dad had gone away on a course, Mum said. So Polly shut her mouth and did not raise an outcry at forgetting her picture.

School started again. Everybody was talking about fireworks and bonfires, except Nina, who had to be different. Nina went round claiming that she was being followed by sinister strangers. Nobody knew whether to believe Nina or not, least of all Polly.

“You mustn’t speak to them,” she said, thinking of what Granny had said.

“No fear!” said Nina. “I’m going to tell my Dad about them.”

That made Polly wish her Dad would come home. She missed him. She spent a lot of time with Nina that week, round at Nina’s house. Mum was still in the mood, not speaking much and not much company. Nina’s house was much more fun. It was all lined with varnished wood inside and smelled of cooking spices. Nina’s toys were allowed to lie about on the floor, just anywhere. Nina had cars and Action Men and guns and Lego and dozens of electronic machines. Most of the batteries were dead, but they were still fun. Polly loved them.

The irony was that Nina much preferred Polly’s toys. By Friday evening she was sick of playing with cars. “Let’s go round to your house,” she said. “I want to play with your sewing machine and your dolls.”

Polly argued, but Nina won by saying, “I shan’t be your friend if we don’t.”

They set off. Nina’s Mum shrieked after them that Nina was not to be a nuisance and be back in an hour. It was getting dark by then, and streetlights were coming on. Nina’s glasses flashed orange as she looked over her shoulder. “I am being followed,” she said. It seemed to please her.

By this, Polly understood that it was a game of Nina’s. She was glad, because the idea of being followed in the dark would have been very frightening. “How many are there of them?” she asked, humouring Nina.

“Two,” Nina said. “When it’s the man, he sits in his car pretending to be someone’s Dad. The boy stands across the road, staring.”

They walked on until they came to the pillar box on the corner of Polly’s road. Nina knew Polly did not believe her. “I told my Dad,” she said, as if this proved it. “He took me to school this morning, but the man kept out of sight.”