Polly

He’d treated himself to a comfort-size tub of Häagen-Dazs ‘Cookie Dough Dynamo’ which he had no intention of sharing with Dominic, no matter how starving his brother might be, how hard he might plead, how temptingly he might bribe. Currently, the tub was at the bottom of the plastic bag; Max could feel it because he was holding the bag next to him as he waited by the whirring passport machine. He looked at his watch and then at the store’s clock and estimated he had been faffing around, gambling and posing, for at least fifteen minutes since paying for his goods. He added on another ten minutes since he had plucked the ice-cream from the freezer cabinet and placed it with relish in the then empty basket.

Still the machine rumbled and clicked and though he looked up the chute he could see nothing. He sat down, alongside a cackle of old ladies, on the orange chairs provided by the store.

Nothing for it, I’ll have to salvage what I can.

He took the ice-cream tub from the bag and gave it a gentle squeeze. It yielded ominously quickly to his touch. He eased the lid off easily and pulled back the film cover, licking it meticulously. Slowly, he licked at the goopy surface of the ice-cream. Actually, it hadn’t melted much at all. But enough, all the same, to warrant him lapping at the softer parts.

‘Like the cutest puppy,’ Jen Carter, bearing witness to the whole episode while she waited in the queue, said to herself.

As Max was waiting for the machine to blow-dry the photos which had finally appeared, a blonde woman, lean and too tanned for this time of year, approached him.

‘Looks like you could use one of these,’ she said in an American accent, offering him a Maryland cookie. He looked at her bewildered.

How can biscuits help with drying photos?

‘Sorry?’ he said, a quick glance at the machine to see that the blow-drying was still in operation.

Come on, machine.

‘For your ice-cream?’ said the woman, tapping the tub with the biscuit packet. ‘Like, in place of a spoon.’

‘Right, right!’ Max responded, a little embarrassed, glaring at the machine to hurry up. He’d recently read an article about supermarkets being hotbeds for ‘singles in search of sex’ and was increasingly worried that there were ulterior motives for this woman and her cookies. The machine was silent. Thank God.

My hands are full; bugger and damn!

‘Here, let me,’ the woman offered.

‘No, no,’ rushed Max, ‘honestly.’

Too late.

She had the photos. Though she pretended not to look, she’d have seen the one of him pulling his monkey face. And the one below of his wide-eyed theatrical pout. In a glance.

‘Er,’ Max stumbled, ‘thanks, right, yes, thank you. Fine. They’re for my girlfriend. She’s in America.’

‘My home, my country,’ sighed the woman, clasping hands (and the photos) to her breast and smiling.

‘Yes,’ said Max, inadvertently clapping eyes on her breast, ‘Vermont.’

The woman’s smile fixed itself and then dropped. She scoured Max’s face and he found himself rooted by a pair of very blue eyes.

‘Vermont?’ she gasped, ‘you wouldn’t be—?’ She let the sentence hang. England sure was small – but not that small, surely.

Max’s eyes alighted on cat biscuits, tinned salmon and condensed milk visible in the woman’s plastic bag.

Buster.

‘You’re not—’ he stopped. They stared at each other, searching for some further clue.

‘I’m Jen Carter,’ she laughed, eyes dancing while her brow twitched becomingly.

‘Good Lord!’ Max chuckled, shaking his head and grinning back, ‘I’m Polly’s Max.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘I do,’ he assured her, ‘I am.’

They shook their heads and then shook hands.

‘Well well,’ Max said, handing Jen the ice-cream while he restored order to his shopping bag.

‘Can I tempt you,’ Jen asked, ‘with Polly’s spoons? You want to eat up your ice-cream back at the apartment? Check the place over? Say hi to Buster?’

What an offer. Of course he did.

Aha. Is autumn to be a season of trysts? A helluva fruity mess? A little bit of harmless swinging? Mixing if not matching? Musical affairs? Bed jumping and wife swapping? But no one’s married here. Yet. Does that make it any less significant? Easier? Does that make it right? Or just not as wrong?

Hold on, I thought these four characters were besotted with their true partners? Fenton and Fyfield. Miss American Pie and her hunk of Chip. It might be an interesting notion in terms of our tale’s plot – but what of the potential chaos in our characters’ lives? We know these people. The thought wouldn’t enter their minds, would it? Or if it did, if it crept in, it would be banished at once, of course. Or, if not quite at once, it would be considered carefully – and then rejected defiantly. Surely.

NINE

While Jen cursed autumn for dressing the pavements in a lethal cloak of sodden leaves and for giving her a stuffy cold, Polly praised the fall frequently each day for its stunning blaze of cool fire. She was rarely without a smile or a spring to her step and her delight and her energy were infectious. Trudging across Hampstead Heath in its October livery of russets and browns was one thing, but jogging or cycling or sitting – just living – in Vermont, in a landscape which boasted every possible hue of red, orange and yellow was something else entirely.

‘Forget Keats!’ Polly told her senior class, ‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”? I hardly think so. Don’t take any notice of him – he never came to Vermont, you see. But if he had, class, how do you think he would have described it? Anyone? Don?’

‘Er, “season of pumpkin and palette of fire”?’

‘Good! Laura?’

‘“Trees clad the colour of passion; sun slumbering till spring”?’

‘Super! Kevin?’

‘“Fall: the sweep of flame that is the swansong of the maple.”’

‘Terrific! Gosh, look at it out there – come on, let’s spend the remainder of the lesson outside composing odes.’

The Bench, Hockey Pitch

19th October

Darling Max,

My class are composing odes to the fall so I thought I’d do the same but in letter form to you. I’ve told the seniors to forget Keats – do you think that very wicked? But most of them are eighteen years old, so I’m sure they can handle such an order! I won’t tell the juniors to do so as they’re far too impressionable, and I can’t instruct the freshers and sofs because I doubt they know who Keats is. I think the seniors feel liberated, relieved in some way – given carte blanche to shake off the spectre of hallowed literature, to praise nature in whatever terms they choose. They’re picking some excellent ones too.

As you know, I don’t believe in God, but I have to credit and thank some thing; whoever, whatever. As the fall has taken hold, it is as if some divine, huge power is laying their hand over the land in a slow, magical sweeping. Initially, just the fingertips of some of the leaves on a few of the trees were touched with crimson. Within a week, every tree had a flourish of copper or brass amongst the remaining green – as if a whole branchful had been given a celestial handshake. Now the maples are cloaked in incredible swathes of colours from the highest yellow to the deepest maroon; so vivid and bright that I don’t know whether to weep or wear sunglasses. No mists, no mellow fruitfulness; instead an amazing clarity, crystal-clean light and a clear breeze. This land is rich indeed, for the leaves are made of gold, of rubies, of garnets. Ho! Sorry to prattle on in such syrupy terms, but I really have fallen under the spell of this place.

The only drawback is the Rodin Syndrome. Now that I have experienced the fall in Vermont, I fear any other autumn anywhere else will surely seem second-rate and mediocre. Rather like all other sculpture once the work of Rodin is known.