Polly

‘Hold me, Max.’

‘Would passenger Polly Fenton, flying Virgin Atlantic to Boston, please make her way to the departure lounge.’

‘You have to go.’

‘I know. Hold me a moment longer.’

‘This is the final call for passenger Polly Fenton, flying Virgin Atlantic to Boston, make your way to the departure lounge immediately.’

‘Got everything?’

‘Um, not sure, shall we check?’

‘You have everything.’

‘I do?’

‘You do.’

‘I do. OK.’

‘Off you go.’

‘Bye bye.’

‘Bye bye.’

‘Bye.’

Max watched her go away from him.

God, she can’t.

‘Polly!’

He ran towards her. Someone was examining her passport.

Wait!

‘Polly!’

They were handing her passport back to her.

Oh bloody hell, what am I? – what the? – Jesusgod.

‘Polly?’

Her tear-streaked face turned to him.

They regarded each other, Polly biting her lip in a futile bid to keep tears at bay. She wanted to smile for Max. She couldn’t if she was clamping on to her lips. Tears and a smile were much better than neither of either. She lavished both on him. He cupped her face in his hands and pressed his lips against her forehead. Then he held her at arm’s length and took hold of her wrists.

Jesusgod, I can’t believe I—

‘Marry me.’

There!

Pardon?

Polly was stunned and far too choked to speak her reply. The passport officer cleared his throat and addressed her, rather ominously, by name. Polly wiped her nose on Max’s shirt. He took her left hand and slipped something along her fourth finger. The orange plastic neck-ring from the small bottle of fruit juice. Scratchy and ridiculously oversized. Exquisite.

‘You’ll have a proper one when you come home. Promise.’

TWO

When John Hubbardton died in 1906 at the age of eighty-nine, he had a minor river and, consequently, the small town along its banks named after him. That the town’s school, which he had founded in 1878, should also be renamed in his honour was a foregone conclusion. Lower South River thus became Hubbardtons River, the town of Lower South was renamed Hubbardtons Spring and the Lower South School became The John Hubbardton Academy. The mountain, in whose embrace all three lay, was also given the man’s name. By the 1920s, river, town, school and mountain were known universally as Hubbardtons. One lived in Hubbardtons, one’s kids were at school at Hubbardtons; summers were spent canoeing Hubbardtons, winters skiing Hubbardtons. We’ll discover the town and the river alongside Polly when she arrives, maybe the mountain too, if she learns to ski, but we can have a sneak preview of the school now, for Polly herself is re-reading her information pack. She is two hours into her journey.

The John Hubbardton Academy is a prep school. Not, you understand, in the British sense (small boys learning rugger and round vowels in preparation for Eton); Hubbardtons is a high-school, a boarding-school, ‘proud to provide a rounded preparation for college’, as proclaimed on page one of the glossy brochure.

‘Here at the John Hubbardton Academy, we’re one big family,’ commences page two. There are 240 students and 45 full-time teachers. When John Hubbardton founded the school 118 years ago it was, by necessity, co-ed. The school went temporarily all-male in a perverted stance against the 1960s, but extended an apology and an invitation to females a decade later. Currently, two thirds of both students and teachers are male. But no one is complaining.

‘We work and play, and we learn and live. Together. And we have 150 acres to do it in.’

It certainly looks picturesque from the brochure. Whether the buildings are genuinely old, or just old-style, is irrelevant; they are structurally pleasing and set attractively within grand grounds sympathetically landscaped. The superb backdrop of the Green Mountains completes the picture. Seemingly seamless; from the brochure photographs at least.

Polly slips the folder into the seat pouch in front of her, in between the safety instructions and the duty-free catalogue.

Poor old Jen Carter, whoever she may be. Do you know, I’m not sure that BGS is a fair trade for the JHA. I can’t believe Max proposed!

In 1820, when Belsize Park sat just outside London, a thoroughly modern building was built for the purpose of overseeing the education of young ladies residing locally. The establishment was duly named Belsize Ladies’ College. An insignia was designed (an open book with a lit candle propped, somewhat precariously, at its centre) and a motto was chosen (Cherchez la femme).

Until the turn of the century, sixty pupils were attended to by six teachers in this one building. 1900 saw the first expansion of the school with the purchase of the four-storey house next door, and similar shrewd acquisitions followed in the early decades. Now, there are 300 girls and twenty-seven teachers squeezed into a coterie of old houses around the original school building; ingeniously interconnected by a series of corridors, covered walkways and iron staircases. No one is quite sure when the college for ladies became a school for girls but the institute is known now as Belsize Girls’ School. The insignia and the motto remain.

The grounds at BGS comprise two concrete rectangles over which the layout of a pair of netball courts are superimposed in red lines; two tennis courts, likewise, in blue. An oak tree, protected by an unquestioned ancient law, stands defiant, slap in the middle of the larger rectangle. It makes for interesting reinterpretations of the rules of netball and tennis. Winter and summer terms, the girls can choose to play hockey and cricket respectively on the manicured sports fields owned by the nearby public boys’ school. Needless to say, the popularity of these two sports vastly outweigh tennis and netball. In the spring term, there is a choice between pottery classes in the cellar of the sixth-form house, or choral society at the boys’ school. Unsurprisingly, you never heard so many fine voices.

Polly has taught English at Belsize Girls’ School for five years. She landed the position the day after she had forlornly sent out her seventeenth job application, the morning of the day when Max first asked her out. Something divine was intervening and she welcomed it. She still feels truly blessed.

I hope this Jen Carter Person will be happy living my life for me – or at least a part of it – while I’m gone.

Polly wriggles her feet into the red socks that came free with the flight and places the complimentary ‘snooze-mask’ over her tired eyes as, indeed, the passengers either side of her have done. Three hours to go.

Oh, for Marmite on toast.

Think about Max. Marriage. Marmite. Mmm!

‘Pollygirl set sail OK then?’

Dominic handed his brother a glass of his incomparable home-brew which he had poured on hearing Max’s car return. Max nodded, made an affirmative noise in his throat and accepted the beer with unbridled gratitude, downing half the pint swiftly and with eyes closed as if it was some elixir. Or in the hope, at least, that the fast-working potency of the beverage might lead him to believe that Polly had not gone at all.