“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.
5
O see you not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few enquires.
THOMAS THE RHYMER
Dad came back two days later. Polly had just got home from Nina’s and she was in the hall when she heard his key opening the door. She rushed and hugged him. Dad greeted her with his usual half-shout and great grin, and hugged her back, just as usual. Polly felt the arms hugging her quivering ever so slightly. It reminded her of the quiver she had felt in Mr Lynn’s arm when she pulled him down the street after catching the horse.
The quiver stopped when Ivy came and stood in the living-room door, looking at them with her stoniest expression. Polly felt Dad’s arms all hard as he looked up and said, “Now, what’s all this, Ivy?”
“I’ve been to a lawyer,” said Mum.
“You haven’t!” Dad said blankly, and then tried to hide the blankness with a grin.
“That’s right, laugh it off,” Ivy said. “As usual. But I have. And I’ve told Polly all about it too. I’ll thank you to let her go and stop subverting her. Come here, Polly.”
Dad’s arm clenched round Polly and he made a strange noise. It was a jeering groan, and a maddened shout, and the growl you make before hitting someone, and the sound you make trying not to cry, all in one. “Subverting!” he said. “Just what have you been making her think of me?”
And Polly was suddenly being pushed back and forth along the hall while her parents shouted at one another. The first push was Dad trying to use Polly like a shield or a hostage to get past Ivy into the living room. But Ivy stood barring his way to anywhere but the hall and put her arms round Polly protectively. Dad shouted that she was using Polly against him like she always did. Mum pushed Polly back to Dad. Back and forth Polly went, feeling so numb and stupid that she almost wanted to laugh, in spite of the way they were screaming.
In the midst of it the back door banged without anybody but Polly noticing. Granny was there, upright as the Queen Mother and stiff with anger, and taking everyone’s attention, even though she was only a head taller than Polly.
“Polly’s coming with me,” Granny said, “until you’ve had your shout out. I’m not taking sides, and it doesn’t matter to me what you settle, but Polly’s not coming back until you have. Get your things, Polly.”
Polly thought Dad seemed relieved. Ivy drew herself up angrily. “Reg, did you tell her to come here and poke her nose in?”
“I phoned to see how she was,” Dad said defensively. “That’s all.”
“You—!” began Ivy.
“Shut up!” said Granny. Her voice banged like someone hitting a biscuit tin. “Reg is always glad for someone to do his dirty work for him – I’ll give you that, Ivy – but he didn’t ask me to come. I told you, I just came for Polly. When I’ve got her, I’ll go. But not until.”
Granny, naturally, won. Ten minutes later she and Polly went out of the front door with a duffel bag of Polly’s clothes, Granny marching and Polly creeping rather.
“I know, I know,” Granny said. “I’m not a saint, Polly. You’ll have to learn that.”
Saint or not, Polly thought there was a kind of holy calm about Granny’s house, smelling of biscuits. She stayed there a week, and went to school from there. It meant a longer journey and not seeing so much of Nina, but it seemed worth it. Polly sat at Granny’s kitchen table and painted Christmas cards for everyone she knew, including Mr Lynn. Then she painted several big pictures of Tan Coul fighting a dragon and overcoming a wizard, with herself dressed as a boy, rather small, down at one side.
While she painted, Granny bustled quietly about and talked to Polly about things she had done as a girl. Granny had been what she called “a bold, bad girl”. She had done a number of things Polly thought were really much more daring than gate-crashing a funeral. But she was surprised that Granny did not talk about Dad when he was a boy, the way she usually did.
“That would be taking sides,” Granny said, “and I said I wouldn’t. Besides, I’m not sure I didn’t spoil your father rotten. I’m not making the same mistake over you. Off to bed now, and no arguing.”
Polly had the same bedroom she had shared with Nina. And there was her Fire and Hemlock picture hanging over her bed. She lay and looked at it, with Mintchoc curled up and purring on the pillow by her neck. Mintchoc had a smell too, but not of biscuits. It was a faint, clean scent, like talcum powder. Polly stroked her and looked at the shapes coming out of the smoke in the picture. They really were four men, rushing to put out the fire before the whole field caught. If Polly screwed her eyes up, she could sometimes see a fifth, smaller shape, a bit to one side, behind the flames. She liked to think it was herself as Hero. There was no doubt in her mind that the bigger shapes were Tan Coul and his three friends. If she went on staring with her eyes squinched, she found she could see the misty shape of the Chinese horse too, rearing amid the vapour that was rising all round the four men. The horse and the smaller shape disappeared when she knelt on her bed with her face right up against the picture, but the four men were always there.
Polly spent some time thinking what Tan Coul’s friends might be like. When she was tired of painting, she wrote Mr Lynn a letter about them. Some of the letter was about Awful Leslie and Dreadful Edna, and some of it was suggestions about how to fight dragons, but the friends were the important part.
Tan Coul has three frends who are heros too. They are Tan Audel who is sumone I don’t know, and Tan Thare and Tan Hanivar. I know them. Tan Thare is jolly, he can make music sound out of nowhere to friten his enemies. Tan Hanivar is rather a sad case becuse he keeps turning into things and doesnt want peple to know. He can be a wolf or even a dragon, it is very hard for his frends not to kill him by mistake.
At the end of the week Granny took Polly home, with her paintings, cards, and letter in a new folder. Mum seemed glad to see her. She hugged Polly and told Granny she was grateful. But Dad was gone. His hi-fi had gone too, and an armchair, and a number of smaller things from round the house. The divorce was definite.
“Definite,” said Ivy, when Polly asked.
In a way, it made home as peaceful as Granny’s house.
Polly got very busy then preparing for the Christmas play at school. She remembered to send her Christmas cards, but she clean forgot the letter. After all, hero-business was only a game and school was real.
Mum and Dad both came to the school play, but they did not look at one another and they sat on opposite sides of the hall. Polly did not know Dad was there until she came on the stage as the youngest of the Three Kings. Nina told her. Nina was King Herod. She had turned out to be far better than any of the boys at ranting and roaring and looking kingly. Miss Green said that none of the boys could get on the stage without looking sheepish, and she made them all shepherds, for obvious reasons, as she said. So Nina was having the time of her life in a wriggly stuck-on moustache and beard, shouting and strutting and having everybody executed. But her eyes kept moving from one side of the hall to the other, keeping tabs on whose parents were there.
“Your Dad’s come,” she said to Polly out of the side of her mouth.
“I know!” Polly whispered, with rather a jolt, because she had not known at all. And she got on with trying to offer King Herod some gold.
“Away with it!” cried Nina. “I am not your King of Kings!” [He’s left your Mum, hasn’t he?] And I know no more than you where he may be.”
“It is not you but a child,
Your Majesty [Yes],” said Polly. “[Shut up.] A star rising in the east told us that he was born.”
“This is terrible news!” King Herod said to the audience. And to Polly, “[Are they going to get divorced?] And what else does that star tell you? [Is that what that boy Seb was talking about?] Do you know where the child is?”
Polly sighed and nodded to the first question. She shook her head to the second question, but it was one of the other Kings who had to explain that they were following the star, so she could not speak. This conversation, she thought, was exactly like the way the deeds of Tan Coul were mixed up with the real world. She wished she could have explained it to Mr Lynn like this. She felt prickly anger with Nina for being so nosy, and it made her go cold and stony. She suddenly knew how Ivy felt.
“Then I tell you what,” Nina was saying as she strutted round the stage. “I’ll entrust the three of you with a very important mission.” She strutted up behind Polly. “[Your Dad’s girlfriend doesn’t want him to see you, does she?] I wish to honour the King of Kings myself. I’d like you to tell me when you’ve found him. [It must feel ever so strange!]”
Polly pressed her lips together and refused to say more than the lines she had learned. The Three Kings left the stage. Nina had a good rant and then left too.
She pushed through the angels waiting to go on and found Polly. “Tell me what it’s like not having your Dad at home. Was that boy a detective?”
“No,” Polly said stonily.
“My Mum says divorce marks you for life,” Nina persisted. “Do you feel very different?”
“I’m just the same as ever I was!” Polly said loudly. Miss Green looked round from arranging angels’ wings and shushed. “Now go away,” said Polly.
Dad left the hall before the play finished. “Why do you think he came?” Polly asked Mum as they walked home.
“Because I told him to,” said Ivy. “I told him you had a right to have your own father take an interest in you.”
“I wish you hadn’t,” Polly said. Not wanting to mention Nina, she explained, “He was bored. I saw him yawning.”
“So was I bored!” Ivy retorted. “I didn’t see why I should be the only one. That play has not changed one word since you started at that school. And before that I was the Angel Gabriel in it myself. I could almost scream by now.”
This was one of the queer things about divorce which Polly could not have described to Nina – the way Mum said this kind of thing to her that she would normally have said to Dad instead. And the way Dad was not really gone. He was not there, but he hovered in the background all the time. Polly wished he would go right away and get it over with.
She went away with Mum for Christmas, to Aunty Maud. Aunty Maud’s house was full of tiny cousins, staggering or crawling or lying in cots and bawling. Since they all thought Polly was marvellous, Polly barely had time to notice that Mum was out most of the day. “Ivy needs to relax,” Aunty Maud told her. The only time Ivy was there during the day was Christmas morning, when they all opened their presents. Polly’s big present was a dolls’ house from Dad. He must have forgotten she had one already. Polly tried to be brave. She had wanted a fort, and some tanks and guns. She smiled.
“I told him that was what you needed,” Ivy said, collecting wrappers. “I hope you like it.”
Polly smiled until her face ached and slowly unwrapped the last parcel. She was lucky to get anything from Dad. Aunty Maud had told her so. She did not want to be ungrateful.
A shower of paperback books fell out of the parcel. With them was a badly typed note:
You’ve probabably read all these already. If you have, throw them away. They were the things they told me in the book shop that nobody should grow up without reading. Merry Christmas.
T. G. L.
They were from Mr Lynn. The smile on Polly’s face became real. She sorted through the books. The only one she had even heard of was The Wizard of Oz. There were eleven others. Polly hovered a moment between Five Children and It and one most enticingly called The Treasure Seekers, and then picked up at random The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. She began to read it. She read for the rest of Christmas, mostly kneeling on the floor with her hair dangling round the book like a curtain, but sometimes, when a cousin crawled up and tried to grab the book, she took it away behind the sofa and crouched there in the shadows. She never heard the television. She only vaguely heard Ivy saying, “It’s no good speaking to Polly when she’s reading, Maud. She’s deaf and blind. Reg used to stop her. You let her be.”
Polly read greedily, picking up another book as soon as she had finished the first one. She felt like a drug addict. She had read The Box of Delights and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe too before she went home, and was beginning The Sword in the Stone. She read the rest in the week before school. Then she surfaced, with a flushed face and a deep sigh. The feast was over.
“And I only sent him a Christmas card!” she wailed.
That was easily remedied. She had a whole letter waiting, forgotten, in her folder of paintings. But the letter, when Polly looked at it, seemed very thin and out of date. The twelve books she had read since made her realise how little she had really said in it. There was a lot more she wanted to say anyway. So she crouched on the floor with her hair dangling again and wrote three more whole pages, like a girl inspired. She told Mr Lynn about the divorce – he had been divorced from Laurel, so she knew he would understand – and Nina and King Herod. Then she told him about her disappointment over the dolls’ house and how the books had made up for it. She explained the best bits in all the books, and ordered him to read The Hundred and One Dalmations at once.
My v favrit thouhg is Henrietta’s House,
she went on, forgetting the little she knew of spelling in her enthusiasm.
The peple in it do lik hero bisnis only they invent a hous and in the end it is reely trew. They hav aventeres in caves, Tan Coul must do that it is esitin. I red til my eys look lik Ninas all fat and pink. And thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.
Lov Polly.
The letter was now vast. Polly had to steal one of Mum’s big envelopes for it, because there seemed no way she could fold it to fit into one of her own. She posted the huge letter quite boldly, the next time she went for fish and chips. By this time she was sure that Seb had been fooled when she pretended to promise not to see Mr Lynn. She did not think he would bother her again. And she was right in a way. It was a long time before she saw Seb or Mr Leroy again.
When school started, Polly began training seriously to be a hero.
It was not easy, and it caused a number of upheavals. The first was with Nina. Nina might have been good at ranting and pretending, but she was not athletic. She ran out of puff after once round the playground. When she found Polly had joined the Athletics Club, she was horrified. “What do you want to do that for?” she said.
Polly had not been so pleased with Nina since the Christmas play. “To train my muscles,” she said coldly.
“Then stop,” said Nina, “or I won’t be your friend any more.”
“All right. Don’t be,” said Polly.
It gave her a savage, free feeling to say it and then turn away, leaving Nina gaping. She made friends with two girls who were good at running instead. Nine years later Polly could not even remember their names. But she remembered very clearly how annoyed she was with her muscles. Polly tested them every night by trying to lift her bed in the air, all four legs at once, and the most she could ever get off the floor was three. Then Mum would shout to know what she was doing.
Besides, Polly said to herself, it’s not just strength that heroes need. They need courage and good skills and timing. They need something to make the adrenaline really flow. These were all things she had gathered from watching sport on television. Ivy spent a lot of time around then sitting in front of the television, just sort of staring. Polly got to watch many things that Ivy would have turned off when Dad was there.
Polly did the logical
thing and asked the boys who played football in the lunch hour to let her play too. They were surprised, but they agreed quite politely. And once Polly had got the rules straight – which took her a week, during which time she played on both sides together and scored fourteen own goals – she proved to be a fast runner and a ferocious tackler, and they let her go on. Her knees were perpetually skinned and grey, and the roots of her hair grew dark with mud from heading the ball. Her only worry was that she enjoyed it so much that she was not sure it counted as training.
But it was a peculiar thing to do. Mira Anderton, the huge girl who was the school bully, took to standing beside the game and jeering at Polly.
Polly was frightened at first. Then she straightened her shoulders and reminded herself that bravery was what training was all about. She was not going to be scared of Mira. She supposed she had better fight Mira at once and get it over. Then she had second thoughts. Heroes do not fight for themselves, but for other people. I’ll wait until she does something to someone else, Polly thought. Then we’ll see.
She caught Mira pulling the hair of a little kid on the way home that afternoon. “Right!” shouted Polly, and attacked.
It was a wild success. The truth was that Mira was so astonished that a peaceful girl like Polly should suddenly go for her that she gave up almost without a fight. The little kid ran away. Mira went over backwards into a puddle, and the only thing she managed to do to Polly was give her an accidental slap in the face as she fell. Polly’s nose wept some drops of liquid. She wiped it off and looked at it as she walked away. It looked like blood to her, but it could have been adrenaline, and she was on the whole pleased at the way her training was coming on.
The trouble was, Mira had a position to keep up. She planned revenge. Two days later Polly was flying about the football part of the playground in the lunch hour as usual when she heard screams. Not just any screams either, but the yells of somebody being really hurt. She looked. She saw Mira had another girl down on the ground and was kneeling on her, banging her head on the asphalt. A fat leg in a grey sock waved feebly in time with the screams. Polly left the game and sped to the spot.