2

She had not picked a rose, a rose,
A rose but barely one,
When up and started young Tam Lin

TAM LIN

The lodger came about a week later. He was a fattish, cheery man, full of energy, called David Bragge, who worked on the Middleton Star. He had been divorced too, Ivy said, and he knew how it felt. Polly was shy of him. David made jokes all the time and Polly never understood them.

She was shy of his pink, hairy arms—which she saw a lot of, because David sat watching television with his shirt-sleeves rolled up whenever he was in—and she was shy of his loud, cracking laugh. Ivy made her shyer still by making a great fuss of the lodger and cooking him huge meals.

“We shall be happy now, you’ll see,” Ivy said. Ivy did seem happy. David persuaded her to go down to the pub with him most evenings, and she seemed to like that. Polly was glad. She had a peaceful, empty house to do her homework in, which made it a good thing all round.

At school the fortune-telling craze was dying away at last. Everyone was rehearsing hard for the Carol Concert. Polly stayed late for choir practice two evenings a week. One evening she came latish out of the school gates with Nina, to find herself being waited for. A familiar figure was stamping its feet outside, looking rather withered with the cold but very glad to see her. Dad. Polly set out to run towards him, paused, and then walked up to him with both hands held out. She felt rather ridiculous, but that was the way it took her.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?” Dad asked, taking her held-out hands.

“You know I am,” Polly said. She was very conscious of Nina. Nina stood and stared a moment and then walked off with some other girls. When Nina had gone, Polly could smile. Dad smiled too, his well-known merry smile. He looked just the same, except that his eyes were more crinkled. “Have you come to meet me?” she asked.

He nodded. “Let’s go home. You’ve got a key, haven’t you?”

“Oh thank goodness!” Polly said. “It’s been so strange!”

They walked home hand in hand. Dad was obviously glad to see her. He kept looking at her and smiling. “You have grown, Polly.”

“Of course. What did you expect?” Polly said happily. “Why are you coming home? Has Joanna Renton gone off you?”

“Well you could say that,” he said, sounding rather uncomfortable. “I didn’t know you knew about her.”

“Only a bit,” Polly assured him, as if that made it all right. She was so happy that she had gone quiet all over. She felt like someone listening to great chords of music that were not to be interrupted by speaking. They walked most of the way home without saying a word, even though Polly’s mind was crowded with things she wanted to tell Dad. She could tell him all that later. As they turned into their street, she said, out of the quiet, “Now you’re back we don’t need David Bragge, do we? Will you tell him to go?”

Dad half stopped walking. “David? Is he there?”

They went on more slowly, and Polly felt more thoughtful than quiet. It was the first sign she had had that David Bragge was rather more than just a lodger. Still, she thought, it was bound to be all right now. She unlocked the door and they went indoors. Dad, now she saw him in the hall light, looked rather thin and threadbare. She could see one or two grey hairs glinting on his head, mixed into the thick curls Mum used to call Dad’s halo.

Mum was just coming downstairs. She stopped like a statue when she saw them. “Oh no!” she said. “Isn’t that just like you, Reg! Sneaking in on Polly’s coat-tails! What do you want this time?”

“What do you expect,” Dad said, quite mildly for him, “when you won’t answer any of my letters? Ivy, I told you I want to come back. Can’t we talk about it at least?”

“No,” Ivy said, and began to come downstairs like a statue walking.

Polly felt Dad move to back away and manage to stand still. “What’s wrong with you, Ivy?” he said. “You’ve just shut down on me. You can’t do that. You have to talk.”

“All right,” Ivy said stonily. “Talk if you must. Go in the living room and wait.”

“Why?” Dad, and Polly too, glanced at the living room. The television was on in there, and they could see one of David’s pink arms as he sat watching it.

“Because I’m going to phone your mother to come and take Polly away first,” Ivy said implacably. “I’m not having her here for you to get round. Go on in.”

Dad went into the living room, looking determined and a little nervous. He looked almost out of place there, Polly thought in some surprise. As Ivy went to the phone and dialled Granny’s number, she heard David say, with one of his laughs, “An attack of the prodigals, eh, old son?”

“Something like that,” Dad answered as he sat down. “None of your damn business, is it?”

“Oh, you knew?” Mum said to the phone. “You would! Yes, of course he’s here. And yes, I do want you to fetch her now. She thinks he’s the bee’s knees, and I’m not having it!” She put the phone down and turned to Polly. There was an unusual look on Ivy’s face, as if she pitied Polly. “You shouldn’t let people play on your feelings, my love,” she said. “In this world you get taken to the cleaners for having a soft heart. All he wanted was to get in this house, you know.”

“Yes,” Polly said dismally.

After what seemed an age, during which everyone simply waited, Granny arrived and took Polly away. Polly spent the rest of the month at Granny’s and did not go home again till after Christmas. She also stopped being friends with Nina. Nina came up to her at school the next day and said, “You’ll get into trouble. You’re not supposed to go off with strange men.”

“I didn’t,” Polly said. She could not think what Nina meant.

“Yes, you did,” said Nina. “Twice. Once with the man at the funeral and then again last night.”

“That was my Dad last night!” Polly said.

Nina was astonished. “It never was! He looks quite different!”

“He—does—not!” Polly shouted. She turned and walked away from Nina. But that was only annoyance, like the way she had shouted at Ivy. The real thing that made her stop speaking to Nina was the way people kept coming up to her all day, saying, “Is it true what Nina says—you come from a broken home?”

“Broken right in half,” Polly replied to each one. “There’s a hole in the middle where the garden is. You get rained on trying to go upstairs.”

She walked home to Granny’s trying not to cry. She lay in bed that night, staring at her Fire and Hemlock picture, and decided she would definitely climb the wall into Hunsdon House as soon as term was over. She was not quite sure what this had to do with anything, except that it did. She hoped Mr. Leroy would catch her doing it. She would have liked to go for him the way she had gone for Mira Anderton. She wanted to fight someone. But Granny remarked that the house was still shut up. “They can afford to go away to the sun,” she said. “Pots of money—rolling in it.”

The sun was shining the first day of the holidays, when Polly went down the road to the big gates of the house. It was a frosty sun, melting bleakly from streaks of hard grey cloud. The big leaves of the laurel bushes overhanging the drive of Hunsdon House were fringed round the edges with frost. Polly blew on her gloves to encourage herself, spat for luck, and ran at the wall where she had measured it in the summer. It was as easy as climbing wallbars. She was up in a second, unsticking her gloves from the frost at the top of the wall, and swinging over and down. Crunch. Into dead leaves under the trees. She crept crunching forward to the front of the house.

There it was, shuttered, sad and majestic. Even so, Polly at first did not dare come out from among the trees, in case there was someone inside it.

The Perry Leroys were clearly rich enough to have the garden looked after while they were not using the house. Someone had pruned the roses and cut back the lavender hedges beyond. It made the garden seem empty and much smaller. Unless, Polly thought as she tiptoed through, it was simply that she had grown. She looked back at the blind yellow pile of the house. That still seemed big, although the garden had shrunk. A mere few steps brought her to the empty concrete oblong that should have been a pond. Remembering that something had seemed to happen to that pond before, Polly stood for a while, watching it. But it remained a frosty oblong of concrete. She went past it, through further shrubs, until her way was blocked by the wire netting round a tennis court. Now she had a choice: to go back or to cross a slope of frozen lawn towards the house.

Polly hesitated. Crossing the lawn really would bring her out into the open. She stood in the bushes and watched the house carefully. And it was empty. Lived-in houses give you a sense of life, and Hunsdon House was dead, dead as the bare twigs of the pruned roses. The part facing her was a French window with three steps leading up to it. At the bottom of the steps were the two pillars, each holding a vase. And the window beyond was shuttered and dead like all the others.

“Come on,” Polly said out loud. “Behave like a trainee-hero for once!”

She walked up the lawn towards the steps with the two vases as if she had a perfect right to be there. Under her feet the frozen grass made slow, wheezing munches, like somebody chewing ice cubes. Funny, Polly thought as her feet munched. She had remembered the steps with vases as leading up to a plain door, but they clearly led up to a shuttered window. The vases, when Polly reached them, still stood as she and Mr. Lynn had left them. NOW said one, glittering with frost. HERE said the other. By stretching her arms to their very widest, Polly could rest a glove on each one. She gave each an experimental push. Then a harder pull, the other way. It was no good. She could not budge them. Either they were frozen at the bottoms or Mr. Lynn was a good deal stronger than Polly. Frustrated by this, Polly went between the vases, past the hidden HERE on the left and the hidden NOW on the right, and up the steps to the shuttered window. She put her glove on the window’s frosted handle and turned it with an angry push. It opened.

Polly recoiled. “I wonder they don’t have vandals!” she said. “But I suppose they’ve locked the shutters inside.” To see if this was true, she opened the window wider and shoved at the tall wooden shutter beyond it.

It moved under her hand, folding inward a foot or so. Polly stood very still. The house felt dead, she was sure. There was nothing from the garden except a sparse twitter of birds—though when Polly looked round, she was dismayed to see her long line of footprints, green in the white grass, leading straight to the steps like a pointer. “So they’ll know I was here anyway,” she said, and slipped sideways inside, round the shutter. She left the window standing ajar. She did not want to be locked in the house.

She was in the room where the Will had been read. She knew it by the sharp, furry smell of the carpet. When her eyes got used to the dim crack of light from the window, she could see all the comfortable chairs she remembered, but not in lines now. They were arranged to make it a room for gracious living. The door to the hall was open. Polly tiptoed across to it. She felt rather silly tiptoeing, but she could not walk properly, although she could tell the house truly was empty by the smell and the feel. It was quite warm. That was what gave the carpet the sharp, unused smell. Clearly the riches which paid for the garden to be done could easily afford to keep the heating going all winter too.

The hall was a brighter dimness. Light lived in the shiny floor and in the white paint of the jointed flights of stairs going round the space and back again. And there were the Ali Baba vases, with their own faint fizz of light from the patterns on them. Polly avoided them rather—she knew they were empty, of course, but they were still big enough to hold a person—and tiptoed to the archway of the dining room. But it was too dark in there and, besides, what Polly wanted was to explore the rooms up the jointed stairs. She sped there, and up the stairs, in a light scudding of feet.

The room at the first landing was a dark hole. It felt bare. Polly could tell that the stacks of pictures had been taken away. She scudded on, up and round a joint, to the next landing, and gently opened the door there. A study of some kind, she thought. Books, leather chairs, a neat desk swam there in the twilight. But there was a bed too. And, as Polly’s eyes adjusted, she picked out posters on the walls. The Who, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and a spiky picture of an unreal landscape labelled Michael Moorcock. A boy’s room. Polly realised it must be Seb’s. She took her head out and closed the door, knowing she was spying.

Guiltily she went up and round to the next joint. The door there was slightly open. Polly slipped through to a short corridor with a blue-gleaming bathroom opening off one side, into a space of scents and silks. There was a real four-poster bed in here, on a white fluffy carpet. The faint shine of the bed’s curtains, the frills at the top and the quilt across it suggested dark-pinkish satin. Polly took her glove off to touch it, and it was satin. She put the glove on again, because this room was cold. Or maybe it was the thievish way Polly was feeling. She knew this was Laurel’s room. It was a big dimness, with rosebuds on the walls, a soft rosy carpet under the bed’s white fluffy one, silken chairs. One whole wall was folding cupboards with clothes inside. A second wall had a lot of valuable-looking little pictures hung on it in a pattern. Near the window, instead of the lavish dressing table Polly had expected, there was a curious wooden chest, bent and carved, with silver hairbrushes and pearly-looking combs on it. Above the chest a luminous oval of mirror looked at Polly from the wall.

Polly stood in front of it and looked back at herself in the mirror, surrounded in a dim silver filigree of birds, leaves and animals. The cracks of light from the shutters made the mirror look dark and deep. Polly’s hair blazed white in it, and her face looked shy and wondering, not at all like the face of the trespasser she was. Over her left shoulder, very clearly, she could see one of the photographs in the pattern of little pictures on the far wall. That made her snort with laughter and the face in the mirror grin, remembering the Prefects’ mirror and the face of the Deputy Head.

She turned round to look for the real picture and was rather astonished to see that the wall was too far away for her to pick the little oval photograph out. The pictures seemed just a pattern of blobs from where she stood. She had to go right up to them and search, with her face close to the wall, before she found the right one, near the middle of the pattern. She could still not see it properly. She had to unhook it and carry it into the cracks of light from the window before she could. It was a slightly old-fashioned picture of a mischievously grinning fair-haired boy. Whoever he was, he looked older than Seb, and he was too fair anyway. He was nobody Polly knew. Yet there was a sense of familiarity about the photo, as if the mirror trick had worked and Polly was going to know this boy sometime.

Polly stood holding the little oval picture in both gloved hands, struggling between her superstition and her conscience. She was quite sure she was holding something that was going to be important to her and she was horribly tempted to keep it. On the other hand, it would be stealing if she did. And her conscience went on further and told her that she had already stolen one picture—no, six!—from this house. That jiggery-pokery with the pictures during the funeral, which she had conveniently told herself was a trick Laurel richly deserved, had caused Mr. Lynn to go off with six pictures that should have been Laurel’s. Since just one of them had proved valuable enough to pay for a horse, then a car, this made it too serious to be a trick. And to steal another one now would be like victimising Laurel—wronger still.

No. Regretfully Polly crossed the room to hang the photo up again.

Halfway across the room, she heard voices down in the hall. After one moment when she seemed to be dead, Polly came twenty times more alive than normal. Her heart banged a little rapid stutter, like a row of dominoes falling over, and while it did she found she was speeding to the door in long, stealthy steps to look down between the white bars of the banisters. As she went, she heard one of the voices was Mr. Lynn’s. It came echoing up quite clearly.

“If you like,” she heard Mr. Lynn say. “Though I really don’t see what business it is of yours.”

The relief Polly felt at knowing his voice vanished when she heard the deep, chesty voice that answered. That was Mr. Leroy’s. “Come off it, Tom,” this voice said. “Laurel’s interests are mine these days. You must have known Laurel would find out in the end. And you must have known she wouldn’t like it when she did.”

Polly clutched the photo guiltily to her chest and edged forward so that she could see them. They seemed to be standing in the middle of the hall below, side by side rather than face to face, as if they were about to walk into the dining room. The sun must have got round to the French window Polly had left open. A long shaft of light cut through the hall from the living room and fell across both men, so that Polly could see them from the knees up, as if they were floating. It gave both of them a pale, wintry look, particularly Mr. Lynn. He did not seem to be enjoying this meeting at all.

“I suggest you put it right by letting us finance you,” said Mr. Leroy.

Spots of light from Mr. Lynn’s glasses dazzled round the hall as he answered, “Thank you, Morton. But I’ve told you before that I prefer to pay my own way. I’m quite aware of the risk—”

“Risk!” Mr. Leroy’s fatal laugh set up a faint, chiming buzz from the Ali Baba vases. “Tom, you haven’t begun to see the risk you run! You’ve made Laurel furious.”

“Can’t Laurel tell me that for herself?” Mr. Lynn asked.

“Oh, she will if you want, believe me,” Mr. Leroy said. “But I don’t think you’d enjoy it. You’d better let me handle her. If you hadn’t been so secretive about this venture of yours—”

“On purpose,” Mr. Lynn said in his mildest way.

Of course,” Mr. Leroy agreed. “All right. I admit you’ve stolen a march on us and that I can’t at the moment see how you did it. Now you’ll have to pay the price of your low cunning. If you won’t let us finance you, you’d better agree to come back into the fold. Laurel wants you where she can keep an eye on you after this.”

“I am not,” said Mr. Lynn in his most quietly obstinate way, “going to agree to live in Hunsdon House again, for you, or for Laurel, or for anyone else.” He turned into the line of sunlight and walked away into the living room.

Mr. Leroy turned and went with him. “Some such arrangement’s got to be made,” he said. Polly watched their two backs moving away, one wide and upright, the other high-shouldered and thin. “We don’t like to make threats,” came from Mr. Leroy’s broad back, “but we’re going to keep tabs on you somehow, Tom, and you are going to let us do it. Or do you want trouble for your friends?”

Mr. Leroy’s voice faded as they went into the living room. Mr. Lynn’s voice came from in there. He sounded angry now, but what he said was drowned in a burst of Mr. Leroy’s laughter, as if Mr. Lynn’s anger was truly a joke. Then there was silence. And more silence. The house felt empty again.

But it can’t be empty! Polly thought. They’ve gone in there, and Mr. Leroy will see the shutter and the window open, and then my footprints, and he’ll know I’m still inside somewhere.

She felt cold to the very centre of her spine. Her hands shook as they held the oval photograph. When Mr. Leroy found her, she did not think Mr. Lynn would be able to do much to help her. From what she had heard, he seemed to be hard pressed to help himself. She backed away, very gently and quietly, through the open door and into Laurel’s bedroom, back to the edge of the fluffy white carpet the bed stood on. If she hid under the bed, it would take a thorough search to find her.

But she stood there instead, listening and thinking. There really was not a sound from downstairs. Nothing but thick, dead stillness. She began almost to wonder if Mr. Leroy and Mr. Lynn had been there at all. There was only her banging heart to tell her that they had been. That, and her anger. Her anger seemed to have been growing all this time, underneath her fear, until it was large enough to hide the fear completely. She thought of Laurel and Mr. Leroy in the audience on television, watching Mr. Lynn. As if they owned him! Polly thought. They don’t. They can’t. Nobody owns anyone like that!

She laid the photograph carefully down on the satin quilt of the bed and went across to the pattern of little oval pictures hanging on the wall. Taking one out had left a rather obvious gap in the middle of the pattern. But there were, as Polly thought she had remembered, a number of spare hooks sticking out of the wall round the pictures. Evidently Laurel liked to spread the pictures about and arrange them into different patterns from time to time.

Quite carefully and calmly Polly unhooked pictures and rehung them in new places to make another, wider-spaced pattern so that it would not show that one was missing. I might as well do something useful while I’m waiting for Mr. Leroy to find me, she told herself. And I’m wearing gloves, like a good criminal should. It was lucky that all the pictures had the same kind of oval gold frame. Not all of them were photographs, by any means. Quite a number were tiny paintings of a face or a full-length person. Two were black shapes of people cut out of paper, and some were probably charcoal drawings. Polly arranged them with real artistry. There was one miniature painting of a young man in old-fashioned clothes, including a cloak thrown back across one shoulder, that Polly thought was much the nicest. He was leaning against a tree holding a sort of banjo, and his face looked nice. She would have liked to put him in the middle. But since the photograph of the fair boy had come from there, Polly sensibly replaced it with a photograph as like it as she could find, of another fair boy who was only slightly more old-fashioned. She left the paintings round the edges, where they had been before. It looked good when she had finished—almost the same. She went and picked up the stolen photo, zipped it carefully into her anorak pocket, and walked softly out of the room and down the stairs, telling herself she was going to her doom.

She did not quite believe she was, even as she went. The house felt so empty. Downstairs, she knew it was empty. The sun had left the open shutter, and the hall and the living room were dim, and as deserted as they were dim. Polly let herself out through the window and pulled the shutter closed. She pulled the window shut and heard the click as it latched itself. It would not open when she tried it. She walked down the steps, between NOW and HERE on the vases, and back across her line of footprints. They had spread wide and green in the sun, but they were the only set of footprints. Mr. Leroy and Mr. Lynn had not come or gone this way. The puzzling thing was that they did not seem to have used the front door or the side door either. When Polly peered at these doors from the bushes, she could not see any prints on the frosty gravel, nor any tire marks on the drive. She did not see another living creature until she met Mintchoc sitting on the wall in front of Granny’s house.