4

Seb’s disco haunted Polly. Of all the things which were coming to light in this second buried set of memories, Polly was most astonished to find how things to do with Seb had haunted her from then on. At that time it was the disco. Polly did not know how to dance and she was terrified. When school started again, she was forced to consult Nina, who had just developed a craze for disco dancing. Nina took her home and instructed her. And in this way she became friends with Nina again. Nina knew about Michael Moorcock as well. She gave Polly a paperback to read. Polly did not quite get on with it. She suspected she was too young. She thought she was probably too young for discos at Wilton College too, and she quaked.

But it all came to nothing. Seb must have forgotten he had asked her. At all events, the end of term came and he did not let her know. This made it rather difficult when she next saw Seb. And she kept seeing him from then on, here and there in Middleton, usually walking with tall, high-and-mighty-looking boys from Wilton College. Should she stick her nose in the air and look offended? Or smile as if nothing had happened?

In fact, Polly did both at once, in a confused way, the first time she passed Seb. Seb replied with a sort of wave and a sort of grin, at which the other boys looked round after her and murmured things. Polly’s face went scarlet.

“That makes three strange men!” said Nina, who was with Polly at the time. She did not recognise Seb. Polly was so annoyed and embarrassed that she nearly stopped being friends with Nina again. Both of them were losing count of the times they had been friends and then not friends. This was another thing which astonished Polly. She had thought she had hardly spoken to Nina after Juniors, where in fact they dropped in and out of friendship so often that Nina went around explaining, “It’s that kind of relationship, you know.”

Whatever Nina thought that meant, Polly thought the real reason was that she and Nina were always getting out of step with one another, and only overlapped every so often. While Polly was catching up on discos, Nina had passed on to her tennis craze. When Polly took up tennis, Nina had moved on to ecology. And when Nina tried to interest Polly in that, Polly had discovered The Lord of the Rings and was reading it for the fourth time under her desk in Maths.

It was David Bragge, not Mr. Lynn, who put Polly on to Tolkien. By then Polly had got used to David’s pink arms and his way of speaking. They had become quite friendly. It had started with the money for Polly’s ill-fated visit to Mr. Lynn. It had gone on then because, after that, Polly had come in one day to find David roving round the kitchen like an irritated bear.

“The woman’s a vampire!” he said angrily to Polly. “What does she want from life? I have to account for all my movements and every half p. these days, or she says I’m being secretive!”

“Dad let her down,” Polly explained. “She wants to be happy.”

David, at this, became uneasy and contrite. “Shouldn’t say things to you about your mother, should I? Accept profound regrets and pretend it was never said. Right?”

“Yes, but Mum is difficult sometimes,” Polly said. “When she closes down.”

“Doesn’t she just close down!” said David. “You’re a sympathetic wench, Polly, you know. Understanding.”

After that, because of her being so understanding, David took to handing Polly notes secretly, to be delivered to a certain Irishman on her way to school. Mr. O’Keefe was nearly always to be found leaning against the wall of the Rose and Crown. He always took the note with a huge wink and said, “Thank you, my darling.”

“Fourth strange man!” Polly said the first time she met Mr. O’Keefe, since Nina was not there to say it for her.

David was rather anxious about this arrangement. To cover it up, he invented a game of elaborate compliments to Polly. “She’s growing up so gorgeous!” he would say. “The silver-haired lovely of the eighties. What will she be like later if she’s like this now? And I’m booked to be her father and give her away to some undeserving lout or other! Oh, Polly, I mourn!”

Polly supposed the compliments were meant to act like a smokescreen to distract Ivy from the notes, but they made her very uncomfortable and she wished he wouldn’t. She could see they annoyed Ivy. She found she was not looking forward to the time when the divorce was at last settled and Mum and David would be able to get married.

Halfway through the summer term, a little before Polly’s twelfth birthday, a packet came for her through the post. It was not a proper letter. It was something folded inside a typed wrap-round label.

“What’s that?” Ivy asked as Polly tore the label off. Ivy was sitting in her dressing gown watching David eat his bacon and egg.

Polly was equally puzzled. She unfolded a medium-sized poster on rather cheap paper.

BATH FESTIVAL
Beethoven, Dvorak, Bartok
THE DUMAS QUARTET

“Junk post,” said Ivy. “I’d like to know where they got your address. Throw it away, Polly.”

David looked up from his dutiful eating. “It’s a languishing letter from one of her numerous admirers. Eh, Polly?”

“No it isn’t,” Polly said, grinning. “It’s from Mr. Lynn.” Her eyes had found the bottom of the poster, where Mr. Lynn had scribbled,

Joke? Polly’s eyes leaped to the top of the poster again. Dumas? What joke?

“David, that’s not funny,” said Ivy. “Who’s Mr. Lynn?”

Polly sighed. “I went to see him in London—remember?” Of course! The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre (spelled wrong) Dumas. In the middle of the poster Mr. Lynn had helped her get the point by scribbling things beside the printed names. Edward Davies, she read, alias Tan Thare, Porthos. Samuel Rensky, alias Tan Hanivar, d’Artagnan. Ann Abraham, alias Tan Audel, Aramis. Thomas Lynn, alias Tan Coul. Polly smiled widely. It was a clever way to get round Mr. Leroy. The poster must have gone out in a stack of others, so that it did not look like something specially to Polly. And it was interesting to see that Mr. Lynn thought of himself as Athos too, even though he had not written it in.

“Oh, your musician friend,” said Ivy. “School, or you’ll be late.”

Out of respect for the new quartet, Polly got The Three Musketeers out of the library and read it again. For a while too she kept looking in Radio Times and the morning paper, in case there was news of magnificent concerts by a brilliant new quartet now taking the country by storm. But the Dumas Quartet never seemed to get mentioned. Since Polly could think of no other way to find out how Mr. Lynn was doing, she gave up looking. She took The Three Musketeers back to the library and got out The Lord of the Rings instead, which David said was much more her kind of thing.

After she had read it for the fourth time, Polly spent the last slack week of term and the beginning of the holidays busily writing an adventure of Tan Coul and Hero, and how they hunted the Obah Cypt in the Caves of Doom, with the help of Tan Thare, Tan Hanivar, and Tan Audel. After The Lord of the Rings it was clear to her that the Obah Cypt was really a ring which was very dangerous and had to be destroyed. Hero did this, with great courage.

When it was done, she put it in an envelope and addressed it to Mr. Lynn. Then, for two days, she did nothing with it. She was scared when it came to posting it. She thought of the way Mr. Leroy had come cleaving through the crowd at the station and looked at Mr. Lynn, when there was no way he could have known they were there, and she kept going cold all over. But at last she told herself it was silly to be scared. Mr. Leroy had turned up by accident to put Seb on the train. She went boldly out to the High Street Post Office and posted the story there.

She came out of the post office, with the deed done, and the first person she saw was Seb, walking along the other side of the street with a crowd of tall Wilton College boys. Seb, as he always did now, gave her his sort of wave and a grin, and the heads of the other boys turned as usual to see who he was waving at. Polly stood on the steps of the post office feeling like something caught in a searchlight beam. It can’t be true! she thought. He must be here by accident! But she would have given a great deal to be able to reverse posting that letter, like playing a film backwards, and have it zoom up out of the letterbox into her hand.

For days she waiting for something awful to happen. She expected Mr. Leroy every time she ran down to the Rose and Crown with a note from David. But the trouble came from Mr. Lynn instead. A postcard came from Edinburgh. On the back of Edinburgh Castle it said,

It hurt Polly’s feelings horribly. For a whole day she hoped Mr. Leroy would get Mr. Lynn for that. For another whole day she evolved nasty schemes for getting Mr. Lynn herself, by jumping on both his cellos. She could almost feel the satisfying splintering of precious wood under her shoes. On the third day she decided to have nothing more to do with Mr. Lynn. Ever. On the fourth day she got another postcard, of St. Andrews Golf Course this time.

When she read about that damaged cello, Polly’s mind jolted and flew to Seb passing in the street. She was appalled. I think that was my fault! she thought. But how can it be? She waited two days, to give Mr. Lynn time to get home to London, and then telephoned his flat. It was next to impossible, she thought as she dialled the number, for Seb to appear accidentally, or even on purpose, inside the hall of her own house.

Mr. Lynn’s voice spoke. “This is a recorded message,” it said like a robot. “Thomas Lynn is away on business with the Dumas Quartet. If you have a message, please give it after this recording stops. Speak on the tone.” There followed a click, and a sharp beeping.

“Oh. Er,” said Polly, totally disconcerted. “Um. Er. This is Polly. I just wanted to say sorry too. About the cello.” Then she could simply think of no more to say. She put down the telephone, feeling cheated and incomplete. She stood. Then she turned round, threw open the front door, and looked up and down the street.

It was empty. There was no sign of Seb. She seemed to have got away with it.

Mr. Lynn did not reply. Instead, before Polly had time to get hurt again, a parcel of books arrived from Edinburgh. There was no letter, just a piece of paper from the book shop, saying in print: Sent at the request of, then a gap for the name, which someone had filled in as Mr. T. Geeling. It made Polly giggle, both for itself and because they were both thinking of ways to cheat Mr. Leroy. The books were all secondhand: Kipling’s Kim, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, and Perilandra by C. S. Lewis.

That was the first of any number of parcels, from all over the country, sent under all sorts of versions of Mr. Lynn’s name. The Napoleon of Notting Hill from Hereford, from T. O. Massling. The Thirty-nine Steps from Oxford, from Mr. Tomlin, Tom’s Midnight Garden from Birmingham, from A. Namesake, and The Oxford Book of Ballads from Salisbury, apparently from a Chinese person called Lee Tin. And numbers more. All through those summer holidays and the autumn term that followed, parcels of books for Polly kept on coming. It seemed as if every time Mr. Lynn arrived in a new place, almost his first act was to find a book shop and get it to send Polly books under some idiotic new name.

The only trouble was that all Polly seemed to be able to do in return was to ring up the robot machine in London and tell it, “Um. Er. Polly. Um. Thanks.” And to read the books, of course.