6

Polly found herself smiling because of the well-known way Tom’s head turned. It was an utter delight just to see it again. Now watch it! Watch it, she told herself. She was reminded of the glee she had felt while she set up that piece of witchcraft with the picture. It was not to be like that this time. This was not what it was about. All the same, she was so glad! She was still smiling as she slipped round the cross and down the steps, tottering a bit on her numb feet, and seized hold of Tom’s arm. She felt it tense and jerk. “Hello,” she said.

It did not surprise her particularly when Tom turned and peered at her blankly through his rain-speckled glasses. “I think you’ve made a mistake of some kind,” he said.

“No I haven’t,” Polly said. It was bound to be like this. “And I’m hanging on to you from now on.”

By this time Ann had passed them and joined Ed and Sam. Tom hurried after them, shaking his arm to free it from Polly, and Polly went with him, hanging on. “Will you please let go,” he said.

“My good woman,” Polly prompted him. “No, I won’t.”

“What’s the matter with you? Do you want money or something?”

“You know perfectly well I don’t!”

“I don’t know anything about you. Let go!”

They passed the car Laurel’s party had come in, practically fighting. Polly saw Ann, Ed and Sam pause in the station doorway and look round for Tom. Seeing the struggle, they turned away, obviously embarrassed, and went inside. “I’m not going to let—!” Polly was panting, when another person pushed past them and hurried into the station too. Tom tore himself loose from Polly with almost no trouble at all and plunged after. Polly saved herself from falling by catching hold of the wing mirror of Laurel’s car, but her numb feet let her down. She could hear the thumping of feet from inside the booking hall, and raised voices, but by the time she made her feet take her through the doorway, the quarrel seemed to have died down.

Ed was standing with Ann and Sam, blocking the way through to the platform. All of them looked angry and Ed was rubbing his arm. Mr. Piper was looming in front of them, like something at bay. Tom was buying a ticket, with his back to everyone.

“Let me through,” Mr. Piper said peremptorily. When none of the three moved, he turned and shouted, “Tom! For pity’s sake! I’m in a hurry. She’s got Leslie now!”

Tom turned round and gave his yelp of laughter. “So much for your hiding and pretending!” he said. “If you’d told the truth, you could have warned him. Don’t worry. The train will wait for me.”

Ann and Sam moved slowly aside. Ed moved even more reluctantly, and as Mr. Piper dived past him, out onto the platform beyond, he shouted after him, “And be careful who you’re shoving another time!” While Ed was shouting, Tom picked up his cello. All four hurried after Mr. Piper, so quickly that Polly nearly got left behind. She ran to the ticket window, fumbling out her student card and a five-pound note, which was all the money she had.

“The same, please,” she said. She supposed the clerk behind the window knew. A ticket came back, and quite a lot of change. A short journey, then. Polly snatched it up and ran. The train might wait for Tom, but it would not wait for her, which Tom of course knew. But, thanks to Mr. Piper, Polly also knew that Tom had not been trying to shake her off as hard as he had pretended. She ignored her lifeless feet and sprinted.

The train was at the platform, beginning to move. Polly was in time to see Tom’s white parka through the glass of one of the doors. She put on a spurt and managed to claw hold of that door. Then, hopping on one foot as the train gathered speed, she got it open and threw herself inside the train. The door crashed shut behind her.

Inside, it was a perfectly normal train, with a gangway down the middle and rows of foursome tables on either side. Ann, Sam and Ed had already taken three seats at a table some way along. It was obvious that Tom would join them in the fourth seat as soon as he had finished stowing his cello. Polly darted up the gangway and stood in front of the fourth seat, stopping him. Ed and Ann looked at her, and looked away. Sam’s face twisted with embarrassment as Tom turned round and saw Polly. He stood waiting.

“Get out of my way, please.”

“No. And you do know me,” Polly said.

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” said Tom.

“Nonsense. I haven’t changed that much,” Polly said. She leaned one hand on the table to look at Ed. “Ed, do you know me?” Ed shook his head and tried to avoid her eyes. It was the way anyone behaves when a stranger tries to pester him on a train. Sam was already looking away when Polly turned to him. They really did not know her, any more than Leslie had done. Still, I’m not going to be embarrassed out of it this time! Polly thought. That was something of a clue, really. Laurel thought she would be. Laurel worked by admissions, one way or another. Polly looked on to Ann. “Do you know me, Ann?”

Ann was clearly very tired. She was leaning sideways with her head on Sam’s shoulder. She looked up at Polly, direct and penetrating and dark, and frowned. “I think I do, somehow. But I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Bless you, Tan Audel!” Polly said. She turned to Tom in triumph, but he simply walked up the gangway to another seat and sat there. Polly followed, and sat down facing him. Tom behaved as if she was not there.

He took his wet glasses off and cleaned them with a handkerchief. Without them, Polly could see how white and hollow-cheeked and strained his face was. Water dripped from her hair, and her elbows left damp smudges on the table while she sat there studying him. The train clattered round them, hurrying away into the night.

He did know her, Polly was sure. What he felt about her turning up again like this was another matter, but it did look as if Laurel had forced some kind of prohibition on him not to know her. So it followed that it must be important to get him to admit that he did. Or was this simply Polly’s own feelings making her think this? She had been prepared to be cool and alert and collected, and it was all overthrown by her utter delight at seeing him again. She wanted to burst into wild, joyful laughter.

“I know I must be one more damn thing to you,” she said, “but I have come to help if I can. I want to make amends for what I did to you—or apologise at least.” Tom held his glasses up towards the light overhead to see if they were clean, and did not answer. “Do you know,” Polly said, “the Obah Cypt turned out to be the Fire and Hemlock picture? I had it all along. There was a lock of your hair in the back of it—I found it today.”

Tom put his glasses back on and unzipped his wet parka. He sat back, staring beyond Polly. “I seem to be shut in a train with a raving female,” he said. “There is no such thing as an Obah Cypt.”

“Well, it’s the only name I know for it,” Polly said. “Who is Mr. Piper? He seems to have been Tan Coul as much as you were. There was a giant in the supermarket. Edna told me.”

“What institution did you escape from?” said Tom.

Some of the wild laughter did break loose from Polly. “St. Margaret’s College, Oxford. I share a padded cell with Fiona Perks.”

“Go back there,” said Tom.

“How ungrateful!” said Polly. “Don’t forget you started it by hauling me out of that funeral.”

Tom did not answer.

Polly bit her own tongue angrily. Polly, you fool! Keep off funerals. Of all the things to remind him of! “I think,” she said, “I’ve gone and left Granny’s famous umbrella on the steps of Miles Cross. You know the one? The big green and white umbrella you held over her that Sports Day before you went to Australia.” Tom did not reply. Polly tried again. “I don’t exactly blame Granny for telling you off then. She was right, according to her own lights, even though I suspect Morton Leroy had got to her. After all, Granny wasn’t to know you’d already made it quite plain at the panto that I was nothing but a complete nuisance to—”

“Come off that, P—!” Tom began violently. And stopped. “Did you happen to remark what your name was?” he asked carefully.

The laughter tore loose from Polly again. “No.” she said. “I didn’t, and you know it. And, of course, my name isn’t Polly, as you also know. It’s Hero.”

She had done it, Polly realised. She had got it right. Tom took his glasses off again and attended to what was probably an imaginary smear, and he was smiling as he wiped them, all over his strained face, in the same way that Polly was, as if he could not help it. He put the glasses on again, leaned his elbows on the table, and did at last look at Polly. “Polyphonic Assistants,” he said. “You shouldn’t have done that. You never did understand the risk.”

“Yes I did,” said Polly. “I had a talk with Morton Leroy after that pantomime. Had you known all along?”

Tom shook his head. Around them, the train rushed and rattled into darkness. The noise and the pressure suggested they were going through a tunnel. Tom had to shout against the clatter. “Not a notion, to begin with—it was too unbelievable—just like Tan Coul in the supermarket—slowly realising it could only be a giant—”

“That’s the gift she gave you,” Polly shouted back. “Things you make up to come true and then turn round and hit you.”

“Not till you wrote Leroy by mistake for Legris,” Tom shouted. “Then I saw. But you still think ‘This can’t happen to me!’ I still do.”

The things Polly wanted to shout in reply to this were lost, because the train rushed out of the tunnel again, into bright daylight. It burst across them so that they both had to shield their eyes from the brightness. When Polly managed to blink out of the window, she found they were travelling along beside the sea. White surf was folding and smashing almost beside the rails, and a myriad dazzles flickered off the grey water stretching towards the sun.

“Is it always like this?” she said.

“I think it varies,” said Tom. “I’ve only ridden in Laurel’s train once before. It was hills and deserts then. Whatever suits her sense of humour, I think.”

“I could do without her sense of humour,” Polly said bitterly. “True Thomas. You haven’t got cancer, have you?”

“Is that what she told you?” Tom pushed his hands wearily over his face, lifting his glasses to rub his eyes. The train was slowing down now, noticeably. Tom’s face looked as if his rubbing hands were wiping the colour out of it with every rub.

“If I’d been thinking of you at all,” Polly said, angry and remorseful, “I could have seen through that. She only lied when I asked. You taught me about sentimental drivel, but I didn’t think of that once!”

The brakes of the train were shrieking. A station of some kind was sliding into view. Tom stood up. “Well, I’d had years of Laurel, and you hadn’t.”

Polly stood up too. Down the carriage, Sam, Ed and Ann were collecting their instrument cases and moving to the door. When they got there, they stood looking back doubtfully, waiting for Tom.

“You go on,” Tom called to them. “There’s only one way to go. You can’t miss it. I’ll catch you up in a minute.” Ann nodded and got off the train. Sam and Ed looked at one another before they followed her, clearly wondering whether to come back and rescue Tom from Polly, and then deciding that it would be too embarrassing. They got off too, and Tom turned to collect his cello.

“Can’t you just not go?” Polly said.

“I don’t really want them coming to fetch me,” Tom said. “Off you get.”

Polly and he climbed off the train onto an empty, sunlit platform. The place seemed deserted. They walked across the platform, and their feet boomed on the hollow wooden floor of the booking hall. Outside was a long street, lined on each side with chestnut trees, from which big orange leaves, like hands, drifted down across Ann, Ed and Sam, walking ahead in the distance. Above the trees stood the moon, flat and white in the blue sky.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Tom said as they set off down the street. “I’d suggest you don’t come any further, except that I think the only way out now is to go on.”

“I know you won’t want me looking on—” Polly said.

“I don’t,” he said. “But it’s not that. You don’t understand—there’s nothing you can do now.”

“Yes there is,” said Polly. “I have to hang on to you.”

Tom sighed. “I knew you didn’t understand. You were doing that for about five years, but you stopped. I can’t say I blame you.” A hand-like leaf felt on the case of the cello, and slid off again. Polly shuddered. “Anyhow,” Tom said, “I’m quite glad of a chance to apologise.”

“Apologise!” said Polly. “I’d have thought it was the other way round.”

“Both ways round then,” said Tom.

“Mary Fields?” asked Polly.

He shrugged. “That too, I suppose. Some of it was an attempt to keep the heat off you. Poor Mary. I haven’t seen her for over a year now.”

They walked on, with leaves pattering to the street around them. Polly cheerlessly considered. At least she was not being troubled with that pointless gladness any more. Allowing for the fact that Tom was bound to be in a strange state of mind, things seemed no different from the way they always had been. “Then why are you still trying to choke me off?” she said. “You are. You have been ever since I knew you.”

“What else could I do?” Tom demanded. “I had to keep getting in touch, and sending you things, because you were my only chance, but I didn’t have to like what I was doing, particularly after Morton found out. And I drove a bargain with Laurel after that, not to harm you—”

“Don’t tell me!” Polly said. “And I’ve just made you break that one too. I told you not to protect me. Years ago.”

“But you also told me not to be obedient,” Tom pointed out.

At this, Polly rounded on him in exasperation, and found they had come to the end of the street. It ended in two stone pillars supporting an open gate. The name Hunsdon House was engraved deep into each pillar. “We seem to have got Nowhere,” she said dryly.

“What did you expect?” Tom put down his cello in the gateway and leaned against the left-hand pillar. Polly did not blame him for being reluctant to go in. “Let’s not wrangle any more,” he said. “I’m almost out of time.” He held out a hand towards Polly.

Polly stumbled over the cello in her hurry to get near and nearly fell against Tom’s chest. They wrapped their arms around one another. Tom was more solid and limber than Polly had expected, and warmer, and just a little gawky. He threaded both hands into Polly’s damp hair and kissed her eyes as well as her mouth. “I’ve always loved your hair,” he said.

“I know,” Polly said.

They stayed clenched together in the gateway until Polly became aware of Laurel’s sweet, tinkling voice. “Tom!” it said from somewhere in the distance, more and more insistently. “Tom!” It became impossible to ignore. They sighed and let go of one another. Tom picked up the cello again and they walked side by side up the shaded drive and round towards the garden where Laurel’s voice was coming from. Polly was light-headed with strange, miserable joy. In a way it was worth it, she thought, except that it was such a total waste.

At first sight it seemed to be autumn in the garden. The trees there were an unmoving glory of rust, copper-green, olive-silver and strong yellow, fading to purple and deep rose red. But it was hot as summer. Polly’s hair and Tom’s parka steamed in the heat. Swallows flickered in the blue sky overhead, and bees filled the crowding roses to one side—not white roses as Polly remembered, but heavy red and bronze and glaring pink. The shape of the garden had changed too. The lawn now sloped clear down from the house to the place with the empty concrete pool, which was in full view, flanked by six-foot growths of hemlock. The pool was not precisely empty any longer. It was shimmering, all over a surface that did not seem to be there. Strong, colourless ripples bled upwards from it, like water or heated air, wavering the hemlocks and the trees where they passed. Polly could not look at it.

The people were all gathered in the upper part of the lawn, holding wine glasses. It could have been a harmless, charming picnic. They were in elegant clothes, the women in long dresses and picture hats, the men in white or in morning dress. There was a murmur of talk and laughter. Laurel, wearing a long green gown, was reclining in a swinging garden seat under a little tree whose leaves were the same orange-brown as the drink she was sipping. Leslie was lolling beside her on the seat. He did not seem to be able to take his eyes off Laurel. The look on his face was dreamy, besotted, adoring, but spiced with wickedness, as if at least half his feelings were guilty ones.

Seeing Leslie, Tom muttered something and turned rather sharply away to one side of the garden seat, where four chairs and four music stands were set out. Ann and Sam and Ed were there, unpacking music and getting out their viola and violins. They looked round as Tom and Polly came up, with relieved recognition.

“So you got here!” Sam said to Polly. “That makes me feel better.”

“Let’s hope we can do something,” Ed added.

Ann just smiled at Polly, tensely and meaningly. So they know me, Polly thought. Which means that Laurel has no need to bother any more. She watched Tom shed his parka to show a sober, ordinary suit like Sam’s and Ed’s. The four of them sat down and began tuning strings, as if they had been hired to entertain the picnic party. And the elegant, chatting people took no more notice of them than they did of the various servitors going round with drinks. Nobody offered the quartet a drink. They were just hired servants too. Which, Polly thought, was what Tom had been all along to these people.

Here she looked up to see Seb and Mr. Leroy staring at her. They were standing together lower down the lawn, and Polly had seldom seen two people look more aghast. The identical horror on their faces brought out the likeness between them, although Seb was tall and trim and elegant in white, and Mr. Leroy was elderly and yellowing and ill, sagging inside his grey morning coat. As Polly looked, Seb said something to his father—it was clearly, “Let me handle her!”—and hurried up the slope to Polly.

He’s even getting dark places under his eyes, Polly thought as Seb came up to her.

“My Pol!” said Seb. “What are you doing here?”

“I remembered,” said Polly. “I’ve come for Tom.”

Seb sagged, so that he looked even more like Mr. Leroy, and fixed her with a sort of desperate glare. “Polly! Think of me!”

“I am,” said Polly, “and I don’t like what I’m thinking. I don’t like what you did.”

Seb, to do him justice, made no attempt to bluster or pretend. “But it was between me and him,” he said. “It always was. And Tom used you too. Surely you understand, Polly! If they don’t take him, they’ll take me instead.”

Polly turned her eyes from his desperately glaring face. Beside her, Tom was bending over the strings of his cello, not looking at her, pretending he could not hear every word Seb said. She thought of the way Seb had gripped her that time, outside the Leroys’ London flat, and she did see that Seb had been afraid for most of his life. Beyond Seb, Mr. Leroy saggingly propped himself on a stick, and down beyond him the transparent living current bled upwards from the pool, shimmering the hemlocks. Seb had managed her, Polly thought, just as he always did, and brought her to a complete dead end. Her eyes moved on to Leslie. He was gently swinging the seat, smiling languorously at Laurel. And I didn’t even do anything about him! she thought. I should have rung up Nina and made her understand. That’s one thing I should have done.

Seb saw her looking at Leslie. “Laurel’s not through with him,” he said. “She won’t let him go yet. Besides, he’s not much of a life. Polly—please!”

“Oh shut up, Seb,” Polly said. “I wasn’t—”

“One of us has got to go,” Seb insisted. “My father’s on his last legs. He’s been waiting eighteen years now. And Tom’s ten years older than I am, He’s had some time at least!”

Oh God! Polly thought. What am I to do?

Beside her, the strings were tuned. The quartet started to play. When Tom began it, gently rolling sullen, swelling notes out of the cello, she assumed it would be designed to show him as the superb cellist he was. But when Ann’s viola came mourning in, she wondered if it might be intended as a dirge. Beyond Ann, Sam’s violin sang, and Ed’s sang and soared, and the music became something else again, nearly light-hearted. Showing how much the quartet needed Tom? Polly wondered. There was no question they were a good quartet these days. They had improved almost out of mind from the afternoon Polly had spent hearing them practise in the green basement. Everyone was attending. The strolling people gathered round and sat on the grass to listen. Laurel turned round in her seat. Even Leslie forgot Laurel sufficiently to sit up and lean forward raptly. Only Seb, standing close to Polly, was tense and inattentive.

The music broadened and deepened, put on majesty and passion, and moved onward in some way, fuller and fuller. All four players were putting their entire selves into it. Polly knew they were not trying to prove anything—or not really. She let the music take her, with relief, because while it lasted she would not have to make a decision or come to a dead end. She found her mind dwelling on Nowhere, as she and Tom used to imagine it. You slipped between Here and Now to the hidden Now and Here—as Laurel had once told another Tom, there was that bonny path in the middle—but you did not necessarily leave the world. Here was a place where the quartet was grinding out dissonances. There was a lovely tune beginning to emerge from it. Two sides to Nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the void that lay before you when you were making up something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before. That’s a discovery I must do something about, Polly thought, as the lovely tune sang out fully once and then fell away to end, as the piece had begun, in a long, sullen cello note. And her mind was made up.

There was a polite patter of applause. “Isn’t it odd,” Polly heard someone behind her say, “how they always do something like this? It seems to bring out the best in them.”

And if I hadn’t decided, I would after that! Polly thought. Everyone was looking at Laurel now. Laurel was sitting up straight, smiling at Tom. “You mustn’t think I don’t understand,” she said. “But it’s time now, Tom.”

Tom got up and propped his cello carefully against the chair. Polly felt Seb begin to relax beside her. Ann turned round and, rather grimly, stowed her viola in its case. Ed and Sam sat where they were, looking urgently at Polly. My move, Polly thought. Mr. Leroy was coming heavily up the slope towards Laurel’s seat. The King, Polly thought. The King who takes the lives of other men to make himself immortal.

But before Polly could move, Mr. Piper burst out from among the rose bushes and pushed his way through the elegant crowd until he was in front of Laurel’s seat. “Leslie!” he shouted. Leslie blinked up at him from beside Laurel, and then looked over at Tom in a puzzled way and seemed to wonder what was going on.

Laurel sat up very straight. There was suddenly not the least doubt that this was a Court, and Laurel was its Queen. “Charles Lynn,” she said coldly. “What are you doing here?”

Mr. Piper loomed in front of her, grasping at the air with his huge hands, which looked queerly useless to him, as if he had been born with lobster’s claws. “Let Leslie go,” he said. “You cow!” Laurel simply looked at him. He put up a lobster hand to guard his eyes. “All right,” he said. “You can take me instead if you want. Just let Leslie go.”

“No,” said Laurel. “I never make more than one bargain, Charles, and I made mine with you sixteen years ago when I let you go in exchange for your brother.”

“Well, I knew what I was in for, didn’t I? And you didn’t like that,” Mr. Piper said. “Besides, he was the one you really wanted anyway, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, go away, Charles,” said Laurel.

“Just a moment,” Tom put in. Mr. Piper turned round awkwardly and backed away when he found Tom right beside him. “Didn’t I have any say in this bargain at all? Who took that photograph?”

“You did—you were always pinching my camera. I only made the enlargement,” said Mr. Piper. “Leave me alone, can’t you! Why do you keep trying to hunt me down?”

“Because I knew it was you,” Tom said. “It had to be, from the way you kept out of sight when I came. It was a pretty poor trick, making Edna pretend to be your sister, and it didn’t fool me for long anyway. And I needed to know how that bargain was made.”

“And you helped her get Leslie!” Mr. Piper said. “I’m glad I made it!”

“Be quiet, both of you,” Laurel said. “I’m obliged to you, Charles. Tom’s life is one of the most valuable we’ve had—even his infuriating habit of fighting everything I do. Morton needs a strong life just now. But the obligation has nothing to do with Leslie.”

At this, Mr. Piper lost his uneasy temper and shouted, “You unfeeling bitch!”

Laurel raised her face and looked at him. “Go away,” she said. Caught in the tunnel of her eyes, Charles Lynn put his arm across his glasses and staggered. Two servitors came up and took hold of him, and looked at Laurel for instructions. “Take him home,” said Laurel. “His wife will be worrying.” As Mr. Piper disappeared backwards among the crowd, still faintly trying to shout insults, Laurel turned, gently and sweetly, to Tom. “I’m sorry, Tom, but you will find the bargain holds. The picture was yours.”

But it isn’t! Polly thought. He gave it to me! Mr. Piper was still to be heard in the background as she pushed her way forward. Seb made an effort to hang on to her, but she shook him off, hardly noticing.

“I never agreed to it,” Tom said. “Don’t look her in the eyes, Polly.”

Laurel smiled at him indulgently. “Oh no, Polly,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me tell Charles that I never make more than one bargain?”

“Yes,” said Polly. “And I agreed to forget Tom, though I never said for how long, and that isn’t the same as giving him up. But I haven’t come to quibble.” She looked carefully between Laurel and Leslie, two fair heads. “I claim that Morton Leroy has forfeited his right to Tom’s life. And he’ll have to find someone else or go himself.”

“We second that,” said Ed. He and Sam and Ann were standing beside Polly, all looking very determined.

Mr. Leroy propped himself on his stick opposite. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked so much on the point of disintegration that Polly could hardly bear to see him. He could have been a walking corpse. “Laurel,” he said, “I don’t think these people have any right to be here.”

“Yes we have,” said Ann. “My mother was a Leroy, and she told me we had a right to invite three friends.”

Laurel looked at Ann carefully. “Very well,” she said. “In that case, I’ll investigate. Polly dear, I hope you’re not just wasting our time.”

“I’m not,” said Polly. “It is right, isn’t it, that Tom’s life is sacrosanct up to this? I mean that, no matter how crazily he drives or whatever other dangerous thing he does, he wasn’t supposed to get hurt.”

“Of course,” said Laurel.

“But Mr. Leroy made two attempts to kill me when I was with Tom,” Polly said. “Sam and Ed were there the first time, and Leslie was there the second time, when Tom got quite badly hurt—”

“I can vouch for that,” Sam said. “We all can.”

“And you must know it’s true yourself,” Polly said, “because I saw you with Tom only a month after—”

“Tom dear,” said Laurel. “You told me—”

“It doesn’t matter what he told you,” Ann interrupted. “Only Morton Leroy could have hurt him, and you know that even better than I do!”

There was silence. In it Polly heard for the first time a faint rippling whisper from the current bleeding from the pool. Laurel seemed to be considering. “Very logical, Polly dear,” she said, “but please tell your friends not to presume.” Then she looked up, behind Polly and Ann. “Seb dear,” she said, and when Seb had grudgingly moved up near the seat, “Seb dear, I don’t think you were quite honest with me. When we made our plan, you never said a word of your father.” She looked the other way, at Mr. Leroy. “Morton, my dear, I think you may have been rather foolish.”

Mr. Leroy was shaking. His red-rimmed eyes rolled vengefully to Polly. “It was my life she was stealing,” he said chokily. “But she was the one who stole the portrait from your room. You can get her for that.”

“I’ll take that into consideration. Thank you,” Laurel said. “But I shall have to support Polly’s claim, Morton, you see that. Come here, Seb dear.”

Tom reached out and seized Polly’s hand.

“Who, me? Why?” said Seb.

“Silly.” Laurel smiled and beckoned. “I shall need you if Morton loses.”

Seb walked slowly over to the swinging seat. There was a look of such utter horror on his face that Polly realised that this was what Seb had been afraid of all these years. She would have felt sorry for him if he had not said to her as he passed her, “Laurel’s not the only unfeeling bitch around here.”

“It won’t kill you,” Polly said. “Literally.”

Laurel meanwhile gave Leslie a gentle push. “Up you get, dear. Seb’s young. I may not need you.”

Leslie sprang up, hurt, guilty, and puzzled, and stared at Seb settling into his place. “What’s going on?”

“Hush, dear,” said Laurel. “Now, Morton, this is what I say. I shall give both of you a chance. Tom can use anything which is truly his. You can use the exact equivalent. The one who enters the pool first is the one who goes. Don’t you think that’s fair, Polly?”

“No,” said Ann, and Mr. Leroy cried out, “Laurel! I’ve no strength!” and Ann added, “But Tom has. That’s the catch, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Laurel. “But that’s what I’ve said, dear.”

Polly looked down at the grass, trying to work out what this meant. Laurel had taken steps to show Tom he could win. But why? Around her, everyone’s feet were crowding as if people were trying to see something, and Seb, for some reason, was churring with laughter. She looked up. Seb was laughing at her, and Tom was no longer beside her. Seeing Seb’s jeering face, it came to her that Seb had always loved her the way most people bear a grudge. He knew what Laurel meant.

Tom and Mr. Leroy were standing halfway down the lawn. The sound from the near-invisible current had changed to hoarse rasping. The ripples had reversed and were now bleeding back into the pool. The pool itself was—wrong somehow. It lay above, or beyond, or perhaps below the two standing on the lawn, like an open trench in a different dimension. Polly’s mind kept trying to tell her it was not really there, in spite of the funnel of ripples sucking back into it. Those ripples only showed because they rippled everything they passed in front of. As Polly was turning to look, they spread and ponded like a sea tide to shimmer across the green lawn and cover Tom and Mr. Leroy from the knees down. Or had the ripples risen? Neither Tom nor Mr. Leroy had moved, yet the funnel of transparent ripples was now somehow up to their waists.

Mr. Leroy had his stick grimly planted, undulating like a snake in the current. Tom put out a bleached, shimmering hand. It was a habitual sort of gesture, though it had doubt and experiment in it. His cello swam into being, still propped on its chair, on the rippling green slope above him, and its bow was somehow in his hand. And it seemed as if the ponding funnel of ripples tipped about without moving. Mr. Leroy was out of it from the knees upwards, but Tom was under up to his shoulders. Polly saw him realise and stand back from the cello with his arms folded and the bow dangling, rippling under one elbow.

There was polite pattering applause from the elegant people round Polly. A voice cheered Mr. Leroy. Several others called jeeringly to Tom to use the cello, since he had made such a point of having it. Without thinking, Polly plunged forward to fetch that cello away.

“No!” shouted Ann. Sam and Ed seized Polly by her arms and held her back. Polly stopped resisting in a hurry. Even this—her attempt to help and the others’ to stop her—had tipped the cone of ripples about again. Mr. Leroy’s bent grey figure stood clear against the green grass. Only his feet and the tip of his stick rippled. Tom was right underneath, blanched and wavering, and, in the odd, wrong perspective down there, he was in some way a lot nearer to that coffin-shaped trench into which the current was bleeding. The bright garden and the elegantly excited people smeared round Polly as she understood. Tom on his own could not send Mr. Leroy to the pool. Any help sent Tom there instead. Out of the smear, the one clear thing was Laurel, sitting upright in her seat, watching Tom with a small, grave smile. Laurel, with chilly, malicious logic, had made sure that there was only one way Tom could win.

All right, Polly thought. So the only way to win is to lose. I’ll have to lose.

There was a sort of conference going on among the other three, mainly in mutters and jerks of the head, in case this would be construed as help to Tom. “Try it,” said Ann. “It’s all I can think of.”

Ed picked up his violin off the grass where he had dropped it in order to grab Polly, put it under his chin, and played, not his usual sweet notes, but a rapid downwards squalling. A whinny. Below, the bleached, shimmering shape of Tom tilted his head. He said something. Polly knew he was asking her what she thought, but his voice belled into a thousand echoes in the ripples and all she could hear was, “Think-ink-ink?”

She could see the way the others were thinking. Tom had changed the horse for a car, but since Tom was Laurel’s man with Laurel’s gift, that horse was still truly his. It was all the wild strength he had summoned up to get loose from Laurel. They were asking him to summon it again to defeat Mr. Leroy, hoping to use Laurel’s unlucky gift against her. But Polly knew it would only turn against Tom.

“Don’t expect any help from me!” she shouted. It was all the hint she dared give.

But a voice did not cut through the current like Ed’s violin. Tom must have thought she agreed. He nodded. The ripples sped over him faster and faster as he leaned forward and tried to get his bow to the strings of the cello. It seemed to have drifted upwards from him and he could barely reach it.

Polly set off down the lawn again before he could do it. She was sure the others would not dare try to stop her a second time. She passed the elegant people crowding and clapping like spectators at a contest. They laughed and called out at her. She came to Mr. Leroy. He was leaning on his stick watching Tom sarcastically over his shoulder. He broke into his loud, fatal laugh as he saw Polly. But the laugh stopped as she walked past him into the miasmic ripples, and he looked at her uneasily.

Polly kept her eyes on the greyed, uncertain shape of Tom below. He was definitely below now, in the wrong perspective of that current, deep beneath her. Around her, everything became grey-green ripples, but she did not feel the ripples, or anything else particularly. She had meant to harden her mind and be as stony as Ivy, but she seemed stony already. Kind feeling seemed to bleed away from her as she went downwards. Love, companionship, even Nowhere meant less and less. All she felt was a numb kind of sadness. The truth between two people always cuts two ways, she thought. And she had to go on.

As you do in water, she saw Mr. Leroy floating above her, and the blurred soles of his shoes. Tom was floating below, fighting the current to get near his cello. Neither had gone up or down. By which Polly knew she had to go on and lose.

She was quite near to Tom when he succeeded in drawing the bow across the cello. It made a thundering rasp, which was taken up by the echoes of the current and prolonged to a chugging sort of snarl. Tom receded downwards instantly. Ah, well, Polly thought. It wouldn’t have worked. She passed the cello, with echoes ebbing out of it, and the bow, floating, and found Tom in front of her.

He was hanging, swaying, with both arms spread out for balance on the very edge of the trench. It was open like a door behind him. And it was nothingness. There were no ripples here, just nothingness. Truly the dead end of nowhere, Polly thought.

“That was a mistake,” he said to her. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Polly. The horse was coming. She could feel its hoofbeats in the dying din of the cello, cutting across the rhythm of the ripples above her. She wondered whether to say any more. She could have got it horribly wrong. But the only way to turn that wild strength of the horse to Tom’s advantage was to deprive him of it completely. To take everything away, and do it now, because the horse had arrived. When she craned her head in the impossible direction of the garden, back and above, she could see a huge, bent, golden shape racing across the green there. “And it was an even worse mistake,” she said, “the way you used me. You took me over as a child to save your own skin.”

The golden shape surged above. Polly could feel the beast panic as the current dragged it in. “You’re not doing that again,” she said.

Tom stared at her incredulously. She could see his eyes behind his glasses, as wide and grey with shock as they were when he first saw the horse. He had been completely sure of her. Polly could hardly blame him. But she had to go on. The horse was on its way down, screaming, lashing, fighting the current, belling echoes against the trench of nothingness, and the large grey shape of Mr. Leroy was tumbling downwards before it.

“Now you know how I felt,” Polly said. “Taste of your own medicine. We’ve nothing in common anyway, and I’ve got a career to come too.”

Then the horse came. It stood above them like a tower of golden flesh and bone, beating the current with its iron hooves and screaming, screaming. Polly saw a big eye tangled in pale horse-hair, and huge, square teeth.

“I never want to see you again!” she screamed at Tom through its screams. The grey lump of Mr. Leroy slid past her into nothingness. Polly turned away as the horse hit them.