by Freya North
‘Pardon?’ said Polly.
‘I was thinking, you must have been here a month and I had no idea,’ he shrugged.
‘’Bout what?’ Polly asked.
‘’Bout who’s standing in for Jen Carter,’ Chip explained. ‘I guess I just don’t have much cause to go to the main buildings, being the Athletic Trainer. Hell, Stuyvesant House could burn down and I’d probably not know. I’m kinda out of the way here.’
‘What does an athletic trainer do exactly?’ Polly asked, perusing the walls of Chip’s office. ‘We don’t have such things in our school, in England full stop, I don’t think,’ she continued, admiring the array of photos depicting him excelling in a variety of sports. A cabinet full of medals and trophies too. What a hero!
‘Well,’ said Chip, ‘I’m on call if there’s a sports-related injury. Or if a kid’s training, I’ll devise a programme. If they have a bad back, or whatever, I see to it. I administer physio, rehab, hydrotherapy – you know?’
‘Really!’ Polly gasped in awe, pitying poor Miss Henry who looked like a man but preferred women and was head of P.E. at BGS. ‘Hydrotherapy?’
‘Sure,’ shrugged Chip. ‘We have a couple of whirlpools,’ he explained, as if they should be no more eye-opening than a couple of table-tennis tables. ‘So what can I do for you? Or did you just come by to say hi?’
‘Hi, hullo. Actually, it’s my leg,’ Polly stressed. ‘Young AJ and I collided.’
‘Not on some fine detail of Shakespeare, surely – I know the kid’s opinionated but hey!’
‘No no!’ Polly laughed, warming to Chip’s wit and smile. ‘Basketball. And anyway, it’s Hardy at the mo’.’
‘Kiss me?’ asked Chip, turning his head and looking at Polly through slanted eyes.
‘Pardonwhat?’ Polly reacted whilst struggling against being swallowed whole by his gaze.
‘Kiss me Hardy?’ Chip illumined, the picture of innocence.
Look at that picture of him finishing the Boston Marathon. How can anyone look that composed and, um, pleasing, after twenty-six miles?
‘And 385 yards,’ said Chip, reading her mind.
‘Thomas,’ she stressed, leaping back on to safer ground, ‘Hardy. Thomas Hardy.’
‘I gathered,’ Chip said, motioning Polly to a chair while he drew another up close.
‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’ Polly continued vaguely, wondering if Chip’s tan was genuine.
‘Yup,’ said Chip, ‘as I said, I’m pretty cut off out here. Now, let’s take a look at this leg. You want to take your pants down?’
What!
No!
Yes?
‘Your trousers?’ he spelt out with a ‘w’ and a ‘z’.
Yes!
No?
Polly rolled down her leggings, suddenly horribly aware of her bikini-line fuzz, pale thighs and rather bristly lower legs. Chip placed cool hands around her calf and lifted her leg on to his lap, admiring her smooth milky skin to himself.
‘Play much?’ he asked, pressing gently. ‘This hurt?’
‘No and yes!’ Polly all but yelled. Chip winced for her, holding her leg steady. And tenderly. And for longer than was probably necessary, not that Polly would have known. He hovered his hand above it; kept it there, suspended. Polly could feel a cushion of heat. Odd. It was soothing. It gave her a strange feeling.
‘That’s one helluva whack you’ve gotten yourself, lady!’
‘Dialect words,’ she quoted, in a bid to belittle the blush she knew she wore. ‘Those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.’
‘Hey?’ asked Chip.
‘Hardy,’ Polly nodded, adding ‘Thomas’ quickly before Chip could quote Nelson again.
‘You calling me an animal?’ he laughed, hovering a fist above her throbbing shin.
‘No, no, no. I’m far too genteel,’ Polly heard herself say.
Chip sent her on her way with some arnica, a cool pack, and his assurance that there was no damage done.
A very private, quiet side of Polly wasn’t so sure.
Nor, Chip realized, removing the photograph of Jen from his desk and relegating it to the bottom drawer, was he.
Max was shopping at Budgens in Belsize Park because he couldn’t face the one-way system encircling Sainsbury’s in Camden Town; he didn’t like Safeway because the television adverts irritated him supremely, and Waitrose in Swiss Cottage was far too extravagant midweek (which made the Rosslyn Delicatessen in Hampstead a luxury completely out of the question). Yet he loathed Budgens intensely. He only needed a few basics, few of which the store had anyway, but there he was, he realized, mainly because it was Polly’s stamping ground and therefore offered some connection, some comfort in lieu of the real thing. In lieu of an overdue letter.
He bought half a basketful of provisions and was about to make a swift exit when the Lottery machine and the passport-photo machine suggested he do otherwise.
I’ll buy a ticket for Polly!
I’ll pose for some daft passport photos to send with it!
He procrastinated for some time over which numbers to pick before marking off six boxes.
27 for her age, 30 for mine, 5 for the years we’ve been together (and the weeks we’ve now been apart), 19 for the date in December when she’ll be home for Christmas. Damn, two more. 13 because I’m not suspicious, I mean superstitious, and because it equals ‘M’ in the alphabet. 16, likewise, for ‘P’.
‘How will I know if she’s won?’ he asked the sales assistant who regarded him most warily, not imagining that there was anyone in the UK who had never before bought a Lottery ticket.
‘It flashes up half-way through Blind Date,’ she informed him as if he was a halfwit.
‘On the television?’ Max asked, to her stupefied look. ‘When’s it on? Blind Date?’ he pressed, thinking the girl’s grimace of exasperation was merely some unfortunate facial mishap.
‘Sa-Urday nigh-,’ she said, dropping her ‘t’s in mystification, ‘’bou- eigh-.’
Max thanked her and asked her what coins he needed for the passport-photo machine.
While waiting for the snaps to develop, a sickening lurch hit his stomach.
Oh bloody hell, the ice-cream!
He’d treated himself to a comfort-size tub of Häagen-Dazs ‘Cookie Dough Dynamo’ which he had no intention of sharing with Dominic, no matter how starving his brother might be, how hard he might plead, how temptingly he might bribe. Currently, the tub was at the bottom of the plastic bag; Max could feel it because he was holding the bag next to him as he waited by the whirring passport machine. He looked at his watch and then at the store’s clock and estimated he had been faffing around, gambling and posing, for at least fifteen minutes since paying for his goods. He added on another ten minutes since he had plucked the ice-cream from the freezer cabinet and placed it with relish in the then empty basket.
Still the machine rumbled and clicked and though he looked up the chute he could see nothing. He sat down, alongside a cackle of old ladies, on the orange chairs provided by the store.
Nothing for it, I’ll have to salvage what I can.
He took the ice-cream tub from the bag and gave it a gentle squeeze. It yielded ominously quickly to his touch. He eased the lid off easily and pulled back the film cover, licking it meticulously. Slowly, he licked at the goopy surface of the ice-cream. Actually, it hadn’t melted much at all. But enough, all the same, to warrant him lapping at the softer parts.
‘Like the cutest puppy,’ Jen Carter, bearing witness to the whole episode while she waited in the queue, said to herself.
As Max was waiting for the machine to blow-dry the photos which had finally appeared, a blonde woman, lean and too tanned for this time of year, approached him.
‘Looks like you could use one of these,’ she said in an American accent, offering him a Maryland cookie. He looked at her bewildered.
How can biscuits help with drying photos?
‘Sorry?’ he said, a quick
glance at the machine to see that the blow-drying was still in operation.
Come on, machine.
‘For your ice-cream?’ said the woman, tapping the tub with the biscuit packet. ‘Like, in place of a spoon.’
‘Right, right!’ Max responded, a little embarrassed, glaring at the machine to hurry up. He’d recently read an article about supermarkets being hotbeds for ‘singles in search of sex’ and was increasingly worried that there were ulterior motives for this woman and her cookies. The machine was silent. Thank God.
My hands are full; bugger and damn!
‘Here, let me,’ the woman offered.
‘No, no,’ rushed Max, ‘honestly.’
Too late.
She had the photos. Though she pretended not to look, she’d have seen the one of him pulling his monkey face. And the one below of his wide-eyed theatrical pout. In a glance.
‘Er,’ Max stumbled, ‘thanks, right, yes, thank you. Fine. They’re for my girlfriend. She’s in America.’
‘My home, my country,’ sighed the woman, clasping hands (and the photos) to her breast and smiling.
‘Yes,’ said Max, inadvertently clapping eyes on her breast, ‘Vermont.’
The woman’s smile fixed itself and then dropped. She scoured Max’s face and he found himself rooted by a pair of very blue eyes.
‘Vermont?’ she gasped, ‘you wouldn’t be—?’ She let the sentence hang. England sure was small – but not that small, surely.
Max’s eyes alighted on cat biscuits, tinned salmon and condensed milk visible in the woman’s plastic bag.
Buster.
‘You’re not—’ he stopped. They stared at each other, searching for some further clue.
‘I’m Jen Carter,’ she laughed, eyes dancing while her brow twitched becomingly.
‘Good Lord!’ Max chuckled, shaking his head and grinning back, ‘I’m Polly’s Max.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘I do,’ he assured her, ‘I am.’
They shook their heads and then shook hands.
‘Well well,’ Max said, handing Jen the ice-cream while he restored order to his shopping bag.
‘Can I tempt you,’ Jen asked, ‘with Polly’s spoons? You want to eat up your ice-cream back at the apartment? Check the place over? Say hi to Buster?’
What an offer. Of course he did.
Aha. Is autumn to be a season of trysts? A helluva fruity mess? A little bit of harmless swinging? Mixing if not matching? Musical affairs? Bed jumping and wife swapping? But no one’s married here. Yet. Does that make it any less significant? Easier? Does that make it right? Or just not as wrong?
Hold on, I thought these four characters were besotted with their true partners? Fenton and Fyfield. Miss American Pie and her hunk of Chip. It might be an interesting notion in terms of our tale’s plot – but what of the potential chaos in our characters’ lives? We know these people. The thought wouldn’t enter their minds, would it? Or if it did, if it crept in, it would be banished at once, of course. Or, if not quite at once, it would be considered carefully – and then rejected defiantly. Surely.
NINE
While Jen cursed autumn for dressing the pavements in a lethal cloak of sodden leaves and for giving her a stuffy cold, Polly praised the fall frequently each day for its stunning blaze of cool fire. She was rarely without a smile or a spring to her step and her delight and her energy were infectious. Trudging across Hampstead Heath in its October livery of russets and browns was one thing, but jogging or cycling or sitting – just living – in Vermont, in a landscape which boasted every possible hue of red, orange and yellow was something else entirely.
‘Forget Keats!’ Polly told her senior class, ‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”? I hardly think so. Don’t take any notice of him – he never came to Vermont, you see. But if he had, class, how do you think he would have described it? Anyone? Don?’
‘Er, “season of pumpkin and palette of fire”?’
‘Good! Laura?’
‘“Trees clad the colour of passion; sun slumbering till spring”?’
‘Super! Kevin?’
‘“Fall: the sweep of flame that is the swansong of the maple.”’
‘Terrific! Gosh, look at it out there – come on, let’s spend the remainder of the lesson outside composing odes.’
The Bench, Hockey Pitch
19th October
Darling Max,
My class are composing odes to the fall so I thought I’d do the same but in letter form to you. I’ve told the seniors to forget Keats – do you think that very wicked? But most of them are eighteen years old, so I’m sure they can handle such an order! I won’t tell the juniors to do so as they’re far too impressionable, and I can’t instruct the freshers and sofs because I doubt they know who Keats is. I think the seniors feel liberated, relieved in some way – given carte blanche to shake off the spectre of hallowed literature, to praise nature in whatever terms they choose. They’re picking some excellent ones too.
As you know, I don’t believe in God, but I have to credit and thank some thing; whoever, whatever. As the fall has taken hold, it is as if some divine, huge power is laying their hand over the land in a slow, magical sweeping. Initially, just the fingertips of some of the leaves on a few of the trees were touched with crimson. Within a week, every tree had a flourish of copper or brass amongst the remaining green – as if a whole branchful had been given a celestial handshake. Now the maples are cloaked in incredible swathes of colours from the highest yellow to the deepest maroon; so vivid and bright that I don’t know whether to weep or wear sunglasses. No mists, no mellow fruitfulness; instead an amazing clarity, crystal-clean light and a clear breeze. This land is rich indeed, for the leaves are made of gold, of rubies, of garnets. Ho! Sorry to prattle on in such syrupy terms, but I really have fallen under the spell of this place.
The only drawback is the Rodin Syndrome. Now that I have experienced the fall in Vermont, I fear any other autumn anywhere else will surely seem second-rate and mediocre. Rather like all other sculpture once the work of Rodin is known.
God, I wish you were here. It is absolutely beautiful but it would be even better if I could share it. I mean, I go jogging with Lorna and cycling with Clinton (I’m quite fit now – you’d love my tight butt) (that’s American for firm bum) but what I crave is a long, loping walk with you.
Damn – time and paper run out on me – and my juniors are about to have the surprise of their lives: they’re about to meet Chaucer and, while they adore my dulcet tones, I’m not sure what they’ll make of my Middle English accent.
I love you, Max-i-mine. My own ‘verray parfit gentil knight’, I miss you. Write soon,
Polly.
PS. pis send more Marmite – Kate’s gone crazy for it and is using it in everything – Bogey’s food included.
‘Yeah, hello?’
‘Chip?’
‘Jen! How are you? Hey, it’s great to hear from you. I was going to call you only there’s a hockey tournament soon and suddenly the whole team have gotten aches and sprains.’
‘Hey, that’s OK, I’ve been pretty busy too.’
‘So how’s it going?’
‘Good, good – how’s Hubbardtons?’
‘Pretty much the same. I think tomorrow’ll be Mountain Day.’
‘Hey – isn’t that classified information? Wish I could be there.’
‘You don’t have some day similar, in London England?’
‘Nope. Nothing that comes close. Something called Mufti when the kids can wear their own clothes – but that’s only the last day of term.’
‘Some way off.’
‘Sure is. You know, it’s kinda weird living in someone else’s apartment. There’re these crazy women above me – one is old, Swiss and nutty as hell, the other’s an out-and-out psycho. I haven’t managed to come in without one or other noticing – so I’m either sworn at or asked the date, time and year and the whereabouts of some guy called Fr
anz.’
‘Sounds entertaining?’
‘I guess. I think I prefer being Dorm Mother to ten girls though. So, have you met Polly Fenton?’
‘Er, Polly Fenton. No, no, I haven’t as yet.’
‘Oh?’
‘No, I’ve been real busy.’
‘Sure. She’s pretty.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I met her boyfriend and he showed me photos.’
‘She has a boyfriend?’
‘Yes. Chip?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You there?’
‘Sure.’
‘You went kinda distant.’
‘I was miles away, I was just – you know. I don’t know, I’m bushed.’
‘Sure.’
‘So what’s he like?’
‘Who?’
‘This boyfriend guy.’
‘Oh, he’s really sweet and helpful – the boiler here’s a little temperamental so he’s going to have someone come fix it. He and his brother are making dinner for me and Megan this weekend.’
‘Great.’
‘Yeah. You want to know who Megan is?’
‘I’d love to but I gotta go – I have a kid for hydrotherapy in five.’
‘Sure. I love you, Chip.’
‘Love you too, Jen.’
Hampstead
Hallowe’en
Hullo Button,
Lovely to receive your letters – two arrived this morning though you sent them a week apart. Royal Mail – 1, USA Post – 0. You wrote beautifully about the fall and I wish so much I could share it with you. Maybe another year we could take our holiday there.
London is sludgy and slippery, and strolling over the Heath becomes a maudlin trudge without you, kicking the leaves, all rosy-cheeked and alive. There have been some great films on at the Everyman but all Dominic will be coaxed to see is Die Very Hard 27 and Star Trek 43. Plebeian.
Work has been going well; some new commissions as well as potboilers from the faithful. I enclose photos and a Lottery ticket – the acquisition of both being highly traumatic so I hope you’ll be grateful.
You’ll never guess who I bumped into.
Jen Carter!
At Budgens.