Polly

by Freya North

  Zoe gladly allowed her Dorm Mom to have a sodding headache again. All the Petersfield House girls had caught a drift of what was going on between Miss Fenton and that cute guy. They weren’t going to cause any problems for her, they adored her too much. Anyway, their imaginations were hyperactive and the space Miss Fenton created enabled their conjectures to run riot. As soon as Zoe gave the all clear, they gathered together in her room, ate chocolate and hypothesized on what was happening in Miss Fenton’s life. Their postulations ran into veritable novels, any of their proposed endings were plausible, all would make great reading. Our ending can be defined solely by Polly and Max.

  Currently, they are sitting on Kate’s deck. The house is empty as the inhabitants are at a lecture on the human aura and its implications for digestive problems, being held at the community centre in nearby Hanbury Falls.

  ‘Can you imagine holding an evening similarly entitled in Swiss Cottage?’ Max marvels, believing light conversation the best way to ease into his farewell.

  ‘No,’ Polly laughs bravely, ‘maybe Crouch End though.’

  ‘So, are you going to come back then?’ Max asks, ‘to England?’

  Polly frowns. ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘it’s where I live.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Max, ‘but is it your home?’

  Polly looks over Kate’s garden and wishes she was small enough to hide in one of the bushes.

  She is about to hedge her bets.

  Deep breath. Here goes.

  ‘It’s where I live,’ she reiterates, ‘but my home, Max, is with you.’

  There. And you?

  ‘Not wherever you lay your hat?’ he chips in. (Actually Max, don’t do that – just butt in, or interrupt or something.)

  ‘I don’t wear a hat,’ Polly says clearly, ‘but I do wear my heart on my sleeve – and I know now that it sometimes gets me into trouble.’

  ‘Well,’ Max says, as if in some long conclusion, ‘we make mistakes so we can learn by them.’

  ‘We do!’ Polly enthuses, ‘of course. I did and I have!’

  Yippee, he’s back. Same language. Same emotion.

  ‘So have I,’ Max continues.

  ‘Darling Max,’ Polly gasps, smiling, reaching out, ‘my man.’

  ‘Sorry Button,’ Max says, holding her arms before she can sink against him, ‘I can’t do this. I’m just not convinced that we can work it out.’

  She had never seen Max resolute. Not Max Fyfield, the man always open to suggestion, for whom consideration is a central element of his being. Max of the open mind and heart. Both, now, were closed against Polly. The end of a chapter, he explained to her, that’s all.

  FORTY-ONE

  ‘It can’t be,’ Polly said on first waking the next morning. ‘It isn’t,’ she declared to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘I won’t let it.’ Her eyes were shot through the colour of mud and encircled with the darkness that comes from deep anxiety, disbelief and less than two hours’ sleep. ‘I know that he still does love me,’ she reasoned to her toes as she slipped her socks on. ‘Doesn’t he? He does,’ she told her shoes, slipping her hands into them and tapping the soles together while she thought what to do next. ‘Doesn’t he?’

  Put my shoes on.

  Ten minutes later, Polly was at the Dean’s office.

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ she said to Powers Mateland, ‘but I can’t take my classes today.’ Her arms were crossed over her breasts and she regarded Powers with a mixture of pleading and warning.

  Please let me go. Don’t ask.

  ‘The whole day?’ he enquired, with a disconcertingly passive expression.

  ‘Yes,’ said Polly, looking at her watch in a brazenly obvious glance.

  ‘All your classes?’ Powers probed.

  ‘Every single one,’ Polly defined.

  Powers held the crook of his finger to his lips and looked at Polly. He’d been in love. Once.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, as if she had merely checked if she could teach her seniors out of doors.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, as if that was all she’d asked for.

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘Yo, Polly!’

  ‘What time’s your first class? Half ten, isn’t it? Like mine?’

  ‘Yup – you wanna go make love till then?’

  ‘Nope. I want you to drive me to Normansbury for the airport bus.’

  Jackson regarded Polly suspiciously. ‘You leaving?’

  ‘Nope.’ She was twitching her lip and regarding him very directly.

  ‘Now?’ he said, looking at her in amazement.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a jot,’ she confirmed. ‘Can we go, please?’

  God she was pretty when she was hiding the panic. Her twitching mouth, her glassy bottle-green eyes, petite nostrils flaring slightly with each breath, her hair swishing at the slightest movement of her head.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jackson, still blithely confident of his power of seduction.

  Or else, I’m just one crazy sucker.

  Max was not on the bus. In truth, Polly had only half hoped that he might have been. He had most probably taken the one an hour before. It didn’t matter. What she had to say wouldn’t sound right on a juddering bus and anyway, she’d probably feel too queasy to talk unless she was able to look out of the window and in the direction of travel.

  Max wasn’t on the bus because he was still in Hubbardtons, double-checking his rucksack and expressing heartfelt gratitude to Kate.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ he said to her, busying himself with his bags so he did not have to catch her gaze which he could sense, hot and enquiring, on his cheek.

  ‘Sure,’ Kate smiled, ‘it was fun having you here. You come back now.’

  ‘Love to,’ said Max truthfully.

  ‘Come,’ Kate said, nodding her head in the direction of the door, ‘you have a plane to catch.’

  Max’s bus arrived at Logan Airport an hour after Polly’s. He had been a little surprised that she had not somehow found her way on to it, but the landscapes of Vermont and Massachusetts provided ample distraction for him not to dwell on it. Consequently, when he heard a familiar voice arguing at the check-in desk, he was momentarily somewhat disorientated. He stepped back behind a pillar to listen. He couldn’t see her anyway. The queue was long. Her voice, though, was quite clear.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Polly was shouting, ‘I have to speak to passenger Fyfield.’

  ‘Ma’am, I already told you, he hasn’t checked in.’

  ‘Well, can you check please?’

  ‘Honey, that’s all we do and I’m telling you, the guy has not been processed.’

  ‘OK then,’ Polly said in a chillingly curt voice, ‘could you please ask your friends on the other side – you know, after passports and frisking.’

  ‘Lady, if the guy hasn’t come by here, he sure as hell hasn’t gone through there.’

  ‘But where is he?’ Polly cried, her voice breaking with desperation and need.

  ‘He has two and a half hours before his flight. Maybe he’s just late.’

  ‘Max,’ Polly said, ‘is never late.’

  ‘Maybe he changed his mind and changed his flight.’

  ‘No,’ Polly said, resigned, ‘he is hardly likely to do that.’

  Max peeped out from the pillar. The queue forming behind Polly seemed much more interested in her dilemma than they were bothered by being kept waiting. Max smiled.

  OK, Polly, let’s make their day.

  He walked up the queue, catching drifts of conjecture from his fellow passengers.

  Wrong, wrong. This is fun, in a weird way.

  He tapped Polly on the shoulder.

  ‘Looking for me?’

  ‘Max!’

  There was a loud cheer from the queue. Even the check-in assistant looked genuinely pleased. ‘There you go,’ she said, ‘next passenger, please.’ The next passenger insisted that Max checked
in first. Polly felt instantly wretched that he did so, though of course she had no reason to hope otherwise.

  Please change your mind.

  Polly, a man’s mind is often far easier to change than a flight on a super-bucket-seat economy ticket.

  ‘Window seat near the front,’ was the first thing Max said to her as he led her away from the rapt queue. Soon enough though, an argument between check-in assistant and passenger, about lacto-ovo-vegetarian meals, provided the line with a new spectacle.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Max said, not smiling but his look gentle.

  ‘I,’ Polly stammered, her eyes badly camouflaged khaki, ‘I am just.’

  ‘You are just?’ Max asked. ‘Is that a sentence, Polly?’

  ‘I,’ she tried again, ‘came.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘you are indeed here.’

  ‘I am going to say something.’

  ‘OK,’ Max said, slowly again, ‘I’m listening. Do you want to go for a coffee?’ He looked around the concourse and made to move away.

  ‘No!’ Polly shouted, grabbing his arm, breathing audibly. ‘I want to tell you something. I don’t want a coffee.’

  ‘Tea? What, then?’ Max asked. ‘What is it?’

  Polly shrugged. Max looked around the concourse again.

  Oh God, is he looking a little irritated?

  Polly feared she might cry so she turned away from him. And then spun back, just in case he had left.

  My throat. My eyes. Can I do this? How do I do this?

  ‘Please,’ she implored, ‘don’t leave. I mean, for England, yes. Me? No. Don’t. Let’s stay.’ Max looked from her shoes to his shoes in a non-committal way and raised his shoulders, though whether it was as a sigh or a shrug was hard to decipher.

  ‘Please,’ Polly said, tipping her neck so she could look up at his bowed face.

  Max shook his head, ‘Sorry.’

  Polly gasped. Max refused to look because he was desperate not to hear. ‘Polly,’ he said, ‘life’s a journey and—’

  ‘—I want to travel it with you,’ she interjected in as controlled a voice as she could muster.

  ‘Life’s a journey,’ Max persisted, ‘we got off at the same stop – but we changed routes.’ His eyes were very glassy, a sight Polly had never seen, though soon the deluge of her own tears obscured Max from view.

  ‘Our deeds still travel with us from afar,’ she croaked, blinking and gulping, ‘And what we have been makes us what we are.’

  Max regarded her. Sternly. Then quizzically. He cocked his head.

  ‘Say that again,’ he said, locking eyes. She obliged, finding Max’s gaze had burned away her tears. He hummed.

  ‘And again,’ he requested. She repeated the verse, her voice now clear as the light traversing his face.

  ‘Is that what you believe?’ Max asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Polly, ‘at my very core.’

  ‘Snap,’ said Max, in utter amazement.

  ‘Snap?’ Polly queries. Max shrugs and shakes his head in apparent self-disbelief. He doesn’t look particularly happy, he is frowning and looks utterly confused.

  Snap? As in dragon or brandy? Snap out of it? What on earth? Hang on a mo’ – snap?

  ‘Snap?’ she repeats, as if it is the first word she has learned.

  ‘Snap,’ Max shrugs, his eyebrows twitching bewilderment and relief simultaneously.

  ‘Oh?’ she says.

  ‘I think so,’ Max responds. ‘Weird,’ he marvels out loud but to himself, thinking he could desperately do with a coffee, wondering how on earth a line of verse could produce such clarity. ‘It’s like you’ve played your cards right and turned up the trump card no less – because it matches mine. Snap.’

  ‘It is not a game, you know,’ Polly says quietly, sternly, her brow deeply furrowed, her cheeks reddening with humiliation.

  ‘Polly,’ Max breathes, closing his eyes momentarily and swaying a little, ‘am I glad to hear you say that.’

  Now Polly doesn’t know whether to frown or smile, the confusion threatens to cause a headache. Outwardly, the effort wrinkles her face and colours her eyes soft moss. Max can’t help but cup her head and kiss. Polly looks terrified.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  What about? Exactly? This kiss? The past? The future?

  He repeats his kiss and she is able to answer.

  ‘Don’t be,’ says Polly.

  They stand still and suddenly take note of where they are. Noisy departure hall. Plane to catch. Term to finish. Them – from this point on. So much to do, but where to start?

  ‘Do you love and forgive me?’ Polly asks.

  ‘Yes and yes,’ Max replies, ‘you me?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Polly, ‘and yes.’

  They regard each other, frown and smile. Shuffle a little. Look away. Back again. Still here.

  ‘You see, I forgive me,’ Polly exclaims suddenly, ‘because I’ve been most deeply repentant.’

  ‘I’ve been livid with me too,’ Max replies, ‘but I’ll accept my apology because I firmly believe my promise not to do it again.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ reasons Polly, not passing the buck.

  ‘No,’ agrees Max, blaming no one, ‘nor mine.’

  ‘Remember the film Love Story?’ Polly ponders, twiddling her hair whilst staring intently at Max’s stomach, as if rerunning the film on it.

  ‘Slushy bollocks,’ Max responds, putting his hand on his stomach and tapping his fingers to see if he can make Polly blink.

  ‘Actually,’ says Polly, who’s seen it a number of times, ‘it was misguided and wrong – that stuff about love meaning you never have to say you’re sorry.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She blinks and looks at Max directly, arms folded and lips pursed.

  ‘Bollocks indeed,’ she proclaims, ‘dangerous. Love means being strong enough – in yourself as an individual and in yourself as part of a partnership – to apologize.’

  ‘Love,’ interjects Max, ‘means being committed enough to accept it.’

  ‘I’ve come so close to losing what I know now to be my very lifeblood,’ says Polly, tracing her finger over Max’s torso for emphasis, ‘you must see how I’ll never risk that again.’ Max does not reply. He lifts her chin and presses his lips against her forehead. He tucks her hair behind her ears and, in a luxuriously slow, measured gesture, dips his mouth to hers and kisses her very very gently.

  ‘You used to make me feel whole,’ Polly muses, ‘but I see now how that’s not the point. It’s tosh about “two becoming one” – two halves don’t make a whole.’

  ‘No,’ Max agrees, ‘you have to be complete in yourself to be able to function as a pair.’

  ‘Yes,’ Polly nods earnestly, drawing a huge circle in the air for emphasis. Max makes a circle with his finger and thumb, takes Polly’s hands and does the same and then interlinks the two. They stand there for a moment before the tannoy insists that passengers flying Virgin Atlantic to London make their way to the gate. Max undoes his fingers and changes the gesture to the firmest and most formal of handshakes.

  ‘Great. At last. I can leave you,’ says Max, suddenly so happy, finding confident amusement in his little jest.

  ‘Yeah,’ Polly retorts, delighted, ‘just fuck off, would you?’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Could you go, please.’

  ‘I’m out of here.’

  They laugh and marvel and sigh ‘Oh dear’.

  ‘See you soon?’ says Max.

  Why the question mark, Max? Are you unsure?

  Well, it’s odd, isn’t it, I had it all figured out sensibly and bloody George Eliot’s changed it all.

  And Ryan O’Neill. And Polly Fenton. And you.

  Polly regards her watch, squints at the departures board and looks long at Max while she sucks her lips and does mental arithmetic.

  ‘About one month, one week, two days and six hours,’ she elaborates.

  ‘Nearer to
seven,’ Max interjects, ‘hours. With head winds, I think.’

  Polly punches him lightly on the chest, ‘It’s soon enough.’

  Max catches her fist and takes it to his face, burying his nose in her palm, pressing his lips at the base of her hand.

  I remember that smell.

  Swiftly, he pulls her close against him. He traces a route from her forehead to her mouth and then replaces his index finger with his lips. His kiss is planted deep, sown into her soul, and she drinks him in.

  Is this happening? Are you really holding me as close as it feels?

  I won’t be letting go again.

  ‘Will you write?’ Max asks.

  ‘Swift bloody air,’ Polly laughs. ‘Now bugger off.’

  Max last saw Polly the day before the day before yesterday. She’s written Swiftair and he’s just received it. He’ll reply today and send it tomorrow. She’ll have it in about three days.

  Maybe she’ll have written again by then.

  She will have, Max, you can count on it.

  FORTY-TWO

  So, here we are Polly, you’re only a couple of days from the end of term and we’re just a few pages from having to let you go.

  It’s July. It’s been pouring with rain – it’s going to mean a late fall but it will be more brilliant and lasting.

  And you won’t be here to see it.

  No. I’ll be in England. But I’ll know that over the sea and not so far away, autumn is enriching the souls of all who bear witness to it.

  You said ‘autumn’.

  Yes, autumn. In English. I’m having to start my packing, you see – it’s going to take far longer to wrap up my emotions than my clothes and belongings.

  It’s been some ten months.

  The time of my life – and I mean that with no flippancy. I’ve been lost and found and I’ve done it myself.

  What’ll you miss?

  The people. The peace. The pace.

  You can visit.

  We’re going to.

  You said ‘we’.

  Yes, and you didn’t make me.