Polly (13 page)

She checked. She didn't.

‘Where will you be for Christmas?' she asked, sipping her whiskey, wishing it didn't have an ‘e' or ice.

‘Back home, I guess,' said Chip, taking a sonorous glug at his glass.

‘North Carolina?' Polly reminded herself.

‘Yip,' said Chip, ‘and you?'

‘Oh, I'll be going back to England. For a fortnight,' Polly said.

‘Where do your family live?' Chip asked.

‘Oh,' said Polly with an open face and straight voice, ‘heaven.'

‘Jeez man, I'm sorry,' Chip fumbled, laying his hand over Polly's wrist in a sweet gesture.

‘'Sokay,' Polly assured him, patting his hand and chancing upon his elegant, tanned fingers, ‘I never really knew them.'

‘Little Orphan Polly,' mused Chip. ‘How Dickensian.'

Polly laughed breezily, bolstered by Chip's concern. ‘My aunt, who brought me up, is also not around,' she explained.

‘Oh? Where's she?'

‘Same place as my parents.'

‘Can I get my damned foot further in it, I wonder?' Chip groaned, holding his head in his hands and lowering it until it neared the table. Polly poked him gently on the arm. He looked up at her.

‘Silly billy,' she said, delighted at the phrase and its immediate effect on Chip.

I must have something on my nose.

‘So,' said Chip, wrenching his eyes away from hers to ponder into the crook of his finger, ‘it must be Christmas at the orphanage for Li'l Miss Fen'un.'

Polly played along, pulling as bedraggled a face as she could; turning soon enough into a smile of prodigious proportions.

‘Nope,' she said, holding on to Chip's gaze, ‘just me and my boyf and his bruv.'

‘Your who and his what?'

‘Max and Dominic – my boyfriend and his brother respectively.'

Chip raised a glass to their names, respectfully. Supposedly. He went quiet. Then he went to the bar to refill their glasses. Polly's eyes followed him.

He is completely gorgeous. Objectively speaking. I wish Megan were here to see this!

And Max?

Look, he's just a really nice bloke – very friendly and great company. And he has a girlfriend, so that makes everything cosy.

So why did he just wink at you from the bar?

He's just friendly. Probably has something in his eye.

‘Do you know,' Polly started, thanking Chip for the lack of ice, ‘my Max met your Jen!'

See? There's no issue here.

‘Who?' he said, the picture of innocence.

‘Um, Jen Carter,' Polly elaborated, keeping her eyes steady, ‘from Hubbardtons. She's in my flat. I thought you were, you know, an item?'

‘Oh,' Chip said, tipping his head and his hands this way and that, ‘kinda.'

That's good enough. That'll do.

Polly, pleased that all was out in the open and above board, was happy for Chip to move on to other subjects.

‘Wasn't Mountain Day just the best?'

‘Smashing!' Polly enthused, ‘I can't believe it was a month ago.'

‘Have you still held on to all those leaves and twigs and stuff you were collecting?'

‘Oh yes,' said Polly, ‘I want to make a scrap book of my stay, you see. And anyway, I just like to collect twigs and leaves.'

‘And stuff.'

‘Stuff too. They're nice to have.'

‘Well,' Chip says, leaning towards her, ‘the snow'll be here soon and it'll be just white white white.'

‘Will it be white,' laughed Polly, ‘when the snow comes?'

‘Very,' Chip assured her. ‘You ski?'

‘Actually, no.'

‘Want me to teach you?'

Polly regarded him slyly. ‘Well, can you ski, Mr Jonson?'

Chip tapped his chest and raised his chin. ‘Gold medal. Class of '89.'

‘You'll do,' Polly said, raising her glass while concentrating on the fire.

So will you,
Chip decided, chinking her glass. ‘Bottoms up!' he announced in a poor accent but with commendable aplomb. Polly raised her eyebrows. And then smiled.

With the Jack Daniels lubricating their vocal chords and the glow of the fire increasing the warmth between them, it was easy to talk through the evening and on into the night.

Polly thinks very hard about Max later that night. She concentrates. About marriage too. About herself.

I love Max with all my heart. I've never imagined, let alone desired, being with anybody else.

The only man I would ever want to marry.

But
…

do I really want to?

She weeps as silently as she can.

I'm just crying because Max is my darling boy and I love him so deeply. I'm crying because he has asked me to marry him. I'm crying because I don't really know what marriage is, having never really known one. Am I mad? How can a poor little orphan even consider jeopardizing the security, the anchor, that the man who wants to marry her provides?

She sits up in bed and turns on the bedside lamp. A warm glow is cast. This is her room. It was Great Aunt Clara's but it's Polly's now. Her space. It harbours her thoughts and she feels safe here. For Polly, this room consolidates all that Vermont means in general; nobody in her pre-America life knows exactly where she is, precisely what she is doing at any given moment, what it all really looks like. Here, in her room in Vermont, USA, she is Polly Fenton and she is strong. She is all by herself but not lonely.

So why does she weep?

There is no connection with back home.

Is that why she cries?

She is absolutely on her own.

Is that the reason?

This very fact is at once frightening and thoroughly liberating. Polly feels closer to herself than ever she has because, in reality, there is only Polly. Here. Now.

She can describe her surroundings in minute detail, and she does so in her letters, but Megan and Max can't really know what it's like, they can only imagine. She can relate events to them such as Mountain Day, the house raising, Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, but they have to call up images according to Polly's description. Max has never been in Kate's home, let alone with Polly in Great Aunt Clara's bed. Megan has never taken a class at Hubbardtons. It is no discredit to Polly's power of portrayal, but the houses and the mountains and the people that Max and Megan conjure look little like they actually do. For Megan, Chip Jonson is Tom Cruise with a Brad Pitt haircut. For Max, Great Aunt Clara's bedroom is smaller and more English-cottage than lofty New England colonial. For Megan and Max, the face they put to Kate is not hers at all. In their minds, they make Polly's students in the mould of American kids they know from films and television sitcoms.

No one from Polly's England has ever had brunch at the Sunnyside Diner, nor eaten grits. Polly will never eat grits again but that's because she's tried them. She can't describe the taste sensation of grits convincingly though she has tried painstakingly by letter, but she's pretty sure that Megan wouldn't care for it and that Max would hate it. Polly knows, however, that imagining is often not enough; sometimes one actually has to try things before one can make a decision on their merit.

See Polly sitting up in bed, crying silently behind her hands? She is resigned to the similarity between grits and Chip Jonson.

I'm crying because I know I'll have to try it. Even though I think I know it'll be a taste I won't much like.

She steps down from the bed and gazes at Cézanne's portrait of the gardener.

Oh to step within the safety of the picture. To snuggle on his lap, to have him say not a lot, just to understand.

She wishes she were at Giverny, amongst Monet's water-lilies, and she stares at the print until form and space are even more blurred than the artist intended.

Van Gogh's bedroom. Simple and bright. Not unlike Great Aunt Clara's. Close my eyes. Open.

The watercolour of the maples blazing in the fall.

And where I am.

She remembers Mountain Day, over a month ago. Trick or treating well over a fortnight ago. Thanksgiving dinner the day before yesterday, perhaps her favourite day so far. All the waifs and strays from Hubbardtons, for whom home was just too far to travel, converged on Kate's. Never had Polly felt so much part of a family as she did amongst all these temporarily orphaned folk whose families were celebrating in distant states without them. Twenty-eight of them in all, for whom Kate's party, despite mountains of cranberries, two overweight turkeys and her inimitable hospitality, was still second best to spending the holiday at home. Polly, however, praised the vastness of the United States for providing her, that night, with an extended family with whom to celebrate. She gave thanks for them. Something new and something to be cherished. She wished she'd had many Thanksgivings. She wished she could have this again, same time every year. She wanted to have that very first taste of buttery pumpkin pie again and again. She resolved to observe Thanksgiving from hereon after. The last Thursday of every November, she would invite everyone she knew, convert them all to the warmth of this American festival of family and home.

Time was passing. How soon she had felt settled. How quickly term had rolled by. Soon she'll leave and go home. For a while. But she's here, for a while longer.

Back in bed again, Polly is hugging her knees and breathing into the comforter which is not doing the job its name implies. She has stopped crying. She sits very still, it is very quiet. She can hear herself think. There is no distraction in the silent clasp of the night.

I can't help but be attracted to Chip. I don't know what to do about it. This is new and it is terrifying and exciting. Maybe just a kiss will do it. A tiny one, I won't need more. Just a kiss to waylay this hunger, to remind and prove to me that Max, and a life with him, is all I really want.

She closes her eyes. Max. Chip. They merge. Chip is back. Remember his eyes, his lingering gaze earlier this evening? You were happy to look directly at them – easy, open and the most pool-deep blue. Not Max blue. A new blue. But which is the true blue?

God. What am I even thinking? No. Please let me get home, to my Max, so I can heed the feeling and not feel the need.

‘I smell danger,' Polly murmurs as she sidles down deep into bed, ‘but it is laced with an intoxicating aroma.'

S
lowly, he unbuttoned Polly's shirt and brushed it away gently from her shoulders. A plain white bra promised the most perfect breasts behind, but for the time being he was happy to feast his gaze on the flesh currently available. He pushed her against the wall, pressed against her and took her mouth with his. A flap of curtain fell across her shoulder and down one side; her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her neck taut and twisted, just like a Klimt painting. As she stretched her arms up and about his neck, her slim frame elongated and allowed him to slip his hands down the waistband of her skirt and circumnavigate. Her flesh was initially warm and smooth yet seemed to prickle damp instantly under his touch. He left one hand down the back of her skirt where his fingers rested on the cleft of her buttocks. His other hand he took back up to her throat before letting it flow down her torso to her thigh. He grabbed at her, she gasped and kissed him deeper. He sidled his hand up the skirt, tracing lightly the front of her thigh and inching his way upwards, excruciatingly slowly. Her legs were closed tightly but yielded to his feathery touch immediately. Suddenly he cupped his hand forcefully against the mound of her sex. Warm cotton hid it from direct touch but the moistness he excited from her soon filtered its way through to greet his probing fingers.

He took his hands away and clasped her head instead; as he did so, she felt an unwelcome coldness filter over her back and continue between her legs. He watched her eyes burn khaki as disappointment mixed with desire coursed across them. It pleased him. She ground against him for warmth, for more. He clasped the tops of her arms and brought her away from the wall, away from the half-masked safety of the curtain and into the middle of the room, centre stage. Her blouse undone. Her bra peeping through. Her short, floaty skirt twisted. He was still fully clothed. He was still holding her arms. Tightly. Almost painfully. He hadn't said a word. She hadn't wanted him to. He sat her down on the sofa whilst he knelt between her legs, pushed her shirt right away and deftly unclasped her bra. And there they were, those gorgeous, perfect breasts; exquisite pink and pert, previously demure behind a white cotton bra, positively brazen now they were out in the open. He kissed from one to the other, just above the nipple, then returned his mouth a little lower; his hot, desirous breath whispering over them, lips encircling and then taking them greedily. Bite. Taste. Tease.

He felt her breathing quicken through the rise, fall and flutter of her chest. Her hands swept through his hair. Up he stood, his groin at her eye level. She unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them away. His erection had forced the fly of his boxer shorts agape and she buried her nose in the opening. She could smell a close, warm saltiness, the prelude to sex, and she breathed it in deeply so the scent became a taste. His pubic hair tickled her, his cock was just out of reach and view; it was torturous and thrilled her. He yanked down his boxers and she gasped at the sight of him; stiff, proud and powerful. She pressed her lips gently against his balls and felt them tighten in anticipation. She inched her mouth along the length of his erection, the glans beyond her stretch though she bent her neck commendably. He grasped his cock and levered it down a little, she opened her mouth and encircled it obligingly. He bucked gently as she sucked. It was difficult to breathe. She was light-headed. Her hand was over his hand over his cock. His other hand travelled from her neck to her nipple to her lips, where he pressed so he could determine his pride in her mouth.