Was it Granny who minded you putting books down like this? Granny didnt read much anyway.
And why should I feel so worried about it? Polly asked aloud. And wheres my other photo the one I stole?
A frantic sense of loss came upon her, so strong that for a moment she could have cried. Why should she suddenly have
memories that did not seem to correspond with the facts?
Suppose they were once facts, Polly said to herself, with her hand still resting on the book. Ever since she was a small girl, she had liked supposing things. And the habit died hard, even at the age of nineteen. Suppose, she said, I really am like the man in the story, and something happened to change my past.
It was intended simply as a soothing daydream, to bury the strange, pointless worry that seemed to be growing in her. But suddenly, out of it leaped a white flash of conviction. It was just like the way those four or more figures used to leap into being behind the fire in that photograph. Polly glanced up at it, almost expecting to see them again. There were only men-shaped clumps of hedge. The flash of conviction had gone too. But it left Polly with a dreary, nagging suspicion in its place: that something had been different in the past, and if it had, it was because of something dreadful she had done herself.
But there seemed no way to discover what was different. Pollys past seemed a smooth string of normal, half-forgotten things: school and home, happiness and miseries, fun and friends, and, for some reason, a memory of eating toasted buns for tea, dripping butter. Apart from this odd memory about the book, there seemed no foothold for anything unusual.
If nothing happened, then theres nothing to remember, she told herself, trying to sound philosophical. Of course theres nowhere to start.
For some reason, that appalled her. She crouched, with her hand growing damp on the book, forgetting her grimy shoes tangling in the bedspread and the suitcases open on the floor, staring into her appallingly normal memories: a Cotswold town, London, a shopping precinct somewhere, a horseThats absurd. I dont know any horses! she said. Its no good. Ill have to go back to the time before it all started, or didnt start, and get in from that end. That was when she was how old? Ten? What was she doing then? What friends had she?
Friends. That did it. From nine years ago came swimming the shape of Pollys once-dear friend Nina. Fat, silly Nina. Granny used to call Nina a ripe banana. And Polly was so attached to Nina that Granny had agreed to have Nina along with Polly, that first time Polly came to stay with Granny. That would be back around the time there was first a question of divorce between Pollys parents. Back too to when Pollys favourite reading was a fat book called Heroes that had once been Grannys.
At that, Polly raised her head. The funeral! she said.
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