She copied the details on to one of the slips of paper provided in a wooden box on the stand, and retraced her steps to the main desk. She handed the slip to the clerk, signed the form, which was filled in with firm, clear letters, and wrote her address.
‘It should arrive within the week,’ the clerk said. ‘You want a short certificate, do you? I see.’
Polly felt her colour rising, she resented the clerk’s knowing look. A short certificate, proclaiming her illegitimacy to the world, was to be despised.
That’s that, she said aloud as she stepped out into the Strand. The first step had been taken to bring Polyhymnia Tomkins to life.
Perhaps as Polyhymnia she would turn out to be quite a different creature from her old self. Even if she were Polly Tomkins — and no one would use a name like Polyhymnia on an everyday basis, for heaven’s sake — a Polly Tomkins must be a different person from a Polly Smith.
Or was that so? If Polly Smith married a Mr Tomkins, would she be different from when she used her maiden name, was a Tomkins in essence different from a Smith? Would she become a different person when she was Polly Harrington?
Yes, she would be different, because she would be a wife, and in due course a mother.
The thought depressed her.
The last traces of the previous day’s fog had been blown away by the brisk westerly wind that brought instead gusts of rain sweeping across the city. People walked quickly, heads down, black umbrellas held aloft. Polly didn’t have an umbrella, she had given up on umbrellas a long time ago, since, unless it was raining and the brolly in her hand, she invariably left it somewhere. She turned up the collar of her mac and stood for a moment in a tobacconist’s doorway, out of the rain, while she decided what to do.
She could go back to her studio and work. No; the painting on her easel at the moment wasn’t coming out as she wanted it to, and it grew more unpleasing by the day. Figures on a street, but as Oliver remarked, it looked like the worst excesses of the industrial revolution, with gaunt figures against a backdrop of chimneys.
‘It’s London.’
‘Never. It’s undoubtedly some dreary northern street, you’ve caught the spirit of disillusion and hopelessness wonderfully well.’
‘It’s meant to be Russell Square in the rush hour.’
‘One day, Polly, you’ll find what you really want to paint, and it won’t be rat-coloured figures in a dismal landscape, no, nor those fetching but trivial book jackets you do for WH Smith. Nor touching up flower paintings in Rossetti’s workshop.’
‘The jackets and the flowers make me money.’
‘Of course, and even an artist must live, if only on eggs and soup. I daresay you could make an excellent career out of nothing but the book jackets; they have a charm which is, you don’t need me to tell you, quite lacking in your paintings.’
His words had stung Polly. No artist himself, he chose to find his company among artists, and was renowned for having an eye and an unerring instinct for putting his finger on the weakness in any artist’s work. And Polly, honest with herself, had to admit that her art was never going to please her or anyone else unless it changed dramatically.
Her friend, Fanny Powys, happy in her own work of silkscreen printing, had tried to cheer Polly up.
‘Oliver doesn’t bother to make his sharp remarks about painters he doesn’t think have any talent. If he’s polite, you know that artist’s a no-hoper.’
And Fanny should know, for it was at the private view of an exhibition of her prints that she had introduced Oliver to Polly. Polly, her attention entirely on a vigorous design taken from the whorls of oyster shells, had paid scant notice to the tall man who remained standing beside her.
‘It’s a matter of patterns,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes Fanny’s work different from most of her kind.’
And Polly had found herself drawn into a lively discussion about silkscreen printing, which led to wider topics of contemporary art. Polly was amazed that Oliver, who was, he had at once told her, not an artist, should have such an eye, such a quick appreciation of what artists such as Fanny were about.
‘I grew up surrounded by paintings and works of art,’ he explained. ‘My father is a collector, and very knowledgeable. He’s always been interested in the artists of the day as much as in past masters, and so I follow in his footsteps.’
Polly disagreed with Oliver about the work of several painters, and the argument was continued over supper at Bertorelli’s, the restaurant that was to become their favourite eating place.
Polly had taken an immediate liking to Oliver. ‘We are snip and snap,’ she explained to Fanny. ‘Oh, it’s not sex, although I suppose … No, it really isn’t. Affinity, that’s the word.’
‘A strange affinity,’ Fanny said drily. ‘Polly Smith and the Hon. Oliver.’
‘Hon.?’
‘His father’s a lord. Didn’t he tell you?’
Polly pondered on this piece of information. Did it make a difference? No, Oliver was Oliver. Of course he had another life, far removed from the impecunious day-to-day existence of artists like herself. Yet he was, in his way, one of them. ‘He’s a friend,’ she told Fanny. ‘We like one another’s company. Our minds are in harmony. That’s enough for me, his being an Hon. is neither here nor there.’
A man in a dark coat said, ‘Excuse me,’ in affronted tones, as though Polly were standing there with the express intention of keeping him from his tobacco, and she moved out of the way, back into the full force of the wind and the rain.
She made up her mind. She would go back to Highgate, and consult Ma about the passport photograph. Maybe she could suggest who could sign it for her.
Dora was at her piano; even on her busiest days, she never did less than two hours’ practice. In the kitchen, Mrs Babbit, the char, was singing loudly to herself as she turned out a cupboard.
‘How can you play with that noise going on?’ Polly said, as she always did.
‘Focus,’ said Dora, as she always did. Polly, somewhat hesitantly, because she didn’t want to sound accusatory, explained her problem.
‘I never thought of that.’
‘If I’m illegitimate, which I am, then that’s a fact, and there’s no point denying it,’ Polly said.
‘And no need to go broadcasting it from the rooftops, either. I’ve protected you from that all these years.’
‘And it wouldn’t be good for you if word got around. I don’t live here any more, but you do. I’ve been racking my brains, but I simply don’t know these professional kind of people, except the vicar here, and Miss Murgatroyd.’
‘It’ll have to be Dr Parker,’ Dora said. ‘He knows you aren’t my daughter, and he’ll sign it for you.’
‘You told him?’
‘When Ted and I were still hoping for children. He’s never said a word to anyone all these years, he won’t say a word now. Go along right away, and you may catch him before he sets off on his rounds.’
Polly arrived at the doctor’s house just as he was putting his medical bag into his black Wolseley. As she called out to him, he looked up with the long-suffering expression of a doctor trying to get away, but he smiled when he saw who it was.
‘I thought you were another patient.’
‘Well, I am, I suppose, but I’m not ill. I’m never ill.’
‘So what can I do for you?’
‘It’s a photograph, for a passport. It needs a signature. I thought … Ma said …’
Dr