Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

‘Where would she go?’ Polly asked. She snuggled closer to Clancy. Put one arm under his neck, the other across his chest. ‘That’s the trouble’, she muttered, and fell asleep.

  Later she awoke, alone, and remembered, ah, languor, slackness, it was different with Clancy, there was a linking of bones, sinews, blood coursing, there was joining, meeting, the fuck began with a greeting and ended with a pause in a journey which would go on, and on, and on. She felt him in the house, traced him down into the kitchen where he was eating eggs and bacon with Max, Pamela and Sue and Tracy. She heard him, felt him, coming upstairs. The door opened sweetly. He came in, stood in the doorway.

  ‘Here you are, love. Grits and greasy greens.’ He gave her a bowl of cornflakes. She held up her arms to him. ‘Oh, Clancy.’

  ‘Poll.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Jesus Christ—it’s Mum! Clancy—get out! No—get dressed. Look at us. It’s half-past ten and we haven’t got anything on.’

  Her mother, she thought, would not be able to bear it. She would hide her horror under a weight of moral disapproval which, as in a children’s comic, would fall on Polly’s head, smack her into the earth, marked ‘1 TON’. Her mother would be hurt, hurt beyond anything at the resumption of an affair so disliked to begin with, so disastrous in its ending.

  Clancy, with the speed of experience, flicked into his jeans and jersey and was out of the window in a flash.

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘I’ll come in from the garden with a nice spray’, he said.

  She ran to the window, saw him go limberly down the drainpipe to the balcony, disappear on his course down into the garden.

  She found her pants, rummaged for tights, a skirt, put on Clancy’s green sweater for sentimental reasons, put on plimsolls. She looked round the room at the forlorn bed with its grey, rumpled sheets, the clothes, books, ashtrays, teacups. Tracy in the kitchen frying sausages—

  ‘Life presents a dismal picture

  Dark and gloomy as the tomb

  Father’s got an anal stricture

  Mother’s got a fallen womb

  Cousin Fred has been deported

  For a homosexual crime

  And the housemaid’s been aborted

  For the forty-second time.’

  It was sordid, nothing went right, the centre would not hold, the orbit staggered, the planets reeled, the hurricane collapsed in on itself. The doorbell rang again. The junk accumulated, the unpaid bills, unwashed clothes, cigarette ash, tea-leaves, chicken bones, hair-combings. A longer ring on the doorbell. The house mouldered, tiles fell off the roof, wallpaper peeled, it fell in like a card-house.

  She ran downstairs.

  ‘We’ve been ringing and ringing,’ her mother said, ‘weren’t you up?’

  Her mother, wearing a green tweed suit and a cairngorm brooch, her Auntie Daniella, Clancy’s mother, in blue tweed dress and matching coat, black gloves and black polished leather handbag, made up by Revlon, hair by Michel of Streatham, cigarettes by Craven A. The two witnesses arriving to see the re-enactment of the crime. ‘Is this what you remember happening the last time Mrs Goldberg?’ asks the prosecutor. ‘I’m sorry to say it is, Mr Wigram’, sniffs Clancy’s mother holding a tiny, balled-up handkerchief in beringed hands.

  It was a bad moment. As they all came into the kitchen, Clancy came through the french windows, tennis-anyone, with two sprays of winter jasmine in his hands.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ he called, sounding a right ponce, saw his mother standing behind Mrs Turnbull, stopped dead in his tracks, quickly cried, ‘Mother!’ and ran towards her. She drew herself up and repelled him.

  ‘I didn’t expect to find you here Clancy’, Mrs Turnbull said, slightly emphasizing the ‘you’.

  ‘We just popped in to pick up little Maxie’, Mrs Goldstein said.

  ‘Look, Pam and Sue, it’s grandma and Auntie Daniella’, Tracy said from the gas stove. But the two little girls, instead of jumping up, dragging their granny into the garden to look at the pond, or falling off their chairs yelling and needing elastoplast, or bursting into tears and shouting ‘I hate granny. She’s not my granny’, went on eating their cornflakes solidly with their blonde hair falling into their plates.

  ‘Come in and have a cup of tea’, Polly said, for both women still stood in the doorway. She betrayed herself by groping in the pocket of her skirt for a crushed packet of cigarettes, taking one out and lighting it.

  ‘Chuck us an oily, then Poll’, Clancy said boldly.

  Sensing unease, Daniella Goldstein struck. ‘Isn’t that CLANCY’S GREEN SWEATER that I KNITTED you have on, Polly?’

  ‘Oh—yes, it may be,’ Polly said, ‘it’s nice and warm.’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better just collect up Max’s things and go’, Mrs Turnbull suggested.

  ‘Well,’ Polly said loudly, ‘why should you?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Max. ‘Is something up?’

  ‘No, no’, Mrs Goldstein said, her voice cracking with hysteria. She fumbled in her bag like a patient groping for an oxygen mask, found her purse. ‘Why don’t you go out and get some sweets for yourself and the girls.’

  ‘He’s only ten years old’, Polly’s mother pleaded.

  ‘I do know that,’ Polly shouted, ‘I certainly do know that.’

  ‘Run along, Max’, Mrs Goldstein shrilled. The bungalow, the garage, the big picture window, the Cortina, the very venetian blinds and formica work-surfaces of her kitchen were rusting, cracking and crumbling.

  ‘Can I get Cokes?’ he said, eyeing the fifty-pence piece.

  ‘Yes, yes’, she said. Before the door shut behind him, she moaned, ‘Oh, haven’t we had enough trouble already—’

  ‘Come in Mum, and sit down’, Clancy said. ‘Look—Poll and I have gone back together again—’

  ‘No, no,’ she moaned, ‘oh God, don’t let this happen all over again.’

  Mrs Turnbull, white as a sheet said, ‘Haven’t you two got enough common sense to stay out of each other’s way? Who started it this time?’

  ‘It’s not a fight on the landing we’re talking about Mum’, Polly said.

  ‘Well, it seems just as childishly stupid to me. You’re married now. You have two children—yes, run and find the frog and show me—well, I suppose it’s nothing to do with either of us. But what about Max?’

  ‘After all the grief we had, the pain—you said you’d never see each other again. Why couldn’t you have done this years ago—now look, I’ve hoped and prayed to God this wouldn’t happen’, Mrs Goldstein told her son.

  ‘Balls, Mum’, said Clancy.

  ‘Oh—Clancy,’ she said, ‘don’t make it worse by talking like that.’

  ‘The neighbours need never know’, he consoled her.

  ‘As if I’d think about the neighbours at a time like this. The scenes we went through to try and persuade you two to get married, Tracy remembers, don’t you Tracy? Tracy remembers me with my eyes red with weeping, trying to get Polly—’

  ‘To leave Clancy alone’, Polly said rudely. ‘You said I was a tart.’

  ‘Oh God, we all say things at times like that, we wish we’d bitten our tongues out—’

  ‘Polly, what are you going to do?’ Mrs Turnbull asked.

  ‘We haven’t decided. But in the meantime, will you leave Max here?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have given into you all the time, Clancy, when you were young. I spoilt you. I loved you too much. Tracy, Tracy what shall we do?’ Mrs Goldstein said.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything, auntie’, she said.

  ‘Max has to go to school on Monday’, Polly’s mother said. ‘If you’re determined to go ahead, why don’t you let him come back and then let me know what your plans are when you’ve made them?’

  Polly sat down, put her head in her hands. Someone would have to make plans. But why? It all seemed so simple. Heart, head, hands, brain all lay over on the other side of the room, where Clancy’s mother sat in a chair, so
bbing, knotting her handkerchief which would rather be around her, Polly’s, throat; where Clancy stood, slouching, as the poisonous stream ran through his brain. ‘That girl you used to take out, Marie, I saw her the other day, with two lovely children, beautifully looked after. They live in a split-level bungalow at Morden. Frank was always a nice boy. Your father’s looking older, sometimes he looks quite blue about the lips. Why don’t you take a holiday, after all, you’ve been ill. Sally Winder’s split up with her husband. The innocent party of course. Still looks eighteen years old.’

  It was so simple, Polly thought.

  ‘The lease is in my name’, she said, dragging an idea up, hardly interested in it. She should ask them both to go away.

  ‘At least Alexander has some money behind him’, Mrs Turnbull said.

  ‘I’ve never seen a penny of it,’ Polly said, ‘his parents might as well be rag and bone men for all the good it’s done us. And I don’t think you realize how deeply in debt he is.’

  ‘You’ll bring Max to live with you?’ her mother said. She looked at Polly, ready for the blow.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better all round?’

  ‘He has stability, security, with me. I don’t feel—don’t feel he’ll get it with you—I know the disadvantages for him—’

  Max came into the room with a large Coke bottle under each arm. ‘I’ll get some mugs and take it out to Pam and Sue’, he said. Guiltily they watched him go, as if they needed to sacrifice him to make the rain come.

  ‘You’re not telling him?’ Mrs Goldstein demanded of Clancy. ‘Of course you’re not—the shock—he couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘It’ll be worse if we let it drag on any longer’, Clancy said.

  ‘Don’t tell him Clancy, don’t tell him. Please, for me, don’t tell him.’

  ‘He wants to know’, Polly said.

  ‘You—you whore’, Mrs Goldstein said. ‘Clancy—’

  ‘Shut up’, he shouted.

  ‘It’s your fault, Deb,’ Mrs Goldstein shouted at Polly’s mother, ‘all this comes from you—you and that GI. It was nasty. Look at the way you brought Polly up.’

  ‘Daniella—be quiet’, Mrs Turnbull said. ‘We could all talk about the way you brought Clancy up, poor little boy, if we wanted to.’

  ‘Let’s all have a cup of tea’, Tracy said, bringing it round. ‘Clancy I can’t stand any more of this. Can’t you do something? It’s ridiculous,’ she said to the two mothers, ‘you can’t do anything about it. Maybe it’s all for the best anyway. Polly, pull yourself together.’

  For Polly, exhausted by the night, by the day before, the week before, the eleven years before, was sitting and sobbing. Clancy, his hands in his pockets, was sulking by the door. Mrs Turnbull stood like a statue in the doorway. Her sister sobbed and wriggled by the window.

  Max came in with the empty Coke bottles. Tracy said immediately, ‘Max. Come in, I’ve something to tell you. Polly and Clancy are your real mum and dad.’

  Max stood still. He looked first at Clancy, then at Polly; last, at Mrs Turnbull. She nodded.

  ‘I was beginning to wonder about that’, he said.

  The phone rang and Tracy answered it.

  ‘Can I come and live here?’ Max asked. ‘Where will my room be? Can I have the little room at the top? Mum could have my things sent over, aeroplanes and that—’

  ‘It’s that Lord Bec,’ Tracy reported, ‘he wants to talk about that lawsuit.’

  ‘Mum,’ screamed Polly. Mrs Turnbull’s face vanished. She swayed, swayed again and fell to the floor.

  ‘My heart. My heart’, moaned Clancy’s mother, as they gathered round her sister. ‘Oh God, please don’t let this happen to me.’

  Mrs Turnbull moaned and came round. She looked, grey-faced, at Polly.

  ‘Are you all right now Mum?’ said Polly putting her mother into a chair in an experienced way. She was accustomed to her mother’s fainting fits. She blamed herself for not anticipating the effect the scene would have on Mrs Turnbull, for not noticing the familiar biting of the lips and draining of blood from her face.

  Tracy passed Polly a cup of tea which she handed to her mother, who began to drink it neatly, treating it as medicine. In her other hand Tracy held the phone. Polly took it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Lord Bec? This is Polly Kops. My husband is abroad, I’m afraid—well yes, I’d like to discuss it. I’ll have to ring you later, though—at four then.’

  She put the receiver down. Now the long room was hushed. Max handed Mrs Turnbull a cooled flannel for her brow. Tracy sat at the kitchen table, looking at the brown teapot. Clancy stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, Daniella Goldstein stared, blankly, out into the garden. The children chattered in the sandpit. A bird sang in a tree.

  Then it was agreed Max should stay until Tuesday, Mrs Turnbull and Mrs Goldstein got into a minicab and left, a boy called for Max to play with him, Lady Clarissa arrived with Dylan, Lester Dent, the science fiction writer, dropped in with a girl he had picked up on the Saturday troll up and down Portobello Road, and they all went out into the big square with glasses and a couple of bottles of white wine.

  Polly lay under a tree with Clancy holding her hand. She listened to Lady Clarissa.

  ‘That’s not very cool, you nearly broke my nose I said’, she said.

  ‘Uh-huh’, said Polly.

  Max played with his friend, the two little girls ran after them. The science fiction writer, sensing a cooler scene than he in his caution had ever managed before, told them he had been snorting coke.

  ‘Nasty stuff for giving you nosebleeds’, observed Tracy.

  ‘When’s Alexander coming back?’ he said, fondling his girl. He was really in love with Alexander.

  ‘In a week’, Polly told him.

  ‘It’s chilly. I think I’ll go in’, he said. ‘Come on.’

  The girl followed him. She was excited, seeing the gateway from Greenford swinging wide, the primrose path lying ahead. She wanted to know famous pop-stars, see drugs being consumed in large quantities, have new clothes, swim downstream with the mad, the careless, the big spenders, the freaked-out, the dangerous. She would give him her body if he could give her glamour.

  Meanwhile, Polly, very tired, shut her eyes. ‘Any chance of you following and getting him out, Clancy?’ she asked. ‘He’ll go round the house opening drawers and poking round Alexander’s stuff. He gets off on it.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Clancy.

  Polly, extended on the hard, dull earth, holding Clancy’s hand, looking up into the budding trees, smelling the spring, felt love and death.

  Ulla Helander encased in swelling green satin like a comic-strip queen of Mars, came with a glass in her hand.

  ‘Polly’, she said taking in Clancy, Tracy, the tree, the bottle of wine, the clasped hands.

  ‘Pour yourself a drink’, Clancy said.

  ‘Thanks’, she said, giving him for research purposes the old one-two and an eyeful of her breasts as she bent to pour. She noted Clancy’s lack of interest.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘nice to see you then, Poll.’

  ‘Nice to see you, Ulla’, Polly remarked.

  ‘I suppose you’re Clancy’, Ulla said. ‘The band starts recording on Monday week. Are you going?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Clancy.

  Ulla opened her beaded reticule and rolled a joint. She passed it to Clara, who drew on it, passed it to Clancy who passed it to Polly, who passed it back to Ulla.

  Max, holding Sue’s hand, with Pamela on his back, asked, ‘When’s dinner?’

  ‘We’ll go and get a curry in a minute, son’, said Clancy.

  ‘Right-ho, Dad’, responded the boy.

  Martin Sutcliffe came out from behind the tree and said, ‘That’s nice. Why all the secrecy, though?’

  ‘It began,’ said Polly, ‘because it was all in South London and no one wanted the neighbours to know.’

  ‘My Mum threatened to kill herself if we got married, i
f we didn’t get married, or if anyone found out’, Clancy said.

  ‘Why not just—er?’ Ulla said, questioning.

  ‘Left it too late’, Polly said. ‘We’re back in the 60s, now, remember. We were just two kids, from South London. All we knew was that it meant going to someone like Mrs Traill and dying of a haemorrhage in a back room in Tooting Bec. Finally, it got too late. Then, once it was all a secret, it stayed one. You know.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered,’ Clancy said, ‘does Alexander know?’

  ‘No’, said Polly, ashamed and embarrassed.

  ‘Cor,’ said Tracy, ‘you are funny Poll.’

  ‘That’s—er—’ Martin Sutcliffe said. ‘I mean to say—Polly—’

  ‘I guessed you hadn’t’, said Clancy. ‘When I got jealous I used to plan to ring up and tell him, to get one in.’

  ‘Jealous?’ Polly said.

  ‘Well, I’d be on tour, stuck in some hotel room with the band, someone changing their jeans, someone reading out Nicholas Nickleby, we’d be there drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches ten thousand miles from our homes, and I used to think of you all cosy and comfortable in bed with Alexander—’

  ‘Oh, Clancy,’ Polly said, ‘I never knew that.’

  There was a lot she was forgetting which ordinarily she remembered, as who would not, in the circumstances. Leaving out the moon over Soho, there was the day she told her mother. After the family meetings Clancy went on tour and never came back. He was in Sweden when she lay on the hard surgical bed in the labour ward at King’s College Hospital. When it was over there were her mother and auntie Daniella with bunches of chrysanthemums looking at the bald-headed baby with the sprigs of red hair lying in his white hospital crib, while all around thick-set men, who would probably later start coming home drunk and kicking the doors in, were at this moment shyly kissing their wives and handing them little bunches of flowers and staring down at young Shaun, Wesley, Joanne and Maria, knowing they were theirs, for good or ill. Polly had the two grannies, and the fatherless child.

  Later came the friends, but by then it was too late for her. The Honourable Julian, Sue Pettigrew and Lucy Todd were now another world. The real world was Polly, her mother and the hungry baby. Three weeks later Clancy returned at night, flung himself into the room, dropped his drums on the floor and kneeled beside the bed where Polly sat, tiredly feeding the child. Outside, the late traffic swished past in the rain. He asked her then to marry him, with a sincerity missing from his other reluctant proposals that they should marry or live together. But he, like the friends, was too late. Polly, who had walked about in a dream until two days before he came, loving him and the baby and knowing they would be happy, had started to wonder where Clancy had been since he thoughtlessly fathered a child on her and ran away in fear. She told him to go away. Crying, he picked up his drums and left.