‘I’ve committed sodomitic incest’, said Clancy.
‘I never did nothing’, said Tracy. She paused, depressed. ‘Except get him on the balcony.’
‘Come on love’, said Toddy and led her up to bed.
Clancy and Polly looked at each other helplessly.
‘Coming to bed?’ he said.
‘All right.’
While Tracy and Toddy lay together in a warm puppy nest on the cushions a floor above, Clancy and Poll lay muttering the low, remorseless, unending mutters of partners in misery, twisting and turning in the early hours.
‘What shall we do about Alexander?’
‘Max ought to go to school.’
‘I must see Mum.’
‘I have to get these African recordings sorted out.’
‘What will happen to the drug reform movement now?’
‘I’m being tried in a bloody fortnight.’
‘Where am I going to get some money from?’
‘There’ll be an inquest over Lord Bec—dad’, said Polly.
‘Uncle Jo, I call him’, Clancy said.
‘I ought to go and see his wife.’
‘Tracy’ll be lucky if she isn’t done for manslaughter.’
‘It’s bad, with the baby dead and everything.’
‘Oh, there’s Mum.’
‘When will it stop?’
‘Can’t we just split?’
‘It’s never-ending.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Christ, I’m tired.’
‘Let’s go to sleep now.’
‘If only I’d known.’
Soon Max, who had slept late on account of prolonged guitar practice with the au pair the night before, found his mother, red hair streaking round her head, cooking the breakfast in a state of rare calm.
‘Where are Pam and Sue?’ she said.
‘Still in bed.’
‘When did you all go to bed then?’
‘Pretty late’, he told her.
‘That’s just as well.’ She turned the sausages and faced him. ‘I’m afraid there was a terrible accident last night. The balcony collapsed and there was a man on it. He was killed.’
Max stared at her. It could have been him. They were always telling him not to go on it, but he did. A man—killed.
‘Did he fall in the street? Broke his spine?’
‘That’s right.’
He walked up the stairs and down the passage to the front door. He was afraid. He opened the front door, imagining a dead body in the garden, although he knew it would be gone. The morning sun came down on the rubble littering the garden, the dustbin dented and half-buried in bricks, the rubbish still scattered across the road. The cherry tree had lost all its blossom, which lay like used confetti over the broken bricks and plaster around its trunk. The fallen portico still lay across the entrance to the house.
A flashlight startled him.
‘Hullo boy’, said the man with the camera, who had appeared, it seemed from nowhere.
‘What’s your name?’ his companion said ingratiatingly.
‘Max,’ he said, ‘what’s yours?’
‘Henry Fergusson. Do you live here?’
Being a boy brought up at the back of a Brixton sweetshop, Max did not answer questions from strangers. He gave a hard stare.
The paper-boy arrived. ‘Hullo Max’, he said gazing at the rubble. ‘Coo. What a mess. Here’s your publicity for today.’ He handed Max the papers. Max glanced at the top one. There was Lord Bec spreadeagled in the road.
‘Is that the dead bloke?’ he asked the boy.
‘Yeah. Lord Bec. Home Secretary. What was he doing starkers on your balcony in the middle of the night?’
Max bit his lip. ‘I dunno. Doesn’t it say?’
‘Says he was stoned.’ The paper-boy looked up at the sky above the door and said, ‘This house looks a bit of a ruin, now.’
Max flushed. He knew what the boy meant. ‘Thanks for the papers’, he said, and was just shutting the door as Clancy came up the steps, with more newspapers.
He ruffled Max’s flaming hair. ‘This is very bad,’ he said, ‘did Polly tell you?’
‘Yes—something,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know he was in the Government. That man in the front of the house is a reporter, isn’t he?’
‘Yes’, he said.
Max sat down to breakfast. Polly and Clancy read the papers and ignored him. There were photographs of the house, photographs of Bec lying in the road, photographs of Tracy standing dazed by the body in her robes, photographs of Polly, Clancy, a story from Mrs Traill telling of Bec’s earlier visit to the house and hinting at the worst, which was, of course, true. Stories of Polly, Clancy and Alexander, a photograph of Lord and Lady Kops, stories of Lord Bec’s early life. The Sunday Times skirted around the subject of the change of name, but were plainly not committing themselves until Monday, when Somerset House would be open.
As Polly and Clancy drank tea and smoked and Max ate his sausages, the phone rang continuously. Finally Max got up and took it off the hook. It lay squawking in the silence.
Polly had rung her mother at eight o’clock.
‘Eight o’clock on Sunday morning’, came her mother’s voice, slightly blurred.
‘I’ve got an awful shock for you, Mum’, said Polly.
‘Max’, said her mother at once.
‘No. It’s no one close. Well—’ she said uncertainly, ‘anyway, our balcony collapsed last night and someone was killed.’
‘Oh dear,’ said her mother, ‘what a tragedy. What a shock for you. Was it a friend?’
‘Not exactly. You’d better brace yourself—it was Lord Bec.’
There was a long pause. ‘Ah,’ said her mother softly, ‘Jo—dead. Well, well.’ She paused again. ‘You know, I suppose?’
‘An enquiry agent I put on to him. For other reasons, of course. I’m very sorry Mum. It must be a shock.’
‘I haven’t seen him for twelve years,’ her mother said, ‘and before that I hadn’t seen him since you were born.’ And again she said nothing for a while.
‘All right if I bring Max over for lunch?’ Polly asked.
‘Yes. I’d like to see you both.’ Her mother’s voice came very remotely. ‘Well—poor Jo.’
‘We’ll start after breakfast.’
‘I must ring Dorothy and Daniella.’
‘Would you like Clancy to ring his mum?’
‘No—no,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it myself.’
The shop next door, which she was buying, was being gutted. A big new facia board, saying TURNBULL, lay propped against the back wall.
Polly and Max got off the bus and walked to the corner where her mother’s shop was. Mrs Turnbull came to the door behind as they opened the shop door, which was marked ‘Closed’.
Her mother had been crying. Polly hugged her and said, ‘Never mind, Mum’.
‘But what a terrible way to die’, her mother cried. ‘I got the papers after you rang. And just as I was reading them, Dorothy and Daniella rang up. Daniella’s terribly upset. She says it may all come out, and, of course, she was a witness at the wedding. It seems—so long ago. Oh—come and have some coffee. Max, do you want a bun? I’m sure you do.’
They went into the spick-and-span living room. Her mother’s nest, Polly’s nest, for so long. There they had read, played chess, watched TV, pinned up their hair, made dresses, had arguments. It was there that Polly had told her mother she was having Clancy’s baby, her first period, too, for that matter; there she had opened her O-level results, there the kitten had died in her hand. In that brown and yellow armchair she had revised for her exams, given Max his bottles.
Polly’s mother poured coffee. Her mouth was firm. Her nose was proud. Max had a Pepsi and a bun.
‘That boy Harold Edwards keeps on coming round for you’, Mrs Turnbull told him. ‘I’m always telling him you’re away with Polly but he won’t take no for an answer. Do you want to go and see him?’
He looked at them shrewdly. ‘What are you going to talk about while I’m gone?’
‘Lord Bec’s death’, Mrs Turnbull told him.
‘Will you tell me afterwards?’ he asked.
‘Some’, Polly said.
‘Hm’, he said, but the lure was too strong and he got up. In the doorway he turned and said, ‘Am I stopping here, then?’
‘We’ll see’, said Mrs Turnbull. She watched him go, heard the shop-bell clang as he went out.
Polly ate her biscuit. Mrs Turnbull blew her nose. ‘It’s at moments like this that I do blame Jo. All this uncertainty over Max—the whole thing began there.’
‘Was it his fault, then?’
‘No. Perhaps it wasn’t. He was only twenty, I was nineteen. I suppose neither of us was really to blame. He was in the Army of course. He’d been on one of the boats that left Dunkirk. Now he was being posted to North Africa. He came from one of the poor families in Steadman Street. It’s been torn down now, thank goodness. It was a two up, two down and there were eight of them, imagine that, and no mother. Father always on the dole. She was dead, I think, or ran off. In those days poverty was poverty. It meant dirt, inches deep, with no woman about. I think his young sister tried, but she was only thirteen. It meant four to a bed, no sheets, not enough blankets, bread and marge and tea.’ She stopped.
‘Go on’, said Polly.
‘I was just thinking of Jo when I first met him, crop-headed, proud of his uniform. So young. He’d come from a street like that, got apprenticed to a carpenter at fourteen, making coffins, mostly, a horrible job for a youngster. Got dumped in the army at eighteen, nearly killed, scared out of his wits—then they want to post him away to God knows where. Of course, he thought he was going to die. Mother had him in for a meal one night—I fell in love with him. His eyes were so—I’d just got this scholarship to Girton. If it hadn’t have been for Jo, I might have been sitting in some study with a fire burning and rooks cawing outside the windows—well, there you are. We had to get married. That was why I never wanted you to marry Clancy. He went abroad. He came back, just after you were born, took a look at you in the crib by the fire at your granny’s, and that was the last I saw of him for twenty years. He seemed disappointed you weren’t a boy and said you didn’t look like him.’
‘Did he think I wasn’t his?’
‘No, I don’t think he thought that. I just don’t think you seemed real to him. He was just twenty-one then. As far as he knew, he’d been told I was pregnant, believed it and married me. But he didn’t see me again until I’d got you. And it all took place between battles. It must have seemed like a dream to him. It didn’t seem real to me, either. Everything happened so fast. And all the time the bombing, blackout—it was like a speeded-up film. You never got a full night’s sleep. The days went by—we thought we might be invaded. It was only when you were a bit older, and we were winning the war, that I seemed to come to and realize that there I was, twenty-two, with a small child, no husband to speak of—he never wrote, you see—no money but what your granny gave me. It was a shock. I was at the pictures with Claire Tully, an old friend of mine whose husband was in the Navy. And suddenly, it must have been the film, I realized that my husband would never come back, like the others. I came home crying on the bus. I thought about it for days and then one night I went round to Steadman Street to see old Nimmo and see if he knew where Jo was. What a night that was. It was pelting with rain. I was wet through when I got there. Half the street was rubble and as I knocked on the door I heard a rocket go over, and cut out. He let me in. There’d been a row at the wedding, you see. My mother couldn’t bear him. He was a horrible old man and he called me a trollop. He was drunk, too, he kept calling out all through the wedding—oh dear—’
Polly silently handed her mother a box of tissues. Mrs Turnbull blew her nose.
‘Oh well’, she said. ‘He didn’t know where Jo was either. The rocket landed five doors down, too. What a night. I got drenched again on the way back and had the flu on your second birthday. You were two.’
Polly sensed her mother remembering the hoarded candles on the little sponge cake, for which they had saved their rations, the little figure in the smocked dress trying to blow them out, with mother standing behind, trembling, adding an extra puff. She lowered her head and began to weep. Not to mention, she thought, as she sobbed, the lost scholarship to Girton.
‘You could have traced him through the Army’, she said raising a tear-stained face.
‘What would have been the point?’ asked her mother. ‘If he wanted us, he’d only to come and find us.’ She paused. ‘It was sad at the time but, after all, we didn’t know each other. It might not have worked out.’
It was said now and they both knew it. ‘In the end,’ her mother said, brightening, ‘I saw his picture in a magazine—as an eligible bachelor, I might say. I recognized him straight away, in spite of the glasses and the fact that he’d changed his name. I showed the picture to Dorothy and Daniella and they both said it was him immediately. I followed his career with secret pleasure.’
‘What pleasure?’
‘He was getting richer and—more horrible, I suppose. That was how it struck me. I was relieved not to be in it—the tricks, dealings in shares, dirty money, a lot of it. I kept seeing myself covered in diamonds entertaining evil men and not noticing it.’
Her eye fell on the newspaper Polly had put, folded on the table by the coffee cups. Past the fold, her husband’s bare legs lay spread on the street.
‘You must have had a night of it,’ she said, looking at Polly closely, ‘what happened there?’
Polly, expurgating the tale drastically, told her as much as she could of the events leading up to Lord Bec’s death. Under her mother’s steady eye she made a poor job of the tale.
‘Yes,’ her mother said sceptically.
She asked no questions, not wanting to hear the answers. ‘It’s a nasty business. You three, and Alexander Kops, have made a mess of poor old Jo, all right. I’m sorry for Tracy. She must feel dreadful, particularly so soon after losing that baby. It really isn’t a nice story. Jo was a silly fool—I suppose it made up for all those years of careful caution. It’s a pity he had to suffer for it like that, though. The times I’ve told you you ought to have that balcony fixed or knock it down. Really, perhaps it’s just as well. Otherwise it might have fallen and injured one of the children.’
Polly grinned. ‘Just as well it killed granddad instead, then.’
Mrs Turnbull smiled in turn. ‘I don’t know’, she said. ‘There are times when nothing makes sense.’
‘Well, why did he come to see you again after twenty years?’ asked Polly.
‘I think he wanted to see you,’ her mother told her, ‘that was what he said anyway. He must have been forty then, and I don’t believe he had any other children. Perhaps he’d woken up one day and had a sober thought about it. Anyway, there was the Rolls Royce outside the shop one Monday morning, just as I was dealing with a traveller, and the door opened and in walked Jo. He hadn’t altered much. Nor had I. He said “Hullo, Deborah. Aren’t you going to put the kettle on?” So I got rid of the traveller and we came in here and I made him a cup of tea. He kept looking at me while I made it, and I wondered if he wasn’t trying to decide whether to ask me to come back and be with him. Come back, I say, I’d never been with him in the first place. Anyway, something about me wouldn’t do it seemed, so he never made the offer. He probably knew I’d refuse.’
‘Would you have?’
‘Wouldn’t you? After struggling on alone all those years. And when I looked at him I wasn’t tempted.’ Mrs Turnbull nodded. ‘As far as I could see, since Steadman Street he’d gone down and down. He wasn’t sincere any more. The old Jo was at least honest. This one truly wasn’t. He was all dark corners and the left hand not knowing what the right hand’s doing. I don’t think I could have stood a week of it. I’d have been bound to have got involved in what he was doing,
then I’d have joined in all the lies. Not that I’d blame anyone down Steadman Street for doing anything to get out of it. Anything at all. A lot of them were criminals, housebreakers and so forth. Jo had simply gone into another, safer, kind of crime and can you blame him? Oh, I could understand it, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Also I thought he might have kept in touch. It made it awkward for me, with you, to know who and where he was, more or less, and not be able to tell you. How could I? It would have been far worse for you to know you had a father who didn’t want to see you, than to have a father who vanished when you were born.’
‘How did you know he didn’t want to see me?’
‘Well, because after I saw the magazine picture, you would have been about ten, then, and he was just beginning to be a really rich man, I wrote to him suggesting a meeting. I was curious, and I thought it might be nice for you to have a rich and successful father who’d take you to Harrods on Saturdays and buy you patent leather shoes, or expensive toys—I was lonely. I thought—well, it was a dream of course. I knew, really—it was a weak moment. Anyway, he never replied. I was very hurt. And I called myself a fool as well.’
‘He kept the address, though.’
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Turnbull said wearily, ‘he kept the address. Never made any offer of help, never said he wanted to see you, but he kept the address all right. Then he has a sentimental moment ten years after and comes to see you. It gave me some pleasure to tell him you weren’t at home because you’d got an exhibition at Lady Margaret Hall. And I showed him your photograph from that time we all went out to dinner at the Trocadero and you had that green dress.’
Polly remembered it. She in her dress with the nipped-in waist and four stiff petticoats, Clancy embarrassed in his first and last dinner jacket. She began to cry again.
‘He was quite downcast’, Mrs Turnbull remembered gleefully. ‘“Little Polly, little Polly”,’ he kept on saying. I thought, you didn’t say that when you looked in the crib in 1942. Little chimpanzee was written all over your face. “My mother’s name was Polly”, he said. I thought, thanks very much. If I’d known that I’d have called her Susan for her first name, if all they said about his mother was true, and I believe that was only the half of it.’
Polly Put the Kettle On Page 13
