Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

  Ulla shrugged her white shoulders and got up.

  ‘I am embarrassed’, she declared.

  Incensed by her classically-proportioned long fair body, the squeezable breasts, the clump of gleaming blonde pubic hair, Polly flew at her. She seized her by her marble shoulders and shook her to and fro. Ulla wrenched back, stared at Polly and slapped her face. Polly stared, her eyes smarting with tears and pushed Ulla, hard, so that she fell back on the bed. She in turn jumped up, grabbed Polly by the shoulder with her left and punched her in the eye with her right. Polly kicked her in the stomach. She doubled up, groaning.

  Clancy picked up his clothes and left.

  Polly pulled Ulla’s hair. Ulla did not scream. She went on groaning. Polly pulled harder. Ulla remained alarmingly flaccid, still bent and groaning. Polly, with a sudden vision of a hank of Ulla’s blonde hair with blood at the end, dropped the hair. There were a few strands between her fingers. She went to the door, turned and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind’, groaned Ulla, still sitting naked on the bed.

  She went into the kitchen and plugged in the electric kettle. Clancy, dressed, was sitting by the window, looking into the garden. He said nothing.

  ‘You unspeakable bum’, Polly said, desperately. She waited, but there was no reply.

  ‘Did you have to—in my bed?’ He went on sitting there, not looking at her.

  ‘Why, why, why?’ she cried. ‘Don’t you love me? In my bed. Can’t you imagine? And how long’s it been going on for? What do you do? Wait till I go out, then get into bed with Ulla? Oh, Clancy.’ Silence.

  ‘Clancy! Talk to me! I thought we were all right together. Why did you do it. Clancy!’ She screamed.

  She heard the door shut as Ulla went out.

  ‘Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy’, she went on bellowing. She had to make him speak. ‘Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy, Clancy—’ It was not a new trick. She had done it when she was eleven, about a tennis racket. That time he had hit her on the side of the head with it. This time he stood up and walked out of the room and upstairs. She heard the front door click behind him.

  ‘He’s gone after her’, she whispered to herself. ‘He’s gone after her’, she shouted.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Kops,’ said Jean Campbell, leading in the little girls, ‘we’ve had a lovely time in Harrods, haven’t we? Look, show mummy how pretty your hair looks.’

  More trouble, she thought, seeing Polly’s face. And a black eye coming up too. Silly bitch, what did she think she was playing at? Joyfully, she said, ‘Well, what about a nice walk round the garden, Pamela and Sue?’

  Polly was alone in the house. She went upstairs and spent the afternoon crying, moaning and beating on the bed. While the children laughed and called out in the garden, the front door banged open. ‘Polly, Polly!’ called Tracy. ‘We’ve found the cottage! Toddy and me are going to get married!’

  Polly uttered a groan and pulled a pillow over her head.

  In a quiet corner of the garden, by the fence, Lady Clarissa was getting badly beaten up. Punches landed on her body, her poor blind face, her nose bled, her legs gave way, she fell and her attacker was on her crying, ‘Oh you bitch. You bitch. All bitches.’ Kneeling beside her, hammering his fists into her. ‘I’ll take care of you, oh, I’ll take care of you.’ She sobbed and gasped, said, ‘No, don’t don’t.’ ‘Bitch, bitch’, he said hitting her across the face in time to his words.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said a voice. She saw a pair of shoes, trousers beside her.

  The man pulled her attacker up and punched him on the jaw. Lester Dent, for it was he, reeled back. Lady Clarissa’s saviour caught him by the collar of his white nylon roll-necked sweater and held him up.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing—my God, Clarissa!’ He let go of Lester Dent, who stumbled, retched, went through the house and out of the front door holding his jaw, and back by taxi telling himself nothing had happened, anyway she had asked for it, they were all the same, back to Mrs Dent and little Cornelia Dent in Hampstead.

  In the garden Hugo Trelawny said, ‘Clarissa, what happened? Are you all right? Where does it hurt?’

  He seized a lantern from the wall and held it up, fell on his knees and said, ‘Oh, my God, your poor face.’ He produced an immaculate hankie and began to wipe her bloody, tearful face. A crumpled mess of silks, satins and tangled limbs, Lady Clarissa gasped, ‘Oh Hugo, is it you?’

  ‘Of course it is. Don’t worry. I’ll look after you’, he said, wiping away, straightening her out, putting his dinner jacket under her head. ‘Is that your—er?’

  ‘He came up to me and kissed me. Then he did that. I scarcely know him.’

  ‘A pervert’, Hugo Trelawny said with certainty. ‘And what a horrible party this is. Do you think you can get up? I’ll drive you to hospital first, to make sure nothing’s seriously wrong and then I think you’d better come back to my flat.’

  ‘Give me a few minutes more,’ she said faintly, ‘I think I’m all right basically. Thank God you arrived Hugo. I thought he was going to kill me. He kept shouting the most horrible things.’

  ‘A dreadful experience’, he said firmly. ‘Just what you’d expect in a place like this.’ Looking at her tenderly as she lay under the tree he said, ‘It must be five years since I saw you. You can’t have been more than sixteen.’

  ‘You kissed me under the apple tree at Woodhurst, after the tennis match’, Lady Clarissa said, crying, remembering a sunny day in the country, lemonade, a tall figure in tennis clothes, a pair of steady blue eyes, the feel of grass under tennis shoes. ‘I was still at school, then’, she said with a sob.

  He raised her gently to her feet and led her into the house. People, seeing Lady Clarissa, her clothes bedraggled and torn, her face a mess of smeared make-up, blood and tears, supported by her tall companion in well-cut evening trousers, white shirt, with his dinner jacket stuffed under his arm, stared and turned away.

  In the hall she said, ‘Dylan’.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Hugo Trelawny.

  ‘My baby—my little girl. She’s here.’

  ‘Ah’, said Trelawny, taking the information on board and understanding the situation fairly quickly. ‘Well then,’ he said in a practical manner, ‘presumably Mrs Kops has a nanny. I’ll ask her to take care of your little girl until tomorrow.’

  ‘No’, cried Lady Clarissa, for Dylan was all she had.

  ‘Then I’ll fetch her’, said the gallant Trelawny. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Under the table upstairs.’

  ‘Right’, he said, and led her to an ottoman. He left her sitting there and went upstairs. A confident, competent, sensible and highly manipulative man, he knew precisely what to do with his Clarissa. He was not shocked at the sight of the sticky Dylan lying in a striped kaftan on an army blanket under the table. He picked the child up, dropped the blanket when he found Dylan had peed on it.

  As he walked through the guests, he was stopped by Tracy who said, ‘What are you doing with Dylan?’

  ‘I’m taking her to her mother,’ he replied, ‘I’m taking her mother back to my flat. She’s an old friend.’

  Tracy, stopped by the contempt on his face, for her and for everybody in the room, pulled herself together and said, ‘You won’t mind if I come and see?’

  ‘Not at all’, he said.

  So he and Tracy went down into the hall.

  ‘My God. What happened?’ Tracy cried, seeing Lady Clarissa’s condition.

  But Trelawny, carrying the child, with Lady Clarissa on his arm, walked out, shaking the dust of Elgin Crescent off his feet forever, and took his intended bride and her child to Jermyn Street for the night, and then to Wiltshire forever.

  ‘Did you have a nice time at the party, Lester?’ said Mrs Dent, who never went anywhere, to her husband at breakfast next morning.

  ‘A lot of pseudos and bores,’ said Lester, ‘no one you meet at these places is really genuine
. Polly Kops has gone down since Alexander left. He’ll be out on Tuesday.’

  ‘That’ll be nice for you’, Mrs Dent told him.

  And all night the music went on, the strobes flickered, the guests enjoyed themselves. Long Tall Timmy and Frederick danced together a lot, Ulla Helander did her famous strip, Jean Pierre Tonnerre hid behind a tree and popped out on to a Liberal MP who was pissing against it. A handsome student used his body to sell two stories to an elderly lady magazine editor, people told each other tales of themselves and Norman Mailer, William Buckley Jnr, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Aldiss, Dr Schweitzer, the Pope and the Prime Minister, the corks popped, the dance went on. Polly spun about, laughing.

  ‘I’ll meet you on Tuesday at eight, then’, she had said to Alexander in prison.

  Alexander, a whipped child, looked at her. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Do—about what?’ she asked him gaily.

  ‘Me and you. You’ve got Clancy there now.’

  ‘Oh that. Never mind Clancy’, she said, for it was the day after he had walked out and he had not come back since. ‘Everything in the campaign is going well’, she told him. ‘The magazine’s coming out—’ and, after all these months, she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘Till Tuesday then. I’ll bring some clothes for you.’

  ‘Right’, he said, and smiled at her joyfully.

  Swinging herself home in the white Porsche she told herself she loved Alexander.

  But when she got back, there on the step waiting for her was Clancy, holding out his arms, in floods of tears.

  ‘Polly, Polly, Polly. I’ve missed you so much. Oh, Poll. I’m sorry, it wasn’t anything. It was only that time—’

  She flew to him. They clung to each other weeping as they went upstairs to their room, they loved each other passionately, they could never be apart, they were each other by birth, by breeding, by the force of their love.

  ‘Don’t drive that car any more. You’ll die—you will’, Clancy cried.

  ‘I won’t’, she sighed. ‘Not any more.’

  And the guests left the halls of pleasure, the music died and the lights went out. In the darkness the cat ate himself sick on the remains of the banquet. Outside it began to rain, a wind came up and the leaves began to shake on the tree outside the bedroom window.

  Inside Polly moaned, ‘Clancy’, and turned to him. But he was gone.

  Upstairs, Mrs Traill was talking to him across the Guinness bottles. ‘You’ve got to do what’s right for yourself, dear, when all’s said and done.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  What a lovely lad he was. How she hated that Polly. She—leave? She’d see Polly dead on the doorstep first.

  Polly sighed. ‘Where are you?’ she muttered and slept again.

  ‘Daddy!’ cried the little girls and ran, pigtails flying, down the steps to the car. They hugged and kissed him as he got out. Alexander, with a child on each hand, came quietly up the steps to the house.

  ‘Welcome home, Mr Kops’, Jean Campbell said. ‘Now, come upstairs with me, girls, and let your father rest for a little while.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Alexander, ‘let me take them into the garden for a time. Why don’t you go out this morning?’ he said to her. ‘I’d like to spend a few hours with them, at least.’

  What a relief, Jean Campbell thought. At last, a gentleman. And a few hours off to go shopping for her holidays. And that Clancy had slung his hook, maybe for good. Perhaps things would become normal in this house. Not a moment too soon.

  So the morning passed. Polly, feeling very strange, made a cup of tea which they drank in the garden in the fresh autumn air. He looked around and about up at the sky, at his children playing. He came in and admired the house. Turning very pale in the bedroom doorway gazing at the round bed, the hangings, the plants. He did not go in. The children hung on him. Mrs Garcia cooked their lunch. Polly showed him the papers concerning the drug reform movement, the proofs of the magazine, told him the details of the case involving her father’s money.

  After lunch, when Jean Campbell came back to take the children to Hyde Park he said, sadly, ‘I don’t suppose you want to sleep with me Polly?’

  ‘I’d love to’, she said gallantly, and led him upstairs and tried, and tried, to make love to him. But he felt strange, like a piece of wood, he was impotent, he did not want her.

  ‘It would have been better if it had been Ulla’, she said.

  ‘Mm,’ he said, doubtful, but agreeing with her. He pulled the sheet over him, to conceal his wooden body. She pulled it over her, to conceal her own leaden flesh.

  ‘I assume Clancy’s gone out to be tactful’, he said. ‘Or has he moved out?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘You’re buying this place, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m in the middle of it.’

  He kissed her. ‘I’d better be going.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘To my parents, to start with. I’ll collect all the stuff later.’

  She carried his bag downstairs. The lock turned and Clancy let himself in.

  ‘Hullo Alexander’, he said. He was wearing a dark purple suit. Alexander was in jeans.

  ‘Hullo, Clancy.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if I’m staying. You look very orchidaceous.’

  ‘You look as if you’d just come out of the nick’, Clancy said, Each thought of Binnsy, with over eighteen months left to serve, each knew the other was thinking of Binnsy. ‘Is the kettle on, Poll?’ Clancy added.

  ‘Nice one’, said Alexander. ‘You look a real ponce, Clancy, at this moment. Not surprising, seeing that’s what you are.’

  ‘Shut up Alexander’, said Polly.

  ‘He’s going to leave you, Polly’, said Alexander.

  Polly said nothing. She felt very cold. Finally she said, ‘So would you have done.’

  There was a silence. Marseilles-waterfront, rough-trade, darling boy Clancy said, ‘Well, there’s the door, Alexander, sweetheart, if you were thinking of pissing off.’

  Alexander turned round.

  ‘I’ve put your money in the bank, Alexander. Three thousand pounds—’ Polly said and stopped.

  ‘My children’, Alexander said. He walked away down the hall with his bag, opened it and was gone.

  Polly sat down on the stairs with her head in her hands.

  Clancy said, ‘After that I do fancy a cuppa’, and went down into the kitchen.

  Silence came over the house. Mrs Traill came slowly shuffling down the stairs with her oilcloth bag, pushed past Polly, inched down the hall on her bandaged legs. In the doorway she turned and smiled a terrible smile and said, ‘I dreamed about you last night, dear. You were drowning’, and the door shut behind her.

  Polly lay alone in bed on Sunday night.

  ‘It’s no good, Polly,’ her mother had said, ‘he really doesn’t want to come back and I can’t find it in me to persuade him. The boy’s unhappy. All his real friends are here. He says you and Clancy don’t talk to him. He’s very sorry to lose Pamela and Sue, but you must see it’s impossible. No one’s looking after him. He says the nanny thinks he’s too old, and not her job anyway—his socks are in rags. Now, I know socks aren’t everything, but it all points in the same direction. He’s brought his guitar, his books—you didn’t see him off or you’d know. He’s saved up for a taxi so that he could bring everything. That was hardly a thing in that cab he didn’t leave here with, except for a few clothes and some odds and ends he’s bought out of his pocket-money. And I’ve been giving him that. He evidently couldn’t pin you down for long enough even to get his pocket-money out of you. You’ve got a hundred thousand pounds and your child can’t have thirty pence a week. Do you know how many pairs of pants he’s got?’

  ‘Mum, I’ve had a lot on my plate recently. I admit I haven’t counted Max’s pairs of pants.’

  ‘Then it’s a pity, that’s all I can say. I’ll tell
you. He has one pair. He’s been wearing them all the time and washing them in the washbasin at night. A fitted washbasin in his room, and one pair of pants—I ask you—’

  ‘All he had to do was ask—’

  ‘Ask who? You—you never stop whirling for a moment. Or the nanny, who takes no interest. He’s had toothache for a week.’

  ‘I can’t do anything if he won’t come back’, Polly said wearily. ‘Perhaps it was all a mistake in the first place. I don’t want him to go but I can’t put him in manacles and bring him back.’

  ‘That’s settled then, is it?’ said her mother. ‘I’m to put him in the school here? Because if you’re thinking of changing your mind, I’d like to know. The child’s had enough upsets already.’

  ‘That’s all right. You keep him’, said Polly. ‘You’ll do better for him than I ever could.’

  ‘Oh dear’, sighed her mother. ‘Can I do anything to help?’

  ‘No,’ said Polly, ‘it’s all right.’

  ‘Max says Clancy’s away on tour. Is that the trouble?’

  ‘Clancy’s always away for some reason. Don’t worry Mum. You can’t do anything about it. It’s the human condition, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t think you can blame it all on the human condition, Polly’, said her mother.

  ‘Well, it’s me, or all this money, or something. It’s just a patch—it may not last. I hope not.’

  ‘So do I’, said her mother with a sigh. ‘Anyway, I’ll bring him over on Saturday, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Do that’, said Polly, and put the phone down. She lay in her elegant drawing-room with her arm over her eyes to block out the afternoon sunshine. She did nothing all day and felt tired. At night she could not sleep. Soon she would take to haunting Harrods with an over made-up face, straying through streets and parks talking to herself, filling the house with cats, walking about railway stations, bus stations, in and out of museums. I’ll get a country cottage she thought, we can all go down there at weekends, get a donkey, chop up logs. But none of it seemed real and she was too tired to do anything. And these days she found it frightening to leave the house. Too much, I suppose, she thought, too much pleasure, pain, strain, struggle, too many events, how tired I feel, a visit to the doctor—the phone rang.