The sausages spat in the pan. She poured out the golden cornfields.
‘I won’t say any more now’, her mother said, over the heads of Pamela and Sue, who were struggling over a baby’s potty they had just found in a cupboard on the landing. ‘No one can go to the toilet in it. This is for little babies. You’re big girls now. I just hope that one day you come to your senses before you’ve done irreparable harm to yourself and everyone about you. Now, let’s go into the garden while mummy finishes cooking your breakfast. You’ve got to try and sort all this out, Polly, and soon. You’ll want it when you see it on the table.’
‘Mind if I pour myself a cup of tea, Poll?’ Max said, when they had gone.
‘I got orange juice for you.’
‘I’d rather have a cuppa tea’, he told her. ‘I’ve got five pounds to buy myself some gear. Would you rather not talk?’
No. It’s OK.’
‘She doesn’t seem to think much of your life-style’, he said.
‘She may be right.’
‘She reckons you ought to get yourself a job teaching part-time.’
‘I expect I’ll have to, in the end.’
She put the plates on the table. His radiance was fading.
‘Are you all right, Max?’ she asked him.
‘Fine’, he said, eating a sausage. ‘I’ll go and call them.’
Polly was left alone in the kitchen, like a spider falling out of its web, with one long filament stretching after him. Later, they all went up Portobello Road, to buy Max a T-shirt, trousers, a big belt. The stalls, the crowds, the street musicians under the bright cold sun were all calm patterns, all order and harmony. Once Alexander was gone she could then get some sleep, and it would stay like this.
That evening, the boy, in his new T-shirt, big belt and flared jeans, sat on the sofa in the window, strumming. Maurice Burns, humped in an easy chair, smoked a fat joint, Ulla Helander was stretched on the carpet in her Venus of Rokeby pose. Polly and Alexander ran in and out shouting, putting things in Alexander’s grip, which lay open on the floor.
‘Not those socks. I hate nylon socks.’
Polly ran to the laundrette and back, with the washing on the old pram.
She stood pulling her hair in the corner while Alexander threw his clothes about, tried to close the grip, failed, threw books and socks on the rug.
‘This is damp.’
‘Can’t you dry it on the radiator when you get there?’
‘Radiator? Where do you think I’m staying—the Hilton?’
Alexander’s guitar needed tuning. His copies of Gorilla wouldn’t fit in. His contact list was on the piano upstairs. The boy tuned the guitar, fetched the list.
‘They’ll be here in five minutes. Where’s that present for Hektor Clute? Can’t you wrap it up in something better than the Morning Star?’
‘I think you should print that retraction, Alexander’, said Maurice Burns.
‘Just write to Bec and tell him to piss off.’
The phone rang. ‘Blockade will be late—Slasher’s coming back from Maidenhead’, reported the boy.
‘You’d better go to bed Max’, Polly said, knowing that Alexander’s travel anxieties were intensifying. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea. Then you can go.’
‘—off for a few days with the Blockade boys. Try to stall them for a week’, ordered Alexander.
The phone rang. ‘I’m putting a cheque in the post’, he said. ‘Polly, send the printer forty quid out of that money order I gave you.’
Polly did not dare tell him she had spent it. Tonight Alexander was fighting Dunkirk all over again. He whirled and hurled on his long legs and fast feet. ‘Get on to Harrods and tell them that game pie was off. Where are you going?’
‘Make a cup of tea.’
He exhaled, took Maurice Burns’s joint, sank into a chair.
Polly heard Alexander shouting from downstairs.
She ran up. ‘Why don’t you go to bed. Don’t you know it’s past one in the morning?’ Alexander yelled.
‘Polly said I could have a cup of tea before I went’, muttered Max.
‘Never mind what Polly said. Go to bed now. It’s late.’
‘All right’, the boy said, turning to go.
‘Leave him alone,’ cried Polly in the doorway, ‘he’s doing no harm. Why can’t he have a cup of tea?’
‘A boy of his age should have been in bed hours ago. What about his health? Get to bed, you little twerp’, he shouted.
Max was tired. He began to cry. He said, ‘I’m going to tell Mum about you.’
‘Tell your mum, your dad, I don’t care.’
‘Haven’t got a dad’, he snuffled.
‘Oh,’ Alexander said, making himself tall, like a snake about to strike, ‘oh—yes. You’ve got a dad. It’s just that the bloody Turn-bulls won’t tell you who he is. Dads don’t exist in the Turnbull world.’
‘You rotten bastard,’ Max sobbed in his fatigue, ‘you rotten bastard, Alexander Kops.’
‘Here they are’, Alexander shouted as he heard the van stop outside. He was eager now, like a child going on holiday. He grabbed his grip, guitar and pile of magazines. ‘Goodbye, Polly. Give us a kiss.’
Polly with her arm round the sobbing boy, just looked at him.
‘Give us a kiss, Ulla’, he said and kissed her lingeringly. He swept out. There was a long silence.
‘Come on Max,’ Polly said, ‘time for bed.’
‘Who is my dad?’ Max asked in desperation, with a besmeared face and swollen eyes.
‘Oh—ask me another day’, Polly said treacherously. Her eyes filled with tears. She and the boy sobbed, linked arms, went upstairs to bed, Turnbull-fashion, in a cloud of mutual emotion. But, in the style of the Turnbulls, the truth had not been told.
Looking back – II
In Alexander’s absence the house assumed different dimensions. The invisible barrier between downstairs, where Polly lived, and upstairs, where Alexander lived, fell down. The huge chilly throne room, their bedroom, was struck by the sun. Polly put a vase of daffodils in the window. She cleaned and tidied the small cell where she disposed of Pamela and Sue each night when her adult life began. Tracy’s grotto, where she now lay, recovering, was sucked into the rest of the house. Toys were found in it, stale cups of tea and plates appeared on the floor. The house looked dirty. Polly cleaned it, she reunited the rooms, she paced it in confidence knowing she could go anywhere.
She finished the Woodland Storybook one early morning, parcelled it up, addressed it, went to the zoo with Max, Pamela and Sue, ate spaghetti on toast, got Lady Clarissa to confront Angelo, took Max round the National Gallery, to the Imperial War Museum, chatted with him, paid the fare for Clarissa and Dylan to go to their grand home in Berkshire, ignored the addict who slept one night out of two under the piano, except for cooking his meals, which he did not relish. Mrs Traill came and went up and down stairs.
All this took three days, after which Polly began to jump up from her restless bed in the middle of the night, smelling fire and seeing the flames flickering under the bedroom door, began to smoke too much, let the ironing pile up again, find the children irritating, take in a stray cat with cat flu, write poems and worry about Alexander’s return.
The brown envelopes with little windows in them fell remorselessly on the cracked tiles in the hall. She shopped a mile away in case the grocer, the bank-manager, the cleaners where her clothes had been for three months, saw her and asked for money.
‘Ullo, Mrs Kops, missing your ’ubby?’ Mrs Traill asked on Wednesday as she laboured up the stairs.
‘Not half’, Polly would reply, switching on the vacuum cleaner,
‘Nice little boy, Max.’ The voice creaked through the noise of the machine. ‘Your mother’s boy, is it?’
‘Yes’, Polly howled.
‘That’s right, dear’, Mrs Traill said, clambering on up on bandaged varicose veins, dragging the nasty bag full of whatever it was, sheeps’ heads, heart
s, feet, organs, water voles’ paws, vile herbs, religious pamphlets from strange sects, horoscope books, empty milk bottles, a cabbage, an old hairbrush pulled out of a dustbin. How Polly yearned to call the district nurse to Mrs Traill’s flat, then the undertaker, then the Council dustmen to take away her furniture, her greasy carpets, then the Council fumigator and an army of women with buckets of Jeyes’ Fluid and scrubbing brushes, then a whitewash man. How she longed to throw out, burn, cleanse and occupy the festering rooftop of her house.
‘Bye, bye, Mrs Traill. Look after yourself.’
‘Bye, Mrs Kops. Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.’
‘And if you can’t be careful, call for me with my syringe full of dirty Dettol’, Polly added under the booming of the vacuum, for Mrs Traill, before the passing of the Act and the shakiness of old age, had practised as an abortionist from her flat upstairs, and even now Polly sometimes let in haggard middle-aged women or young girls who were still turning to good old Mrs Traill in their trouble, as they had in days of yore.
So Polly dug and scrubbed, planted and washed. ‘You’re always talking to Max,’ Pamela complained, ‘you don’t talk to us at all.’ Said Sue, ‘My dolly’s pram’s broken itself again.’
On Saturday afternoon they all went to the park. The buds were coming out on the trees, Pamela and Sue went on the swings, the seesaw, the slide. They walked, she and Max, round the Round Pond, smelling the spring, chatting, while boys and men sailed their boats and children skimmed and shouted on the grass under the trees, in the sunshine.
‘I’m getting on well enough at school,’ said the long, skinny boy in his new boots, jeans, T-shirt, ‘but at home—sometimes it’s very cold and quiet. You know what I mean? It’s not like a normal house, with other children and a mum and dad. I mean, I go to see the other kids and there’s the telly going and the little brother pissing in the corner and their mum doing all the teas and raving at everybody or just coming in from bingo—well, that’s normal. I feel I’m living in the times of the Railway Children or Little Lord Fauntleroy or something. A right little orphan Annie sitting there in a clean pinny reading books or helping Mum do the carrots. See what I mean?’
Polly sighed. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Well, don’t, for God’s sake tell Mum what I’m saying. It’d hurt her feelings. But I wouldn’t half like a bit of life. Sometimes I even envy Alf Jones and he has a terrible life—there’s about eight of them and he’s the oldest and he’s never at school because he has to stay home and look after the others because his dad’s been nicked, or got in a fight, or something, and his mum’s at the police station, or his mum and dad have had a barney—you know. But even that makes me think, well, it’s normal, in a way. And then these girls at school are always going on about their mum and dad aren’t their real mum and dad, their mum’s really the Queen, or Elizabeth Taylor, or their dad’s Steve McQueen—well, there’s a real mystery about my birth, if you ask me, and they want to try that and see how it feels. I mean, I’m not saying everyone in the school knows who their dad is, there’s some right funny stories about if you want to listen but, somehow, I think there’s more to the fabulous tale of Max Turnbull than that. If you want to know what I think, I think it’s dodgy.’
Polly looked at the boy, his head and face flaming against the sun, and at a toy yacht, battling across the waves of the shining water. She said, ‘I’ll talk to Mum. We should get it all cleared up.’
‘So I should think,’ he said righteously, ‘I mean, I’ve got a right to know.’
So she had thought at his age.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, staring at the yacht, ‘why no one told you. I suppose it seemed all right at the time.’
‘You don’t really know who your dad was, do you?’ he said. ‘I mean, what’s the big secret anyway?’
‘My dad was an air-raid warden in the war’, she said.
He hooted with laughter. ‘Starring Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart. Sounds like codswallop to me.’
‘Oh—come on Max,’ she said, ‘it looks as if Pamela’s run into that tree again. Oh—Sue’s taken her shoes off.’
They both ran to the erring twins, but as she ran Polly, remembering the tone of her mother’s account of her birth, flat, dull, like a lie she was not supposed to believe, decided that it probably was codswallop.
It was a chill night. She lay there staring at the stars and full moon beyond the budding tree outside the window. She slept a light grey sleep, awoke.
There was a dark figure of a man standing in the bedroom door.
She heard a little familiar song.
‘Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light,
Like a little candle burning in the night.
In the world of darkness we must shine.
You in your small corner, and I in mine.’
She joined in:
‘Jesus bids us shine first of all for him,
When he sees our lives are growing rather dim,
He looks down from heaven just to see us shine,
You in your small corner and I in mine.’
In the doorway stood her old, now mature, friend, cousin and companion from St Swithin’s Sunday School, Clancy Goldstein, stark naked.
‘I have a great big candle burning in the night’, he announced, and so he had. His skinny frame seemed to carry with difficulty the weight of his seemingly enormous, blossoming prick.
Outside she saw the dark moon, black holes in space where the stars should have been. She looked at the figure in the doorway again. He advanced.
‘Oh, Clancy, not again’, she said, holding out her arms to him.
‘Why not?’ he said.
Oh, the relaxation, tension in fibre, sinew and nerve, as Clancy’s long body came on to hers, the juicy weight of him, as his long thin cock drove into her like the well-greased brass piston of an engine, as he looked down at her and said with a shaking voice, ‘Polly’, in horror at how little control he really had over what was going to happen, and began to drive. Strange conjunction, odd intercourse. Polly sank into the bed, further, further, the mattress and springs vanished, they whirled in the air, in space, light, bright, around each other, joined only by Clancy’s burning rod. Polly was afraid as they whirled, said, ‘Clancy’, in alarm. He looked into her eyes and dared her to spin. Now the pleasure grew fierce, like Polly’s pain in childbirth, she could not bear any more of it, she would die if it did not stop, burning planets hit, crashed, tried to join, fell apart and plunged, down, down, down into the black vacuum.
‘Oh, what a fuck’, said Clancy, still in her. Polly stared out as the dark moon slowly regained its height, shone over the bed where two beached fish lay in their own fluids.
‘Oh, oh, oh, Clancy,’ she said, unable to repress joy, ‘oh, thank you.’
‘Thank you’, he replied. Suddenly he kissed her. ‘Polly. It’s nice to be back.’
They opened their eyes, looked at each other, admitted each other. Polly tightened her arms, possessively, round Clancy. Each moved. They began to fuck again, slowly, stopping every now and again to exchange remarks.
‘I’m remembering that time on the river at Oxford.’
‘That swan hissing.’
‘Stop if you’re tired.’
‘I’m not tired.’
‘I love you, Polly.’
‘I love you, Clancy.’
‘I love you—’
‘Love you.’
Pure as angels of the senses they went on, and when the moon and stars went out they were singing, tiredly and it was dawn.
‘Let cowards mock and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.’
‘Oh,’ said Tracy, through the gloom, ‘sorry Poll. I heard voices—’
‘Come in Trace’, said Clancy, pulling the sheet over his crucified body.
Tracy came in, carrying an ivory-handled walking stick.
‘Oh. It’s you, Clancy’, she said, peering. ‘I was going to c
onk you with this. Did they let you out or did you escape?’
‘Bit of each. Go and make us a cuppa, eh? Seeing as you’re up and we’re not’, he said brazenly.
‘Nice one,’ she said, ‘I’m ill, you know, Clancy. Oh—all right.’
‘I hope she doesn’t tell her mum’, Clancy said miserably. ‘If the aunties catch on, there won’t half be a row.’
Polly started laughing. ‘What? We’re all drawing our pensions now. Max is here’, she said, as an afterthought.
Clancy began to cry. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t stand thinking about it. I’ll take him out next week and get him some drums.’
‘What a nice idea’, she said, viciously. ‘Never mind, never mind. I love you.’
‘I love you, Polly. When’s Alexander get back?’
‘In a week.’
‘That’s too bad. I suppose we can run away together. It’d be all right—could take Maxie.’
‘And leave Pam and Sue? I could get Alexander to leave, though—perhaps.’
‘Never mind. We’re here, now’, he said, lying on her.
‘Here’s your cuppa,’ Tracy said, ‘I should knock, I suppose.’
Clancy said, ‘Why don’t you get in and drink yours?’
So the three cousins sat in bed drinking their tea alongside each other, watching the outline of the tree outside grow harder as the dawn came up.
They were talking about Christmas 1951, when Polly was nine, Clancy eight and Tracy, who was seven, pulled the tree on top of herself. She recalled the smell of the needles, the prickling all over her through her woolly dress. Clancy said, ‘What’s that?’ The shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of Mrs Traill came past the door.
‘Mrs Traill—the controlled tenant’, Polly said, picturing the five and a half foot bundle of rags, Oxfam poster on bandaged legs dragging itself past her door.
‘She gets up early. Oh my God, I’ve got goosepimples all over.’
‘You should get her out, Polly’, Tracy advised. ‘She’ll do you a real mischief one day. She’s the type.’
Polly Put the Kettle On Page 6