Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘They can be very nasty’, said the Angel. ‘Still, I wouldn’t mind giving one or two of them a Chinese burn.’

  ‘You’re here to stop it, not start it’, she told him.

  ‘I know. I know. Anything for old Alexander.’

  ‘I hope those coppers know what they’re doing’, said another Angel.

  ‘I hope you do’, muttered Polly.

  The air was pungent and heavy with musk and Oriental scents and spices, the lit candles gleamed with a double, treble, light at the far end of the room, the cushions were soft. Lord Bec fainted under Tracy’s caressing fingers. Butterflies, purple, vermilion, crimson, jade, onyx, amber, floated across his eyes. He had taken off his clothes for the rough fabrics chafed his skin. Tracy’s fingers wove patterns over the surface of his body, soft as silk on silk. The butterflies changed to little Disneyland characters. Chipmunks popped in and out of the roots of trees, Mickey and Minnie rode slowly along in a red Model-T, Donald Duck in a blue sailor suit bowled a hoop. And suddenly the king lay in a flowery bower with the queen. And he sensed that Tracy was looking at her watch. And was in the bower again.

  ‘Nice time?’ asked Tracy.

  ‘Yes’, he said. ‘You put something in my drink.’

  ‘That’s right’, she said.

  He accepted what she said. He looked at the honeysuckle climbing up the walls, each tendril, leaf, petal perfect, ideal, sublime in itself.

  A girl’s voice came in a scream. ‘Free Alexander Kops.’ There was a scuffle as she was pulled back from the door.

  Professor Amos Corbett, his raven hair hanging round his pale and skull-like face, rose to his feet. His black eyes burned. He heard nothing, saw nothing but faces, like a field of cauliflowers turned up to him.

  He opened wide his arms and cried, ‘My friends. Oh, my friends. Oh, my cauliflowers.’

  Polly, looking at him, saw clearly that her precautions against the spiking of the carafe with LSD had not been necessary in his case. She hoped the more conventional part of the audience would not notice, or, if they knew, would not mind.

  ‘We need love,’ he said, ‘all of us. I see an angel, wings outspread, hovering over us all.’

  The faces of the pseudo-hippies hardened. They began to mutter to each other. The genuine hippies sat on, feeling fairly bored but relaxed.

  ‘We are talking about what are called consciousness-expanding drugs—drugs to make us see the world differently, vibrantly, can give us insights we might never attain in another way—into ourselves, into the world. Drugs which give us life, understanding—’

  One of the pseudo-hippies, his big ruddy face incongruous above his beads, shouted, ‘Shut up! You’re drugged yourself.’

  ‘I must protest’, cried a man from the front. ‘Professor Corbett is obviously under the influence of LSD.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ cried Toddy.

  ‘What did you have before you came here—half a bottle of whisky?’ called someone else.

  Gascoyne beat on the table with his gavel.

  Shouts came from outside the door. ‘Let us in’, called a voice. ‘Free Alexander Kops’, shouted another. The Hell’s Angels bolted the door. Those outside began to beat on the door shouting, ‘Free Alexander Kops’. The Hell’s Angels put their backs to the door and stood firm. Polly, standing just in front of them, heard the police saying, ‘Move back there. Get back outside.’ There was scuffling. A cry.

  The lamplight fell on a small crowd gathered in the street outside the house in Elgin Crescent. The light was intensified by the arc-lamps of the television companies. Tracy, trying to hear, had arranged for Lord Bec, the new Home Secretary, to make a controversial statement on the drug reform Bill.

  On the step, Bec’s security officer, who had followed him to Elgin Crescent, said to a short fat man, ‘I don’t like this. I’m going inside.’

  ‘I’ll come with you’, volunteered the short man.

  ‘No you won’t. I know you. You’re from the News of the Screws’, the security man said firmly. He rang the doorbell. ‘You stay outside. How did you get here anyway?’

  ‘Call from Bec’s secretary—said he was going to make a statement.’

  ‘Didn’t you check back?’

  ‘We waited an hour for the duty officer at the Home Office to call back. He never did, so we all came here in case.’

  The security man, looking depressed, rang the bell again. As it sounded, there was a murmur outside. The reporter vanished into the street. Looking down, the security officer saw the faces looking up, the cameras moving back across the road, to point upwards.

  The security officer ran down the steps and through the garden gate.

  Perched on the edge of the balcony above the front door stood Lord Bec, stark naked.

  A police car drew up opposite the house. Police officers jumped out.

  ‘Over here’, yelled the security man. ‘Lord Bec’s detective’, he told them. ‘Get this door down quick.’

  Against the sound of the three men throwing themselves at the front door, Bec was speaking out into the street.

  ‘—we must have peace. We are ordinary people. We tire, we have worries, griefs, fears, ambitions. However we may look—rich, secure, powerful, poor and weak—we are all subject to the human condition, need peace from our pain.’

  ‘Oh Christ, get it open’, groaned the detective.

  ‘It’s giving’, panted one of the policemen.

  They all threw themselves against the door just as Tracy opened it. The detective and one police officer staggered up the hall and fell together on the stairs. The other policeman sprawled on the tiles.

  ‘What do you three think you’re doing?’ said Tracy, quite the indignant householder in her robes, holding a candle. ‘You’ll damage the hinges.’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ said the detective, standing up. The two police officers ran upstairs.

  Outside, Lord Bec, a Christ-like figure on the balcony under the lights, was saying, ‘We have only love, love, love and the unconquerable spirit of man.’

  ‘Is he talking about drugs?’ muttered the Daily Telegraph man.

  ‘If he is, I wish he’d get on with it. None of this is any good to me. Still, he may fall off’, said another reporter.

  ‘He’s a rock climber’, said the girl from the Observer.

  ‘Anything, anything at all, which can release us from our unnecessary obsessions—with power, with money, with strife—and can centre our minds on the only things which matter, which can solve all our problems, which are only exacerbated by egotism, aggression, greed, which can make us happy—’ said Lord Bec. There was a wrenching sound below him. He stepped back quickly and cried, ‘anything which can rescue us from our own storms—’

  The wrenching sound intensified, covered by the sound of showering plaster. As Bec ran for the window leading back into the house, one of the porticoes supporting the balcony collapsed, crumbling quietly down on to the garden below. The balcony sank to that side and cracked away from the remaining portico. Lord Bec hurled himself at the window-sill, missed, and as the balcony collapsed on to the front step, he was flung into the middle of the road. He lay spreadeagled across the white line, quite naked, quite dead, still clutching the wood and brass hash pipe in his hand, his face upward to the stars.

  Back at the meeting hall, Amos Corbett had stopped speaking. The audience was on its feet shouting at each other. The door gave way and the crowd of freaks, anti-drug people, Blockade fans and policemen burst in struggling. The audience began to leap on the stage to get out of trouble. Theodore Ramkin was heavily trodden on. The Hell’s Angels mixed in with the struggling crowd, trying to get them out. The imitation hippies started punching viciously. The pushing and shoving quickly turned to fighting as a contingent of stockbrokers ran for Amos Corbett and were wrenched away by big hippies, the Hell’s Angels got out of control and went for the police. A bunch of schoolmasters and social workers were making a spirited attempt to thr
ust their way out.

  Tracy was forced in with the extra police, who rammed themselves through the door in a phalanx. As they swept on, parting the fighting people and dragging them out, in the midst of screams, cries, grunts and groans, Tracy ran to the platform, the tears coming in black streams down her face. Polly, standing in front of Dame Mary, pushed over a middle-aged man who had grasped the good old lady by the shoulder of her beige dress and was spitting an argument at her.

  ‘Oh, Polly, he’s dead!’ Tracy sobbed.

  ‘Max?’ screamed Polly.

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘Who’s dead?’

  ‘Lord Bec. Lord Bec.’

  ‘Lord Bec?’ Polly said, staring at her. The hall was already beginning to quiet. The police, by dragging out a number of shouting people at random, and leaving the doorway empty for a little while, had ensured that many others crept away.

  ‘Are you the organizer, miss?’ said a policeman at her shoulder.

  ‘Yes’, said Polly.

  ‘Well, then—’

  ‘What do you mean, Lord Bec’s dead?’ she said to Tracy.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ said a reporter.

  Tracy was sobbing, unable to speak.

  ‘What’s all this?’ said the policeman. ‘Look, Mrs Kops, I’ve got to ask you—’

  ‘Come on Tracy. What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘—the balcony collapsed. I was trying to help.’

  ‘What balcony? Our balcony?’ shouted Polly. ‘Tracy—look just say what happened—eh? Was Lord Bec on our balcony when it collapsed?’

  Tracy sobbed, ‘Yes. He fell in the street.’

  ‘What’s your address?’ said the reporter.

  Polly told him.

  The reporter went away.

  ‘Was he any relative, Mrs Kops?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then can you help me by telling me what went on here?’

  ‘Let me look after my cousin first.’

  ‘Of course. We’d better go to the station. We’ll get her a cup of tea.’

  Polly and the policeman supported Tracy out of the room, now empty but for Gascoyne surveying the broken and overturned chairs, the fallen beads and trodden headbands, a yellow shoe.

  ‘Come on Gascoyne,’ said Polly, ‘we’re going to help the police with their enquiries.’

  As dawn broke, Clancy, Polly and Tracy were having a cup of tea. Lord Bec’s body had been removed, the bricks and chunks of plaster had been cleared from the road and piled in the gutters. The broken pillar, over which so many policemen, reporters, Secret Servicemen and neighbours had stepped during the last six hours, still lay across the threshold. The last visitors, two civil servants in city suits, who had grilled them for two hours, had drawn the whole story, the acts of intercourse, the bogus press conference, their thoughts, their reactions, their pasts, everything from them, had just departed, leaving them, with the skill of policemen, feeling that their future might be much more uncertain than they thought.

  Now the cousins and Toddy sat in the kitchen by the little table. Tracy lay on the chaise-longue, her face washed clean of make-up and tears. Polly and Toddy were in easy chairs, Clancy was on the stool with his head in his hands. Clancy thought: Poll took that Lord Bec fuck I had badly, because I didn’t tell her. Wonder why? Never mind. This is nice publicity with my own case coming up. It’s going to bugger my defence, getting mixed up in all this. I never had anything to do with that heroin, my lord; and I was only lodging in the house where the Home Secretary fell off the balcony and killed himself tripping out and stoned out of his mind. Just an innocent bystander every time. Who’d believe it? Course, that’s Tracy, poor bitch, doesn’t she look pale, always blundering, ever since we were kids. She was the one who dropped Uncle Ted’s hat we’d pinched into the pond on the common, then there was that cat—Oh, Christ, reporters, the Secret Service, who needs it? At this rate I’ll never get those African recordings into shape, down to my last hundred quid, feel my energy going. That’s what happens when you get mixed up with Poll. Oh, look at her there, isn’t she lovely, but all hell breaks loose, a right patch of turbulence she’s always been, look at the last time, oh I love her, did then, went on loving her, never stopped, just couldn’t face it and look, it’s happened all over again, only worse this time, it’s dead peers, and Ministers, campaigns, all on my bloody time, my recordings, my trial, a bit of peace and quiet that’s all I need, a kip, I’m going to bed.

  And Polly thought: he didn’t tell me about Lord Bec. Why not? Thought it didn’t matter. It did. He’s never cared. I suppose it’s just him. He’d fuck anything that moved, Clancy, always would. I shouldn’t mind, it’s just him. But he doesn’t tell you—Binnsy—he keeps on saying that opium in the Land Rover was Binnsy’s and he didn’t know about it, but he did, anyone could tell that. Lord Bec and Clancy on the floor. He did it for me. He says. I did it for Alexander. Tracy did it, if she did, for me. Now he’s dead. Think of his wife. Oh my God, a whole life gone, just like that. That bloody balcony. I’ve told them and told them. Now he’s dead. What will Alexander say? It buggers his campaign. Or maybe not. I suppose not. I suppose it’s good for the campaign that the main opponent went like that. Not for him, though. Oh the poor sod. And the police, the reporters looking round. I found two in the twins’ room, staring down at them, one with a camera raised—why didn’t he tell me? Binnsy’s in prison. Tracy—we should all go to bed now. When will it all end? Get to bed with Clancy.

  And, Tracy thought: my baby and that man, that’s two deaths I’ve brought on. There’ll be a third, there always is, will it be Toddy? Oh no, please God, not Toddy. He was only fifty-two. Married. If only I hadn’t interfered, rung up all those papers and the telly. I could’ve gone to the meeting like the others. It’s just what Mum used to say, you’ll kill someone one day with your interference, and now I have.

  And Toddy, who seemed to be asleep, put his hand over hers as she lay there and said, ‘Come on, old girl. Come to bed. I’ll getcha a pill.’

  He was helping Tracy up when the doorbell rang yet again.

  ‘I’ll just take her up the back way’, he said.

  The bell rang again. ‘I’ll get rid of them’, said Polly flatly.

  She opened the door, saying ‘Yes?’ like those tired women who have had too many calls from probation officers, debt collectors, policemen, who know that whoever it is, it will not be a friend.

  ‘Not you’, she cried to the tall fair man who stood before her. ‘Go away—haven’t you heard the news?’ She was disgusted now at the impulse which had sent her to his office to hire him to dig up dirt about Lord Bec.

  ‘That’s why I’ve come,’ he said, ‘can I come in?’

  ‘Stay there and I’ll pay you now’, Polly said, hysterical with nerves.

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘come in, then.’

  Tracy was going upstairs with Toddy. Clancy was in the hall saying, ‘What is it? Can’t it wait?’

  ‘It’s an enquiry agent’, Polly said. ‘I hired him. It’s about Lord Bec. We might as well hear it.’

  They all looked at him. He stepped inside. The door still stood open, the light fell across the fallen pillar on the step. He looked back at their exhausted faces.

  ‘Are any of these related to you?’ asked the man.

  Polly leaning against the wall said, ‘Cousins. Please get on with it. I can’t stand much more.’

  ‘Here you are then’, said the man. ‘Lord Bec’s name from 1945 onwards was Joseph Bennett. But he changed it. Before that he was Joseph Nimmo. Of course, this was all gone into before by the government security men. No one else knows. That’s why I’ve come in person.’

  ‘Speed it up mate’, was all Toddy, with Tracy leaning against him, said.

  ‘Under the name of Joseph Nimmo he married Miss Deborah Turnbull at St Michael’s, Brixton, in 1942. The witnesses were Dorothy
Jebbs and Mrs Daniella Goldstein. On February 14th if I’m correct. You were born on September 6th 1942, Mrs Kops, and you can draw your own conclusions.’ He looked from Polly, to Clancy, to Tracy, nervously. Then back to Polly. She had begun to slide down the wall, she crumpled on the tiles. Before Clancy got to her she moaned ‘Shit’ and tried to stand up again. He pulled her to her feet. She stared soggily at the enquiry agent. ‘Lord Bec’s my father?’ she said.

  ‘Was’, the enquiry agent told her.

  ‘Shit’, Polly said again. She felt quite calm, like someone who suddenly finds herself lying in the street under a bus. Knowing the horrors would come later. So that was why her mother had fainted when Lord Bec telephoned.

  Toddy said to the enquiry agent, ‘Thank you very much mate, that’s something to think about. Listen—I’ll see your bill’s paid but do you mind pissing off now? We’ve all had enough for one night.’

  ‘I can see that’, the enquiry agent replied. ‘Well—goodnight. Good morning, I mean.’

  ‘Thanks. Goodnight’, Polly said tonelessly.

  He went out, stepped across the pillar, turned, put his foot on it and reached across for the door handle. He smiled in embarrassment, said ‘Goodnight’ again and shut it.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Your dad’, said Clancy. ‘And my mum a witness. My uncle.’

  The hugeness of the secret which had been kept by these respectable older women all these years, amazed them. They had thought they were keeping the knowledge of their lives from their parents. Their parents had gone on leading their narrow lives, being deceived and taking their own secrets quite for granted. ‘It’s best if they don’t know’, they had told each other, and gone on pretending.

  ‘Got a father and lost him all on the same day’, said Polly.

  ‘My mum was in it, too’, said Tracy. She looked a little brighter. ‘Do you know, I don’t feel quite so bad, now I know he was in the family.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Ooh’, she said on a rising note.

  The same thought had just struck Clancy and Polly.

  ‘Incest,’ said Polly, in a low voice, ‘I’ve committed incest.’