Polly Put the Kettle On
Page 17
‘Has Clancy come back?’ said Timmy speaking from Ireland.
‘No,’ said Polly, ‘I didn’t know he’d left.’
‘Left here? He never turned up.’
‘Never turned up? He left here on Thursday morning to meet you at the air terminal.’
‘No—we never saw him. We had to ring Malcolm Jones from the airport. Luckily he caught the next flight. There was a telegram from Clancy at the hotel in Belfast. It said he was on his way. But he didn’t arrive. I thought he must be at Elgin Crescent.’
‘Oh Christ. I don’t know where he is.’
‘Well, cool it. Clancy’ll always be all right.’
‘I believe you,’ said Polly bitterly. ‘I should try Ulla’s.’
Timmy paused, then said, ‘Thanks, I will.’
‘You mean you already have’, Polly said. ‘He wasn’t there?’
‘She hadn’t seen him either.’
‘Since when?’ Polly said implacably.
‘Thursday afternoon.’
‘Yeah’, Polly said.
‘Well—thanks Poll.’
‘Thank you’, she said emphatically. The phone clicked.
She sat staring at her hands, useless hands, hands which did nothing, could hold nothing. Water slowly rose around her, creeping over her feet, up to her ankles, knees, icy, grey-green, filling the length of the room slowly going higher and higher up the walls, rising over her neck, chin, mouth, nose, over her head until her hair floated in it. She was submerged, chilled, a sea creature, a shipwreck, lifeless, watery, a drowned woman.
‘I just thought I’d give you a ring about this last cheque to Mr el Malik, to make sure everything is in order. The amount seems rather greater than the others’, Mr Lightfoot said cheerily.
‘Yes,’ Polly said, ‘I see.’
‘Your letter fully explained the situation,’ he said delicately, ‘but I thought it wise to make sure you hadn’t got a nought in the wrong place this time.’ And he laughed.
Polly’s tired eyes widened. Perhaps it wasn’t worth bothering with the conversation which would follow. She continued from politeness.
‘I imagine that over the past few months I have been making out large cheques to Mr el Malik?’
‘Certainly.’ He hesitated. ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong, Mrs Kops.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me how my account now stands?’
‘Well, excluding the Senegal interests—’
‘Senegal?’
His voice grew very calm. ‘Yes Mrs Kops. Senegal. You now have twenty thousand pounds. That is, assuming you have paid no money out since our last information.’
‘I think you’ll find I have though.’
‘What did you say—Mrs Kops, I can’t quite understand what you’re saying. Could you be quite plain with me?’
‘It’s fairly easy, Mr Lightfoot’, Polly said slowly. ‘I lost a chequebook at one point. I lose quite a lot of things these days. I have recently lost my cousin. That’s to say, he’s disappeared. Being my cousin, with whom I spent my childhood, he can forge my signature. Children spend a lot of time playing at forging each other’s writing. I expect you know that. Anyway, Clancy can forge my writing. I never wrote any cheques to Mr el Malik in Senegal. And I think when you look you’ll find Clancy, my cousin, has cleaned out the account. That’s it, really.’
She put the phone down and had a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The coffee revolted her. She felt very tired.
She knew she should not drive the Porsche, particularly when she felt so dazed and ill.
As she drove to South London the car swung and swerved as if she were not driving it at all. She felt as if she were being driven home from a party by a drunken driver. She was terrified.
She came up Brixton High Road at forty, the accelerator was not responding, the steering was not responding, the brakes were not responding. The woman came out of the sweetshop on the corner with her shopping bag over her arm and walked off the kerb. Polly braked and the brakes were not responding, and the red-headed boy who had followed his mother, or was it his grandmother, to the door of the sweetshop put his hand to his mouth, then dashed forward and the crowd gathered, someone said, ‘It’s Mrs Turnbull’ and Polly got out of the car and looked under the front wheels, and Max cried, ‘Mum—Polly’ and stood grey with horror looking at the beak-nosed lady with her skirt flung up to show her suspenders lying in the road and the crowd gathered and gathered and Polly knelt by her mum in the dusty street crying, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’, and someone said, ‘Don’t move her’ and Max stood there until someone led him away and someone said, ‘It’s Polly’ and Polly knelt there, looking at her mother and looking at her mother until her mother saw her, and said ‘I’m all right Polly’ and for a moment Polly believed her until she said it again and her eyes closed.
Closing
Polly called, ‘Max, Max. Where are you?’ The moors rose away for miles, the wind screamed over the tough, flattened grass.
Inside the house the stew bubbled, bread rose, fire crackled and kettle sung in the house of Polly, Pamela, Sue, Max and the little tiny new baby.
‘Max! Don’t you do this!’ she cried, looking round for him in the wind, thinking of the little girls getting up and falling in the fire, the baby, waking, smiling, suffocating in the crib.
Up the hill in the coming dark, shouting the boy’s name, ‘Max! Max!’ The gusts rolled darkness about her. She ran up to the tree and stood under the rattling skeleton. She ran down again, stumbling on the uneven ground. She came up to the boy, lying flat on his back by the garden wall, staring up at the sky through his binoculars.
‘Max!’ she cried. ‘Come into the house. It’s cold and dark and late.’
‘I don’t want to come into the house.’
‘Get up!’ she shouted, tugging at him, feeling his legs. ‘Come in. You’re so cold.’
‘I like being cold’, he said.
She smacked him hard on the icy leg. ‘Get up!’
He got up and walked, alone, in front of her into the house. He stood in the kitchen, staring at the wall.
‘Here’s your tea’, she said, ladling out stew.
‘I don’t like stew’, he said.
‘Sit down and eat it.’
‘Why can’t I go back to grandma’s?’
‘She’s not well enough to look after you.’
It was like a psalm. He said it twenty times a day. Twenty times a day she made the response.
‘And we know why’, he said. Amen.
Finally he ate a carrot, put down his fork and said, ‘Where’s Clancy now?’
‘Still in Nepal.’
‘Alexander?’
‘Still in Nepal with him,’ she said.
Temple bells, hot streets, donkeys, eyes dazed and struck by the sun, the colours, movements, smell of Oriental scents, spices, beauty always nigh, arm in arm together, together enjoying slender brown bodies, in the sunshine, in the drug-smelling darkness, together, like long-lost brothers.
Alexander and Clancy met on a bench on the hippy trail to Nepal. Alexander, in his Land Rover drove past Clancy, dying of dysentery in a dusty street somewhere east of Suez, stopped, recognizing the red head flat on the dusty street, not prepared to let his cuckolder, cousin-in-law, supplanter, die, although he really enjoyed the course of his illness. Having three or four things in common—drugs, music, being foreigners, Polly—they became buddies. And so it came to pass that Polly received postcards showing temples and decorated oxen from them, the messages varying according to their moods. FUCKING COW GO AND STUFF YOURSELF, read one, signed Clancy and Alexander. SORRY ABOUT THAT, read another, signed Alexander. I LOVE YOU LOVE YOU POLL, wrote Clancy. On the back of a view of the Himalayas YOU WOULD LIKE IT HERE, Clancy told Max. THIS IS A VERY FIERCE BEAR BUT IT WOULD LET YOU STROKE IT, Alexander wrote to Pamela and Sue and, on the back of a picture of a brown, swaddled and decorated baby, Clancy wrote, HULLO LITTLE BABY THIS A NEPPALESE LITTLE BABY XXX FROM YOUR DADDY.
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br /> Max read his postcards with a frozen face and stuffed them immediately in the kitchen range.
Now, his body was shut in, bent over his plate.
‘Max,’ said Polly desperately, ‘I bought you a new—’
And the phone rang.
‘Phone’s ringing’, he said, not looking up. ‘If it’s grandma I’d like a word with her.’
Polly ran to answer the phone, in case it woke the baby.
‘Martin!’ she said, her voice rising in artificial welcome. She heard herself, sounding false, ringing in Max’s ears as he stared at his cooling potatoes. ‘Yes, yes, of course, lovely. See you, yes, yes.’
She put down the phone, feeling sick, treacherous, done. Here comes Sutcliffe, another gentleman caller in a fast car, whisky in one hand, contraceptives in the other. The children are packed off to bed, there is a boozy dinner, they swig wine, whisky, rum and Coke, there on the rug in the firelight the weekend guest puts his hand on her shoulder, gets her in a half-nelson, boston crab, two falls and a submission, Polly’s shoulders are on the mat. Max lying in bed studying the ptarmigan, identifying birds’ eggs from a big coloured plate in the Book of British Birds, hears the bout going on above the sound of the telly, sighs a tired sigh, falls asleep, satisfied, dreams his bad dreams. Tomorrow he will pinch the twins, wake the baby.
Polly straightens her shoulders and marches back into the kitchen. She takes the kettle off the range and makes herself a cup of tea.
‘Well, life must go on’, she announces. ‘We’ll all be dead in a hundred years.’
A Note on the Author
HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of ’60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.
Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey
After the Cabaret
All the Days of My Life
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
Cassandra
Connections
Elizabeth and Lily
Fifty-First State
Hannie Richards
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
Mrs Rochester
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs Mulvaney
The Cry from Street to Street
Miles and Flora
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1975 by Constable & Company Ltd
Copyright © 1975 Hilary Bailey
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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The moral right of the author is asserted.
ISBN: 9781448209323
eISBN: 9781448209330
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