Polly Put the Kettle On Read online

  HILARY BAILEY

  Polly put the kettle on

  To my Mother

  Contents

  Opening

  Looking back I

  Looking back II

  Looking back III

  Closing

  A Note on the Author

  Opening

  Polly sat alone by the blazing fire, with her tiny baby sucking at her breast. Faint red down covered its pale and fragile pate. With blue eyes slitted, mouth rounded hugely against the nipple, it sucked stertorously, heaving great breaths into the silence. The room was darkening. A tree rattled against the window panes. Beyond the stone walls of the wild garden, the windy moors rolled away for ever.

  In the kitchen bread rose in the range, tasty stew bubbled on top, the kettle steamed gently, the table was laid. Small boots and shoes lay, polished, in front of the fire. The bedroom smelt of wind and fresh sheets. Nuts and apples were laid out in the attic.

  The fire crackled in Polly’s house, the baby slept in Polly’s house, the kettle simmered, the stew bubbled, the bread rose, the wind roared outside the windows of the little house of Polly, Pamela, Sue and Max.

  Upstairs the twins lay asleep with their golden curls tangled on the pillows, the little furry faces of bear and squirrel peeping over the sheets beside their own rosy faces. Soon it would be time to call the boy in from the moor, where he lay waiting, watching the last birds dropping down into the tussocky grass. The baby’s slitted eyes dropped shut, her head lolled on the breast. Polly rose, crept to the crib by the fireside and laid her down gently.

  She went through the kitchen and opened the back door. Gusts of wind hit her. She leaned over the rough stones of the garden wall, seeing the grass beaten by the wind; hearing it rattle and howl in the branches of the lonely elm on the rise.

  ‘Max. Max. Where are you?’ she called.

  Inside the house the fire crackled, the baby slept, the kettle steamed and the bread rose, the stew bubbled, the small boots and shoes shone in a row.

  She stood in the wind calling, ‘Where are you?’

  Looking back – I

  She picked up a matchbox from the kitchen table, opened it, gazed at the contents and flung it to the back of the kitchen counter. She threw the cigarette on the floor.

  ‘Fuck you, Alexander Kops.’

  Two cats pranced about her feet in the long darkened kitchen, where the ghostly shapes of ironing-board, rocking-horse, old sofa, small table covered in cups, were revealed in the light coming through the french doors to the garden. She stood at the other end, by the window, hearing the traffic’s roar and, from above, the bang, bang, bang of a shoot-out. Da, da, da, da, da, da—the Indians must be coming.

  The garden gate creaked open. A small shuffle as slippered feet came through. She saw from her basement the surgical bandages on the legs from the calf down, the old black waterproof bag coming up the path to the front door. There came the shuffle of the feet, the clink of the bag as the legs came up the path. A pause on every step until they disappeared from view up the front steps. The front door opened and closed. Then the sound of the slow, clinking progress along the hall, the creak of the stairs as Mrs Traill, with her burden of Guinness bottles, made her ascent of the fifty stairs to the top of the house, pausing on each of the three landings for breath and a good old listen outside all the doors to find out what was going on behind.

  Polly went to a small door at one side of the kitchen and ran up the back stairs to the hall, stopped, listened, ran up the next flight to the landing above, saw the bandaged legs turning the corner of the stairs, opened a door, ran in and shut it.

  She stood in the doorway of the long living-room. A Victorian still life—Thought, Indolence, Repose—spread out before her. In a corner the Indians were still riding round, firing the fort. The top of a tree waved and sighed in the window. Old flowery wallpaper and a ceiling covered in heavy Victorian moulding loomed over the scene.

  Ulla Helander, in silks and beads, lay extended on the torn sofa. She looked languorously at Polly from under purpled lids. Long Tall Timmy, lead guitar for the heavy rock group, Blockade, lay on the carpet, his denims glittering with studs and sequins, his battered green boots shining with silver stars. ‘Lady’—really the Honourable—Clarissa Fossett, in shawl and boots, leaned dreamily in a corner, with four-year-old Dylan, similarly clad, asleep on the floor beside her. Harry Slasher, in his plumed hat, sat on a battered chaise-longue under the window, looking out and scratching his armpits slowly. Two small Frenchmen, one in a leather jacket, one in jeans and denim jacket, sat against the wall opposite her. The first had his feet on a carpet-bag from which clothing spilled, the other had his arm across a small suitcase.

  The focus and cause of this gathering, her husband, Alexander Kops, lay full length in front of the empty grate on a set of the proofs of his magazine, Gorilla. He was long, he was lean and he had golden hair.

  ‘Toddy around?’ she asked him.

  ‘Upstairs with Tracy’, Long Tall Timmy told her, after a pause.

  ‘Did she want him to go?’

  ‘Stay cool Polly’, advised Alexander, extending a joint.

  Polly took it and pulled.

  ‘They woke up the children last time’, she pointed out. ‘Also, Tracy’s arm got broken.’

  No one responded.

  Polly sat down. Bad scene at the fort. A dolly lay spreadeagled on the ground among the smoking ruins. A nasty hank of hair hung over the back of the wagon. The joint reached her again. She pulled. Someone picked up the dolly. Slasher scratched his armpits.

  There was a thud from upstairs.

  ‘I wonder if Mrs Traill’s fallen over?’ she mused.

  ‘Perhaps’—one of the Frenchmen said to the back of Alexander’s head—‘if you could send us one hundred copies a month of Gorilla, we could perhaps send you one hundred copies of our Rouge Bataillon.’

  ‘Sure,’ Alexander said, ‘good idea. I’ll tell the circulation manager. What about a cup of tea?’

  There came another thud.

  ‘I’d better go up’, Polly said.

  ‘Put the kettle on, Poll’, Alexander said.

  ‘Is Toddy speeding?’ Polly asked.

  ‘He seems to be’, Long Tall Timmy said.

  ‘Oh, nice one’, said Polly, running from the room and up the stairs.

  ‘I heard thuds’, she cried, running into Tracy’s room. It was hung with shawls and posters. There were big cushions on the floor; joss sticks burned around a dim, purple lamp and patterned blinds hid the windows.

  Tracy, small, red-headed, face painted dolly-fashion, looked up from her tarot cards, spread on a buhl table before her.

  ‘Not from here, love’, Tracy said. ‘Oh blimey, there’s the Hanged Man.’

  ‘Thought it was Toddy’, Polly told her.

  ‘He went out to score some hash. It’s all right. He’s very peaceful now, very remorseful. He swore he’d never do it again. It was the strain of that Spanish trip—all the hassles over the money and that. And that horrible chick, Daniella or Spaniella or whatever her name was. It seems he thought she’d given him VD.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘No. It was all nerves. Guilt, really.’

  Polly sat down on a cushion.

  ‘Oh dear, my back’, said Tracy, straightening up. ‘This is a real bastard, Polly. I don’t know what to do with myself. I really don’t. Another eleven and a half weeks. It doesn’t seem possible.’

  ‘Let’s go out and get another dress. Take your mind off it.’

  ‘That’s the last thing to take my mind off it—looking in the changing-room mirror and seeing an elephant. Anyway, what have they got for me? I’m in that Indian gear from the market
from now on—loose flowing robes, and that’s it. Polly look at my legs—they’re all swollen. To think you carried twins. I don’t remember you looking so big.’

  ‘Other people don’t’, said Polly. ‘Anyway I was living on those bacon scraps from Cutler’s.’

  ‘Oh that reminds me. Are you going to see auntie this week? Fetch me some of those mint humbugs from the shop will you? They’re the only thing that seems to settle my stomach.’

  ‘OK’, said Polly, getting to her feet. ‘Oh, Mrs Traill may have fallen over.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tracy, ‘let her lay. Perhaps she’ll die and increase the value of your property. Do you know what she did to me yesterday—only kicked over my shopping basket I’d left in the hall, that’s all. Broke all my eggs. I saw her do it while I came down the stairs.’

  ‘I’d better look’, said Polly.

  ‘Sucker.’

  ‘Night, night’, said Polly.

  ‘I wish that bleeding Hanged Man hadn’t turned up.’

  Polly ran up another flight of stairs, looked in on the twins, tucked Sue up, ran up another flight of stairs.

  The landing was gloomy under its dim, unshaded bulb; Edwardian ivied wallpaper hung in strips. A half-open door revealed a grim and grimy lavatory with a broken chain. Polly went up to one of the cracked, brown-painted doors and knocked.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mrs Kops.’

  The door opened. Mrs Traill looked out, fat, old, balding, in a black dress and grimy pinafore, framed by the shelves carrying books and lidless saucepans, a picture of the Queen. She looked at Polly with the weak truculence of generations of evicted tenants, those who refused their subscription to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and ran to the polling booths in bare feet to vote Conservative.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Heard some thuds’, Polly said. ‘Wondered if you were all right.’

  ‘In your head, no doubt’, Mrs Traill said, darkly fearful but insulting. She knew what went on downstairs. ‘Or it’s that old boiler,’ she added, maligning the premises also, ‘you should have that looked at.’

  ‘As long as you’re all right’, Polly said, and went downstairs shuddering.

  Alexander, who saw her as a characterful old Cockney controlled tenant, stopped her frequently on the stairs to enquire about her varicose veins and life story. Sensing the squire, she responded with colourful anecdotes of the past ‘cor how we laughed when baby piddled on the landlord’s boots’, earthy humour and little bits of made-up working class folk-lore. This left Alexander feeling democratic, and horrified Polly, who knew that Mrs Traill was a wicked old bag and that once her deep desire for revenge grew greater than her terror of the police she would get them busted. Until then, she contented herself with slandering, or telling the truth about, them to anyone who would listen, steamed open their mail when she could get hold of it, tripped the twins up on the front steps and whispered gruesome things to Tracy about her coming child. Polly’s attitude shocked Alexander, but she knew that Mrs Trail had first lured Tiddles upstairs with scraps of meat and then given him rat poison, so that she had found his black body stiff and dead on her bed one morning when she woke up. Alexander said Polly was paranoid. Tracy who was Polly’s cousin—though not her only cousin, as we shall see—volunteered to grease the stairs.

  As Polly ran down the stairs again Alexander cried out, ‘Polly, put the kettle on.’

  She ran past the room in which they all sat, remembering the Biblical promise ‘there shall be no more tea’. Behind her thudded Alexander. They confronted each other in the long, dim kitchen.

  ‘Put the kettle on, Polly’, he pleaded. ‘Can you sleep Slasher and those two Frenchmen tonight? Slasher’s been thrown out by Maria and the Frogs haven’t got any money for a hotel.’

  ‘They can go in Auntie’s old room—they’ll have to have sleeping bags. There aren’t any sheets. I’m not having Slasher—’

  ‘Put the kettle on. He’s got nowhere to go.’

  ‘And I know why. He’s got crabs.’

  ‘He has not got crabs.’

  ‘It’s a well-known fact. That’s why Maria threw him out.’

  ‘No, it was because she went off him.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But, basically, Slasher’s got crabs.’

  ‘He got cured.’

  ‘So he said. Look, Alexander, Slasher has got crabs and I do not want him here because he will spread his crabs around all over the place—you will have crabs too, Alexander, and so will the rest of us.’

  ‘I don’t believe he’s got them.’

  ‘Ask him. He’ll deny it. He always does. But those who have put him up know better. Sarah had to have the Council in.’

  ‘Well, he can just doss down on the sofa. He needn’t take his trousers off. The cold’ll kill off any stray crabs that go in it.’

  ‘Oh shit’, she said. ‘Look—let’s sort something out. You, or somebody you brought in, left a matchbox full of speed on the kitchen table where one of the children could have eaten it. It’s got to stop.’

  ‘What’s got to stop?’

  ‘Leaving stuff about all over the place. Apart from the danger to the children, the lease is in my name.’

  ‘You’d better get old Greene to get the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give Mrs Greene the push. Then you can become the Reverend Mrs Greene, and you won’t have a worry in the world about your children or the lease. You can have accidia, anomie and crises over the thirty-nine articles instead.’

  ‘Alexander—’ she said.

  ‘You know what? You’re a real suburban frump at heart. Why are you always bitching? Can’t you put the kettle on?’

  ‘It’s not good enough, that’s why.’

  ‘Oh shut up. I’m trying to think. I haven’t written my leading article for Gorilla. Pete Mendoza’s missing and the recording’s tomorrow. I don’t need all this. I do not need it.’

  He looked threatening.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘look threatening.’

  ‘I’ll bloody be threatening’, he said, pushing her against the gas stove. The kettle clanked.

  Polly set her teeth.

  Clarissa Fossett came into the room, fluttering shawls and dangling beads.

  ‘Have you a drop of milk for Dyl, Poll? She’s woken up and wants a drink.’

  ‘Help yourself, Clar,’ Polly said, ‘I’m turning in.’

  She sagged out of the kitchen, up the stairs, up the stairs to the bedroom. It was chill with the chill of an April evening. The bed was unmade. There was only one pillow. She had failed to reclaim them from the beds of the last night’s guests. The carpet was gritty. Che Guevara looked down mournfully from the wall. She got into bed and stared through the cracked window panes at the tossing trees.

  Later, she shuddered as Alexander made harsh love to her. It was, she supposed, a legacy from her mother which supplied this intolerance to married life. That passing GI in 1945 had not been father to her or husband to her mother, had not laid any wage packets on the table on Friday night, not brought any sweets home in his pocket on Saturday, had not been hushed for when he was tired, had his shirts hung on the line, pushed her on swings, taken her mother to the Works dance. A bar of chocolate, she supposed, a pair of nylons, a cuddle before the V2 cut out and hit the George, Melmoth Street, no one hurt and Blackie the cat dug out after three days—not a stable family, nuclear family, no wonder she couldn’t get on in one. Staring at Alexander’s hawklike profile on the pillow, she wondered how to fit him and herself and Pamela and Sue into a stable nuclear family. An alien jigsaw puzzle, with odd-shaped pieces made of basalt, putty, mercury and jam tart—a few tears stole down Polly’s cheeks. Slasher, chilling his crabs on the couch downstairs, began to play riffs. There came a thud.

  ‘Cor, I’m fed up’, thought Polly.

  But next morning it all seemed better. At half-past six the house lay under the weight of its sleepers. In sweater and jeans Polly jumped about, cleared plates and cups and glasses, put
them in the sink, pottered out to see how her daffs were doing, breathed the dieseled air, popped in, peeled some spuds, decided to make a a cake, got out the flour, butter, eggs, salt, raising-powder, cake tin, put them on the kitchen table, made a cup of coffee and had a cigarette. The box of Swan Methedrines had gone. She put a few catkins in a vase. Drank the coffee sitting on the steps in the garden. Stubbed the fag out and chucked it at a daffodil. ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote and bathed every veyne in swich licour, etc, etc’, she said.

  ‘Cuppa tea going, Poll?’ Lady Clarissa called, leaning over the balcony upstairs. Her blonde hair hung down over her face, over the edge of the balcony, glittering. Her blue eyes were hazy.

  Six-thirty in the morning …

  Our camera sweeps caressingly over the network of North Kensington streets. Vans, horsedrawn carts, barrows piled high with fruit are jolting and rattling down towards Portobello Road fruit and vegetable market. Men in jeans and duffle coats are going to work. A spaced-out freak leans against the wall of Finch’s, the pub on the corner, and stares widely at Rosie as she, bandaged legs, arms, hands, sacking apron and all, sets up her stall for the day’s work. And we go on past him, down Elgin Crescent, over Ladbroke Grove, to the crumbling porticoes of Number 1, Elgin Crescent, through the hall where the stuffed wolf lies on its side on the cracked red and white tiles. Up to the first floor where Slasher lies on the sofa under a grey blanket with his guitar at his feet. Pale little Dylan, still in her boots, sleeps, open mouthed, in a nest of blankets in the corner. In the little room opposite slumber the two Frenchmen, noses upturned. Above Slasher, in the tousled bed upstairs, sprawls Alexander Kops, in his Blockade T-shirt, editor, poet, swordsman and wit, son of the well-known Lord and Lady Kops, only child of a merchant bank. Cold light falls on him through the curtainless windows. Opposite him is the nursery where his twin daughters, Pamela and Sue, lie with their rabbits and dollies and comics. Further up the house, Tracy moves cumbrously on her pillows on the floor. A green-faced addict is spark-out on the rug under the piano in another room yet. On top of all, in the attic, Mrs Traill tosses in her grimy flannelette nightgown, hazy dreams of revenge, memories of dead brothers and sisters on hop-picking holidays sleeping in straw, going through her head.