Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Let me.’ He fished a handful of coins out of his pocket. ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Two coffees with milk and sugar. Where does it say that?’

  ‘Coffee regular.’ He put in two coins. The machine digested them, then with a whirr and a clunk, a paper cup descended and a spout plopped the right amount of coffee into it.

  ‘How marvellous.’

  ‘Don’t they have these in England?’

  ‘Not like this.’ They did, but Lily wanted to admire America. ‘Were you there long?’

  ‘Just a quick business trip.’

  Another cup arrived and was filled. Lily waited for him to get his black coffee, so that she could walk back through the mess hall with him, but he waited, starting to drink his coffee.

  ‘Your first flight?’

  To lie, or to sound inexperienced? Lily took a sip of coffee, then put down Ida’s cup and pushed back her glasses to see him better, and said, ‘May be my last.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. Why do you do that all the time with your glasses?’

  He’d noticed her. ‘The frame is loose.’

  ‘Take them off.’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘You don’t need to see to drink coffee.’

  Without her glasses the small corner space was less dingy, the garish vending machines muted, the man less real. Seeing only soft blurs of colour increased the feeling of being part of a dream. ‘I must…’ Her voice was blurred too. ‘I must take Ida’s coffee up to her.’

  She put on her glasses to follow him through the mess hall. The bold airman said, ‘Quick work, baby,’ and some of the others laughed.

  The man with blue eyes said, ‘Hey, fellas,’ placidly. He did not spill his coffee on the stairs, but Lily did. On the next floor she turned to go on up and he said, ‘This is where I leave you.’

  ‘Thanks so much.’

  ‘You’re entirely welcome.’ For such a relaxed man, he was exceedingly polite.

  ‘I say.’ Lily stopped with her feet on the bottom step of the next flight. ‘When I–you know, noticed the propeller standing still and all that, and I told you and you went up, I mean, did they know?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ His eyes narrowed when he smiled, ‘if you hadn’t been so quick on the ball, we might have crashed.’

  ‘Honest?’ But he was smiling more to himself than to her. ‘Oh, come on. The pilot must know whether an engine’s running or not.’

  ‘Let’s say you saved us.’

  Lily wanted to say, ‘If you’re making fun of me, please don’t.’ He was at an age when he would probably think that childish, so she said, ‘Oh, well,’ and went on up.

  ‘Have a nice night.’ He had not gone through the swing door. He was looking at her back view. Damn. She was plodding up with her legs apart so as not to spill any more coffee.

  In the bedroom, Ida was unhappy.

  ‘Why have you been so long? The coffee’s cold.’

  ‘Want me to go down again?’

  ‘No. I’m all blown up as it is. I’ll never get to Boston. Why did this have to happen to me?’

  ‘I told you. It’s adventure.’

  Lily took off her flowered dress and hung it up carefully, shaking out the bow, trying to smooth the skirt. At a knock on the door, Ida got back into bed and pulled up the sheet. It was the man from the coffee machine. Lily was in her petticoat, with bare feet, which made her a little shorter than him.

  ‘You forgot your magazine.’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  He had one in his hand. ‘Gee, you have a better room than I do.’ He looked round, his clear blue eyes passing over Lily as if she were his sister. ‘Goodnight,’ he said quietly and went out.

  ‘You didn’t have a magazine,’ Ida said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He gave me change for the coffee.’

  ‘So now he wants to see you in your slip.’

  ‘Pity I’m so fat.’

  ‘Better than me.’ Ida sat up and looked down at her flat chest. ‘I’ve always been too thin.’

  ‘Does Buddy like that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He says–well he don’t say much.’

  ‘Doesn’t he tell you you’re beautiful?’ Lily felt beautiful from the coffee–machine man’s eyes, even though they had been brotherly.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to know Buddy. He’s not like that. I don’t mind. I’m not romantic, like you are. There’s more to marriage than romance, you’ll find that out one day. There’s having your own home and nice things and people giving you attention, because you’re Mrs Someone.’

  Lily sat on the end of the hard institutional bed. Although Ida was talking as if she were her big sister, Lily still felt older.

  ‘At Watkins Air Force Base, see, we’re going to have married quarters of our own, half a house, made of wood, with a bit of garden and a covered-over place to put your car. Buddy has a Plymouth, they call it, two-tone blue. We’ll have a television and a machine to wash clothes.’

  ‘He must be very rich.’

  ‘He has good pay, but everyone has those things, and I will too.’

  She looked up at Lily with a tired defiance in her violet-shadowed eyes, her closed mouth nondescript without the bright pink lipstick.

  ‘Ida,’ Lily leaned forwards. She could feel it coming on. She had to ask, ‘Are you sure you love him?’

  ‘Oh … love.’ One side of Ida’s mouth went up in an ugly little sneer. ‘What’s love got to do with it? There, I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? But in my situation you don’t pin all your hopes on love.’

  ‘Has it been tough, then?’

  ‘Bit rough in spots.’ Ida pushed back the sheet and got out of bed. Her small blunt feet were still swollen from the plane, with red dents across them from her new shoes. She went to the mirror to fiddle with her tightly permed hair, pushing it up, pulling bits of it down. It always sprang back to the same shape, like a wig above her pale bony forehead.

  ‘Tell me.’ People needed to get stuff off their chests, and Lily was ready to listen. ‘Dear Doctor Lily…’ One of her many ambitions was that one day she would have an advice column in a women’s magazine. ‘Dear Doctor Lily, I have never told this to anyone before…’

  ‘What was it like, Eye?’

  ‘No worse than most, I suppose.’ Ida shrugged.

  ‘Bad enough to make you glad to get away, though.’ A statement rather than a probing question. They had done that in Preparation for Interview Techniques, Session II.

  ‘Knock it off, dear.’ Ida’s eyes met hers knowingly in the mirror. ‘I’m not a case history at your college.’

  They had pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. The coffee blew Ida out again into delicate little belches behind her fingers.

  ‘If you didn’t say “Excuse me” every time and put your hand up,’ Lily muttered, ‘no one would notice.’

  The two teachers from Rhode Island who sat with them did not notice anyway. They were on the edge of their chairs, wearing coats and checking their cameras and tickets and passports, their minds already ahead to arriving in Boston. The man Lily had met by the coffee machine did not even look at her. Had seeing her in her slip been too much for him? Another chance lost.

  The airport was a springboard, the rocks less sinister, the ponies less deprived. In their seats by the wing, Ida and Lily held hands again as they taxied past the broken cliffs. At the end, the plane stopped for a long time before it turned and moved forwards to take off. The runway was so short, it would have to spring up like a pheasant. Ida’s ring cut into Lily’s fingers. The boy across the aisle clutched the arms of his seat. The coffee-machine man stared fixedly out of the window as if he would never see land again. All four propellers were going, but where was the engine’s roar of power, where the speed? They would never make it.

  They weren’t even trying. The plane was merely trundling back along the runway, and the passengers sat back in dismay, the energy they had used to urge it off the ground was
ted.

  Back in the airport building, the man with the blue pullover came over and moved someone’s coat and sat next to Lily. Electricity charged up through her body into the roots of her hair. Her hands trembled, so she put them in her pockets. When he spoke to her, she answered without looking at him.

  Sourly the passengers watched their Captain walking back from the plane.

  ‘Sorry, folks.’ He came into the lounge, tanned, thickening, prematurely grey (with the uncertainty of flying the Atlantic?). ‘We’re gonna get you outa here, but not yet. See the agent about cables or phone calls. On us, of course. Relax. Take it easy.’

  ‘We don’t want to relax,’ the bald businessman said. ‘We want to get to the United States.’

  ‘So do I,’ said the Captain. ‘I have a brand new baby to see.’

  Nobody cared about his rotten baby. They were offended by it, but he went away pleased with himself.

  Back to the buses. Back to the Air Force base.

  They sat apathetically in the mess hall, drinking eternal coffee and reading old newspapers. Children ran wild and their parents ignored them. An earthy girl with long, fine cobwebby hair and loose cotton clothes unbuttoned her man’s shirt and fed her baby. No one looked, or looked away.

  The agent came in, looking bruised. ‘We’re getting a plane from France,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Cries of anger. Wails of protest.

  ‘Listen here, Bud.’ The bald man in the heavy black jacket moved forwards threateningly. ‘It’s not good enough.’

  ‘Look,’ Lily’s blue-eyed man spoke up in a pleasant conciliatory way. ‘Apparently it’s the best they can do.’

  ‘And I’d appreciate it,’ the agent added with more spirit, ‘if you didn’t call me Bud. My name is Mortimer.’ He put back his shoulders and jutted his neat beard.

  ‘Fair enough. Okay, Mort.’

  After that the agent was Mort to everyone, and the passengers began to be names and characters.

  Ida and Lily. Ida the GI bride. Jokes and sentiment. The bald business man became Wally, who had a bottle in his bag. The coffee-machine man was Paul.

  He worked for a big luggage and saddlery shop in Boston.

  The bus drivers took them on a tour. Paul and Lily did not say much. Once when they were walking in a small grove of stunted birches behind the hot-spring greenhouses, he put his hand in her pocket and threaded his fingers into hers. Lily had the sensation of walking lightly upwards, as if her feet had left the earth.

  Back at the base, the airmen were in the mess hall, so people wandered in and out of each other’s rooms. Wally had another bottle of whisky and some paper cups. Paul brought doughnuts and hot chocolate up to Lily and Ida’s room, and they sat on the beds because there were no chairs.

  ‘I like this,’ Ida said. ‘In a funny way, I don’t want it to end.’

  ‘But we’ve got to get you married,’ Paul said. ‘You’ve got to be Mrs Bernard Legge.’

  ‘Ida Legge,’ Lily said. ‘Can she stop being. Ida Lott and be Ida Legge? People will want to know, “What happened to it?”’

  They laughed and were easy together, and Paul sat very close to Lily on the bed, with his jacket off and his skin magnetic under his shirt. His quiet, amused voice, close to her, was overwhelming. She could hardly breathe. The chocolate threatened to rise up from her stomach.

  ‘Ida Payne,’ Ida giggled. ‘You know what? Perhaps my mother was right. She looked angry when my cousin came to take me to the airport and brought me that flower.’ The white carnation was browning in a paper cup. ‘I thought she was going to say, “Don’t go,” but she said, “You’re a bigger fool than I thought.”’

  ‘Don’t you want to get married?’ Lily swallowed down the mutinous cocoa.

  ‘Well, I had to escape.’

  ‘What from?’ Paul leaned towards Lily and rested his hand on the bed behind her, so that her arm was against his chest.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to know. Jackson, who’s coming out of prison. My family who hates me. Well–my mother does worse than my Dad, for obvious reasons. With incest, if you’ll pardon the word, the mother always pretends it’s the child’s fault.’

  ‘My God, Eye.’ Her heart competing with the cocoa in her throat, Lily leaned forwards away from Paul. ‘You poor–’

  ‘Don’t give me no more case–worker talk. I’ve heard all that. Forget it anyway. It’s only because I let Wally give me that whisky.’

  ‘He fancies you.’ Lily managed to say it lightly, although her mind and body and spirit were fainting towards Paul.

  ‘Knock it off. Let’s go to bed. We’ve got to get up early if that plane’s really coming.’

  When Ida went out to the bathroom, Paul turned Lily quickly, and before she could take off her glasses, kissed her long and searchingly, with his eyes open, watching hers.

  She had never known this with anyone. Clumsy slobbers, bony adolescent bodies, grabs in the wrong places, drunken lunges. A sliver of her mind went wandering off with those memories while the rest was submerged, with her body, in Paul. How long could you go without taking a proper breath? Dear God, if you let my stomach rumble first chance it gets with a grown-up man, I’ll never… never what? She had never done anything worth mentioning for God yet, and now there was no future. Only this spinning swirl with thoughts flying off at the edge and her body dissolving at the centre. Time stopped.

  She jumped up when Ida’s heels hobbled along the passage outside, pushed back her glasses and stood by the window, looking agitatedly out at the colourless light night. When Ida came in, Paul got up and said goodnight to her and went out.

  ‘Think I’ll use the bathroom too,’ Lily said feebly. She took a towel, but she didn’t really care what Ida thought.

  Paul was waiting for her by the swing door at the end of the corridor. He pulled her through the door.

  ‘Take off your damn glasses.’

  Even if there had been someone on the stairs, they would have gone on kissing and holding each other and fusing together, as close as people can be without actually–oh, what will happen to me now? This has never, I’ve never – Paul’s murmurs to her were gentle and surprised and admiring. Hers were gasps, a sort of choking madness.

  ‘Oh, I love, I love you,’ she had to say.

  ‘Ssh, quiet now. No, you don’t.’

  ‘I do, I love you.’

  Her youth’s search was over. I’ve found you! she shouted inside.

  When he lifted his head again, she felt so happy and sure of him that it was fun to ask, ‘Have you got a girl?’, knowing it did not matter.

  ‘Do I have a girl?’ He pulled back and held her away, his arms stiff. ‘Lily, I thought you knew. I have a wife.’

  Fool. You’ve made a fool of yourself again. Heavy as lead. Wish I was dead. She put on the glasses which had been imperilled in the crushed pocket of her dress, and picked up the grey Air Force towel off the floor.

  ‘No, look, Lily. I’m married, sure, but we’re in the middle of nowhere, not attached to anything we know.’

  Lily turned away and put the towel up to her face.

  ‘Don’t go back to your room.’

  ‘I must.’ She was going to cry. She ran away from him and went into the bathroom and made faces at the plain child’s face in the mirror, glasses blurring, skin reddening, the ill-bred nose splodging.

  In the bedroom, she took off her dress and got into bed without looking at Ida. Lily willed her not to say anything, although she herself probably would have asked, ‘Want to tell me what happened?’ or some such damn fool Lily question.

  When Ida turned out the light and soon began her little snores, like a thin old snuffly dog, Lily lay with her arms wrapped round her disintegrating body and stared into the half darkness where furniture and bags and coats on hooks were still discernible in the monotonous twilight outside the window. Soon she got up, put on her poor creased dress that had started out so new and
fresh to captivate Pam’s brother at Boston airport, and went downstairs to the coffee machine.

  He didn’t say, ‘I knew you’d come,’ so she didn’t either. She had not known that anyway, only that she had to be there.

  He was wearing the cornflower pullover that made his eyes intensely blue. He got their coffee and they leaned against the dull-green wall to drink it, looking at each other over the paper cups. One or two men came into the little corner space, said, ‘Hi’, or didn’t say, ‘Hi’, and put their money into the slot and thumped a button.

  How will I ever be able to bear the sound of coins rattling through the works of a machine? I will never forget the sticky red Coca-Cola dispenser with WHERE’S SHIRLEY? scrawled across it, and the OUT OF ORDER sign amended to KICK ME. The smell of the stewed coffee will break my heart.

  Paul did not say anything. It was a self-assured trick he had, waiting for someone else to speak first. Not fair.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Lily huffily, because she had decided to be huffy, ‘your wife bought that jersey for you?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled at her as if he knew her right through and out at the back.

  ‘Do you know what it does to your eyes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you vain?’

  ‘Isn’t everyone?’

  ‘If I was,’ Lily said peevishly, ‘you cured that.’

  ‘I tell you I’m married, and you translate that into, “You’re ugly.” Look, what the hell, it makes no difference now. We’re on an island the size of Kentucky in the middle of the North Atlantic, helpless and frustrated because we can’t get to Boston, and trying to make life easier for each other.’

  Was that all?

  ‘I love you,’ Lily said miserably.

  He had strong shoulders and a small waist, worn higher up than English waists, long legs, rubber-soled shoes that didn’t lace, trodden over at the sides, funny comfortable things to wear with that decent grey suit. His face was on the same design as his body: broad at the top and narrowing. His thick hair was the colour of wet sand, buff envelopes, dun horses, the dark side of blown barley. His nose was unremarkable, as noses should be. He smiled with his mouth closed, the corners going out and up, the wide cheeks pushing up the lower eyelids. His skin had a warm woody colour, as if he spent a lot of time out of doors, even in the winter. The lines at the outer end of his agonizingly blue eyes had been put there by smiling and the sun.