‘I’ll always be grateful to you,’ Lily said. You’ve taught me everything I know, she wanted to say, but that would sound conceited, as if she really did know something now. In any case, someone burst into Joan’s office, crying, ‘Where are the files on the Mulcahys?’
Saying goodbye to the clients was far worse. A temporary worker had already started to take them over, but Lily kept on as long as possible with Sidney and the McKnights and Mrs Daley, and spastic George who was about to leave the day centre and go to his job-training school.
The trouble was, Lily had made it too easy for them to get too dependent. Joan had warned her about this a dozen times.
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ Lily always said. ‘I’m helping them to use their strength, not mine, such as it is.’
‘Don’t woo them, then,’ Joan said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If they need you too much, you’ll end up needing them.’
I do though. It’s time I went. I need Paul more.
Sidney was resigned, because everybody in his life disappeared sooner or later. Mrs Daley was angry, because Lily had promised to take her on an outing, and there had never been time. The McKnights were so nice about it that she could tell them why she was leaving, and show them Paul’s picture. She had taken it on the common when he came to Wimbledon to meet her family, wearing another blue pullover she had bought for him the day they had breakfast together.
The McKnights had an old, sick mother living with them in two rooms, with no proper heat or water supply. Lily had been the only person who could get anywhere with the landlord. Could Lily speak to him just once more before she…
‘Oh dear, I haven’t got time. I’m sure Theresa will help.’
‘But if you could just talk to him once more about the electricity. When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Lily lied. She had to escape.
Family, girlfriends, old boyfriends waxing or waning, the job, the beloved clients, her whole twenty-four years of life. How lucky she had been to be able to throw herself into it all, and then before it got stale, jump out of it and start again somewhere else.
‘I’ll come back, I’ll come back,’ she told everybody, and this was what made it possible to go, in the end. She was escaping to be somebody different with Paul, but the old solid love and knowledge would still be here, to come back to.
Lily’s father thought Paul seemed a decent sort of chap, although a good bit too old for Lily, childish as she still seemed to be, in spite of getting the job in the counselling agency and coming home with all kinds of unnerving expressions like ‘single parent syndrome’ and ‘anger turned inwards’.
Paul was a step up for this family, with his dad a judge, and certainly a cut above some of the con men and misfits Lily had brought home, let alone the ones she hadn’t brought home, for reasons that would have been obvious, James Spooner supposed, if he could have laid eyes on them. Paul had called James ‘sir’ and laughed at his jokes, which, when James got to know him better, he would have to explain wasn’t expected in this family. James would make the jokes because he liked to, whether anyone laughed or not, just as he would continue to act up a bit if he felt like it in the tea-break, to keep his mind and wit supple, even when the Post Office staff were surly from the shock of Monday or the toll of Friday.
But how would he get to know his son-in-law better, with Paul and Lily Stephens, as he must write to her now, gone off to Massachusetts with indecent haste right after the wedding, and how would he struggle through the tedious backwaters of life without his bright, kaleidoscopic daughter?
His best daughter. James allowed himself to admit that, after she was gone. Blanche the Good, his Bianca, had always been Daddy’s girl, and Lily the one with whom you never quite knew where you were. Big sentimental dramas about ‘I love my ugly old Daddy’, one minute, and storms of protest the next if he suggested any improvement in her style of dress or behaviour.
Now she was gone, a married woman. After all the years of kidding himself that Lily wasn’t really having it off with any of the buffoons or delinquents, James had to abandon his fantasy of Lily as an unsullied child.
When he tried to put this into words to Nora, she had surprised him by saying, ‘Well, I certainly never kidded myself. When she asked me for information about contraception, I told her.’
‘She asked you – her mother? That’s depraved.’
‘Well, I am a nurse, when all’s said and done. You’ve got to keep up with the times, Jamie. Things have changed since our day. Now the young think they invented sex.’
‘How did they get here, then?’
‘They don’t want to know. They don’t want to think about their parents doing anything in bed.’
‘Nor do you, most of the time.’
‘I’ve as much right as you to say when and when not.’ Since she had started working at the hospital as a State-enrolled nurse, Nora had taken some alarming turns towards independent thought.
‘Since when?’ James grabbed her by the front of her thick healthy hair and bent her backwards over the kitchen table, snarling like a gorilla.
‘Let me up, there’s a dear,’ she said, his fangs at her soft white throat. ‘I’ve got something on the stove.’
‘And about time.’
When Nora was on night duty, she slept in the afternoons, and usually did not get up in time to have supper ready before James’s gastric juices started eating into his stomach wall. When she was on the seven-to-three shift, life was normal, but when the hospital, which knocked staff around like snooker balls and didn’t care a fish’s eye for family life, put her on three to eleven, she left something on the stove for Blanche to heat up, and James came home and went to bed wifeless.
Those nights, he went down to the Three Horseshoes, or up the hill to the George, if he needed an audience. He could usually find someone to give him a laugh for one of his imitations. Harold Wilson making a speech at the opening of a brothel was a current favourite. James had a nice throaty baritone voice for the evenings that turned musical, when someone was in the pub who could jangle the old upright, like playing on a skeleton with spoons.
Tonight, he popped down to the George while Nora was finishing supper and putting on her uniform.
‘Well, here he is!’ Nigel called from the bar. It was warming to be welcomed like that, so that heads turned. ‘James Spooner, the man who sold his daughter to the Yanks.’
James enjoyed the teasing, and the chance to make a story out of Lily’s wedding; how she had practically pulled him up the aisle at a trot, what the clergyman had on his breath from lunch, and how the whole thing had ruined him, and Blanche would have to elope, in the unlikely event she fell out of love with dogs for long enough to find a man.
Someone bought him another pint, and he said some sturdy, hand-across-the-sea things about Paul, and boasted that Lily had looked a knockout.
It would have been nice to be able to tell her about the expansive things he said about her and her husband in the George. When he had something to tell, Lily used to put her arms on to the table and open wide at him the eyes that had become so beautiful since she got rid of the goggles. Used to? She wasn’t dead, for God’s sake.
He raised his mug. ‘Here’s to her happiness,’ he said cheerily. But the thought that she wasn’t there made him feel very low and aged. New aches and twinges darted in and out among the old predictable ones.
Terry was ten. He had been eight when his father and mother split apart, and then started to get divorced from each other.
He knew they had been fighting. You couldn’t not know, living in that house with them, not because of the noise and screaming, like in Warren’s house, or Jason’s apartment where the glass ornaments trembled, but because of the deadly cold silences.
Sometimes at supper, Terry had been the only one who talked. It was tough, trying to keep things going, telling a few stories – ‘Don’t play with your food, Terry’ – putting on fu
nny voices, dropping things to get attention. ‘Pick it up.’
‘It’s got germs on it now.’
‘The floor’s clean. And anyhow, your system is immune to household germs.’
‘At school, if you drop something, they won’t let you –’
‘Go and wash it.’
‘You do it, Mom, if you’re going to the kitchen.’
‘Do it yourself.’
‘No!’
‘Don’t shout at me. You see the way he is, Paul, he’s like a savage.’
‘No, he’s not. Come on, Terry, go get another fork.’
‘You can’t make me. I don’t want to eat anyway. I hate pork. I hate everything – I hate you! Don’t – no, Dad, no! Let me go – I hate you!’
Mild stuff really, just routine, to liven up the boredom of mealtimes. Terry got away with it most of the time, because his mother was all talk and his father was patient and wanted to be gentle. When he started going round to Eddie Waite’s house, he began to find out how much farther you could go without getting butchered.
Eddie had a few brothers and sisters and his mother was sort of whacked out most of the time, drunk or sober, so Eddie got away with all kinds of things she never knew anything about.
Like slipping candy and small stuff off the store shelves into your pocket, and then going with a big grin through the checkout with the detergent or whatever it was you’d been sent to buy. Easy.
‘You mean, you never done it before?’ Eddie asked as they walked away from Art’s Super Store. Walk, don’t run, even if you’re peeing your pants with fright. ‘Stick around, kid. I’ll show you a lot of fun things.’
Like breaking off car antennas, snap, snap, snap, all along the line in a parking lot. Like running a nail along the paintwork of a fancy new Mercury. Like taking coins out of your mother’s purse when she was in the bathroom, dimes and quarters here and there, so she wouldn’t notice and make a big scene.
The first time Terry took two nickels from the mug where his mother collected coins to pay the newspaper boy, he thought the kitchen walls would crash in on him. He heard her feet on the stairs and almost put the coins back, but he had promised Eddie, so he kept them. The next time Eddie asked him to get money, he said he couldn’t do it.
‘You always do what I say.’ Eddie was not a tyrant, but he was older and he was the leader. Terry admired him and desperately wanted to keep his friendship.
‘She’s locked the money away,’ Terry invented. He had reached up his hand once or twice to the mug on the shelf over the stove, but it became paralysed on the way up.
‘Okay, dummy, do this, then.’ Eddie was always testing Terry, to see if he was worthy of his friendship. ‘Come into Kale’s Market and knock down that pile of tomato soup cans they got there.’
‘Sure, Eddie. Easy.’
‘Hey, you!’ A man caught Terry’s jacket sleeve as he was running out of the store. ‘I been watching you kids. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want that Waite kid in here, and I don’t want you neither. Now get on home.’
When Terry got home, he sat outside until he saw his father’s car, the beloved little red car that he could steer, sitting on his father’s knee, but pretended to despise, because it was three years old, with a lousy radio.
‘Hi there.’ His beloved father got out quickly with an extra-large smile. ‘Waiting for me?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Want to do something outside while it’s still light? Get some more boards up on the shed, or something?’
‘Sure.’
As Terry followed him through the side door that led into the house from the garage, his mother called from the living-room in her flat, monotonous voice.
‘Paul, please go right back out –’ she always said please when she was upset – ‘please go back out and look for Terry. He’s off somewhere.’
‘He’s here. He was waiting outside.’
‘Hello, Terry. Couldn’t bother to come in and let me know you were home?’
In the living-room, his mother looked quite ordinary and peaceful, sitting by the coffee-table with a drink, filing her nails. So Terry made a sound like ‘Hunhnyah’, and shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms.
‘Mr Kale called,’ his mother told his father. ‘One of the men who works there caught Terry making trouble in the store.’
‘It was an accident.’
‘Was it? And I suppose it was an accident that you put a chocolate bar in your pocket?’
‘Terry – what’s this?’ His father pounced round as if he was going to spring on him.
‘Him and Eddie Waite.’ His mother chewed on Eddie’s name with grim satisfaction.
‘I told you I didn’t think you ought to hang around so much with that kid.’
‘I don’t, Dad. I don’t even like him.’ Eddie was Terry’s best friend. He loved him, but he would say anything to stop his father getting angry.
‘He’s lying, Paul,’ his mother said, without looking up from her nails.
‘I’m not, I’m not! What’s the good of telling the truth? Nobody ever believes me.’
‘Terry, calm down.’
When his father took hold of him, Terry bent his head, quick as a cat, and bit him in the fleshy part of his hand. His father swung him around and pushed him up the stairs to his room and shut the door.
Terry listened for a moment to see what they were saying. He opened the door and heard his mother cross the hall in hard heels. She said, ‘Lay off me, Paul, just this once, will you, please.’
‘For ever, if you like.’
Terry took two books from the shelf and hurled them down the stairs. Then he pulled one of the small drawers out of the top of the bureau, opened the window and emptied the socks and underpants outside on to the side path. He followed them with a holy picture Grandma Stephens had given him last year, to ward off nightmares. Crash, tinkle.
‘Come down at once and pick all this up!’ His mother’s voice from the garden, a bit later. He kept the window shut, and did not answer.
‘I thought we were going to work on the shed.’ His father was out there now. Terry turned up his radio. ‘Too bad. Well, come down and pick this stuff up before supper. It’s going to rain.’
Much later, after the kitchen sounds told Terry that they had had supper, the dog next door began to bark. Terry looked out of the window and saw his father kneeling in the dusk, picking up bits of glass from the brick path. In the light from the lower window, the top of his thick hair glistened in the rain like early morning cobwebs.
Every part of Terry’s being wanted to run down and help him. Who wouldn’t let him? It was like a separate person holding him back. He pulled down the blind, stealthily, so his father would not hear the roller, and look up.
After his father went away to live in an apartment, and then they got divorced, Terry began to see that it must have been partly his fault for behaving so badly, and being in trouble all the time.
His mother’s explanation was, ‘Your father didn’t love us enough.’
His father did not try to explain. He just told Terry, ‘We’ll be together a lot of the time, and we’ll still always be the most important people in the world to each other.’
So if that was truly so, what Terry had to do was to act decently, and Dad would one day come back and live at home, and there would be another dog, even Buster back, why not? His father’s terrier had gone to a new home, because he could not be kept in the apartment, and Terry’s mother had never liked him.
Terry began to behave quite well. No screaming or throwing things. Enough homework to get by. The garbage taken out. ‘You’re the man of the house now, Ter.’ His mother thought that would flatter him. He explained to Eddie that he had got to lie low for a while, and Eddie understood, true friend that he was, and did not involve him in the riskier adventures. Terry did not see his father often enough, but it was great when they were together. No arguments. No testing Dad to see how much he would stand. They did th
ings his mother would not approve of, like going to a wrestling match and staying up late to watch a horror movie propped up side by side on the sofa-bed in Dad’s apartment, eating Chinese food with chopsticks.
His father usually dropped him off at the house, had a few calm, reasonable words with his mother on the doorstep, and then drove away.
One time, to get him used to the idea of coming back, Terry said casually, ‘Why not come in?’
‘Oh – I don’t know that I have time.’
‘Cup of coffee, maybe? A drink?’
‘All right, then. Why not?’
His mother, who was dressed to go out with one of her boyfriends, was annoyed. So Terry made the coffee and his father sat in his usual chair, the one he had wanted to move to the apartment, but it was too wide for the doorway, quite at home. Terry fussed around him, bringing him a cushion, a plate of cookies, lighting the table lamp, showing some new photographs.
‘You want a Polar Bar? We have some in the freezer. Still eat Polar Bars, Dad?’
‘Not without you, I don’t.’
‘Let’s have one now. Can we, Mom?’ he remembered to ask, being virtuous. He brought the ice-cream, unwrapped in saucers, with spoons and paper napkins, and sat on a stool near his father.
‘Gee, this is cosy, isn’t it, Dad?’
‘Sure is.’
Terry’s mother had not sat down, and was walking about in high heels, the calves of her legs tight and her hair polished like a metal cap.
‘You’ll have to go, Paul. I have theatre tickets, and Terry’s going to sleep over with a friend.’
‘I don’t have to, Mom. I can stay here, if Dad could stay till you get back.’
His mother frowned. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. Your father has to go anyway. How about dropping Terry off at the Wakes’, Paul?’ When she was telling you to do something, she often put it as a question.
‘Eddie Waite? You still seeing him?’
‘Yeah. He’s my friend. Why?’
‘Nothing,’ his father said carefully. ‘Just watch it, though.’
At school, Terry and Eddie still had fun beating the system wherever they could, using their secret code to each other in spelling tests, pushing vile notes through the ventilation holes of enemies’ lockers. But it was hidden stuff. No open warfare with teachers, who began to suspect that Terry Stephens might make something of himself after all.
Dear Doctor Lily Page 7