Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘No way.’

  ‘But you knew about it, ma’am.’

  ‘Don’t drag me into it.’ Ida was furious. She had heard no more about the brooch and rings, and she had given Buddy credit for staying clear of any funny business. ‘My husband is in Viet Nam. He’s a war hero.’

  ‘We understand.’ If Nutting had worn a hat, he would have removed it.

  ‘I don’t know nothing about anything.’

  ‘Fine. I believe you are friendly with a certain Mrs Ellis, on the base.’

  Ida found herself telling them about Duane and Cora. Why not? They had got Buddy into the Elite Jewelry business, and they had trapped him into this. As a receiver of stolen goods, he wouldn’t have been smart enough to operate on his own.

  They already knew about Duane and Cora. It was Cora who had put them on to Buddy. So Ida could have kept her mouth shut and not made herself feel like a louse for playing the same cheap rotten game as Cora.

  But she hadn’t exactly grassed on her. She had just answered questions truthfully, like she had about Jackson all those years ago, when the oily CID man stated, ‘You know where he is, don’t you.’

  ‘We’re getting out,’ she told Bernie and Maggie when they came home from school.

  ‘Ow?’ Maggie went back to the door. It was what she used to ask Adam.

  ‘We’re not going to stay here.’

  The housing office always needed quarters. Ida told them she was giving up the house, and they offered her a rental and cost-of-living allowance. She sold the Chevvy for ninety-three dollars, sent the stuff from the house to storage, put the first month’s allowance towards air fares, and went to England to see her family.

  George and Clara Lott, in Christmas cards and very rare letters, had suggested in a lukewarm fashion, ‘We ought to see our grandchildren.’ Well, they should. It was time now.

  Five

  When James and Nora Spooner had been landlords of the Duke’s Head for about five years, they left it for a three-week holiday with Lily in Massachusetts. James wanted to do this long before, but Nora, who was so serious about the pub that she would have taken all the fun out of it if he had let her, would not risk leaving it.

  ‘We’re establishing ourselves. We’ve got to be here in person. Slow and steady wins the race, you know. The first five years is the worst.’

  ‘I thought that was marriage, Nor.’ Jam did a fake duck.

  ‘No, that’s the second five, and then the third, and the fourth.’

  ‘You hear how she talks to me?’

  They were having this conversation in the bar, where the customers enjoyed the double act of Nora being so brisk and sensible, and Jam the eternal little boy in trouble, playing games to please everyone and always getting it in the neck. If Nora had a bladder on a stick, they could have done a nice Punch and Judy turn.

  The Duke’s Head was in a built-up village on the border of Bucks, and Oxfordshire. Too near the motorway, said new commuter residents who would not have been able to come here and put plumbing and sun porches into old cottages and joined all the local activities that the villagers avoided, if it had not been for the motorway.

  Jam had been forty-nine when they moved in, so he remained officially in the neighbourhood of fifty, mature enough to cast sage sayings over the bar, but in his prime as far as jokes and easy talk went, and meeting the customers on their own level, which was what you had to do.

  He did his mein Host act, but not as a jolly beaming landlord. It was better to be lovably eccentric and a bit quirky, so that new people craved for him to remember their name. The subtle impression he liked to foster, which made the Duke the success it was growing to be, even though the Lamb still had the cricket club, was that the customers were not doing him a favour, but the other way round.

  Everybody wanted to have their name given to them, to feel they belonged: ‘They know me here.’

  Nora greeted them quietly with the tight little smile that still dented the dimple that had driven Jam mad when he courted her in the crankcase shed at the fighter aircraft factory.

  ‘The usual?’

  But if James did not care for them, and they had brought a guest they hoped to impress with the quaintness of the pub and their own acceptance here, he might make them suffer, until he chose to come round from behind the bar and start telling the tale, which would have any tricky customer eating out of his hand with gratitude.

  Nora had mastered the ordering and the accounts and the occasional part-time help they employed. James had learned how to take care of the beer, and had brought the social side to a fine art.

  ‘It caters to the ham in Jam,’ he told Lily. ‘You were right. It’s a God-given audience.’

  But enough was enough. A West End star wouldn’t stand for being on stage matinées and evenings seven days a week, even though earning far more than James, whose profits, after meeting the expenses of the house behind the pub, were ploughed back by Nora into the business. They needed a break. Jenny Dobson, who had been at the Duke’s Head before they came, could manage the bar food and the serving and cleaning up, and muttonchop Melvyn, who helped at weekends, could handle the bar in his fluffy sideboards, and shifting the barrels round in the cellar at night, as long as he kept the contents outside himself, and not within. Blanche, living nearby with that weedy young husband to whom she wouldn’t give kennel-room if he were one of the terriers she bred, would come in and do Nora’s office stuff.

  Boston was wild. Jam travelled everywhere on buses and the archaic subway, talking to strangers and telling them about the London Underground. He could imagine some English tourists being shy and lost amid the noisy bustle of hurrying people who knew where they were going, but not James Spooner. He had learned long ago to make the best of looks that were more comic than handsome. Now that his receding hair accentuated his big crooked nose, and the fat that used to fill out the skin of his face had fallen into his paunch, he exploited himself as an amusing devil you’d not be afraid to get to know.

  When Nora was with him, she fussed. ‘I’m sure people in Boston don’t talk to strangers in lifts.’

  Lily told him, ‘It’s easier to get arrested over here, or shot. I’m not going to drive you around if you’re going to make signs at women out of the back window.’

  Out with the children, if he stopped to chat with another family on the Common or the harbour excursion boat, or in the Aquarium, Isobel called fiercely, ‘Gramps, come ’eer!’ and slapped her thigh as if he were a dog.

  James did not want to leave Newton, which was only a short subway ride from the stimulating city of Boston, but Lily and Paul had rented a house on Cape Cod, and that was where everyone else wanted to go.

  The journey took two cars, crammed with suitcases, the dog, Isobel’s friend Rose Mary, and more cartons of food and washing powder than they could possibly need in two weeks, unless Cape Cod was the outback, in which case, why leave Boston?

  The way down was a bit glum. Monotonous fir trees on either side of the long, straight, featureless road, few houses, a flat land with glimpses of sea and marsh. James was cheered by the accumulating lines of cars among which they travelled, and, as they approached the canal bridge, there began to be gift shops, restaurants, ice-cream stands, motels and supermarkets.

  ‘Don’t mind the Strip,’ Paul apologized, as they climbed the high arc of the bridge, with the swift tidal water swirling far below. ‘The Cape’s not like that, although a lot of it is beginning to be ruined by too many people and too much building.’

  ‘The march of progress.’ James was quite keen on progress, as long as he didn’t have to make it himself. The new bright brick houses in their village at home were better looking than the old dingy council houses with their propped-up gates and narrow back-compounds of chickens and Brussels sprouts. The village shop was now a mini-market, which stocked almost everything you could want, at shocking prices, but the council tenants seemed to be rolling in money, on or off the dole, and poured in and out o
f the mini-market as if it were going out of style.

  Paul and Lily had found a low house made of grey wood, with sheds and a leaning barn, set back from the main street of the village in small rough fields with broken walls and fallen fences.

  ‘Originally a farmhouse when this end of the village was all open land,’ Paul said. ‘Built in 1880.’

  ‘Gee,’ Jam obliged. Part of the Duke’s Head had been built about 1650.

  Lily and Paul thought it was perfect. Two of the bedrooms were under the roof, with steeply sloped ceilings and a smell of damp. The long living-room had scrappy wicker furniture and rag rugs over the silt of last summer’s sand. The kitchen was narrow and inconvenient, with taps that roared and knocked, and cracked linoleum counters that Nora set about briskly with a sponge, grumbling about the last tenants. The front porch was decorated with broken shells and dried-out geranium plants, and two elderly rocking-chairs, where Jam established himself with his bourbon to see who came down the road.

  Most people went by in cars. Anyone who walked – children, dogs, old men in long-peaked caps, boys with huge feet balanced on skateboards, bubble-gum girls with shorts like brief knickers – was hailed by James.

  Pretty soon, he was known at the post office down the street, where mail had to be collected. Talk about progress.

  ‘When this drops on to your mat,’ he wrote on picture postcards of lobsters to favoured bar customers and to Jonesey in Wimbledon, ‘give thanks for twice-a-day delivery in the dear old backward mother country.’

  Business at the Cape Cod post office was so slow, they probably read all the postcards, going and coming.

  James became a regular at the little corner drug store. Every day, if they weren’t off on an expedition, he put on his new Boston hat, white cotton with little holes for sweat, a striped band and the brim turned up all round. Jam did not just put on a hat. He took it by the crown and dropped it on from a distance, at an insecure angle. Jaunty. He had found an old crooked cane on a hook behind the back door, and he rattled it along picket fences and aimed it at passing cars, as he walked down with his two granddaughters and Rose Mary to buy them ice-cream sodas at the drug store’s soda-fountain.

  He sat with them on a stool and chatted to the lorry drivers who turned off the road for coffee, or the plumbers and policemen who craved ice-cream as Englishmen craved beer.

  The shapely woman who made coffee and pulled levers to put foam in the girls’ sodas and bent upside down to scoop chocolate ice-cream from the bottom of the container, raising a nimble leg backwards, was called Dodo. She learned to call him Jam, and he carried home far more inside information about this neighbourhood than Lily or Paul had guessed at in their years of summer renting.

  ‘It’s lucky for us,’ said Isobel, who was no dope, ‘that you like to come down to the drug-store and make passes at Dodo.’

  The first week, Paul took them to Martha’s Vineyard, which was like the Isle of Wight, only less so, and drove them round to see folksy museums and gift shops where everything smelled of scented candles, and to eat fish dinners off oval plates that would have held a whole roast turkey. The second week, when Paul had to go to Boston every day to work, Lily and Nora and the children wanted to go to the beach every day. James sometimes preferred to stay behind in the shade of the porch, and listen to the commercials on the radio.

  ‘The rocking-chair eases my lumbago,’ he said, when Nora appeared in the square mauve beach-coat above sturdy bare legs that ran straight down into her new plastic sandals.

  ‘You’ve not got lumbago.’

  ‘I have now. Too much sitting on sand.’

  One evening, James put his sporty hat on the front of his head against the low red searchlight of the sun, and walked with Lily down a sandy path to Hidden Harbor, the secret place she had discovered, with a shallow inlet behind, and a curve of clean sand and flimsy yellow shells, that was empty because it was private.

  ‘We’re not allowed here. But the shore ought to belong to everyone,’ she said, in the democratic voice she had picked up at the college.

  ‘But property is sacred.’ James had thrown more cats and dogs and children out of the garden at 127 Granada Road than you could, as Dodo had taught him to say, shake a stick at. ‘You got anarchy else.’

  Jam was afraid of no man, but he respected the rights of Colonel Tilley and Sir Allen, who had the two big houses and what was left of the farmland around his village. Although he laughed about them with others in the bar, and imitated Sir Allen’s twitch and stammer, he felt, as landlord of the Duke’s Head, that he was correct in being tickled pink when they came into the pub.

  ‘I’m too lucky, Jam,’ Lily worried. ‘I’ve got Paul and the girls and all this – well, I haven’t got it, but it’s here – and my nice house in Newton. And Paul.’

  ‘You said him.’

  ‘Not often enough. Paul! Paul! Paul!’ She screamed at a flight of squabbling seagulls. ‘He’s my life. I’d die for him.’

  ‘That wouldn’t help.’ James was skipping flat stones into the path of the red sun on the still water.

  ‘I’ve got it all, and I don’t know why, when I think of all the struggle and misery people have to go through. “Why me?” I think. Why not Ida?’

  ‘Why indeed? Who’s Ida?’

  ‘My mate. You know, the one who had to come and take refuge with us last year, with all the children. She lives in squalor, Jam. I wanted her to come down here, but –’

  ‘But you’re lumbered with Yours Truly and Co.’

  ‘Don’t fish,’ Lily said automatically. ‘She wouldn’t let herself come. But I don’t think she’s ever seen anything like this in the whole of her life.’

  Lily’s secret place was beautiful, but it was desolate, and the opposite shore only a faint line across the bay. James preferred the big public beach, where there were muscular male and female lifeguards, in case he swam too far out after beer and hot dogs.

  There were also droves of girls in assorted shapes to chuckle about to Nora (’Not in front of the children’), and pretend to lust after, although he secretly feared he might be impotent before he was out of his fifties, and headed for a long and foolish old age, unless he could muster the nerve to shoot himself.

  When he went down to the sea in his Hawaiian swimming-trunks, he sucked in his paunch and stuck out his chest, elbows out to show his biceps, which had been improved, since his Post Office days, by all those beer barrels.

  If Cathy and Isobel each took a hand and walked into the sea with him, the muscle-man image gave way to the kindly grandfather, which meant he could let his stomach go, and flounder about with Cathy in the shallows, instead of having to strike out in a manful crawl, and try to look as if his feet were not on the bottom when he stopped for breath.

  The best part of the beach was going home to coffee and jelly doughnuts and a shower in the downstairs bathroom, which was stuck on at the back of the house as if it had once been a woodshed.

  ‘Let’s put a shower in at the Dukerie, Nora.’

  ‘If we’re talking water pressure –’ she liked all these new fad phrases, although they did not suit her face or voice, ‘you’re not on.’

  ‘Why not? Why lie in your own dirty bathwater?’

  ‘Speak for yourself. Because the tank’s too low.’

  When Paul came home, Jam would be on the porch in a clean T-shirt that said ‘I luv Cape Cod’ and plaid Bermuda shorts, with his first bourbon of the day. Before Paul’s car had stopped by the side of the house, the screen door would bang open and Lily would fly out with the dog, an apron over the wet swimsuit she had not bothered to take off, thick hair bouncing, the bottom half of her face smiling, the top half frowning with the intensity of her emotion. Paul would get out of the car quickly to be ready for her onslaught.

  She threw herself at him and they stood as one person, embracing as desperately as if they had been parted by six months and a war and a couple of mountain ranges. The dog sat back and waited for his
turn, but if Cathy had followed Lily out, her fine hair still slicked down from the sea, she poked at her mother or father until they separated far enough to let her stand between them.

  Isobel and Rose Mary would be down at the bottom of the back field with Tony, the dark boy who lived on the other side of the fence with a jumbled family and too many barking dogs. He and Isobel were very thick, although he was five years older. They climbed trees and rode bikes and built a tree-house together. Tony’s mother was part American Indian, and his father was part negro.

  ‘You let the girls play with a black boy?’ James asked Lily.

  ‘Shut up, you can’t talk like that over here,’ Lily said. ‘He’s not black anyway. His grandfather came from the Cape Verde Islands, so he’s Portuguese.’

  ‘Don’t confuse the issue.’ James knew black when he saw it.

  One evening, Paul came home early and Tony’s big sister came up to stay with the children, while the grown-ups went to. the local summer theatre. As they went in with the crowd, a glorious creature swam towards them through the men in coloured jackets and the women in flowered dresses, like a great angel fish among lesser fry.

  ‘Poll – and my English lily!’

  ‘Hullo Paige, how lovely you look. This is my mother and father. Paige Tucker.’

  ‘Oh, my Gahd, isn’t this the most delightful thrill to meet you lovely folks?’

  She put her ringed hand into Jam’s. It was like holding the crown jewels. ‘Go on in, you beautiful people, I don’t want you to miss a word of this fabulous show.’ Her hair was a dawn cloud, her mermaid eyes were framed in glittering green paint. ‘I’ll see you in the interval. Can’t wait. God bless!’ She blew a kiss from lips that looked as if they would taste of raspberry icecream, and swam away.

  ‘Puts it on a bit, doesn’t she?’ Nora said, as they went to their seats.

  But James was wildly in love.

  He sat at the end of the row and made two trips out to the gents for a glimpse of Paige Tucker, who ran the theatre and stayed out at the front by the bar or the box office. He could not risk a third time, because she might suspect prostate trouble, but there she was in the interval, asking him, in front of everyone, ‘Don’t you adore the show, my dear?’