Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Pardon me for living,’ James said. ‘You four girls have fun together. I think I’ll call a taxi and go to town and see if I can get me one of those Boston Red Sox jackets to wear at home.’ It would be, as they said over here, a conversation piece, the hit of the Duke’s Head.

  ‘I’m making hamburgers for lunch.’

  ‘Don’t wait for me. I may be a while.’

  When Art came in Art’s Taxi, Jam asked him to drive to the theatre. He went in, on tiptoe from holding his breath. Pyge was in her office, on the phone.

  ‘Jamspoon! Excuse me,’ to whoever was on the phone.

  ‘We’re going out to lunch,’ Jam said masterfully.

  ‘So we are.’

  James paid off Art’s Taxi and waited until she finished giving someone on the phone a piece of her mind about bit-part salaries, and then they went off in her car.

  ‘Let’s go where we’ll be seen.’

  She took him to a restaurant on the harbour, where she was greeted by several lunchers, to whom she said, ‘May I present James Spooner,’ in a way that made them think he was someone, from the theatre perhaps. She kissed the proprietor and fussed until he took a Reserved sign off a table by the “water, where they could see the yachts going by, and the big power boats with fat men in dark glasses perched up high like emirs by the tall deep-sea fishing rods.

  James ordered Bloody Marys, and told the waiter what should go in them. They came with celery stalks as stirrers. He ate his crisply, to show his teeth were his own.

  ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t see you, Pyge.’

  ‘You’re not going?’ She looked genuinely disappointed.

  ‘Two days. I did come back to the theatre that night, you know, but you’d gone.’

  ‘I left word for you. I’ll kill that Alex. He’s not reliable, and he mixes a lousy martini.’

  Jam told her how he mixed his own Duke’s Special, stirred in a pewter jug with a silver jamspoon. ‘You’ll have to come and try one.’

  ‘And bring my own ice, I suppose.’

  He laughed extravagantly, although at the pub, he was sick of American tourists and servicemen doing variations on that joke.

  They had a wonderful time. They ate lobster salad, and Pyge kept saying things like, ‘Ohmygahd, this is fun,’ and, ‘I’m having such a great time,’ and laying her jewelled fingers on his arm, and tossing her head about with an eye on people at the other tables, who could not fail to notice her.

  The ectoplasm hair was garnished with two micro-pigtails hanging beside either temple. She wore an orange caftan with huge violent beads: her office clothes, since she had not known she was being taken out to lunch.

  She found Jam entertaining. He did his low-key imitation of Prince Philip teaching a girls’ gym class, and sketched in Same-again Mabel, one of his bar creations: music-hall Yorkshire, puffing out his cheeks and waving an opinionated finger, with a napkin for a headscarf.

  Pyge thought he was a riot. ‘You have natural talent.’ She dropped her voice to the throaty level she used for serious theatre talk. ‘Too bad you’re not staying on. I have all kinds of contacts in New York.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ said James. ‘I wish I could stay, I really do, but Nora would never hear of it. She’s married to that pub.’

  ‘And it could never do without you, obviously. You must be a big draw.’

  ‘You think I’m wasting my talents?’ James was in heaven. A huge yacht crept past the window on engine power, and he raised his lager glass to a woman in a bikini on deck.

  ’Quién sabe?’ Pyge smiled like a lighthouse in a storm. ‘You are a gifted gentleman, Jamspoon, and a very rare soul.’

  Back at the Duke’s Head, he showed Pyge’s photograph to some of the chaps in the bar, when Nora was not around. She leaned diagonally across the picture, with cleavage and those American teeth, and this cloud of amazing hair, like a dandelion puff-ball.

  ‘Yours always, Paige Tucker.’

  James boasted. He was entitled to. ‘It was one of those things. We were soul-mates.’

  ‘Har, har.’

  ‘Knock it off, no, honestly. She says to me, “You ought to be on the stage, Jamspoon,” she tells me. “On the styge, Pyge?” “A natural,” she says, just like that. She has all kinds of contacts, of course, movies, TV. She could present Yours Truly, but I know where duty lies.’ Sigh. ‘One on the house, then, waddayasay fellas, to celebrate the Jamspoon’s return.’

  He talked American for a few days, then dropped it. There was a lot to do. Blanche and the others had managed well enough, but the stock was low, and bottles were in the wrong places on the shelves, and Martin had bought a case of flabby cut-price crisps from a vagrant salesman, and let his brass beer-pulls and drip pans become a disgrace. Nora was glad to be home, but after Boston and Cape Cod, James found it all rather boring and a big let-down. He began to plan when they could go back to the States again. He didn’t call it America now. That was for tourists.

  ‘It’ll take us another five years till we can get the money together,’ Nora said, happy in her flowered morning overall that covered the clean blouse with a bow at the front, and could be whipped off at opening time, ‘and hope to keep ourselves above the red line. Let alone I’d never leave Muttonchop on his own again, now that Blanche knows it’s twins. Duffy won’t even be three when they’re born.’

  Calm, fertile Bianca, taking motherhood so placidly, not whirling about in a stew like Lily, always behind, always dropping one job for another and dropping everything to rush out and prove to the girls that she could still do hand-stands and somersaults.

  Twins in the family. Skipped a generation from Jam’s grandparents, just like they said. Twins were in Neil’s family too, but the blood wasn’t strong enough there to carry them on. It was amazing how he could knock them out, that runty little chap, James’s second son-in-law, who couldn’t poke a hole in a net curtain. Neil had some sort of dud job with a tractor firm, so that when one of the few local farmers, who had bought up everybody else, was in the pub, James could at least say, ‘My son-in-law’s in your line of business.’

  Same old round. Same jobs to get through every day, same faces, same jokes. Always having to be up front, always sharp-witted, two shows a day, even when you felt like burying your head in the sand.

  James put Pyge’s picture under his thick Arran sweater in the bottom drawer. After a while, nobody wanted to hear about the States any more, although one evening when Jam was cutting up a bit behind the bar in an American sailor hat that said, ‘Hello Cutie’, Duggie Manderson did tease him, ‘Ought to be on the stage, eh? Tell you what, though, you do look a bit like that loony chap in the beer commercial – “The Bitter End”.’

  That night, after Nora had gone through to the cottage, James spent some time making faces into the oval mirror behind the bar, framed by the arms of a naked lady, holding a glass of ruby-red on top.

  He tried to analyse his funny old mug objectively. Some people suffer from superfluous hair. Superfluous skin was his trouble, but it made his face rubbery enough for exaggerated changes of expression. His big crooked nose could make his eyes look sad and triangular, when he dropped his head and turned the eyes upward. He could raise both eyebrows at the same end, for the quizzical look. He could suck in his mouth and be toothless, or stick out his bottom lip like a Hottentot, or flap his upper lip and lose his chin like one of the Hooray Henrys who stopped in here on race days.

  When he stopped making faces and let everything go, he could look quite dreadfully old.

  ‘Where am I going?’ he asked the face between the fleshy arms of the mirror’s frame. Man’s age-old cry. ‘What’s it all about?’

  He went up to London to buy Nora a birthday handbag from D. H. Evans, the kind she liked, with a thousand pockets and zips to carry all her worldly goods and letters from her sister in the Isle of Man. On the way home, he took a detour to Wimbledon to see Jonesey.

  Jonesey was just home from work, with his shoes off, tie of
f, belt off, as always when he stepped through the door, diving into that dreadful old cardigan with the shawl collar, which he had rescued from the Oxfam shop twice when Sheila had condemned it.

  ‘Want to go up to the George? Some of the old crowd’s still there.’

  ‘No.’

  Not just to go back five years older, with nothing much to show for it. Being the landlord of a pub had seemed such a marvellous thing at first, the height of ambition and status. Now, like marriage or anything else in life, it was a matter of daily routine. Open, kick ‘em out, open again next morning, close, open again before you’d barely had your tea, kick ‘em out too late for the good programmes on the box. Who in the George would be impressed with just another pub keeper? They knew Nigel too well, and Nigel knew James and what he had let himself in for.

  He and Jonesey drank some ale and sat by the electric fire while Sheila made ham and eggs. James had rung Nora to say he would be late.

  ‘You said you’d be home by seven-thirty, so I could get to my meeting.’

  ‘What meeting?’

  ‘The church drama committee.’

  ‘You don’t go to church.’

  ‘I’m talking about the play.’

  ‘What play?’

  ‘I told you. Hiawatha.’

  ‘Oodle-oodle-oo!’ His war cry choked into laughter. Nora had a fair singing voice, but she wouldn’t be able to act her way out of a paper bag, in a black wig and chicken feathers.

  ‘Do me a favour, James. You’re wasting money. The phone company aren’t in business for their health. If you start home now, I’ll just get to my meeting. Please, James.’

  ‘Sorry, kid. I’ve got a meeting too. Luck of the draw.’

  His meeting with Jonesey in the warm sitting-room that drew the scents of the day from Jonesey’s socks, was a comfortable time to talk about the States, and Lily and her girls, and Pyge.

  ‘I love it over there. It felt right. I’d have stayed, given half a chance, made a new start, with a decent bathroom for once in my life, and a toilet you don’t have to sit on backwards and take the lid off the tank to diddle the ball-cock to flush it.’

  ‘Ah, I know.’ Jonesey was contented with his lot, but he could still dream.

  ‘Do you think I’m wasting my life?’ Jam asked him. ‘I have, like Noel Coward, if you know what I mean, I have this talent to what’s it, a way of making people laugh. What the world needs.’

  ‘The world needs love, the kids say.’

  ‘That’s a long way off. Meanwhile, a few laughs don’t do no harm.’

  Jam made one of his extreme faces and quacked at the cat, who got up and moved away under a table.

  ‘You’d ought to meet my friend, Bill,’ Jonesey said. ‘He’s got hisself into the business.’

  ‘Street trade? I’m a bit old for that, seductive though I am.’

  ‘No, being photographed, for an agency. He’s on in years, like us, but there’s a call for that. You may have seen him. He’s the man who holds up the little tube of Hemerol and talks about what it’ll do for your piles.’

  Nora had been so huffy with James when he got back from Jonesey’s, that the next time he went to London, he told her he was going to see his mother in Devizes, a satisfactory distance away. Nora could not ring her to check, because the nursing-home had no phone that wheelchair patients could use, and Ma could not talk sense into it anyway, since she was more or less permanently out to lunch, poor old dear.

  The office of ‘Faces’ was in Kensington High Street. James walked nonchalantly up and down past the door a few times, then turned in and went up the stairs before he could change his mind. There was a waiting-room with a window in one wall behind which two women were working at desks, and a young man in a black turtleneck was on the phone, his chair tipped so far back, another half inch would put him in the lap of the tough-looking red-head. In case they had not noticed Jamspoon, he walked across his side of the window before he sat down.

  Next to him sat Winston Churchill. Well, Winnie was dead, of course, but this chap… oh, Lord, was this only an agency for people who looked like other people?

  The other person in the waiting-room looked like a dwarf. Because he was a dwarf. He had a good-sized head and tiny legs that dangled his feet miles away from the floor. He read a newspaper folded sideways to dwarf size, just two columns wide.

  Winston Churchill and the dwarf went in for interviews with someone called Henrietta. The glass panel in the window never slid back to ask James to come through, or even to ask his name and business.

  In for a penny, Jam. He stood up, neatened his sincere tweed jacket and tapped on the window. The blonde at the desk on the other side slid it open at once.

  ‘Have you got an appointment?’

  ‘No, but I was just passing, so I thought I’d drop in.’

  ‘Are you registered with us? I’m not sure I –’

  She seemed kind enough, so James said, ‘Not yet, but I want to be. You’re called “Faces”. Well, I’ve got a face. Boy, have I got a face!’ He struck a Jimmy Durante pose.

  The blonde smiled charitably. ‘Did you bring stills?’

  ‘Come again?’ James condensed his neck and pushed out his face like a tortoise.

  ‘Still pictures. Come back with pictures, Mr –’

  ‘Spooner.’

  ‘Eight by eleven. There’s one of our catalogues in the waiting-room, if you want to see the kind of thing we need. Bring in two poses, Mr Spooner, and you can fill out an application form.’

  ‘Why can’t I do that now? I’m up from the country.’

  ‘Well, that can’t be any problem if you’re planning to work in London.’

  She was polite and reasonable. She had a mid-Atlantic accent, with a short a in can’t. He couldn’t be disappointed in her.

  ‘We’ll look forward to seeing you here again.’ Soft hiss of glass through metal slot. Gentle click of panel in window. She picked up the phone again, smiling and relaxed. James could not hear what she said.

  While he was looking through the large intimidating catalogue of fascinating faces, far better qualified than James to advertise mail-order suits or a haemorrhoid cream, a nondescript-looking man bounded up the stairs.

  Sorry, old cock, they’ll never use you. The man tapped on the glass, made an ‘Okay?’ gesture with his head, and opened the magic door to go on through to Henrietta and the action.

  He was neither short nor tall, fair nor dark, a middling sort of person you would use to shadow someone, because nobody would notice him. He must be the one who played Mr Ordinary Man-in-the-Street, the one who answers ‘Don’t know’ to the pollster with the clipboard, someone with whom the dimmest customer could identify.

  The younger men in the catalogue were good-looking according to fairly conventional types: slick, sporty, romantic, boyish, broody. Most of the middle-aged men were character types: pop-eyed comedians, fatties, skinnies, outdoor furrowed faces you could grow a crop of barley on. Some were in costume: a clergyman, a jovial bus conductor, a cook, a copper.

  Next day, James drove into High Wycombe, which was far enough away for secrecy, and went into a photographer’s, who had a nice line of gap-toothed brides and smirking children in the window.

  ‘I need some publicity pictures,’ he told the tubby young man with the loose mole, as if it were the sort of thing you needed every day.

  ‘For – ?’

  ‘Publicity.’ Some people, you had to spell it out to.

  ‘Sales promotion, that kind of thing?’

  ‘No, more personal.’ James dropped his voice. There were other people in the shop.

  ‘A portrait, then? We have a process that will bring it up as if it was done in oils.’

  James recoiled. I recoil from oils. ‘Black and white,’ he murmured. ‘One normal – I mean, like you see me now, if you can call that normal, ha ha. In the other, I’ll be wearing a character hat. Like a –’ he sketched it around his head with his hands – ‘a bowler or
a policeman’s helmet.’

  ‘I don’t quite think we –’ The young man looked for help to where his mate was in conference with the bride’s mother.

  ‘Or a beret.’

  When they had French bread at the end of the bar where Nora or Jenny set out the lunch snacks, Jam did a nice line as a café patron with a white apron and the bread under his arm and an old blue beret that Lily had left behind.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ James gave him a brisk nod and turned smartly to exit with his lips drawn up to whistle, as if his business had come to a satisfactory conclusion.

  He rang up a woman he knew, whom he had seen a few times on the side, no funny business, just keeping his hand in.

  ‘Didn’t you say that son of yours was a photographer?’

  ‘Ned? He’s done a few freelance jobs. He’s good, but he’s got a long way to go.’

  ‘I might be able to put something in his way.’

  ‘That’s good. He’s having a hard time keeping up with his rent.’

  Good. He wasn’t living at home.

  Ned took a whole afternoon to take three poses. He took dozens of shots, but that was his affair, since they had agreed on a basic price. Ned was eager and serious. He had once taken pictures of a visiting French singer, backstage, so James wore the beret as well as the bowler hat, and told him what it was for.

  ‘It’s sort of hush-hush at the moment, though,’ he said. ‘Top-secret campaign. The client doesn’t want anything leaked, so better not tell your Ma I was here.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew my mother. Are you a friend of Dad’s?’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  James put Lily’s beret into the bowler hat, which had been his father’s, and hurried up out of the basement flat where Ned lived sparsely with his expensive camera and lenses and lights, and his cooker behind a curtain.

  ‘These pictures are fine, but the bowler’s out of date.’ Henrietta’s smooth brow drew into a severe frown.

  ‘Don’t I look like a banker?’ Now that he had gained the fastness of Henrietta’s office and she was taking him seriously, James was his bold self again.