‘Oh God, oh God.’ Lily burst into tears. ‘This was never going to happen. We were never going to fight.’
‘We’re not fighting.’
‘Men always say that, to make it look as if it wasn’t their fault. No, you’re right. I’m wrong. I’d love to go to the Jensens with you. I’ll bribe Mrs Dunn to come. I’ll pay her double.’
‘You don’t need to pay anyone,’ Ida said, when they told her. ‘I’ll look after your kids.’
‘You’ve got enough to do.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Of course, Eye, but this is better.’
‘Please yourself. But it’s a waste of money.’
Mrs Dunn had come early, while they were dressing. When they came down, they found her standing uneasily in the living-room, because she could not find a place to sit down.
‘Where are the girls?’ Lily asked.
‘Running around outside.’ Mrs Dunn had glasses as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms. You could not see what she thought or felt. ‘They seem kind of wild. The rascals.’ She added an unsmiling afterthought.
Lily told her about the children’s supper and bed time, and called them in to say goodnight. Isobel stamped in and flounced about. Maggie flopped in after her in a huge shirt of Ida’s and grinned, ‘Who you?’, gap-toothed. Cathy would not take Mrs Dunn’s hand to go into the kitchen.
Paul started the car, and the kitchen screen-door swung open. One arm and half of Cathy came out, the other arm held by Mrs Dunn.
Lily turned her face forward again. ‘Let’s go on,’ she said tensely.
As they moved forward, they heard Cathy scream, ‘I wish you dint never been borned!’
The party had been great, and Lily enjoyed it. She stayed close to Paul, and glowed under her thick, shining bangs, and flirted with him, and not with any of the other men, which she sometimes tried out mildly, to keep her hand in. Paul drove home fast in the rain, wanting to pay off Mrs Dunn and get up to the bedroom.
Something looked different about their road and front lawn. Ida’s sagging car, obscene among the neat compacts and suburban station-wagons, was not parked outside.
‘She’s gone on a toot and left that woman with all the kids.’
Mrs Dunn was sitting in her jacket and plastic rain bonnet on a straight chair in the front hall.
‘My friend gone out?’ Lily spoke carefully to Mrs Dunn, who always looked as though she did not like what she could smell on your breath.
‘Gone, Mrs Stephens. I sat upstairs with your little one; because she was fussy.’ Pause to be told, ‘Oh, thank you.’ ‘I heard them racketing around the other bedrooms. When I came down, they had fled like thieves in the night.’
After Mrs Dunn had been overpaid and gone down the street to her own house, Paul shouted, ‘Hooray!’ and poured drinks, but Lily was cast down.
‘She’ll get by, Lily darling. She’ll go back and sort out that violent airman, or she’ll make out on her own. She’s tough, that one.’
‘But after all we’ve done for her. That’s what hurts.’
‘Not as much as if we’d had to throw her out.’
‘I wouldn’t have.’
‘I would.’
‘Well, you didn’t have to prove it.’ Lily brightened up. ‘She’s saved you that. Good old Ida.’
They had drunk to her, and taken their glasses upstairs through the peaceful house.
Now, four years later, Lily took two weeks off from the Day-Nite answering service, to which she had returned now that Isobel and Cathy were nine and seven, and they took one of their trips to England, with Terry, who was in his second year at an art school in Boston.
Paul was going to the British Equestrian Trade Fair again. His Tack Rack had been a runner-up for the New Products award when he first showed it. It had continued to sell well in England, and now he was showing Tack Rack Junior, the same modular system, scaled down for children and ponies, which Turnbull’s were claiming was their own idea, but they would still have to pay Paul the same percentages under his contract.
He would be travelling quite a bit on this trip. He hoped Terry might go round with him, because Lily was nervous about what her stepson would do with himself, and whether he would like her country, or despise it for all the bumbling oddities she could see with a clearer eye now that she had been in America for ten years.
Terry was grown up, but he was still as unpredictable at twenty as he had been when she first knew him at ten, and then as a teenager. When he was younger, Barbara had always managed a good reason why he could not go to England with Paul and Lily. He had never been out of the United States, except to Canada. He was excited about the trip, so it was fair enough that he did not want to sit with Lily and his father and the restless girls, but pretended he was travelling alone. The plane was not full, so after take-off he moved to an empty seat, like a seasoned traveller, clamped the headset over his ears and had two whiskies and some red wine, Paul observed by turning round cautiously, and was cross and rumpled when James Spooner met them at Heathrow.
Terry sat in the front, and Jam kept asking, much too soon, ‘How do you like it, my lad? Never see anything as green as this where you come from, eh? Look now, these are the Chiltern hills, built up out of ancient history. Men have been here since 2000 B C. Bit of a time before Christopher Columbus and all that lot, eh?’
Terry was monosyllabic, hunched into the heavy jacket that he had brought because he had heard that England was always cold. But when he saw the brick and flint cottage with the wooded hills behind it and in front, the Duke’s Head, white, with beams and curly red tiles, and the old inn sign of the laughing Duke, he said, ‘Gee,’ and got out of the car quickly.
Terry had seen this kind of thing in movies, and on calendars his step-grandmother sent, and he had heard about it from Lily and Paul, but he had no idea that England would be like this. He had expected to feel strange, and that people would see at once that he didn’t fit into the scene, and would write him off as an American tourist.
It wasn’t like that at all. No one noticed him, and at the airport the officials were totally relaxed. He had heard that students always got hassled in Europe, but he walked through British customs as if it wasn’t there–just a few men in uniform lounging about on tables and not even looking at Terry and his hangover, let alone pulling him aside and saying, ‘Excuse me, sir, where are the drugs?’
His grandfather, who had a loose lumpy face like a mobile potato, cried a little when he saw Lily and the kids, and wiped the end of his big nose on the back of one hand as he grabbed Terry’s hand with the other, and said, quite emotionally, ‘I’m glad you came.’
Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. He was quite a theatrical old buster.
As they crossed the road from the terminal building to the garage, the clouds were a low grey ceiling, and warm rain hung in the air like mist. Lily and Paul made the kind of ironic noises with which passengers in the plane had greeted the Captain’s announcement that it was raining in London. But so what? Who would want to step out of Heathrow airport into the same crude blue skies and indiscriminate sun of New England?
Terry rolled down the front window of James’s small sober car, and ingested the new traffic noises – huge double trailer trucks from France and Germany on these Mickey Mouse roads – and stared at the toy fields and the casual old houses and churches, any one of which would be a show piece in a neighbourhood in the States.
After they had turned on to side roads away from diesel fumes, he smelled pig manure and wet earth and an indefinable savour of new leaves and cut wood and sheep’s wool on the vivid green turf of the hills that Lily’s father was yattering on about.
Terry did not answer the old guy. He was too occupied with absorbing to be able to disgorge. They would think he was trying to be blasé, but he had grown used by now to being misinterpreted. If people couldn’t guess what you thought or felt, too bad. It wasn’t worth trying to make it easy for them.
They c
ame over the brow of a hill and dropped into the wet fog which hid the bends of the hairpin road that Lily’s father, like every other lunatic driver in this decadent country, took at death-defying speed. When the mist cleared at the bottom of the steep hill, there it was. It stood modestly by the side of an unimportant road, old as all get out, beamed, tiled, leaning slightly into the hill, a genuine English pub like dozens they had passed, but this one was in the family.
For a long time now, Terry had felt disgruntled and out of step with everything about him. Privately knowing that the unease was in yourself, not your surroundings, made no difference, if there was nothing you could do about it. You had to wear the appearance of a victim who never got a decent break. It didn’t fool anybody, but it gave you the excuse to make no effort.
Here at the Duke’s Head, in this small-time village which looked to Terry like it hadn’t accomplished much of any thing in hundreds of years, he felt at home. No need for defences. It wasn’t long before he was admitting to his surprised father and Lily, who had both been dubious about bringing him, because he might not enjoy himself worth the price of the fare, ‘This is my kind of place.’
‘I know what you mean,’ his father said. ‘I feel like that when I come over here.’
‘Why don’t you move over, then?’
‘That would spoil it.’
‘Then this whole deal is an illusion, just because it’s old and strange and foreign, and “there”, the way we look at it, not “here”?’
‘If so, I’ll keep it that way.’
They were walking together up on the hills, along a sheep trail that took them through yellow gorse under the ridge, with the valley laid out below: tidy, cultivated villages no more than crossroads, farm clusters, towns like neat citadels, instead of octopus stains eating up the landscape.
One of the most remarkable things about this trip was that Terry was getting along pretty well with his father. The man could get along with anybody, but Terry had not been at ease with him for years. Now he was. Three thousand miles from his mother and sincere Drummond Blake. Was that it?
There was not room for all of them in the cottage behind the Duke’s Head, where the faucets ran either hot or cold, but not both at once. Terry stayed with Lily’s sister Blanche and her husband Neil, a bicycle ride away. James said Neil was a no-hoper, but Terry got on quite well with the shy, skinny man, no match for Blanche, who was as bossy as Lily in a quieter and more subtly smug way.
Neil collected snail shells, which was weird, but convenient, since there was a multitude of them colonizing this wet earth, where everybody grew vegetables. Terry made some sketches of the more colourful spiral shells, and Neil thought he would have them made up into a Christmas card.
‘Not this year,’ Blanche said. ‘I promised the twins it should be them.’ The twins were one year old.
Their house was fairly new and plain, but it stood next to an ancient farmyard, the top of whose front wall was as carefully thatched as if it had been a house, a glorious squandering of artistry, like an Italian Renaissance fresco on the wall of an outhouse. Beyond Terry’s window was a huge sagging barn with enormous doors that bulged like the side of a ship and had little doors in them, through which slow-moving men came and went in mossy pants and dark vests and collarless shirts. At one end, three horses looked out of shabby loose boxes, with crooked half doors and cobwebbed windows. When the horses came out to be ridden, or to go into the pasture at the side where Terry could watch them roll and shake themselves with legs stuck stiffly out like sawhorses, they were thoroughbreds, immaculate, elegant. They were like beautiful girls stepping out over garbage from a scarred door in a Boston back alley.
Besides the twins, Blanche had a fat small boy called Duffy. She also bred Jack Russell terriers, sexy little mutts who lived in kennels out back, and barked so continuously that you got used to them. Her favourites came indoors and lay on the rug on their tight rounded sides, with their short legs stuck out, but not reaching the floor. One villain sometimes sat up and let out a long red prick and took it in his mouth, and went round and round and round, damnedest thing you ever saw. Terry was shocked, but Blanche only said, ‘Jack Russells are like that.’ Terry tried to kick the rotating fiend when she wasn’t looking.
Blanche gave him a great English breakfast, with slices of bacon as floppy as wash cloths, and bread fried in sausage grease, and tea that would have made his hair curl, if it had not been so hopelessly curly already that he had to keep it cut short when most of the other students wore theirs long. If he let it go, it grew out as well as down, and made his head look way too big on his body that was way too short and planted on feet that were way too small.
After breakfast and a few juicy burps to make Duffy laugh and the indoor Jack Russells bark, he did the dishes, because, ‘Every-one does his bit in this house; Neil loves to hoover, don’t you dear?’ Terry would ride the bike to the Duke’s Head, where he was allowed to help.
There was a public bar and a saloon bar, divided by a narrow passage from the front door where the jolly old Duke, the scourge of the land, so ‘twas said, creaked in the wind. The public had benches and tables and a dart board and a cigarette machine and pictures of women advertising booze. The saloon had a carpet and small tables with wooden armchairs, and a fireplace large enough to have little seats in it on either side. Between the beams, the low walls were hung with pictures which looked as if they had been there since the first pint was drawn. Sporting prints too dark and damp-stained to see more than whiskered men in top hats leaning back on horses that galloped with all four legs out at the same time. Photographs of favourite dogs. Grooms in derbies holding short-tailed hunters. A woman in a hat like a cake, fixing ribbons on a champion bull that may have gored her the next minute. Lily said that her father sometimes claimed that this or that dog or horse or gent with a gun in the crook of his arm came from his family, although the regulars knew that the pictures had come with the pub.
James knew that they knew, of course, but it was all part of the character he had built for himself: funny, lovable, outrageous, gabby, faking voices, pulling his rubbery face about to make people laugh, giving them a verse or a chorus to make them protest, ‘Knock it off, Jam. We come in here for a bit of peace and quiet.’
Terry loved it all. He usually stayed till closing time, serving drinks, collecting glasses, cutting sandwiches, exchanging a few words with strangers in a way he could never do at home.
There was a lot of work to do, especially when James was in London, having his picture taken for an advertisement. Terry washed glasses and sorted empties and brought up stock from the cellar, and Nora taught him how to pull pints of beer just the way people here wanted it, so close to the rim of a pint mug that one more drop would lose it. He could set it intact on the bar in front of a man who would square his elbow and lift it unspilled to sea-anemone lips.
The quantities of ale poured down was amazing, even by New England tavern standards. The stone passage to the bleak men’s room out back was worn down by a constant weighty-bladdered tread.
Customers, tickled to see a Yank working with skill among the beer handles and optic measures, often offered him, ‘One for yourself.’ Terry’s father did not monitor what he drank. Often he drank a bit too much and was amazed to find himself joining in the repartee of mild insult which was the coin of humour in the saloon bar of the Duke’s Head. One evening when Paul and Lily were off somewhere, Nora let Terry help himself to as much as he liked, so he got polluted and fell down in the acrid passage to the gents. Nora drove him home with the bike on the back of her car. When he rode groggily over next day, she gave him something fizzy that took out his top sinuses, and said to him in her wise, unflustered way, ‘Better to know the enemy, eh?’
‘Yes, ma’am. That stuff is dynamite.’
James was there most nights, and Terry helped him to shift the barrels of real ale on to their sides in the racks in the cellar, so that the beer would settle by opening time tomorr
ow, when the tap would be piped up to the beer engine. The firkins and kils Terry could roll about by himself. For the thirty-six gallon barrels, he and James put their heads together and levered the weight between them.
‘What do you do when Dad or I aren’t here?’ Terry asked.
James flexed his muscles. ‘My strength is as the strength often, because my heart is pure.’
‘Because your wife helps you,’ Nora made her composed, self-satisfied face.
She let the old guy pretty much have his head. He liked Terry, because he would listen to his stories, some true, some probably not, of his new geriatric career. Terry called him Jamspoon and loved to look at his album of clippings. Jam as a chef, licking spaghetti sauce off a wooden spoon. Jam in sports jackets and grandfatherly cardigans in a men’s wear catalogue. Jam with a hair-piece, before and after. The top half of Jam hanging out of a wrecked car to illustrate a story in a magazine. Jam in a television commercial as a background businessman in a derby, going through a revolving door.
‘Hey, Jamspoon, you’re famous!’
Terry was suitably impressed.
He drew a quick charcoal caricature of Jam as the man with the hat on the back of his head, looking at his retirement dream house – a dog kennel in Terry’s picture. It was pinned up in the bar, until Bob Whittaker threw darts at it.
When his father came back from the trade fair, he took a walk up in the hills with Terry before he had to start out again on a sales trip for Turnbull’s. Paul took off his jacket and put on one of the blue sweaters Lily was always buying for him. Terry took his big sketch pad under his arm. There was a particular view he wanted to get in this afternoon light, farther along to the west, where a grass path, wandering aimlessly among the broad grey trunks of ancient beech trees, suddenly disappeared down a chalky bank, with nothing in front of you but the rest of England, leading your eye away through mysterious changes of colour to a shadowy horizon that merged into the sky.
They took the car to the top of the road, and then followed the path round the corner of the first hill, and along the inner curve toward the next promontory. They walked among flat white and yellow flowers like poached eggs, and hoof prints in the spongy turf.
Dear Doctor Lily Page 24