‘What a place to ride,’ Terry said.
‘I can hardly bear to see the tracks of horses that don’t have us on them, can you? You’d gone off horses last time you were on the Cape. I was sorry about that.’
‘So was I, but that was why, I guess. Teen stuff.’
‘Because you loved riding, or because I loved it?’
‘Oh, Dad, don’t try to analyse that kind of crazy stuff. Who knows? I couldn’t let myself. Now I want to, and we can’t.’
‘Want me to try to get a couple of horses tomorrow?’
‘Don’t push it, Dad. My mind changes all the time. I never know how I’ll feel.’
They were walking in single file along a sheep track on the edge of the slope, so they did not have to look at each other.
‘You having some hard times?’
‘Who isn’t? Most people at school have some kind of problem. Capital P. It’s a pretty weird place, you know.’
‘I thought you liked it.’
‘I do and I don’t.’
There were a few classes that interested him, like life drawing and photography, but most of it was the pits. Second-rate students, and third-rate professors grinding out the same old ideas and stale techniques.
After his grandmother died and his grandfather was alone, the Judge had tried to help Terry grow up. He had taken him soberly to what had seemed like the right places: concerts, museums, good restaurants, a weekend with old friends in Maine who played word games. Terry had very little to say, although his head was so teeming with ideas and fantasies that he could have shouted round the courtyard of the Frick Museum, or dashed himself down on to the rocks of the wild northern coast.
To stop everybody asking him what he was going to do, he had chosen the art school. It was the only thing he could think of.
Last Christmas, he had planned to talk to his mother about dropping out until the fall semester; but she chose to be depressed – oh, but depressed – with pasty skin and the suspicious eyes, and that poor guy she married turning cartwheels to try to get her going.
The deadening stone formed and calcified within Terry, and unhinged him.
‘Poor old Drummond Blake wanted to send me to a shrink.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Paul caught up with him as the ground flattened out.
‘He thinks I act kind of bizarre sometimes.’
‘Do you?’
‘Hunhnyah.’
On Christmas Eve, Terry had taken money from his mother’s purse and gone out and bought this huge frozen turkey that was marked down, and cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes and three different kinds of pie.
When he was unpacking it all, his mother had dragged into the kitchen in those decayed slippers and said in the drone she used, to make sure you knew how she felt, ‘Who’s going to cook that?’
‘You, Mom. And I got what you need to make your famous stuffing.’
‘Lover child, I’m sick.’
Terry and Drum were going to roast the turkey, but it wasn’t thawed out by Christmas morning, and it didn’t seem worth it anyway. It took up a lot of room in the refrigerator, and began to drip through a slit in the wrapping, so Terry threw it over the back fence of the house that had all those cats and dogs.
He went to a party and brought home a fortune-teller from Peru who did not speak any English. He went to the movies with some friends, wearing a robe and slippers in the snow. He drove his mother’s car without gas and left it ten blocks away and pretended he could not find it. He went naked into the bedroom of Drum’s daughter Wendy and pretended he thought it was the bathroom. He tried to make love to a flaky girl he met in a bar. He told her he was going to Katmandu and she said she would go with him. Next night, her boyfriend came and heaved a brick through what he thought was Terry’s window. Poor old Wendy, with those earnest teeth. She wasn’t having much luck.
Drummond called the police and Terry got out on the road with a back-pack and hitched up to his grandparents’ house on the North Shore. He had spent the rest of the vacation with Uncle Robert, playing trains and sitting on a bench in the shopping mall, eating yoghurt and doing crossword puzzles.
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Act bizarre.’
‘Oh, well.’
They were into the trees by now, walking on centuries of dead leaves under the new green tracery that turned and glistened between the arching branches.
‘This is the place, Dad.’
Where the trees ended, the sun lay along the edge of the bank, and then there was nothing more. Far below and beyond, the world of distance could never be reached.
Terry sat down in a hollow between two thick tree roots, and opened the sketch pad on his knees to the virgin page he was about to desecrate or transfigure. His soft pencil brought in the tree trunks, tilting here and there from the pull of their powerful roots, the path trodden into the leafmould, the dramatic shadow of the bank’s edge under its rim of sun. He would touch it in with crayons at home and hint at the distance in overlapping colours, no detail, darkening as far as the gradual beginning of the sky.
The next time he looked up, his father was sitting on the bank, looking out over the sheer drop. His arms were on his knees and his shoulders relaxed forward. If you could see his face, it would be smiling peacefully. You would know him anywhere by the beautiful shape of his head.
The low sun along the ridge of the hills gilded the left side of his thick sandy hair and tipped it with thistledown, light and luminous. The other side of his head and the blue curve of his shoulder were in shadow.
When they got back, Terry worked quickly on the colours before his eye lost them. The muted distance, a blaze of green here and there on the leaves, spots of sunlight on the grey tree trunks, the gold light on the hair, the saxe-blue sweater.
‘It’s good,’ Paul said.
‘Don’t be so amazed.’ Terry put his arm over the picture.
Paul lifted the arm away. ‘It’s damn good!’
‘Oh well.’
Terry had drawn it as a picture of this marvellous scenery with a man in the middle ground. It had emerged as a picture of his father, set in that scene.
‘Come on the trip with me tomorrow,’ Paul said impulsively.
‘Dad, I –’
‘I’ll be going to an equestrian centre and some of the big stables. We could have a good time.’
Caught off guard, Terry did not know what to say, Why couldn’t he say, ‘I’d love to’?
He said, ‘Maybe, but … it’s the fête, you know. I promised Duggie I’d help with the dog show.’ He made a face to show he too thought that was stupid.
In the morning, Blanche put down Terry’s bangers and flabby bacon.
‘You going with your Dad?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because if you’re not, I’ll have Isobel and Cathy over here, so Lily can go.’
Paul and Lily came to fetch Terry in the rented car, because it was raining. When Blanche made her offer, they were overjoyed; you could see it.
‘But are you sure you don’t want to come, Terry? Come with us.’
‘I guess not.’ With the weight pulling him down, it was hard work to dredge up a voice.
He did not want to go shopping with them, or to go to the Duke’s Head and help with the Young Farmers’ meeting. He would stay at Blanche’s and catch up on some reading.
Paul and Lily went out to the car. Terry watched them from the front window, his legs apart, because Duffy was pushing a wooden train back and forth between them. It was raining quite hard. His father and Lily turned up their collars and ran for the car. Paul opened the passenger door, but Lily did not get in at once. They both stood against the inside of the open door, their eyes eating each other up, their faces gleeful, like secret children, because they were going off together and they did not want anyone else.
They did not need to kiss. Maybe after ten years, you had progressed beyond the basic arousal of kissing.
The rain had darkened his father’s hair. The expression on his face brought forth demons and red-hot fiends from Terry’s soul to flail their arms about and gnash their teeth. Lily, eager and laughing, was simply a woman; not a mother, not anyone’s daughter or sister, not a wife.
They were so in love, it was indecent.
Terry turned away, to a shriek from the floor as he splintered a car of Duffy’s little train.
So in love.
It was still raining on the afternoon of the church fete. Well, of course. It always rained in England.
‘The weather doesn’t want to be kind to us,’ Nora said.
The British always spoke of the weather as if it were a person with a mind of its own, whereas in the States, it was the property of The Weatherman.
‘Won’t they cancel it?’ Terry asked Duggie Manderson.
‘Cancel it, what for? If we cancelled things for a drop of rain, nothing would ever happen.’
Duggie was a large, bland, imperturbable fellow who was a regular at the Duke’s Head, downing his half pints, not saying much. He had lived in the village since God began. Everyone knew him. Everyone asked him to help. Terry had seen him quietly dispose of a belligerent drunk for Nora one day when Jam wasn’t there.
‘Good thing I wasn’t,’ Jam had boasted, when he learned of it. ‘If he’d said that to Nora in my hearing, he’d not have had a head left to pour booze into.’
By the time the fête had been opened by a local celebrity – ‘Remember the church roof, friends. Spend your money today like water if you don’t want to have water leaking down the back of your neck at matins’ – the rain had lightened to that English speciality, a fine, penetrating drizzle. Sheets of plastic covered the food and gifts and used paperbacks on the stalls that stood about on Lady Somebody-Something’s wet lawn.
Lady S-S, laughing on a brave high note, bending over the stalls to congratulate the peasants on their cakes and jellies and knitted junk, looked like a Boston bag-lady picking over the trash cans; but she was at least a genuine toffee-nosed Brit, the first Terry had seen, because that sort wouldn’t be seen dead in the Head. Hooded girls led soggy ponies and donkeys around, with white-faced children clinging to the handle of the felt saddles. The barbecue was sheltered by a golf umbrella. Croquet, putting and hoop-la went peacefully on, as if the sun were shining. The fortune-teller’s tent had a puddle on the roof and mud in the doorway.
Duggie’s Dog Show was the pièce de résistance. Doggie’s Dug Show. There were ten classes, and although the drizzle became rain, they went through every one of them.
Terry’s job was to get the paid-up entries into the ring and see that they did what they were supposed to do, and did not go for each other’s throats.
In the Fancy Dress class, Lady S-S led round a black Labrador wearing a frill on its collar and a limp ballet skirt. Blanche had made a tiny saddle for the terrier with the long prick, and fastened a jockey doll astride it. On the end of the leash, Blanch, always ready to enter into the spirit of things for the communal good, took off her raincoat to reveal herself also dressed as a jockey. Children had dogs they couldn’t control in wet ribbons and melting paper hats.
The judge, who wore a sailing slicker with a hood and visor that prevented her or him seeing more than the tips of his/her green boots, wanted to give all the prizes to the smaller children, but the grown-ups wouldn’t have it. The Comic Dog Show might be fun for the kids, but it was deadly serious for the adults.
‘Choose on merit,’ Terry heard Duggie mutter into the judge’s hood. ‘At least give a second to Lady S.’
‘Fuck her,’ Terry thought he heard the judge say.
Obedience was a farce. Dog Looking Most Like Owner was equally insulting to the dog and the owner. The classes thinned out. Gradually all the spectators disappeared.
‘You’re a brick, Terence,’ Duggie said when it was over at last. ‘Just take the shovel and clean up the dog mess from her Ladyship’s lawn, will you, there’s a good chap.’
Like hell, I will. Terry stuck the shovel into an impenetrable bush, where it would not be discovered until next winter, and went into the back of the great house.
Nora and various other women in aprons were handing out tea and cakes in a prehistoric stone-floored kitchen, where you might find one of Henry VIII’s chewed drumsticks, or debauched serving wenches under a table.
‘Sod this,’ a hoarse voice said in Terry’s ear, as he waited in line at the tea urn. ‘Come on out to the van and have a drink.’
Terry turned to see who the voice spoke to, and found it spoke to him, out of the mouth of a youth in a heavy rain-beaded sweater with leather patches stuck all over it in unlikely places.
The van was up to its hub-caps in mud in the barnyard of the great house. In the back, on the carpeted floor, were another guy and two girls and some bottles and cans of beer.
What they were doing at the church fete was anyone’s guess, unless they were picking pockets. They had Terry marked out, apparently.
‘You’re from the Duke’s Head, in’t you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ The Scotch tasted good. Terry was as soaked as a seal, seeing the world through wet lashes.
‘We don’t go to the ‘ead. They grass for the pigs,’ the girl with the snakes of hair said.
‘How old are you?’
They were younger than Terry. Too young to drink legally, but they seemed to have plenty of practice at it, and no lack of supplies.
The weight lifted slowly up through the middle of Terry’s vitals and out through the top of his head. The crushing picture of Lily and his father blew away in a wisp of smoke. His first joint since he left the States. How had he survived?
Terry was with these amazing kids for two or three days (he lost count), and screwed, or was screwed, twice – one success, one miserable failure – by Sue on the carpet in the back of the van. Or was it the one with the snakes?
They drove around the nastier parts of this tract of England, and sometimes went into pubs that were not so totalitarian as the Duke’s Head, and got beer and pork pies. Terry was drunk or high most of the time. Once or twice, he surfaced to wonder if he ought to tell someone where he was (where was he?), but his father was off with the tight-crotch riding breeches set, and Blanche and Lily’s parents were probably glad to have a break from him.
When James found him in the cold, grubby public bar of the Three Feathers, he didn’t say ‘Hello’ or ‘Where have you been?’ He walked up to the bar and asked for a pint of Old Peculier, and did not turn around until he was half-way through it.
Terry was on a bench in the corner with Peter and Sue. Sue’s face looked like empty paper. She had washed her hair in the ladies’ room toilet tank because there was no water in the basin, and was drying it on her purple scarf.
‘Ready?’ Jam asked, as if the meeting were planned.
‘Sure.’ Terry got up and followed him out.
Jam did not take him to Blanche’s house. He put him to bed at the cottage, and told Nora he had flu. All next day, he dosed him with some terrible oily stuff that got rid of everything inside Terry between his navel and his spine.
James Spooner’s life had taken three turns for the better in the last two and a half years. First, he had fallen in love with Pyge – brief, but rejuvenating. Then he had signed up with Faces and begun to make up for fifty years of not being appreciated. Then he had met Evelina Rudd, and it was a good thing he’d already had that bit of a do with Pyge, or he might have thought he was past it.
It came about like this. For a year, he had been hoping to get his Equity card, so that he could do more than just background work in television commercials and films. But Equity wouldn’t give you a card unless you could show a few contracts, and you couldn’t get a contract without an Equity card.
Henrietta at Faces had told James that he might be able to squeeze through if he could develop the performances he had done in the George at Wimbledon ‘by popular demand’, i.e. whe
n Nigel could get people to shut up and listen. He might get into Equity on the variety side, if he could get a few paid pub engagements.
Obviously the landlord of the Duke’s Head couldn’t go round singing ‘The Parson’s Lady’ in other boozers, but why shouldn’t he employ himself in his own pub?
‘We’d ought to get a piano in the bar, Nora. Liven this place up a bit.’
‘It’s not that kind of pub.’
‘But –’
‘In any way, shape or form.’
‘Why not? They loved it at the George.’
‘Wimbledon is not South Oxfordshire. This old place is historic, James, in case you’ve not noticed. It’s been like this since time in memoriam.’
‘But with Paul coming over in a few months?’ James suggested cunningly. ‘You know how he loves to play.’
Nora adored Paul. He took more notice of her than most people, who had got used to her always working quietly and contentedly at something, in the house or in the pub.
‘No piano.’
‘No piano, Sergeant.’ James saluted.
He had read in one of Nora’s women’s magazines that if you gave in over the little things, it was easier to get your own way when it counted. He used this as an excuse to himself for letting Nora have the last word.
For a while, he toyed with the idea of trying to buy an Equity ticket from the family of a member who had died. It had been done before, when no picture had been sent to the union. Then he met a black man at a stills session, where they were both photographed from the back, looking up at a hoarding. While they were getting cricks in their necks, waiting for the photographer to get his angles right, the other model told Jam he had got into Equity on the variety side by doing conjuring and ventriloquism for children’s homes and private parties.
When James got home, he poured himself a glass of barley wine, ‘builder of brainpower’ – he often thought in advertising slogans now – took a packet of shrimp-flavoured crisps off the rack, and sat down in the empty public bar to have a think.
Dear Doctor Lily Page 25