Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  He wouldn’t have the nerve to perform for kids. They could see through you, just like he always could when he was a boy.

  ‘Too sharp by half.’ His mother had clipped him when he spoiled the conjurer’s act at a birthday party. ‘Know it all, you do.’ Then she had bought him a bag of sweets on the way home. ‘At least you don’t take after your father. You get it from me.’

  Well, now she knew nothing, poor old dear, except her room at the old people’s home, and a wet bed when the so-called nurses were busy. Shocking place.

  Guilt. Hullo, my old unnecessary friend. James shoved it aside. He was too occupied with his career to go to Devizes just now. Poor old batty Ma, who used to do the crosswords and send in for newspaper competitions. ‘Complete this limerick.’ ‘Put a caption to this picture.’ Terrible to get so old that people forgot what you were really like. All those old folk, pushed away out of sight. Left to their own Devizes, ha ha.

  Ha ha! Got it.

  Nora was out shopping, so it was safe to use the bar phone. She went along with Jam’s career, of course, but he didn’t want funny looks and commonsense advice at this stage.

  He rang Henrietta at Faces. She was always available. Lived and breathed the job, in the office at all hours, except when she was off bullying a film producer, hard as nails behind that baby face.

  ‘What about me doing some concerts at old people’s homes, to get my ticket?’

  ‘If you think anyone would pay you.’

  ‘Worth a try. Song and dance, monologues, the spoons, that style of thing.’

  ‘They might pay you not to.’ Henrietta’s deep masculine laugh came out of her flat dancer’s belly. ‘It’s no wonder I love you, Jamspoon.’ She was on that footing with almost everyone. It didn’t mean a thing.

  ‘Olde tyme numbers. Take ‘em back, poor old dears. Puppet shows. I can do all the voices.’

  ‘Just as well most of them will be deaf.’

  James went to Soho and bought three hand puppets – old man and woman, young girl – with rather disgusting, crude caricature faces, but they were cheapish, and you couldn’t be too subtle for this type of audience. The old-lady puppet looked like Edward Heath in drag.

  The material he had used at the George would get him thrown out of the kind of places where his poor Ma lived out her unwanted days. He took a look at some song sheets and joke books, and found some old Stanley Holloway monologues and songs. Just the ticket. Just the ticket for the ticket. Clean, but comic. Saucy and sentimental. Music-hall stuff. The old dears would eat it up.

  From the council offices, James got a list of geriatric warehouses in a wide area, not too close to home. It was hard to get anyone to talk about even a small fee, but he started out by going round gratis to test the waters and get his hand in, and soon they would be begging him to come back, and would tell their chums in the golden-age racket.

  Testing the waters was about it, he thought to himself grimly, manipulating the old-gent puppet and singing, ‘Champagne Charlie is my name, champagne drinking is my game, there’s no drink as good as fizz! fizz! fizz!’ to a semi-circle of bewildered old ducks, some of whom sat with their legs apart and their skirts ridden up to show the urine bags strapped to the unpromising inside of their scrawny thighs.

  ‘You’d like to meet my missus,’ he sang to them in an old man’s voice.

  But she can’t get away,

  She’s working late tonight cos it’s the other girl’s ‘arf day.

  Nah, you wouldn’t call her tall,

  In fact, she’s rather small,

  But ‘er ‘eart is much bigger than ‘er brain.

  It was hard going, but he worked on his accents and droll voices, until some of the patter really came out comic. The nurses, glad of a break, shrieked with laughter and fell about. Some of the audience were asleep, or dead. Some were anxious about when tea would come. A few of the prize patients wagged their heads and cackled.

  Why did people who had once been perfectly sensible take to cackling in old age? You heard them being interviewed on the radio. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve seen it all, cackle, cackle. In my time, there weren’t no lorries through here at all, just the trams, cackle.’

  ‘Nora,’ he begged, returning home, ‘you won’t let me cackle when I’m old, will you?’

  ‘No, dear.’ She was at the stove, her haunches square and familiar under the apron strings.

  ‘I’ve had a hard day.’ They had given him a cup of tea, but no biscuits. ‘What’s for my supper?’

  He and Nora had to eat their evening meal separately, taking turns while the other was in the bar.

  ‘That’s for me to know, and you to guess.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Would you rather I said, last night’s shepherd’s, hotting up?’

  ‘Spare me. Here, I’ll get things going in the bars. Do me a mixed grill, there’s a love.’ He advanced and put his arms round her warm waist. ‘Got a kidney in the freezer?’

  ‘Oh, you.’ Stirring custard, she turned her face and leaned back to kiss him.

  Irresistible, you see. She couldn’t resist him. Cackle, cackle.

  He put a scarf over the old-lady puppet’s wild white hair and worked up a cackle routine – for the bar on Saturday night, not for the nursing homes.

  The sight of all those old relics brought forth the lurking guilt about his mother that pounced out for an ell if he ever gave it an inch. He asked the manager of the home in Devizes whether he could come and entertain. Kill two birds.

  ‘My usual fee –’ he began on the phone.

  ‘Oh, but I’m afraid we –’ she countered.

  These sentences seldom needed to be completed. So far the only money he had got was from a rather posh place full of vicars’ widows, to whom he had rendered ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’.

  Some of them were not too far gone to enjoy a little tap dancing. Jam still had a few steps – ending with a cramp roll and a couple of buffaloes off to the right, but he could hardly work the clutch on the way home.

  In Devizes, they got Ma up into a chair and wheeled her out, to sit with her face hanging out of her head like a bulldog, glowering and fumbling with the lap rug.

  Oh, God, it was horrible. She was a lump in the chair, sliding sideways like a blancmange, nothing to do with the strong, vigorous survivor who had been security and mate to James after his father skipped. Not fair to the stocky, cocky girl in her wedding picture, grinning up at her tall husband – look what I got! – to obliterate that memory with this.

  The clown with the breaking heart, James gave them:

  ‘This extract has been removed due to copyright issues’.

  He wound up the show with his joke: ‘I’m going to leave you to your own Devizes,’ which got a couple of titters, but no cackles. Had everyone in the town been saying it for years?

  ‘Who …’ His mother was mumbling.

  ‘That’s your son!’ A nurse bent over her. They had been telling her that since James bounded out with the puppets.

  ‘Silly fool,’ she said quite clearly. It was the first thing she had said for months.

  At the home, some old people from outside had been brought in a mini-bus to see the show. Their keeper asked James if he would come to the council’s day centre and perform for the senior citizens.

  He did not want to go back to Devizes, even for another chance at making the joke, but he began to go round other senior centres attached to sheltered housing, or sometimes to a hospital. There was always a piano, and he could work up a better act for them and ask for a fee, and sometimes get it. A couple of times, he was asked to perform at a town hall for a special group. Eventually he could send in some contracts to Equity, with a picture of himself in a Stanley Holloway bowler hat, so that Nora could not sell his ticket after he was dead.

  The week after James got the tip from Jay Skinner at the Feathers and rescued Terry from those juvenile delinquents, his application was miraculously approved.

  H
is card came through! In the nick of time to pull him out of the blues. After Lily and Paul and his granddaughters had left, he had felt as flat as a pancake. Ached all over. Nothing to get out of bed for.

  Nora was her same old self, putting the cottage back to rights after the beloved invasion, carrying her little radio from room to room. She was always the same. Sometimes James felt he had outgrown her. Here he had soared into a new profession in his fifties, but Nora was content to potter along in the same old rut and let life happen to her, rather than make it happen. She was getting shockingly grey, and dropped in the front when she took off the hoists and let it all go. It must be worse for women. They had more to lose.

  If little Duffy loved his Grandad, he concealed it. He and Bianca’s ferret-faced twins, born with the misfortune to take after their father, were no substitutes for fairylike Cathy who doted on Zam, her baby name for him, and electric Isobel, inheritor of the energy of both Lily and Jam’s mother.

  James had not told Paul or Lily anything that Terry had said about his travels in the van with those gruesome drop-outs. He did not know how much Terry told them. There was a bit of a dust-up, and then it was time for them to fly back to Boston.

  Terry hadn’t wanted to leave. He got a bit tight with James in the bar after hours, and said he wanted to stay in England and get Jam to enrol him with Faces. In the morning, he went off to the airport with the others, looking washed up and childlike.

  Jam would not have taken him to see Henrietta. Too young and awkward with himself. No confidence.

  When his ticket finally came, James went confidently to the Faces office in Kensington High Street. Upstairs in the waiting-room, the window slid back for him at once.

  ‘Well, look who’s here!’ Bunny leaned sideways from her desk for a kiss, keeping the phone against her other ear, into which someone excitable was talking. ‘Want to see the boss? She’s got someone with her right now, but it won’t be long.’

  Jam sat down and looked through the big catalogue of models. He never tired of seeing his two stills at the top of page 270, and reading his description.

  ‘Height 6´I, chest 42, waist 38, inside leg 33, collar 17, hat 7 3/4, shoes II. Hair: dark grey, balding. Eyes: brown. Character: sings, vocal impressionist/large hands/pot belly.’ Next time it was reprinted, it would say ‘Equity’.

  A young woman with long black Hawaiian hair was also waiting. James was glad that she had heard his insider’s conversation with Bunny, and he turned the book a little on the table, hoping that she would see his pictures.

  When a man with a limp and a Groucho moustache came out of the inner door, James got up and went through it. The girl must envy him. Now he was one of the elite who went right on in.

  Henrietta was talking on the phone. She was always on the phone. You sat down opposite her at the desk, and she chatted to you between, or during calls.

  ‘A dwarf, you want? Two dwarfs. Can do. Hullo, Jam love. In running shorts. Okay. Men, you want. Oh – women? They’ll have to wear tops … company T-shirts, you’ll provide.’

  When she put down the phone, Jam told her he had got his card, and she said, ‘Fantastic!’ before the phone light flashed again, which was nice of her, because Equity actors were in and out of here all the time.

  ‘I’ll ring Evvie for you. I know she’s casting a T V film with Elliott Gould, and they need men ringside at a boxing match.’

  Henrietta sent James out with an appointment for a casting audition. ‘Don’t shave before you go. Dress a bit rough. Stick your belly out. Good luck!’

  ‘Thanks, Henry. It’s a big chance. Wish me –’

  ‘Get out of here. I’m busy. You people are all the same. A two-second character part and you want star treatment.’

  James went back through the waiting-room, still wearing a grin. He gave some of it to the Hawaiian girl, and she sighed, and recrossed her legs. With underpinning like that, she would go much farther than James.

  The audition was so-so. Evvie, who was a freelance casting person, was quite helpful and not unattractive in a fidgety, sharponed way, with a bush of dry brown hair round her head that stood out farther each time she ran her restless hands through it. There were dozens of men, all trying to look like the sort of men who went to fights. James smoked too many cigarettes, and when he was called into the room in front of Evvie and the producer and other people on the film, they told him at once, ‘Light a fag,’ and he started to cough.

  ‘That’s okay, Mr – er. Sit in that chair, hands on knees, lean forwards, stick your eyes out, you’re looking at something incredible. Now jump up and wave your arms. Point at someone. The referee. You’re mouthing. Good, okay, fine, thanks.’

  James gave it his all and left, wrung out and coughing.

  So when pub customers asked him, ‘What are you up to these days, Jamspoon?’, he could look at his nails and say modestly, ‘Oh, nothing much. Little thing with Elliott Gould.’

  It was bad luck to anticipate, but he did get called back for a second interview, which meant being paid for his time, at least. He got the job. Two days’ work, in his old navy polo-neck and baggy back-legs-of-the-elephant trousers.

  Evvie was there on one of the days, jittery, chain-smoking, hair like a thorn bush. James spoke to her. She answered, distracted, but friendly. He made sure she knew his name. The caster was your key to success.

  Not long after, Bunny called him for a commercial that would be shot in a railway buffet. ‘You’re an old gent with a suitcase, travelling.’

  No one ever said, ‘You’re supposed to be a so and so.’ You were it.

  The audition was in a video studio, with Evvie and an irritable cameraman called Kyle, who swore at her and bullied the group of men of about Jam’s age, some better, some worse preserved. Evvie swore back. The candidates grew more nervous. They were friendly to each other, on the surface. Underneath, it was cut-throat.

  ‘You’re grandfather types,’ the caster told them in her quick, creaky voice. ‘All you do is drink a cup of tea at that little table, look at your watch, get up, put on your hat and rush out.’

  ‘I haven’t got a –’

  ‘They didn’t say we –’

  ‘Anyone not got a hat?’ Evvie raised her cracked voice above the complaints. ‘Borrow.’

  James had a hat. Faces always told you exactly what you had to have. It was a hat he had bought when he was demobbed after the war, and found again and resurrected when they moved. It had a crumpled top and a wide soft brim that could be pulled into a Trevor Howard angle to suit his crooked face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Evvie said from behind the camera and the lights. ‘You’re not a romantic old fart. You’re a comic grandfather. Plant the hat straight on.’

  Jam lifted and centred it, and made his face laughable.

  ‘Get on with it,’ the cameraman said. ‘Action.’

  Jam drank his cold tea, winced as if it were hot, raised an eyebrow at his watch, did a little panic routine – where’s my bag? – and shambled out with his jacket flapping. He was a comic grandfather.

  After an interview with the advertising agency, he got the part. His luck was running.

  After the commercial was aired, he was famous. That is to say, once in a while, someone would say, in the pub or somewhere else, ‘Saw you on the telly last night.’ Even more than the small cheques coming in, that’s when it was good, being in this game.

  Nothing happened for weeks. That was part of the game too. James rang Faces almost every day, in case something had just come in, and they might not think of him. Often he rang from the phone box outside the post office, in case Nora got fed up with it.

  She didn’t understand that when James was called at the last minute, that was show business. That was the way it was done in that world, which was a universe away from this one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-it’s-called-walking Chiltern village.

  ‘Sorry, love, got to go. Last-minute call.’ James would hurry puffing to find Nora.

  �
��I need you here. Let them get someone else.’

  ‘And have them never call me again because I turned it down? Nora – this is my career.’

  He would get their weekend helper, Jack, to come in and give Nora and Jenny a hand, wheedle Nora to press a suit or shine his shoes, and dash off.

  Jack needed the money. It wasn’t a burden to him if Jam’s engagement ran into overtime, and someone like Duggie would always pitch in, regulars who felt they belonged to the Duke, and the Duke to them.

  Twice, Jam had a line to say. ‘Let us pray,’ as a plummy vicar about to say Grace, and, ‘Give us a fag,’ as a figure in an old army greatcoat, stumbling out of the dark.

  Talk about drama.

  One day when he was doing background in a commercial that Evvie was casting, she needed someone for a timed shot – crossing the street at the exact moment and angle to meet the star at a certain spot chalked on the pavement. She recognized James among the crowd, and asked him to do it.

  He and the star had to nod-and say something, in long shot, and then he bent to pat her dog. James did it right nine times. The star did it wrong. After the tenth time, when it worked, the star told James, ‘Thanks.’

  He went away, hazed about with the hot fragrance of her hair and skin and clothes, and leaned against a fence where Evvie was leaning, biting her nails and resting first on one thin foot, then the other, like a tired bird.

  ‘Thanks,’ James said.

  ‘That’s okay. It’s useful to have people who won’t make a hash of it.’

  She sighed and dropped her cigarette and ground it out with a sharp heel. She did not use scent, or if she did, it didn’t have a chance against the star’s musky clouds that still invaded all Jam’s passages.

  ‘Tired, sweetie?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Fed up too.’

  ‘So am I,’ James lied. ‘Like to come for a drink when this is over?’

  She went with him, that was the amazing thing, this restless skimpy creature from the higher levels of power, hung about with scarves and beads. They had a drink at a tarted-up place near the film location. They had two drinks. She started to talk about the rotten state of her relationship with Kyle, the video cameraman, and by some miracle, James found the good sense to shut up and listen. Evvie was unhappy. James bought her dinner. She ate an amazing amount for someone whose figure looked as if it could hardly accommodate her internal organs, let alone an oval dish of steak and chips and a lump of Black Forest gâteau.