Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  In his car, when he took her back to where hers was parked, Evvie sat for a moment and did not get out. James bent over in a chivalrous, sheltering way and gave her quite a gentle kiss. She tasted of French mustard and cigarettes. Her lips were dry. He wetted them for her, after the chaste kiss, licking them. Within the heavy mascara and painted green shadow, the whites of her eyes were not clear. Her skin felt hot.

  ‘Got a temperature?’ James asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Just tired and fed up.’

  ‘That’s why I asked you out, remember? You’re supposed to feel better now.’

  ‘Oh, I do. Thanks – er, Jamspoon. Do you really want me to call you that?’

  ‘Not on the set.’ He implied that they would meet on another job, one that she’d get for him.

  ‘I must go. Kyle will be raving.’

  ‘You live together?’

  She nodded. She often used her bushy head instead of speaking, her narrow lips folded tight.

  ‘Does he beat you?’ James wanted to ask. He wanted her to be abused, so he could be the rescuer. Grandfather type? That was two other guys.

  Kyle may have been raving. Nora wasn’t. James had rung her from the restaurant to say they were shooting late, and she had accepted that, and kept his supper. He took it out to the back and gave it to the Labrador that was always hanging round the dustbins. Taking sweets from a child, it was, fooling Nora. You rotter, Jamspoon. You glorious, regenerated, degenerate rotter.

  Casters often asked for feature people by name when they got to know them, rather than just, ‘Send me three bankers and a fireman and a saucy nurse.’ So no one at Faces was surprised when Evvie asked for James Spooner to audition for the barman in an advertising campaign for fruit-flavoured cordials.

  Jam was an oh-ho barman, pouring the vile-coloured syrups in a roguish, yet protective way for a young girl like a wood nymph. The idea was to reassure young girls who felt like wood nymphs that it was all right to go into pubs and bars, and that this low-alcohol poison was what you ordered if you wanted to be safe and sophisticated. What a hope.

  Evvie was on the set, thin and pale, but full of fizz.

  ‘Thanks for getting this for me.’ During a break, James brought her a coffee.

  ‘Well – thanks for the dinner. It helped just to be quiet and talk.’

  ‘Want to repeat the therapy some time?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Just say the word.’

  He saw her again not long after, at a stills session. Whether the TV was screened or not, they were going ahead with posters and magazines and point-of-sale. In a profession where more people starved than worked, it was a rare bit of luck for James.

  He and Evvie met after that in a bar near her office. She told him about her divorce from the Iranian she had married when she was eighteen, and the child who was now at college. That put her within shouting distance of forty.

  James told her nothing about his marriage, partly because that made him feel loyal to Nora, whatever he was up to (and he wasn’t sure himself), partly because Evvie was not interested. James was attentive. He had brought her a pair of the black dangling earrings she favoured, and he drove her home to Finsbury Park, hoping and not hoping to be seen by Kyle.

  The situation between them was this. James wanted to keep in with her to get work. Evvie liked an audience and she wanted to annoy Kyle, who was younger than her and believed she needed him more than he needed her.

  They both knew the situation, but in a curious way, the lack of romance or lust led them very easily and unpossessively into bed in a second-rate hotel in the Midlands.

  At first, James was nervous and hesitant.

  ‘Just hold me, then,’ Evvie whispered. Even her whisper had a creak in it. ‘Just let’s hold each other and pretend life is safe.’

  But James could get the comforting routine from Nora. That wouldn’t do. With a courageous cry, he threw himself at Evvie’s bird body, and once she got the message, she responded with speed and skill.

  By God, she knew her stuff! They did one thing that James had never done before, and didn’t know you could do. In their younger days of good jolly straightforward sex, he and Nora would have been shocked to find that anyone did that.

  No strings. That was how it was between Jam and Evvie. No obligations. I’m not ever going to leave Nora. Evvie’s not leaving Kyle. Just thumbing her nose at him.

  They saw each other at intervals, for a drink and a smoke, or a meal, and didn’t go to bed, or did.

  Wow! he sometimes thought to himself at odd moments during the day. Wow, Jamspoon. What are you up to, you old dog? He had a watertight alibi, with the uncertain hours of his profession. Nora could not possibly find out, and she would never be hurt.

  One of Evvie’s clients wanted small twins for an off-beat toddler-product advertisement.

  ‘Get your daughter to bring her two along for audition.’ Evvie rang James at home, and when Nora answered, said she was his agent, which she was. ‘They look just right from their photograph. Not too bonny.’

  ‘Thanks for those kind words.’ Nora was in the room. James kept his voice impersonal.

  ‘Don’t tell your daughter that. Tell her she could pick up a nice little bit of cash. We could fudge them into the job under your Faces membership.’

  ‘I can’t promise.’

  ‘Try it. For me, Jammie?’

  How did she know his wife was not on an extension in another room? The thrill of danger crept up his chest and neck and into the nerves of his teeth.

  ‘I’ll let you know.’ He would have like to have said, ‘Forget it,’ but Evvie was a powerful woman, in or out of bed. He never turned her down.

  Nora would be proud to see the twins in an ad, even if it said, ‘Which twin is wearing Bottidri?’ Should he ask her to persuade Blanche? Instinct told him to leave Nora out of it. Anything to do with Evvie had got to be part of his guilty secret which, for some reason, gave him no guilt. During the last few weeks, James Spooner, full of fun, but at heart a conventional lad, had persuaded himself of the advantages of a bit on the side, for all concerned.

  Blanche was furious. She did not often get angry, but when she did, her tranquil eyes bulged and cords stood out at the sides of her weather-browned neck, like tent-stays.

  ‘It’s bad enough to have you running about with that seedy theatrical crowd, and having people say, “Wasn’t that your father I saw on telly, dressed as a policeman?’”

  ‘You’ve got to accept, it’s my career now.’

  ‘Well, leave us out of it.’

  ‘Why so bitter, Bianca?’

  ‘You used to pull your weight in the pub, Daddy. Now you don’t.’

  ‘I bring in extra money.’

  ‘How much, I wonder? A couple of thousand a year, perhaps, if you’re lucky.’

  ‘Who told you that? The sky’s the limit. I’m beginning to get featured.’

  ‘By the time you’ve paid Jack, and train fares or petrol to London, what’s left? Let alone buying clothes. And that briefcase. And the tennis racket.’

  ‘Child of my youthful passion, you want the parts, you’ve got to have the props.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s very hard on Mum.’

  ‘She encourages me.’

  Blanche moved backwards away from him, in her boots. They were having this nasty conversation in the yard by the kennels, with the terriers as Greek chorus. Her stiff retreat from him brought to James an overwhelming sense of the loss of his Lily, who always leaned forwards, who came at you with open arms, ready to agree or laugh or argue with equal enthusiasm. Her visit had been too short, and was long gone past. The thought of all that unfriendly grey water between them caused James to speak out of turn.

  ‘Your mother would never hold me back,’ he said roughly. ‘She’s not like you.’

  There – gone and done it. Neil had been offered a job with better promotion prospects up north, but Blanche wouldn’t go.

  She pu
shed past him and went into her house. The dogs hurled their taut barrel bodies against the bars of their cages in protest, deafening him with their inane shrill barking.

  ‘Shut up!’ he shouted so fiercely that his voice skidded and rose as shrill as theirs. He picked up a metal bucket and threw it against the kennel bars.

  Blanche opened the back door.

  ‘I saw that,’ she said.

  On the way to Heathrow, Lily sat in front with her father, and Terry sat with Paul and the girls, hunched up in the corner of the back seat, like a sick chimpanzee. Beside Lily, Jam’s profile had its crooked smile, the eyebrow nearest to her raised, trying to be ironic about his own sadness.

  When they said goodbye, he clutched at Lily in a trembling sort of doddery way, which made her see ahead to her father as an old man.

  ‘I need you,’ he whispered from somewhere out of the depths of his reality. Not putting on an act, cracking a joke, smilin’ through.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Daddy.’

  Lily kissed him again, and they were gone through the gate with several people behind them, and it was too late to say what she should have said: ‘I need you too.’

  When the plane rose and banked above the piercing green, the reservoirs, the grids of tidy brick houses, she leaned the side of her face against the window, and felt English. Living in America with Paul and the children was all she wanted; but could I come back here … could we?

  When she first went to America, everything was too big, distances too great, patches of scenery the same for hours and hours, stores too vast. Who needed ten different kinds of tuna fish?

  Now that all this was normal, the bizarre was little potty English grocers with muddy potatoes, Nora’s Mini, Blanche’s small van for the dogs, rocking on its narrow tyres when they were all barking inside.

  Two winters ago, she and Paul had bought rolls of cotton wool to stuff into the draughts round the cottage windows. The Duke’s Head gents’ froze up. The oven temperature dropped while she was baking a cake.

  ‘Pair cuts,’ Nora talked about. Lily had not understood at first what she said. Her own voice, basic Wimbledon, adaptable up or down, had become transatlantic: accused of sounding like a Yank in England, and, ‘I love your British accent’, in the States.

  Driving to Cape Cod to start their summer month in the old farmhouse, they stopped in Plymouth Harbor to visit the Mayflower, because Cathy had been doing the Pilgrims. Poor child, she would do them next year and the next and the next, obsessively, in her New England school.

  They stood on the wharf and marvelled at the tiny rib cage of the hold where a hundred people had lived for a year, and had babies, and died.

  ‘Did any of them ever go back home?’ Cathy asked. ‘I would have.’ She liked England. She liked wherever she was.

  ‘I wouldn’t, you dope.’ From Isobel, at ten, casual remarks often came out like insults. ‘Would you, Mud?’

  Since hearing Alan Sherman’s summer camp song, ‘Hello Mudder, Hello Farder’, she called Lily Mudder, or Mud.

  ‘We do go back. We just have.’

  ‘I mean, to live.’

  ‘Daddy’s too American. I don’t think he could take it. He likes plumbers and snow ploughs to come when he wants them. Remember when we bought the cotton, Paul, and Jam said we were decadent?’

  ‘Suppose you got divorced.’ When Isobel was working up to being difficult, she spoke without looking at you. ‘Would you go, Mud?’

  ‘What’s this? We’re never going to be divorced.’

  ‘Daddy and Terry’s mother did. He might have a taste for it.’

  ‘Lay off me,’ Paul told her mildly.

  Isobel slid her eyes towards her father, and away. ‘I’m only telling you what Terry said.’

  ‘He wouldn’t say that,’ Lily said quickly. ‘It doesn’t sound like him.’

  ‘All right, don’t believe me. You never do.’ Isobel threw her candy wrapper into the harbour.

  ‘Hundred dollar fine,’ Paul said.

  ‘Want me to jump in and get it?’ She started to climb the wooden railing.

  ‘Get down, Isobel.’

  ‘You want trash in the ocean, or dontcha?’

  Isobel was going through the struggle of trying to fight her father at any opportunity. He gave her his ‘stay calm’ routine, but she would rather have a yelling match, or the drama of a punishment. When she could not make Paul angry, she would turn to her mother and goad her, until Lily obliged by shouting or whacking her. Once, when this happened in England, Nora had scolded Lily as if she were still a child, which had pleased Isobel tremendously.

  Terry did not come to the Cape this summer. He had signed up for a course on the Impressionists at the Museum of Fine Arts, but instead he got a summer job on a fast-food counter at the airport. He wore a T-shirt that said ‘Pie in the Sky’ and a paper forage cap. He was growing his hair.

  The shabby house was beginning to seem like theirs. As soon as they arrived, Lily cleared out anything left by other tenants, except the battered books which were there from year to year: Flora and Fauna of Martha’s Vineyard, History of the Manamessett Yacht Club, The Outermost House, Byways of Old Cape Cod, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, 1956.

  They had only been there ten minutes before Tony appeared from the house beyond the field wall, grinning, teeth large and white in his dark face, giving them a chronicle of the tenants who had been in the house.

  ‘Bottles – you should see the bottles that went out with the trash. One week, the lady asks me, “Where’s the town dump?” She don’t want to put them out by the end of the driveway no more.’

  Tony was fifteen this year, working with his father on landscaping. He continued to spend a lot of time with Isobel. They still had the boards wedged into the crook of the big maple, that was their tree-house. In the curve of Tony’s upper lip lay a shadow that was the prelude to a moustache. Isobel was only ten. Perhaps it ought not to be all right, but it was.

  Tony was taking care of an absent neighbour’s rough Western pony. Paul had brought down a bridle and was teaching Tony to ride it bareback. Isobel too. She was more civilized when Tony was around.

  Cathy had made friends here, with the family who lived opposite, and other children who were there in the summer. Lily had got to know women on the beach and in the village. She and Paul got asked out. They gave a big chili supper on the grass. They were beginning to belong.

  Lily loved the looks of Paul in the summer. His brown bare legs were straight and firm. His eyes were intensely blue. The sun put silvery streaks into the top of his fair hair. Not grey streaks. That was years away. He was only forty-four, an ageless age.

  This year, he immersed himself in this place even more thankfully, because he had been having some hard times in Boston. Turnbull’s were still trying to find a way to claim that Tack Rack Junior was theirs, not his. He suspected that they might be planning to design their own modular units and market them under another name, to cut him out. He had been successful on his last English trip. He had turned in an excellent report, but it had been criticized, and picked to pieces by people who did not know the British market.

  When Edward Turnbull retired, it had always been assumed that Paul would succeed him as Managing Director. Dread Ed was pushing seventy, and would fuss himself into another heart attack if he wasn’t careful. Paul was training a Turnbull nephew, one of a succession of family hangers-on who had come into the store, and passed on to what they thought were higher things. This one was digging himself in.

  Turnbull thrived on its traditions. Bright, abrasive Leonard’s unnecessary new ideas would not be adopted, but they were listened to and discussed, instead of being turned down, and the philosophy of the store’s whole marketing programme explained to Leonard yet once more.

  Paul got on with him all right, because life would be too unpleasant if he didn’t.

  ‘What are your plans?’ he asked Leonard from time to time.

  ‘Oh – I’ll be mov
ing on before too long, I guess. Pick up what I can here, and give you folks what I can. A very pleasant interlude. I’ll always be grateful to you, Paul.’ Patronizing jackass. Paul was not deceived. He bided his time.

  Here on Cape Cod, he could forget it. He had a way of being able to put away worry and discouragement with his Boston clothes, and throw himself into happiness, taking Lily with him.

  His friend Harry Sutton came down to stay. He had been married again and separated since Lily first met him. He had always behaved like a bachelor, even when he was with his second wife, and he was totally undomesticated. He strewed coffee mugs and beer glasses wherever he happened to be. He left dirty clothes in a pile in the corner of his room. He drove off without saying where he was going, just when you were going to put a meal on the table. He left Arthur shut in his car and forgot him. He dripped water and sand on cushions. He turned up, delighted with himself, with live lobsters and wine when Paul already had steaks on the barbecue. He was lovable and funny, tiring, argumentative. Lily and Paul and the children were very fond of him.

  The three of them rented horses and rode through the small woods and moorland of the wildlife preservation area, where pheasants and deer were preserved to be shot at by men in plaid wool shirts in November.

  Lily learned more about riding from Harry than from Paul, because she listened to Harry and didn’t argue so much. She had ridden enough now to begin to understand Paul’s horse passion. It wasn’t just the ride. It was everything. When they got back to the stables, she liked going with the horse into the gloom of the barn where his box was, and taking off the tack and rubbing at the wet patch under the saddle, and exchanging casual horse talk with the young girls who were always around. If the horse was not going out again, she would take down his halter from the hook outside the box and lead him out to roll in the sandy patch at the corner of the field. She hung over the gate with Paul, chewing stalks of hay, to watch the horses moving quietly away in the evening light, and make fantasies of how it would be when they had horses of their own.