Dear Doctor Lily (32 page)

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 tomorrow, 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.

‘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.