Dear Doctor Lily (54 page)

‘Funny, when you think how hard I tried to lose it.'

‘Not all that hard.' Isobel waited, wondering how to say this. ‘Do you think Daddy – I mean, do you think Daddy will mind about me and Tony?'

‘Shit, man, he's not up there on the roof like an Old Testament patriarch.'

‘If he were, you couldn't say, “Shit, man”.'

‘I've got to learn to do the things I couldn't do when he was alive,' Lily said slowly and instructively, to herself as well as to Isobel.

‘Good old Mud.' Isobel looked down at her with approval. ‘I think you're going to make it.'

‘I'm scared, though.'

‘So am I.'

But they were two strong women. They admired each other.

Pixie was a good old gal, but there were times when Jamspoon decided he was sick of her, and might have written her off if he had anyone else for company. In a rash close moment by her wide gas fire, a delightful furnace, Jam had told her his age, believing that she was older than him. She wasn't. She only looked it. She was five years younger, and the discovery had encouraged her natural tendency to boastfulness.

Pixie had been in crowd and stand-in work for years, and fancied herself the darling of Central Casting. She knew all the assistant directors of all the film and television companies.

‘Oh, yes, they always ask for me.' Jam was getting fewer jobs these days, and he did not want to hear from Pixie that she was still on the crest of the wave, dear heart. ‘Wedding guest, restaurant, audience at the opera, stand-in for a difficult artiste – “Call Pixie Lamont,” they say. They know they can depend on me.'

‘I'll tell you what,' James said to Lily, when she was in England looking for a house, ‘I wish Nora hadn't left.' He gave it out as new information, because during the five years since his wife had gone off with Duggie, he had persuaded himself that it had been a mutual separation. ‘Sometimes, you know, I day-dream that she'll come back.'

‘I don't think she will now.'

‘You can't tell with women.'

But if she did, it could be awkward, because James had a much better dream that he kept shrouded and in waiting, while Lily went round to estate agents, and looked at totally unsuitable houses all over the Chilterns and the Thames valley.

He had more or less given up films and commercials, because of the early calls and all the standing about, which was murder to his varicose veins. There was also the risk of running into Evvie. He was still getting a bit of advertising work from Faces, although the products tended to be things like pensioners' rail cards and laxatives and denture stickem and last-ditch life insurance. He had even done a charity appeal for an old folks' home, with a sagging cardigan and a walking frame for props, because none of the resident old codgers could do it right.

‘Next step will be a coffin ad,' he joked, and consoled himself with old slogans like, ‘Pour me a Porsons' and ‘A little luv, a little Lux-u-rest' from the days of his glory.

Before Lily even came over, he had laid his plans. Poor dear girl, who could she turn to if not her old father? He began to talk to Blanche about selling the Duke's Head to her and Neil, although his son-in-law would have to sharpen up his act if he were going to keep the bar customers happy.

Blanche would immediately sacrifice the public bar and the
dart board and fruit machine to make a proper restaurant.
Tant pee,
as they said, and James would feel like a conservationist who has held out against a motorway through the swampy meadows and finally gone under to the juggernauts of progress.

Lily had tutted at the state of the cottage and the random quality of Jam's life, but she did not try to straighten him out. She would not go into the pub, because it was as hard for her to be confronted with people who had known her as part of a couple as it had been for Jam when Nora scarpered. He told Lily he knew just how she felt. She looked at him blankly, as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

She was out most of the day, came back to cook supper for James on the crusted stove which would have given Nora a terminal stroke, and went to bed early, but was often still awake when James closed the bar and shifted the barrels and came up-stairs.

‘You're overdoing it,' he told her. ‘Take it easy.' The only way he knew how to treat a bereaved person was like an invalid.

‘I've got to keep going,' she said. ‘I don't want time to think. My only hope is to start a new life. Find a little house to be a hermit in. Get a dull job. What's it matter?'

‘You've got the girls,' James ventured, as a preliminary to one day saying, ‘You've got me.'

‘Yes, thank God, but not really “got” them. Isobel will stay in the States, I'm sure.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Well … she plans to live with Tony. Remember Tony Andrade, who used to work with Paul so much? I haven't told you before, because I hadn't the strength to hear you say, “He's black.” He's a decent young man, and she –'

‘She can't. He's black.'

‘Thank you, Jam. He isn't, incidentally. My little Cathy will be gone off to college before I can turn round, then gone away from me, like they do.'

‘You could take a refresher course,' Blanche said when Lily talked about a job, ‘and finish your exams. Go back to being a social worker. They're crying out for them.'

‘They'll have to manage without me. I'll never do anything like that again.'

‘But you're good at it, I thought.'

‘Shut up. I don't want to hear about it.'

‘My lips are sealed.' Blanche, in her mid thirties – good God, how had he acquired children of thirty-four and forty? – sometimes sounded like her mother.

When Lily finally found a cottage, she decided on it immediately, without taking time to think about it, because she was afraid she would lose courage. Blanche went over with her to take some measurements and help her talk to the estate agents, and she did not take James there until everything was settled.

The cottage was on the Berkshire downs, where she had no associations or friends. After leaving the security of the motorway, James found himself winding through narrow lanes and up and down hills, until they turned off at an unmarked lane that was hardly more than a cart track, and came to a gate in a thick box hedge labelled ‘Daisy Cottage'. It was low and white and thatched, too typical for James's taste, like a greetings card. Beyond an over-run garden that would take years to clear, pastures and stubble and new ploughed land folded down into an unseen valley and folded up over the opposite hills, with not a house in sight.

The village was some distance away from Pie Lane, only a few straggling houses and farm buildings, with no shop or pub.

‘It's pretty lonely here,' James said.

‘That's what I want.'

There were three small bedrooms and two downstairs rooms that had been knocked into one long room, with a fireplace at each end and ceiling beams that were much lower than at the Duke's Head. It was not bad. Old places that had been done up with radiators and the decencies of life were hard to come by. It was a nice cottage, if you wanted to live like Peter Rabbit.

As James stood in the doorway to scan the lonely view for a sign of life, even one man on a tractor, the sun came out and flooded past him into the house. He stepped back inside. He could learn to duck his head. Perhaps those old red tiles on the floor would not draw the damp up into his bones.

‘Well, what do you think, Jam?'

‘Pretty fair.' They could invite people to stay – join local clubs
– get a video. ‘You could put a bed for me in that little downstairs room at the end. Otherwise we wouldn't have a spare bedroom.'

‘Jamspoon – oh, my God, you didn't think …'

‘No, no, of course not.' No fool Jam. He knew when to bluff. ‘Just joking. But when you invite me for dinner, I might have to stay the night because of the dreaded breathalyser ha ha.'

But why, ‘Of course not'? Why wouldn't a daughter want to live with her old Dad who loved her and had stuck by her, unlike some parents he could mention?

After Lily finished her business and had gone back to America, Blanche started talking to a solicitor, and an architect visited the Duke's Head.

James began to panic. Pixie baked him a lovely cake for his sixty-second birthday, with no candles on it, for tact. Her daughter Button had gone to the Isle of Man with a woman friend who was an obvious dyke. Pixie wore the gold lame that she had worn for the 1930s ballroom scene in
The Woman I Love Beside Me.
The front of it dipped very low in a U-shape, but her bosoms dipped lower.

It was candlelight and wine all the way, and poached eggs on a slice of gammon for breakfast, and spiced tomato juice for his hangover, which he had not had since Nora flew the coop. I might do worse, Jam thought, resilient as ever, so used to having his dreams shattered that he was a dab hand at building new ones. I might do worse.

Wearing the Japanese peignoir with the friendly dragon clinging to her broad comfortable back, Pixie rang Central Casting.

‘David? Hullo, dear heart. Anyone want Pixie Lamont …? Tuesday? Smart rural? Lovely.'

James rang Faces, not to be left behind. The new young man in the outer office, brisker than Jam's old pals, who themselves were not as thrilled to see him as in days of yore when he was a hot number, said, ‘May be something. Not sure. Call you back.'

‘Wait, Eddie. I'll give you another number. Put it in my file. If you can't reach me at home, try here.'

‘Oh ho,' Eddie said.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, oh
ho.'

Lily was away two months. When she got back, the autumn leaves were flooded with spectacular colour. As she drove home from Boston, she looked for the huge maple tree before the Plymouth exit. It was a spreading burst of orange, tipped with fire from the setting sun, in its full glory, displaying itself to her with, ‘Look what you'll be missing!'

As an antidote to the reproof of the blazing maple, Lily thought possessively of Pie Lane on the Berkshire downs, its blowsy hedges nearly meeting, and of herself standing by the fence between the pasture and the small garden, trying to absorb the strange new view that kept its distance, leaving it up to her future eyes whether it became closer and familiar.

At the house, Brad and Allie Miller, who had stayed with Cathy, had left everything in good shape. It had usually been Tony's sister and her husband who stayed in the house when Paul and Lily went away, but it had not seemed right to ask them under the circumstances, since the Andrade family were less relaxed than Lily about Isobel moving in with Tony.

Terry had said, ‘We won't need anyone in the house. The girls and I will cope.' But he was still not coping with anything very well, and often going to work with a hangover.

He was gone before Lily returned. A friend from England had turned up. ‘A very strange guy,' Isobel said. ‘What's Terry been up to over there?' Brendan had stayed two nights, and they had left together.

Arrangements for the sale of the house went ahead. Lily and her daughters started to sort out what she would take to England and what Isobel could use, and what should be sold or given away. Lily kept some of Paul's shirts and sweaters, and the old faded gold Turnbull pullover, which still smelled quite strongly of him.

Arthur's eyes and ears and limbs were deteriorating, and he was a bit old for the plane journey and six months in quarantine kennels, but Lily could not go to England without him. She sent him off ahead with the black and white sheepdog that Cathy had rescued on one of her obsessive visits to the animal shelter. Driving back from leaving them in their cages
at the airport, she thought, ‘That's done it. Now I'll have to go.'

The pony had gone to one of Cathy's friends who had younger sisters. The Grossmans, who were buying the house, wanted to keep John. Mrs Dawson's spoiled fat horse and another boarder had already come back, and the stable and yard were busy again. Lily did not often go to see the horses, but when she saw the younger Grossman boy fooling about with John in the field, she wanted to storm down to the tack shop and tell Mr Grossman, ‘John doesn't like being messed about by children.' But as she watched, she saw that he did.

The boy was riding bareback, his thin legs hanging straight down, hands high, turning the horse with the reins against his neck, and all John's Western memories of his youth in Kansas were coming back to him. Paul had wanted him to look like an Eastern hack: extended trot, head and neck up to the right point of flexion behind the ears. Now he looked contentedly like a cow pony, over-flexed, feet sliding into a flat singlefoot jog.

Harry, who had found Robin for Paul, was going to have the bay horse in his stable. He came down with the trailer to fetch Robin, and Lily gave him lunch and enjoyed being with him, able to talk about Paul or about other things quite easily. None of the strain that she often felt with people who were not close friends – either quiet and abstracted and losing the thread of the conversation, or trying too hard to chatter and be lively, to show she was all right.

When Lily left the table to put a log into the stove, Harry got up too and went to stand by her.

‘I want to put my hands on you. Would that be all right?'

‘No, Harry.' She straightened up.

‘We could go up to bed?'

She smiled and shook her head at him.

‘We might have once,' he said, ‘if it hadn't been for Paul. I still want to. Do you?'

‘I want someone to put their arms round me. That's all. That's one of the things you take for granted, and then miss dreadfully.' She wrapped her arms round herself. ‘I find myself embracing people dike the minister and that nice man in the drug store who was so helpful with all the pills.'

Harry moved her arms aside and put his arms round her. He tightened them, and as his funny creased, boyish face with the long tilted eyes came close, she felt the nerves in her body responding, and pulled away in horror.