Dear Doctor Lily (2 page)

The plane landed, bumped, hit the ground again, shuddered and braked smoothly. Lily let go of Ida's hand to join in the short applause, genuine or ironic, which greeted this miraculous feat.

‘Okay?' The man across the aisle looked over and smiled with his eyebrows raised. He had put on his jacket, a tweed the same colour as his hair. Lily nodded, but she could not smile yet.

‘Vellee sollee for bumpee landing.' The Captain over the
intercom. ‘We'll offload here, folks, while they get some spanners out and wind up the clockwork again. See you later. Take your hand luggage with you.'

That should have warned them. In the seedy airport café, which smelled of cigarettes and wet rags, fifty–odd passengers were given coffee. Lily and Ida sat crushed at a slopped table with several people, including a Canadian couple like a pair of bison who itemized everything that had been wrong with this flight since they bought their tickets. When an airline official came into the doorway with a false smile, they said, ‘About time,' and got up, collecting their bags.

‘No hurry.' The official had grown a small clipped beard to make his chin look stronger, without success. ‘We'll take care of everyone. We apologize for this unfortunate delay, but the mechanics are going to need a little longer.'

‘Well hell, how long?' the Canadian asked for all of them.

The official coughed and ducked his head and said, ‘We're going to put you up overnight in the United States Air Force base at Flekjavik.'

Groan, groan. Anger, protest. But the passengers were too tired to give the man more than a token hard time. They trooped out fairly meekly to the buses. Ida was anxious, and bringing up hot wind from the coffee, which she always did when she was upset, she said, dragging on Lily's arm while Lily carried her flight bag over the other shoulder with her own.

Lily was alert and expectant. This was much more exciting than just flying the Atlantic like everyone else, and Pam's wedding was not for another two days.

‘Brace up, Ida. Not everyone goes to Iceland.'

‘Not everyone wants to.'

The bus passed sturdy white houses with painted shutters and fences, one-storey shops with steeply pitched roofs, stone farms low to the ground, open moorland with sheep grazing on grey-green grass, no trees or hedges to be seen in the light twilight that did not grow darker.

Inside the wire fence of the Air Force base, they were given sandwiches and ice–cream in the mess hall, and then there was nowhere to sit and nothing to do but go to bed.

Lily and Ida had a room together. Ida took off her pink suit and lay down with a great sigh. The ice–cream had made her teeth ache. Lily roamed, looking out of the window at the bare ground and the functional buildings, inspecting empty drawers, opening the door to listen to the corridor of closed rooms, where someone coughed, voices rumbled without emphasis, water ran, a child cried.

‘Go to bed. Aren't you tired?'

‘I feel charged up. Must be the Arctic twilight.' Lily's body felt electric. Her skin felt smoother, creamier, her hair thicker. ‘I wish …'

‘I wish we had a cup of tea,' Ida said with her eyes shut.

‘So do I.'

‘Very strong.' Flat on the bed, Ida's slight body disappeared into the mattress, only her curled hair rising like a bush in the desert.

‘I wish you hadn't thought of it.' At the mirror, Lily was examining her skin with her glasses off, which improved it. ‘Now we've got to have one. Let's go and prowl.'

‘We can't.'

‘We can.'

Lily waited while Ida tried to struggle into the pointed shiny black shoes with very high heels in which she was to totter towards Buddy on the Boston tarmac.

‘They're too small for you.'

‘No.' Ida changed her mouth of pain to the closed smile which hid her teeth. She stood up, then sat down again on the bed and took off the shoes. ‘I don't want to put my suit on again anyway.'

Annoyed with her, Lily went out of the room and down the concrete stairs. She found her way back to the mess hall, where men were now sitting at the tables with food and bottles and paper cups, playing cards and dominoes or reading or smoking or just sitting. Lily spoke to one of the men, who leaned back in his chair and looked up at her, tongue in the corner of his mouth, dark Mediterranean eyes boldly amused.

‘A cup of tea?' he mimicked. ‘Oh, veddy, veddy Bwitish.'

A wolf whistle from another table, and someone called out something that Lily was glad she could not hear.

‘Give her a break.' A woman in Air Force uniform looked up from a letter. ‘Try the vending machines.'

The machines were in a corner space off the mess hall. Coca-Cola and pictures of other fizzy things, ice-cold and condensing. No tea in the hot machine, but tomato soup, hot chocolate, coffee, coffee regular, coffee extra cream, coffee extra sugar. Insert two dimes.

Lily had no American money. Did she dare ask?

A warm bitter smell of coffee came from the machine. In the pictures over the knobs, the tomato soup was bright orange, the chocolate had a foam of cream on the top, the coffee had bubbles swirling and a spiral of steam rising.

Ida would like it. It might keep her awake to talk about Buddy, which Lily wouldn't mind, because if she was really going to end up as a counsellor, she had got to learn what made people cleave together, as well as what split them apart.

‘Having a hard time choosing?' A man's voice behind her. ‘They probably all taste equally foul.'

It was the man from the seat across the aisle. He had taken off the blue pullover, so the colour of his eyes had calmed down. He had a good nose. Lily liked a good nose. No one in the family had one, only splodgy common things.

She pushed her glasses back on hers. ‘I haven't got any American money.'

‘Let me.' He fished a handful of coins out of his pocket. ‘What'll it be?'

‘Oh, thanks. Two coffees with milk and sugar. Where does it say that?'

‘Coffee regular.' He put in two coins. The machine digested them, then with a whirr and a clunk, a paper cup descended and a spout plopped the right amount of coffee into it.

‘How marvellous.'

‘Don't they have these in England?'

‘Not like this.' They did, but Lily wanted to admire America. ‘Were you there long?'

‘Just a quick business trip.'

Another cup arrived and was filled. Lily waited for him to get his black coffee, so that she could walk back through the mess hall with him, but he waited, starting to drink his coffee.

‘Your first flight?'

To lie, or to sound inexperienced? Lily took a sip of coffee, then put down Ida's cup and pushed back her glasses to see him better, and said, ‘May be my last.'

‘I don't blame you. Why do you do that all the time with your glasses?'

He'd noticed her. ‘The frame is loose.'

‘Take them off.'

‘I can't see.'

‘You don't need to see to drink coffee.'

Without her glasses the small corner space was less dingy, the garish vending machines muted, the man less real. Seeing only soft blurs of colour increased the feeling of being part of a dream. ‘I must…' Her voice was blurred too. ‘I must take Ida's coffee up to her.'

She put on her glasses to follow him through the mess hall. The bold airman said, ‘Quick work, baby,' and some of the others laughed.

The man with blue eyes said, ‘Hey, fellas,' placidly. He did not spill his coffee on the stairs, but Lily did. On the next floor she turned to go on up and he said, ‘This is where I leave you.'

‘Thanks so much.'

‘You're entirely welcome.' For such a relaxed man, he was exceedingly polite.

‘I say.' Lily stopped with her feet on the bottom step of the next flight. ‘When I–you know, noticed the propeller standing still and all that, and I told you and you went up, I mean, did they
know?'

‘Oh, I don't think so.' His eyes narrowed when he smiled, ‘if you hadn't been so quick on the ball, we might have crashed.'

‘Honest?' But he was smiling more to himself than to her. ‘Oh, come on. The pilot must know whether an engine's running or not.'

‘Let's say you saved us.'

Lily wanted to say, ‘If you're making fun of me, please don't.' He was at an age when he would probably think that childish, so she said, ‘Oh, well,' and went on up.

‘Have a nice night.' He had not gone through the swing door.
He was looking at her back view. Damn. She was plodding up with her legs apart so as not to spill any more coffee.

In the bedroom, Ida was unhappy.

‘Why have you been so long? The coffee's cold.'

‘Want me to go down again?'

‘No. I'm all blown up as it is. I'll never get to Boston. Why did this have to happen to me?'

‘I told you. It's adventure.'

Lily took off her flowered dress and hung it up carefully, shaking out the bow, trying to smooth the skirt. At a knock on the door, Ida got back into bed and pulled up the sheet. It was the man from the coffee machine. Lily was in her petticoat, with bare feet, which made her a little shorter than him.

‘You forgot your magazine.'

‘I didn't …'

He had one in his hand. ‘Gee, you have a better room than I do.' He looked round, his clear blue eyes passing over Lily as if she were his sister. ‘Goodnight,' he said quietly and went out.

‘You didn't have a magazine,' Ida said. ‘Who's he?'

‘He gave me change for the coffee.'

‘So now he wants to see you in your slip.'

‘Pity I'm so fat.'

‘Better than me.' Ida sat up and looked down at her flat chest. ‘I've always been too thin.'

‘Does Buddy like that?'

‘Oh, yes. He says–well he don't say much.'

‘Doesn't he tell you you're beautiful?' Lily felt beautiful from the coffee–machine man's eyes, even though they had been brotherly.

‘Well, you've got to know Buddy. He's not like that. I don't mind. I'm not romantic, like you are. There's more to marriage than romance, you'll find that out one day. There's having your own home and nice things and people giving you attention, because you're Mrs Someone.'

Lily sat on the end of the hard institutional bed. Although Ida was talking as if she were her big sister, Lily still felt older.

‘At Watkins Air Force Base, see, we're going to have married quarters of our own, half a house, made of wood, with a bit of
garden and a covered-over place to put your car. Buddy has a Plymouth, they call it, two-tone blue. We'll have a television and a machine to wash clothes.'

‘He must be very rich.'

‘He has good pay, but everyone has those things, and I will too.'

She looked up at Lily with a tired defiance in her violet-shadowed eyes, her closed mouth nondescript without the bright pink lipstick.

‘Ida,' Lily leaned forwards. She could feel it coming on. She had to ask, ‘Are you sure you love him?'

‘Oh … love.' One side of Ida's mouth went up in an ugly little sneer. ‘What's love got to do with it? There, I've shocked you, haven't I? But in my situation you don't pin all your hopes on love.'

‘Has it been tough, then?'

‘Bit rough in spots.' Ida pushed back the sheet and got out of bed. Her small blunt feet were still swollen from the plane, with red dents across them from her new shoes. She went to the mirror to fiddle with her tightly permed hair, pushing it up, pulling bits of it down. It always sprang back to the same shape, like a wig above her pale bony forehead.

‘Tell me.' People needed to get stuff off their chests, and Lily was ready to listen. ‘Dear Doctor Lily…' One of her many ambitions was that one day she would have an advice column in a women's magazine. ‘Dear Doctor Lily, I have never told this to anyone before…'

‘What was it like, Eye?'

‘No worse than most, I suppose.' Ida shrugged.

‘Bad enough to make you glad to get away, though.' A statement rather than a probing question. They had done that in Preparation for Interview Techniques, Session II.

‘Knock it off, dear.' Ida's eyes met hers knowingly in the mirror. ‘I'm not a case history at your college.'

They had pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. The coffee blew Ida out again into delicate little belches behind her fingers.

‘If you didn't say “Excuse me” every time and put your hand up,' Lily muttered, ‘no one would notice.'

The two teachers from Rhode Island who sat with them did not notice anyway. They were on the edge of their chairs, wearing coats and checking their cameras and tickets and passports, their minds already ahead to arriving in Boston. The man Lily had met by the coffee machine did not even look at her. Had seeing her in her slip been too much for him? Another chance lost.

The airport was a springboard, the rocks less sinister, the ponies less deprived. In their seats by the wing, Ida and Lily held hands again as they taxied past the broken cliffs. At the end, the plane stopped for a long time before it turned and moved forwards to take off. The runway was so short, it would have to spring up like a pheasant. Ida's ring cut into Lily's fingers. The boy across the aisle clutched the arms of his seat. The coffee-machine man stared fixedly out of the window as if he would never see land again. All four propellers were going, but where was the engine's roar of power, where the speed? They would never make it.

They weren't even trying. The plane was merely trundling back along the runway, and the passengers sat back in dismay, the energy they had used to urge it off the ground wasted.

Back in the airport building, the man with the blue pullover came over and moved someone's coat and sat next to Lily. Electricity charged up through her body into the roots of her hair. Her hands trembled, so she put them in her pockets. When he spoke to her, she answered without looking at him.