Dear Doctor Lily (23 page)

The best part of the beach was going home to coffee and jelly doughnuts and a shower in the downstairs bathroom, which was stuck on at the back of the house as if it had once been a woodshed.

‘Let's put a shower in at the Dukerie, Nora.'

‘If we're talking water pressure –' she liked all these new fad phrases, although they did not suit her face or voice, ‘you're not on.'

‘Why not? Why lie in your own dirty bathwater?'

‘Speak for yourself. Because the tank's too low.'

When Paul came home, Jam would be on the porch in a clean T-shirt that said ‘I luv Cape Cod' and plaid Bermuda shorts, with his first bourbon of the day. Before Paul's car had stopped by the side of the house, the screen door would bang open and Lily would fly out with the dog, an apron over the wet swimsuit she had not bothered to take off, thick hair bouncing, the bottom half of her face smiling, the top half frowning with the intensity of her emotion. Paul would get out of the car quickly to be ready for her onslaught.

She threw herself at him and they stood as one person, embracing as desperately as if they had been parted by six months and a war and a couple of mountain ranges. The dog sat back and waited for his turn, but if Cathy had followed Lily out, her fine hair still slicked down from the sea, she poked at her mother or father until they separated far enough to let her stand between them.

Isobel and Rose Mary would be down at the bottom of the back field with Tony, the dark boy who lived on the other side
of the fence with a jumbled family and too many barking dogs. He and Isobel were very thick, although he was five years older. They climbed trees and rode bikes and built a tree-house together. Tony's mother was part American Indian, and his father was part negro.

‘You let the girls play with a black boy?' James asked Lily.

‘Shut up, you can't talk like that over here,' Lily said. ‘He's not black anyway. His grandfather came from the Cape Verde Islands, so he's Portuguese.'

‘Don't confuse the issue.' James knew black when he saw it.

One evening, Paul came home early and Tony's big sister came up to stay with the children, while the grown-ups went to. the local summer theatre. As they went in with the crowd, a glorious creature swam towards them through the men in coloured jackets and the women in flowered dresses, like a great angel fish among lesser fry.

‘Poll – and my English lily!'

‘Hullo Paige, how lovely you look. This is my mother and father. Paige Tucker.'

‘Oh, my Gahd, isn't this the most delightful thrill to meet you lovely folks?'

She put her ringed hand into Jam's. It was like holding the crown jewels. ‘Go on in, you beautiful people, I don't want you to miss a word of this fabulous show.' Her hair was a dawn cloud, her mermaid eyes were framed in glittering green paint. ‘I'll see you in the interval. Can't wait. God bless!' She blew a kiss from lips that looked as if they would taste of raspberry icecream, and swam away.

‘Puts it on a bit, doesn't she?' Nora said, as they went to their seats.

But James was wildly in love.

He sat at the end of the row and made two trips out to the gents for a glimpse of Paige Tucker, who ran the theatre and stayed out at the front by the bar or the box office. He could not risk a third time, because she might suspect prostate trouble, but there she was in the interval, asking him, in front of everyone, ‘Don't you adore the show, my dear?'

James took her jewelled hand, raised it high, and found a place to drop a kiss, with pouting lips, the way it was done.

‘It's a treat,' he said, although he had hardly been aware of the comedy. ‘Congratulations.' He might have added, ‘Dear lady,' if Nora hadn't been there.

‘I haven't had my hand kissed for years. I shan't wash it. Poll, darling, bring the folks by for a drink at my table afterwards.'

At the big round table in the bar, Jam was so enslaved that he could not worry about what Nora thought. She and Lily were talking, about the children probably. They could go on endlessly about that, just as they used to do years ago about Nora's patients and Lily's cases. For a while, before more people joined them, James sat next to Paige.

He called her Pyge, putting it on a bit to make her laugh. ‘I'm a good old cockney, in't I, Pyge?'

‘Pyge,' she echoed him. ‘Oh, I adore that. Poll, you do have the nicest fathers-in-law – oops, sorry. Rodney dear,' to one of the college-student waiters, ‘bring Pyge a double J & B, you know the way I like it.' She winked at the golden lad, as if they were having it off after hours, damn her. ‘And one for my new friend, James.'

‘Jam, they call me. Jam Spooner, Jamspoon, get it?'

She got it. She loved it. She adored it when he talked about the pub. ‘The Duke's Head – it's inspired. I can just
see
you with all those oak beams and pewter mugs. I tell you what, Jam, let's you and me start a pub here, a genuine, authentic British pub. The Pyge's Head. We'll make our fortune.'

She chatted and glittered to others, but always turned back to James. Once she took his hand, exclaimed at its size and strength and read his fortune from the palm.

‘Journey overseas. Meet a fair lady.'

‘Die in bed.' It was the best he could do. His wits were bemused and dazzled.

‘Oh, Jamspoon, you are too much. Whose bed?'

Luckily she turned away to call to someone across the room. Nora was giving James one of her steady looks across the table. Lily and Paul were laughing together about something. Lily wore a white dress with a low square neck that showed a lot of smooth, sun-tanned flesh. How lovely she was, and my God, she looked fully mature, grown up at last at thirty-two. How can I be the father of a ripe woman almost half-way through her life?

When the pianist took a break, Paul went up to the piano and played at someone's request, ‘They Try to Tell Us We're Too Young'.

‘Thank God we're not.' Pyge leaned her head sideways, so that James was in a cloud of fine hair, like a scented Scotch mist. ‘I wouldn't want to have to go through that agony again for anything, would you?'

‘Not when it can be like this.' Jam was either drunk or insane. He felt about seventeen.

Next day, Pyge rang. She rang!

‘For you, Gramps.' Isobel came in with her curled-lip face. ‘Some old woman. She sounds kinda weird.'

‘Cynthia Pigott.' An ex-neighbour in Granada Road, the reason he had to leave Wimbledon, he sometimes boasted. ‘How could she track me down here?'

It was Pyge.

Tonight was the last night of the comedy. She knew how much he and his lovely wife had enjoyed it. It was sold out, but she would leave their name with the usher and they could drop in and stand at the back for that priceless last act, and stay for the farewell cast party.

‘Bring Poll and that darling Lily, of course. See you, Jam-spoon!'

Lily did not want to go. ‘You and Mum have fun without us. You can take my car.'

Jam's day went by in exaltation: at the soda-fountain, where Dodo was impressed that he had met Pyge, on the beach, on the porch, teaching the girls and Tony to play cricket in the field with a baseball bat and a rubber ball.

‘I thought you had lumbago,' Nora called from one of the bedrooms where she was changing sheets.

‘Instant cure. I am your young and sprightly bridegroom.'

While the children were looking for the ball in the long grass, James ran up the stairs and pushed Nora back on the bed for a passionate kiss. Better keep her sweet and unsuspecting, swine that he was. Impotent? Who said?

He could not take in much more of the comedy's last act than he had the first time round. Afterwards, in the bar, he did not get
the chance to be next to Pyge, but sitting opposite, he talked and joked with the actors and kept up with their back-and-forth wisecracks in a way that would have left the dull-witted lot at the Duke standing. At the crowded, noisy table, he was playing to an audience of one, and Pyge knew it.

You could hardly blame Nora for wanting to go home. Back at the house, she undressed before James did, and climbed into bed and was asleep almost at once, the lines on her good, familiar face, which was getting to look quite old when she was tired, smoothed out under the window in the light from a million stars, many more than you ever saw at home.

Lily and Paul were asleep. Feeling like Lily's son, James crept past her door and went out and drove the few miles back to the theatre.

There was only a scattering of people at the tables in the bar. Pyge and the actors had gone on to a night spot.

‘Where?' The barman did not know. ‘Did she leave a message for me? I'm with Mrs Tucker. Where can I find them?'

‘Who knows?' The barman's face, whose style of moustache had gone out with William Powell, indicated, ‘If you were, you should know where she's gone.'

‘The joys of love,'
Jonesey used to sing at the George, when the mood of the bar was not too rowdy,
'are all too brief. The pain of love is a long, long grief.'

James suffered all Sunday. Nora reported on how many J & Bs he had consumed the night before. They all thought he was hung over, so he went along with that, lest they should guess at the agonies of love that gnawed at his vitals.

He would not go to the beach. ‘I ache all over.' The rocking-chair creaked like a dirge. ‘Sick as a dog, Nora.'

‘Spirits are six per cent stronger here, you know, and a single's like our double.'

‘I may be sickening for something.'

‘Keep away from the children, then, if you've got a little virus. We don't want to spoil their holiday.'

‘I pray I may never get cancer, Nora. You'd pass it off as Jam's little lump.'

That evening, Tony Andrade, whose mother was part Wam-panoag Indian, took Paul and his family to the pow-wow in the town of Mashpee. Tony's mother wore an Indian dress with a lot of beads and fringes and was called Princess Laughing Owl, instead of Betty Andrade. After the children had sung and danced in a more or less tribal way, Tony's father started the famous fireball game.

He brought out a huge ball of tightly packed rags which had been soaking for days in kerosene, lit it with a wild cry and hurled it on to the grass, where dozens of children kicked it about, shrieking with joy and fear. The ball flared as it rolled, and the skittering brown legs flickered and jumped in the flame and shadow, as if they were part of the fire.

Cathy clung with her arms around Paul's legs, and Rose Mary held Lily's hand, white-faced, but Isobel was out there with Tony, running and shouting and pushing small bodies out of her way. The only time she got near the fireball, she swerved away and Tony kicked it for her, and she grabbed his shirt and ran behind him into the zigzagging mass of dervish children.

A bigger boy scooped up the ball and threw it. A wild girl with flying plaits kicked it under a car.

A drawn-out, ‘O-o-oh' from the crowd. The children fell back. What now? Paul saw the lumbering figure of James, who had tagged along to the pow-wow with no enthusiasm, suddenly stumble out from the line of watching grown-ups and throw himself flat to pull out the fireball and hurl it away before the car blew up.

‘Who's that?'

‘Who's the hero?'

‘That's a junk car anyway. No gas in it.'

Poor Jam had burned his hand, and it had to be soaked in bicarbonate and bandaged by Nora. She treated him tenderly, although he winced and squealed and told her, ‘Good thing you gave up nursing to pull pints.'

Poor old James was still a bit off-colour on Monday. When Paul
left for work, he found his father-in-law up early and sitting on the swing in the maple tree, moodily drinking tea with the bag still in the mug.

‘How's the hand?'

‘Terrible.' He raised a bundle from his lap that was a scarf tied clumsily over Nora's neat bandage.

Before Paul reached the Bourne bridge, the traffic was clotting. Commuting from the Cape was dangerous in bad winters, and hell on wheels in the summer; but thousands of people did it now, and it was worth it to come back in the evening to the narrow land where Paul felt completely at home, as if he had been a fisherman or a saltmaker or an old Wampanoag Indian in a former life.

On a couple of evenings, Paige had lent him the nice little chestnut horse she kept at a stable near the theatre, and he had rented another quiet one for Lily, so that they could ride together.

She was learning well. She could ride a better horse. Paige's chestnut could ‘walk a hole in the wind', but Lily's plain brown horse was used to pottering along yards behind with beginners who did not know how to use their legs. Lily talked all the time when they were walking, so that Paul had to sit turned in his saddle, holding the chestnut back, which made it jog fretfully.

‘It's easier to make a slow horse walk fast than a fast horse walk slow. Kick him, Lily. Here, I'll pick you a stick. Whack him down the shoulder.'

Lily kicked and whacked. The brown horse was impervious.

Next time, he asked the stable for a better horse, and it ran away with Lily on the long stretch of grass that used to be an airstrip. Paul held the chestnut back with difficulty, so as not to race. He caught up with Lily as her horse slowed and swerved at the end of the field and stopped, and suddenly put its head down to tear at grass, although it was winded and blowing.

Lily fell off down its neck and leaned against the wet, heaving sides.

‘My God, are you all right?' Watching someone else in trouble was much worse than being in trouble yourself. Paul had been in an agony of anxiety. ‘Why couldn't you stop him? He must have a mouth like iron.'

‘I wanted to gallop,' Lily lied. Her hair-clip had come out, and her thick front hair was over her face. ‘I wanted to go fast.'

‘In that case, you don't charge off without telling the other person.' Anxiety turned swiftly to anger. ‘If you're going to learn to ride, you've got to do it properly, or I'll be damned if I'll bother to teach you.'