Dear Doctor Lily (33 page)

Duggie's Dog Show was the
pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance.
Doggie's Dug Show. There were ten classes, and although the drizzle became rain, they went through every one of them.

Terry's job was to get the paid-up entries into the ring and see that they did what they were supposed to do, and did not go for each other's throats.

In the Fancy Dress class, Lady S-S led round a black Labrador wearing a frill on its collar and a limp ballet skirt. Blanche had made a tiny saddle for the terrier with the long prick, and fastened a jockey doll astride it. On the end of the leash, Blanch, always ready to enter into the spirit of things for the communal good, took off her raincoat to reveal herself also dressed as a jockey. Children had dogs they couldn't control in wet ribbons and melting paper hats.

The judge, who wore a sailing slicker with a hood and visor that prevented her or him seeing more than the tips of his/her green boots, wanted to give all the prizes to the smaller children, but the grown-ups wouldn't have it. The Comic Dog Show might be fun for the kids, but it was deadly serious for the adults.

‘Choose on merit,' Terry heard Duggie mutter into the judge's hood. ‘At least give a second to Lady S.'

‘Fuck her,' Terry thought he heard the judge say.

Obedience was a farce. Dog Looking Most Like Owner was equally insulting to the dog and the owner. The classes thinned out. Gradually all the spectators disappeared.

‘You're a brick, Terence,' Duggie said when it was over at last. ‘Just take the shovel and clean up the dog mess from her Ladyship's lawn, will you, there's a good chap.'

Like hell, I will. Terry stuck the shovel into an impenetrable bush, where it would not be discovered until next winter, and went into the back of the great house.

Nora and various other women in aprons were handing out tea and cakes in a prehistoric stone-floored kitchen, where you might find one of Henry VIII's chewed drumsticks, or debauched serving wenches under a table.

‘Sod this,' a hoarse voice said in Terry's ear, as he waited in line at the tea urn. ‘Come on out to the van and have a drink.'

Terry turned to see who the voice spoke to, and found it spoke to him, out of the mouth of a youth in a heavy rain-beaded sweater with leather patches stuck all over it in unlikely places.

The van was up to its hub-caps in mud in the barnyard of the great house. In the back, on the carpeted floor, were another guy and two girls and some bottles and cans of beer.

What they were doing at the church fete was anyone's guess, unless they were picking pockets. They had Terry marked out, apparently.

‘You're from the Duke's Head, in't you?'

‘Uh-huh.' The Scotch tasted good. Terry was as soaked as a seal, seeing the world through wet lashes.

‘We don't go to the ‘ead. They grass for the pigs,' the girl with the snakes of hair said.

‘How old are you?'

They were younger than Terry. Too young to drink legally, but they seemed to have plenty of practice at it, and no lack of supplies.

The weight lifted slowly up through the middle of Terry's vitals and out through the top of his head. The crushing picture of Lily and his father blew away in a wisp of smoke. His first joint since he left the States. How had he survived?

Terry was with these amazing kids for two or three days (he lost count), and screwed, or was screwed, twice – one success, one miserable failure – by Sue on the carpet in the back of the van. Or was it the one with the snakes?

They drove around the nastier parts of this tract of England, and sometimes went into pubs that were not so totalitarian as the Duke's Head, and got beer and pork pies. Terry was drunk or high most of the time. Once or twice, he surfaced to wonder if he ought to tell someone where he was (where was he?), but his father was off with the tight-crotch riding breeches set, and Blanche and Lily's parents were probably glad to have a break from him.

When James found him in the cold, grubby public bar of the Three Feathers, he didn't say ‘Hello' or ‘Where have you been?' He walked up to the bar and asked for a pint of Old Peculier, and did not turn around until he was half-way through it.

Terry was on a bench in the corner with Peter and Sue. Sue's face looked like empty paper. She had washed her hair in the ladies' room toilet tank because there was no water in the basin, and was drying it on her purple scarf.

‘Ready?' Jam asked, as if the meeting were planned.

‘Sure.' Terry got up and followed him out.

Jam did not take him to Blanche's house. He put him to bed at the cottage, and told Nora he had flu. All next day, he dosed him with some terrible oily stuff that got rid of everything inside Terry between his navel and his spine.

James Spooner's life had taken three turns for the better in the last two and a half years. First, he had fallen in love with Pyge – brief, but rejuvenating. Then he had signed up with Faces and begun to make up for fifty years of not being appreciated. Then he had met Evelina Rudd, and it was a good thing he'd already had that bit of a do with Pyge, or he might have thought he was past it.

It came about like this. For a year, he had been hoping to get
his Equity card, so that he could do more than just background work in television commercials and films. But Equity wouldn't give you a card unless you could show a few contracts, and you couldn't get a contract without an Equity card.

Henrietta at Faces had told James that he might be able to squeeze through if he could develop the performances he had done in the George at Wimbledon ‘by popular demand', i.e. when Nigel could get people to shut up and listen. He might get into Equity on the variety side, if he could get a few paid pub engagements.

Obviously the landlord of the Duke's Head couldn't go round singing ‘The Parson's Lady' in other boozers, but why shouldn't he employ himself in his own pub?

‘We'd ought to get a piano in the bar, Nora. Liven this place up a bit.'

‘It's not that kind of pub.'

‘But –'

‘In any way, shape or form.'

‘Why not? They loved it at the George.'

‘Wimbledon is not South Oxfordshire. This old place is historic, James, in case you've not noticed. It's been like this since time in memoriam.'

‘But with Paul coming over in a few months?' James suggested cunningly. ‘You know how he loves to play.'

Nora adored Paul. He took more notice of her than most people, who had got used to her always working quietly and contentedly at something, in the house or in the pub.

‘No piano.'

‘No piano, Sergeant.' James saluted.

He had read in one of Nora's women's magazines that if you gave in over the little things, it was easier to get your own way when it counted. He used this as an excuse to himself for letting Nora have the last word.

For a while, he toyed with the idea of trying to buy an Equity ticket from the family of a member who had died. It had been done before, when no picture had been sent to the union. Then he met a black man at a stills session, where they were both photographed from the back, looking up at a hoarding. While
they were getting cricks in their necks, waiting for the photographer to get his angles right, the other model told Jam he had got into Equity on the variety side by doing conjuring and ventriloquism for children's homes and private parties.

When James got home, he poured himself a glass of barley wine, ‘builder of brainpower' – he often thought in advertising slogans now – took a packet of shrimp-flavoured crisps off the rack, and sat down in the empty public bar to have a think.

He wouldn't have the nerve to perform for kids. They could see through you, just like he always could when he was a boy.

‘Too sharp by half.' His mother had clipped him when he spoiled the conjurer's act at a birthday party. ‘Know it all, you do.' Then she had bought him a bag of sweets on the way home. ‘At least you don't take after your father. You get it from me.'

Well, now she knew nothing, poor old dear, except her room at the old people's home, and a wet bed when the so-called nurses were busy. Shocking place.

Guilt. Hullo, my old unnecessary friend. James shoved it aside. He was too occupied with his career to go to Devizes just now. Poor old batty Ma, who used to do the crosswords and send in for newspaper competitions. ‘Complete this limerick.' ‘Put a caption to this picture.' Terrible to get so old that people forgot what you were really like. All those old folk, pushed away out of sight. Left to their own Devizes, ha ha.

Ha
ha!
Got it.

Nora was out shopping, so it was safe to use the bar phone. She went along with Jam's career, of course, but he didn't want funny looks and commonsense advice at this stage.

He rang Henrietta at Faces. She was always available. Lived and breathed the job, in the office at all hours, except when she was off bullying a film producer, hard as nails behind that baby face.

‘What about me doing some concerts at old people's homes, to get my ticket?'

‘If you think anyone would pay you.'

‘Worth a try. Song and dance, monologues, the spoons, that style of thing.'

‘They might pay you not to.' Henrietta's deep masculine laugh came out of her flat dancer's belly. ‘It's no wonder I love you,
Jamspoon.' She was on that footing with almost everyone. It didn't mean a thing.

‘Olde tyme numbers. Take ‘em back, poor old dears. Puppet shows. I can do all the voices.'

‘Just as well most of them will be deaf.'

James went to Soho and bought three hand puppets – old man and woman, young girl – with rather disgusting, crude caricature faces, but they were cheapish, and you couldn't be too subtle for this type of audience. The old-lady puppet looked like Edward Heath in drag.

The material he had used at the George would get him thrown out of the kind of places where his poor Ma lived out her unwanted days. He took a look at some song sheets and joke books, and found some old Stanley Holloway monologues and songs. Just the ticket. Just the ticket for the ticket. Clean, but comic. Saucy and sentimental. Music-hall stuff. The old dears would eat it up.

From the council offices, James got a list of geriatric warehouses in a wide area, not too close to home. It was hard to get anyone to talk about even a small fee, but he started out by going round gratis to test the waters and get his hand in, and soon they would be begging him to come back, and would tell their chums in the golden-age racket.

Testing the waters was about it, he thought to himself grimly, manipulating the old-gent puppet and singing, ‘Champagne Charlie is my name, champagne drinking is my game, there's no drink as good as fizz! fizz! fizz!' to a semi-circle of bewildered old ducks, some of whom sat with their legs apart and their skirts ridden up to show the urine bags strapped to the unpromising inside of their scrawny thighs.

‘You'd like to meet my missus,' he sang to them in an old man's voice.

But she can't get away,

She's working late tonight cos it's the other girl's ‘arf day.

Nah, you wouldn't call her tall,

In fact, she's rather small,

But ‘er ‘eart is much bigger than ‘er brain.

It was hard going, but he worked on his accents and droll voices, until some of the patter really came out comic. The nurses, glad of a break, shrieked with laughter and fell about. Some of the audience were asleep, or dead. Some were anxious about when tea would come. A few of the prize patients wagged their heads and cackled.

Why did people who had once been perfectly sensible take to cackling in old age? You heard them being interviewed on the radio. ‘Oh, yes, I've seen it all, cackle, cackle. In my time, there weren't no lorries through here at all, just the trams, cackle.'

‘Nora,' he begged, returning home, ‘you won't let me cackle when I'm old, will you?'

‘No, dear.' She was at the stove, her haunches square and familiar under the apron strings.

‘I've had a hard day.' They had given him a cup of tea, but no biscuits. ‘What's for my supper?'

He and Nora had to eat their evening meal separately, taking turns while the other was in the bar.

‘That's for me to know, and you to guess.'

‘Don't
say
that.'

‘Would you rather I said, last night's shepherd's, hotting up?'

‘Spare me. Here, I'll get things going in the bars. Do me a mixed grill, there's a love.' He advanced and put his arms round her warm waist. ‘Got a kidney in the freezer?'

‘Oh,
you.'
Stirring custard, she turned her face and leaned back to kiss him.

Irresistible, you see. She couldn't resist him. Cackle, cackle.

He put a scarf over the old-lady puppet's wild white hair and worked up a cackle routine – for the bar on Saturday night, not for the nursing homes.

The sight of all those old relics brought forth the lurking guilt about his mother that pounced out for an ell if he ever gave it an inch. He asked the manager of the home in Devizes whether he could come and entertain. Kill two birds.

‘My usual fee –' he began on the phone.

‘Oh, but I'm afraid we –' she countered.

These sentences seldom needed to be completed. So far the
only money he had got was from a rather posh place full of vicars' widows, to whom he had rendered ‘Get Me to the Church on Time'.

Some of them were not too far gone to enjoy a little tap dancing. Jam still had a few steps – ending with a cramp roll and a couple of buffaloes off to the right, but he could hardly work the clutch on the way home.

In Devizes, they got Ma up into a chair and wheeled her out, to sit with her face hanging out of her head like a bulldog, glowering and fumbling with the lap rug.

Oh, God, it was horrible. She was a lump in the chair, sliding sideways like a blancmange, nothing to do with the strong, vigorous survivor who had been security and mate to James after his father skipped. Not fair to the stocky, cocky girl in her wedding picture, grinning up at her tall husband – look what I got! – to obliterate that memory with this.