Dear Doctor Lily (4 page)

‘I'm not scared to stand before you this morning.' Mort's voice was unusually loud. His little beard waggled. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your plane is on the runway.'

Cheers and excitement, and in the stampede out of the mess hall, Paul and Lily came together out of sight in the corner by the dispensing machines, and he kissed her once, gravely.

‘My heart is broken,' Lily said.

‘No, it isn't,' he said kindly.

‘Will you come to London again?'

‘I doubt it. I was only there for the trade fair.'

‘And even if you did …?'

‘Yeah. Even if.'

He let her go and stood back so she could walk out. She looked round. I will never forget this place, never. She bent down and picked up a plastic spoon off the floor and put it in her pocket. The dream was over.

The engines started, all four of them, with not even a ragged cheer from the passengers, because it wasn't funny or frightening any more.

Lily took Ida's hand and ran her finger over the courageous little ring. ‘Look, Eye,' she said, under cover of the engines revving up at the end of the runway. ‘You know, perhaps you shouldn't marry him, if you're not really sure.'

‘Who
says?'
Ida pulled her hand away.

‘Well –
you
did. I mean, last night.'

Fool, fool. Put your foot in it again. Dear Doctor Lily and her advice column, forgot one of the basic rules – don't remind people what they said. Yesterday's leftovers are not today's hot lunch.

‘But I mean.' She had to plod on, to make sure she had done everything she could to rescue “Ida from possible disaster, willing or not. ‘Marriage is the rest of your life
(I'd never do anything to hurt Barbara).
You haven't got to go through with it, if you –'

‘Leave me alone.' Ida set her pink mouth in a sucked-in grimace that looked as if she had no teeth. ‘I didn't tell you not to make a sketch of yourself with that fellow all over the Air Force building.'

‘I didn't.' Having started this wretched conversation feeling like Ida's grandmother, Lily felt absurdly young again. ‘I'm sorry, Eye, I was only trying to help.'

‘I know.' Ida turned and gave Lily her crooked smile. ‘But you got to learn to leave people alone.'

‘That won't get me far as a social worker.'

They both laughed, and Paul looked across at them, and then away.

‘Good thing too,' Ida said.

The plane roared to a crescendo. The broken cliffs approached, slid by, sped past, the black buff ahead menaced them and then gave up and dropped out of sight as they soared.

Paul got off the plane ahead of Lily, who could not get up until Ida finally managed to squash her feet into the new shoes. She saw him in the baggage hall, going through customs, and
followed him through the narrow exit where the crowd waited, forcing herself to look for his wife. Barbara would be small and chic, with tiny feet and hands and short crisp hair in overlapping leaves. The child would toddle forwards, and his father would put down his bag and briefcase and bend to pick him up.

Paul walked out through the glass outer door alone, and disappeared among the crowd of taxis and cars. He had not looked behind him.

‘Lily!' It was Pam's brother, looking different in America, wearing a loose old jersey and torn grey tennis shoes. ‘Where the hell have you been? Don't bother to tell me. We kept calling the airline and telling them for God's sake, you'd got to be here for the great day tomorrow. C'mon.' He took Lily's suitcase. ‘We'll just make it to Pam's last supper if we drive fast.'

By the time Ida had got through customs with her two suitcases, she had lost Lily and was on her own in the crowd of passengers and greeters. She had to have a porter, but she had no money to pay him until she found Buddy. Suppose he wasn't here? Suppose he had given her up and gone back to Watkins A.F. Base, Mass?

‘See your party, miss?' The friendly black porter stopped his trolley.

Ida looked everywhere, moving this way and that to see past groups of people gathered round passengers, talking noisily, small children clamouring at ground level. No Buddy. No patch of grey-blue, moving rather stiffly, as he did when he was in uniform.

‘He'll be here, I know he will.' Did the porter think she had been ditched?

‘Sure he will.' The porter took her bags off the trolley. ‘I have to go help another party.'

‘But I can't pay you till I –'

‘Don't worry about it. I'll be back. Just look for me on your way out. You'll be okay.'

He was huge and kind and dignified and safe, like Jarvis Murray at the bottom of Staple Street, whose daughter had taught Ida to jive. When he had gone, Ida stood by her luggage as if she were on a tiny desert island, and wondered if she would recognize Buddy, even if he were here. They hadn't seen each other all that many times, and people didn't look the same over here anyway. Mrs Bison had put on dark glasses and crimson lipstick. Wally, talking to a man in a black suit by the phones, didn't look so jovial.

Where was Lily? She had wanted to meet Buddy. Why hadn't she waited? Ida's feet were in agony. She kicked off her shoes and stood with them in her hand, searching, waiting, not
knowing where to go if she moved from this spot.

A shortish man was walking down the main hall, frowning as he came towards her. She looked him right in the face before she recognized the heavy eyebrows that ran into each other over his short nose and made his eyes look close together. Buddy out of uniform, in a plaid wool jacket over neat dark green trousers.

Too late, she lifted her face into her closed-mouth smile and held out her arms with her shoes in one hand. He knew she had not recognized him.

He looked not like himself. A stranger. Her heart battered against her flat chest in a panic to escape.

‘Ida,' he said, in that way he said it, half-way between Ahda and Eyeda, putting two slurred syllables into the
I
.

‘Hullo.'

‘Where the hell have you been? I've been out of my mind. When I didn't get no call from you, I thought, hell, what's going on here?'

‘I did send a cable.'

‘Where to?'

‘The Air Force base.'

‘So how could I be there if I was here, waiting for you? What the hell. Put your shoes on.'

‘They hurt. Aren't you going to say hullo?'

Ida stepped over the box and he put his arms round her, and now he did feel familiar, his arms like iron bands, his body pushing at her. He smelled of beer. He only kissed her very briefly because he was angry. His round childish face was petulant, the lips pushed out, the frown a dark roof over his aggrieved brown eyes.

‘I know, I know, but I'm here, aren't I? And it wasn't my fault.'

‘Well, shit,' he said. ‘It's a hell of a way to start our life.'

‘Oh, shut up, stupid. It's all right now. I'm here. Everything's all right.'

His frown softened. His pouting mouth relaxed into his smile for her, teasing, head on one side, wanting favours. Not a giving smile, it wasn't, though. An asking one.

Ida struggled into her shoes and the porter came back and
wheeled her luggage outside. Buddy didn't tip him enough, and the porter said, ‘That'll be two bucks more, mac,' quite happily. In England the porter wouldn't say, ‘Give me another two quid, mate.' He would just walk away and hate you.

While Buddy went to get the car, Ida stood with her bags, loosening first one shoe, then the other, and panicked again. What if he never came back? What if he was so browned off that he got into the two-tone blue Plymouth and drove away and left her in a foreign land? She couldn't just turn round and take the plane back to England, as if it were the tube.

In England, she had thought she was quite tough, fighting for survival, fending off her family, getting that job in the hotel, chucking Jackson when it was obvious he was going to be nailed for the car theft. Here, she felt like a beginner. Buddy seemed to need her. That was surprising. She needed him, and until she'd found her feet here, she would have to get used to that. A dependant, she would be, as an Air Force wife, and that was how she felt, as cars and taxis and buses crowded past, three abreast, or stopped and picked up passengers, until finally she would be alone on this bit of pavement with her borrowed suitcases, which looked revoltingly shabby compared to other people's luggage.

‘Walked out on you, has he, Ida?' Wally grabbed her arm and squeezed it. He was a great one for grabbing and touching and moving his foot about under the table. ‘Come on with me, then, ho ho.' He wagged his head roguishly, and winked at the man in the black suit, who looked Ida up and down very coolly and said, ‘C'mon, Wal, better get a cab right away if we're going to make that meeting.'

‘Can't leave this little lady alone.'

‘My friend is fetching the car.' Fiancé was a stupid word. Ida had not been able to say it, even at work, when she had shown her ring at the tea-break in the housekeeper's room.

‘This is my girlfriend,' Wally kept on. ‘We've been bundling with the Eskimos, haven't we, Idaho?'

He had his arm round her shoulders when a huge blue car slid up to the kerb, and Buddy sprang out and bounced over the pavement like a frenzied ape.

‘Get in the car,' he told Ida curtly. ‘I'll get the bags.'

‘You must be whatsisname,' Wally said genially. ‘Put it there. You've got a wonderful little –'

‘What's it to you, mister?' Buddy pushed between Wally and Ida and shoved her towards the car. She started to get into the passenger seat, but the steering wheel was there and she had to go round. Buddy threw her stuff into the back and got in, seething. She had never seen him like this, except once in a pub, when someone made a feeble joke about America, and he had raised his fists and shaken them in a ridiculous way, and the joker had laughed and pushed them down and bought him a pint.

They drove off among the traffic sweeping away from the airport.

‘This car's huge,' Ida said.

‘Bigger than those toys in your country, maybe. Small for here.'

So it was. Some of the other cars were enormous. A long black job, with hatchet-faced men in the back, took about five minutes to pass them.

‘Mafia,' Buddy said.

‘They've got a crucifix hanging in the back window.'

‘Natch.'

Like water going into a drain, twelve lines of cars crowded two abreast into an endless tunnel, where a man walked moodily along a raised walk, deafened by noise and choked with fumes. Ida said nothing. There was nothing to say. Her eyes closed, but Buddy wouldn't like it if she went to sleep yet. He did not speak. His right hand, the one with the big service ring, which Ida's mother had said was sissy, tapped on the wheel. Out of the tunnel, they went up on to a road on stilts that stalked across the city on a level with the roofs of houses and the middle of office buildings.

‘Is this Boston, then?'

‘Where else? Real hick town,' Buddy said.

Ida thought it looked exciting. ‘Lily says it's the next best to New York,' Ida said.

‘Who's Lily?' He had nothing but contempt for the name.

‘She and I shared a room at Flekjavik.' Ida pronounced it glibly. ‘She's ever so nice. I wanted you to meet her.'

‘And I suppose old knucklehead with the wandering hands was in the room too, was he?'

‘Oh, shut up. What do you think I am?'

‘I don't know. I don't trust you. I don't trust any woman.' Buddy had a built-in saga about what women were like.

‘But I'm going to marry you.'

‘Yeah.' He sighed. ‘I'll be glad when it's over and we'll be on our own at Watkins.'

Driving north, they passed a sign that said Peabody. That was where Lily was going, somewhere near there, she had said. When they said goodbye, they had told each other, ‘See you again some time, somehow, somewhere.' She ought to have waited for Ida. ‘I want to see Airman Second Class B. Legge,' she had declared, and then forgotten. Perhaps just as well, since B. Legge had been so angry. Lily would have tried to make the best of him, and said something embarrassing like, ‘I know you two will make each other very happy.'

Dream days. You make your own happiness in this world. Or not, as the case may be.

‘Peabody,' Ida said. ‘That's where Lily was going.'

‘So what's so great about this Lily?' Buddy asked without interest. ‘You and she have a good time?'

Although she knew so little about Buddy, Ida knew enough not to say, ‘It was fun.' She said, ‘I was worried about you.'

Buddy's driving profile looked self-satisfied, which was how he looked when he was pleased.

‘Love me?' Ida risked.

‘I guess so. I tell you, kid, I've got the hots for you.'

He took her hand and put it in his lap. That was different, though, that wasn't love, the sort Lily talked about, but it would do for now.

They drove endlessly to reach New Hampshire. America was too big. Ida slept, waking two or three times to see towns, villages, then hills, and a sunset like a picture postcard. Then darkness the next time she woke, the headlights tracking the road, hundreds of pairs of other headlights approaching, passing, the wireless drumming out a perpetual beat, without any tune. Stupefied,
half awake, half asleep, she felt the car going up a hill, swinging round a lot of bends. It stopped with a soft crunch, and she had to open her eyes.

In the black night, a small house stood by itself at the side of the road, yellow light coming out of the windows on to a veranda with wooden pillars and some wooden steps. Buddy got out and came round to Ida's side, to pull her out of the car.

‘Come on in and meet my folks.'

‘I'm scared.' This was the worst part so far.