Dear Doctor Lily

MONICA DICKENS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

When she was eighteen, Lily went to the United States. In the early sixties, London Airport was still a fairly romantic muddle of small buildings and temporary wooden sheds left over from the war. People wandered about in a leisurely way, carefully dressed for travelling, because flying was still an event, instead of a trauma to be survived in old clothes and flat shoes. There was room and time for everybody. You could arrive late if you wanted, and hop on your plane at the last minute, as if you were catching a bus.

Lily, a naïve, passionate adventurer, with smooth brown hair fastened back from her innocent round forehead and the frame of her glasses loose, was anxious to shake off her parents and go forth alone, to be whoever she wanted to be. But James and Nora stuck to her closely, as you could in those days when there was no formal security, breathing behind her neck while she stood at the counter, walking down corridors where she wanted to run, strolling with her across the tarmac, her father carrying her bag and hoping people would think he was a passenger.

‘Hurry.' Other people were ahead of Lily, climbing on to the plane. ‘It might go without me.'

‘Knock it off, you've paid for your ticket.' Her father slowed, his huge hand dragging at her arm. ‘My ankle's acting up.'

Lily shook him off, dragged the bag from his shoulder, kissed them both quickly and ran, the bag bumping against her leg.

At the top of the steps, on her own at last, she looked down at them from a world away. The little people of England, unambitious, safe. Daddy in the Post Office. Mum a State-enrolled nurse. Neither of them had ever dreamed of doing any of the amazing things that Lily was going to do in the remarkable life ahead of her.

She waved, turned away, put up a practised middle finger to push her glasses back on to her nose and stepped into the plane.

It smelled of cooking, electricity, rubbery fabric and manufactured air. Up front, three men in white shirtsleeves were gods in the cockpit. When one of them turned to reach for something behind his narrow seat, Lily quickly looked away, as if a lavatory door had been left open.

‘Seat 23B.'

‘Yes, I know.' Lily gave the hostess a breathy smile. Had known, as soon as they gave her the number that in the seat next to her would sit a person of excitement and promise.

Half-way down the plane, she put her coat and bag on the rack, sat down and dared to look. By the window, the person of promise was only a pallid girl with dry curly hair and a mouth painted on like a rose, with small crooked teeth inside.

Oh well. Lily could not have coped with a man anyway, let alone an exciting one.

‘I'm glad you've come.' The narrow starved-looking face, which made Lily's cheeks feel as wide as pillows, turned to her eagerly. ‘I thought I'd sit alone. I couldn't have stood that for seventeen hours. My name's Ida Lott. Do you want to say yours? It's quite exciting isn't it, this big plane and everyone so matter of fact as if it happened every day. Well, it does of course, but not to me.' Her rosebud mouth closed carefully over the crooked front teeth. Her watchful eyes were set far back in shadows.

‘Nor to me.'

‘I'm too nervous.' Ida was a good bit older than Lily and the shadowed eyes were not born yesterday, but now Lily felt responsible. ‘It's my first flight too,' she reassured her. ‘I'm going across for a wedding.'

‘Don't be daft. So am I.'

‘A friend of mine from school is getting married. Is yours family or a friend?'

‘Well.' Ida looked down at her hands. The ring! It blazed like a tiny headlight on her thin finger. ‘Me.'

‘Oh, how romantic.'

‘Yes.' Ida kept her head down and raised her eyes sideways. ‘I suppose it is, really.'

‘It's the most romantic thing I ever heard of.'

Ida giggled, and put her left hand over her mouth. To show the ring? To hide her teeth?

Lily bought Ida a gin and lime, and they had an intriguing meal of small unsuitable dishes, and Lily got gravy on her skirt and mayonnaise on the floppy bow of her grey and white dress. Afterwards, people got up and milled about, lining up for the lavatories as if the drinks and food had gone straight through them. When most of the passengers had settled down to read or sleep, Ida got her pictures out of a new shiny black handbag and told Lily about Bernard Legge, who was Airman Second Class at Watkins Air Force Base in Massachusetts.

‘Well, everyone calls him Buddy, and I do too. “I, Ida, take thee, Buddy.”' She giggled. ‘What do you think of that?'

‘I think it's marvellous.' Lily imagined herself stepping off the plane into the arms of a man in uniform with whom she would walk away, leaving everything behind. She thought about going home in five days' time, different because she had been to America, and finding everyone the same. Daddy going to work on his bike, Mum still on the night shift, same old back and forth about when to have supper, and no one at college even remembering that she had been away, until she asked to copy their lecture notes. ‘What's he like?'

‘He's very nice, really. It's a new life.'

Because of the gin, Ida told Lily a few things about the grim life in Staple Street, Stafford, from which she had been rescued by going to an Air Force dance and meeting Buddy.

His picture in uniform showed a babydoll face unsuitably garnished by a bar of dark eyebrows that met over his inconsiderable little snout of a nose.

‘Do you love him?' Lily liked to risk direct questions.

‘Yes, thank you,' Ida said politely. ‘And he says he loves me. “You're kinda cute,” he says, “I guess I love ya.” Though I don't see why he should really, because I'm not much of a –'

‘Don't fish,' Lily said sternly.

‘Excuse
me
.' Ida lowered her long mauve lids and went to sleep.

Leaning sideways against the window, she was very slight and exhausted looking in her new pink suit with the bon voyage
carnation slewed sideways on the lapel. Her tightly curled wedding hair had risen too high. With a narrow bony forehead like that, she would have looked less vulnerable with a fringe. In spite of Buddy Legge and Staple Street, Stafford, Lily still felt protective, enclosed with Ida in the private pocket of their seats, cut off by the high backs in front and behind. Beyond the window the curved grey edge of the plane's wing, with frost on the rivets, was the only reminder that they were divorced from the earth. The circular blurs of the two propellers bore them faithfully through icy space, while Lily watched over Ida palely sleeping, and speculated on whether she needed help – a commodity Lily was always poised to hand out. She was training to be a social worker. While she was waiting to save the world, she could start with Ida Lott.

She slept and woke after what seemed only a few minutes of dreams that hustled her with sharp instructing voices, but her watch had gone ahead two hours. Ida was still asleep. Lily leaned forwards to look at the sturdy wing and the propellers. The circular blur nearest the window was gone. Blades were there, three of them, standing still in the moving air that vibrated their curved tips slightly.

Lily woke Ida. ‘Don't look now,' she muttered, ‘but look out there.'

Ida's heavy eyelids, curved like mauve shells, lifted slowly. She turned her head to the window without moving her head.

‘They give it a rest now and again, I daresay,' she said and closed her eyes.

Lily shook her again and whispered, ‘Something's wrong. It's not supposed to be like that.' She watched the blade outside the window to see if it started up again, or dropped off. ‘Do you suppose they know?' She leaned away to look down the aisle. Passengers all in their seats, not a stewardess in sight. ‘What shall we do?'

‘Don't ask me. I've never flown before.'

‘Nor have I.'

‘Are you upset?' Ida took hold of Lily's arm. Her finger nails were painted to match the pink suit, but bitten.

‘No,' Lily lied, because she was the leader, and if she was upset, Ida would be upset.

The boy on the other side of the aisle had his painful adolescent face bent into a magazine, scowling. Lily stretched a hand across to him.

‘I say.'

The boy's face flared, but he hunched his shoulders and pretended not to hear. Beyond him, a man with his jacket off was reading a book. Lily leaned behind the youth's back and said, ‘I'm sorry to bother you.'

The man had thick fair hair and narrow blue eyes whose colour was intensified by his cornflower-blue pullover. A woman must have bought it for him. ‘One of the propellers isn't going round.'

‘My God.'

‘Do you think they know?'

‘Hope so.' He was American.

He got up to look, then stepped over the boy's legs and started forwards along the plane. Something about him made Lily and Ida feel as relieved as if he had gone to start up the propeller.

Now things were happening. The stewardess with hair like clipped straw came very fast down the plane, and the dumpy one with the eternal smile went very fast up it.

‘No cause for alarm.' The Captain's deep, folksy voice over the intercom began to alarm the passengers. ‘We're experiencing a small bit of trouble with one engine. Still got three others, ha ha.'

Some passengers got up and came to stare at the propeller, like motorists gaping at an accident.

‘Please be seated and fasten your belts. Everything is fine. But we're gonna make a little detour, folks, and get this baby fixed. No big problem, but just for extra security, we're gonna turn back and make a landing at Reykjavik, Iceland.'

Iceland! A buzz of talk swarmed through the plane.

‘Repeat – no problem. We regret the delay and we'll take care of all you good folks with free beverages.'

Who wanted free beverages? They wanted to get to Boston. Some of those on the aisle reached out to catch the dumpy stewardess on her way to the galley, with questions, complaints, anxieties. She smiled and nodded and reassured. The straw blonde went watchfully down the other side, like a nurse going round the ward at night.

‘You okay?' Back in his seat the blue–eyed American leaned across to Lily.

‘How long will we have to stop there?'

‘Who knows?'

‘Is it dangerous?'

‘No, just a bore. Stay calm. I don't want you to be scared.'

The boy with the erupting skin was nervous, but too shy to join in. He pretended to be still looking at his magazine, but his hands were shaky and his raw face on fire.

‘Take it easy, son,' the man told him.

‘Take it easy,' Lily passed on to Ida.

‘I feel dead queer.'

‘No, you don't. This is an adventure.'

‘Buddy will be waiting.' Ida twisted her small sparkly ring. ‘He'll think I've crashed.'

‘Oh, rubbish, no he won't. If he's in the Air Force, he'll have the sense to find out what's going on.'

‘He might,' Ida said unhopefully.

Over Iceland the sun was knocking sparks off the sea. Craning with Ida to see this small rock in the northern waters, Lily saw an unwelcoming grey moonscape. Hardly anything green or growing, an inadequate landing strip carved like a narrow step out of the rocks at the base of bare cliffs. Ida's small hand reached for Lily's large one, and they hung on to each other, fiercely crushing, clammy.

The first take-off had been frightening enough. The first landing, and in a place like this, was terror of death. As the plane rushed down past the cliff so fast that it must cannon into the jagged bluff at the end, Lily saw that the cliffs were broken rocks and fissures among which small groups of square hairy ponies like goats grazed on nothing.