Dear Doctor Lily (42 page)

Nora continued to murmur, ‘Easy does it,' and ‘It's all right,' so calmly that Lily pushed away from her and said crossly, ‘It may be all right for you, but it's not for anyone else.'

‘He's upset, isn't he? Oh dear, I am sorry,' Nora said, as if she had overcooked the beef.

‘Upset? You've ruined his life, that's all.'

‘Well, it was either that, or let him ruin mine,' said this mother,
at once so familiar and so strange. ‘Sit down, Lily dear, and I'll make some tea. Or would you rather have coffee, with your American ways?'

With the tea tray, she brought in Duggie, who had been skulking in the kitchen until he saw how the land lay. Lily had always got along perfectly well with him, as everyone did, and although she had come here prepared to hate and despise him, he was still the same polite, considerate, comfortable Dug Manderson, but there was a hint of smugness about him as he fussed over pouring second cups of tea that made Lily ask him harshly, ‘Why did you do it?'

‘Well,' he said equably, ‘Nora and I are both fifty-five.' That was a lie. She was almost fifty-seven. ‘We feel we're entitled to this last bit of happiness.'

‘That's immoral.'

‘Oh, I don't think so,' Duggie said, and Nora said, amazingly for one who had been a regular at the village church and helped Mrs French to deliver the parish newsletter, ‘Morals has nothing to do with it.'

‘You're a married woman.'

‘Don't talk to me like that, Lily dear. I did my time with your father faithfully, and made a go of the Duke's Head. I brought up you two beautiful girls and saw you happily married, and I love my grandchildren. Now I'm going to do my own thing.' It was worse, to hear her using her inappropriate slang.

‘You could have told us.'

‘You might have tried to stop me.'

‘Could we?'

‘No, but I didn't want any unpleasantness.'

‘What do you think you've got now?'

‘That's enough, dear,' Nora said, as if Lily were a clamorous seven-year-old. ‘I'm glad to see you, and looking so brown and well after your Cape Cod sun. I tell Duggie, “You can't beat a New England summer.” It's wonderful to have you here, so let's not spoil it with water that's already gone under the bridge. Tell me about Paul and the girls. How are they? And the new house? I'm sorry I can't come this time, but we'll both be over to visit one of these days, if we may.'

‘Why not?' Life must go on. Children need their only grandmother. Lily showed Duggie her wallet photograph of the Cape Cod house, and he showed her some pictures of bungalows from estate agents.

‘Why a bungalow, Mum?' was all that Lily could say. ‘You've always gone upstairs to bed.'

Whoops. She expected at least one of them to blush, but they were serene, with placid mouths contemplating the various brick or stucco or concrete toadstools.

‘Lately,' Nora said, ‘I've been having that old trouble with my leg. My nursing veins, I call it.'

‘I didn't realize that.'

‘Well, I'm never one to complain, as you know.'

No, you just walk out.

‘Any luck?'

When Lily returned to her father, he was hovering about, watching for her car in the garden behind the cottage, pretending to hoe the sprouts; which would go to waste now, since it was always Nora who had gone out to wrench those frozen grey-green balls off the ugly stalks.

Lily shook her head. ‘She didn't say much, but she made it clear.'

‘This is it, eh?'

‘Are you going to get a divorce?' Lily asked him when they were indoors, having a drink. James had not gone back to work in the bar yet. Blanche and Jenny and Co. were keeping up the pretence that Nora's mother was ill and Jam had strained a rib muscle. It was the only thing he could think of, because he had done that before, over the barrels.

‘She says she doesn't care. She and that man are content to live together. In sin, Lily. How do you like having a mother who's so up with the times?'

‘I hate it.'

The sedative atmosphere in the furnished flat had stifled and choked Lily's distress. Coming home, angry thoughts had driven with her, and Jamspoon picked up enough energy from her to boil up some belated rage himself.

I shall divorce her,' he told Lily, over his second whisky. ‘Drag her through the courts. Who knows, I might want to marry again myself.'

‘Oh, Daddy, come on.' Then Lily looked up quickly. ‘Anyone in mind?'

‘I wasn't going to tell you.'

Oh, my God, what kind of a mess was this?

Blustering and colouring up, her father told her a little about this woman friend, who seemed to be some kind of film agent. ‘A colleague. We work closely together. Don't think badly of me, child. Try to understand.'

Take it with a grain of salt, Dear Doctor Lily. He's still sticking to his pathetic act of being a dashing philanderer.

But she asked, ‘Did Mum know?'

‘Of course not.'

If it were true, she must have. But he would not admit that to Lily; either because it wasn't true, or because he had to cling to his version of Nora's illogical mid-life madness.

‘I'll divorce her and marry Evvie. That's what I'll do.' He perked up, and looked round for applause.

‘How old is she?' Lily's heart sank.

‘About forty.'

‘Don't do it, Daddy.'

‘I want you to meet my little Evvie. I've told her all about you. You'll like each other. She needs a decent man, poor wee bird, and Nora's lost her chance with me, serve her right. Yes, yes, that's it. Let's have a drink.' His eyes, which had been watery with tears since Lily arrived, were glittering now under Nora's crinoline lamp.

Jam tried several times to get his Evvie on the phone, but could never reach her. He left messages at her office, but she did not ring him back.

‘That's show business. Here and there, all over the place. She flies to Germany. She's going to get me work there.'

Lily went home, still not sure whether he was really having an affair with this unlikely-sounding woman: ‘Brilliant. Built up her own business. Highly respected. Stunning looker. Knows all the stars.'

Her father… her mother. The background of Lily's life had reeled and turned upside down with a hollow lurch. She could not depend on her parents any more. They had gone off the rails. She was the parent now, and they were the children.

Usually, when she first got back to Boston, it was too fast, too crowded, too shifting, too American, and she felt one of her pangs for the dependability of England. Now England was like a loose tooth, a conquered country, an island adrift and sliding into the sea.

‘This is security,' she told Paul, as they manoeuvred with a throng of other cars to get into the needle's eye of the harbour tunnel mouth. ‘I've never been so glad to get home.'

Next day, after Isobel and Cathy had gone to school in their new British sneakers and the sweaters with sheep and lambs spiralling round them, Lily went straight to Crisis before she had finished unpacking, or cleaning out the army of tiny left-overs that Aunt Bridget had arrayed so thriftily in the refrigerator.

‘Hi, Lily,' Chuck said, when she went into the telephone room to greet the volunteers. ‘You heard about it, then?'

‘About what?'

‘Shit, man.' Chuck put his hand with the bitten nails over his bearded mouth. ‘Better let Martha tell you.'

‘What's
happened?'
Lily ran upstairs into the office.

Martha spun her chair round from the desk. ‘I didn't know you were back yet. Now listen. I don't want to hear you say, “I shouldn't have gone.'”

‘It's Louise.'

Martha nodded.

‘Where is she?'

‘Nowhere. She's dead.'

Lily sat down on the hard chair by the door, and began to cry. Her eyes were sick of it. She had cried with Jam, with Nora, with Blanche, and with Paul at the airport, because she was so glad to see the dearly beloved safeness of him.

Louise had done so well at South Side that Dr Reed had transferred her, not to St Clement's, who would not take her back, but to the psychiatric unit of another Boston hospital. Because of her history, she was on suicide precautions until she
settled down. She was supposed to have a nurse with her all the time, or to be checked every fifteen minutes when she was asleep, to make sure she had not cut herself or taken pills.

On the third evening, she told the young nurse she wanted to sleep.

‘You don't have to sit there,' she said. ‘It upsets me. I'm all right. Please leave me alone for a bit.'

The nurse went away for fifteen minutes, was called to do something, then something else, got involved and did not come back for two hours. She found Louise hanging in the closet with a lamp cord round the clothes rail. She had not left the door of the room open, as she had at St Clement's, presumably because she felt certain the nurse would come back.

‘But who knows?' Martha said sadly. ‘After so many attempts, flirting with death like she did, maybe the time came for her to say, “This is it.”'

‘But she was so much better the last time I saw her,' Lily agonized.

‘Dr Reed showed me a page from her journal they found in the drawer by the bed,' Martha said. ‘Here, I copied it.'

A week ago, Louise had written neatly, ‘Suicide is an angry, panicky, uncontrollable gesture which appears forced upon you. There is no alternative – it must be done.'

‘And I thought she was all right. God, I'm stupid.'

‘Do you feel responsible?' Lily did not look up. ‘How arrogant can you get? Take a hold of yourself, Lily.'

‘I feel so rotten.'

‘For Louise? Or for yourself?'

‘Isn't it always for yourself, when someone dies?'

‘You know what I mean.'

She didn't want me to go away.
The thought drummed heavily through Lily's head. She saw Louise, laughing, alive, her hair in skimpy braids, in the shoddy cafeteria.
Don't go, Lily.

Lily had encouraged James to go back into the Duke's Head bar with her before she went home to America. He had a drink to steady him before opening time. No one came in until after six, and by that time he'd had another, and was ready to accept the jokes and teasing from old friends, and the civility of strangers who treated him like the landlord, which always gave him strength.

‘Place isn't the same without Nora, though,' people said. ‘When's she coming back?'

‘Soon, I hope.'

‘Gone to visit her mother?' George's wife asked. ‘I always understood she was dead.'

‘No, worse luck.'

Eventually, the news would be all over the neighbourhood, but by that time, James would have seen a solicitor and got something started.

At last, he managed to get hold of Evvie. She had been away. She had been ill with flu. She had moved to a different flat.

‘Why didn't you give me your new number? My daughter's been over here, and I wanted her to meet you.'

‘Oh, I think not.'

‘But you don't understand. Things are different now. Me and Nora aren't together any more.'

‘You've separated?'

‘You could call it that.'

Evvie coughed, and sucked in a breath, as if she had whooping cough. ‘Are you all right, Jamspoon?'

‘In the pink. You know me. Are
you
all right?'

‘Just the fag end of flu. Things are different with me too.'

‘We have our ups and downs, you and me.'

‘I'm back with Kyle again.'

She was off her rocker. ‘Why?'

‘We need each other, I suppose, in a sick sort of way.' Evvie gave one of her rasping laughs, and coughed again. ‘So –'

‘So sod off, Jamspoon?'

Oh
no
. I'll see you soon. There's a job coming up at Shepperton next week that you might do.'

‘I'll be away,' James said shortly. He wouldn't, but he might as well bugger up his career too. He had wrecked everything else.

A few weeks later, when he was at a very low ebb – drama and crisis over, loneliness and boredom here to stay, the dubious comfort of self-pity ousted by self-hate – George Dunn leaned across the bar and began the head-wagging and winking routine that would get him certified one of these days.

He put up his hand and said behind it, ‘Picked up a copy of
Do It Yourself the
other day.'

‘Going to build Sheila's greenhouse at last?'

‘Come off it. You know what I mean. Couldn't believe my eyes when I seen you in that dirty book. Bit of fun, eh? Lucky old lad.'

‘Get your eyes examined,' Jam said. ‘It wasn't me.'

‘I could have sworn – well, bad luck. But I'll bring it in. See what the lads think.'

‘You do that,' James said pleasantly, ‘and I'll carve my initials in your face with a beer bottle.'

When Mike lost his job with the New Bedford taxi firm, after he wrapped the cab around a pole at the bottom of Union Street, Momma was not so good to him as she had been when he was out of the house most of the day.

‘Get out and get work,' she would say, hitting his feet down off the furniture, or banging both kitchen chairs tightly under the table just as he was going to sit down and ask for coffee.

‘Can I find anything?'

‘Your father always did. Time and again, he always found a job.'

‘What were they? On the roads, cleaning up at the bus station. What kind of jobs for a man who'd been a teacher?'

‘He had the work ethic'

‘He needed to get away from you.'

‘He was a good man. That terrible winter, rather than see us go short of food and fuel, didn't he go out with the storm crews?'

‘And didn't it kill him?'