Dear Doctor Lily (7 page)

Behind the barn Ida met Jeff in a fringed leather waistcoat and corduroys, filling a small truck with logs he sold to help support them in the winter. He was shy and so was Sis, but Ida felt less shy with them than she had with anyone, including Lily, who wasn't exactly critical, but who knew how she wanted you to be. This slow, hard-working, outdoor life was different from anything she had ever known, but it called to her.

‘Do you think Buddy would leave the Air Force and become a farmer?' she asked.

Sis and Jeff laughed heartily. No comment, so Ida laughed too.

At the car Verna Legge showed the wedding hat.

‘I was going to find some sort of flower to wear,' Ida said, disclaiming the hat.

‘Put it on, Hilda.'

‘No.'

Sis was laughing inside herself. Ida was not going to be made a fool of.

‘Don't make her, mother. She – well look, it might be bad luck for me to see it before the wedding.'

‘Oh, you are coming, then?'

‘Sure.' Sis began to laugh inside herself again. ‘Wasn't I invited?'

Mrs Legge backed the car without looking to see if the dog or child were behind it, and hauled it round like a battleship.

‘See what I mean,' she stated triumphantly as she lurched off, scattering stones.

Ida had turned round to see Sis and the little girl holding hands, with their hair and their long skirts blowing. She fought the stiff window to roll it down far enough to lean out and wave.

Buddy did not turn up until early the next morning.

‘They screwed up my pass,' he said. ‘Been driving through the night.'

As Ida understood it, Watkins base wasn't all that far away, but he needed a grievance to present to his mother, like a bunch of flowers.

He looked better in his uniform. He always did, and when he had had a shower and a shave and a stack of Verna's pancakes, with floods of maple syrup and oily butter that clung round his mouth, he was quite a dashing bridegroom.

My wedding day. Who would have believed it? Eighty-five per cent of English women get married at least once, but each one is shocked when it happens. The electric heater in the trailer had set fire to itself and burned a hole in the wall that smelled of scorching rubber, so Ida was allowed to get ready in the bath-room,
and to have it to herself for one whole half hour. She soaked with a highly scented bath cube given her by Phyllis, who was in a romantic mood, thrilled with herself in a new dress the colour of cough syrup.

What the hell am I doing? Ida lay in the fragrant scummy water, keeping the back of her hair dry. Do I love him? Lily shouldn't have talked like that. Secretly, it had shaken Ida a bit. Does he love me? In his way, I suppose. We can make a go of it. Because it was her wedding day and therefore quite unreal, Ida let herself drift away into lying fantasies of low, cushioned rooms and log fires and flaxen-haired children and cow manure.

When she came out of the bathroom in her white dress and silver shoes, with her new silver eye make-up and pancake foundation over the wretched shadows below them, and the best pink mouth she had ever drawn, glossy as satin, Buddy looked up from the kitchen table and passed the back of his hand over his lips.

‘Not bad,' he said in a wet throaty voice, which meant emotion with him. ‘Bit like they wear for tennis, but not bad.' He looked her slowly up and down and up (she had a padded bra). Then he wiped his mouth again and gave a low whistle.

Mrs Legge had the white hat over a lampshade near the door, so it could not be avoided, but after Buddy had driven off with his friend Malc who was going to stand up for him as his best man, and the rest of them were all ready to leave for the church, Sis hurried in wearing a long Indian kind of dress and gave Ida a big white carnation made of silk that she had bought for her hair.

Ida was in a spot. Not really. Mrs Legge could stuff herself with the hat. Sis pinned the flower on to one side of her curls. Since Verna Legge was raging, Ida went off to the church in Jeff's truck.

After the wedding – my God, I've gone and done it! – they had coffee and cakes and beer and sweet wine in the hall at the side of the church. It was nice. There was a doddery old grandmother on a walking frame and a few cousins and local people, and Buddy stayed next to Ida all the time, holding her hand in his hot sticky one, or stroking her arm and telling people, ‘This is my wife.'

‘Never thought they'd get ya, Buddy boy.' ‘Nor did I. Feels good though.' ‘Atta boy.' ‘Sure feels good.' And other comfortable remarks that made Ida feel glad about the whole thing.

Henry Legge, in a suit, said to her quite formally that he was proud to welcome her into the family. Mrs Legge did not say a word to anyone the entire time. She sat by the wall with her knees apart, and when Buddy and Ida came to say goodbye to her before they left, she turned her head away, so Buddy's kiss landed nowhere.

‘You better kiss her goodbye,' he whispered, but Ida merely gave her a victor's smile and drew him away.

At the gates into the Air Force base, there was some fuss because Ida did not yet have a Dependant's identity card, and the guard, who was as brusque and suspicious as a gaoler, would not believe she was Mrs Legge.

‘Look, this is my wedding dress,' she leaned forwards shyly to tell him. She had taken the white flower out of her hair and put it carefully away in a paper napkin with silver bells on it that one of Verna's despised neighbours had brought, but she was still wearing the white dress.

Buddy put out an elbow and pushed her back. Women didn't talk to guards. Although he lived here, Buddy was quite nervous, because the man in the white helmet was a military police sergeant and out for trouble. He finally had to unpack a bag at the back of the car, scattering things on the floor, to find the marriage certificate.

‘Welcome to Watkins,' the sergeant said dismissively.

Their house was Number 1009 Pershing Street, which did not mean that there were one thousand and eight other houses there, but they were in the tenth block. Although Buddy had already been to the house after the last couple moved out, and moved in a few bits of furniture, the sergeant had humiliated him and he was too nervous to find the street in the dark. The officers' houses were bungalows spaced apart, with gardens like a suburb, but the huge enlisted family area had dozens of streets with identical, square, two-storey wooden houses, almost all with a bright light outside.

‘Electricity must be cheap over here,' Ida observed, to ease the tension.

Buddy was too rattled to answer. At last, when they found themselves at the crossroads of Otis and School Streets, he had to ask a group of boys discussing a motor-bike on the corner, which he hated to do. By the time they found the house and pulled into the covered car park alongside, he was cursing under his breath and his hands were shaking.

‘He gets easily upset,' Verna Legge had told Ida in the No-name Laundromat

Too right, he did. When he had unlocked the front door, he forgot to pick up Ida and carry her over the sill, as he had promised. He walked into the house, switching on all the lights, and went right through into the kitchen at the back to run water and sluice his face.

‘Come back here!' Ida stood on the wooden front step in her good coat with the Peter Pan velvet collar over the white dress.

Her shout brought him. He looked hastily to right and left to see if any neighbours had heard Ida and come out to look, then scooped her up and carried her easily into the bare house, kicking the door shut behind him. When he bent to put her down, Ida clung round his neck and giggled. He squeezed her tightly and kissed her with his wet face, and she made him carry her into the kitchen, kicking off her silver shoes as they went.

There was a stove and a sink and a refrigerator and a washing-machine, but they only had two chairs and a card table in the living-room, and a bed upstairs.

There was some beer in the fridge. Ida didn't drink much of hers because she didn't want it to repeat on her in bed. Buddy drank quite a lot, stopped being jittery and became sentimental. He even mooed to her, ‘Don't ever leave me, Ah-eye-da.'

He carried her up the stairs, because that had gone well for both of them downstairs, had a quick but satisfactory bash at her, and went to sleep.

That was all right. When Ida was twelve, sex had turned out to be less exhilarating than the magazines made out, and nothing that had happened to her since Pa had changed her mind.

Buddy woke in a foul mood and went off to work, hardly speaking to her. That was all right too. Best thing about playing house was having it to yourself all day. Ida stood in the kitchen in
her nightgown and bare feet. The house was warm. The refrigerator made a responsible whirring sound. My own home! She stroked counters and door frames, and furnished the house in her mind with flowered wallpaper and bright-coloured chairs and carpets. She had bread and grape jelly and tea without milk. Among the few groceries Buddy had got in, he had remembered tea. She thought of him fondly.

He came home in his lunch-break and they went to the huge dazzling Commissary and the Base Exchange and bought masses of everything, and Ida bought a postcard of a jet fighter going like a dagger over Washington D C. That evening they went to a late-night discount store to look at couches and tables. They bought a television set. Buddy seemed to have plenty of money.

Ida would write to Lily:
All okay. Marriage is wonderful. I like it here.

Next day Buddy came home for supper and a quick bash on top of the bed upstairs, and went out again, because the boys wanted to celebrate his wedding.

In the following days Ida made friends with some of the other wives in this settlement of white wooden houses. They thought she was cute, and invited her in for coffee to astonishingly immaculate interiors, considering they had two or three children and sometimes a dog. They took her shopping in their cars, because the base was so huge, you couldn't walk anywhere.

At the end of the week, Buddy came home from his work in the supply warehouse to change his green fatigues, went out without eating the supper Ida had prepared, and didn't come back at all until he woke her by kicking open the bedroom door at seven a.m. and changing into uniform without a word or a look at her.

‘Where have you … Buddy, I… Pardon me asking, but…'

He was a man of stone. Soft fleshy stone, but stone.

That day she finally wrote the card to Lily, and Sandy from two blocks down took her to the base post office.

All okay,
she wrote to Lily.
You okay?

About six years after the side trip to Iceland, Paul Stephens went to England again to promote a new type of waterproof horse blanket manufactured by the firm for which he was now chief buyer.

The store near Boston Common sold bags and belts and suitcases and boots and wallets and everything made of leather, including jackets and camel saddle stools. They also sold everything for horses and their riders and slaves. They had small subsidiary tack shops in two of the horsier towns outside Boston, displays at all the big shows and cross-country events, and a small workshop which made their own lines of equipment.

Paul had started out with them on the floor, and graduated to buying and marketing. After high school, he had served two years in the United States Navy and come out of it knowing how to cook and splice a rope, but knowing nothing about what he wanted to do, except that he did not want to be a lawyer.

‘You're breaking your Dad's heart,' his mother said, but his father, an overworked attorney, was tougher than that.

‘You'd never make it, anyway,' he told Paul plainly. ‘You're too easy-going. You like everybody.'

‘He gets that from you.' Paul's mother never gave up trying to sentimentalize her prosaic, private-souled husband.

‘Not guilty. That's not the way I got to be successful.'

Paul went to business college and came out to discover that finding a job took longer than he expected. He cooked fast-food in a highway service-stop for a while, and tended bar in a restaurant that was dark at lunchtime, and shared an apartment with two friends from college.

Walking in Boston on his day off, he stopped in at Turnbull's to buy a belt that was in the window, with a buckle like a snaffle bit. Horses were an old love from childhood riding days.

The salesgirl had an eager, confiding way with her. She was not busy, so they talked, and Paul found out there was a job going, and applied for it on impulse.

Two weeks after he started work, the eager girl left to go to Canada with her boyfriend, but Paul stayed.

He had met his wife, Barbara, at a horse show in which she was riding, and his connection with her family, who were in the North Shore hunting world, helped him in his job. Barbara taught him to ride all over again, her way, but after Terry was born she became very depressed, and was not helped by the doctor saying it was physical not psychological, because she wanted it to be psychological.

Her body eventually recovered of its own accord, but the marriage never got back to the way it was. Paul's native patience was wearing away on the grindstone of her stifling moods. The two horses had gone, because they cost too much, and she couldn't be bothered anyway. Paul was successful, with good contacts, but his job compared unfavourably with the husbands of most of Barbara's friends. A salesman was a salesman. Some of the North Shore women had taken up with trainers or opportunist show jumpers, but the man who sells you the saddle is in a different class to the man who teaches you how to sit in it.

‘Where did our youth and rapture go?' Barbara mourned.

Paul still felt young at twenty-nine, and vulnerable to rapture from the open air, the sun, the snow, horses, summer beaches, and his son, his son, his beautiful son who had been mostly his until Barbara began to pull out of the depression, unwillingly back into life.