Dear Doctor Lily Read online

  The starless night smelled of fir trees. The air was very sharp and still, colder than Boston had been when they got out of the plane. At the back of the house, dogs barked, children shouted, a woman yelled, something smashed. A car passed on the road behind Ida, swinging its lights on tall tree trunks and a sharp hill bend, otherwise it seemed very quiet and isolated up here. What would there be for Ida to do, when Buddy had to go back to Watkins?

  It was not quiet inside the house. A bolt crashed. The door flew open and an enormously fat woman put short arms like bolsters round Buddy and shouted at him, and at the two dogs who squeezed out between their legs and leaped on to Ida, so that she was pushed against the post at the edge of the porch and nearly fell down the steps.

  Ida screamed, and Buddy’s mother shouted, ‘They won’t hurt you – Mick, Walker, come off it, damn you!’

  Buddy got one dog by the scruff of its neck so that it yelped, and a boy with porcupine hair lunged across the porch and got his arms round the smaller of the two dogs, which wore no collars.

  ‘Well, come on in, come on in.’

  Buddy had described his mother as ‘a real homey lady, you won’t need to feel strange with her’. But he had not said that she was huge and powerful and very noisy. Bad things had gone on in Ida’s house, but quietly: insults hissed, warnings whispered, a secret bitterness lurking in the passages and cold small rooms like rat poison behind the wainscot. Whatever went on here was at full belt. Everyone shouted, including Buddy. The wood-stove was bashed at with a giant poker. Huge logs were hurled into it. Plates were crashed on to the table and into the sink, and even through the air when the dog, Walker, a bristly ginger criminal, put its paws on the kitchen counter and got a tin plate from across the room into its ribs.

  The only quiet person in the family was Buddy’s father, Henry Legge, who greeted Ida in a long-sleeved vest and blue trousers too baggy for his lean frame, and said she was very welcome, and must be tired out.

  ‘Cut it out, Henry, she’s as fit as a fiddle,’ Verna Legge yelled from another room. ‘Don’t mind him, Ida.’ She filled the doorway, cradling tins of beer. ‘He’ll say the first thing that comes into his head, amazing it is sometimes, how the old man carries on, though most of the time he don’t say much, thank God, but it’s all up here.’ She put down all the beer cans except one, which she tapped against her head. ‘He’s very deep, is this one.’

  She sat Ida and Buddy down at the table with mugs of coffee and plates of food. Billy, the porcupine boy, and a plump, bossy girl called Phyllis and a sticky toddler in a sleeping suit crowded round, asking questions, hitting each other, grabbing at the cake, while their mother’s arms swept about like a flail and her voice bounced off them unheeded.

  When she spoke to Buddy, the flesh of her wide face creased into a soppy smile and her chins wobbled as she shook her head fondly at him, her small eyes, dark brown, like his, soft as velvet. She put food in front of him in a doting way that he accepted as his accustomed right. She put two sugars in his coffee and stirred it for him.

  ‘Tough luck, Buddy boy,’ Ida thought, ‘if you expect that from me.’

  What did his mother think of her? The father was polite, but how could Ida ever be found good enough for Mrs Legge’s little darling?

  There were no spare beds in the house, so Ida was to sleep outside in a sort of caravan parked at the back, until Buddy came home next week for the wedding. For tonight, he would sleep on the sofa in the front-room, crammed with battered toys and bicycles and broken furniture and old boots and car tyres. The rooms were bigger than the neat, pinched rooms where Ida’s parents lived in Staple Street, but there was less space to move about in them.

  Buddy and his parents were drinking beer, and Verna Legge was shocked because Ida wouldn’t.

  ‘I thought Limeys invented beer. Well, she’ll learn our ways.’

  But Ida’s insides were not much good with drink at the best of times, and now she felt sick and exhausted.

  ‘I need to go to bed,’ she whispered to Buddy.

  ‘Need to go to bed, do you honey?’ One of Verna’s eyes disappeared among folds of rubbery flesh. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  ‘I’ll take her out, Ma.’ Buddy got up. In this house he had hardly talked directly to Ida.

  ‘Turn on the yard light, then, one of you kids.’ Their mother shouted at Billy and Phyllis, although they were leaning on the table, eating potato crisps and taking sips out of the beer cans. ‘And you come back in, Buddy, you hear me? You’re sleeping on that front-room sofa. I don’t want no funny stuff. This here is an English girl.’ The eye disappeared again. ‘And we’re going to have a decent and proper wedding, done right just like everything else in this family. That right, Henry?’

  ‘I’ll say that’s right,’ he echoed firmly, as if it had not already been said.

  A glaring yellow light outside the back door showed Ida a small caravan nesting in weeds among tilting sheds and piles of wood, two cars without wheels, and assorted rubbish which spread up the hillside.

  Verna Legge shouted from the back door, ‘The old man’s hooked up some lights,’ at the same time as Buddy and Ida ran into a sagging wire running from the corner of the house to the caravan.

  A car mechanic’s lamp hung on a hook from the caravan’s low ceiling, and by its naked light, Ida saw two seats and a flap table and some old clothes and bedding stuffed into plastic bags. A wire led from the light fitting to a rusted electric heater fixed to the wall.

  Ida’s suitcases were on one seat, and Buddy showed her how to pull out the other one to make a bunk bed, and they put grey sheets on it and blankets which smelled of dog. When it was down, there was no more standing space. Ida had to climb over a pile of plastic bags and over the end of the bunk. Sitting there, she watched Buddy’s face, pasty and critical, as he looked at her.

  In the car she had looked forward to being in bed with him. They had never had a chance at anything, except the back of a small car he had borrowed from an airman at the base in England. Now she felt drained, and her nerves were on edge from the clamouring children and restless dogs and the noise which Buddy’s mother broadcast generally around herself, giving no clue as to where Ida stood with her.

  ‘What have you done to your hair?’ Buddy chewed on his rounded lips which were always wet, sometimes with spittle in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I had it permed. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘For the wedding. Are you excited?’

  ‘I guess so.’ He stared at the front of her blouse for a while, the bar of his eyebrows lowered, and then he said, ‘Turn off that heater before you go to sleep. Pop’s a mechanic, but nothing he fixes works right.’ He nodded and went out.

  When he banged the door, the small caravan trembled like a cardboard box. He moved more violently here than he had in England. If the heater fell down on the bed, that would be it. Sad to come all this way and then be immolated.

  She put on a nightdress with a jersey over it, and a pair of socks, switched off the light and heater together and hurried to crouch under the bedclothes, shivering not only from cold, but from strangeness and loneliness. You couldn’t call it homesickness, because what had England or Stafford or her family or anyone she knew ever done for her?

  But as she huddled in the small flimsy space, curtained with torn lace, the bad and boring and miserable old scenes which had so powerfully propelled her into this daring venture would not stay inside in her head. Instead, the things she thought about and the pictures she saw were the ones she missed, and would never know again. Tea after school with her grandmother in the ground-floor flat where the cat came in and out of the window and threaded through the windowsill plants like a native through the jungle. Secret games with her friend Lizzie in the grounds of the old asylum, with code words and a funny language, and a shrieking dash out of the bushes when the boys found them, to climb the fence the same way they got in. The sea, the sea, the sea, in Wales,
very fierce and mysterious. It would suck you in and drown you, but you could skitter along the edge of it, veering up into the sand when a wave broke, and dashing back when it retreated, to dare it to come at you again.

  Ida had only ever been to the sea once, but it was the best day of her childhood, about the only one she remembered in full detail.

  She thought about the other women and girls at the hotel. They had been suspicious of her at first. When they dumped some of their own work on her, she did it for one day, and on the next, she told them where they could put it. After that they liked her better. She and Linda would giggle, making beds together, and make up wild stories about the people who slept in them. Linda had a mind like a sewer.

  When Ida left, the girls gave her a cosmetic-bag with rosebuds on it and a rubber lining and a slot for your toothbrush. If she had stayed at the hotel, she could have worked her way up to being housekeeper.

  Sleep, Ida ordered. She was usually able to drop off like an underfed dog, wherever she was, whatever was going on. She had slept away half her childhood when her mother let her stay up in her dog-kennel room with the sloping ceiling and low rounded door. From twelve on, she was late for school almost every day, and asleep again after supper over homework in the corner, especially when Dad had some of the Faithful in and they were going at it, their bullying commands to the God they owned – ‘Scatter our foes by the wayside’ – bouncing off the ochre walls.

  Sleep, Ah-eye-da. She gave a few light snores, to fool her body into thinking it was asleep.

  The noises of the Legge night assaulted her caravan. Dogs barked, doors banged, shouts, whistling, a hundred tin cans thrown out against an iron fence. The whistler fell over something in the yard and cursed thickly.

  Ida knelt on the seat and saw the last light go out upstairs. Window groaned up. Cat yowled. Window croaked down. Silence. The wind rose and took over. Ida went back to her maggot’s hole, alone with the night.

  Here I am. What the hell have I done? Have I made a horrible mistake? Curled under the covers as she must have been inside her mother, if you could imagine that woman’s stingy frame expanded to accommodate a baby, Ida cried in a lonely, unsatisfying way. She thought about Lily: ‘Are you sure you ought to marry him?’, and how kind she was and anxious to say the right thing, and got her head snapped off for her trouble.

  If we were still in Iceland, I’d be nicer. Lily was a good kid, with her open, round face that hadn’t yet been written on, and her clean brown hair and her jokes and big clumsy feet. The fat would drop off her once she found out what life was all about. Ida was homesick for Lily.

  She was still awake when a movement of cold air told her that the door at the end of the trailer had opened.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Ida sat up. In the doorway, a darker shape blocked the darkness of the night.

  Buddy’s light laugh, excited. ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Oh, Buddy, no. You know we said.’

  ‘What?’ He had shut the door and was taking his shoes off, thump, thud.

  ‘We’ll be married in a week. We said we’d wait.’

  ‘You did.’ He was taking off clothes.

  ‘Suppose your mother – ?’

  ‘Shit on her.’ He launched himself over the plastic bags like a diver and was on her, outside the covers at first, grinding her into the hard mattress, then tearing away the blankets and wrenching up her nightdress like a man just out of prison.

  It wasn’t like what it was in the back of the borrowed Ford. That had been quite nice. He’d been nervous, anxious, needing her help. Now he was a mad bull, stinking of beer, his mouth all slimy with saliva, gasping out words Ida had never heard, even from Jackson at his worst, splitting her apart with a brutality that made Ida cry out, ‘No!’ in the remembered desolation of that child who had cried out, ‘No, Pa, no!’ and got a pillow stuffed over her head, so that she was dying at both ends at once.

  One thing about Buddy: he didn’t take very long. Pa had gone on and on, praying over her in that disgusting way, asking his God, that madman, to cleanse her, whispering, so no one would hear, bits of the Bible, frenzied calls to the prophets.

  Buddy ravaged her and was done. Couldn’t hold it.

  ‘Agh!’ he yelled with his head thrown back, and one of the dogs barked in the backyard, hoarse on its chain. A window banged open and Mrs Legge screamed, ‘Cut that out, Walker!’ and banged down the window.

  ‘You liked it, you liked it.’ Buddy started to bite at Ida, not teasing, but painfully. He lay on her like a spent stone, so she could hardly breathe.

  ‘If you think I liked that, you can’t know much about women,’ she said with what breath she could get. ‘Get off me and out ofhere.’

  He went backwards on all fours to the end of the bunk, groped for his clothes, opened the door on the cold night, giggled conceitedly and was gone. Ida lay battered, and let the pain slowly seep away. At least she didn’t have Pa kneeling by the bed, the bald spot at the top of his thinning hair thrust into her face as he muttered prayers for forgiveness into the eiderdown.

  Buddy was gone before Ida woke up. She lay and moved bits of her body to check if it all worked, then got up and put on her plaid skirt and a high-necked jersey. She climbed carefully down the steps of the trailer and picked her way across the yard, feeling straddle-legged.

  The kitchen was the only warm room. Everyone was in there. Mr Legge in his dark-blue working overalls, with ‘Henry’ woven on the pocket, was eating coloured cornflakes like a child. Phyllis was dressed for school, with petticoats under her skirt. Billy shovelled food into his mouth and around it. The baby was on the floor, wearing only a wet nappy. Mrs Legge was at the sink, crooning to a song on the radio.

  ‘Sleep good?’ she asked Ida over the radio and other noises. ‘Coffee’s on the stove.’

  Ida had planned to ask for tea, but lost her nerve. She picked up the pot to pour coffee into a mottled enamel mug. Mrs Legge shot a look sideways at the high-necked jersey, which did not hide the red grazes on the side of Ida’s chin from Buddy’s beard stubble.

  Would she be angry? Let her. Curiously, now that she knew about the boozing monster side of Buddy, Ida felt more confident, more in charge. America was a treacherous jungle, but this was a situation she could cope with. She knew where she was now. She had Lily’s address in England. She would write to her when she had the chance to buy postcards and say, ‘Iceland was nothing – this is really an adventure, Lil, but I’m surviving.’

  Mr Legge went off up the hill on a motor-bike. Billy and Phyllis went off to school down the hill in a long yellow bus filled with children fighting and waving their arms and legs about behind the elderly driver who ignored them. Ida would have liked to unpack some of her clothes and hang them up, but there was nowhere, so she refolded some of the stuff in the suitcases, put her short white wedding dress on a wire hanger she found in the yard and hung it over the trailer door. When the yellow bus ground up the hill in the afternoon, Phyllis came flouncing into Ida’s caravan and knocked the dress to the floor and trod over it in boots.

  Ida snatched it up and held it, furious.

  ‘What’s that?’ Phyllis made a face at it.

  ‘What I’m going to get married in. What’s it to you?’

  ‘When Sis got married she had a long white gown and white veil.’ When Phyllis stood with her stomach out under the stiff petticoats, there wasn’t much room for her in the small space at the end of the trailer.

  ‘Well, I haven’t.’

  Ida had not even wanted to wear white, but her mother had set her face. ‘We’re not having those people over there think we don’t know how it’s done,’ and bought this dress in a sale for her. It turned out the sale had ended the day before, so Ida had had to make up the difference in price.

  ‘Lemme see what all else you got in your bags.’

  ‘No.’ This one had to be stopped before she started.

  ‘Hey, not fair! Mom!’ She threw her shrill voice over her shou
lder towards the house.

  ‘C’mon back in!’ Her mother threw the shout back.

  ‘You’re a pig,’ Phyllis told Ida.

  ‘Ditto.’

  When Phyllis had jumped out, shrieking, Ida shut the door and hung the dress up again. There was no lock on the door, so Billy knocked the dress down when he came to say ‘Hullo,’ blinking shyly and jerking his mouth, and Mr Legge knocked it down again when he came to call Ida for supper.

  ‘Settled in okay?’

  He looked hollow under his overalls. His long jaw was dark blue.

  ‘I’m all right, thanks.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Whatever you told him, he answered, ‘Is that so?’ and sometimes ‘Could have knocked me down,’ or ‘Could have fooled me.’

  Life at the Legges’ was hardly worth flying the Atlantic for, let alone a detour to Iceland, but the wedding was only a week away, and then Ida would be able to hang out her clothes in the semi-detached at Watkins Air Force Base and lock the doors and wash herself in a bathroom where the bath wasn’t full of old newspapers and potatoes, and no dogs shouldered in to have a go at the broken bag of biscuits. She could have a pee without someone pounding on the door, and cook sausages and pies and custards in a kitchen she would keep clean as her mother’s. Here in Leggeland, the stove was too far gone to tackle, and she was not allowed to scrub out the sink on the grounds that it was going to be used again before she could turn around. Verna Legge produced mostly frozen food from a huge freezer chest in an outside shed, thawing it out at full power, so that the outside was burned and the inside ice-cold.

  Ida helped as much as she could with the children and the baby Vernon and the washing-up and throwing away – cartons and tins went out of the back door in the vague direction of some old oil drums – and there didn’t seem to be any sweeping, nor a broom to do it with.

  She went shopping with Mrs Legge. ‘Downtown,’ Verna said. She was stuffing dirty clothes into a heavy cotton bag that was stencilled USAF.

  ‘I could clear out the sink and wash some of those,’ Ida offered. ‘I have some things of my own to do.’