Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Paul and Lily slowed to a walk.

  ‘Let’s make them sell it to us, and live here always,’ Lily said. ‘You and me.’

  ‘You’d get sick of me.’

  ‘Stop that fake just-an-ordinary-guy stuff. You’d get sick of me first.’

  What would it be like to live without the world? Paul wondered. The dream was that it would be easier. Nothing to interfere with love. The reality might be a suffocating strain, the two of you needing people and life and challenge and children to give purpose to your alliance.

  Cathy, Isobel, Terry. Three completely different beings who were on earth because of Paul, but following the course of their natures independently, growing the way their genes dictated. His, but miraculously themselves.

  The dream vision of him and Lily selfishly marooned gave way to another, in which Terry came wandering along the edge of the marsh in those great hiking boots that were two sizes too big, turning up unexpectedly at a meal time. ‘Oh, hi.’ He sat down and picked up a fork, as if he had just been outside for two minutes.

  Isobel was reading under yellow lamplight, her swatch of dark hair swung forward over her flawless cheek. This is a great story, Dad. Sit down, I’ll read to you.’ She read to him now, as he used to love to read to her, in her Massachusetts version of her mother’s clear, vivacious voice.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Cathy flew into the shack like a moth, bare feet pattering like wings. ‘Daddy, c’mere, I found you a sand dollar!’, carrying the fragile gritty disc to him unbroken.

  The man in the shack stepped suddenly into the doorway and flapped a duster cheerily at them. John jumped sideways, dropped a hind leg down the bank of the bog and only just managed to pull it up and recover himself.

  They turned across the end of the dunes where the flat tops of stunted pine trees were blown toward the land, and got off to have something to eat. Lily was already hungry.

  ‘I guess I was wrong about Harry,’ Paul said.

  ‘No, I was.’

  ‘Did you really want to come here with him?’ It was easier to ask this sitting in a hollow on the coarse dune grass, holding the reins while his horse nipped new leaves off a little bush.

  ‘Well, he slapped me down, didn’t he? I asked for that.’ Loading the horses into the trailer this morning, Lily had been silent with Harry, following his instructions, instead of kidding him and laughing. ‘Whatever it was – and it was nothing, honest – it’s over now.’

  Paul risked telling her what Isobel said she had seen in the barn.

  ‘Physical excitement.’ Lily was leaning against her horse, eating a sandwich. ‘Playing with fire,’ she declaimed dramatically. ‘I’m sorry, darling. Harry played the game for fun, but then, as you see, he dropped me on my face. Oh dear, now you won’t have any excuse to have old Jeanette down again, to make me jealous.’

  Paul groaned. ‘Don’t bring her name into this lovely place. She finally sent me a bill for the work she did on the brochures.’

  ‘Too much?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred bucks.’

  ‘That rat. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It was my fault for not making a written contract with her.’

  ‘Bemused by all that oily fawn hair?’

  ‘Wretchedly unbusinesslike.’

  ‘You think I’d criticize? It’s me that makes a mess every time. Me, me, me.’

  ‘Let’s not beat our breasts.’ Paul got up and pulled Robin’s head out of the bush. ‘What am I going to do about Jeanette?’

  ‘Leave her to me,’ Lily said aggressively.

  ‘It’s my business.’

  ‘Mine too. I’ll see her off. Listen, darling.’ She held Paul’s arm and looked at him seriously. ‘Nothing comes between us.’

  With one of her quick switches between solemnness and excitement, Lily got quickly into the saddle and turned John toward the ocean.

  ‘Ready to gallop?’

  As they left the stunted trees and turned to the gap in the higher dunes, the wind from the sea hit them in the face like a shout.

  The tide was out. Beyond the deep soft sand, ridged flats and shallow pools glistened in the hard bright light. The sea was far away, breaking in overlapping ranks of small surf.

  The horses were wild with excitement, trampling, and grabbing their heads down, eyes agog. Lily could not hold John, so she shouted, ‘Let’s go!’ and they went.

  They had miles of hard sand before the cottages started, and a scattering of hazily glimpsed tiny people on the beach. All you had to do was lean forward and let your horse go until he was ready to slow down, and if he never was, you could turn him up into the soft sand to stop him.

  The quarter-horse part of Robin sent him into a flat-out sprint for a quarter of a mile. Then his head and back came up a bit and his stride slowed and lengthened, and he settled into a steady powerful gallop, drumming the hard sand, splat, splatter through the pools and channels. The wind tore past, shrieking. Lily and John came alongside. She and Paul could only look toward each other with joy and open their mouths on a wordless shout that streamed away behind them with the streaming tails and storm of kicked-up sand.

  For a long time, the beach was endless. The houses and people did not seem to come any nearer. They galloped for ever, out of time and out of life. Suspended in the ecstasy of power and speed.

  At last, John slowed. His dark, chunky head was down. People became distinguishable; a woman with children, men jogging along a sand bank, still figures on the edge of the surf with fishing poles stuck at an angle into the sand. Lily turned John toward the dunes and stopped. Ahead of her, Paul pulled Robin in. He trotted a few paces and then stopped, wet and heaving.

  Paul’s hair and face and shirt were soaked with spray. He turned in his saddle to look at Lily. She had got off. She stood with the red shirt clinging to her, her hair tossed back wildly from her wet face, holding the reins of the brown horse. John stood with his legs apart, head up, nostrils squared to the salt wind.

  Paul’s body was relaxed in exhaustion. His mind was swept clear of everything but serenity. Lily. The horses. The sea. Freedom. Peace. His lovely children. He thought: I have everything I want.

  When they got home, Harry came out to help them unload the horses. Lily seemed at ease with him again. In the house, she went straight to the phone in the kitchen, and she talked loudly to Jeanette, so that Paul and Harry could hear.

  That bill you sent us. It’s far too much.’ Some fast talk from the other end of the phone. ‘Agreed? No, it wasn’t. You’ve got nothing in writing … What? Oh, about five hundred at the most. I don’t even think the work was all that good, but we’ll send you a cheque.’ Splutter. ‘Well, if you don’t like it, come down and we’ll give you a saddle or something … a secondhand one.’ Quack, quack. ‘Okay. So sue already.’

  ‘Power!’ Harry threw out his long monkey arms, with the fists clenched.

  Lily threw her arms out and backwards, sticking out her glorious chest, which had lost nothing in fifteen yean of marriage and motherhood.

  ‘Oh, Harry, we had such a wonderful day! I … love… my… life!’ She flung her arms round Paul.

  Joy. Almost too intense to bear.

  Mike called Lily several times on the Crisis number. Sometimes she talked to him. Sometimes one of the volunteers told him, ‘I’ll see if she’s in here,’ as if it wasn’t obvious that they would have known whether Lily was there.

  Mike was working again now. Indestructible Corrigan had taken him back, to load and drive, though not to live, because Corrigan, famous lone wolf, had let a domineering female move in, and was on a diet and in danger of becoming domesticated.

  Occasionally, when Mike was delivering near the south end of Boston, he would drive behind the Crisis centre, and if Lily’s white car was there, he would park the van and go in to see her. Sometimes she would sit with him for a while, whether he chose talk or silence. Sometimes Martha came down to see him, and tried to find out how long he was prepared to live o
n the edge of a precipice.

  Lily would be upstairs. On his way out, Mike kept Martha talking in the hall and sent his senses up the stairs to where Lily sat or stood or moved about. In an odd way, he could feel closer to her in his imagination than if they were actually in a room together, when he often could not look at her, and could not speak.

  Last summer, Lily had employed a girl to be with Isobel and Cathy, so that she could go to Boston to work. This year, she had asked Martha to find a temporary assistant. Lily went into the office only about once a week, and supervised from home the volunteers in the outreach programme, with which Crisis helped people who could not come in to the centre.

  Martha would take her back in the office any time. Meanwhile, Paul’s shop was doing well. It might take two or three more years to show a profit, but customers were beginning to come to him from a wide area. Turnbull’s wasn’t the same now, some of them said. They would rather come here, because they knew Paul, and although he did not have a huge stock, he could always get them what they wanted.

  More people were coming to live on Cape Cod. Some of them brought their own horses, although too many of the places to ride were being bulldozed up and built over, and sold to people who would not let riders skirt round the edge of their property to reach a trail that had been a bridle path for years.

  Paul had two extra horses now, as boarders. Tony helped and Lily worked in the stable and in the shop, and went to horse shows with Paul to follow up the right contacts. They were very happy.

  She had given her father the fare to Boston for his sixtieth birthday, and he came for two weeks and talked his heart out to Lily and Paul and Isobel and Cathy and Tony and Dodo at the drug store, and anyone else who would listen. Although he lived in a pub world where people came in morning and evening, and he had to chat to them, he was lonely, and hungry for his own kind of talk: showbiz tales of photographers and film studios, past days, the old gang in Wimbledon, the post office talent shows. Nora, Nora, Nora.

  ‘She’s lost so much.’ He ruminated in his favourite wicker chair on the porch with the same brand of bourbon that Paul had remembered to get for him. ‘What I can’t see is how she could chuck it all away. Marvellous woman, Nora. I’m not saying a word against her, mind, but the change of life makes some women go dotty, and that’s all about it.’

  Cathy and Isobel were both teenagers now, busy with many friends, and with tennis and horses and boats and ballet, and Isobel had a morning job, taking a toddler to the beach. Lily had been afraid that their grandfather would be disappointed to find them no longer children who wanted to go to the drug store for sodas, but he was enchanted with them because they were beautiful – dark and vivid, fair and graceful – and they told him jokes and gave him a lot of loving attention.

  ‘I’ve got something she hasn’t,’ he said, after Lily had used half a roll of film taking pictures of him clowning and hamming with the girls, and wearing a hallowe’en wig to support Cathy in a ballet pose.

  ‘She’s coming over to see us.’ Cathy sat on the grass, where he had let her fall. ‘She said she would.’

  ‘But I came first.’

  He would not go to the theatre, nor make any move to see Pyge Tucker.

  ‘She’d love to hear about your success,’ Lily urged him. ‘You could tell her about the doctor commercial, and going to Germany for the tourist advertisements. She’d be so impressed.’

  ‘Success isn’t everything,’ James said weightily. ‘Pyge, glorious Pyge, God bless her, she knew me in my halcyon days when my ego was intact. Now I am but a hollow man.’

  They all told him they were sad when he left. So he sprang it on them jauntily at the airport.

  ‘You think I’m only going back to the pub, to see if Terry and Blanche have killed each other yet. You don’t know about Pixie.’

  ‘Who’s Pixie?’ If he had made her up, wouldn’t he have invented a more convincing name?

  ‘Aha!’ Finger to large nose, more bony now, because he had lost weight with losing Nora, and Faces threatened to take the speciality ‘pot-belly’ off his page in the next catalogue. ‘She shall be nameless. Soul of discretion, that’s Jamspoon. Wish me luck.’

  Ida’s friend Mike was working again and in better shape, although he often seemed to guess when Lily was in Boston, and called her there, or came in to see her.

  ‘Watch out,’ Martha said. ‘He has a yen for you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s scared of women.’

  Lily still felt she could help him. Once, when he panicked on the phone and told her that he was losing his mind and his grip on any kind of reality, she was able to reassure him and get him slowly calmed down. She did not know what was wrong with him. Nor did Martha. ‘Except he’s pretty sick. If he goes on running away from help, he’ll run into real trouble and get picked up and put back into Bridgewater again.’

  One evening in October, Mike called Lily at home. He had been in an accident, and was in trouble with Corrigan and with the police, because of his record. He was hysterical. She had to talk to him for quite a long time. Paul was used to that. She often made calls to clients she had been to see. But when Mike called her again, when she had just put dinner on the table, Paul said, ‘Tell him not to call you here. I thought you weren’t allowed to give clients your home number.’

  ‘I don’t. But he knows it, because he was here.’

  Once Mike called her in the night. She made him hang up, and got a volunteer on duty at Crisis to call him back. An hour later, he called Lily again and was angry at first, and then wept.

  He knew where she lived.

  One morning when she was in bed with flu, he turned up at the house in one of Corrigan’s brown and white vans. From upstairs, Lily heard Paul talking to him, and Mike arguing.

  ‘I’ve told you.’ Paul raised his voice. ‘You’d better go.’

  Lily got up and put on jeans and a loose old sweater and banged at her hair with a brush, and went down.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mike?’ His hair was greasy and ragged. His clothes were dirty. He had a stubble of beard. He was haggard.

  ‘Let me talk to you,’ he said hoarsely, and coughed like a derelict.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘No, Lily,’ Paul ordered her. ‘You go back up.’

  ‘I’m all right. I feel better. Come and sit in the kitchen, Mike, while I make some coffee.’

  She felt she could not turn him away without some kindness, but Paul was furious. He said, ‘For God’s sake!’ and banged out of the house.

  ‘Don’t come here again,’ Lily told Mike. ‘I can only help you through the centre. Don’t call me here. I can’t talk to you.’

  Of course. That confirmed what Mike knew. She wanted to see him, but her husband wouldn’t allow it. Paul Stephens. Mike knew all about him. ‘Too good to be true,’ Ida had told him long ago in the New Bedford days, which had semed so lousy and hopeless, but looked like a paradise of security compared to the way he lived now.

  ‘I’ve told you.’ Driving away, Mike imitated the level, snotty voice to himself. ‘You’d better go.’

  Too good to be true. Too good for Mike, but Mike had the edge of him. He knew Paul wasn’t good enough for Lily. Ordering her upstairs like a child. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ and banging out of the house. Well, she didn’t go up, did she?

  Mike had the edge on him, because Paul Stephens didn’t know who Lily was. Mike’s precious, his dear, his love. Lily knew, pale and pitiful in that sloppy grey sweater. One day, she would get sick of being treated so badly, and turn to Mike and ask him to be kind.

  Driving over the high bridge put the Cape Cod canal between him and her. The water ran swiftly, choppy, swirling into smoothness under the middle of the bridge, as the tide dragged it out to sea. The road ahead was a flat and empty future. Grey sky of November, hauling winter behind it like a funeral train.

  Nothing good ever happened to Mike in November. With winter coming, his mother had always stirred him up
, goading him, reciting everything about him she couldn’t stand, before the unnerving plunge into Thanksgiving and Christmas, when he must be her spoiled baby.

  It must have been November when he took the pills at Ida’s house. To make it the last November. Someone should have kept Bernie out of the kitchen.

  Only Lily could shatter the curse of November. And the treacherous month was not even half done.

  Mike did not take the van back to Corrigan’s depot. He went west on the turnpike and drove around the Worcester and Springfield area for days, sleeping in the van, drinking, buying some dope. He called Lily from different pay phones. At first she said, ‘I’m sorry. Tell me where you are, and I’ll get someone to call you back.’ Then she hung up on him. Then her husband answered the phone and hung up on him. Then they left the phone off the hook, so that he could not get through.

  Mike was angry. He smashed up a few pay phones, because if anyone got him angry, they deserved what they got.

  Corrigan would have reported the van by now. A police car spotted him and came after him. Mike pulled the van off the road, grabbed a bottle, jumped out and ran into the woods.

  A wanted man. Liquor and amphetamines kept him going. The wind hunted him through the trees and across cold open fields to the lights of a small town. He took a beat-up old Volkswagen from the yard of a dark house and drove east through a storm of rain, sucking at the bottle, crying sometimes, and wiping his nose and sore eyes with bits of dirty paper towels that were on the floor of the car. The November skies wept across the streaming windshield.

  Because Crisis had to be able to reach Lily, she could not go on leaving the phone off the hook at night, so Paul had changed the house phones over to the number of the shop, until they could be sure that Mike had given up.