Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  She saw Arthur first, on the edge of the sea. His back end was lying with the legs straight out sideways, his front end sitting propped up. His head hung and his jaws were open, strings of saliva hanging down. Then she saw beyond a thorny bush something blue, almost hidden in the long grass and reeds.

  She jumped off. Robin would not be led forwards, so she slung his reins quickly round a branch of the bush and ran to where Paul was lying on his back, a wound on the side of his head, eyes closed, mouth open, arms flung out and up, like a gesture of surrender.

  He’s dead. She knew and accepted it, for a cold suspended moment. Then she came to life and started to call his name, touching his face and telling him, ‘You’re not dead, you’re not dead!’ over and over again. Kneeling, she raised her head and shouted across the inlet to the empty, shuttered houses.

  He had a faint pulse, and his skin was cold and clammy. His breathing was harsh and laboured. Grasping his thick blue sweater and the back of his riding breeches, she managed to turn him on his side. He groaned, a horrible throaty noise, and stopped breathing. She shouted at him and shook his arm. She did not know which part of him she could touch. His lips were turning blue, but as she leaned over him to try mouth-to-mouth, he gasped, and the struggling, rattling breaths began again.

  There was an enormous swelling on the side of his forehead. The skin was torn and shattered. Blood from his scalp and from his ear had run down his neck, and was beginning to congeal. His breathing was still hoarse and irregular, with agonizing pauses, but she had to leave him to get help.

  She shouted again, and screamed. No one. No workmen in the summer houses. No boats on the sea.

  ‘Arthur – I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I’ll be back. Hang on, guard him, I’ll – oh God, let it be all right – it’ll be all right!’ she told them wildly.

  She forced herself away from Paul, freed the horse’s reins and galloped back like a maniac out on to the road. A car just missed her, swerved and stopped in the loose sand.

  ‘What the –’

  ‘Call the rescue squad. My husband’s badly hurt. Down there on the beach. Call the vet too – please. There’s a smashed-up dog.’

  ‘Will do.’ The man had a shiny bald head and a firm mouth. Thick black sides to his glasses. Dependable.

  ‘Hurry – I’ll go back there.’

  Soon after she reached Paul, the ambulance came, careering down the curving path in a cloud of dusty sand. Two people jumped out, a short man with bristly grey hair, a young woman, strong, with a high colour. They knelt and stood and got equipment out of the ambulance, and knew what they were doing, swiftly, and communicated briefly. Lily’s mind kept on registering details normally by itself, while she stood by, frantically doing nothing, her whole being concentrated on Paul.

  Inside the ambulance, he was breathing oxygen through a tracheal tube, the wound covered with a loose pad, the bandaged hand lying on his chest over the blanket, where the man had put it carefully, as if the thumb still mattered.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked Lily.

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t with him. He was riding.’

  ‘Thrown off? Hit his head on a rock, I guess.’

  ‘But the dog – someone attacked them.’

  The man looked out of the back door of the ambulance at the peaceful seaside scene, sparkling in the early sun. ‘Anything’s possible.’

  The young woman finished talking into the radio. ‘Right. We’re to take him to Boston. Massachusetts General neurosurgery unit.’

  ‘Can I come – oh, God, what will I do with the horse?’

  ‘Leave your husband to us.’ The woman put her arm round Lily and rubbed the side of her face against hers in a friendly, animal way. ‘You follow in your car.’ She did not add a futile, ‘Don’t worry.’ Lily liked and trusted her for that.

  They were gone. Now Arthur. ‘Oh, my poor Arthur, my good dog.’

  He had dragged himself farther away from the sea, and was lying flat, panting, his tongue and gums too pale, one eye rolled up at her with his funny china-eyed look, a lot of the white showing. Lily could see that his back leg was broken. She sat by him in the wet sand. Stroking him and telling him he was brave and good, while her mind was with Paul, speeding head first unknowingly up the highway, scattering the early rush-hour traffic with sirens and, flashing lights.

  The vet came. God bless the bald man with the dependable glasses. The vet put on a splint and laid Arthur in the back of his car, and put two rugs over him.

  ‘I can set the leg. I think he’ll be all right.’

  That meant that Paul would be all right, of course it did. Signs and portents. Omens and charms. Her breath rasping her throat, Lily chanted voicelessly to the beat of Robin’s hoofs racing home on the sand and on the hard road. He’s all right he’s not he’s dead he’s all right… Cars pulled out of her way. A woman ran out of a door, shouting. A bicyclist wobbled and stopped and put down a foot.

  Cathy ran out of the house, hair tied back, dressed for school. Lily flung herself off the horse and told her. Blood drained from Cathy’s delicate skin. Her light blue eyes overflowed. She cried without noise, trembling.

  ‘Where’s Isobel?’

  ‘Gone. Her bus comes before mine.’

  ‘How can you and I go off to Boston, Cath, and leave her at school, not knowing?’

  ‘Go and get her?’

  ‘Take too long. Should I call the school, or is that worse?’

  Cathy shook her head wretchedly, standing with her toes turned in and her arms hanging helplessly forwards.

  Lily dithered. A car came fast into the drive. Lily’s friend Nina had seen her galloping back down the road. Oh – friends. Thank God. Nina took it in swiftly.

  ‘You and Cathy go. I’ll feed the horses and put them out. Then I’ll go and get Isobel from school and bring her up to the hospital.’

  ‘Paul may be dying.’ Lily looked into her eyes. Cathy had gone into the house for jackets.

  ‘Yes.’ Nina looked back steadily. Like the rescue squad woman, she did not say, ‘You mustn’t think that,’ or, ‘He’s going to be all right,’ or any of the cowardly talisman efforts to ward off disaster.

  In the Boston hospital, Paul went through a long operation to raise the depressed fracture of his skull, tie off damaged vessels and remove a deep blood clot. While he was in the operating room, Nina arrived with Isobel and found Lily and Cathy in a hot and airless waiting-room that clung to its aftertastes of anxiety and overflowing metal ashtrays. When Nina went to get coffee, Isobel fell upon Cathy in fury, because she had gone to Boston without her.

  ‘We had to get here – don’t!’ Cathy pushed her away. ‘Daddy was dying.’

  ‘Why should you be there and not me?’

  ‘Go ahead – go on only thinking about yourself!’ Cathy turned on Isobel in a way she never did.

  While Lily could only sit and watch them dully, they hit each other, and then cried.

  After that, they were both marvellous. They listened, one on each side of their mother, propping her up, while the surgeon talked. A square man, ruddy-faced from some autumn vacation, pink hands clasped: the hands that had been inside Paul’s brain, folded over the secret of the terrible injury.

  Deep haematoma… bruising and lacerations to the brain.

  ‘Brain damage?’ Lily whispered.

  ‘Not necessarily permanent, no. No, you don’t have to expect that, Mrs Stephens. See how he does… very serious blow… brutal force. Mrs Stephens, have you any idea who did it?’

  Lily shook her head. Cathy and Isobel continued to stare at the doctor in silence, their sweet young mouths pulled down, their clear eyes stricken with terror.

  Lily opened her mouth, shut it, licked her lips, swallowed, and heard herself ask, ‘Will he die?’

  ‘Always the chance of another haemorrhage. But no, I don’t see why, Mrs Stephens.’

  He was one of those people who tell you your name all the time, in case you don’t know it.


  After Paul became hazily conscious, in Intensive Care, he seemed to have no memory of what had happened. He hardly spoke. He drifted in and out of a sleep that was like a coma. The police were there from time to time, but he did not see or hear them. Lily and her daughters were there all the time, for as long as they were allowed. Nina went home and came back again to be with Isobel and Cathy while Lily slept, and to wait with Lily while they slept. The motel room had brown zigzag bedspreads, and a roaring bathroom fan that came on with the light, so you could sob and howl in there.

  Tony came and sat dumbly with Isobel in the cafeteria, staring at her dulled, colourless face and holding her hand under the table. Harry and other friends came and went as in a dream.

  Once, when Cathy was close to her father’s head, he opened his swollen eyes as far as he could, below the white turban of bandage, and said thickly, ‘Arth.’

  ‘He’s all right, Daddy.’ Cathy’s small hand went on stroking his arm above the intravenous needle. ‘He broke a leg.’

  ‘Flew into the fray… like your grey… your bray…’

  ‘My brave grey cat.’

  Paul smiled and shut his bruised, watery blue eyes, and Cathy dripped tears and soft pale hair on him as he drifted away from them again.

  Jamspoon had not been able to find Terry for several days. He had wandered away from the Duke’s Head months ago, because he got fed up with Blanche bossing him around and making him serve the lunches that were spoiling the old pub by becoming grander and more elaborate.

  He had drifted away from James, because he got tired of going with the crazy old guy to spend hours of agonizing boredom hanging around on movie locations, after Jam had got him to sign up for crowd work. He removed himself completely after Jam’s grisly old girlfriend Pixie, who was also a film extra, specializing in spangled evening dresses, had told her daughter Button that Terry needed a woman as much as Button needed a man.

  Yikes! Get me out of here! Terry was working in the kitchen of a hotel in Aberdeen when James finally tracked him down and told him what had happened to his father.

  ‘A week ago! My God, I should be there. Why didn’t you –’

  ‘Why didn’t you? I had the devil’s own time finding you, and Lily says they haven’t heard from you for months. So much for this great love you’ve got for your father.’

  ‘I’ll kill you, Jamspoon.’ Terry was standing at the wall telephone in the stone passage between the kitchen and store-rooms, shivering.

  ‘You do that, my dear. But get your lazy bum over to Boston first. And – Terry!’ He called out to stop him hanging up. ‘Tell Lily I – tell my Lily, if she wants me, I’ll come.’ His voice broke, hammily.

  Jamspoon was let off the hook, because Lily did not want him. Paul was going to be all right. He was not going to die. She couldn’t be distracted from her effort to get him well enough to go home from the hospital. She did not want her mother yet either.

  ‘Later,’ she told Nora. ‘Come later when I’ve got him at home and I’ll need help.’

  ‘Will you, Lily?’ Terry asked. ‘Will he be in bed all the time?’ Was his father going to be a paralysed invalid? ‘Will he need a lot of nursing?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so, but if Nora wants to come, she may as well feel needed.’

  ‘Why don’t you think about yourself?’ Terry asked.

  ‘I do, all the time. But it’s not much fun.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s Isobel at the end of the hall. It’s your turn to be in the room now.’

  Sometimes his father wanted to talk, half sensibly, half vaguely. Sometimes he just wanted to sit in the chair by the window, and frown and fall asleep while Terry talked to him. He did not remember that Terry had been in Europe for two years. He was unnecessarily polite, from habit, but he could not be interested in hearing about any of it.

  The police, who were still looking for this Michael Baxlee character, whom Terry would torture and strangle when they found him, had told them all to keep asking, to try to help Paul to remember.

  ‘Who, Dad? Who was it? Who came at you? The vet said Arthur’s leg was probably broken by a kick. You saw him jump out of the sea, didn’t you? Who did Arthur jump at? Who did it?’

  ‘Who did what?’

  ‘Who hit you?’

  ‘What who?’

  ‘Try and see it, Dad. Try to remember.’

  When his father first left his room, to go to the sun lounge in a wheelchair, it was Terry who pushed him. Lily wanted it to be her, but she let Terry do it, because it would be ‘good for him’, as it would be good for wanton old Nora to leave Duggie to feed budgies in the bungalow and come over to help.

  When Mike turned up with his hair long and greasy and someone else’s jacket that was yards too big for him, Ida had not seen him for a long time. She had thought he was still working for a builder in Vermont. Now he was going to fly to Toronto to see his old rehab roommate Robbie.

  Ida and Shirley did not want Mike around, because the police had been to their house looking for him, for some undisclosed reason. So they lent him some money, and Ida took an afternoon off to drive him to the airport. She was upstairs getting changed when the police arrived. She had to come down in her wrapper to open the door. Mike was in the kitchen with a bowl of soup and a boloney sandwich. They put the handcuffs on him first, then talked.

  Assault? Who? What did Mike do?

  Aggravated assault.

  Paul Stephens.

  Ida’s stomach caved in as if she had been kicked by a horse. She backed to the sink and leaned over the draining board. The contents of her head had dropped into her stomach. She was going to faint or throw up, or both.

  The same prints of his boots on the beach and in the field where he had worked. Why had that crazy Lily ever taken him on?

  Mike went into one of his show-piece rages. A cop had him by each arm. His wrists were locked behind his back. Ida could have told him that language like that would get him nowhere.

  The very blond cop with the sinister white eyelashes told him, ‘You can tell that to the judge.’ He made the corny joke seriously.

  Ida and Shirley went to the courthouse, because Mrs Baxlee would not go, and there was no one else. Mike did not tell anything to the judge. The albino policeman read out the statement he had made at the station, and the judge ordered him to gaol, awaiting trial.

  Nine

  After Paul had been home for about a month, Ida came to see Lily. Paul was asleep when she arrived. ‘But he wouldn’t want to see me anyway.’

  Lily did not tell her politely, ‘Of course he would.’ Even when he was free from headaches, Paul only wanted to see his family and close friends for a very short time.

  ‘It’s you I came to see anyway, me old Lil, dear old pal.’

  ‘That was nice of you, Eye. I’m glad. People have all been so great. Americans are very kind, kinder than English people, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel American, don’t you?’

  Lily shook her head. ‘I love it here, but I don’t think I’ll ever completely belong. I still feel English.’

  Lily sat on the floor by the fire, wrapping a few Christmas presents with no enthusiasm. Ida sat in a chair. At forty-three, her fat was a solid structure, anchored to floor or furniture. She had lost her light balloonlike movements, although her breathy voice was still weightless.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lil.’

  ‘Yes. It was a ghastly thing to happen.’

  ‘No, I mean, I have to say, I’m sorry for what I did.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bringing you together with Mike.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s mine.’ Lily had not said this to anyone, and no one had said it to her. Yet. ‘Dear Doctor Lily – you know me, Eye. I had to wade in with both feet.’

  ‘Why did you give him the job here?’

  Lily stared into the pulsing red hollow of the logs on the wide hearth, and leaned against Ida’s short st
rong legs.

  ‘Paul did it to please me, and that’s the terrible truth of it.’

  Ida put her hand into Lily’s hair and stroked her scalp. It felt good.

  ‘I had tried so hard with Mike,’ Lily said. ‘Too hard. Thinking I could straighten him out, ignoring how sick he was, I suppose.

  After the attack, it was a long time before Paul finally remembered what had happened. He suddenly said one day, when we’d been talking about something else and he was looking blank and not listening, “My God, you’re right. It was that damned madman. It was Mike,” he said, and looked at me like a sword. It was as if he had said to me, “It was you!”’

  Paul never blamed Lily for getting too involved with Mike, but since she blamed herself bitterly, it did not make any difference.

  At first, while he was still very weak and not able to move about much, he was his same old sweet self; but as he began to creep back into life and be more active, the cycles of headaches and depression began, and he was not so much himself, as his sick self. A new sick self who had bursts of temper and said uncharacteristically irritable things to Lily and the girls, even to the animals. Arthur was the only one who could never annoy him. The dog kept close to Paul, moving his back leg stiffly, next to the leg on which Paul limped.

  The sledge-hammer blow had ruptured his ear drum, and he was still rather deaf on that side. Cathy’s voice was quiet, and he would snap at her, ‘What? Don’t mumble.’

  Obligingly, she moved round to his good side. ‘That better, Daddy?’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t be so nice to me. Why don’t you all walk out? Let me rot. I’m no use to you.’

  When one of them offered help, he might say peevishly, ‘I’m all right. Don’t fuss.’

  ‘Don’t you fuss, then,’ Lily was driven to retort.

  ‘What?’