Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Calm down, darling. Remember how you were the one who was always so calm?’

  ‘How can I be calm when things are in such a mess?’

  He fussed about nothing, or panicked, because he could not remember, or could not understand. Harry had found a young couple to run the tack shop and the stable, and Paul was often on their necks, criticizing and agitating and wanting to take charge of things himself, when it was almost all he could do to walk with his stick over the uneven ground down to the barn.

  Once Lily found him in Robin’s loose box, a fork in his hand, leaning against the wall with his eyes shut. He had been trying to muck out. The wheelbarrow was in the doorway, with some of the dirty bedding in it.

  ‘Paul – darling, you –’ No. Mustn’t say, ‘You shouldn’t.’ ‘Let me help you,’ she said.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her without seeing. Then he jerked his face away, tipped his head up, and slid down the wall to He in the shavings, jerking and shaking. Lily pulled the barrow out of the way and knelt down to hold him, until the brief seizure was over, and he went limp, and opened his eyes and smiled innocently up at her.

  Afterwards, with the doctor, he couldn’t remember the fit, nor being able to walk from the stable to the car. Dr Monroe thought it was part of a cycle of pain and headaches, caused probably by scar tissue.

  ‘Could it happen to me again?’ Paul was recovered, but sleepy.

  ‘Not likely.’ Dr Monroe always gave you the best news. He believed in the possibility that you could make things happen by believing that they would. ‘But it means you won’t be able to drive.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Paul slumped and sulked like a child unfairly chastised. He actually had not driven his car yet, but the news that it was forbidden made him feel trapped.

  ‘I’ve got to get going again,’ he grumbled restlessly to Lily. ‘Why do you all hold me back?’

  But the next day, he told her, ‘I feel lousy. I don’t want to get up,’ and would not let her even open the curtains.

  ‘Bad headache?’

  ‘Not even that excuse. I just feel, kind of… undone.’

  Once when he didn’t come in for dinner, he was in the office behind the shop, with papers and bills muddled all over the desk and file drawers open. He sat with his head in his hands. Lily thought he was crying, but when she spoke to him and he raised his head, his face was dry.

  He had lost weight in the last weeks. It was very painful to see the lovely triangular shape of his broad-cheeked, smiling face narrowed and bonier, the skin looser, dry and colourless. Some-times now his blue eyes which had always been so hopeful looked haunted by troubles that Lily could not know or comfort.

  ‘Come on in for dinner.’

  ‘I’ve got to get these orders straight. But I can’t, Lily, I can’t. What’s happened to me?’

  ‘You’re not ready for this yet. Your head has got to heal.’ Lily bent and picked up off the floor the glasses that he had to wear now. ‘Anthea will straighten it out in the morning.’

  ‘I want to do it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Her experience has been in a different kind of business. She can’t understand the way I’ve built this up.’

  Anthea came to Lily and said, ‘I know he’s not well yet, but it is hard to do things right for him. You know that Frank and I will have to leave in the spring anyway. Maybe it would be better if we –’

  ‘Wait. Hang on. It will be all right.’

  ‘You should make a tape of that, Mud,’ Isobel told her. ‘You say it all the time.’

  ‘Well, it will be all right. We’ve just all got to hang on. One day soon, things will be back to where they were.’

  Dr Monroe, fatherly and reassuring in his British-style tweeds and old rowing-club ties, continued to be hopeful. Medication had controlled the seizures. Paul had only had one more. Isobel, atone with him in the house, had heard him call out, and found him shaking and scared in the bath, teeth chattering, his hands trying to hold on to the sides, water sloshing.

  She had held him and calmed him and found the right pills, and helped him out and dried him and got him into his bathrobe and into bed.

  She and Cathy had always wandered in and out of their parents’ bathroom when they were children. ‘It’s a bit different when your daughter is sixteen,’ Paul said afterwards.

  ‘Were you shy?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘We didn’t have time for that,’ Paul said. ‘It was a crisis we were in together.’

  Since Paul’s moods had made him more difficult, the stormy scenes of Isobel’s childhood had recurred a few times. Lily was happy to see them so close.

  The neurologist in Boston was hopeful too. The cycles of pain and depression were still intense, but they seemed to be further apart.

  When Nora came over, on the heels of a blizzard, which caused her to observe, ‘It’s a white world,’ five times during the drive from the airport, she was helpful to Lily, and comfortable to have around. Paul was fond of her. She had always adored him, and she showed her love and sympathy in the busy, practical ways which she had perfected all through her life. With her mother taking some of the load, Lily realized how exhausted she was, far more tired than when she used to drive seventy miles each way and put in a day’s work in Boston, and shop and clean the house, and go chasing off after emergency clients in her spare time.

  Away from Duggie, Nora was her old self, which was comforting and peaceful for this household where so much had changed. Her grey hair was still set in the same neat, old-fashioned way. She had brought the old fur-coat which had seen her through many Oxfordshire winters, and a new pair of her usual broad fawn suede boots, which made her look like a cart pony. Her red-veined cheeks were smooth and round. Her hands were plump and soft, after nearly five years of Duggie doing the washing-up and the heavy cleaning.

  Isobel and Cathy, who had been mystified by the improbable exploits of their staid, cosy grandmother, wanted to talk openly about the break up of her marriage to James.

  ‘Old devil, he is,’ Isobel said. ‘Remember when he fell in love with Paige at the theatre? He even told Dodo about it at the drug store, when we were having our raspberry sodas. Even when I was little, I used to wonder sometimes how you put up with him.’

  ‘Oh, it was quite all right, my dear,’ Nora said, ironing in the living-room, so she could watch the television soaps. ‘Froth and bubble. Marriage is a lottery, as you’ll find out one day. Swings and roundabouts, I say.’

  ‘You probably shouldn’t have walked out though, Gran.’ Cathy was very moral. ‘But perhaps if you hadn’t, he might have.’

  ‘Grandpa? Oh, no, dear.’ Nora would not criticize James, especially to her granddaughters, who were still children to her, although they had always talked about everything with Paul and Lily and had both become very mature and responsible since that ghastly early morning of November 7th, when Mike split their world asunder, like Vulcan parting the clouds with thunder.

  With Nora there, Lily was able to drive up to Boston to see Martha and to collect the books and papers that she had left in the office at Crisis.

  She had sent in her resignation, but Martha was irritatingly persistent in telling her, ‘You’re on leave, not resigned. Take as much time as you need, and come back to us when Paul is better.’

  ‘I won’t want to. I don’t want to do anything like this any more.’

  ‘Do you think calamity will make you change your ways? Look at some of our customers.’

  ‘No, I’d be no use. I couldn’t help anybody now.’

  How could Martha even ask her? With her candid, weathered face and her chopped brindle hair, and her sneakers and the faded jeans too tight across the womanly bottom she tried to ignore, Martha was so totally wrapped up in Crisis that she was impervious to what was going on in the world outside.

  As Lily had been. Sometimes when she looked at her battered Paul, in the dark glasses he had to wear when the headaches messed up his eyes, and saw the beloved face, that use
d to be so serene and smiling, drawn and puzzled and in pain, she thought about the Judge on that long-ago Easter at the ham lunch, ‘with all the fixin’s’. Lily in her red dress ranting so earnestly about involvement, and the Judge with his mixed metaphor about not plunging in up to the neck: ‘It could sow the seeds of ruin.’

  She tortured herself, going back and back to that.

  In bed with Paul, their bodies could occasionally reach each other. Often he was frustrated and distressed. Lily’s instinct was to hold him close, fiercely close, force it to be the way it used to be, not let him turn away to the edge of the bed.

  She and Nora came back from the supermarket with the car filled with bags of all the stupid things that seemed necessary to keep life rolling along; more of them with Nora here, since she could not pass any new displays or special offers.

  As they came up the road, a car was turning out of their drive. Paul was in the stable yard with Arthur, cleaning one of the horses, tied up to a ring outside the barn.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Summer people. They’re going to board two horses and two ponies.’

  Oh, no. With Peter and Anthea leaving, even if we have to close the tack shop for a while, how will we manage? Paul can’t possibly do the work.

  He was happy, out here with the horse, working slowly and thoroughly, holding Robin’s thick tail in one hand and brushing it out in strands.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a short ride.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Lily said.

  ‘No, you unpack the groceries, or Nora will put them away in a new system.’

  Lily did not want him to go out alone, but she could not stop him. Arthur, who could not run with the horses now, sat at the end of the drive and waited. Paul came back quite soon, thank God.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Paul looked a bit shaky. ‘I had to come back because I want to start moving hay out of the end boxes,’ he said as an excuse.

  Four extra horses – how was she going to stop this? Could she call the owners and explain?

  ‘Who are these people? They had a New Jersey licence plate. Where do they live?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be dealing with them. It’s not going to make extra work for you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Lily took John’s reins, to lead him in, but Paul took the reins from her.

  Frank had left everything ready for Paul to bring the horses in and feed them, but he stayed out there for a long time, as darkness fell and it grew cold. Lily’s normal self would have barged out and said, ‘Let me help,’ not bothering about what Paul wanted. Now she had to be contained and careful, not knowing if he wanted her out there or not, not even able to go and ask him.

  She stood by the glass of the back door, looking out at the light in the barn. When Nora came and put an arm round her, she began to cry.

  ‘What’s happened to us all? Our lives were so secure and unchanging, and now your life and Daddy’s is turned upside down, and Paul and I – my poor safe Paul – we had everything we wanted. He was so happy! Mum, it’s not fair. He was so happy.’

  She slumped at the kitchen table and sobbed rendingly, out of control. She had not cried much, because it made her feel too ravaged, and she could not let Paul see. When the stable lights went out, Nora took her upstairs to weep.

  ‘What’s happened to us, Mum? It wasn’t meant to be like this.’

  Soon after, Lily let herself get angry with Paul, because she thought he was unfair to Cathy. Cathy was taking a music exam, and she had to practise the piano, but it never seemed to be the right time when the noise would not bother Paul.

  She was starting a dog obedience class for some of the children in the village. When he went outside, he was upset because they were all out there in the field with their assorted mutts and mongrels, calling and whistling and shrieking hysterically at stubborn rebels and threatened dog fights.

  ‘Come and help judge, Daddy,’ Cathy called. ‘We’re doing tests.’

  He turned and went back into the house.

  ‘Why take it out on her?’ Lily heard herself grumble, quite nastily.

  I’m glad Lily chewed me out. Better than knocking herself out to be so patient all the time. Like poor little Cathy. When I told her not to play the piano, she said, so damned amiably, ‘You play, then, Daddy.’

  I can’t. My fingers slip off the keys. I blur the bass. Terry used to show me new chords on his guitar, but now I can’t follow. I hear it wrong. When the sledge-hammer hits me again and the pain and nausea start, I’m deaf and blind. When the pain goes, sometimes everything else goes. They all fade away from me. I can’t reach them. I can’t feel. I’m lost.

  I’m fifty. I think I’m impotent. ‘It will be all right,’ Lily says. ‘Lie with me, like this, like when we were in Iceland and you wouldn’t do it.’ She was a fat baby, and desperate, and I was so smug and paternal.

  I can’t always remember much of last month, last week, but everything about the golden past. When you love only the past, you’re getting old. I’m old. I look at the back of my head in Terry’s picture, and then I look in the mirror that Lily hung next to it, ‘So you can see the front of you as well as the back,’ and I see this old grey sick man, and new lines are being drawn in every day.

  Terry says I look glamorously consumptive. ‘Keep the limp,’ he says. ‘It’s romantic’ I wish he’d stayed here and not gone dodging off to Boston. ‘If you’re okay, Dad, I’ll go and see some friends.’

  ‘And your mother.’

  ‘I guess.’

  Would Barbara also nag at Terry about getting into a proper career? Why doesn’t he come back, so we can talk? Because he doesn’t want to hear what I want to say.

  ‘Lily, how about calling Terry and see if he’ll come down next weekend?’

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  If he won’t, she’ll make up an excuse that won’t hurt my feelings.

  The elm trees are hazed with green. The pines have pushed out bright new fingertips. Blossom foams and there are tiny violets scattered along the paths where we used to ride so joyfully in the spring. The horses were shedding lumps of winter hair from their hot stomachs, and were wild to gallop when the wind swung sweetly round to the west and rushed into their faces.

  I can’t ride. My balance has gone. When I got on Robin yesterday, the ground tilted up. Tony reached up to help me off.

  ‘Don’t!’ I yelled at him. ‘Leave me alone.’ I don’t want him around here so much. Isobel isn’t a child now.

  Isobel’s father grumbled to her, ‘Why don’t you have any white boyfriends?’

  Daddy, of all people. He was the most unprejudiced person Isobel knew. Everybody was racist in varying degrees, even if they didn’t admit it or even realize it; but her father genuinely wasn’t. Or wasn’t then. Since November, life for all of them was divided into then and now.

  He had loved Tony. He had taken an interest in him since they first came here, and helped him to grow up, and taught him about horses.

  ‘There’s your mate,’ Mud would say to Daddy when she saw Tony coming up through the field. They were always working on projects together.

  ‘It’s his injury.’ Tony was amazingly forgiving about Paul’s new attitude. ‘It isn’t him talking, see. It’s still that old hammer. It’s that frigging Mike, it’s all his fault. I hope they put him away for ever.’

  Now that Tony was working as crew on the island ferries, Isobel saw less of him. If he was on the late boat to Nantucket, he would stay over there and do the early-morning run next day. He would be on the boats long hours for several days, and then have a few days off, but he often spent them on Nantucket, where he had friends.

  When he was twenty-one, he had moved out of his parents’ house, as a sort of coming-of-age ritual, to a pad of his own in Mashpee, where most of his cousins lived. He had taken Isobel there a few times. It was a tiny little place, like a hut in the woods, with a sofa-bed in the one room and a
lean-to kitchen and shower at the back. Isobel cleaned it for him, and helped him to clear away enough scrub oaks to dig and plant a vegetable garden. The blinds were old, so she made curtains for the windows.

  ‘What are you making?’ Her father came into her bedroom when he heard the sewing-machine.

  In the old days, he would have been pleased to hear her say, ‘Curtains and a tablecloth for Tony’s house.’ Now she had to say, ‘Curtains for a girl at school’s room.’

  ‘Bit jazzy.’ Her father picked up a piece of the bright patterned fabric and blinked.

  ‘He likes it. She does, I mean, and her boyfriend does.’

  Now that the crisis had settled down into part of family life, they all coped with it day by day, and it sometimes seemed as if it had always been with them. But once in a while, when Daddy’s migraine was bad and he couldn’t talk or eat or sleep, and threw up all night in the bathroom, it hit Isobel with such an overwhelming sorrow that she could hardly stand it. Friends noticed a difference in her at school. She couldn’t study. She dropped out of the class play. There were days when she dreaded getting home to find out what was going on.

  When Tony had three days off, her friend Linda, who had her licence and the use of one of her parents’ cars, took Isobel over to Mashpee.

  She cooked some fish and vegetables and she and Tony drank some wine, and she begged him not to take her home. Their kisses and petting had become more intense lately, as Tony’s caution dissolved. Tonight, the despair that had been building up in her for weeks exploded in a fury of tears that engulfed them both. Then they were on the floor, and away from the world, and out of their minds with a passion that carried Isobel beyond the pain and the moment of fear into a soaring triumph.

  It was done. At last it was done. She wasn’t a child. She could do this just as well as anyone else. Better, because Tony kept saying, ‘It was never like this, I swear. Never with anybody. Only you, Bella.’

  ‘Better than the Indian girl on Nantucket?’

  ‘What Indian girl?’ She was a joke between them, whether she existed or not. Isobel had invented that she had a gold tooth and long black greasy braids. ‘I don’t know no Indian girl on Nantucket.’