Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Nina’s husband, Sam, went out to deal with them. They stood around for a bit, looking nonplussed, and then they turned the truck and left.

  The tack shop was closed and the two other boarding horses had been taken away, but Lily was glad to have the care of John and Robin and the pony: familiar physical work among the good smells and textures, the horses absorbed in their unchanging daily routines, Arthur lying in the sun across the barn doorway. He was not visibly pining for Paul, but he had attached himself very closely to Lily.

  Isobel found her in Robin’s loose box, crying while she forked manure out of the shavings. Her daughters were more help to her than she was able to be to them. She could not feel their pain separately, only as a component of her own anguish.

  ‘Dr Monroe called to see how we were doing.’ Isobel had tied back her strong curling hair challengingly from her exhausted face, while Cathy let her cobweb hair float forward in a misty curtain. ‘I said okay. He didn’t want me to bring you up from the barn. He said he’d call again.’

  ‘Did he talk to you?’

  ‘Yes. He said if Daddy had lived, he could have got much worse, physically and mentally. “He’s been spared that,” he said, “and so have all of you.”’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Lily flung the fork into the wheelbarrow and covered her face with her hands. ‘I want him here. I want him back – sick, crazy, helpless, crippled – I want him here on any terms. I’d nurse him and take care of him for the rest of my life. I don’t want my life – I want him back!’

  Isobel put her arms round her mother and let Lily cry into her hair. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. She knew that too well herself.

  Paul had died before Terry could get there. His resentment about that simmered at the front of his gloom and silences until the rage beneath it inevitably surfaced and boiled over.

  He stayed in the house longer than Lily expected, longer than he ever had before. He ate and drank a lot, but would not help with anything about the place. He whispered in corners with Isobel, and was quite rude to Lily in a way that reminded her of their struggles when he was ten years old and she was first married to his father. He would not share his grief with her. Engrossed in her own, she could not make the effort to reach him.

  One night, when he had been drinking quite a lot, Lily asked him what his plans were. He was sitting low down in Paul’s deep chair with his feet on a stool. His hair, which had been long and bushy when he came over, had been chopped raggedly by himself, after Cathy threatened to cut it. He wore Paul’s shirts, un-laundered. At twenty-six, he was old enough to put them in Lily’s machine by himself, but he hardly ever did. His bare feet were dirty, the toe nails broken.

  ‘So tell me, Terry.’ When the June evening cooled, Lily came in from outside. She had been lying in the long chair under a bright half moon, trying to sail with it through small silver clouds. Such an evening that used to take her and Paul out to the field where the horses grazed, and the grey cat balanced along the top rail of the fence. ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘What plans? I guess I’ll just stay here for a while in my father’s house.’

  ‘Pity you never stayed as long when he was here.’ She knew, even as she started, that she shouldn’t say it.

  ‘You force me to remind you.’ Terry looked up at her with his eyes narrowed spitefully. ‘That it was a pity you didn’t give up charging around Boston pretending to save the world, while he was alive.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Lily stepped back against the wall as if he had punched her.

  Isobel, who was sitting on the floor in front of the television, looked round over her shoulder. She had been drinking too. Her glass of wine was on the carpet. Lily thought she would attack Terry, but she said, ‘I used to tell you, Mud. Daddy was fed up with it.’

  ‘He wasn’t. You didn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t want to hear. You thought he thought everything you did was wonderful.’ Isobel turned all the way round, the television screen blabbering and rioting behind her. ‘So you got away with it.’

  ‘Isobel, don’t, I –’

  ‘You know what you did.’ Terry suddenly swung down his feet and leaped up, knocking over Isobel’s wine-glass.

  ‘Look, please – stop this. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘No.’ Terry kicked a small chair out of the way and came to stand in front of Lily, moving his clenched fists as if he would hit her. ‘You know what you did. It was your fault – that crazy, fucked-up Mike. I’m glad he killed himself. Best thing he ever did.’

  Terry, don’t. What good will that do now?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, of course. One of your beloved underdogs. Still in love with the no-hopers, and look what it did to us all!’

  Isobel scrambled up, shots and shrieking tyres behind her.

  Terry jutted his anguished face forwards and screamed, ‘You killed my father!’

  ‘Don’t, don’t,’ Lily moaned. ‘Don’t you know I think that all the time? You’re right, it was my fault. I wondered when you’d say that. Thanks very much, Terry. I hope you feel better.’

  Surprised, Terry opened his fists. He raised his arms sideways helplessly and let them fall. Lily still stood backed away from him, rolling her head from side to side against the wall.

  ‘Don’t, Mud.’ Isobel pushed Terry aside and took her mother’s hand. ‘You didn’t know … How could you know?’

  ‘I should have.’ Lily went away from them, to lift her feet with difficulty up the stairs, hanging on to the rail like an old woman. Nothing could relieve the heaviness of her guilt, which had a life of its own, apart from her.

  At the top of the stairs, she leaned on the windowsill and looked out at the whitened lawn and the dark mass of the old barn, riding like a high ship below the stars.

  Guilt couldn’t help Paul. It could not help her children, or Terry, and if she let it increase its stranglehold, it would ruin her.

  The seeds of ruin. Well, she had sown them, and this was the harvest.

  One night after Cathy had moved back to her own room, Lily’s exhaustion played its game of dropping her into sleep over a book and then bringing her wide awake as soon as she turned out the light and bid down her head. Arthur snored on his bed in the corner. The night was endless. When she could not stand her circular sick thoughts any longer, she got up and went into Isobel’s room.

  The bed was neatly made. Isobel’s purse was not there. In the kitchen, the keys of Paul’s car, which she had been driving since she got her licence, were gone from the hook.

  When Lily went back upstairs, the dog in Cathy’s room barked, and Cathy woke.

  ‘Where’s Isobel?’ Lily went in to her.

  ‘Gone to Linda’s?’

  ‘Not in the middle of the night. She didn’t go to bed till after twelve. Do you think she’s all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Cathy pulled the sheet up to her chin protectively and said in a small voice, ‘She’s probably with Tony.’

  ‘At his place?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Does she go there often?’

  ‘I thought you’d guessed.’

  ‘I suppose I did, but I didn’t really want to know, because I couldn’t say anything to Daddy.’

  The extravagantly beautiful Cape Cod summer was wasting its time. Day after day of intense blue skies and tireless sun. It might as well be cold and grey and raining.

  Visitors came and went. The phone seemed to ring all the time; Boston friends, people in the village, friends Lily and Paul had made during nearly ten years on the Cape, all so kind and considerate. They invited her to their houses for supper. She did not want to go anywhere, but she must, so that they could feel pleased that they had done something for her.

  Weeds grew among her flowers. Crab grass crept over the lawn. Spiders’ webs in ceiling corners were larders of dead flies. Slats fell out of the shutters. In the barn, the feed-room was unswept. Straw from hay bales was not hanging on a nail, but tangled on the floor.
r />   Lily put off and put off deciding what to do with the stock in the tack shop. She hardly ever rode, or went to the beach to swim. She went into rooms for a purpose she forgot, and stood looking round vaguely, touching things, putting out a hand to pick something up, drawing the hand back, wandering out.

  At one point, she turned Paul’s picture to the wall, because it seemed that she stood trapped in the shadows under the English beech trees, watching helplessly while Paul would get up with his hair full of light and move into the distance away from her.

  Terry turned the picture back the right way.

  She thought she might be going insane. The idea of escape preoccupied her more and more. She could not stay here like this.

  When she went to Donna’s women’s group, wearing a bright flowered shirt that Paul had bought in Hawaii, the women explained to her that she was trying to escape from the pain.

  ‘Wait a year,’ they said. ‘Don’t do anything in a hurry. You need your home.’

  ‘No, no, I can’t stand it. There’s no reason for me to be here now. It doesn’t feel like my home. It’s not my house any more. It was ours.’

  One Friday, she went to the city to talk to the lawyer. Isobel had a summer job as a waitress. Cathy was a counsellor at a small children’s day-camp in the village. Tony had helped Terry to get work at Woods Hole, parking cars for the ferries. Lily went to Boston alone.

  Each year, the traffic was worse. She fretted and stewed on the way home, as she used to when she drove home late from Crisis and she was afraid Paul would be upset and ask, ‘Where have you been?’

  He never said that, but he always came out of the house as soon as he heard her car, looking anxious.

  At the place where the cooler air from Cape Cod Bay began to mingle with the inland heat and then gradually took over, her mind cleared.

  I don’t need to fret and push and hurry and take risks to pass. The girls will get their supper if they want it, if they’re home. I’m free.

  I don’t want freedom.

  Use it, said the strong sane part of her that had been lying dormant under the flooded wallowing and dithering and guilt and craziness.

  Experimenting with the freedom, she went back another day to Newton and stayed with her friend Josephine who was now divorced, and went to the theatre with Harry and saw a few other people.

  Harry did not want to talk about Paul, because it made him unhappy, and he wanted to enjoy his evening. Lily still needed to bring Paul into the conversation whenever possible, although she had already sensed that this made some people uncomfortable. When she said yet again, ‘Paul used to say …’ or ‘Paul and I went there …’, she felt them thinking, ‘Why does she keep on?’, but she had to keep his name alive.

  Being social again in town clothes was an effort. Lily wanted it to end so that she could go home; but when she got back to her house, which was empty, it did not close round her as she had expected. It had stepped a pace back. It did not want her.

  ‘Shan’t we ever be happy again?’

  If she had not had Tony, Isobel could not have borne this terrible time. Her love for him was nourished by her desperate need. He could not say the right things to her, but he was there. He held her close and made love to her, and their love-making eased the weight of her sorrow.

  She had got a prescription for birth control pills from a woman doctor, but Tony had to remind her and urge her to take them.

  ‘I want to have a baby,’ she told him. ‘Everything’s ruined and different. I can’t go on with my life as it was before.’

  ‘What do you want to do then?’ Tony took the lead in some things, and was quite strict and demanding with her. Sometimes he was at sea, and looked to her for answers, as if she were older than him.

  And now Isobel’s mother was talking about moving. There were people who wanted to buy the house and take over the stable and the tack shop. Her house, sure, she had a right to do what she liked. ‘But it’s our house too,’ Isobel protested. ‘You haven’t asked us yet.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m so selfish now, I’m all tied up in myself in knots and I don’t think about anyone else. What do you think? We can’t run this place on our own.’

  ‘And you want to go. That’s okay. I just wanted to be asked.’

  Later, when Isobel came home one night from working at the Pine Tree restaurant, Lily called her into her room, where she was sitting up in bed in Daddy’s blue pyjamas, with tea and bread and butter, a sign that she had tried to sleep, and couldn’t.

  ‘Darling.’ She patted the bed for Isobel to sit down. ‘What would you think if we went to England?’ Isobel looked down and said nothing, picking at the frill on the edge of her short white apron. ‘I don’t think I can bear to stay on the Cape, and it’s getting so crowded and spoiled anyway. But where else would I go in this country? I don’t belong here, without Daddy. Cathy seems to quite like the idea, as long as she can take the dogs. Would it be very hard for you? You could do a year in sixth form there. What do you think?’

  Isobel let her finish talking, then waited a moment before she got up in her silly green and white pixie uniform and said, ‘You go ahead and do what you like. I won’t be coming.’

  Poor old Mudder. She had disintegrated a bit in these last months. In the old days, she would have come back sharply with, ‘What do you mean, you’re not coming?’ Now she just said, ‘Oh,’ and looked crushed. Then she said, ‘But you’ve got another year before you graduate. You can’t live alone. Where would you live?’

  ‘With Tony.’

  Isobel watched her mother. She said, ‘Oh,’ again, and you could see her mind working and struggling and then shrugging its shoulders and giving up.

  ‘In that shack?’ was all she said, bleakly.

  ‘I’m making it nice. I’ve bought some stuff. When school starts, I can keep working at the Pine Tree, evenings and weekends, and pretty soon, we’ll get a bigger place.’

  ‘Do you want to marry Tony?’

  ‘Maybe one day. Go on, say it. I’ll have dark-skinned children.’

  ‘No, Isobel, don’t be silly.’

  ‘You’ll have black grandchildren.’

  ’Good.’ Lily smiled in a ‘Take that!’ way.

  ‘Then you don’t mind?’ The woman was amazing. A weeping widow dithering around the place in her dead mate’s plumage, but she could still struggle up to a challenge and be Lily-isn’t-she-marvellous.

  ‘I mind about you being so young.’

  ‘I’ve aged a lot since November.’

  ‘So have I. Look at me.’

  ‘You look good, Mud. Much less than forty. You need to put on a bit of weight again, that’s all.’

  ‘Funny, when you think how hard I tried to lose it.’

  ‘Not all that hard.’ Isobel waited, wondering how to say this. ‘Do you think Daddy – I mean, do you think Daddy will mind about me and Tony?’

  ‘Shit, man, he’s not up there on the roof like an Old Testament patriarch.’

  ‘If he were, you couldn’t say, “Shit, man”.’

  ‘I’ve got to learn to do the things I couldn’t do when he was alive,’ Lily said slowly and instructively, to herself as well as to Isobel.

  ‘Good old Mud.’ Isobel looked down at her with approval. ‘I think you’re going to make it.’

  ‘I’m scared, though.’

  ‘So am I.’

  But they were two strong women. They admired each other.

  Pixie was a good old gal, but there were times when Jamspoon decided he was sick of her, and might have written her off if he had anyone else for company. In a rash close moment by her wide gas fire, a delightful furnace, Jam had told her his age, believing that she was older than him. She wasn’t. She only looked it. She was five years younger, and the discovery had encouraged her natural tendency to boastfulness.

  Pixie had been in crowd and stand-in work for years, and fancied herself the darling of Central Casting. She knew all the assistant directors of
all the film and television companies.

  ‘Oh, yes, they always ask for me.’ Jam was getting fewer jobs these days, and he did not want to hear from Pixie that she was still on the crest of the wave, dear heart. ‘Wedding guest, restaurant, audience at the opera, stand-in for a difficult artiste – “Call Pixie Lamont,” they say. They know they can depend on me.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ James said to Lily, when she was in England looking for a house, ‘I wish Nora hadn’t left.’ He gave it out as new information, because during the five years since his wife had gone off with Duggie, he had persuaded himself that it had been a mutual separation. ‘Sometimes, you know, I day-dream that she’ll come back.’

  ‘I don’t think she will now.’

  ‘You can’t tell with women.’

  But if she did, it could be awkward, because James had a much better dream that he kept shrouded and in waiting, while Lily went round to estate agents, and looked at totally unsuitable houses all over the Chilterns and the Thames valley.

  He had more or less given up films and commercials, because of the early calls and all the standing about, which was murder to his varicose veins. There was also the risk of running into Evvie. He was still getting a bit of advertising work from Faces, although the products tended to be things like pensioners’ rail cards and laxatives and denture stickem and last-ditch life insurance. He had even done a charity appeal for an old folks’ home, with a sagging cardigan and a walking frame for props, because none of the resident old codgers could do it right.

  ‘Next step will be a coffin ad,’ he joked, and consoled himself with old slogans like, ‘Pour me a Porsons’ and ‘A little luv, a little Lux-u-rest’ from the days of his glory.

  Before Lily even came over, he had laid his plans. Poor dear girl, who could she turn to if not her old father? He began to talk to Blanche about selling the Duke’s Head to her and Neil, although his son-in-law would have to sharpen up his act if he were going to keep the bar customers happy.