Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Blanche would immediately sacrifice the public bar and the dart board and fruit machine to make a proper restaurant. Tant pee, as they said, and James would feel like a conservationist who has held out against a motorway through the swampy meadows and finally gone under to the juggernauts of progress.

  Lily had tutted at the state of the cottage and the random quality of Jam’s life, but she did not try to straighten him out. She would not go into the pub, because it was as hard for her to be confronted with people who had known her as part of a couple as it had been for Jam when Nora scarpered. He told Lily he knew just how she felt. She looked at him blankly, as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  She was out most of the day, came back to cook supper for James on the crusted stove which would have given Nora a terminal stroke, and went to bed early, but was often still awake when James closed the bar and shifted the barrels and came up-stairs.

  ‘You’re overdoing it,’ he told her. ‘Take it easy.’ The only way he knew how to treat a bereaved person was like an invalid.

  ‘I’ve got to keep going,’ she said. ‘I don’t want time to think. My only hope is to start a new life. Find a little house to be a hermit in. Get a dull job. What’s it matter?’

  ‘You’ve got the girls,’ James ventured, as a preliminary to one day saying, ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘Yes, thank God, but not really “got” them. Isobel will stay in the States, I’m sure.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Well … she plans to live with Tony. Remember Tony Andrade, who used to work with Paul so much? I haven’t told you before, because I hadn’t the strength to hear you say, “He’s black.” He’s a decent young man, and she –’

  ‘She can’t. He’s black.’

  ‘Thank you, Jam. He isn’t, incidentally. My little Cathy will be gone off to college before I can turn round, then gone away from me, like they do.’

  ‘You could take a refresher course,’ Blanche said when Lily talked about a job, ‘and finish your exams. Go back to being a social worker. They’re crying out for them.’

  ‘They’ll have to manage without me. I’ll never do anything like that again.’

  ‘But you’re good at it, I thought.’

  ‘Shut up. I don’t want to hear about it.’

  ‘My lips are sealed.’ Blanche, in her mid thirties – good God, how had he acquired children of thirty-four and forty? – sometimes sounded like her mother.

  When Lily finally found a cottage, she decided on it immediately, without taking time to think about it, because she was afraid she would lose courage. Blanche went over with her to take some measurements and help her talk to the estate agents, and she did not take James there until everything was settled.

  The cottage was on the Berkshire downs, where she had no associations or friends. After leaving the security of the motorway, James found himself winding through narrow lanes and up and down hills, until they turned off at an unmarked lane that was hardly more than a cart track, and came to a gate in a thick box hedge labelled ‘Daisy Cottage’. It was low and white and thatched, too typical for James’s taste, like a greetings card. Beyond an over-run garden that would take years to clear, pastures and stubble and new ploughed land folded down into an unseen valley and folded up over the opposite hills, with not a house in sight.

  The village was some distance away from Pie Lane, only a few straggling houses and farm buildings, with no shop or pub.

  ‘It’s pretty lonely here,’ James said.

  ‘That’s what I want.’

  There were three small bedrooms and two downstairs rooms that had been knocked into one long room, with a fireplace at each end and ceiling beams that were much lower than at the Duke’s Head. It was not bad. Old places that had been done up with radiators and the decencies of life were hard to come by. It was a nice cottage, if you wanted to live like Peter Rabbit.

  As James stood in the doorway to scan the lonely view for a sign of life, even one man on a tractor, the sun came out and flooded past him into the house. He stepped back inside. He could learn to duck his head. Perhaps those old red tiles on the floor would not draw the damp up into his bones.

  ‘Well, what do you think, Jam?’

  ‘Pretty fair.’ They could invite people to stay – join local clubs – get a video. ‘You could put a bed for me in that little downstairs room at the end. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a spare bedroom.’

  ‘Jamspoon – oh, my God, you didn’t think …’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’ No fool Jam. He knew when to bluff. ‘Just joking. But when you invite me for dinner, I might have to stay the night because of the dreaded breathalyser ha ha.’

  But why, ‘Of course not’? Why wouldn’t a daughter want to live with her old Dad who loved her and had stuck by her, unlike some parents he could mention?

  After Lily finished her business and had gone back to America, Blanche started talking to a solicitor, and an architect visited the Duke’s Head.

  James began to panic. Pixie baked him a lovely cake for his sixty-second birthday, with no candles on it, for tact. Her daughter Button had gone to the Isle of Man with a woman friend who was an obvious dyke. Pixie wore the gold lame that she had worn for the 1930s ballroom scene in The Woman I Love Beside Me. The front of it dipped very low in a U-shape, but her bosoms dipped lower.

  It was candlelight and wine all the way, and poached eggs on a slice of gammon for breakfast, and spiced tomato juice for his hangover, which he had not had since Nora flew the coop. I might do worse, Jam thought, resilient as ever, so used to having his dreams shattered that he was a dab hand at building new ones. I might do worse.

  Wearing the Japanese peignoir with the friendly dragon clinging to her broad comfortable back, Pixie rang Central Casting.

  ‘David? Hullo, dear heart. Anyone want Pixie Lamont …? Tuesday? Smart rural? Lovely.’

  James rang Faces, not to be left behind. The new young man in the outer office, brisker than Jam’s old pals, who themselves were not as thrilled to see him as in days of yore when he was a hot number, said, ‘May be something. Not sure. Call you back.’

  ‘Wait, Eddie. I’ll give you another number. Put it in my file. If you can’t reach me at home, try here.’

  ‘Oh ho,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, oh ho.’

  Lily was away two months. When she got back, the autumn leaves were flooded with spectacular colour. As she drove home from Boston, she looked for the huge maple tree before the Plymouth exit. It was a spreading burst of orange, tipped with fire from the setting sun, in its full glory, displaying itself to her with, ‘Look what you’ll be missing!’

  As an antidote to the reproof of the blazing maple, Lily thought possessively of Pie Lane on the Berkshire downs, its blowsy hedges nearly meeting, and of herself standing by the fence between the pasture and the small garden, trying to absorb the strange new view that kept its distance, leaving it up to her future eyes whether it became closer and familiar.

  At the house, Brad and Allie Miller, who had stayed with Cathy, had left everything in good shape. It had usually been Tony’s sister and her husband who stayed in the house when Paul and Lily went away, but it had not seemed right to ask them under the circumstances, since the Andrade family were less relaxed than Lily about Isobel moving in with Tony.

  Terry had said, ‘We won’t need anyone in the house. The girls and I will cope.’ But he was still not coping with anything very well, and often going to work with a hangover.

  He was gone before Lily returned. A friend from England had turned up. ‘A very strange guy,’ Isobel said. ‘What’s Terry been up to over there?’ Brendan had stayed two nights, and they had left together.

  Arrangements for the sale of the house went ahead. Lily and her daughters started to sort out what she would take to England and what Isobel could use, and what should be sold or given away. Lily kept some of Paul’s shirts and sweaters, and the old faded gold Turnbull pul
lover, which still smelled quite strongly of him.

  Arthur’s eyes and ears and limbs were deteriorating, and he was a bit old for the plane journey and six months in quarantine kennels, but Lily could not go to England without him. She sent him off ahead with the black and white sheepdog that Cathy had rescued on one of her obsessive visits to the animal shelter. Driving back from leaving them in their cages at the airport, she thought, ‘That’s done it. Now I’ll have to go.’

  The pony had gone to one of Cathy’s friends who had younger sisters. The Grossmans, who were buying the house, wanted to keep John. Mrs Dawson’s spoiled fat horse and another boarder had already come back, and the stable and yard were busy again. Lily did not often go to see the horses, but when she saw the younger Grossman boy fooling about with John in the field, she wanted to storm down to the tack shop and tell Mr Grossman, ‘John doesn’t like being messed about by children.’ But as she watched, she saw that he did.

  The boy was riding bareback, his thin legs hanging straight down, hands high, turning the horse with the reins against his neck, and all John’s Western memories of his youth in Kansas were coming back to him. Paul had wanted him to look like an Eastern hack: extended trot, head and neck up to the right point of flexion behind the ears. Now he looked contentedly like a cow pony, over-flexed, feet sliding into a flat singlefoot jog.

  Harry, who had found Robin for Paul, was going to have the bay horse in his stable. He came down with the trailer to fetch Robin, and Lily gave him lunch and enjoyed being with him, able to talk about Paul or about other things quite easily. None of the strain that she often felt with people who were not close friends – either quiet and abstracted and losing the thread of the conversation, or trying too hard to chatter and be lively, to show she was all right.

  When Lily left the table to put a log into the stove, Harry got up too and went to stand by her.

  ‘I want to put my hands on you. Would that be all right?’

  ‘No, Harry.’ She straightened up.

  ‘We could go up to bed?’

  She smiled and shook her head at him.

  ‘We might have once,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for Paul. I still want to. Do you?’

  ‘I want someone to put their arms round me. That’s all. That’s one of the things you take for granted, and then miss dreadfully.’ She wrapped her arms round herself. ‘I find myself embracing people dike the minister and that nice man in the drug store who was so helpful with all the pills.’

  Harry moved her arms aside and put his arms round her. He tightened them, and as his funny creased, boyish face with the long tilted eyes came close, she felt the nerves in her body responding, and pulled away in horror.

  ‘Just testing, lady.’ Harry laughed, protecting himself from being hurt. ’Kaput. Too bad. Doesn’t work.’

  When Lily was packing clothes for the movers, she found herself not folding the sweaters, but rolling them tightly, in Paul’s naval style. She had already noticed that she was keeping her accounts more neatly. She had run the Crisis office efficiently, but her own affairs had always been slapdash. Paul was methodical and tried to teach her a system, but she had only half listened, restlessly, because there were better things in life.

  Now she was doing what he wanted, although he wasn’t here to see. Who was doing it? Dead people are too busy to come back and roll a sweater or balance a cheque book.

  In a drawer, she found one of the notes from early in their marriage that he had left for her every day before he went to work at Turnbull’s. In the desk in the study downstairs, she found that he had kept every one of the love notes she had left for him on scrappy bits of paper, on the kitchen table, in the tack-shop office, on his pillow if she were going away, in his suitcase when he went off without her.

  The loss was not so much not getting his notes now, as not writing hers.

  After the movers came, Lily and Cathy and Isobel cleaned the house and lived for a week with a card table and garden chairs in front of the fire, and sleeping bags on old mattresses that were going to the dump.

  The morning that Isobel was going to leave with the big grey cat for Tony’s shack, now known as Our Cottage, Lily sat helplessly at the card table, stricken by what was actually happening. ‘How can I leave you?’

  Cathy went tactfully away, so that Lily did not have to add dutifully, ‘But I’ve got Cathy.’

  Isobel sat down again and put her hands over her mother’s on the table. ‘I’ll be okay,’ she said perkily.

  ‘I won’t. I need you.’

  ‘I need you too.’ Isobel’s lip dropped and stuck out as if she were still a small child, and a tear fell into it.

  ‘I’ll come back, lots, and send you money to come over to me.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  They looked at each other across the small rickety table.

  If she had cried, at any time, ‘Don’t go, Mud!’, would Lily have stayed? But Isobel was starting her own new life for herself, and making the shack a place for Tony. For Lily to have hung about on the edge of it (waiting for black grandchildren) would have been madness.

  When she went to New Bedford to say goodbye, Ida said, ‘Hang on a sec, I’ll come with you.’

  ‘I wish you could. Would you ever go back to England?’

  ‘I’d be daft to go. Bernie’s doing so well at the community college. Myaggie’s Myaggie, and old Fred’s in trouble all the time, but so he would be in England. Lying? He has the gift, and a terrible temper, just like his father. If I ever think I want to go to England, it’s because I imagine that all the things I hate here – crooked pols and violence and bullshit and rip-offs – aren’t the same over there. Which they are. Like I say, I’d be daft to go. You’re daft.’

  The Grossmans started to move into the house, and Lily and Cathy spent their last few days with Nina and Sam. On a freak warm early April morning, Mrs Grossman called.

  ‘It’s such a great day. Come and have a last ride.’

  Lily wavered. ‘Go Mud,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Go,’ Nina ordered. ‘Take my car.’

  In borrowed jeans and oversize boots, Lily rode John down the track towards Hidden Harbor. Not to the beach. She would only go half-way, then turn through the woods and ride round the sandy roads among the deserted summer cottages where she and Paul and Terry had stayed by the marsh. When they came to the turn-off through the trees, John resisted. He wanted to go down to the water, so she let him go ahead.

  He was not being Western, but moving strongly and collected, head up to the bit, in his old way for her. He was doing beautifully and she was riding well. She hadn’t lost it. At the mouth of the inlet, she let him walk out through the seaweed in the shallow low-tide water.

  Not so long ago, she had dragged her feet through the sand here with Arthur, crying out to the seagulls, crying for Paul. Now that madness seemed far behind. She had moved a long way ahead from despair.

  Paul was here. Not as a fallen ghost among the cold winter grasses. He rode with her. If she had seen him physically, sitting easily on Robin and turning back to smile at her, she would not have been totally surprised.

  John put down his broad black head and started to slap at the water with a front hoof, a threat of sagging down to roll. Lily pulled up his head and he stood stock still and stared across the inner bay to where a yellow bulldozer moved like a toy among the rocks.

  ‘I’m going, Paul,’ Lily said. ‘Is that all right?’

  Her mind knew the answer in his dear remembered voice.

  ‘I’m coming too.’

  Without warning, John suddenly buckled his knees and went down into the sea. Lily stepped off just in time. He thrashed and floundered about. Her borrowed clothes were soaked. The wide boots filled with very cold water. She laughed aloud. She had thought you couldn’t laugh alone. You could.

  Back on the beach, she hung John’s reins down to the ground so that he would stay, like a Western-trained horse, and stood on her head in the sand to let the w
ater run out of her boots.

  Eleven

  First there was mud and sticky ploughed land which clung to your boots and the underside of your dogs from January to April. Then imperceptibly the landscape greened. Points of life pricked through the heavy brown earth, and it gradually dried, giving up its moisture to what grew above it.

  The corn was an inch high. Then, suddenly it seemed, between one rampaging spring storm and the next, the fields were upholstered in lush green velvet. Ankle high. Calf high. The trees puffed out, round and rich. The hedge lines looping up and down the contours of the gentle hills blurred and spread.

  The hectic patch of rape-seed flower in the middle of Lily’s view was constant sunlight, enhancing the subtler pastels of the changing greens and the pale-washed sky. Lambs, kids, calves, foals came forth as rapidly as the growing grass and grains, and celebrated. In May, cow parsley foamed from the banks, and wet days turned Pie Lane into a car wash. The hay beyond the garden fence would soon be ready to cut. Silvery waves shivered through the green wheat. Already a light brown haze was on the curving slope of barley, as if the whole field had been put under a grill and lightly toasted.

  Last year, Lily had walked on the hills, along riding tracks that made her sick with nostalgia as she sloshed through the puddles of other horses’ hoofs, without really seeing the countryside. She had leaned on her post-and-rail fence and looked over the stunning view without being able to absorb it, or to comprehend that it was her view, which would eventually become as familiar in all its changing aspects as her own face in the mirror.

  A year later, she realized that she must be walking with her head higher, because she stumbled over ruts and craggy flints that she had avoided when her eyes were on the ground. She saw much more, and what she saw began to mean something.

  ‘I think I’ve turned a corner,’ she told Susan, who lived in the village, comfortable, casual, doing two part-time jobs and bringing up three children and making allowance for an immature, variable husband who came and went.

  ‘Hope for you yet? Then who will I have to be sorry for?’