Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Was I so dreary?’

  ‘No, brave, you and Cathy. You’ve got guts.’

  That was what Lily wanted to hear. They had survived the upheaval of departure. They had got through the first year, learning not to be strangers. She had thought she knew England, but it had changed, or she had forgotten. Everything was slower than in America, and appliances and gadgets fell apart more quickly. The workmen who did up her kitchen and bathroom were lovely men with sturdy jokes, but they worked like snails and kept disappearing for two weeks at a time. Once when she had been to London, she found two of them on the floor, asleep by the fire with woollen hats pulled over their eyes.

  In the bad storm last winter, the snow shrieked across the open fields and piled up in impassable drifts at both ends of Pie Lane. In New England, the snow ploughs would be out all night, but here you waited for a humanitarian farmer. People of the village struggled back and forth in a friendly way, borrowing milk and yeast and baked beans from each other, and playing cards and looking for a book to read. Lily could not get her car out for a week.

  Later, odd little cranky Eric Pigeon dropped in once at midnight, when he was walking his matted mongrel down Pie Lane and saw that Lily still had a light on.

  She was wearing Paul’s winter dressing-gown. ‘Sorry about this.’ She knew she looked frumpy.

  ‘Moronic woman,’ Eric said. ‘Don’t try to flatter me that it matters.’

  She poured him a whisky, but he only stayed two minutes before his dog whined, tied up outside, and he jumped up and went away, with the whisky and Lily’s glass.

  The village was calmly friendly. Lily and Cathy were assimilated effortlessly, no big social deal, just allowed to start belonging here whenever they got around to it.

  Some of the women still talked in funny trumpeting voices (which sounded funnier after you had been living in the States), as if they had not heard about the revolution. Their children or grandchildren talked cockney or Berkshire, an accent whose stressed r’s were pleasantly not unlike American.

  The BBC was riddled with rare dialects. A Scots newsreader talked of Aggravated Buggery. The House of Commons sounded like the Battle of Hastings. Punks were creatures from European outer space, unknown in Boston, Massachusetts. Punks in Newbury? Lily had visited it when it was a little backwater country town. She stared, because it seemed more insulting to ignore them.

  In the main street, where people milled up and down with pushchairs all day and every day, as if the shops would close for ever tomorrow, a boy had bleached his hair a dry, hard gold and tortured and spiked it into a horrendous crown of thorns, which he carried, stiff-necked, past Marks & Spencer. No one paid any attention to him. Lily stared, and felt quite old.

  Cathy made some friends quickly at school and in the village, and rode with them long distances on her bicycle. In the first few months, she and Lily had to break their hearts every week, visiting the dogs in the kennels. Young Sheila was undaunted, a key member of the deafening chorus that barked and yelped when anyone came within smelling distance of their yard, but Arthur was muted and lost. When Lily and Cathy had to walk away, Sheila would be up on her hind legs at the wire, tossing out shouts of protest, but Arthur stood foursquare in the middle of the run, down at the front as he had become with age, and moved his grizzled head uncertainly. What …? Where?

  ‘Don’t look back, Mud. He’ll be all right when he comes out.’

  Cathy could not wait for that, but acquired a small furred beige dog from the postman, for whom she made tea every morning, because she was up early to catch her bus. A postman bringing letters at six forty-five! But Lily had to quell a treacherous self-indulgent nostalgia for the old walk along the abandoned railroad track to the post office on Cape Cod, to turn the knob of her mailbox to its combination.

  Two times right to H. Once left to B. Reverse and stop between K and L. Or was it J and K? My God, she had forgotten it already, and she chose to let herself become distressed over this unimportant symbol of her lost past, which led to others, and others, and wasted half a day.

  Daisy Cottage did not accept her for some time. The Cape Cod house had withdrawn as she prepared to leave, and now this solid old thatched cottage held itself back to see what she would do. Her chairs and tables were not quite at home either. Not enough people had sat yet in this place. The air was empty of voices and laughter.

  In the garden, Lily did enough weeding and tidying to save the plants that were already there, but she did not make changes or plant anything new. She did not know how long she was going to stay. Parts of the white cottage walls needed painting. The roof needed re-thatching. That could wait.

  She did not hang up Terry’s picture of Paul on the hill for a long time. Her bedroom walls were too low, because of the sloping ceiling under the thatch. Neither end of the long living-room was the right place. The picture either dominated the white walls, or was submerged by the open beams. Eventually Lily hung it, with the plastic spoon, in the front hall, where the western sun struck across it from the side, as the sun along the top of the hills had irradiated Paul’s hair while Terry sat on a tree root behind him and quickly made the sketch.

  When the dogs came out of quarantine at last, Sheila was ecstatic and unchanged, but Arthur seemed blinder and deafer and vaguer. He was upset to find the bossy small dog there. A striped cat had turned up too, as cats did for Cathy. It stared uncharitably at Arthur, and he moved shiftily away, and waited his chance to steal its food.

  There had been no rabbits or hares on their Cape Cod land. Here the fields were full of them. When small bold rabbits came under the fence to sit on the lawn in the early morning and evening, the dogs shrieked at the glass door and burst out, all three of them, always too late. In August, a hare got up in the stubble and Arthur was gone, faster than he had run for years, almost as he used to run behind galloping horses.

  He did not come home. Lily found him collapsed under a hedge, and he died on Cathy’s lap on the way to the vet.

  He had been everybody’s dog, but as he got older, he had depended more on Paul, and when Paul was ill, the dog was by his chair, on his bed, following him where he limped, his stick on one side, Arthur on the other. When good dog Arthur left them quietly, he took with him one more visible part of Paul.

  During their first winter, Cathy had changed to a weekly boarding school to be with two of her close friends, and Lily got a job at a country hotel outside Newbury. It had recently been re-opened by an energetic and ambitious couple in their thirties, who had tried a lot of other things they didn’t like, and finally put money into what they loved. With him, it was cooking, with her, doing domestic things beautifully, and making people comfortable and happy.

  As Round Hill Rectory began to be discovered, they needed more than the odd chambermaid and weekend waitress. They took on Lily, who did a bit of everything for an unsensational salary, because she liked the odd hours, and the optimistic courage of Gerry and Janet and their cheery approach to disasters, real and threatened.

  They also loved each other, and showed it. Lily found she could not be with couples who fought or hurt each other. Once, invited to the big house of Mrs Colonel Dodgson – ‘When we were ee-nindia’ –a woman craftily insulted her husband across the table, and Lily had cried impulsively, ‘Oh, be nice to him, for God’s sake, or he’ll die and it will be too late!’ and disgraced herself by bursting into tears.

  For quite long periods, she felt strong and content, and could enjoy her new friends and even look ahead with some pleasure. Then – bingo – she would be awake all night in a cocoon of guilt and regrets, remembering, sorrowing, reminding herself deliberately of all the things with which she could chastise herself.

  Selfish. Arrogantly sure of his love and admiration. Impatient when he was ill. Consumed by the work at Crisis. Always home late, talking about her day, not Paul’s. ‘I’m desperate too,’ she had to hear him say, again and again, and at three o’clock in the morning, all her mistakes with Mike were
jostling and crowding in. The spectre of Paul’s anxious, sick face and his limp and silent tears of pain was obliterated by Mike up there like a fly, under the canal bridge in the Coastguard spotlight.

  ‘I love you!’ Silly fool. The men in the boat and up on the bridge must have had a riot with that afterwards.

  She saw him jump and fall feet first through the black swirling water into the dark image of his unloved young body hanging like a puppet from the ventilator grille in the bare prison cell.

  When Cathy at the weekend asked her how she had been, as she always did, Lily told her.

  ‘What’s the point of all that?’ Cathy asked sensibly. ‘You think you owe it to Daddy, or something? The way I see it, that kind of carry-on must push him farther away, not bring him closer.’

  She was beautiful and healthy, with milky whites to her steady light blue eyes. In the States, she had been rather neat: bouncy sneakers, plain bright clothes fitting her tidy narrow shape. Now she wore sloppy disconnected garments, black and earth colours, shuffling happily in loose flat shoes, like the other girls.

  In the summer, she hiked in groups along the ridge of the hills above the Vale of the White Horse, learned to play tennis well, bicycled to Kate’s swimming pool, adored Kate’s brother, who never spoke to her.

  On the first very hot day, Lily was going to garden and paint the outdoor chairs and clean the windows… until she let herself be seduced into thinking about Hidden Harbor, on such a day as this. Sick with longing for the sea, she lay for hours in the hammock and did nothing but nag at the aching memory of all the lovely summer places – Nauset Outer Beach, the Vineyard, Sandy Neck and the wild drumming gallop over the hard sand and through the splattering tide pools.

  She fell heavily asleep and woke when the little dog jumped into the hammock. The Judge’s grandfather clock was striking five. Dogs’ dinner time. Detached from earth, unreal, she held the warm, quickly pulsing heart of the dog to her chest, swinging gently under the sky, and was at peace.

  ‘The widow Stephens,’ Eric Pigeon said to her in his insolent fashion. ‘This place is crawling with widows. They come out from under mossy stones and embroider hassocks for the church, and expect me to be an extra man at dinners, to pour the wine.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Lily said.

  ‘You don’t give dinner parties.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘God, no. Disaster.’ He was opinionated and quite rude. ‘A fortyish widow. Who would come?’

  ‘You would.’

  ‘I’m safe. I’m a eunuch, I think.’

  ‘I never knew one of those.’

  ‘And you shouldn’t now, darling.’ He stood on tiptoe to embrace her outside the village shop. He could be spasmodically warm and quite loving. ‘You’ve got to devote attention now to the serious man hunt.’

  Lily stepped back, furious. ‘Don’t dare say anything like that to me!’

  ‘Don’t snarl at me like a bitch over its dead mate. I’ll cut your tongue out.’ He said things like that.

  Eric was a balding, slight, retired fellow in baggy trousers, who lived alone with his smelly dog and a few chickens and goats. He had been in marketing for something like margarine and cooking oil, writing promotion and packaging copy.

  ‘Words are my slaves, damn you, don’t criticize,’ he had said before Lily ever opened her mouth. He was writing a book. ‘Who isn’t?’ When people smirked at him, ‘I suppose you’re writing about all of us in this village?’ he snarled savagely, ‘Readers want to be entertained, not bored to death.’

  He had insulted almost everybody, but because this was England, they tolerated him for being batty.

  Cathy wanted to go to the village church, because she liked the school services, and Kate’s brother could occasionally be viewed here. Lily liked the vicar, a large cheery man who rode a big roan mare with a rump the same shape as his. The minister on Cape Cod had said to her, ‘You’ll be all right, my dear. You’re British. Stiff upper lip, okay? Okay.’

  This vicar had said, ‘What a terrible time for you, and how hard it must be to struggle to create a better one.’

  It was all right for admirable Susan in the village to tell her she was brave, because Lily wanted Susan to admire her; but she had been pleased that this vigorous ruddy man had let her pull a sad face and indulge in, ‘Poor me!’

  She and Cathy stopped on the way into church to watch the smooth arms-up-arms-down of the bell ringers: two sweet serious women and a young boy with his tongue between his teeth and Thomas who was a thatcher, from one of the villages on the opposite hill, across the valley.

  When Thomas said, ‘Stand,’ and the organ swelled to accompany the vicar and robed choir up the aisle, the ringers left the bells up and went to their seats. Lily, sitting in a back pew, heard Eric come in late and bang the heavy door, saw him look at the vicar’s broad praying back and the congregation bent painfully forwards, and saw him turn and look again at the bell ropes. Then he leaped and grabbed the coloured woollen sally of the tenor bell and was carried up to the roof with a high curdling scream. That was the kind of thing he did.

  Lily and Cathy quite liked him.

  That’s because you’re foreigners,’ Eric said, calling in on them with his wrist in plaster from the fall in church. ‘Youm doan’t unnerstand our ways.’

  He tied his goats out along the grassy path where Cathy walked the dogs, and the billy butted Sheila in the ribs and knocked her into the hedge.

  When Cathy complained, he glared his myopic eyes almost to bursting through his thick spectacles and shouted, ‘I’ll shoot your dog!’ That was the way he was.

  He was wispy and delicate, always injuring himself, and knocked off his feet by coughs and flu. When last winter’s storm cut off the village, he had slipped on the ice and opened up his forehead, hurrying to take a thermos of bloody Marys to an old lady before any good woman could get there with her homemade soup.

  ‘Listen, will you, for once in your life,’ he told Lily, sitting up when he had been told to lie flat. ‘You must keep an eye on Ma Eccles. She likes rum in her tea. And there’s trouble with her granddaughter. The probation officer’s got to be talked to, so you must see to that, and ring up her cretinous son and tell him you’ll drain all the blood out of his liver if he doesn’t get up here with the electric blanket.’

  ‘Lie down, Eric. Don’t drag me into it.’

  ‘You’ve got to help. What’s the use of you?’

  ‘Leave me out of it.’

  Lily could not explain why. Nobody over here knew the true story of what had happened on Cape Cod, although she was sure they all told each other versions of it. She made Eric’s coffee and left him. She could just imagine herself intrusively involved with the village, trapped again by needs and wants, trying to run people’s lives. One of Mrs Colonel Dodgson’s ‘splendeed weemeen’, knocking herself out to please the disgruntled old bags at the Silver Threads teas, chasing Ma Eccles’s son over half the home counties, and going to the juvenile court with his delinquent daughter.

  The job was enough. It kept her busy, and most of the time, it kept her from pain and nostalgia. At the hotel, she did whatever was needed: cleaning, flowers, kitchen, serving meals, making drinks, reception, phone, talking about the States with American visitors who detected the transatlantic leftovers in her speech.

  She often stayed later at Round Hill Rectory than she had meant to or was paid for – as at Crisis. But when Cathy was not there, she did not have anybody to come home for.

  The bitter loneliness of this gradually lost its sharpness. Although she was still often homesick for many places and people in America, she knew she had been right to make this tremendous change. Going home to nobody at the Cape Cod house would have meant continually missing Paul, looking for him, remembering him in his old places – the piano, his chair, walking up from the barn when he heard her car. Coming home to Daisy Cottage was a lonesome business sometimes, but he had never been here. She did not look for him.
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br />   The dogs’ welcome never failed. After she had fed them and made herself tea or a drink, there began to be tired times when she caught herself feeling glad that she did not have to cook anyone’s supper.

  Jamspoon came from London once in a while, looking better fed, wearing coloured waistcoats, fancying himself as a Londoner, not interested in the garden, cracking the old jokes about the silence keeping him awake after lunch. He was always going to bring Pixie. She adored the country. She was a peasant girl at heart, you could tell it by her pastry. She and Lily would hit it off something astonishing. Lily found him very tiresome, and was glad that Pixie never came.

  Nora had gone back to nursing, but she made the long journey from Essex occasionally and moved the furniture about and uprooted weeds, with or without Duggie, who might as well not have come for all he said or did, unless you let him go to the kitchen sink, or tell you what route he had taken from Chelmsford.

  Blanche came over with the children. Duffy was eleven. He had a lovely voice and was taken up with his choir, but the eight-year-old twins were out of hand. The Duke’s Head took up a lot of Blanche’s time and energy and she and Neil could hardly ever be at home in the evenings, because of the bar and restaurant.

  With the sun brilliant on a blowy day, the twins did not want to walk with the dogs up to the White Horse at Uffington. They wanted to watch television. Cathy unplugged the set. Gordie flew into a rage.

  ‘Be nice,’ Blanche pleaded. Gordie attacked her with blind violence.

  ‘I think I’m losing my grip.’ Blanche sent him outside, to throw clods of earth at the cows in the paddock. ‘Stop that!’

  ‘Not you,’ Lily said. ‘I’ve always envied the way you cope with everything so calmly.’

  ‘I envied you,’ Blanche said, unexpectedly shy. ‘You came and went, you and Paul, like – sort of – creatures from another world. You came home to dazzle us.’

  ‘Did you think that? How odd.’

  ‘Gordie, come inside! Helen go out and stop him doing that to the tree.’