Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘I hate him.’ Helen ran up the steep little stair that went up like a loft ladder to the spare room.

  ‘I was jealous of you, Lily.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be, when I had Paul?’ Lily said. ‘And look at me now.’

  ‘Yes. Look at you.’

  Anyone else would have said something like ‘You’re doing well.’ Blanche simply mirrored the situation as it was, and it was oddly comforting.

  When Lily’s car failed her, she could not miss work, so Eric drove her to the hotel and promised to come back after she had finished lunches.

  He did, but not as planned. He always had a better idea. He came back early and had lunch at the hotel himself. Spying on her? Out for trouble? He wore his droopiest dark-green trousers which looked as if they were tied at the waist with string, and a flashy black and white check jacket with a red bow tie.

  He was courtly with Janet. ‘But listen,’ Lily told him privately. ‘No funny business.’

  ‘Why can’t I lunch here the same as anyone else?’ Eric raised his voice. A man and a woman at the bar looked round.

  ‘I’m warning you.’ Lily picked up glasses from the next table and spoke without moving her lips.

  ‘I’ll slit your gizzard,’ he hissed, smiling and nodding at the couple by the bar.

  Lily was in the kitchen. Janet and Val were in the dining-room.

  ‘Who is that dreadful little man?’ Janet pushed through the swing door in a fluster. ‘He’s complaining about everything and annoying the other guests, and Val is a nervous wreck. Why did he have to come here?’

  ‘To fetch me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘When will your car be fixed?’

  ‘Two more days.’

  Angrily, Janet rearranged the meat and vegetables on Eric’s plate, shoved it into the microwave to heat it, and took the same food back to him.

  ‘Fabulous lunch.’ Eric raved about the hotel on the way home. Lily would not talk to him. As they came into Newbury, the traffic was very heavy. It was a race meeting day and it was raining. Racegoers were going home.

  Eric, who became infuriated in crawling traffic, and was at risk of getting out and thumping the lids of other cars, yanked his wheel and dived down a side street on one of his complicated, time-wasting short cuts. He slammed on the brakes at a roadworks barrier blocking a narrow back alley. Ahead of them, a boy with a shaved blue head and another with a Roman helmet of stiff orange hair fell out of a doorway, dragging something with them. It was a girl in black tights and a torn top, hair like a bushman. She broke away and darted round the boys, slapping and kicking at them.

  They pushed her up against the wall. She was screaming and struggling, and they were hitting her.

  ‘Sod’s teeth!’ Eric was struggling with his seat belt. ‘Wait till I get at those swine.’

  ‘No, Eric, stay in the car.’ Lily leaned across him to try to hold his door shut. ‘She probably asked for it. Leave them alone.’

  ‘She’s younger than Cathy. Come on – help me!’

  He was out in the street, all five foot two of him, flailing his thin arms.

  ‘Let’s go for ’em, Lily!’

  ‘No – it’s not our business. Stay out of it. You haven’t got a chance.’

  Terrified, she got out of the car and could only stand and watch as he climbed over the barrier and tore down the alley, shouting at the tangled confusion of the boys and their victim. Shrieking a sort of war cry, puny Eric, tiresome little man, waded in. He was as brave as a lion.

  Lily, bigger and stronger, stood paralysed, with her hands over her mouth. She thought he would be killed.

  As quickly as he had gone into the fight, he was thrown out of it, flung against a dustbin, like Cathy’s brave grey cat being thrown out of the dog fight. As Lily ran towards him, the girl stood up from the wall, ran her hands through her wild hair and bent double. She was not hurt or sobbing. She was laughing.

  Out of the doorway, furtively, came Lily’s punk with the golden crown of thorns, pinch-faced, peering up and down the alley like King Rat coming out of his hole. The four of them jeered at Eric and ran off down the street, hooting and zigzagging from side to side.

  Lily helped Eric to his feet and he kicked the dustbin. He had been hit in the face. A bruise was swelling and darkening over his right cheekbone, and the eye was closing. Lily drove his car to the hospital.

  ‘You think I’m an ass,’ he said, through the paper towel he was holding to his face.

  ‘I think you’re incredibly brave. I was a drivelling coward. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Moronic woman. It was man’s work.’

  As they went into the hospital, Thomas the bellringer was coming out of the lift with some other visitors.

  ‘What’s it this time?’ he asked Eric. ‘Been fighting?’

  ‘I’m accident-prone. Can you take Lily to work tomorrow?’

  After Terry was fired from the Regent Street store, he stayed on with Brendan in the Balham apartment until he could neither pay his share any more, nor tolerate Brendan’s innocent chatter about the management training course and what a fool Terry had been to chuck up his chances of a fine advanced career in retailing.

  Terry had stayed at the department store longer than in any other job, nearly two years, which almost constituted a career. When Brendan had turned up at the Cape and persuaded him that signing on for the Christmas shopping rush in London was money for old rope, Terry had gone with him like a zombie. He had been wretched in his father’s house. No point to anything. He might as well be wretched in Regent Street.

  Brendan came from Belfast, but would never go back. The Provos had shot his brother, for whom nothing had ever worked out right, by mistake for an informer. Nothing would ever work out for Brendan either if he stayed in the decaying furniture shop with his demoralized family. By working hard and making his way in London, he could somehow make up for his brother’s thrown-away life.

  After three weeks as temporary sales staff, he had signed on for full training.

  ‘I’m doing it for Billy,’ he said, ‘and you should think what you’re doing too, Terence.’ He was a great moralizer, was Brendan. ‘Wasn’t your Dad always after you to settle down? Here’s your chance. Settle.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. Heaven is not a far country. Make him proud of you.’

  ‘A-a-ah.’ Terry shoved that away, but he was so confused and without direction that he did hang on to the thought. He knocked himself out in Toys all through the Christmas pandemonium and the January sales, and, needing more money to move with Brendan out of their bed-sitter and into an apartment, he took extra tests and training and found himself wearing a plasticized label that said, ‘Mr Stephens Second Asst. Mgr’ in Men’s Knitwear.

  He had finally got it together for his father, and the great emptiness began to fill up a little, from the bottom, like new tissue growing in a wound. He did not go to visit Lily. She might be still raw with pain, or she might be ready to talk sentimentally about his father and the past. Either way, he was afraid of being dragged back.

  He was drinking less. He liked London, and he liked the people he worked with and most of the customers. He kept a note pad in the drawer with his order book, and did some quick sketches of features and clothes and attitudes, and the faces people made in front of a mirror when they tried something on, to blow up for the sensational composite magazine illustration, ‘Menswear, 1985’ which he would accomplish some day.

  Brendan had the girl Kitty in Ireland who would come over eventually. Terry got to know a few girls at the store, nifty with their long black British legs and black and white striped shirts, and a few outside, who would never apply here, or get taken on. One of them was a pudgy girl with rounded edges, but a very sharp nature. She got disgusted when Terry would not take days out to go off on a tear somewhere with her, because he was being tried out as Assistant Manager and that was more important to him – just, by a big effort of will – than Denise.<
br />
  Denise took up again with her property-developer friend.

  ‘You’ll lose me,’ she had told Terry when he would not do what she wanted.

  ‘I’ll take that chance,’ he had said, knowing that they had something strong between them, that she wouldn’t ditch him, not now when they were still in a fever for each other. But she did. Brendan was quite relieved. Terry agonized over Denise. He could hardly manage to fake a sane appearance at work. He took two days off to walk the streets round about the east London neighbourhood where he thought the property man lived.

  His department manager warned him. Terry was back at work, performing niggling tedious tasks and talking to customers through a blur of depression. When the pain of Denise faded, the depression stayed. If he made a sale, okay. If he didn’t, so what? The order books went to seed. He clocked in late. He was rude to a man who swore that a red pullover was bought here, although he brought it back in the bag of a rival store.

  The manager warned him again. Ronnie, the very young Second Assistant, toadied around hopefully. The old black pit opened up inside Terry. He fell into it, and from its depths, he told the manager what he could do with the job.

  Once more. Once more into the breach, dear Dad. Blown it once more.

  When he was in steady work, God help him, he had bought a small silver car like a rusted biscuit tin. He put his clothes and books and stuff into it, left a note and some money for Brendan, and drove out west to find Lily’s house.

  He got lost. Natch. He had gone uphill on the right road, according to the map, but nobody in the village had heard of Lily. That was not like her. She usually made enough noise. So much for the boast of, ‘Cathy and I are beginning to feel we really belong,’ that she had written to him. But no one had heard of Pie Lane either. He was in the wrong village.

  Why did she have to hide herself in a place like this? The narrow lanes wound back upon themselves purposelessly. Any one of a dozen side roads might turn out to be a cart track ending in the middle of a field, or it might be Pie Lane.

  Who needed it? She probably wouldn’t want to see him anyway. Terry was ready to give up the whole idea, when he passed a cottage with a small grey truck outside and recognized it from the picture that Lily had sent him.

  He backed up. A man was on the thatched roof – thatching, what else? He had steel spectacles hooked round his pointed ears and leather pads on his knees, like a horse.

  ‘Mrs Stephens here?’

  The man had taken off most of the old thatch at one end of the house and was laying in sheaves of straw with the wheat heads still on them, packing them tight.

  ‘At work,’ he said.

  ‘What time does she come back?’

  ‘Early, late. You never know with her.’

  Terry could not tell one English country accent from another. This was pleasant, vowels soft and slow, a blur of r’s.

  ‘Oh. Well, I – I’m her stepson.’

  The thatcher nodded down at him civilly. ‘The house is open. You can go in if you want to make the tea,’ he said familiarly, as if he had been working here for some time, which presumably he had, since all but one end of the roof was covered with a thick new thatch.

  The cottage was really nice. White walls and beams, and wide windows low enough to see the whole garden and the view. Pieces of furniture from Terry’s past made the rooms familiar. Healthy plants on the windowsills and hanging from beams looked more like his father than Lily. In the kitchen, he found a bottle of Scotch and had a quick drink, because he was nervous of meeting her here, on what was completely her own ground. He made strong tea and took two mugs and a cake out to the garden table.

  The thatcher did not introduce himself. He drank his tea, looking peacefully at the view, and pointed out where his house was hidden behind the hill on the other side of the valley. He let Terry fetch him another mug of tea. His hands were brown and square, criss-crossed with scratches from the straw. Without his glasses, his brown eyes were inward-looking. He was a composed, deliberate man. Terry had been in a stew driving down, but it was comfortable, sitting here with him in the late afternoon sun.

  When the thatcher went back to work, he tied some of the loose bundles of straw on the lawn into tight sheaves, and after Terry had watched him climb the ladder with half a dozen, then down again to fetch some more, he started to pass them himself, climbing half-way up the ladder and reaching up past the man’s heavy boots.

  Lily hurried through the garden gate, breathless, dropping things, more like her old self than the drained, dry-skinned woman he had fought with on Cape Cod.

  ‘I couldn’t think whose car it could be, and then I saw your guitar. Terry, this is wonderful. Hullo, Thomas. I see you found an assistant at last.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if I want one, after that last young man took off with the money.’

  ‘And your jacket and the radio, don’t forget.’ It was evidently an oft-told story.

  Cathy would be home from school at the weekend. Terry must stay. He did not tell Lily yet that he had nowhere else to go, and she said nothing as she helped him to unload his worldly goods from the car.

  Thomas had swept up straw and orange string like a tidy housewife, and left. The sun had gone down in a blaze of autumn splendour on the other side of Pie Lane. Opposite the sunset, the stubble fields of Lily’s view were golden-pink in the afterglow. Painted clouds hung above the valley. The whole sky was a rose-coloured bowl. As Lily and Terry stood with their backs to the fence to look at the cottage, the amazing light suffused the new thatch like a blush on a dusky skin.

  ‘Pretty nice, huh?’ Lily had talked English to the thatcher, but she dropped into easy old American with Terry. He was afraid she was going to say, ‘I only wish your father could see it,’ so he said, ‘Your lawn wants mowing. Want me to do it for you tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll let it go for a bit. You can see how the cottage got its name. I hate to cut those daisies.’

  ‘They’ll grow again.’

  ‘Like you and me. How are you, Terry? You’ve done well in London, haven’t you? How’s the job going?’

  ‘Oh, that. I packed it in.’

  ‘Then what –’

  Don’t start on me. ‘Can we have a drink?’

  Lily told him that Isobel was going to have a baby. That Kid? My God, she had grown up ahead of Terry in the end. She was going to become a Roman Catholic, and she and Tony were getting married. Lily and Cathy were going over next month for the wedding.

  A crazy little runt called Eric stopped by that evening, and poured his own drink and was very familiar with Lily, and rather caustic with Terry. A couple of Scotches and some wine had made Terry feel more morose – as usual. He might have given the guy a poke if he’d had the energy, and the little jerk had not been smaller than him.

  ‘What a wimp,’ he said, when Eric had gone off, singing in a high voice down the lane, because half a bright moon and all the stars were out.

  ‘Not really.’ Lily told him a story about a fight with some punks.

  ‘Stupid with it too,’ Terry scoffed. ‘You can’t marry him.’

  ‘I’m not going to marry anyone. You know that.’

  ‘You’re only – what? – forty-one, forty-two.’

  ‘I’m married to your father.’

  ‘To a ghost? Come back to haunt you, that weird stuff?’

  Lily laughed. ‘Wherever Paul is, he’s got better things to do than that. It’s not that he’s come back. He’s gone, but sometimes he’s here, not all the time, just now and again, in some strange way I never expected.’

  ‘How, here?’

  ‘It’s very odd. I say things he used to say. I do things he used to do. Unconsciously. Things that aren’t like me. I check the oil in the car sometimes.’

  ‘You’re copying him. That’s not so odd, because he’s not here to do it for you.’

  ‘It’s more than that. I do it without thinking. Remember how he used to lay those wonderful fires with tight
rolls of newspaper?’

  Terry nodded. He had seen how the fire was laid here before she lit it when the evening grew cold.

  ‘Look at the house plants. I could never touch them at home. I was the kiss of death. I screw in screws. I coil the hose instead of leaving it all over the lawn. I – oh, a lot of little things. I clean the sink. Remember how I was such a slob, and he’d come and scour it out, whistling like a sailor scrubbing the decks? I’ll tell you a funny thing, though. I forgot Paul’s death day this year. May the tenth. It came and went.’

  ‘Not for me. It hit me hard. I called you, but you were out.’ Part of this was true. The day had sunk him, but he had not called. ‘You’re lucky you forgot it. You’re tough, aren’t you, Lily?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been better than me,’ Terry said. ‘But then, I wasn’t doing so well before he was killed.’

  ‘He wasn’t killed,’ Lily said patiently. ‘Poor Mike attacked him. Paul died later.’

  ‘He killed him.’ It infuriated Terry that she had said, ‘Poor Mike’. ‘But you can’t live with that?’

  She smiled. She looked younger and more colourful again, in the deep striped chair that Paul had given her, at home, not just passing through.

  ‘For a long time, I had to torture and almost destroy myself with, “It was my fault.” Crazy. Fault doesn’t come into it. Fault’s always irrelevant. He died. I’m alive. I miss him all the time, but look, Terry, if it was my fault, I suppose I can live with it.’

  Eric was having a dinner party. He had invited seven people, but after he got himself thrown off next year’s fete committee for telling the secretary that he would ruin her before the whole of Berkshire and that part of Oxfordshire that Edward Heath took away from Berks. in 1974, she and her husband would not come and nor would the committee chairman, so Eric invited Lily, and told her why. He always told you if you were a stop gap.

  He cooked a superb Beef Wellington, and harped on how long it had taken him, so that no appreciation could be enough. In every discussion, he waited until he saw what everyone was against, and then took that line, which did at least force people to defend their opinions.