Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  When the other guests left, he wanted Lily to stay and help him wash up. He tied a greasy apron round her, but she took it off.

  ‘I’ve been at the sink all day at the Rectory. The kitchen man’s got mumps. Let me go home. You can do all this tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t boss me about. Did you boss your wretched husband?’

  To test her new growing strength, Lily said, ‘Sometimes’, quite honestly, and wished she hadn’t, because Eric asked, ‘Did he lie down and say, “Kick me”?’

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘No, you’re not. Forget the sink. We’re going to have a drink and play backgammon.’ Lily had not played since she had played with Paul. ‘Don’t leave me. I get nervous.’

  ‘All right, but only so that I can beat you. The British don’t know how to play this game,’ she said as they set out the pieces.

  ‘You’re British.’

  ‘When I’m with you, I feel American.’

  They were in the front-room, playing and insulting each other quite harmoniously, when they heard some small noises at the back of the house. Eric’s grubby dog jumped up from its deplorable bed, releasing a miasma of different smells, and let off some shrill, ugly barks without leaving the room.

  ‘There – there it is again. Hear it? Go, Sherman, go and see what it is.’

  The dog would not go, so Eric went. He opened a small drawer in the dresser and took out a pistol.

  ‘No, Eric – don’t be a fool.’

  He shook off Lily’s hand and nipped down the passage to the dark kitchen. She followed him, keeping out of his way. Eric without a gun was dangerous enough.

  ‘Come back!’ she called, and heard him open the back door in the scullery.

  There was a confusion of noise and shouts and then a shot. Going cautiously to the door, Lily saw that someone was in her car. The engine started and the car jerked backwards.

  ‘Hey!’ She had stood back when Eric went after the punks, but now she ran out, shouting. There was a man in her car, a clownish, large contorted face, lank hair stranded on a bulging forehead. He looked at Lily aghast, then crashed the car backwards into Eric’s hen house.

  Chickens squawked out of the loosened door. The car engine stopped. The man got out with difficulty, because he was big and blubbery, and stood in front of Lily with his fat bottom lip and his fat hands hanging and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She grabbed his arm as if she were a policeman, and looked round for Eric.

  ‘Lily.’ His voice came creakily from low down by the wall of the house. He was hunched up under the scullery window. ‘I hate to say this, but I’ve shot myself in the foot.’

  Once again, she drove Eric to the hospital in his car. This time they had blubbery Roger in the back. Time enough to take him to the police station after she had got Eric’s foot to Casualty, wrapped in towels. Roger was passive and willing. He had only tried to take Lily’s car because he needed to go and see his wife, and was too tired to walk any farther.

  She did not take him to the police.

  While Eric was in hospital for a few days, Lily brought him his letters, cleaned up the dinner things and tidied the house, fed the dog and let it out three times a day, and found a capable child in the village who would feed the chickens and goats and milk the two nannies. It was the least she could do for a neighbour, but she also found herself embroiled with Roger and his myriad problems.

  She tried to resist. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she wanted to beg him. ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to get involved,’ but he was such a great blockheaded baby and he had got himself into such a mess that she could not abandon him. She did not really want to. Dear Doctor Lily, a charger scenting battle, galumphed into the fray.

  Roger had a council flat, no job, which did not worry him, and no wife, which did. He and the misguided woman who had married him fifteen years ago had been separated for a long time, but he still mooned over her and wanted her back. She was quite contentedly settled down with a man by whom she now had three children, but that made no difference to Roger. The only thing on his mind was getting into their house to see his wife.

  Under siege, she and Mack had been surprisingly patient. They turned the television up louder when Roger banged on all the doors, front, back, front, side, back, front. When he prowled outside at night, calling her name, they would open a window and throw water on him.

  ‘Not hot water,’ Roger explained, ‘and never any muck or like that. If I could just get to talk to her. I know we could make a go of it again.’

  ‘But Roger, she doesn’t want to see you.’ Lily had been to talk to Roger’s wife, at his request. She did not add, ‘They laugh about you. They just wish you would go away.’

  She had also talked to Roger’s probation officer, who had been part and parcel of his life since he had breached a court order not to go within a quarter of a mile of Number 14 Elsmere Road, and done a little minor criminal damage when he was upset. Lily did not mention the attempted theft of her car. Roger had troubles enough. Eric’s hen house had suffered more than the car, and Roger was sorry, and had brought wood and long nails and tacked it together again.

  The probation officer was a sensible harried woman with too many clients, who would like to get Roger off her books.

  ‘If you could just get it out of your mind,’ she and Lily told him when the three of them met in her office, ‘you could go ahead with your life.’

  ‘Okay,’ Roger said cheerfully. He was a likeable lump of dough. He never got aggressive or cantankerous. He always agreed with you, and raised his fat curved eyebrows and smiled his loose smile and tipped his large head on one side hopefully.

  ‘Perhaps if he had a job to go to,’ Lily said. ‘If you had a job that you were interested in,’ she amended quickly to Roger, ashamed of having talked about him over his head, as if he were in a wheelchair. ‘You’ve got too much free time, and you start brooding. You need to be busy.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Roger agreed.

  Lily knew he had done kitchen jobs in hotels and restaurants. The mumpsy man was not coming back to Round Hill Rectory. Gerry and Janet needed more help. Sidetracked from his obsession, Roger might be all right.

  Am I going out of my mind? Yes, but she could not stop herself.

  ‘I’d like to ask around a bit and see what I can do. If that’s all right with you?’ she asked the probation officer. ‘Is that all right, Roger?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. Yes.’

  ‘You want to work again?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘You take it easy for a bit, and we’ll see what we can do. Stay away from Elsmere Road, all right?’

  ‘Oh –’ he pushed his lips forwards like a trumpet – ‘Yes’

  Three days later, he went to Elsmere Road and let the air out of the tyres of Mack’s car. Then he threw the dustbin – full, but he was a strong man – through the lounge window. Patient or not, they had to call the police.

  With all that was going on with Roger, Lily was not very receptive when her father turned up with his tale of woe.

  ‘A wand’ring minstrel, I.’ Pixie was ill. She could not work any more. ‘I think it’s the big C, but they won’t say. She looks dreadful and it’s made her shockingly crabby. I tell you, Lily, it’s been very hard for me, living in that house of sickness these last few months.’

  ‘Hard for you?’ However well you knew him, James could always take you by surprise with the depth and breadth of his selfishness.

  ‘I’ve been an angel of mercy, but it’s clear that the time has come for me to fold my tents.’

  ‘You mean, you’re walking out on her?’

  ‘Well, there’s always old Button, when she comes back from Greece, and so I thought, if I could hole up here for a bit, you and I could be cosy together and catch up on old times, and I can pop in and out of London as ness, to flog the odd laxative, although the profession is falling on evil times, and jobs are few and far between.’

  �
��You are a swine,’ Lily told him.

  ‘That’s a thought that hadn’t occurred to me. I’m supposed to be a lovable old rogue.’

  ‘Not to me. I see through you, Jamspoon.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since always, I suppose.’

  ‘But you loved your poor old procreator.’

  ‘I still do. But you’re not going to live here.’

  Grown a bit hard, his darling Lily, but then, she had suffered much. James was a big enough man to make allowances. He had covered his retreat anyway. Before he came to Lily, he had been to see Nora, because she owed him something, for old times’ sake.

  She was still nice to him. Exasperated but kindly, in her old way, and she gave him a bacon sandwich and a brown ale and seemed quite glad to sit and talk to him. Getting a bit pissed off with deadhead Duggie, no doubt.

  One of her nursing pals had just killed off a private patient, in her own home. Easier to do there than in a hospital. The rich patient’s house could not be sold until the solicitors and the government got their cut. A caretaker was needed, small salary and all found.

  Near Nora?

  ‘No,’ she had said in her prim bossy way – you could always see where Lily got it from – but with luck he could keep his car on the road and keep his driving licence out of the hands of those eager breath-testers in green Day-glo jackets who swarmed on the edge of the motorways like maggots on a rotting corpse. They’d not get James Spooner. Too canny, Jamspoon.

  When Roger went before the magistrates on a charge of breaching the court order and the terms of his probation, Lily went with him. She drove him to the court, because he seemed to be uncertain whether he would turn up or not.

  They sat on a bench at the back of the court and listened to short stories about driving without a licence, or over the legal alcohol limit, or failing to stop for a police officer.

  Some of the men were rough customers, but when they stood behind the high ledge of the dock, they were diminished, their public masquerade stripped away, crumpled up and thrown into a corner. The man who had spent the night in custody had a hangover clamped round his brow. They were substandard now, but when they had paid their fine or done their time, what would they care? Most of them had already paid visits to this court from time to time, like going to the dentist.

  But the magistrates on the bench carried patiently on, fair, well-mannered, mild keepers of the gate against total anarchy: a clean-faced woman with a brisk bronze tassel of hair, a bald man like an accountant, a large chairman with brindled hair and beard all in one, like a pelt. All three of them wore half-spectacles. Looking over them at the defendant, pallid in the dock, they were quite magisterial and intimidating.

  When it was Roger’s turn, he had nothing to say. He put his fat hands on the edge of the dock like a dog begging, and looked hopefully for a bone from the bench.

  The chairman told him he might have to face a custodial sentence. Lily wondered if Roger knew what that meant. She began to feel nervous. Now she was about to be something more than just a spectator in this drama.

  Roger’s probation officer, who had painted her eyes hyacinth blue for the court, which made them look more tired, was telling Their Worships about this person Mrs Lily Stephens, who was helping the defendant.

  ‘Is Mrs Stephens here?’

  ‘Sir, she is.’

  The usher, who was no more than a young woman with a pony-tail and a sleeveless black gown over her pink angora sweater, ushered Lily to the witness box. There she stood, on trial for her life, the gallant little widow in decent black, twisting a lace handkerchief in her slender fingers. Pay attention, Lily. The chairman was asking her if she would answer a few questions.

  ‘Sir, I’d be glad to.’ That was how you said it.

  ‘You have been taking an interest in the defendant?’ The magistrates looked at her over their spectacles. Were they thinking, ‘Hullo, here’s this widow. What kind of an interest, eh?’

  But she had the letter from Gerry and Janet. It was passed up to the bench and the magistrates put their bronze and bald and pelted heads together and muttered and whispered like the three bears, and nodded at her, and looked a little less inscrutably at Roger with his silly childish grin and hopeful eyebrows.

  ‘Are you willing to take this job at the – let’s see – at the Round Hill Rectory Hotel?’

  Roger nodded. Too hard.

  ‘Do you consider that he can perform it satisfactorily, Mrs Stephens?’

  Lily nodded too hard also, and launched into an enthusiastic sales pitch for Roger and his future. The court must be impressed. ‘I work at the hotel and I’ll undertake to keep an eye on him and sec that he works properly.’

  Here’s this amazing woman, they were thinking, willing to rescue this poor hapless fellow. Lily had already written the chairman’s speech of gratitude.

  He didn’t know his lines. ‘We thank you for the help you’ve given, Mrs Stephens.’ He lowered the spectacles a bit farther down his leonine nose. ‘But don’t go too far. We would advise you not to take the principal role in this man’s welfare. That will be best left to the probation service.’

  But I know him best. And the probation officer has got too many customers already, without old Rodge. She would love to unload him.

  ‘If we give him another chance by allowing his probation to run on, it will be up to him, you know, not you, whether he takes it or not.’

  Ticked off.

  ‘You may stand down.’ The three bears were quiet and patient. Paul would have made a good magistrate. If he and Lily had bought a house in the English countryside, as they always said one day they might, he could have gone on the bench.

  ‘Keep trying,’ he would have said to Roger. ‘You can make it.’

  He would not have said to Lily, ‘Don’t go too far.’ No don’ts, except, ‘Don’t be stifled. Keep on being yourself.’

  Up on the barn roof, Terry looked over the farmyard and the wide ploughed field to the thin line of trees on the curving horizon, and felt at the same time on a level with the sky and at one with the turning earth. Since he had been with Thomas, he had realized that this was the only honest-to-God work he had ever done in his life. He was learning something that men had been doing in this country for six hundred years. He was going to be good at it. For the first time that he could remember, he felt a part of the life of the world.

  Thomas was at the end of the long roof, laying wadds of straw against the barge board and tying them in with tarred cord. They hardly talked when they were working, and not much at other times. When they took their breaks, it was mostly brief un-sensational bits of information that Thomas had picked up since he started hanging straw with his father when he was a boy.

  After he left Lily and Cathy, Terry had stayed with Blanche for a while, helping in the pub, which he had always enjoyed, and which reminded him of the happy old time with Dad before Terry had got mad with him and Lily for being so exclusively in love, and gone off in that carpeted van with Sue and the girl with the snaky hair.

  He was beginning to be able to think rationally about good times lost. Lily was right. For a long while you had to shut the dead person out, for fear of the pain that came with them. But when you finally began to risk opening the door and letting them back in, they came familiarly to reassure you that the past was now, and was not lost.

  When Blanche began to ask, ‘How long are you planning to stay?’, Terry packed his stuff into the biscuit tin and came back to the Berkshire downs to find Thomas. He knew that Lily’s thatch would be finished. He drove around the lanes over a wide area, staying away from Daisy Cottage, until he saw the small grey truck outside a cottage with a ridge of Thomas’s own pattern of scallops and points, having one end of its thatch repaired.

  How did he ever get the nerve to ask a solid citizen like Thomas, a guy who had got it all together, to take on a short square person of twenty-seven with a forgettable face, who had screwed up pretty well everything he ha
d ever laid his hand to?

  Thomas’s wife had gone off with a greyhound slipper three years ago, taking their teenage son with her. After Terry had worked with him for a month, Thomas suggested diffidently that he might like to leave his lodgings with Mrs Rambert and her beehives and move into his house.

  Terry went down the ladder to make some more ‘bottles’ from the split bundles of wheat straw. He knocked the butt ends of the straw on a board to level them and tied them tightly enough to satisfy Thomas. He carried several up in a curved iron holder and hooked it into the old thatch, then banged in some spars for Thomas with the mallet.

  ‘Let’s see that hand.’

  Terry turned over his hand, blistered and sore and chapped with the cold. The straw wrecked your hands, but when it had become thatch, end over end over end to lead water off the roof, it looked as smooth as a velvet cushion, graciously rounded. There was a healing split in his palm where he had tried to knock in hazel spars with his hand, like Thomas.

  Thomas looked at it and nodded. ‘Rub in some of that oil and make me some more spars,’ he said. ‘We’re running short.’

  Sitting on the tailboard of the truck, splitting the tough lengths of hazel with a billhook, Terry remembered too late to keep his fist on his knee as a buffer, and the knife slipped and cut the front of his knee.

  Damn, damn, damn. A woman at the farmhouse bandaged it up tightly, and Thomas told him to take the rest of the day off.

  ‘I’m all right.’ Terry was furious with himself. He knew his job too well to make a stupid-ass mistake like that.

  ‘Go home and put your foot up. Go on.’

  ‘I told you. I’m all right.’

  The cold light was waning. They only had an hour or so to work. Terry’s knee was throbbing and he had started to shiver, but he sharpened his cut spars and twisted them with his sore hands to show how tough he was. When he shifted the ladder along and went up on the roof again, he could hardly drag his stiffly bandaged knee up the ladder.

  He did not have to drag it down again. He stepped down with one foot, and as he put his weight on that rung to bring the bad leg down, suddenly there was nothing there, and he and the ladder fell on to the hard ground outside the barn.