Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Roger was working out fairly well at Round Hill Rectory. He was slow and stodgy and unenterprising, but as long as you told him what to do, he usually stuck with the work until it was finished, and then went padding off with his gorilla walk to hoot at someone through his adenoids, ‘What you want me to do next?’

  Lily kept a sharp eye on him. Three bears or no three bears, she reminded him every day that the extension of his probation depended on him turning up at work on time and keeping away from Elsmere Road.

  ‘Elsmere Road, where’s that?’ He arched up his eyebrows like furred caterpillars to make Lily laugh at his innocence.

  ‘Man to see you.’ He came one morning into the office where she was making up bills.

  ‘Where?’ There was no one in the entrance hall beyond the office window.

  ‘Service door.’

  ‘Well, Mr Blair is in the kitchen. He can deal with it.’

  ‘He wants you.’ Roger made his trumpet lips.

  Now what? In a hotel, you could never do anything without an interruption.

  Thomas was standing on the back drive. Lily took the harried look off her face.

  ‘I don’t want to bother you,’ Thomas said, ‘but I thought you’d want to know about Terry.’

  ‘Terry?’ What on earth had Terry got to do with Thomas? What now? She had got Eric back on his feet, and pretty much straightened out poor old Rodge. What kind of trouble was Terry in now?

  Thomas did not want to come into the hotel, because he was in his working clothes, but Lily took him into the small library lounge and brought him coffee. Terry had cut his knee and then fallen off a barn roof.

  ‘He set the ladder against some metal at the eaves, and it slipped. Bit shocked after the cut, I daresay. He’s all right,’ Thomas said in his calm way. ‘Bit knocked about, poor chap, but he’s young and tough and the doctor says he’ll do, if he stays off the roof a few days. Terry said not to tell you, but I thought you should know.’

  ‘Why didn’t he tell me he was back here?’

  ‘He didn’t want you to feel responsible for him.’

  ‘You mean, he was afraid I’d try to run his life?’

  ‘Well –’ Thomas looked up and laughed – ‘that too. He thought you might feel you had to take him in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have.’

  ‘You might. You’re a bit of a one for lame dogs, aren’t you?’

  As the hotel got busier before Easter, Roger started to turn up late, and once he missed a whole day.

  When Lily tackled him, he shifted the blocks of his feet and confided, ‘I don’t really like getting up in the morning.’

  ‘But you know your probation depends on you sticking to the job. If you don’t keep the conditions, you could get a really heavy fine. They could even send you to prison.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like that.’

  ‘Well, if you want to work here, and I know you do, you must come in on time. You make it too difficult for everyone else, don’t you see?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.’

  ‘Good. Then we’ll see you tomorrow at eight thirty.’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s nice getting the money from you or Mrs Blair, but perhaps it would be better if I got it from Social Security.’

  ‘Oh, Roger!’ Lily was furious, but she turned away from him to restrain herself and put her face back together. ‘I’ll take you home after work.’ She sighed. ‘And we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘All right.’ Roger went back to the kitchen.

  No one could force him to stay here. No one could force him to stay out of prison, or to pull his amorphous life into shape. Whatever he chose to do, with or without the help of Doctor Lily, he had got to do it his own way, not hers.

  All right, I can accept that. He’s allowed not to change his ways unless he wants to. So am I.

  In early April, it was still frosty in the mornings. Lily always went outside as soon as she was up, because it reminded her of going out early on Cape Cod to feed the horses. She went to the fence, and the dogs hared off. Cathy was already out in the field, with soft apples for the young Jersey heifers who were out again after being penned in for three months, making fertilizer. One day perhaps, she would be feeding a horse out here. Her hair was like thistledown.

  Under a pearly sky, the bright young wheat was frosted to a pastel green, like lichen. The cows were pale as cream. Their breath steamed gently over the grey grass. Everything was muted. Tree skeletons were softened and the hills opposite were blurred behind low wisps of cloud that trailed idly along the valley.

  Now that Terry had settled into his life with Thomas, and was at peace with Lily, he had painted a picture of her like this, with her arms on the top rail of the fence, looking out into a disappearing view. Her hair and skirt were blowing sideways, and Terry had made her neck more slender and her waist smaller than it really was.

  The new picture hung beside the one he had painted of his father. Lily was no longer troubled by the idea that Paul was walking away from her into his own mysterious landscape. Side by side, the two of them looked calmly out together upon a universal horizon.

  Together, but myself. The sound of bells came faintly from behind the opposite hill. Thomas and the sweet serious women and the boy were ringing for early service.

  ‘This extract has been removed due to copyright issues’.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London

  WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © Monica Dickens, 1988

  The moral right of author has been asserted

  The extract on p. 249 is from ‘My Word, You Do Look Queer’, copyright 1923 by Francis Day

  & Hunter Ltd.

  The extract on p. 442 is from ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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  ISBN: 9781448206674

  eISBN: 9781448206315

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