Consider the Lily (41 page)

She held out the other hand. ‘The rash has come back,’ she said. ‘I think I need more of that cream.’

In his professional grip, her hand had no substance. He turned it over to examine the palm. Angry and invasive, the condition had worked its way into the cracks.

‘That must hurt,’ he said. ‘Are you washing in soda or anything like that? Anything you don’t normally use?’

Matty used carbolic soap to scrub her hands after gardening which, these days, was frequent. There was also Gentle Dame Nature’s Plant Food, but she was not going to go into all that. ‘Kitchen soap?’

‘Might be the offender if you’re not in the habit of using it. Any special face or hand creams?’

She shook her head and Robin fished in his bag for his notebook. Some patients liked to seek reassurance in their doctor’s face, others required a little privacy while they talked. Judging Matty to be in the latter category, Robin kept his head bent as he asked, ‘Is something bothering you, Mrs Dysart?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sleeping well?’

‘Yes.’ Matty’s tone was one she adopted at afternoon tea parties.

Robin wrote a sentence. Then he looked up at her and tried the direct approach. ‘I am going to ask you again, Mrs Dysart. Is anything bothering you? Very often the sort of condition you have recurs when a patient is anxious.’

The girl is sitting by the statue in the garden, crying. She looks up as Matty approaches... and melts away.

Matty cleared her throat and repressed the urge to spread out her fingers until they cracked. ‘You remember our last conversation, Dr Lofts? About something you called the unconscious?’ Robin nodded and she continued, ‘Well, I was wondering. A friend of mine is... longing to see someone who is dear to her. But this person is far away. The strange thing is that she keeps seeing this person, usually in a particular place, but not always. Like a ghost.’

‘What are you asking me?’

Matty kept her hands flat on her thighs. ‘I don’t know, really.’

Robin wrote ‘Hysteria?’ in his notebook. ‘I would have to read up on the subject to be absolutely sure, Mrs Dysart, but from what you tell me it appears that your friend is projecting her dearly held wish outside herself and that it’s taking a physical form. So she... I take it she is a she?... she is seeing what she wants to see.’

‘I see.’ Matty looked at Robin and laughed awkwardly. ‘Sorry that’s the wrong word to use. I think I understand.’

She gave Robin the impression of being huddled up inside.

‘Does anyone else see what your friend sees?’

There was a long pause. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well. That’s not necessarily significant.’

‘Doesn’t it seem very odd to you?’ asked Matty painfully. ‘Mad, even?’

Robin wrote ‘Delusion?’ beside ‘Hysteria?’. He searched in his mind to possible clues as to Matty’s condition and wrote ‘Childless at present. Wish for a child?’ He looked up.

‘Unusual, yes. But I don’t think, unless your friend is displaying notably antisocial tendencies, that she could be called mad. I think it is quite possible that a deep, unfulfilled longing can manifest itself physically.’

And the misery, Matty asked herself silently, the misery that comes with the sightings. Is it all mine? Or someone else’s?

‘Has your friend suffered a loss?’

Matty hesitated. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘It’s an odd thing, but well documented.’ Robin thought aloud and addressed the Valadon. ‘Sometimes when someone has lost something or someone very important the grief only comes out later, after a second loss perhaps, or a period of great tension.’

‘I see.’ And Matty did see. A long, sloping line of desert dune and the child waiting by the window.

Robin transferred his gaze back to Matty and closed his notebook. ‘The more I practise, Mrs Dysart, the less surprised I am by what I see and hear. It’s important to keep one’s mind open.’

‘May I tell my friend what you said?’ Matty seemed less pinched and huddled. ‘I know she’ll be grateful.’

‘Please do. If she would ever like to come and see me, I’m always available.’

The black bag was another useful prop in stage-managing consultations. Robin hunted through its compartments for nothing in particular while he waited to see if anything else was forthcoming. Nothing was, and he fastened it up.

‘Do you mind if I ask how old you are?’ said Matty.

Robin’s eyebrows shot up, and then he grinned. ‘Patients often ask me that. Not much older than I imagine your husband is. I’m twenty-nine. Why?’

‘I just wondered. I apologize if that was a rude question.’

‘Not at all.’ Robin made for the door and turned to face Matty. ‘Mrs Dysart. I’m going to be rude. Are you very unhappy?’

The pinched look was replaced by one of acute embarrassment. Matty fluttered her hands.

‘Goodness no,’ she said. ‘I’m awfully happy.’

Predictably, Robbie offended Miss Binns and no apology would mend the situation. Miss Binns therefore departed, leaving Robbie to reign undisputed.

Outwardly, nothing changed. A hoist had been installed to help Rupert change position, but papers still lay in heaps on the table and dust blanketed his war memorabilia. A strange odour also lingered and, once, Matty and Flora horrified each other by asking if it was Rupert’s flesh rotting?

Appearances are deceptive. The balance in the sick room lay in Robbie’s favour and she, experienced by years of ruling a nursery, took control. She knew – the family knew – that the family needed Robbie. Who else would cajole, bully, and care for Rupert with a devotion that no one else could give?

She was not a subtle person, her tactics were often crude, but they were effective. Along with the dust, Robbie’s
imprimatur
now lay on the room; unmistakable, almost stifling and, as Danny had so shrewdly concluded, designed to beat off the intruder.

For his sins, Rupert was forbidden wine, pork and sticky suet puddings, and made to eat cabbage, fresh fruit and to keep the whisky down to a tot a day. To give Robbie credit, he looked better. She insisted also that the family only visit him at agreed times in the morning and afternoon. Fair enough, conceded Flora to her brother, it gave Robbie time to manage the complicated business of washing, dressing and feeding an immobilized patient.

‘Now, now, Sir Rupert, you know you get tired so don’t go on about the rules.’

‘Bloody hell, Robbie. Do you have to cut a chap’s balls off?’

‘Tsk, Sir Rupert.’ Robbie thrust her face over his as she brushed the greying fair hair. ‘So vulgar.’

‘You haven’t heard anything yet.’

‘Well, sir, I shall have to ask you to make sure I don’t.’

‘I want Danny to come and see me, Robbie. Send him up.’

‘That man is not setting foot in this place again, sir. Not until you are better.’

‘If I order you, Robbie.’

‘Well, you can, sir, but that is the day I leave this house and settle with Miss Polly.’

Rupert’s tongue, his only weapon, was no match for Robbie’s cast-iron devotion. In the end,
faute de mieux,
he grew to rely on it.

For her part, Robbie grew thin and exhausted as a result of vigils kept over Rupert during his bad phases. Wrapped in a shawl, she sat enfolded by stillness, broken only by the rustle of trees outside or the high, startling call of a fox, and watched all night over the dreaming, twitching form in the bed. Every so often she administered medicine, or patted the pillow and her hand lingered on Rupert’s forehead or held the thick wrist and its increasingly unpredictable pulse. At last, she knew what it was to possess.

When Robin knocked on the door after leaving Matty, Robbie was standing by the bed talking to Rupert. Propped on his pillows, Rupert’s skin matched the linen and his eyes were angry and inflamed. One hand was raised as if to make a point, and Robbie was listening with her just-leave-it-to-me expression. Between them stretched intimacy.

At the doctor’s entrance, Robbie looked up and it was quite obvious that the subject of their conversation had been Robin. Liberated blue serge wrinkled at Robbie’s waist as she advanced towards Robin.

‘Sir Rupert wishes to speak with you and I’ll thank you not to upset him. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ She departed with a click of her lace-up leather shoes.

The interview granted by Rupert to Robin proved a revelation to the latter. Too shrewd not to perceive that he was part of an upward progression in a society where antecedents mattered, Robin had grown a thick skin as far as his background was concerned. It did not matter to him that his brother-in-law was the blacksmith and that his father had been a village schoolteacher; that his ancestors had dug in the chalk pits and banded together in tithings to farm the land. It may be that the chasms presented by the English class system were impossible to ignore, but as far as he was concerned they could be negotiated around.

Nevertheless, by the time Rupert, savage with frustration and discomfort, had finished, Robin’s thick skin had been well and truly flayed.

If Dr Lofts wished to transgress his professional ethics, went Rupert’s message, then it was Lofts’s own affair. Rupert neither minded nor cared. However, when the doctor took it upon himself to trifle with Rupert’s daughter, then the doctor should watch out. Rupert pronounced the word ‘doctor’ as if it levelled with ‘Piccadilly pimp’. Either Dr Lofts cut off all contact with Sir Rupert’s daughter from this moment forthwith, or his services would no longer be required. There was no discussion.

For a man who was seriously ill, it was an impressive performance.

White to the lips, Robin took refuge in professionalism. ‘Sir. I need to check your pulse.’ And it took an effort of will not to grip the thick wrist and squeeze it until it bruised.

The sound of raised voices floated in from the passage outside and the door burst open. Flora thrust herself into the room. She pushed the door shut and leant back on it, ignoring Robin’s signals to go away. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I gather Robbie has been talking to you.’

Robin released Rupert’s wrist. ‘A little raised,’ he noted on the chart that hung at the end of the bed. ‘Have you been doing the exercises I recommended, sir?’

‘Father!’

Rupert ignored Flora. ‘If you mean that damned toe-wriggling and wrist-waving, no, I have not. I don’t believe in it.’

‘Father.’ Flora went up to the bed and looked at Robin’s set expression. ‘What’s Robbie been telling you?’

Rupert made a sawing movement with his head, and the loose flesh subsided into his neck. ‘My dear Flora, Robbie has only your best interests at heart...’ No, Flora contradicted silently. She has yours. ‘Robbie was perfectly correct to come and tell me if she saw you carrying on with someone unsuitable.’

Flora made a huge effort to keep calm. ‘May I remind you that you rely for your health on this so-called unsuitable person with whom I am supposed to be carrying on, Father.’ Robin looked up from his position by the medicine bottles and smiled his sweet smile. The charge between them leapt across the room, inescapable and provoking. Flora’s hands clenched and she thought how unfair her father was – unfair and unbelievably hurtful. She took a deep breath and made the most daring statement of her life.

‘You’re friends with Danny, Father. You spend more time with him than you have with us. Always have done. What’s the difference? Why can’t I be friendly with Dr Lofts?’

‘Flora don’t—’ Robin sounded sharp.

For a second or two, Flora thought she had won. Then Rupert replied, ‘You are more ignorant than I thought, Flora. I don’t carry on with Danny. That’s the difference. Do you wish me to spell out what I mean?’

‘Father...’ Flora made the mistake of glancing in the direction of the pier glass and was confronted by her own reflection: unbrushed hair, lumpy skirt, a wrinkled stocking. Suddenly her bravado drained away, leaving her unfocused and unsure. How could she take on her father? The entire family?

‘I had thought, Flora,’ Rupert sounded so like the cold, angry man who had dominated her childhood that she wanted to run out of the room, ‘that out of a pair of witless daughters you were the one with common sense and a sense of fitness.’

The tips of Robin’s ears had gone red and the sight dug a hollow somewhere in Flora’s middle which churned with panicky fear at the scene. In the bed, Rupert moved restlessly.

‘Are you listening to me, Flora?’

The temper note was strengthening in his voice. Flora looked at Robin for help but he shook his head. In that second, Flora understood the power that the sick exert over the well.

Robin wrote directions on the label of a new bottle of pills and placed it on the tray with the other medications. ‘I will leave you now, sir,’ he said. ‘Please take the pills as directed. I will remind Miss Robson.’

‘Get out,’ said Rupert.

Panic turned into desperation and spurred Flora. ‘Father, please stop.’

A flush stained Rupert’s pallor. ‘Dr Lofts is leaving now.’

At certain points in her childhood, Flora had been conscious of a muddle of anger and guilt in the house, no less punishing for not being understood. Perhaps it was something to do with growing up? Or with her mother, whose death had bequeathed bitterness to her children? Less so to Flora than to Kit and Polly who had been older. But however Flora ducked, wove and ran, the muddle always claimed her at crucial moments.

She gazed down at the man who had ruled her life and to whom she was bound, a solid, injury-raddled and, she realized, wounded man. Rupert stared back at his daughter and Flora was appalled to see that lurking in the depths of his eyes was a plea. Then she looked at the man she loved, quietly folding up his stethoscope and stowing it in his bag. Only the tips of his ears and the hunch of his shoulder indicated just how barely he was containing his rage.

The battle was too big for Flora to fight.

‘Get out, Lofts,’ repeated Rupert. ‘Flora, I’m cold. I want the fire lit.’

To her eternal shame, Flora let Robin go.

Kit discovered her first. Flora was crunched up on the window seat overlooking the garden. She had cried until her eyelids felt as if they had peeled away from her eyeballs.