Dear Doctor Lily (50 page)

Ida and Shirley did not want Mike around, because the police had been to their house looking for him, for some undisclosed reason. So they lent him some money, and Ida took an afternoon off to drive him to the airport. She was upstairs getting changed when the police arrived. She had to come down in her wrapper to open the door. Mike was in the kitchen with a bowl of soup and a boloney sandwich. They put the handcuffs on him first, then talked.

Assault? Who? What did Mike do?

Aggravated assault.

Paul Stephens.

Ida's stomach caved in as if she had been kicked by a horse. She backed to the sink and leaned over the draining board. The contents of her head had dropped into her stomach. She was going to faint or throw up, or both.

The same prints of his boots on the beach and in the field where
he had worked. Why had that crazy Lily ever taken him on?

Mike went into one of his show-piece rages. A cop had him by each arm. His wrists were locked behind his back. Ida could have told him that language like that would get him nowhere.

The very blond cop with the sinister white eyelashes told him, ‘You can tell that to the judge.' He made the corny joke seriously.

Ida and Shirley went to the courthouse, because Mrs Baxlee would not go, and there was no one else. Mike did not tell anything to the judge. The albino policeman read out the statement he had made at the station, and the judge ordered him to gaol, awaiting trial.

After Paul had been home for about a month, Ida came to see Lily. Paul was asleep when she arrived. ‘But he wouldn't want to see me anyway.'

Lily did not tell her politely, ‘Of course he would.' Even when he was free from headaches, Paul only wanted to see his family and close friends for a very short time.

‘It's you I came to see anyway, me old Lil, dear old pal.'

‘That was nice of you, Eye. I'm glad. People have all been so great. Americans are very kind, kinder than English people, don't you think?'

‘I don't know. I feel American, don't you?'

Lily shook her head. ‘I love it here, but I don't think I'll ever completely belong. I still feel English.'

Lily sat on the floor by the fire, wrapping a few Christmas presents with no enthusiasm. Ida sat in a chair. At forty-three, her fat was a solid structure, anchored to floor or furniture. She had lost her light balloonlike movements, although her breathy voice was still weightless.

‘I'm sorry, Lil.'

‘Yes. It was a ghastly thing to happen.'

‘No, I mean, I have to say, I'm sorry for what I did.'

‘What?'

‘Bringing you together with Mike.'

‘It's not your fault. It's mine.' Lily had not said this to anyone, and no one had said it to her. Yet. ‘Dear Doctor Lily – you know me, Eye. I had to wade in with both feet.'

‘Why did you give him the job here?'

Lily stared into the pulsing red hollow of the logs on the wide hearth, and leaned against Ida's short strong legs.

‘Paul did it to please me, and that's the terrible truth of it.'

Ida put her hand into Lily's hair and stroked her scalp. It felt good.

‘I had tried so hard with Mike,' Lily said. ‘Too hard. Thinking I could straighten him out, ignoring how sick he was, I suppose.

After the attack, it was a long time before Paul finally remembered what had happened. He suddenly said one day, when we'd been talking about something else and he was looking blank and not listening, “My God, you're right. It was that damned madman. It was Mike,” he said, and looked at me like a sword. It was as if he had said to me, “It was you!”'

Paul never blamed Lily for getting too involved with Mike, but since she blamed herself bitterly, it did not make any difference.

At first, while he was still very weak and not able to move about much, he was his same old sweet self; but as he began to creep back into life and be more active, the cycles of headaches and depression began, and he was not so much himself, as his sick self. A new sick self who had bursts of temper and said uncharacteristically irritable things to Lily and the girls, even to the animals. Arthur was the only one who could never annoy him. The dog kept close to Paul, moving his back leg stiffly, next to the leg on which Paul limped.

The sledge-hammer blow had ruptured his ear drum, and he was still rather deaf on that side. Cathy's voice was quiet, and he would snap at her, ‘What? Don't mumble.'

Obligingly, she moved round to his good side. ‘That better, Daddy?'

‘Oh, God, don't be so nice to me. Why don't you all walk out? Let me rot. I'm no use to you.'

When one of them offered help, he might say peevishly, ‘I'm all
right.
Don't fuss.'

‘Don't
you
fuss, then,' Lily was driven to retort.

‘What?'

‘Calm down, darling. Remember how you were the one who was always so calm?'

‘How can I be calm when things are in such a mess?'

He fussed about nothing, or panicked, because he could not remember, or could not understand. Harry had found a young couple to run the tack shop and the stable, and Paul was often on their necks, criticizing and agitating and wanting to take charge of things himself, when it was almost all he could do to walk with his stick over the uneven ground down to the barn.

Once Lily found him in Robin's loose box, a fork in his hand, leaning against the wall with his eyes shut. He had been trying to muck out. The wheelbarrow was in the doorway, with some of the dirty bedding in it.

‘Paul – darling, you –' No. Mustn't say, ‘You shouldn't.' ‘Let me help you,' she said.

He opened his eyes and looked at her without seeing. Then he jerked his face away, tipped his head up, and slid down the wall to He in the shavings, jerking and shaking. Lily pulled the barrow out of the way and knelt down to hold him, until the brief seizure was over, and he went limp, and opened his eyes and smiled innocently up at her.

Afterwards, with the doctor, he couldn't remember the fit, nor being able to walk from the stable to the car. Dr Monroe thought it was part of a cycle of pain and headaches, caused probably by scar tissue.

‘Could it happen to me again?' Paul was recovered, but sleepy.

‘Not likely.' Dr Monroe always gave you the best news. He believed in the possibility that you could make things happen by believing that they would. ‘But it means you won't be able to drive.'

‘Oh,
God.'
Paul slumped and sulked like a child unfairly chastised. He actually had not driven his car yet, but the news that it was forbidden made him feel trapped.

‘I've got to get going again,' he grumbled restlessly to Lily. ‘Why do you all hold me back?'

But the next day, he told her, ‘I feel lousy. I don't want to get up,' and would not let her even open the curtains.

‘Bad headache?'

‘Not even that excuse. I just feel, kind of… undone.'

Once when he didn't come in for dinner, he was in the office behind the shop, with papers and bills muddled all over the desk and file drawers open. He sat with his head in his hands. Lily thought he was crying, but when she spoke to him and he raised his head, his face was dry.

He had lost weight in the last weeks. It was very painful to see the lovely triangular shape of his broad-cheeked, smiling face narrowed and bonier, the skin looser, dry and colourless. Some-times
now his blue eyes which had always been so hopeful looked haunted by troubles that Lily could not know or comfort.

‘Come on in for dinner.'

‘I've got to get these orders straight. But I can't, Lily, I can't. What's happened to me?'

‘You're not ready for this yet. Your head has got to heal.' Lily bent and picked up off the floor the glasses that he had to wear now. ‘Anthea will straighten it out in the morning.'

‘I want to do it. She doesn't know what she's doing. Her experience has been in a different kind of business. She can't understand the way I've built this up.'

Anthea came to Lily and said, ‘I know he's not well yet, but it is hard to do things right for him. You know that Frank and I will have to leave in the spring anyway. Maybe it would be better if we –'

‘Wait. Hang on. It will be all right.'

‘You should make a tape of that, Mud,' Isobel told her. ‘You say it all the time.'

‘Well, it will be all right. We've just all got to hang on. One day soon, things will be back to where they were.'

Dr Monroe, fatherly and reassuring in his British-style tweeds and old rowing-club ties, continued to be hopeful. Medication had controlled the seizures. Paul had only had one more. Isobel, atone with him in the house, had heard him call out, and found him shaking and scared in the bath, teeth chattering, his hands trying to hold on to the sides, water sloshing.

She had held him and calmed him and found the right pills, and helped him out and dried him and got him into his bathrobe and into bed.

She and Cathy had always wandered in and out of their parents' bathroom when they were children. ‘It's a bit different when your daughter is sixteen,' Paul said afterwards.

‘Were you shy?' Cathy asked.

‘We didn't have time for that,' Paul said. ‘It was a crisis we were in together.'

Since Paul's moods had made him more difficult, the stormy scenes of Isobel's childhood had recurred a few times. Lily was happy to see them so close.

The neurologist in Boston was hopeful too. The cycles of pain and depression were still intense, but they seemed to be further apart.

When Nora came over, on the heels of a blizzard, which caused her to observe, ‘It's a white world,' five times during the drive from the airport, she was helpful to Lily, and comfortable to have around. Paul was fond of her. She had always adored him, and she showed her love and sympathy in the busy, practical ways which she had perfected all through her life. With her mother taking some of the load, Lily realized how exhausted she was, far more tired than when she used to drive seventy miles each way and put in a day's work in Boston, and shop and clean the house, and go chasing off after emergency clients in her spare time.

Away from Duggie, Nora was her old self, which was comforting and peaceful for this household where so much had changed. Her grey hair was still set in the same neat, old-fashioned way. She had brought the old fur-coat which had seen her through many Oxfordshire winters, and a new pair of her usual broad fawn suede boots, which made her look like a cart pony. Her red-veined cheeks were smooth and round. Her hands were plump and soft, after nearly five years of Duggie doing the washing-up and the heavy cleaning.

Isobel and Cathy, who had been mystified by the improbable exploits of their staid, cosy grandmother, wanted to talk openly about the break up of her marriage to James.

‘Old devil, he is,' Isobel said. ‘Remember when he fell in love with Paige at the theatre? He even told Dodo about it at the drug store, when we were having our raspberry sodas. Even when I was little, I used to wonder sometimes how you put up with him.'

‘Oh, it was quite all right, my dear,' Nora said, ironing in the living-room, so she could watch the television soaps. ‘Froth and bubble. Marriage is a lottery, as you'll find out one day. Swings and roundabouts,
I
say.'

‘You probably shouldn't have walked out though, Gran.' Cathy was very moral. ‘But perhaps if you hadn't,
he
might have.'

‘Grandpa? Oh, no, dear.' Nora would not criticize James, especially to her granddaughters, who were still children to her, although they had always talked about everything with Paul and Lily and had both become very mature and responsible since that ghastly early morning of November 7th, when Mike split their world asunder, like Vulcan parting the clouds with thunder.

With Nora there, Lily was able to drive up to Boston to see Martha and to collect the books and papers that she had left in the office at Crisis.

She had sent in her resignation, but Martha was irritatingly persistent in telling her, ‘You're on leave, not resigned. Take as much time as you need, and come back to us when Paul is better.'

‘I won't want to. I don't want to do anything like this any more.'

‘Do you think calamity will make you change your ways? Look at some of our customers.'

‘No, I'd be no use. I couldn't help anybody now.'

How could Martha even ask her? With her candid, weathered face and her chopped brindle hair, and her sneakers and the faded jeans too tight across the womanly bottom she tried to ignore, Martha was so totally wrapped up in Crisis that she was impervious to what was going on in the world outside.

As Lily had been. Sometimes when she looked at her battered Paul, in the dark glasses he had to wear when the headaches messed up his eyes, and saw the beloved face, that used to be so serene and smiling, drawn and puzzled and in pain, she thought about the Judge on that long-ago Easter at the ham lunch, ‘with all the fixin's'. Lily in her red dress ranting so earnestly about involvement, and the Judge with his mixed metaphor about not plunging in up to the neck: ‘It could sow the seeds of ruin.'

She tortured herself, going back and back to that.

In bed with Paul, their bodies could occasionally reach each other. Often he was frustrated and distressed. Lily's instinct was to hold him close, fiercely close, force it to be the way it used to be, not let him turn away to the edge of the bed.

She and Nora came back from the supermarket with the car filled with bags of all the stupid things that seemed necessary to keep life rolling along; more of them with Nora here, since she could not pass any new displays or special offers.

As they came up the road, a car was turning out of their drive. Paul was in the stable yard with Arthur, cleaning one of the horses, tied up to a ring outside the barn.