Dear Doctor Lily (55 page)

‘Just testing, lady.' Harry laughed, protecting himself from being hurt.
'Kaput.
Too bad. Doesn't work.'

When Lily was packing clothes for the movers, she found herself not folding the sweaters, but rolling them tightly, in Paul's naval style. She had already noticed that she was keeping her accounts more neatly. She had run the Crisis office efficiently, but her own affairs had always been slapdash. Paul was methodical and tried to teach her a system, but she had only half listened, restlessly, because there were better things in life.

Now she was doing what he wanted, although he wasn't here to see. Who was doing it? Dead people are too busy to come back and roll a sweater or balance a cheque book.

In a drawer, she found one of the notes from early in their marriage that he had left for her every day before he went to work at Turnbull's. In the desk in the study downstairs, she found that he had kept every one of the love notes she had left for him on scrappy bits of paper, on the kitchen table, in the tack-shop office, on his pillow if she were going away, in his suitcase when he went off without her.

The loss was not so much not getting his notes now, as not writing hers.

After the movers came, Lily and Cathy and Isobel cleaned the house and lived for a week with a card table and garden chairs in front of the fire, and sleeping bags on old mattresses that were going to the dump.

The morning that Isobel was going to leave with the big grey cat for Tony's shack, now known as Our Cottage, Lily sat helplessly at the card table, stricken by what was actually happening. ‘How can I leave you?'

Cathy went tactfully away, so that Lily did not have to add dutifully, ‘But I've got Cathy.'

Isobel sat down again and put her hands over her mother's on the table. ‘I'll be okay,' she said perkily.

‘I
won't. I need you.'

‘I need you too.' Isobel's lip dropped and stuck out as if she were still a small child, and a tear fell into it.

‘I'll come back, lots, and send you money to come over to me.'

‘Yeah, I know.'

They looked at each other across the small rickety table.

If she had cried, at any time, ‘Don't go, Mud!', would Lily have stayed? But Isobel was starting her own new life for herself, and making the shack a place for Tony. For Lily to have hung about on the edge of it (waiting for black grandchildren) would have been madness.

When she went to New Bedford to say goodbye, Ida said, ‘Hang on a sec, I'll come with you.'

‘I wish you could. Would you ever go back to England?'

‘I'd be daft to go. Bernie's doing so well at the community college. Myaggie's Myaggie, and old Fred's in trouble all the time, but so he would be in England. Lying? He has the gift, and a terrible temper, just like his father. If I ever think I want to go to England, it's because I imagine that all the things I hate here – crooked pols and violence and bullshit and rip-offs – aren't the same over there. Which they are. Like I say, I'd be daft to go.
You're
daft.'

The Grossmans started to move into the house, and Lily and Cathy spent their last few days with Nina and Sam. On a freak warm early April morning, Mrs Grossman called.

‘It's such a great day. Come and have a last ride.'

Lily wavered. ‘Go Mud,' Cathy said.

‘Go,' Nina ordered. ‘Take my car.'

In borrowed jeans and oversize boots, Lily rode John down the track towards Hidden Harbor. Not to the beach. She would only go half-way, then turn through the woods and ride round the sandy roads among the deserted summer cottages where she and Paul and Terry had stayed by the marsh. When they came to the turn-off through the trees, John resisted. He wanted to go down to the water, so she let him go ahead.

He was not being Western, but moving strongly and collected, head up to the bit, in his old way for her. He was doing beautifully and she was riding well. She hadn't lost it. At the mouth of the
inlet, she let him walk out through the seaweed in the shallow low-tide water.

Not so long ago, she had dragged her feet through the sand here with Arthur, crying out to the seagulls, crying for Paul. Now that madness seemed far behind. She had moved a long way ahead from despair.

Paul was here. Not as a fallen ghost among the cold winter grasses. He rode with her. If she had seen him physically, sitting easily on Robin and turning back to smile at her, she would not have been totally surprised.

John put down his broad black head and started to slap at the water with a front hoof, a threat of sagging down to roll. Lily pulled up his head and he stood stock still and stared across the inner bay to where a yellow bulldozer moved like a toy among the rocks.

‘I'm going, Paul,' Lily said. ‘Is that all right?'

Her mind knew the answer in his dear remembered voice.

‘I'm coming too.'

Without warning, John suddenly buckled his knees and went down into the sea. Lily stepped off just in time. He thrashed and floundered about. Her borrowed clothes were soaked. The wide boots filled with very cold water. She laughed aloud. She had thought you couldn't laugh alone. You could.

Back on the beach, she hung John's reins down to the ground so that he would stay, like a Western-trained horse, and stood on her head in the sand to let the water run out of her boots.

First there was mud and sticky ploughed land which clung to your boots and the underside of your dogs from January to April. Then imperceptibly the landscape greened. Points of life pricked through the heavy brown earth, and it gradually dried, giving up its moisture to what grew above it.

The corn was an inch high. Then, suddenly it seemed, between one rampaging spring storm and the next, the fields were upholstered in lush green velvet. Ankle high. Calf high. The trees puffed out, round and rich. The hedge lines looping up and down the contours of the gentle hills blurred and spread.

The hectic patch of rape-seed flower in the middle of Lily's view was constant sunlight, enhancing the subtler pastels of the changing greens and the pale-washed sky. Lambs, kids, calves, foals came forth as rapidly as the growing grass and grains, and celebrated. In May, cow parsley foamed from the banks, and wet days turned Pie Lane into a car wash. The hay beyond the garden fence would soon be ready to cut. Silvery waves shivered through the green wheat. Already a light brown haze was on the curving slope of barley, as if the whole field had been put under a grill and lightly toasted.

Last year, Lily had walked on the hills, along riding tracks that made her sick with nostalgia as she sloshed through the puddles of other horses' hoofs, without really seeing the countryside. She had leaned on her post-and-rail fence and looked over the stunning view without being able to absorb it, or to comprehend that it was
her
view, which would eventually become as familiar in all its changing aspects as her own face in the mirror.

A year later, she realized that she must be walking with her head higher, because she stumbled over ruts and craggy flints that she had avoided when her eyes were on the ground. She saw much more, and what she saw began to mean something.

‘I think I've turned a corner,' she told Susan, who lived in the village, comfortable, casual, doing two part-time jobs and
bringing up three children and making allowance for an immature, variable husband who came and went.

‘Hope for you yet? Then who will I have to be sorry for?'

‘Was I so dreary?'

‘No, brave, you and Cathy. You've got guts.'

That was what Lily wanted to hear. They had survived the upheaval of departure. They had got through the first year, learning not to be strangers. She had thought she knew England, but it had changed, or she had forgotten. Everything was slower than in America, and appliances and gadgets fell apart more quickly. The workmen who did up her kitchen and bathroom were lovely men with sturdy jokes, but they worked like snails and kept disappearing for two weeks at a time. Once when she had been to London, she found two of them on the floor, asleep by the fire with woollen hats pulled over their eyes.

In the bad storm last winter, the snow shrieked across the open fields and piled up in impassable drifts at both ends of Pie Lane. In New England, the snow ploughs would be out all night, but here you waited for a humanitarian farmer. People of the village struggled back and forth in a friendly way, borrowing milk and yeast and baked beans from each other, and playing cards and looking for a book to read. Lily could not get her car out for a week.

Later, odd little cranky Eric Pigeon dropped in once at midnight, when he was walking his matted mongrel down Pie Lane and saw that Lily still had a light on.

She was wearing Paul's winter dressing-gown. ‘Sorry about this.' She knew she looked frumpy.

‘Moronic woman,' Eric said. ‘Don't try to flatter me that it matters.'

She poured him a whisky, but he only stayed two minutes before his dog whined, tied up outside, and he jumped up and went away, with the whisky and Lily's glass.

The village was calmly friendly. Lily and Cathy were assimilated effortlessly, no big social deal, just allowed to start belonging here whenever they got around to it.

Some of the women still talked in funny trumpeting voices (which sounded funnier after you had been living in the States),
as if they had not heard about the revolution. Their children or grandchildren talked cockney or Berkshire, an accent whose stressed r's were pleasantly not unlike American.

The BBC was riddled with rare dialects. A Scots newsreader talked of Aggravated Buggery. The House of Commons sounded like the Battle of Hastings. Punks were creatures from European outer space, unknown in Boston, Massachusetts. Punks in Newbury? Lily had visited it when it was a little backwater country town. She stared, because it seemed more insulting to ignore them.

In the main street, where people milled up and down with pushchairs all day and every day, as if the shops would close for ever tomorrow, a boy had bleached his hair a dry, hard gold and tortured and spiked it into a horrendous crown of thorns, which he carried, stiff-necked, past Marks & Spencer. No one paid any attention to him. Lily stared, and felt quite old.

Cathy made some friends quickly at school and in the village, and rode with them long distances on her bicycle. In the first few months, she and Lily had to break their hearts every week, visiting the dogs in the kennels. Young Sheila was undaunted, a key member of the deafening chorus that barked and yelped when anyone came within smelling distance of their yard, but Arthur was muted and lost. When Lily and Cathy had to walk away, Sheila would be up on her hind legs at the wire, tossing out shouts of protest, but Arthur stood foursquare in the middle of the run, down at the front as he had become with age, and moved his grizzled head uncertainly. What …? Where?

‘Don't look back, Mud. He'll be all right when he comes out.'

Cathy could not wait for that, but acquired a small furred beige dog from the postman, for whom she made tea every morning, because she was up early to catch her bus. A postman bringing letters at six forty-five! But Lily had to quell a treacherous self-indulgent nostalgia for the old walk along the abandoned railroad track to the post office on Cape Cod, to turn the knob of her mailbox to its combination.

Two times right to H. Once left to
B.
Reverse and stop between
K
and
L.
Or was it
J
and
K?
My God, she had forgotten it already, and she chose to let herself become distressed over this
unimportant symbol of her lost past, which led to others, and others, and wasted half a day.

Daisy Cottage did not accept her for some time. The Cape Cod house had withdrawn as she prepared to leave, and now this solid old thatched cottage held itself back to see what she would do. Her chairs and tables were not quite at home either. Not enough people had sat yet in this place. The air was empty of voices and laughter.

In the garden, Lily did enough weeding and tidying to save the plants that were already there, but she did not make changes or plant anything new. She did not know how long she was going to stay. Parts of the white cottage walls needed painting. The roof needed re-thatching. That could wait.

She did not hang up Terry's picture of Paul on the hill for a long time. Her bedroom walls were too low, because of the sloping ceiling under the thatch. Neither end of the long living-room was the right place. The picture either dominated the white walls, or was submerged by the open beams. Eventually Lily hung it, with the plastic spoon, in the front hall, where the western sun struck across it from the side, as the sun along the top of the hills had irradiated Paul's hair while Terry sat on a tree root behind him and quickly made the sketch.

When the dogs came out of quarantine at last, Sheila was ecstatic and unchanged, but Arthur seemed blinder and deafer and vaguer. He was upset to find the bossy small dog there. A striped cat had turned up too, as cats did for Cathy. It stared uncharitably at Arthur, and he moved shiftily away, and waited his chance to steal its food.

There had been no rabbits or hares on their Cape Cod land. Here the fields were full of them. When small bold rabbits came under the fence to sit on the lawn in the early morning and evening, the dogs shrieked at the glass door and burst out, all three of them, always too late. In August, a hare got up in the stubble and Arthur was gone, faster than he had run for years, almost as he used to run behind galloping horses.

He did not come home. Lily found him collapsed under a hedge, and he died on Cathy's lap on the way to the vet.

He had been everybody's dog, but as he got older, he had
depended more on Paul, and when Paul was ill, the dog was by his chair, on his bed, following him where he limped, his stick on one side, Arthur on the other. When good dog Arthur left them quietly, he took with him one more visible part of Paul.