Dear Doctor Lily (56 page)

During their first winter, Cathy had changed to a weekly boarding school to be with two of her close friends, and Lily got a job at a country hotel outside Newbury. It had recently been re-opened by an energetic and ambitious couple in their thirties, who had tried a lot of other things they didn't like, and finally put money into what they loved. With him, it was cooking, with her, doing domestic things beautifully, and making people comfortable and happy.

As Round Hill Rectory began to be discovered, they needed more than the odd chambermaid and weekend waitress. They took on Lily, who did a bit of everything for an unsensational salary, because she liked the odd hours, and the optimistic courage of Gerry and Janet and their cheery approach to disasters, real and threatened.

They also loved each other, and showed it. Lily found she could not be with couples who fought or hurt each other. Once, invited to the big house of Mrs Colonel Dodgson – ‘When we were ee-nindia' –a woman craftily insulted her husband across the table, and Lily had cried impulsively, ‘Oh, be nice to him, for God's sake, or he'll die and it will be too late!' and disgraced herself by bursting into tears.

For quite long periods, she felt strong and content, and could enjoy her new friends and even look ahead with some pleasure. Then – bingo – she would be awake all night in a cocoon of guilt and regrets, remembering, sorrowing, reminding herself deliberately of all the things with which she could chastise herself.

Selfish. Arrogantly sure of his love and admiration. Impatient when he was ill. Consumed by the work at Crisis. Always home late, talking about her day, not Paul's. ‘I'm desperate too,' she had to hear him say, again and again, and at three o'clock in the morning, all her mistakes with Mike were jostling and crowding in. The spectre of Paul's anxious, sick face and his limp and silent tears of pain was obliterated by Mike up there like a fly, under the canal bridge in the Coastguard spotlight.

‘I love you!' Silly fool. The men in the boat and up on the bridge must have had a riot with that afterwards.

She saw him jump and fall feet first through the black swirling water into the dark image of his unloved young body hanging like a puppet from the ventilator grille in the bare prison cell.

When Cathy at the weekend asked her how she had been, as she always did, Lily told her.

‘What's the point of all that?' Cathy asked sensibly. ‘You think you owe it to Daddy, or something? The way I see it, that kind of carry-on must push him farther away, not bring him closer.'

She was beautiful and healthy, with milky whites to her steady light blue eyes. In the States, she had been rather neat: bouncy sneakers, plain bright clothes fitting her tidy narrow shape. Now she wore sloppy disconnected garments, black and earth colours, shuffling happily in loose flat shoes, like the other girls.

In the summer, she hiked in groups along the ridge of the hills above the Vale of the White Horse, learned to play tennis well, bicycled to Kate's swimming pool, adored Kate's brother, who never spoke to her.

On the first very hot day, Lily was going to garden and paint the outdoor chairs and clean the windows… until she let herself be seduced into thinking about Hidden Harbor, on such a day as this. Sick with longing for the sea, she lay for hours in the hammock and did nothing but nag at the aching memory of all the lovely summer places – Nauset Outer Beach, the Vineyard, Sandy Neck and the wild drumming gallop over the hard sand and through the splattering tide pools.

She fell heavily asleep and woke when the little dog jumped into the hammock. The Judge's grandfather clock was striking five. Dogs' dinner time. Detached from earth, unreal, she held the warm, quickly pulsing heart of the dog to her chest, swinging gently under the sky, and was at peace.

‘The widow Stephens,' Eric Pigeon said to her in his insolent fashion. ‘This place is crawling with widows. They come out from under mossy stones and embroider hassocks for the church, and expect me to be an extra man at dinners, to pour the wine.'

‘I don't,' Lily said.

‘You don't give dinner parties.'

‘Should I?'

‘God, no. Disaster.' He was opinionated and quite rude. ‘A fortyish widow. Who would come?'

‘You would.'

‘I'm safe. I'm a eunuch, I think.'

‘I never knew one of those.'

‘And you shouldn't now, darling.' He stood on tiptoe to embrace her outside the village shop. He could be spasmodically warm and quite loving. ‘You've got to devote attention now to the serious man hunt.'

Lily stepped back, furious. ‘Don't dare say anything like that to me!'

‘Don't snarl at me like a bitch over its dead mate. I'll cut your tongue out.' He said things like that.

Eric was a balding, slight, retired fellow in baggy trousers, who lived alone with his smelly dog and a few chickens and goats. He had been in marketing for something like margarine and cooking oil, writing promotion and packaging copy.

‘Words are my slaves, damn you, don't criticize,' he had said before Lily ever opened her mouth. He was writing a book. ‘Who isn't?' When people smirked at him, ‘I suppose you're writing about all of us in this village?' he snarled savagely, ‘Readers want to be entertained, not bored to death.'

He had insulted almost everybody, but because this was England, they tolerated him for being batty.

Cathy wanted to go to the village church, because she liked the school services, and Kate's brother could occasionally be viewed here. Lily liked the vicar, a large cheery man who rode a big roan mare with a rump the same shape as his. The minister on Cape Cod had said to her, ‘You'll be all right, my dear. You're British. Stiff upper lip, okay? Okay.'

This vicar had said, ‘What a terrible time for you, and how hard it must be to struggle to create a better one.'

It was all right for admirable Susan in the village to tell her she was brave, because Lily wanted Susan to admire her; but she had been pleased that this vigorous ruddy man had let her pull a sad face and indulge in, ‘Poor me!'

She and Cathy stopped on the way into church to watch the smooth arms-up-arms-down of the bell ringers: two sweet serious women and a young boy with his tongue between his teeth and Thomas who was a thatcher, from one of the villages on the opposite hill, across the valley.

When Thomas said, ‘Stand,' and the organ swelled to accompany the vicar and robed choir up the aisle, the ringers left the bells up and went to their seats. Lily, sitting in a back pew, heard Eric come in late and bang the heavy door, saw him look at the vicar's broad praying back and the congregation bent painfully forwards, and saw him turn and look again at the bell ropes. Then he leaped and grabbed the coloured woollen sally of the tenor bell and was carried up to the roof with a high curdling scream. That was the kind of thing he did.

Lily and Cathy quite liked him.

That's because you're foreigners,' Eric said, calling in on them with his wrist in plaster from the fall in church. ‘Youm doan't unnerstand our ways.'

He tied his goats out along the grassy path where Cathy walked the dogs, and the billy butted Sheila in the ribs and knocked her into the hedge.

When Cathy complained, he glared his myopic eyes almost to bursting through his thick spectacles and shouted, ‘I'll shoot your dog!' That was the way he was.

He was wispy and delicate, always injuring himself, and knocked off his feet by coughs and flu. When last winter's storm cut off the village, he had slipped on the ice and opened up his forehead, hurrying to take a thermos of bloody Marys to an old lady before any good woman could get there with her homemade soup.

‘Listen, will you, for once in your life,' he told Lily, sitting up when he had been told to lie flat. ‘You must keep an eye on Ma Eccles. She likes rum in her tea. And there's trouble with her granddaughter. The probation officer's got to be talked to, so you must see to that, and ring up her cretinous son and tell him you'll drain all the blood out of his liver if he doesn't get up here with the electric blanket.'

‘Lie down, Eric. Don't drag me into it.'

‘You've got to help. What's the use of you?'

‘Leave me out of it.'

Lily could not explain why. Nobody over here knew the true story of what had happened on Cape Cod, although she was sure they all told each other versions of it. She made Eric's coffee and left him. She could just imagine herself intrusively involved with the village, trapped again by needs and wants, trying to run people's lives. One of Mrs Colonel Dodgson's ‘splendeed weemeen', knocking herself out to please the disgruntled old bags at the Silver Threads teas, chasing Ma Eccles's son over half the home counties, and going to the juvenile court with his delinquent daughter.

The job was enough. It kept her busy, and most of the time, it kept her from pain and nostalgia. At the hotel, she did whatever was needed: cleaning, flowers, kitchen, serving meals, making drinks, reception, phone, talking about the States with American visitors who detected the transatlantic leftovers in her speech.

She often stayed later at Round Hill Rectory than she had meant to or was paid for – as at Crisis. But when Cathy was not there, she did not have anybody to come home for.

The bitter loneliness of this gradually lost its sharpness. Although she was still often homesick for many places and people in America, she knew she had been right to make this tremendous change. Going home to nobody at the Cape Cod house would have meant continually missing Paul, looking for him, remembering him in his old places – the piano, his chair, walking up from the barn when he heard her car. Coming home to Daisy Cottage was a lonesome business sometimes, but he had never been here. She did not look for him.

The dogs' welcome never failed. After she had fed them and made herself tea or a drink, there began to be tired times when she caught herself feeling glad that she did not have to cook anyone's supper.

Jamspoon came from London once in a while, looking better fed, wearing coloured waistcoats, fancying himself as a Londoner, not interested in the garden, cracking the old jokes about the
silence keeping him awake after lunch. He was always going to bring Pixie. She adored the country. She was a peasant girl at heart, you could tell it by her pastry. She and Lily would hit it off something astonishing. Lily found him very tiresome, and was glad that Pixie never came.

Nora had gone back to nursing, but she made the long journey from Essex occasionally and moved the furniture about and uprooted weeds, with or without Duggie, who might as well not have come for all he said or did, unless you let him go to the kitchen sink, or tell you what route he had taken from Chelmsford.

Blanche came over with the children. Duffy was eleven. He had a lovely voice and was taken up with his choir, but the eight-year-old twins were out of hand. The Duke's Head took up a lot of Blanche's time and energy and she and Neil could hardly ever be at home in the evenings, because of the bar and restaurant.

With the sun brilliant on a blowy day, the twins did not want to walk with the dogs up to the White Horse at Uffington. They wanted to watch television. Cathy unplugged the set. Gordie flew into a rage.

‘Be nice,' Blanche pleaded. Gordie attacked her with blind violence.

‘I think I'm losing my grip.' Blanche sent him outside, to throw clods of earth at the cows in the paddock. ‘Stop that!'

‘Not you,' Lily said. ‘I've always envied the way you cope with everything so calmly.'

‘I envied
you,'
Blanche said, unexpectedly shy. ‘You came and went, you and Paul, like – sort of – creatures from another world. You came home to dazzle us.'

‘Did you think that? How odd.'

‘Gordie, come inside! Helen go out and stop him doing that to the tree.'

‘I hate him.' Helen ran up the steep little stair that went up like a loft ladder to the spare room.

‘I was jealous of you, Lily.'

‘Who wouldn't be, when I had Paul?' Lily said. ‘And look at me now.'

‘Yes. Look at you.'

Anyone else would have said something like ‘You're doing well.' Blanche simply mirrored the situation as it was, and it was oddly comforting.

When Lily's car failed her, she could not miss work, so Eric drove her to the hotel and promised to come back after she had finished lunches.

He did, but not as planned. He always had a better idea. He came back early and had lunch at the hotel himself. Spying on her? Out for trouble? He wore his droopiest dark-green trousers which looked as if they were tied at the waist with string, and a flashy black and white check jacket with a red bow tie.

He was courtly with Janet. ‘But listen,' Lily told him privately. ‘No funny business.'

‘Why can't I lunch here the same as anyone else?' Eric raised his voice. A man and a woman at the bar looked round.

‘I'm warning you.' Lily picked up glasses from the next table and spoke without moving her lips.

‘I'll slit your gizzard,' he hissed, smiling and nodding at the couple by the bar.

Lily was in the kitchen. Janet and Val were in the dining-room.

‘Who is that dreadful little man?' Janet pushed through the swing door in a fluster. ‘He's complaining about everything and annoying the other guests, and Val is a nervous wreck. Why did he have to come
here
?'

‘To fetch me, I'm afraid.'

‘When will your car be fixed?'

‘Two more days.'

Angrily, Janet rearranged the meat and vegetables on Eric's plate, shoved it into the microwave to heat it, and took the same food back to him.

‘Fabulous lunch.' Eric raved about the hotel on the way home. Lily would not talk to him. As they came into Newbury, the traffic was very heavy. It was a race meeting day and it was raining. Racegoers were going home.