Dear Doctor Lily (59 page)

‘Sir, I'd be glad to.' That was how you said it.

‘You have been taking an interest in the defendant?' The magistrates looked at her over their spectacles. Were they thinking, ‘Hullo, here's this widow. What kind of an interest, eh?'

But she had the letter from Gerry and Janet. It was passed up to the bench and the magistrates put their bronze and bald and pelted heads together and muttered and whispered like the three bears, and nodded at her, and looked a little less inscrutably at Roger with his silly childish grin and hopeful eyebrows.

‘Are you willing to take this job at the – let's see – at the Round Hill Rectory Hotel?'

Roger nodded. Too hard.

‘Do you consider that he can perform it satisfactorily, Mrs Stephens?'

Lily nodded too hard also, and launched into an enthusiastic sales pitch for Roger and his future. The court must be impressed. ‘I work at the hotel and I'll undertake to keep an eye on him and sec that he works properly.'

Here's this amazing woman, they were thinking, willing to rescue this poor hapless fellow. Lily had already written the chairman's speech of gratitude.

He didn't know his lines. ‘We thank you for the help you've given, Mrs Stephens.' He lowered the spectacles a bit farther down his leonine nose. ‘But don't go too far. We would advise you not to take the principal role in this man's welfare. That will be best left to the probation service.'

But I know him best. And the probation officer has got too many customers already, without old Rodge. She would love to unload him.

‘If we give him another chance by allowing his probation to run on, it will be up to him, you know, not you, whether he takes it or not.'

Ticked off.

‘You may stand down.' The three bears were quiet and patient. Paul would have made a good magistrate. If he and Lily had bought a house in the English countryside, as they always said one day they might, he could have gone on the bench.

‘Keep trying,' he would have said to Roger. ‘You can make it.'

He would not have said to Lily, ‘Don't go too far.' No don'ts, except, ‘Don't be stifled. Keep on being yourself.'

Up on the barn roof, Terry looked over the farmyard and the wide ploughed field to the thin line of trees on the curving horizon, and felt at the same time on a level with the sky and at one with the turning earth. Since he had been with Thomas, he had realized that this was the only honest-to-God work he had ever done in his life. He was learning something that men had been doing in this country for six hundred years. He was going to be good at it. For the first time that he could remember, he felt a part of the life of the world.

Thomas was at the end of the long roof, laying wadds of straw against the barge board and tying them in with tarred cord. They hardly talked when they were working, and not much at other times. When they took their breaks, it was mostly brief un-sensational bits of information that Thomas had picked up since he started hanging straw with his father when he was a boy.

After he left Lily and Cathy, Terry had stayed with Blanche for a while, helping in the pub, which he had always enjoyed, and which reminded him of the happy old time with Dad before Terry had got mad with him and Lily for being so exclusively in love, and gone off in that carpeted van with Sue and the girl with the snaky hair.

He was beginning to be able to think rationally about good times lost. Lily was right. For a long while you had to shut the dead person out, for fear of the pain that came with them. But when you finally began to risk opening the door and letting them back in, they came familiarly to reassure you that the past was now, and was not lost.

When Blanche began to ask, ‘How long are you planning to stay?', Terry packed his stuff into the biscuit tin and came back to the Berkshire downs to find Thomas. He knew that Lily's thatch would be finished. He drove around the lanes over a wide area,
staying away from Daisy Cottage, until he saw the small grey truck outside a cottage with a ridge of Thomas's own pattern of scallops and points, having one end of its thatch repaired.

How did he ever get the nerve to ask a solid citizen like Thomas, a guy who had got it all together, to take on a short square person of twenty-seven with a forgettable face, who had screwed up pretty well everything he had ever laid his hand to?

Thomas's wife had gone off with a greyhound slipper three years ago, taking their teenage son with her. After Terry had worked with him for a month, Thomas suggested diffidently that he might like to leave his lodgings with Mrs Rambert and her beehives and move into his house.

Terry went down the ladder to make some more ‘bottles' from the split bundles of wheat straw. He knocked the butt ends of the straw on a board to level them and tied them tightly enough to satisfy Thomas. He carried several up in a curved iron holder and hooked it into the old thatch, then banged in some spars for Thomas with the mallet.

‘Let's see that hand.'

Terry turned over his hand, blistered and sore and chapped with the cold. The straw wrecked your hands, but when it had become thatch, end over end over end to lead water off the roof, it looked as smooth as a velvet cushion, graciously rounded. There was a healing split in his palm where he had tried to knock in hazel spars with his hand, like Thomas.

Thomas looked at it and nodded. ‘Rub in some of that oil and make me some more spars,' he said. ‘We're running short.'

Sitting on the tailboard of the truck, splitting the tough lengths of hazel with a billhook, Terry remembered too late to keep his fist on his knee as a buffer, and the knife slipped and cut the front of his knee.

Damn, damn, damn. A woman at the farmhouse bandaged it up tightly, and Thomas told him to take the rest of the day off.

‘I'm all right.' Terry was furious with himself. He knew his job too well to make a stupid-ass mistake like that.

‘Go home and put your foot up. Go on.'

‘I told you. I'm all right.'

The cold light was waning. They only had an hour or so to
work. Terry's knee was throbbing and he had started to shiver, but he sharpened his cut spars and twisted them with his sore hands to show how tough he was. When he shifted the ladder along and went up on the roof again, he could hardly drag his stiffly bandaged knee up the ladder.

He did not have to drag it down again. He stepped down with one foot, and as he put his weight on that rung to bring the bad leg down, suddenly there was nothing there, and he and the ladder fell on to the hard ground outside the barn.

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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