Dear Doctor Lily (8 page)

‘Trouble with you,' she would say, ‘is you're too happy. Why are you always smiling?' She had adored his cheerful face at first. Now she disgruntled it into a weapon against her. She began to wonder whether she was going to fall into depression again.

It was at this point that Lily fell in love with Paul in Flekjavik. But that was only a dream. Crazy too. You didn't throw away two people's security for what was an illusory kind of cruise-liner romance with a girl only fourteen years older than your son.

However, when Terry started school, Barbara got a job with a man who was making expensive dressy sweaters in Wellesley, had a loveless affair with him, then a more involved and open one with somebody sleazier, and through a high-priced lawyer hired by her father, got custody of their son when she and Paul were divorced.

‘I might just as well have slept with that girl I met in Iceland,' Paul told Barbara at one point during all the nastiness.

‘Like all the others?'

‘What others?'

‘You can lay off pretending now. You and your standards. If there's one thing I despise, it's a hypocrite.'

I would never do anything to hurt Barbara,
Paul heard himself telling Lily pompously on the cement staircase, a stifling funnel for the Air Force's hot-spring heating system.

Alone in London, Paul managed to get a ticket for a musical about travelling in time.

From the circle, he watched the tops of people's heads coming into the seats below. A man and a woman walked sideways along the third row. Broad shoulders in a low black dress. A swath of glossy brown hair, shining under the high chandelier, caught back with a wide clasp and falling squarely to the exact level of the cut ends at the back.

Is it? Isn't it? It was six years, after all. She wouldn't be doing her hair the same way.

In the interval, he went looking for her in the crowded bar. Not a hope. He manoeuvred round two expansive men and a gesturing woman, and came face to face with Lily. She was leaning against striped satin wallpaper, staring at him with her mouth open, the same but different.

‘Is it? It is, isn't it?'

‘Paul.'

She still had the same high colouring, but her face seemed narrower, her neck more slender on the wide shoulders that carried the low-cut black dress, very different from the bunchy thing she had worn. It had been a child's face then, the features unformed, soft and round. Now it was strong and very alive and glowing.

In six years she had grown away from him. He wouldn't have a chance with her now, a battered old divorce of thirty-four. The young man she was with in those good orchestra seats was probably one of many, unless the swine was her husband. She was out of Paul's reach.

‘Lily – what happened to you? You were such a kid. What happened to those God-awful glasses that kept falling off?'

She relaxed into a smile. ‘Sorry about them.' She poked the middle finger of her right hand towards the bridge of her nose. ‘I've got contact lenses now.'

‘You're lovely.' He shook his head slightly as he said it, regret in his voice.

‘Oh, rubbish.' That brisk denial had not changed.

A man with hair longish and curling at the sides materialized alongside. ‘You stay here, Lil. I'll get the drinks.'

‘Your Husband?' Paul nodded towards the curly sideburns trying to get the barman's attention.

She laughed. Although her face was no longer plump, when she laughed her cheeks still went out sideways in a rounded chubby way. ‘You're the one who's married, remember?'

‘That's just it.' Paul dropped his voice like a stone between them. ‘I'm not any more.'

Her mouth fell open again. She searched his face. Then she recovered and muttered things like, ‘I'm sorry … hard for you.'

When the other man fought his way back with two drinks, Lily introduced him.

‘I'm Paul Stephens.' He knew Lily did not remember his last name, if she had ever known it. He did not know her name.

The man asked Paul where he was from and what his business was, and said some things about the play, and how he hoped it wouldn't start up all that popular nonsense about reincarnation again.

‘Why not?' Paul asked. ‘We've all lived before. That explains a lot of things, like
déjà vu
and instant attraction.'

‘I can't agree. You get one stab at life and that's it. If you make a mess of it, you don't get another chance. Right, Lil?'

‘I don't think so,' she said softly, hard to hear in the hubbub. ‘I think you can recognize someone from another life.'

Not hearing, the man turned away, as someone called his name. Paul and Lily looked and looked at each other.

Paul stayed an extra day in London and changed his appointment with a racing stable. Lily came to his hotel at nine o'clock.

‘I'm not going to work,' she said. ‘Can we have all day?'

‘Till I have to drive to the country this evening.'

‘I'll come with you.'

They were having breakfast. It wasn't a very nice hotel, since Turnbull's were tight with expenses. The dining-room was drab and the waitress discouraged, with a nasty bulge in her shoe. They were not eating, but drinking coffee and staring. Lily stirred her coffee with the plastic spoon she had picked up from the floor by the coffee machine in Iceland.

‘You're still sentimental, Lily. You haven't changed.'

‘Nor have you. I love you. Now say it, go on.'

‘What?'

‘“No, you don't. Hush now.” You were so edgy and cautious.'

‘Well, Lily, I was married, for God's sake.'

‘You're so proper. If we got married, would you still be like that with another woman who tried anything on?'

Back in America, as soon as he had told Terry, Paul telephoned Barbara to say he was going to marry again. There was a pause. Then Barbara said, ‘Oh, English. She rides, then?'

‘No, she doesn't know anything about horses, as a matter of fact.'

‘Good. Then you can teach her. You'll like that, being better at something.'

‘Barb, don't be like that.'

‘No, I shouldn't, should I?' She had been more mellow towards him of late. There had not been so much trouble over Terry's visits. ‘Seriously, Paul, I really am glad for you. As long as it doesn't mean – '

‘It won't mean anything, if that's what you mean.'

Paul was paying her only for his son's support. Her lawyer had been clever about the custody, but not as crafy as Paul's lawyer about the settlement. The process had been squalid and villainous. Paul and Barbara both hated it so much that they had even briefly discussed staying married. The happiness they had shared – the small house outside Boston her father bought her, the early rapture, the horses, the meals Paul cooked her, her serene pregnancy, the miracle of a perfect baby boy being suddenly among them – all brought to nothing, and the memories of them violated
and strangled by delays and greed and the horrible warfare process of the court.

At one point. Paul had been ready to say, ‘I'll give her everything I have, what does it matter?' Now it did.

‘I wondered.' He called Barbara again tentatively. She could be quite friendly and rational, but she could still be triggered off. ‘I thought, I mean, after all, this is very important to Terry too. I wondered whether he would like to come to England for my wedding. My parents could take him over.'

‘Your wedding.' Barbara did not go in for exclamation marks. She said it flatly, as a statement. ‘You must be crazy.'

‘I was going to ask him myself, but I thought I'd better check with you first.'

‘I'm amazed you even thought of it.'

‘Let me talk to him. What time will he be home? Why don't we let him make up his own mind?'

‘He's only ten years old. You don't lay those kind of choices on a child, Paul. In any case, he shouldn't even be offered the choice right now. He's not been acting in the kind of way that deserves a trip to England.'

‘Oh God, not again? Why didn't you tell me? You know we agreed I'd always be involved when there was any problem.'

‘Well, you don't want to be bothered every time he screams at me, or tears the place apart. I can't call you eight times a day.'

‘Barbara – what's wrong with him? He was into a much easier phase.'

‘He was. Until you presented him with your joyful gift of a wicked stepmother. Happy Columbus Day.'

‘Listen, if you'll let me say this. He'll get along fine with Lily, I know he will.'

‘Why don't we let him make up his own mind?' One of her ploys: quoting you back at yourself. ‘But let's at least try to make it a little easier for him, huh?'

Getting married to Paul was splendid enough. Going off with him to live in the United States was an incredible adventure for which Lily was eagerly ready at twenty-four. Her life had already been threatening to get into a rut. Train, work, train home to Wimbledon, try to be at least half as fair to her parents as they were to her. Fight with her sister Blanche, make it up. Meet men, get rid of them or be dropped, meet new men with persistent hope, hang on to one or two drearies so as not to be at home too many evenings.

With the usual good luck in which she believed, as some people believe themselves dogged by ill fortune, here was salvation, before it all got boring and she lost zest and hardened towards her thirties. Now she would be a married woman during that dread decade, a mother perhaps, with Paul in America, the bird who flew the coop, the daughter who would always be prized because she wasn't there, the sister who would seem glamorous, the friend who was envied.

In Boston, she would lose weight, become witty, magically develop a clothes sense, be gracefully domesticated, stop bossing people about.

Telling her parents had been more difficult than she had foreseen. When she took Paul home, her father put on an act, jovial and very British, and her mother came out of the kitchen and realized she had forgotten to take off her apron, which set her back in the conversation. Blanche looked unhappy. But you could tell they liked Paul. He was agonizingly polite, and very considerate. He laughed at Daddy's jokes and laid on a bit too thick his admiration of the supper, the house, the garden, the photographs, and made too big a deal of being friendly with the dog, who would make friends with anyone. No need to make the family suspicious.

But they liked him. They did. They were glad for Lily. Even if they had not been, she would have gone roaring ahead with the enterprise, and they would have had to take their chances.

In the Family Centre, the helping agency where she worked, it was exciting to break the news, and show a photograph. When
Joan said, very sincerely, ‘I don't know what we're going to do without you,' Lily did feel a pang of guilt and regret strike through her armour of self-centred excitement.

Three years ago, she had left college without completing the social work course, because after a summer typing job with the Family Centre, they had offered her a permanent post as a secretary. She talked to the clients a lot. There were always people in the waiting-room, and Lily's ear was useful to them as a preliminary to the person they had come to see, or sometimes instead of, if Joan or Jane or Bill or Tina or Mrs Levy never got round to them. The budget did not allow any more case workers, but Joan began to train Lily, and to let her go out on calls with the others, and write reports, and eventually have clients of her own. She had got in at the back door to just where she wanted to be.

Although the rest of the staff were happy about Lily's marriage, Joan, unmarried, a middle-aged sane saint in stretched cardigans, did not want to understand how Lily could give all this up. As Director, she had been wonderfully encouraging and helpful to Lily, and now she was hurt, and looked suddenly vulnerable and a bit older.

She rallied to resume her tower-of-strength behaviour. In the weeks before Lily left, Joan treated her as if nothing had happened, and continued to trust her with almost as many sad and difficult and frustrating cases as the others.

On the afternoon of a day of disaster, when someone had swallowed pills in the lavatory, and a drunk and abusive husband had to be fetched off the premises by the police, and the Hutchinsons had been evicted from the new flat, and five people in crisis came in without appointments, and Bill had to dash away to the juvenile court when magistrates decided to hear the twins' case at the last minute, Joan had said mildly to Lily, nodding her untidy grey head towards the door of the teeming waiting-room, reeking of sour baby by now, awash with spilt tea and knee-deep in crumbs and chocolate wrappers, ‘I wonder how you can be so ecstatic about marriage when you see what it does to people.'

That was all. When Lily left, Joan gave her a brooch made like a fleur-de-lis, and Lily promised to find herself the same kind of
work in a Boston agency, and send for Joan to come over and sort them out.

‘I'll always be grateful to you,' Lily said.
You've taught me everything I know,
she wanted to say, but that would sound conceited, as if she really did know something now. In any case, someone burst into Joan's office, crying, ‘Where are the files on the Mulcahys?'

Saying goodbye to the clients was far worse. A temporary worker had already started to take them over, but Lily kept on as long as possible with Sidney and the McKnights and Mrs Daley, and spastic George who was about to leave the day centre and go to his job-training school.

The trouble was, Lily had made it too easy for them to get too dependent. Joan had warned her about this a dozen times.

‘Don't worry, don't worry,' Lily always said. ‘I'm helping them to use
their
strength, not mine, such as it is.'

‘Don't woo them, then,' Joan said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘If they need you too much, you'll end up needing them.'