Dear Doctor Lily (51 page)

‘Who was that?'

‘Summer people. They're going to board two horses and two ponies.'

Oh,
no.
With Peter and Anthea leaving, even if we have to close the tack shop for a while, how will we manage? Paul can't possibly do the work.

He was happy, out here with the horse, working slowly and thoroughly, holding Robin's thick tail in one hand and brushing it out in strands.

‘I think I'll go for a short ride.'

‘I'll come,' Lily said.

‘No, you unpack the groceries, or Nora will put them away in a new system.'

Lily did not want him to go out alone, but she could not stop him. Arthur, who could not run with the horses now, sat at the end of the drive and waited. Paul came back quite soon, thank God.

‘How did it go?'

‘Fine.'

Paul looked a bit shaky. ‘I had to come back because I want to start moving hay out of the end boxes,' he said as an excuse.

Four extra horses – how was she going to stop this? Could she call the owners and explain?

‘Who are these people? They had a New Jersey licence plate. Where do they live?'

‘Don't worry. I'll be dealing with them. It's not going to make extra work for you.'

‘I didn't
mean
that.' Lily took John's reins, to lead him in, but Paul took the reins from her.

Frank had left everything ready for Paul to bring the horses in and feed them, but he stayed out there for a long time, as darkness fell and it grew cold. Lily's normal self would have barged out and said, ‘Let me help,' not bothering about what Paul wanted. Now she had to be contained and careful, not knowing if he wanted her out there or not, not even able to go and ask him.

She stood by the glass of the back door, looking out at the light in the barn. When Nora came and put an arm round her, she began to cry.

‘What's happened to us all? Our lives were so secure and unchanging, and now your life and Daddy's is turned upside down, and Paul and I – my poor safe Paul – we had everything we wanted. He was so happy! Mum, it's not fair. He was so happy.'

She slumped at the kitchen table and sobbed rendingly, out of control. She had not cried much, because it made her feel too ravaged, and she could not let Paul see. When the stable lights went out, Nora took her upstairs to weep.

‘What's happened to us, Mum? It wasn't meant to be like this.'

Soon after, Lily let herself get angry with Paul, because she thought he was unfair to Cathy. Cathy was taking a music exam, and she had to practise the piano, but it never seemed to be the right time when the noise would not bother Paul.

She was starting a dog obedience class for some of the children in the village. When he went outside, he was upset because they were all out there in the field with their assorted mutts and mongrels, calling and whistling and shrieking hysterically at stubborn rebels and threatened dog fights.

‘Come and help judge, Daddy,' Cathy called. ‘We're doing tests.'

He turned and went back into the house.

‘Why take it out on her?' Lily heard herself grumble, quite nastily.

I'm glad Lily chewed me out. Better than knocking herself out to be so patient all the time. Like poor little Cathy. When I told her not to play the piano, she said, so damned amiably, ‘You play, then, Daddy.'

I can't. My fingers slip off the keys. I blur the bass. Terry used to show me new chords on his guitar, but now I can't follow. I hear it wrong. When the sledge-hammer hits me again and the pain and nausea start, I'm deaf and blind. When the pain goes,
sometimes everything else goes. They all fade away from me. I can't reach them. I can't feel. I'm lost.

I'm fifty. I think I'm impotent. ‘It will be all right,' Lily says. ‘Lie with me, like this, like when we were in Iceland and you wouldn't do it.' She was a fat baby, and desperate, and I was so smug and paternal.

I can't always remember much of last month, last week, but everything about the golden past. When you love only the past, you're getting old. I'm old. I look at the back of my head in Terry's picture, and then I look in the mirror that Lily hung next to it, ‘So you can see the front of you as well as the back,' and I see this old grey sick man, and new lines are being drawn in every day.

Terry says I look glamorously consumptive. ‘Keep the limp,' he says. ‘It's romantic' I wish he'd stayed here and not gone dodging off to Boston. ‘If you're okay, Dad, I'll go and see some friends.'

‘And your mother.'

‘I guess.'

Would Barbara also nag at Terry about getting into a proper career? Why doesn't he come back, so we can talk? Because he doesn't want to hear what I want to say.

‘Lily, how about calling Terry and see if he'll come down next weekend?'

‘Of course, darling.'

If he won't, she'll make up an excuse that won't hurt my feelings.

The elm trees are hazed with green. The pines have pushed out bright new fingertips. Blossom foams and there are tiny violets scattered along the paths where we used to ride so joyfully in the spring. The horses were shedding lumps of winter hair from their hot stomachs, and were wild to gallop when the wind swung sweetly round to the west and rushed into their faces.

I can't ride. My balance has gone. When I got on Robin yesterday, the ground tilted up. Tony reached up to help me off.

‘Don't!' I yelled at him. ‘Leave me alone.' I don't want him around here so much. Isobel isn't a child now.

Isobel's father grumbled to her, ‘Why don't you have any white boyfriends?'

Daddy, of all people. He was the most unprejudiced person Isobel knew. Everybody was racist in varying degrees, even if they didn't admit it or even realize it; but her father genuinely wasn't. Or wasn't
then.
Since November, life for all of them was divided into then and now.

He had loved Tony. He had taken an interest in him since they first came here, and helped him to grow up, and taught him about horses.

‘There's your mate,' Mud would say to Daddy when she saw Tony coming up through the field. They were always working on projects together.

‘It's his injury.' Tony was amazingly forgiving about Paul's new attitude. ‘It isn't him talking, see. It's still that old hammer. It's that frigging Mike, it's all his fault. I hope they put him away for ever.'

Now that Tony was working as crew on the island ferries, Isobel saw less of him. If he was on the late boat to Nantucket, he would stay over there and do the early-morning run next day. He would be on the boats long hours for several days, and then have a few days off, but he often spent them on Nantucket, where he had friends.

When he was twenty-one, he had moved out of his parents' house, as a sort of coming-of-age ritual, to a pad of his own in Mashpee, where most of his cousins lived. He had taken Isobel there a few times. It was a tiny little place, like a hut in the woods, with a sofa-bed in the one room and a lean-to kitchen and shower at the back. Isobel cleaned it for him, and helped him to clear away enough scrub oaks to dig and plant a vegetable garden. The blinds were old, so she made curtains for the windows.

‘What are you making?' Her father came into her bedroom when he heard the sewing-machine.

In the old days, he would have been pleased to hear her say, ‘Curtains and a tablecloth for Tony's house.' Now she had to say, ‘Curtains for a girl at school's room.'

‘Bit jazzy.' Her father picked up a piece of the bright patterned fabric and blinked.

‘He likes it. She does, I mean, and her boyfriend does.'

Now that the crisis had settled down into part of family life, they all coped with it day by day, and it sometimes seemed as if it had always been with them. But once in a while, when Daddy's migraine was bad and he couldn't talk or eat or sleep, and threw up all night in the bathroom, it hit Isobel with such an overwhelming sorrow that she could hardly stand it. Friends noticed a difference in her at school. She couldn't study. She dropped out of the class play. There were days when she dreaded getting home to find out what was going on.

When Tony had three days off, her friend Linda, who had her licence and the use of one of her parents' cars, took Isobel over to Mashpee.

She cooked some fish and vegetables and she and Tony drank some wine, and she begged him not to take her home. Their kisses and petting had become more intense lately, as Tony's caution dissolved. Tonight, the despair that had been building up in her for weeks exploded in a fury of tears that engulfed them both. Then they were on the floor, and away from the world, and out of their minds with a passion that carried Isobel beyond the pain and the moment of fear into a soaring triumph.

It was done. At last it was done. She wasn't a child. She could do this just as well as anyone else. Better, because Tony kept saying, ‘It was never like this, I swear. Never with anybody. Only you, Bella.'

‘Better than the Indian girl on Nantucket?'

‘What Indian girl?' She was a joke between them, whether she existed or not. Isobel had invented that she had a gold tooth and long black greasy braids. ‘I don't know no Indian girl on Nantucket.'

Isobel got up and drank some wine and called her mother and told her she was staying the night with Linda, and called Linda to warn her, in case Paul was in trouble and her mother needed her. She pulled out the sofa-bed and straightened the bedding and plumped up the pillows in a domesticated way, and turned on the small lamp and switched off the ceiling light. Then she took off
what was left of her clothes and got into Tony's bed, and he started to teach her some of the things she needed to know to further the progress of her sex life.

Linda owed her something, because Isobel had helped her when she was depressed after she had to have an abortion, so she went along with being used as an alibi. Once, when Isobel was with Tony, her mother did call Linda, and Linda came over to Tony's and beat on the door, and they shouted, ‘Get lost!' because they thought it was one of Tony's cousins playing tricks.

Linda took Isobel home, very fast through the night, swerving round corners because she had a right to, in an emergency. Cathy was sick, with a fever, and Daddy was very restless and jumpy. Mum needed to go to the hospital for his pills, which she had forgotten to pick up during the day.

He had not told her the bottle was almost empty. She should have looked. Poor Mud. She stuffed her nightgown into a pair of slacks and pulled on a sweater, and roared off without combing her hair.

Cathy was asleep, flushed and damp, with her arms flung out and her feet kicked out of the bedclothes. Isobel covered her up and went to sit with her father.

‘Good girl,' he told her. ‘I can always count on you. You'll always be there for me, won't you, Iz?'

While her mother was gone, Isobel brought the backgammon board upstairs, and he played distractedly, wanting to win, but not wanting her to let him win, which was how she herself had felt, as a child.

‘Who taught you to play so cunningly?' he complained when she won.

‘You did.'

‘Good for me. Good for you. Good girl.'

Isobel did not feel strange or guilty that she had got up from Tony's tumbled bed to come to him. She felt proud and adventurous. She was a grown-up. She could love her father even more, as an equal. She had something of her own now.

Terry was amazed that his father and Lily were not bitter or angry against the man who had attacked him. Mike seemed irrelevant to their present situation, as if the assault were an act of God.

Isobel and Cathy were encouraged not to feel hatred.

‘What good would it do?' Lily said sadly. ‘It wouldn't hurt Mike, and it would only poison you.'

Terry thought he was the only one who openly hated Mike's guts. If the man had not been locked up, he would have stalked him and shot or knifed him on a dark night. He tried to go and visit him in the county gaol, but Mike refused to see him.

‘If I was you,' Terry told his father, ‘I'd think about him every day. I'd blast him with evil vibes and damn his soul to hell for what he did.'

‘I've got enough to do coping with the results of that.' His father smiled in his old equable way that showed more teeth, now that his face was thinner.

‘You'll have to give evidence at the trial. How will you like standing up there looking at him?'

‘I think they usually let you sit,' his father said. ‘Especially if you've been ill.'

In some ways, he was like himself. In others, the brain injury had changed him. He had never nagged at Terry before about what he was going to do with his life. He had understood when he dropped out of art college, and been glad of Terry's ability to get jobs. Now he harped on his inability to keep them. Terry had got to have a career. He must reapply to the art college. Or go to business college. Or get in on the ground floor of some big firm.

Terry did not want to be at the Cape Cod house all the time. He had nowhere to stay in Boston, so he went to Amy's apartment and asked her if he could have a bed. She was cooking pasta and vegetables for herself when he turned up, but she added chicken and all kinds of other things and gave him a most marvellous meal, with subtle hints of herbs, unlike Lily, who either threw in too many, or forgot. All or nothing.

She was touchingly glad to see him. Amy never played games
to make you guess how she felt. Terry stayed for a week or two, but it was awkward for Amy, because she was involved with another man, and could not have him at the apartment while Terry was there.

‘If you would stay for keeps,' she told Terry candidly, ‘I'd find some way to get rid of Bennett.'

‘I wish I could.'

‘Why can't you?'

‘Don't let's go into that again. I'm years away from committing myself, you know that.'

‘Since you left, I've had another guy like you who ducked out to save his skin. So what are women supposed to do until you all grow up?'