Free Dear Doctor Lily by Monica Dickens

impulse.
    Two weeks after he started work, the eager girl left to go to Canada with her boyfriend, but Paul stayed.
    He had met his wife, Barbara, at a horse show in which she was riding, and his connection with her family, who were in the North Shore hunting world, helped him in his job. Barbara taught him to ride all over again, her way, but after Terry was born she became very depressed, and was not helped by the doctor saying it was physical not psychological, because she wanted it to be psychological.
    Her body eventually recovered of its own accord, but the marriage never got back to the way it was. Paul’s native patience was wearing away on the grindstone of her stifling moods. The two horses had gone, because they cost too much, and she couldn’t be bothered anyway. Paul was successful, with good contacts, but his job compared unfavourably with the husbands of most of Barbara’s friends. A salesman was a salesman. Some of the North Shore women had taken up with trainers or opportunist show jumpers, but the man who sells you the saddle is in a different class to the man who teaches you how to sit in it.
    â€˜Where did our youth and rapture go?’ Barbara mourned.
    Paul still felt young at twenty-nine, and vulnerable to rapture from the open air, the sun, the snow, horses, summer beaches, and his son, his son, his beautiful son who had been mostly his until Barbara began to pull out of the depression, unwillingly back into life.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I might just as well have slept with that girl I met in Iceland,’ Paul told Barbara at one point during all the nastiness.
    â€˜Like all the others?’
    â€˜What others?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Is it? It is, isn’t it?’
    â€˜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