It happened that she and Alan were in Edinburgh for the signing of a contract for the latest site of a new Fernley cinema when there was a telephone call from Harry to their hotel on Princes Street. By then he had served a span as cleaner and usher, spent two months in a pay-box and was presently in a projection-room. Alan took the call and Lisa was able to tell immediately by the change in his voice and expression that something was terribly wrong.
“How badly hurt is she? Which hospital? Your mother and I will be on the next train south. Goodbye, Harry.” He replaced the receiver and turned to face Lisa, his expression grave.
She thought her heart had stopped. “Is it Catherine?”
He nodded, taking her hands into his. “She’s been in an accident. She was knocked off her bicycle by a motorbike skidding on the wet road. Her injuries are bad, but she’s alive and the surgeons are fighting for her. Harry rang from the hospital.”
The train journey south was the longest Lisa had ever known. In spite of the landscape rushing past the windows, it seemed to her that the wheels were scarcely moving. At King’s Cross they took a taxi straight to the hospital where Harry met them. Maudie, who had been cycling with Catherine on her way home from school and had gone with her in the ambulance, broke down and sobbed when she saw Lisa.
“Don’t blame yourself, Maudie,” Lisa urged, still in a state of shock herself. “It was an accident nobody could have foreseen. We must be brave for Catherine’s sake.”
Maudie sank down once again on a seat in the corridor while Lisa and Alan went with Harry to the surgeon who had asked to see them as soon as they arrived.
“Your daughter has come through the operation as well as could be expected,” he told them, “but it is only fair to warn you that the next few days will be critical. She is still unconscious, but you may see her and sit with her. Please be prepared. You will find her barely recognisable, although some of the bruising is superficial.”
A nurse showed them into the room with its pale green half-tiled walls and white bed. Lisa pressed a shaking hand over her mouth to stifle a cry and Alan supported her with an arm as they looked down at their child lying there in bandages. Swelling and bruising to the face eliminated any resemblance to the pretty, carefree eleven-year-old to whom they had waved goodbye only a few days before. Lisa sank down into a chair at the bedside, torn with love and anguish, her face stark and dry-eyed.
“I’ll bring your old doll to you, darling,” she whispered tremulously, “and Teddy. You’ll be pleased to see them when you wake.”
They brought her childhood toys, which Catherine still treasured, and a favourite little basket of chocolate fishes covered in silver paper that had come from Paris and which she had admired too much ever to eat. All the time her life was hanging in the balance and she did not know they were there, although they kept tireless vigil night and day. On the morning she finally opened her eyes and recognised them, they were both gaunt with exhaustion and worry, but everything was forgotten in their rejoicing that she had pulled through and would be well again.
“When shall I be going home?” was the first sentence she spoke with any strength, but it was some weeks later before she was able to leave the hospital. Then Lisa took her home to Maple House to recuperate and regain her health completely.
Catherine’s convalescence was a lengthy one, and it was natural that before long Alan began to draw his son into the place that Lisa had vacated temporarily in the business. Gradually a good partnership formed between father and son despite frequent clashes. Harry was brash and raw at times in handling matters, but he was learning fast on the executive side, and often presented ideas that Alan respected and incorporated into the publicity and other aspects of the enterprise. The two of them became accustomed to Lisa’s being at Maple House with Catherine. As the months went by it was accepted, almost without discussion, that she would not be returning to work, particularly since the doctor had advised that Catherine attend a local school in the good country air instead of returning to her previous one in London. About the same time Maudie’s husband came out of the Navy and went to work in a Portsmouth pub where Maudie joined him. Her going made it all the more necessary that Lisa should make no move that would disrupt Catherine’s existence further and hinder her returning confidence in herself.
With a cook, two housemaids, a kitchen maid, and a gardener, there was nothing for Lisa to do domestically. If it had not been for the campaign of fund-raising for the orphanage, to which she was able to rededicate herself with fervour as soon as Catherine started school again, she would have found the days immeasurably long. She had never been without work in her life before and idleness was totally unnatural to her. At least Alan managed to get home to Maple House several nights a week and always at weekends. Harry she saw less, for he led his own life and either stayed in town, which he did most of the time, having taken his own apartment, or brought a party of friends home for the weekend.
Then the carpets were rolled back for dancing to the gramophone and there was tennis on the house’s two courts in summer, and expeditions to local football matches in winter, with chestnuts toasted by the fire afterwards. Noisy sports cars in primary colours were their sole means of transport. Harry had a different girlfriend every time, although there was a certain similarity about them, for each one smoked cigarettes in long holders, had nails painted red by the newly invented polish that had been introduced on the market, jingled with bangles and beads, and executed the Charleston with a vigour that invariably revealed the rolled tops of their pale silk stockings and a gleam of thigh.
Alan continued to discuss the cinema business with Lisa as he had always done, but more and more her connection with it lapsed to become almost entirely social. As before, she went to film parties with him and gala nights and many other occasions. An event of supreme importance was the showing of the first talkie. She heard Al Jolson speak from the screen and gasped with everybody else, although in her case, knowing the cinema world as she did, it was more the portent than the wonder of it. Not long after that, talkies came thick and fast. Silent films were still shown but many of the most important feature movies were reissued with dubbed sound, and she heard the roar and thunder of the chariot race in Ben-Hur, which had been silent when it was first shown at the opening of one of the Fernley cinemas in the North.
It was Lisa’s suggestion that Harry be given a trip to the United States as a twenty-first birthday present. “It’s time he saw the country where he was born and his mother before him. I know he has long wanted to visit California and see the studios there.”
“I’d like that myself,” Alan commented. “Before we came back to England I had thought of our going to live in Los Angeles. Remember?”
She remembered. With her mind and her heart she remembered many things. “When Risto invited us to visit I was sure we would take up that invitation before too long. It would still hold with Minnie. She would love to see us. We really must go one day. In the meantime, what about Harry’s coming-of-age gift?”
“Yes, of course we’ll give him the trip. Minnie will arrange an entrée for him to the motion picture studios, I’m sure.”
Harry’s trip to the States coincided with the Wall Street crash. The troubles and confusion of the land in which he had first drawn breath merely drew him closer to it, for he felt curiously at home from the moment he stepped ashore. He spent some time in and around New York before travelling on to California where Minnie had invited him to stay. He wrote home that her house in Beverly Hills was a marble palace with a huge swimming pool in which her monogram was inlaid with gold. As for Minnie, she was even more beautiful than her screen image had led him to expect. She had taken him round the studios where he had met Jean Harlow on the set of Hell’s Angels and spent hours with technicians and cameramen at their work, which was of particular interest to him. He had been invited with Minnie to a party at Pickfair, where the glamorous gathering had consisted almost entirely of famous faces, and Minnie her-s
elf entertained on a lavish scale. It was obvious to those at home that Harry had been made most welcome by her and that she was doing all she could to give him a memorable vacation.
Harry was never to forget the time with her. She widened his experience considerably and rewardingly during the whole of his sojourn in California. Minnie herself, lonely in spite of her exotic surroundings, many acquaintances and public adulation, was deeply touched by this link with her youth and with Lisa, who had protected her throughout many of those traumatic years.
Lisa continued to strive for the rebuilding of the orphanage. Mrs. Bradlaw, feeling her age at last, finally surrendered the post of principal, but then only because her successor, whose name was Mrs. Frampton, was a woman of her own calibre and of like mind. Lisa found in Mrs. Frampton a fighter as strong as Mrs. Bradlaw for the rights of children, and the three of them worked in complete harmony towards the goal of a new orphanage.
One of Lisa’s major fund-raising events was a film charity evening at a Fernley cinema. Several well-known movie actors and actresses from British studios attended to help raise money. The occasion coincided with Catherine’s fifteenth birthday and she wore her first real evening dress. She had suffered no lasting facial scars from the accident and was growing into womanhood with a clear ivory skin, thick-lashed dark eyes, and fair hair that had deepened to a rich, golden shade. At the buffet supper after the performance, she talked without shyness to various people of her aim to join her father and brother in the cinema business as soon as she was sixteen and could leave school.
“I’ll take a secretarial course to prepare myself for the office work. Eventually I hope to organise bookings and shoulder responsibilities as my mother did in the first Fernley cinemas.”
Listeners glanced in surprise towards Lisa at this information. They had either never heard, or had forgotten, that once she had been a kingpin of the enterprise. Neither was it known generally that a recent reduction in the price of the cheaper seats throughout the circuit had been at her instigation. Times were bad for many people. There were hunger marches and much unemployment, and after seeing the depressed workless hanging about the streets in Leeds, which she visited frequently to consult Mrs. Bradlaw and others on the fund committee, as well as in other places, Lisa had faced Alan and Harry with her demand. Prices were to be accommodated in order that people out of work could spend a few hours in the warmth and comfort of a cinema, which would be lacking in their own homes, and forget their troubles for a while through the enjoyment offered on the screen. Just as she had once bent the rules for the benefit of slum children, she wanted consideration given to adults in similar distressed circumstances. The new ruling went through. It gave her great satisfaction for more reasons than one. It appeared she could still make her mark on the Fernley circuit when the need arose.
In the summer of 1932 Catherine obtained her school certificate and left the school she had attended since recovery from her accident to go to a secretarial establishment. It was a two-year course. She completed it at a time when her father was moving into the greatest venture of his life. Lisa had been the first to hear the special news that he had to tell.
“I’ve put in a bid for a prestigious site in the West End. We have Fernley cinemas all over the country and a great number in London itself, but I’ve been waiting for exactly the right location where we can stand side by side with our rivals in Leicester Square. This is to be the Fernley cinema that will surpass all others elsewhere!”
“I’m so glad,” she exclaimed happily, linking her hands behind his neck and kissing him. “It’s been a dream of yours for a long time. Now it is to come true!”
It pleased her to see the enthusiastic support that he received from Harry, who flung himself into the enterprise to the exclusion of all else, except perhaps some time with his current girlfriend, whoever she happened to be. For months he and Alan had consultations with bankers and investors, architects, contractors, designers, artists and electricians. Even when they were away from the business premises, they continued to talk on the same topics with each other.
Lisa watched from the sidelines. The days when she had selected colours and fabrics for decor and furnishings had long since gone. As the project advanced, Alan spent more and more time in London, sometimes working over the weekends with Harry. When she did arrange a dinner or cocktail party, Alan invariably telephoned to ask her to make his excuses, as he could not get away, and there had not been a house party since before the project started. Also, Harry’s friends were less frenetic than they had been previously, most of them having settled down to marriage. After his visit to the States, it had been noticeable to Lisa that his girlfriends became in her opinion far more suitable as prospective daughters-in-law than previously, but as yet he had not singled out one in particular. Catherine, upon the completion of her course, moved into the London apartment with her father, and Maple House became quieter than ever before.
Fortunately Lisa had much to keep her busy, for her fund-raising campaign for the orphanage finally came to fruition. An elderly neighbour, who had attended all the local functions she had held to raise money, died and left a handsome bequest in her will to the charity. Without delay, they were able to construct a large and well-built mansion in beautiful grounds where the children could live in family groups with a house-mother, a principle laid down by Dr. Barnado, who had always been Mrs. Bradlaw’s guiding light. Lisa was invited to perform the opening ceremony. Since it had become her policy to invest in good clothes, she wore a Schiaparelli coat of blue wool against the cold weather, its length mid-calf, its buttons a hallmark of the designer in the shape of circus horses, which she thought would be as amusing to the children as the fashion world claimed them to be unto itself. With the principal and staff grouped with the local dignitaries beside Mrs. Bradlaw, who in her eighties was still as upright and determined as she had always been, and the children gathered in a big semicircle, Lisa put the key in the entrance door to unlock it. It swung wide to cheers and applause. She turned to receive a bouquet of pink carnations from one of the younger orphans, who wore a cheerful red plaid outfit. No more institutional grey or threadbare castoffs, but bright serviceable clothes that would enable them to blend into school life and social activities without being set apart from others by their attire. Lisa held out her hand to Mrs. Bradlaw, who had also received a bouquet.
“You shall be the first to enter, Mrs. Bradlaw.”
“No, my dear. You represent every one of the children who never knew the benefits with which this generation is to be blessed. It is right and proper that the privilege should be yours.”
So Lisa stepped first over the threshold and took with her memories of Amy and Minnie and Rosie and Teresa and many more, seeing them as clearly in her mind’s eye as if she were fourteen again.
Upon her return to Maple House, Lisa cleared up some correspondence during the next few days. Then she packed a suitcase and drove to London, deciding to stay a week or two in the apartment in order to do some shopping and see the progress that had been made on the new Fernley cinema. She also wanted to be with Alan. She felt she had neglected him during the past hectic months. Previously they had always been in close contact over everything, even though in the business she had become a background figure, and recently they had virtually seemed strangers to each other, each being involved in their individual projects that had kept them apart more than ever. It was almost as if Alan and Harry and Catherine had drawn away from her into their own dedicated little group and she had been left outside and practically forgotten. Yet this feeling was dispelled by Catherine’s warm welcome when she arrived. Alan was not at home.
They exchanged news while Lisa unpacked her suitcase, as Catherine folded garments away and hung up dresses. Then they returned to the spacious drawing-room and sat on the window-seat with a view of the park. This apartment was far larger by many rooms than the one adjacent to the first Fernley cinema, and was luxuriously appointed. Its Art Deco style and
furniture provided a rich and exciting geometric setting in sharp contrast to the mellow atmosphere of Maple House.
“It’s ages since you last came to London, Mother. The new cinema is almost finished now. Another few weeks and it will be ready for its grand opening.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it. There’s been no chance before now. I’ve spent most of the past months travelling to Leeds and back. Now my time is my own again.”
“We’ve missed you. Why don’t you move here and be with us? You could keep Maple House for weekends and holidays as you used to before I had that accident.”
Lisa shook her head, smiling. “I’m happiest in the countryside these days. It’s fun to come to London of a while, but the city is not for me anymore. I’m hoping that when the new cinema is launched, your father and I can pick up our lives together again.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t wait until then.”
Lisa shot a direct look at her, alerted by a faint note of unhappiness in her daughter’s voice. “Why do you say that?”
Catherine avoided her eyes, seemingly engrossed in tracing with a fingertip the sunray pattern on the cushion of the window-seat. “Although Daddy is busy, I can tell he’s lonely without you.”
“You are here.”
“That’s not the same. I’m out a lot in the evenings with friends. I wouldn’t blame him if sometimes at a day’s end he couldn’t face returning to a deserted apartment on his own.”
“I see.” Lisa sat motionless. She felt sick and hollow inside. There could be few wives who received warnings of another woman from their own daughters. It appeared she had neglected Alan far more than she had realised. “In that case I mustn’t be selfish about living at Maple House. Your father means more to me than anything else. I’ll have some more of my clothes and other things sent here and I’ll stay all the time he needs me.”
What the Heart Keeps Page 36