Lisa Logan

by Marie Joseph

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Part Three

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Four

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.

  Her novel A Better World Than This won the 1987 Romantic Novelist’s Association Major Award.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Ring a-Roses

  Maggie Craig

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Emma Sparrow

  Gemini Girls

  The Listening Silence

  Lisa Logan

  MARIE JOSEPH

  For Daniel Stevenson

  Prologue

  ‘I ALWAYS LOVED you, but I love you this minute more than I have ever done before.’

  Even in the midst of his genuine distress, Angus was fully aware that his words had a grand poetical ring about them.

  Captain Angus James Logan, as straight and tall as in the days of his soldiering in France when he had passionately believed he was fighting a war to end all wars, stood by the bedside of his daughter Lisa. All he could see in the diffused light filtering from the landing was a tangle of dark hair on the pillow. It hid Lisa’s face completely. A sob rose in Angus’s throat. She had always slept like that, disappearing behind her long hair, drawing it round her like an extra sheet.

  The enormity of what he was about to do filled him with a despair so profound he shuddered violently. A tear crept slowly down his cheek. Lifting a finger, he wiped it away.

  Would she ever understand, this child of his heart? Might it not have been wiser, kinder, to have sat down with her and explained? Angus slowly shook his head from side to side, seeing, in his imagination, Lisa’s huge grey-blue eyes fixed on his face as he stumbled through the words.

  ‘There are times,’ he might have said, ‘when the only thing left for a man to do is to run away.’

  He stiffened, as if to attention. Now the dramatic side of his nature, the frustrated actor in him, was taking over, setting the scene as if in a play. With Angus Logan taking the leading part. Naturally.

  ‘You’ll be well rid of me, my bonny wee lass. Aye, I mean what I say.’

  The voice in his head deepened. ‘I am like I am because of what happened to me out there in the mud at Ypres, nineteen years ago.’ He raised a suffering face. ‘Out there with my men, drowning in a sea of stinking filth, I was too much of a coward to run away. But now … ah, now… .’

  Moving with the unsteady gait of a man who, in the course of a long evening, had drunk an amount of gin which would have left a lesser man prostrate, Angus walked over to a pink velvet chair and sat down.

  In that year, 1935, Angus Logan was still suffering, like so many of his contemporaries, from a prolonged state of shell shock. He had endured four hellish years of trench warfare, been awarded a medal for outstanding bravery in the face of enemy action, and had returned home apparently unscathed.

  The name of Captain Angus James Logan was not entered in any medical records. His nervous legacy took the form of a feverish pursuit of pleasure. Adrenalin still pulsed through his veins, but any sudden noise, such as a clap of thunder or a whoosh of a rocket on Bonfire Night, was enough to send his mind, if not his body, screaming for the safety of the nearest bolthole.

  Now, on that dark night, with the winds from the Lancashire moors battering the trees, bending them into nebulous shapes, Angus sat very still in the darkened bedroom. Burying his face in his hands, he groaned softly.

  His financial ruin had been slow but inevitable. The inherited wealth from his father and grandfather, thrifty Scottish ship owners, had been frittered away by his inept handling of financial affairs. On the Manchester Exchange he was known as a likeable rogue, a fool to himself, even by those who accepted his generosity. Now that he was finished, men he had always considered to be his friends watched him slyly, raising their glasses to each other as if gloating over his downfall. For the space of a few terrible minutes Angus Logan stopped play-acting and faced the truth.

  And oh, dear God, the sensation was as if the earth had suddenly lost its speed, to whirl unfettered into infinity.

  ‘Lisa … Lisa … I have no choice. Believe me.’ The whispered words were torn from his heart. ‘There is no other way. Maybe some day you’ll understand.’

  His drooping shoulders were bone-thin, as angular as the rest of his tall frame. In his fuddled state his thoughts fought the gin, his fingers plucked at his knees like spiders scampering up a wall. His head jerked sideways in the direction of the closed door to his wife’s bedroom. He pictured her asleep, her mouth slightly open, her face shiny from its application of Pond’s cream, her hands in the white cotton gloves she wore to preserve her skin’s whiteness. Delia had always taken the preservation of her looks very seriously.

  Angus tightened his lips. It had been a long time since he found the nightly procedure amusing… .

  ‘She doesn’t need me, Lisa,’ he whispered. ‘Your mother hasn’t needed me for a long time.’

  His moustache quivered. ‘Aye, and the truth is I’ve no’ needed her, either.’

  Angus stood up and walked slowly back to the bed. Stretching out a hand, he gently lifted a strand of his daughter’s hair. It was much darker than the red-gold of the Logan hair, but in sunlight the auburn lights could be seen clearly.

  Swaying where he stood, Angus swallowed the ache of tears in his throat. All at once he remembered Lisa running towards him across the sands in Brittany on their last year’s holiday, her young breasts outlined in her wet woollen bathing costume. How beautiful she was. How beautiful she was going to be… .

  The tears ran down his cheeks, into his military moustache, over his weak chin. His bonny lass would grow into womanhood, and he would not be there to see.

  ‘Forgive me. If you can. And always remember me with love.’

  The drama of the softly spoken words comforted him. As he backed slowly from the room he fancied he could hear them lingering like an echo, repeating and fading until they were no more.

  Angus was still wearing what he had always called his penguin trappings, but a packed suitcase was down there in the hall, his raincoat folded over the top.

  He buttoned the coat, taking his time. Then, without a backward glance, he turned the key in its lock and stepped into the wide black-and-white tiled vestibule. Closing the door behind him, he opened the heavy front door.

  It was a night without stars, a night as cold and damp as if the sky itself was clouding the topmost branches of the tall trees. An exit like that called for a long slogging walk, with a man’s head bent against the sighing wind and the driving rain.

  But Angus had always managed somehow to suffer comfortably, ever since his four-year sojourn in France, so now he wrenched open the door of his ca
r, a bull-nosed Morris, and slipped behind the wheel to switch on the ignition.

  Captain Angus James Logan, late of the Scottish Highlanders, twice mentioned in dispatches for outstanding bravery in the face of enemy action, was running away at last.

  PART ONE

  One

  IN THE PREVIOUS summer of 1934 Hindenburg had died in Germany; a man called Hitler had become Führer of his people; and the Logans had sailed for Brittany on their annual holiday.

  In the West End of London Noël Coward’s Conversation Piece was playing to a packed audience, and errand boys pedalling down English country lanes were whistling a song called ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.

  The Logans lived pleasantly in a charming red-brick house called The Laurels on the outskirts of an East Lancashire cotton town, but on street corners the unemployed gathered, hands in pockets, and Woodbine stubs of cigarettes were passed from mouth to mouth.

  Their houses, terraced and as uniform as strings of cheap beads, straggled up the steep streets without a touch of green anywhere to gladden the drabness or soothe the eyes of those who lived there.

  In that year many of the men had been out of work for four years or more. The hardship of their hand-to-mouth existence showed in the grey resignation of lined faces and the slump of thin shoulders. There was a recognizable leaning in the way they walked, as if their faith in the brave new world promised to them after the war to end all wars had long since evaporated.

  Clever boys and girls won scholarships to the grammar schools and their mothers went without food to provide blazers and decent shoes. Or, at times, sadly explained that the scholarship would have to be sacrificed.

  But away from it all, totally impervious to the grinding ache of poverty, families like the Logans took their middle-class status for granted.

  Angus and his wife Delia kept up a hectic round of dinner parties, refused to see that the dizzy twenties had gone for ever, danced into the early hours on well-sprung dance floors, drove like maniacs round the lush Lancashire countryside, followed the cricket scores on the wireless, and took their annual holiday as a matter of course.

  On a windswept beach in Brittany Lisa glanced down at the scooped-out neckline of her bathing costume.

  Horrified, because they were showing, she pulled it up, tugging angrily at the sodden woollen material.

  Angus saw her and sighed. Fourteen and a half was a terrible age to be, neither one thing nor the other, not child nor yet woman. Patting the sand around him into a more comfortable hollow, he groped in the pocket of his khaki shorts for matches, bent his head and struggled to get his pipe going.

  ‘Where’s Mother?’ Lisa ran up to him, flopped down and snatched off her white rubber bathing cap. She shook her head, releasing two thick plaits. ‘Don’t tell me she’s gone off round the headland again with Uncle Patrick? There’s nothing there but rocks and little pools with slimy grey crabs in them. Honestly! You’d think they’d seen enough crabs to last them a lifetime.’

  ‘You haven’t enjoyed this holiday much, have you, love?’ Angus, contented for the moment because his pipe was going nicely, teased her with his smile. He was rewarded by a look of scathing disgust.

  ‘Why Uncle Patrick and his hateful son Jonathan had to come with us I don’t know.’ She hitched the front of her wet costume up again. ‘I mean, it might not have been so bad if Jonathan’s mother had come with us instead of her horrible son. It would have done her chest as much good here as in Switzerland. At least you could have talked to her whilst the other two went off crabbing or wasted hours trying to go brown.’ She frowned, glancing sideways at her father. ‘It’s been beastly for you, too. I can tell that. I hope they don’t jolly well want to come with us next year.’

  ‘I’ve been OK, love.’ Angus flipped a small pebble towards the sea. ‘What about Jonathan? Didn’t he feel like a swim before dinner?’

  ‘Him?’ Lisa snorted. ‘He’s just a great big show-off, if you must know. Well, of course he’s a boy, so he’s bound to be, isn’t he? He’s juvenile really.’

  ‘At nearly nineteen? Not all that juvenile, surely?’

  Liza gloomed at the horizon. ‘All he wants to talk about is his car. It’s a 3–litre Bentley, I’d have you know, dark green to match England’s racing team. It has a Union Jack on the side and a leather strap round the bonnet. You’d think he was Malcolm Campbell to hear him talk.’ She pulled one of her plaits round and chewed on it for a while. ‘Jonathan Grey has always been conceited. That day we went to Lannion on the bus – you know, that cold day when he wore plus-fours – I told him he looked like Ronald Colman, and guess what? He believed me!’

  ‘How do you know he believed you?’

  ‘I could tell by the way he stroked his silly five-a-side moustache.’

  Lisa’s tone was lofty, but Angus sensed the overwhelming insecurity. He patted her knee. There were freckles marching like a battalion of ants across the bridge of her nose and over her cheekbones. Two weeks of sun and wind had tinged her fair skin to a pale milk-chocolate shade and brought out the auburn tints in her dark hair. Her expression was sullen, her short upper lip quivered with indignation. She looked at war with the world.

  ‘I’ll go up to the hotel now.’ Leaping up quickly, she wrapped herself around in a voluminous towelling tent-like garment, tying the cord at the neck into a fierce double bow. ‘Are you coming with me?’

  ‘I’ll stay and smoke my pipe out.’ Angus turned back to the sea, his profile averted. Lisa stared at him for a moment, biting her lips. She slip-slapped her way over the sands in her yellow bathing shoes with the pink rubber flowers on the toes. The multi-coloured wrap clashed with the red and green of her costume; she was all colour, but her thoughts were as grey and brooding as the winter moors in her native Lancashire.

  This year’s holiday had been truly awful. It was all the fault of Uncle Patrick and his boring son, of course, and yet somehow there was something else. Lisa shook her head. Normally she was so proud of her father. He was always so smartly dressed in his go-to-business suits, or his speckled tweeds, but beachwear didn’t show him off to advantage at all.

  He was quieter. Nothing like his normally ebullient self. Lisa whispered the word aloud. Ebullient. Yes, it was the right one for her father. His high spirits did have an aggressive bullying force about them. She nodded.

  Lisa liked words. To her they were as expressive as music. For a moment she cheered up, remembering a picture she’d seen just before they’d come away. Robert Donat in The Thirty Nine Steps. He’d been magnificent. His husky voice had thrilled her right to her marrow.

  Leaving the beach, she began the long climb to the hotel.

  Her father wasn’t even trying to be pleasant. The August sun had reddened his face to a bright lobster shade. His nose was beginning to peel, not that he cared, Lisa was sure. And what was worse, Uncle Patrick’s face was a lovely shade of walnut, not a sliver of hanging skin in sight. Lisa trudged on, hating the sun for its unfair discrimination.

  It was an awful thing to admit, even to herself, but somehow her father had really let himself down these past two weeks. For one thing, his shorts were too long, especially for ‘abroad’. The Frenchmen wore their shorts well above their knees, and so did Uncle Patrick. Which went without saying. Lisa gave an unladylike snort.

  Her father looked much too British sitting on the beach smoking his pipe and reading the Financial Times – a three days’ old Financial Times at that. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath.

  It was also a bit much him going to that crummy little casino every night on his own. You couldn’t even call it a real casino. More of a gambling den really. Lisa nodded in a smug puritanical way. The croupiers reminded her of Hollywood gangsters in their white shirts and black bow ties, with cigarettes stuck in their faces. No wonder her mother was reduced to having to put up with Uncle Patrick’s company such a lot.

  It wasn’t as if Uncle Patrick was her real uncle, or that the hateful Jonathan was he
r real cousin. Lisa shuddered. At least she’d been spared that.

  Monsieur Dubois, the proprietor of the small hotel perched on the cliff side overlooking the bay, was in his tiny office cubicle by the entrance to the black-and-white tiled reception area. A swarthy man with a bushy moustache which swamped his face, he looked up from his ledgers, nodding a smile at Lisa.

  Answering the smile in an absent-minded fashion, she crossed the hall and ran up the wide staircase. The floors of the landing were highly waxed and her rubber shoes made no sound as she padded along to her room at the far end.

  ‘Lisa! I thought you’d gone for a swim.’

  The woman coming out of a bedroom – Uncle Patrick’s bedroom – put a hand to her throat. ‘You told me you were going for a swim.’

  ‘I’ve been for one. The sea’s too cold to stay in.’ Lisa opened the door of her own room wide as her mother followed her inside.

  Delia Logan’s cat-like eyes had a wary look about them. Her face was flushed as if she too had just come in out of the sun. She moved over to Lisa’s bed and sat down, her usual jerky movements stilled for a moment as she pondered what to say.

  Delia Logan was so fashionably thin that her bones seemed to move skeletal-like beneath the folds of her dresses. Three times a year she suffered the indignity of having her raven-black hair strung up to an electric contraption in Lewis’s beauty salon in Manchester. The result was that it clung to her head in corrugated waves, ending in three rows of tiny sausage curls. A slavish follower of fashion, she had discarded the twenties’ pencil-slim silhouette, her long cigarette holder and her Eton-cropped hairstyle, long before any of her contemporaries. Her calf-length dress on that late summer’s day was in green marocain with a bib front of silk organdie.