by Marie Joseph
She took a leather case from her purse and lit a Park Drive cigarette with a nervous flick of a gold lighter. ‘I started my packing then found I’d lost the keys to my case.’ Narrowing her eyes, she watched her daughter carefully. ‘So I went into Uncle Patrick’s room to see if he had one that fitted.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Lisa snatched up a toss of clothes from a chair and walked through the open archway into the bathroom, the set of her back daring her mother to follow.
Delia couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her daughter’s nude body. Lisa guarded any intrusion on her privacy with an almost fiendish determination. In Delia’s present state of nerves the situation was both irritating and ridiculous; but all the same she stayed where she was.
‘Uncle Patrick hasn’t got any keys to his case so I needn’t have bothered,’ she called out.
‘Oh?’ Stepping out of the wet bathing costume, Lisa hurled it into the bath. She wished her mother would go away. It was a boring conversation anyway, and she’d left her knickers in the dressing-table drawer. Now she’d have to drape herself in a towel to go and fetch them. She jerked her chin up in a gesture of exasperation.
‘Father’s down on the beach, smoking his pipe. On his own,’ she added, stepping round Delia’s legs and clutching feverishly at the slipping towel.
Through a curl of smoke Delia narrowed her eyes. Had that last remark been merely an innocent criticism, or did Lisa suspect? With a bounce of her long plaits Lisa flounced back into the bathroom, leaving her mother puffing jerkily at the cigarette. Delia let out a breath on a sigh of relief. No, Lisa was just willing her mother to go, making it quite clear that in her daughter’s bedroom she was an intruder.
Delia relaxed a little. All the same, it had been a stupid risk going to Patrick’s room in the afternoon. She felt the heat rise to her face with the recollection of their love-making. The risk they had taken seemed to have added an extra dimension to his passion. He had been like a man possessed, clinging, moaning, telling her she was the only reason he could tolerate his present existence.
What he really meant was that his invalid wife was too ill to be made love to. Sometimes, in the early hours, lying wide awake, Delia admitted this to herself. But now, sitting on Lisa’s bed and smoking, she closed her eyes and felt again the smoothness of his back, tanned like her own to a satisfying copper shade.
‘We must be mad,’ he’d whispered, and she’d agreed. But oh, dear God, it was a madness worth every moment of heart-stopping fear. Loving someone the way she loved Patrick wasn’t wrong. Love was never wicked. How could it be? Alice Grey had incurable TB. The doctors knew it and so did Patrick. He couldn’t be expected to live his life like a monk, he wasn’t made that way. And if it wasn’t her then it would have been someone else.
Delia felt a stab of pain at the thought, then immediately blanked her mind against its implications.
‘We’re dressing up as it’s the last night.’
Getting up from the bed, she stubbed out her cigarette in a round glass bowl on Lisa’s dressing-table, hoping vaguely that it was an ashtray. She raised her voice. ‘I wouldn’t mention to your father that I lost my keys. They’re bound to turn up, and you know how cross he gets when I lose things.’
In the tiny bathroom Lisa was buttoning herself into a liberty bodice. She knew that any day now she would have to bring up the subject of a brassière to her mother. Most of the girls in her form wore them, dividing their fronts into two. Lisa poked a covered button through its buttonhole, grateful that for the time being the bodice flattened her bosoms nicely into a shape far from rude.
‘I won’t tell him,’ she promised. ‘Do I have to wear my pink dress? It’s a bit tight. Underneath the arms,’ she added quickly.
The men wore their dark suits that evening. Jonathan Grey had slicked his black hair back with brilliantine. Lisa could smell violets whenever he inclined his head towards her. The points of the collar on his white shirt were fastened beneath the knot of his tie with a narrow gold pin. His tiny sideburns reminded Lisa of smears of gas-tar imprinted with his thumb. Tonight he’s decided he’s Ivor Novello, she thought uncharitably, the pink dress making her mean-minded.
The first course was oysters, served in a huge blue bowl. Lisa watched Uncle Patrick’s Adam’s apple move beneath the skin of his neck as he swallowed. Catching her eye he winked, but she turned her head away. Not for anything would she have winked back. Not for all the tea in China, she told herself fiercely.
The French holidaymakers were eating as if every mouthful was to be their last. They gnawed at chicken legs, snapped off lobster legs with small silver pincers taken from their top pockets. Lisa didn’t eat oysters, so was free to stare around her. The French children were drinking red wine, watered down for the youngest it was true, but drinking it all the same. Lisa glowered into her glass of still lemonade, unaware of the fact that Jonathan Grey was looking at her with an expression akin to distaste.
Usually, whenever he saw Lisa Logan, she wore school uniform, a gym slip with box pleats descending from a yoke, a white blouse and a tie striped in her school colours, navy and a paler blue. Her plaits stuck out from a hat shaped like a pudding basin, and her legs were encased in black woollen stockings. Now, sitting there in the pink dress with its large Peter Pan collar, she looked strangely top heavy.
‘Did you go in the sea this afternoon?’ he asked suddenly, feeling sorry for her without having any notion why.
Lisa turned startled eyes in his direction, and Jonathan blinked. Just for a fraction of a second he saw the promise of beauty in the small, oval face, the depths of the enormous grey-blue eyes. Give her a year or so, he thought complacently, and little Lisa Logan might be worth a second glance.
‘I did go in, but only for a few minutes. Too cold.’
‘Yes, the sea always is on this coastline,’ Jonathan said, then gave up.
‘Coming to the casino later?’ Angus smiled at Jonathan over the rim of his wine glass. ‘Last jolly old night and everything. You never know, we could recover the cost of these past two weeks.’ He turned to Jonathan’s father. ‘How about you, Patrick?’
‘Might as well.’
Jonathan intercepted the swift interchange of glances between his father and Delia which seemed to say, ‘Oh, God, what a sell! Still, we mustn’t rock the boat too much.’ Jonathan read their thoughts easily. How transparent they were. How boringly obvious. It was truly pathetic.
‘I think I’ll go for a stroll along the beach.’ He raised his glass to Lisa in a mocking gesture. ‘Care to come with me, Miss Logan?’
To his amusement Lisa blushed so scarlet that her freckles almost disappeared. ‘Yes, please,’ she said, without thinking, the blush deepening at such an idiotic reply.
‘That leaves little me to amuse myself,’ Delia said, pouting in a vivacious way.
The two men laughed. At what Jonathan didn’t quite know.
When the long meal was over they excused themselves. Delia jumped up, obviously a bit miffed, Jonathan was pleased to see.
‘I’ll go up and finish my packing,’ she said.
Lisa picked in a half-hearted way at a bunch of grapes in a basket. The black ones were juicy and sweet, but the green had a sharper taste. Leaning across the table, Jonathan filled her glass with the remains of the carafe of red wine.
‘What the eye doesn’t see,’ he said heartily, and sighed. Already he was regretting his impulsive invitation. Lisa Logan was only a kid in spite of her sprouting chest. He bit morosely into a grape. The whole holiday had been a disaster from start to finish. He had only agreed to come because his mother had asked him to take her place.
‘My mother is very ill,’ he said suddenly.
Lisa looked acutely embarrassed. ‘Do you think the doctors in Switzerland will be able to help?’
Jonathan took a cigarette from a slim silver case. ‘Nope. I doubt it.’
‘How awful.’ Lisa took a grape, then put it straight back, feeling now wa
s not the time to chew.
‘She’s like D. H. Lawrence. Her mind is burning up her body. She writes poetry. Unpublished, but very good.’
Lisa wished she could think of something to say that would be appropriate. She had read D. H. Lawrence, of course, and thought some of the passages in his books very rude. She coughed in a self-conscious way. ‘Lawrence is a bit too consciously analytical for my taste,’ she said, remembering having read that somewhere. She was rewarded by the sight of Jonathan’s dark eyebrows ascending almost to his hair-line.
‘Don’t tell me you read him at school?’
‘Not in the fourth form, but I read him in bed. I keep him underneath the mattress. Mother would have one of her pink fits.’
‘I doubt it.’ Jonathan’s voice was starchy with contempt. ‘Middle-aged people surprise one sometimes.’ He got up from the table, the cigarette held loosely between his fingers. ‘Shall we go then? If you want to go up for a cardigan I’ll be waiting outside. OK?’
Walking self-consciously in order not to wiggle her bottom, Lisa preceded him out of the dining-room. Reaching the stairs, she bounded up, dignity already forgotten.
Jonathan went outside into the clear warm dusk. He sat down on a low stone wall, smoking and staring at the speckle of lights from the other hotels scattered at intervals round the wooded slopes overlooking the bay.
There were times, like now, when he wondered if he’d been right to chuck up his scholarship after only two terms? He’d enjoyed Oxford at first, but the pressures to be either a Marxist or a Fascist had irritated, then angered.
‘All I ever wanted to do was to come into the business,’ he had told his father. ‘Maybe bum it for a while round Yugoslavia or Greece with a haversack, then come home and work my way up from the bottom. Lugging a hod of bricks up ladders might help me to forget some of those effete types I met at Oxford. Mass ideology isn’t for me.’
Amazingly Patrick Grey had agreed at once. ‘Oxford was always more your mother’s idea than mine. Lot of pansies at Oxford, anyroad.’
And yet there were times when Jonathan wondered if he hadn’t been too hasty, too intolerant. Tonight was one of those times.
‘Here I am.’
He looked round, startled for a moment, as if Lisa Logan was the last person on earth he expected to see. She had fastened a blue cardigan over the pink dress, with such obvious haste that there was a left-over piece at the bottom with a button doing nothing at the top. She had changed her shoes too, replacing her evening pumps with what looked like school sandals, flat brown monstrosities with T-bar straps.
Jonathan threw his cigarette away. Getting up from the wall, he thrust his hands deep into his pockets. ‘Off we go, then,’ he said morosely.
It was a warm night, filled with the scents of late summer, mingled with the tang of seaweed from the rocky headland at the far end of the small beach.
‘Not much night life round here, apart from the bloody casino.’ Jonathan swore because it suited his mood. ‘Your father’s lost a packet over the last two weeks.’ He glanced sideways at the small girl trotting stolidly by his side. At least the ugly sandals meant he didn’t have to monitor his stride. She too had pushed her hands deep into the pockets of the woollen cardigan, stretching it out of shape. There was a vulnerability about this girl which caught him unawares at times; as though for all her cheek – and she had plenty of that – Lisa Logan was in reality almost pathologically shy.
‘What’s your mother doing? Packing, like she said?’
Lisa shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. She went straight to her room. To look for her keys, I expect.’ Slithering down the grassy slope leading to the beach, scorning the offer of a helping hand, Lisa turned her head. ‘My father has a thing about locking cases. You’d think we had the Crown Jewels in them the way he goes on.’ She took the last bit at a run, the two thick plaits swinging out then flopping back into place. ‘Mother was so upset, she went into your father’s room this afternoon to see if he had any keys that might fit. You’ve no idea how stroppy my father can get at times. He seems to be in a bad mood most of the time these days.’
Jonathan widened his eyes. ‘How do you know your mother went in my old man’s room? Did she tell you?’
‘I saw her coming out.’ Lisa’s tone was faintly patronizing. ‘I saw for myself how worried she was. My father makes big fusses about little things. I’ve told you. She almost burst into tears when she saw me.’
‘I’ll bet she did.’ Jonathan mumbled the words to himself. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Surely Lisa must suspect something? Surely she had some inkling? Nobody could be that innocent, even at fourteen.
Over by the rocky headland the waves were lapping. The night was so still they lapped then receded silently, as smoothly as if they were of oil and not water. There were dark purple patches on the sea where seaweed moved blistered tentacles to and fro. There was no sound, nothing but the soft rhythmic lapping.
Sighing, Jonathan took off his jacket and laid it down on the sand. ‘The sand’ll brush off. Come on, Lisa. Sit down. We can rest our backs against this rock. We should have kept to the cliff road if we’d wanted a long walk.’
With an awkward, ungainly flop, Lisa sat down at the very edge of the silk-lined jacket. She hugged her knees up to her chin, first tucking her dress down carefully between her legs.
In case the sea saw her knickers, Jonathan guessed.
For a while they were silent, both of them staring straight ahead at the darkly blurred smudge of horizon. Once or twice Jonathan turned to look at her, and once, conscious of his gaze, Lisa smiled a wide touching smile.
‘You don’t have to talk to me. Just get on with your thinking. I’m OK.’
Jonathan took out a cigarette and lit it, holding the match in a cupped hand against a non-existent wind. He heard himself being pleasant, although in his present mood it went against the grain. ‘Are you working towards university, Lisa?’
‘I suppose so.’
Now that he was really listening to her for the first time, he realized her voice was husky and lower than he might have expected coming from such a small girl.
‘But I don’t want to teach,’ she was saying. ‘I’d be awful at it. I’m too bossy as it is.’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘Travel,’ she said at once. ‘If I was a boy I’d just take off. Riding a bike with a tent strapped on to the back.’
Jonathan hid a smile. ‘Your parents would never allow that.’
‘Gosh, no. They’d have a pink fit. Especially my mother. She’s stricter with me than my father.’
Without warning a great weight of boredom settled itself on Jonathan’s shoulders.
What the hell was he doing sitting with this strange little kid on a beach in Brittany in the dark? And, more to the point, what was his mother doing lying out on some sanatorium balcony in Switzerland, staring at the mountains? Spending two whole weeks on her own. He shifted his position on the jacket. Why hadn’t his father gone with her? His mother had travelled with a nurse, but if you were ill it was a familiar face you wanted to see.
She was going to die, his mother. Not this year, maybe not next year, but her coming death was written on her face. Jonathan had seen it there. It was a kind of dignified loneliness, as if she was trying to tell you that she knew and couldn’t bear hurting you with her knowing.
‘Life can be pretty bloody for some people,’ he said.
Lisa didn’t know what to say, so to cover her shyness she said the wrong thing. ‘Can it?’
‘Oh, well. Not for you.’ Jonathan refused to look at her. ‘You think life’s just a bed of roses, as they say. Don’t you?’
‘Now you’re cross.’ Complacently Lisa pulled one of her plaits round and began to chew the end. ‘Why don’t you go back to the hotel? I don’t care. I can always tell when people are in moods.’
Jonathan stared at her placidly chewing the end of her plait. God, how insufferable s
he was! What on earth had ever made him think she was even remotely pretty? Exasperation rose thick in his throat.
‘You’re a little snob,’ he said clearly. ‘Paid for to the High School. A pony of your own in the paddock at the back of your house. Holidays abroad every year. Dancing and piano lessons. Don’t you ever stop to think what it’s like for some people?’ Savagely he threw the cigarette stub into the sea. Why had he said all that? He didn’t mean it, not really. He really was in a lousy foul mood.
‘Are you a Bolshie?’ Lisa sounded fascinated. ‘Is that why you work on one of your father’s building sites? Do you think I should leave school to work in a cotton mill? Standing at my looms in clogs and talking like Gracie Fields?’
‘You standing at three looms?’ Jonathan gave a short laugh. ‘That would be the day.’
Lisa was in no way perturbed. She picked up a pebble and flicked it towards the sea. ‘I suppose you don’t realize what a hypocrite you are? My father talks to me sometimes about your sort of person.’
‘Carry on.’ Jonathan’s voice was deceptively soft.
‘Well … you might be working as a navvy at the moment, but you’re not going to end up as a navvy, are you? Oh, no. What you’re going to end up, Jonathan Grey, is as a director of your father’s firm. But the men you are working with will still be heaving bricks and digging holes, won’t they?’ She nodded her head up and down twice, infuriating him. ‘Then, of course, they’ll respect you, because you were once one of the lads. “Mr Jonathan doesn’t ask us to do owt he wouldn’t do ’imself,” they’ll say.’
Before he could speak she smiled her strangely disarming smile. ‘I love arguing, don’t you? My father and I have jolly good arguments. I don’t mind what you say to me, honestly.’
Her sudden sweetness was too much for Jonathan to take at that moment. Almost despairingly he pulled her towards him, bent his head and kissed her.
It was a hard, closed-lips kiss, utterly devoid of passion, but the push Lisa gave him sent him sprawling backwards on to the sand.
For a split second he lay where he was, too surprised to move. The sand had got into his hair. It was stuck to the brilliantine he had used earlier in the evening. He didn’t use much, just a bead in the palm of one hand rubbed into the other then smoothed over his hair. But now the blasted sand was sticking as if he’d used glue.