by Marie Joseph
His temper flared so quickly he could actually feel the heat of it burning his face. Lisa was walking away, and if she’d been a boy he would have rushed after her, knocked her down and rubbed her own face in the wet sand.
She wasn’t running, merely plodding along with her graceless tomboy slouch, her shoulders hunched as she trotted bumpily over the ridged beach. Jonathan closed his eyes and saw red.
As he caught her up, swinging his jacket over his arm, his cigarette case fell out of his pocket. The catch had needed mending for a long time, and as the case bounced against a rock it sprang open, spilling his cigarettes into a tiny pool. Jonathan swore.
Grabbing Lisa by the elbows, he swung her round to face him. ‘What’s wrong with you, for Pete’s sake? Have you never been kissed before?’
‘Not by a boy!’ His anger was mirrored in her eyes. ‘And not like that. Not on the lips!’
Jonathan stared at her in amazement. If she wasn’t so obviously in deadly earnest it would be funny. She looked funny, squaring up to him like that, with both hands clenched and her chin thrust forward. Her top teeth stuck out as well, not too much but enough to give her a marked resemblance to a skinned rabbit. She was actually doing a little dance on the sand, shuffling her feet as if they were in a boxing ring sparring up for the first exchange of blows.
‘If you could just see yourself with your hair all mucky with sand. If only you could see… .’
There was a break in her voice. She was close to tears, but Jonathan was past caring. All his bottled-up worry about his mother rose to choke him, just as if a hand had suddenly squeezed his throat. Bending down, he picked the cigarette case out of the shallow pool. His mother had given him the silver case for his eighteenth birthday, and as he shook the sea water out of it he saw her face, pointed and thin, and her blue eyes with that awful bruised look around them. She was going to die, and Lisa Logan’s mother would go on living.
‘Your mother doesn’t have the screaming ab-dabs when my father kisses her. I would say she enjoys it no end,’ he said deliberately.
For a long moment they stared at each other, Lisa’s eyes wide with shock, before she turned to run from him, not looking where she was going, slipping on the wet sand, tripping once, then stumbling on.
‘Come back, stupid!’
Jonathan’s voice spiralled after her, but Lisa ran on. Her mind was in a turmoil, thoughts whirling round and round. It was as if Jonathan’s words had lifted the lid off a cauldron filled with unspeakable truths, only half understood up to now.
Her mother going off for long walks with Uncle Patrick round the headland, disappearing for hours at a time, coming back with her curly hair like a nimbus round her brown face. Appearing like that on the landing with guilt in her eyes, following Lisa into her room and going on and on about the lost keys. Lisa caught her toe on a loose pebble, winced with the pain of it, and kept on running.
Her mother wouldn’t do that. Not with Uncle Patrick. There was a stitch in her side but Lisa ignored it. Kissing maybe, but not that?
Reaching the hotel, she stopped by the low stone wall. It was damp and mossy, but she sat down, crossing her arms over her bolstered breasts, rocking herself to and fro.
It was awful. She blinked back the tears pricking behind her eyelids. Tomorrow they would be going home. They would climb into the rickety local bus and be driven at speed through leafy lanes, past grey stone houses shuttered against the sun. Maybe there would be the same old woman in a blue sun bonnet, out in the middle of a field, calmly milking a cow. At St Malo they would take a taxi cab to the quayside, perhaps see the same old man sitting there smoking a clay pipe, his creased face folded into lines of contentment.
They would sail back to England, and before the new term began she would go with her mother down to the town to buy a new navy-blue gaberdine coat and a pair of indoor shoes for school. Everything would be normal and ordinary, and yet how could anything ever be normal and ordinary again? Her mother was a whore… . Lisa said the word quietly inside her head. Words like that were not for speaking out loud. She was a whore, and her father was a cuckold.
Sensing that someone was standing in front of her Lisa looked up and saw Jonathan.
‘Aren’t you cold, kiddo?’ His voice was ragged with shame. There was an apology in the way he stood. ‘It wasn’t true what I said.’
‘No, I’m not cold, thank you.’ Lisa stood up and moved round him. She was not cold, not her body, anyway. The cold was deep inside her, gripping her stomach with an icy hand. At the door of the hotel she faced him, her head held high. ‘It’s quite true what you told me. I knew it myself, as a matter of fact.’
She turned to go inside, leaving the impression of her shocked and tearless face imprinted on Jonathan’s mind. Wheeling round, he ran with his loping stride down to the beach again. From over the sea sheet lightning flashed in a white flame. With the approach of the storm the waves began to curl in fury.
‘Oh, hell! Oh, flamin’ hell!’ Jonathan raised his face and felt the first drops of rain. ‘Oh, God, why does my mother have to die? Why?’ Then he turned to walk slowly back to the hotel, his black hair sleeked to his head as if he were a seal coming out of the sea.
Two
‘HONESTLY, LISA, I wish you’d stop turning round. You’ve been doing it ever since we came in.’
Rachael Levy, a small plump Jewish girl, the only Jewish girl at the High School in 1935, brushed the sleeve of her coat with the tips of her fingers. ‘The big picture’s coming on, and besides, you keep marking my coat with your choc-ice. Honestly, you are a fidget.’
Reluctantly, Lisa faced forward. ‘It’s just that there’s a boy I know sitting behind us, with a girl,’ she whispered. ‘And I don’t want him to see me.’
‘Why not?’ Immediately Rachael twisted round in her seat. ‘Is he in the back row? On one of the double seats?’
‘Of course not. He’s about twenty, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Have you been out with him?’ Rachael was not one to give up easily. ‘I thought you told me you wouldn’t go out with a boy even if one asked you.’
Lisa thought she detected a note of sarcasm in her friend’s voice, but decided to give Rachael the benefit of the doubt. The newsreel preceding the big picture had shown Jews in Berlin being made to scrub the pavements outside their shops, and she knew for a fact that Rachael had relatives in Germany.
‘He’s a family friend,’ she hissed from behind her choc-ice. ‘He came with us on holiday last summer to Brittany. With his father,’ she added. ‘He’s horrible. Honestly!’
‘Sh … sh.’ A woman in the row behind tapped Lisa’s shoulder. ‘Some folks have come to see the picture. If you don’t mind.’
It took a few minutes for Lisa to blot from her mind the sight of Jonathan Grey sitting in one of the red plush seats with his arm laid nonchalantly across the seat on his right, his hand resting on the shoulder of a girl with a floss of fair hair. What was he doing in the pictures in the afternoon, anyway? Surely he should be slapping cement on bricks somewhere, or had he been rained off? Not that she cared, of course.
Since the holiday in Brittany Uncle Patrick’s visits to the house had been much less frequent, but Lisa was sure her mother was meeting him somewhere. There were days when Delia came in after Lisa had got back from school, flushed and anxious, making excuses when excuses were not necessary, rushing upstairs to change out of her smart costume, saying she didn’t want to seat the skirt.
Back from an assignation with her lover, Lisa would tell herself bitterly.
Up on the screen Leslie Howard waved a long kerchief in front of his aristocratic nose: ‘They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.’ His voice, as English as buttered toast for tea, lulled Lisa into a state of mind at first relaxed then more and more excitable as the tale of The Scarlet Pimpernel began to unfold. Merle Oberon was so beautiful, with her high cheekbones and her luxurious dark hair, but why didn’t she guess th
e identity of the Pimpernel? Lisa’s eyes glowed in the warm gloom as, identifying thoroughly with the characters, she rode the streets in the tumbrels, laid her head on the block, knitted round the guillotine, and then, as Merle Oberon, raised her exquisite face for the dashing hero’s kiss.
As usual when a story held her, she wasn’t reading or watching. She was there, breathing, living every moment, so that when the lights came on at the end and she followed Rachael out to the foyer it was as though Leslie Howard walked by her side, his hand on her arm, his eyes filled with love, his honeyed voice telling her to watch her step.
‘Hello there, Lisa!’
With a tremendous effort Lisa tore herself away from Leslie Howard’s side. Her big grey-blue eyes were red-rimmed from the tears she had shed on Merle Oberon’s behalf, a sodden handkerchief was still held tightly in her clenched hand, and it was obvious to Jonathan Grey that she was finding the transition from make-believe to reality almost impossible.
‘Won’t be a minute,’ he told the girl clinging on to his arm. Pinching the crown of his brown trilby, he placed it on his head, remembered he was still indoors, and took it off again. He smiled at Lisa, hoping the fat girl she was with would take the hint and step away, but Rachael stood her ground, scowling at him from beneath fierce black eyebrows. Now what had Lisa Logan been saying about him, Jonathan wondered.
‘Enjoy the picture?’ He spoke directly to Lisa, and as she blinked he saw she was still in some far-away place.
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘But when you’ve read the book it’s all a bit tame somehow.’
Jonathan sighed. God, but she hadn’t improved. Still the same kid he’d always known, saying one thing while obviously thinking another. And what the hell was her fat friend giggling about? Forgetting all about manners, Jonathan placed his hat on his head, nodded and touched the brim with a finger.
‘See you at the dance tonight, then.’
As he walked away Rachael gripped Lisa’s arm tightly. ‘What did he say? What dance? Oh, isn’t he like Ronald Colman!’
‘The Conservative Ball in the Public Halls.’ Lisa looked martyred.
‘I’m going with my parents, worse luck. Jonathan Grey will be there with his father. My Uncle Patrick,’ she added bitterly. ‘Not that he’s my real uncle, thank God.’
Then, remembering what Rachael’s real uncle might be doing at that very moment in the troubled streets of Berlin, she was overcome with fervent compassion. Tucking her arm into Rachael’s, she gave it a squeeze against her side so that they walked out entwined into the street crowded with shoppers.
Lisa heard her mother speaking on the telephone as she let herself into the big detached house on the outskirts of the town. The hall, like the rest of the house, was thickly carpeted and when Lisa stopped by the sitting-room door, she hesitated, one hand on the round brass knob.
‘Oh, please,’ Delia was saying. ‘Please, darling. It’s been so long. I know we shouldn’t, but if you only knew… .’
Lisa leaned closer to the slight gap in the not quite closed door. Eavesdropping was a despicable thing to do, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, she owed it to her father, surely? She gripped the cold brass knob hard, straining to hear the softly spoken words.
‘We aren’t hurting Alice, darling. She doesn’t know. How can she even begin to guess when we’ve always been so careful? All I want is just a little time alone with you to talk. Just that. I can drive out to the same place. Please. I think I’m going mad. There’ll be no chance to talk tonight.’ There was a pause. ‘Please?’
At that moment the expression on Lisa Logan’s face was one of pure loathing for the woman sobbing into the telephone. She opened the door.
Through the books she read, the films she saw, Lisa was capable of identifying with heartbreak. She could suffer anguish over fictional characters, yet there in the hall, darkened with the gloom of a rainy late afternoon, she failed utterly to recognize the desperation in her mother’s voice. The women in the tumbrels, rolling their way through the streets of Paris to the guillotine, had been more real to Lisa than her mother who was moaning now, the telephone receiver held close to her chest.
As if it were a stethoscope sounding out her heart, Lisa thought, totally immune to the sight of her mother’s ravaged face.
‘That was Uncle Patrick you were talking to!’
Bursting into the room, the wet, bedraggled beret she wore slipping down over her forehead, her eyes narrowed into slits of adolescent accusation, Lisa faced Delia. ‘You don’t care tuppence for how you are deceiving my father! You don’t deserve to be married to a man like him, and if I didn’t care about hurting him I would tell him. Yes, I would!’ With the violent nodding of her head, the beret slipped even further down her forehead. There was rain on her nose, and in her fury the freckles on her cheekbones stood out against the whiteness of her skin.
Delia stared at her daughter as if she couldn’t believe the evidence of her eyes. Replacing the receiver with a hand that shook, she sagged into a chair and covered her face with her hands. She was shivering uncontrollably. First Patrick’s evasive mumblings at the other end of the wires, then this… . Oh, God! It was too much!
‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘Just go away. That’s all.’
Dripping rain on to the Chinese carpet, Lisa stayed where she was. One half of her, the half that on most days genuinely loved her mother, wanted to kneel down by the chair and pull Delia’s hands away from her face and tell her she understood. Angus had been very difficult lately, staying away in Manchester for days on end, prowling round the house in a bad mood, flaring into a temper when spoken to. No wonder her mother had been flattered by Uncle Patrick’s attentions. Jonathan’s father could charm the birds off the trees, even Lisa had to admit that. It was the Irish in him, she supposed.
But her mother loved him. Had lain with him. The pedantic phrase culled from the love stories Lisa was in the habit of reading rose to torment her.
‘You’re too old!’ Her voice dripped scorn. ‘It’s disgusting! Do you ever stop to think you’re having an affair with a man whose wife is slowly dying?’ The beret fell over her nose and she pushed it back with a trembling finger. ‘It would kill my father if he found out. Can’t you see?’
To Lisa’s horror, Delia threw back her head and laughed. It was a terrible kind of laugh, high-pitched, staccato, interspersed with hiccuping sobs.
‘Oh, dear God! Kill your father, did you say? Oh, dear, dear God! That’s rich, that is.’ The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Delia’s dark eyes were like black coals pricked out in the pallor of her face. ‘It’s always him, isn’t it? Your paragon of a father. Upright, noble Angus Logan, virtue personified.’ Delia’s mouth tightened into a thin line. ‘Before you carry on condemning me, standing there like the Day of Judgement, let me tell you… .’
The big front door opened, then closed with a resounding crash. As the two faces swivelled round, Angus came into the room, hurling his briefcase into a corner of the massive chesterfield, before making straight for the drinks’ cupboard over by the window.
‘What a day!’ He poured a glass of gin with a lavish hand, then slopped tonic into it more modestly. ‘The bloody train from Manchester was crowded, then I couldn’t start the car.’ He turned round. ‘What are you two doing? I thought you’d both be upstairs titivating yourselves up for tonight. We’ll have to leave in less than an hour if we’re to be in time to partake of cocktails with the Mayor and his good lady.’
When Delia rushed frantically from the room, he took a long drink. ‘Now what have I said?’
Lisa felt her very heart would melt with love as she stared at her father. He was so obviously overtired, so bowed down with worry, she had an urge to hurl herself at him as she’d done as a child, burying her head deep in his chest, hugging him until he pretended to plead for mercy.
‘You haven’t said anything, Father,’ she said, wrenching off the beret and unbuttoning her coat. ‘I don’
t think Mother realized how late it was.’ She forced a smile. ‘You know how long she takes to get ready.’
Angus drained the glass and went straight to the cupboard for a refill. He guessed something had been going on but let it go. He had accepted many years ago that his loveless marriage was in no way unique. There weren’t enough fingers on his two hands to count the number of his friends and colleagues locked together in similar bleak circumstances. This was a house where any attempt at what was lately being described by fashionable psychiatrists as ‘communication’ had ceased to exist a long, long time ago.
‘Has it been a bad day, Father?’
Angus smiled wearily. That remark must surely be the understatement of the year. Sitting down in a winged armchair, he closed his eyes, resting the cold rim of the glass against his forehead. What a funny child she was, his little Lisa. So fierce, so loving.
‘Would you like me to massage your neck?’
‘That would be lovely.’
Slowly, gently, Lisa began to move her thumbs, rotating them over the hard knot of tension at the back of her father’s neck. He needed a haircut. The thick, red-gold hair straggled down over the top of his white collar, and yet on the crown it was beginning to thin.
An overwhelming sensation of tenderness and love stilled Lisa’s hands for a moment. He wasn’t old, this beloved father of hers, but he was a long, long way from being young. Much too old, anyway, to have a wife who sobbed into the telephone over another man. Lisa shivered.
How could she? How could anyone of her mother’s age? Perhaps Delia was going through the ‘change’? Lisa had listened to Mrs Parker in the kitchen talking about the awful things in store for women of a certain age. Mrs Parker had gone through torture with her hot flushes, and had told Lisa about a friend who had gone off her husband… .