by Marie Joseph
‘Will Patrick Grey marry you when his wife dies?’ His tone was weary.
‘Yes! Yes! And yes! He’d marry me tomorrow if he could!’ Delia spoke too loudly and with too much vehemence, but Angus was too shattered to notice.
The blood was pounding in his head. The intense throbbing pain was making him feel dizzy. And yet what his wife had just said brought the kind of peace that comes to a man who hears what he has long been wanting to hear. It was strange how his thoughts were suddenly crystal clear, not fuddled with drink. To tell the truth he was surprised. Knowing Patrick Grey as he had thought he did, he would have imagined that booze and women were mere pastimes in a life saddened by the long illness of his wife.
‘So you’ll be wanting to divorce me?’ Angus closed his eyes. He wished his wife would stop answering his questions as loudly as if he was out in the fields. Now that the pounding in his head was easing up he was beginning to get himself under some sort of control again. He could hear himself consciously modifying his voice as he slipped into the role of injured husband. ‘Or shall I divorce you?’
‘You bloody hypocrite!’
His eyes snapped open as Delia leaped from her chair to stand over him, shaking with anger. ‘You’re not feeling anything, are you? You’re going to walk out on me, aren’t you?’ She made a choking sound in her throat. ‘You’ve been wanting to go for a long time, and now I’ve given you the excuse you were looking for. You can walk out of this house any time now because of what I’ve just told you. You would leave actually feeling you were doing the right thing. Actually hearing applause in your head, wouldn’t you?’
‘Do you want me to stay?’ Angus looked away from the creased skirt not an inch from his eyes. ‘Go. Stay. Stay. Go. It’s all the same to me.’
When Delia knelt down, gripping his chin and forcing him to look at her, the expression in her eyes made him flinch. So intense was her loathing that he could feel the violence of it radiating from her tensed body. She was beyond herself with a frustration and rage which went far beyond the terrible things they were saying to each other.
‘You’re in a mess again with the bank, aren’t you?’ She pounded clenched fists on his knees. ‘You haven’t been to the Stock Exchange for weeks, have you? You’ve been borrowing from your colleagues again, then gambling away what they’ve lent you. Mrs Parker told me this morning she hasn’t been paid for weeks. And you promised her you’d see to her wages yourself.’
Her next words were gabbled. ‘I went down to Booths yesterday for coffee, and the man sent for the manager. He asked politely if we’d forgotten to settle our account for the past three months. Three months, Angus! How long do you think they’ll let us have things on credit? There’s a slump in this town, Angus! Even shopkeepers can’t live on air.’
‘You’d be better off without me.’ Angus passed a long hand wearily across his forehead. ‘I’m a born loser.’ He drew his thick eyebrows together as if in sudden pain. ‘It was the war. You know it was the war. I reckon I’d have been better off if I’d stopped a bullet. As it is … .’
At once Delia jumped up. ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ She began to shriek hysterically. ‘That old sob story leaves me stone cold, Angus Logan. This time you get yourself out of whatever mess you’ve got yourself into.’ She walked to the door, straight-backed, not a hair out of place.
As cold and hard as a bloody statue, Angus told himself.
‘And Patrick Grey’s lousy with money, isn’t he?’ he shouted.
‘Yes!’ Delia turned. ‘Because he knows how to handle it, that’s why!’ There were two hectic red spots on her cheekbones. ‘The building trade might not be what you call a gentleman’s profession, but at least he knows how to keep solvent. He thinks you’re a fool, if you must know.’
‘Then go to him!’ Angus yelled, making no more attempts at latching on to his slipping control. ‘Either go to him, or sit tight till his wife dies. It won’t be long from what I’ve heard.’
When the door banged, he groaned aloud. Oh, God, but he felt rough. The pounding in his head was beginning again. It was one o’clock in the morning, and in six hours’ time he would have to be up, dressed, shaved and on his way to Manchester to an interview he dreaded with every fibre of his being.
And when he walked out into the street again he would be a ruined man.
Pushing himself up from the cushions of the massive chesterfield, he walked unsteadily into the hall and through to the small room he used as a study. He stretched out a hand to the roll-top desk, then drew it back. No need to look for solace there. He knew what lay behind the wooden slats. He could actually see them, pile upon pile of unpaid bills. Gambling debts most of them. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Promising Paul to gain time to placate Peter. It was all too much. Far too much for a man who had suffered as he had in the stinking mud of Flanders Field.
Sinking into a chair, he buried his head in his hands.
There was a way out. His mouth twisted in a sudden moment of self-revelation. For Angus there had always been a way out. For a long time he sat there, pressing his fingers against his closed eyelids as if he would shut out reality.
Delia knew there was someone. He corrected himself. She knew there had always been someone. He sighed. But this time it was different.
Margaret was a widow, eight years older than Angus, a woman who wanted a presentable man by her side. And rich. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Soft of flesh and of eye, as cuddly as a plush rabbit, with a ruthless mind at total variance to her appearance.
With Margaret there would be no more jiggling with money, no more responsibility. She had made that clear. Her own plump fingers would hold the purse strings, but her generosity towards him would be unbounded. Angus wriggled in his chair. She loved him, was obsessed by him, had told him so, over and over again.
They would go abroad. Australia. As far away as possible from this grey northern town where tall mill chimneys pointed satanic fingers to a rain-filled cloudy sky. It would be a new beginning, like being born again.
Almost imperceptibly Angus’s shoulders lifted. Whatever passed for his conscience was stilled. Delia, in telling him Patrick Grey would marry her when his wife died, had thrown the key to Angus’s freedom right at his feet. Now all he had to do was to pick it up.
In his bedroom he threw things carelessly into a suitcase. He had seen actors in plays and films packing like that. Just grabbing shirts and socks from drawers, ramming a jacket down on top, then clicking the locks before taking a last lingering look round the room. Down in the hall he snatched his raincoat from the hallstand and laid it over the top of the case.
Then, still in what he called his penguin trappings, he walked slowly back up the wide staircase, one hand trailing the banister rail. The curtain was not ready to come down, not quite yet.
In his daughter’s room he stood by her bed, as straight and tall as in the days of his soldiering in France.
Would she ever understand, this child of his heart, that what her father was doing had been written in his stars a long time ago?
In the diffused light filtering from the landing, all he could see was a tangle of dark hair on the pillow. Lisa had always slept like that, disappearing behind her long hair, drawing it around her as if it were an extra sheet.
The enormity of what he was about to do filled Angus with a despair so profound he shuddered. But it was the only way … the only way.
‘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.
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.
Three
MISS ADAMS, MA, headmistress of the town’s Girls’ High School, gave a sideways sniff. From her position on the platform during Assembly she had a clear view
of Lisa Logan being taken out on the arm of a prefect.
Lisa Logan was not one of the regular fainters. Miss Adams could have named every one of the half dozen of her girls who slumped at monthly intervals over their hymn books. There was very little the strict disciplinarian did not know about her ‘gels’.
Coming from the south, initially as the school’s geography mistress, she was possessed of a highly developed social conscience. The present state of the Depression in the cotton town saddened and appalled her.
For the girls with white gym blouses washed to a sketchy shade of grey, and black woollen stockings darned over darns, she showed understanding and tolerance. Sleeping as some of them did, two and even three to a bed, what more natural than at times they found the standing in Assembly too much? Breakfast for some of her scholarship girls, she guessed, was nothing more than a mug of weak tea and a slice of bread and margarine, smeared with jam if they were lucky.
But for the Lisa Logans in her school a faint meant, more often than not, a too-late night spent dancing at one of the town’s many functions in the Public Halls.
That same afternoon she called Lisa to her study.
‘Come!’ she called, answering Lisa’s timid knock.
‘Feeling better?’ She looked at Lisa over the top of her reading glasses, taking in the white face, the shadowed eyes, then moving down to the spotless white blouse, the neatly pressed box pleats of the navy-blue serge gym slip. Every item of Lisa’s uniform was bought without counting the cost, Miss Adams knew from the school outfitters round the corner from the Market Place.
‘You went with your parents to the Conservative Ball last night. I am right, am I not?’ Miss Adams took off her glasses and laid them down on her blotter.
‘Yes, Miss Adams.’
‘And the dance finished at two o’clock this morning?’
‘Yes, Miss Adams.’
Lisa stared at the headmistress’s hands. They were lying neatly folded together on the pink blotter, but they might just have easily been drumming with impatience. Lisa could sense the disapproval coming at her from the other side of the wide desk.
For a wild moment she wanted to blurt out the truth. That long before the dance ended she had taken her drunken father home in a sports car, had watched him slump, grey-faced, as her mother had followed, shouting her shame aloud in the sitting-room. That she had cowered in bed hearing their voices raised in anger, and that this morning, with her mother asleep in her room and her father apparently on his way to his office in Manchester, she had come to school without breakfast.
With an effort she tried to take in what her headmistress was saying.
‘There are gels in this school, Lisa, who will be leaving before they take their Matriculation examinations. Bright gels in your form, one in particular who would, I know, win an open scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. Not for them the advantage of staying on until they are eighteen to take Higher School Certificate. And why? Can you even begin to tell me why, Lisa?’
‘Because their parents can’t afford to keep them on. Because they have to go out to work to earn money,’ Lisa mumbled.
‘Exactly. And yet you… .’ The normally quiet voice hardened with exasperation. ‘With all the opportunities available, you neglect your education by staying out all night and indulging in quite unnecessary extras such as piano, dancing and riding lessons.’ The hands took up the glasses and began to twirl them round. ‘There are private schools in the town for gels like you, Lisa Logan. But my school has a reputation of which I am justly proud. My gels are here to learn, to acquire academic status, to collect diplomas and go on to degree standard, not fritter their young lives away in pursuits that will still be waiting for them should they be that way inclined in later years.’
The voice softened. There was something in Lisa’s air of dejection that touched the older woman’s tender heart, a heart hidden by a dark grey spotted blouse with a gold fob-watch pinned to the stiff shiny cotton.
She sighed, turning the watch over to check the time. ‘What do you want to make of your life, Lisa? I know your English is good. Miss Shaw tells me you have a certain flair with words. But your maths are deplorable. Miss Entwistle says if the letters are changed from ABC to XYZ on her geometry theorems you flounder. Geometry is a subject to understand and qualify, not learn off by heart without knowing why. You will fail your Matriculation Certificate if you can’t get at least a Pass in maths. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Miss Adams.’ Lisa’s head drooped. ‘I was hoping to go to University. Or maybe a Teachers’ Training College,’ she added in desperation. ‘Although I’m not all that keen on teaching. Perhaps I might find something to do with horses. Or work as a dental assistant,’ she went on, searching feverishly in her mind for the right thing to say, sensing her headmistress’s growing impatience.
‘You may go, Lisa.’ Miss Adams waved an imperious hand. ‘And try to get some extra sleep over the weekend. Remember there are many, many gels who would give anything for your advantages.’
‘Yes, Miss Adams. Thank you, Miss Adams.’
Outside in the hall, Lisa pulled a face at the closed door. For all her intelligence and precocious perception, she had missed completely the genuine concern in Miss Adams’s manner.
‘She talks Bolshie, just like Jonathan Grey,’ she muttered to herself, as she walked back to her form-room. ‘Maybe if my mother had made my blouse, and I smelled because I didn’t wear linings in my navy knickers, she’d like me better. Silly old pace-egg.’
‘What did she want you for?’ Rachael Levy, from her desk behind Lisa’s, leaned forward and tugged at a plait. ‘Are you being expelled?’
‘No such luck.’ Lisa opened a geography textbook and stared down at a contour map, her eyes as bleak as the darkening skies outside the tall windows.
It was raining hard when she walked from the tram down the short lane leading to The Laurels. The leaves on the dark green bushes looked like shiny lozenges, and the whole house had a strangely shuttered look. The leather case with Lisa’s books for the weekend homework banged against her legs. A lace in her school shoes had come undone, and as she climbed the three steps to the big front door she tripped.
‘Hell’s bells!’ she said aloud, and felt better for it. ‘I’m home!’ she shouted, dumping her case on the floor and hanging her coat on the hallstand without bothering with the loop stitched into the back of the collar. ‘It’s me!’
She was halfway upstairs, her mind already ridding herself of the hated school uniform, when a noise from the sitting-room made her stand still, her face wearing its listening expression.
Her mother was crying, and the terrifying thing was that Delia wasn’t crying softly. It was like the wail of a child finding itself abandoned in a crowded place. An ice-cold finger of fear trailed down Lisa’s spine.
It was a shocking way for an adult to cry. Lisa stood on the threshold of the sitting-room for a moment, frozen into immobility.
Delia was crouched over the padded arm of the chesterfield, a glass in one hand and a screwed-up lace handkerchief in the other. Her features were blurred into a mask of despair, and her eyes were red slits in the sallowness of her face.
‘Ah, you!’ She stared at Lisa, her mouth wide open. ‘Now let’s see what you can find to say in your father’s defence. See if you’ll be sticking up for him when you hear what’s happened.’
Lisa moved slowly forward. There was a feeling of dread inside her, tightening her chest as if someone had pulled a rope round her, slipping the knot so that she couldn’t breathe.
‘Father? What’s wrong? There was more than just his drinking wrong with him last night, wasn’t there? I’ve been thinking all day about how awful he looked. He’s in some sort of trouble, I just know!’
Delia was leaning forward, almost bending in two, only the top of her head showing. Going forward in a little rush, Lisa knelt down on the carpet, trying to see her face.
‘Mother? Where is he? He’d
gone off to work when I went out. Has he had an accident or something?’ She tried to grasp one of Delia’s hands. ‘Oh, please don’t cry like that! Try to tell me. Please!’
Slowly raising her head, Delia looked upon her daughter. A feeling of blind rage roused her from the stupor she had wallowed in all that long, dark day. There was love and a desperate concern in Lisa’s face, superimposed on a creeping fear.
But it wasn’t for her. Oh, dear God, no, it wasn’t for her mother. It was all for him, the way it had always been. The two of them, banded together, against her. And now she was able to wipe that look from Lisa’s blindly trusting face for ever.
Spitting the words out with cold, calculated venom, Delia trampled on that childish devotion as surely as if she had walked in heavy boots over her daughter’s body.
‘Your father has left us. He never went to bed at all. Early this morning he packed a case, wrote me a letter.’ She nodded towards a sheet of writing paper screwed into a ball in the far corner of the chesterfield. ‘Would you like to know what he said?’
Holding her breath, Lisa gave a slight nod.
‘The letter said that as your father has decided in his great and kindly wisdom that we will be better off without him, he has made up his mind to go abroad and live in Australia. With his mistress.’ Her lips twisted into a mockery of a smile. ‘Oh, yes! He’s been staying with a woman in Manchester on and off for years. A stinking rich widow from all accounts. So as far as you and I are concerned he has written us off. Finished. QED.’
Lisa held herself quiet for a long moment. It was like something she had read in one of Mrs Parker’s News of the World. But it was untrue. It had to be. Hurling herself at Delia, she pounded with her fists.
‘Daddy wouldn’t do that!’ In her terror she used the name she had always used as a small child. ‘He wouldn’t just go away. Not without telling me. Not abroad.’