by Marie Joseph
‘I’m going downstairs.’ Through the crack in the door Richard faced her, a belligerent expression on his red face, his eyes Irene’s eyes, shiny and blue. ‘I want to talk to you.’
He was sitting at the small table in the kitchen when she joined him. There was no shame on his face for what he had done. He was wearing his brown woollen dressing-gown and had found time, Lisa noticed, to lay the collar of his pyjama jacket neatly over the dressing-gown collar. The fair hairs on his chest were almost white now. Lisa found she had to turn her head away.
‘There doesn’t seem to be a lot left for us to talk about, does there, Richard?’ She sat down, facing him across the table. ‘In my book, what you did to me was rape. Or is that too strong a word for you to stomach?’
‘A man can’t rape his own wife.’ Richard’s high colour deepened only slightly. ‘Stop being dramatic. You’ve been married too long to play the prude.’
A sharp pain stabbed at her temples, and she pressed it away with a finger. She felt sore where he had forced her to unwilling surrender, and his total lack of sensitivity filled her with a creeping disgust.
‘I love you,’ he said, ‘but I won’t stand being made a fool of. Especially with that dago from the builder’s yard.’ The blue eyes turned sly. ‘Anyway, he’s got his own problems from what I’ve heard.’
‘What have you heard?’ Lisa forced her voice to steadiness.
‘Millie tells me his wife caught the drinking habit from her father-in-law. Looks like a slut with mucky clothes, shouting in shops and showing herself up in the market. No wonder your friend makes a grab at other women. Millie tells me no decent man would touch her with a barge-pole.’
‘Millie tells you?’ Lisa wasn’t ready to absorb the meaning of his words, not yet. All she could do was sit quite still and stare at the nauseous matt of white hair on her husband’s chest. Beneath it his skin looked red and damp. Lisa shuddered. She didn’t like his skin, she thought wearily. For a long time she hadn’t liked the touch of her husband’s skin. ‘Millie told you?’ she said again.
He was blustering now. ‘Well, she does overhear things when she’s out at the shops. She’s not like you, always running around doing a man’s job. Women gossip,’ he added, ‘and sometimes they bring the gossip home.’
‘Home?’ Lisa shook her head from side to side, feeling the damp strands on her neck. It was strange how the part of her which should have been fighting mad was subdued deep inside her with a sadness she could barely tolerate. Of course this was virtually Millie’s home; it had been her home for longer than it had been Lisa’s. Millie Schofield loved this bullying, bewildered man with a steadfastness his own wife could not compete with. Nor did she want to. All she wanted to do at the moment was to creep upstairs into the spare room and curl up on her side in the bed kept ready for guests who never came. And think… .
Think about Jonathan with a wife who drank, the Amy she vaguely remembered from her schooldays, a girl with a mane of auburn hair who had looked after Jonathan’s father, saying he was her cross. From a long time ago she heard Jonathan’s voice saying that.
‘Would you care very much if I … if we parted?’ Lisa’s mouth seemed to be having difficulty stretching round the words. ‘I’ve failed you, Richard. In so many ways I have failed you. Wouldn’t it be better if we went our separate ways?’
‘No!’ The shouted word brought her sharply out of her dream-like trance. ‘Don’t say that!’ The face across the little table was wrenched out of shape by a blinding, tearing anger. ‘That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? To run away as your father ran away.’ Richard shot out a hand and gripped her wrist, taking her by surprise. ‘You’ll never go, because if you did I’d see to it that you never saw Peter again. He’s my son, and if you go then you’ll have no claim to him.’ The clinging fingers dug deep into her soft flesh. ‘Besides, I couldn’t live without you. You’re mine and I’ll never let you go. Lisa! Look at me!’
Wearily she looked at him, at the naked fear in the hard blue eyes, at this man who could change in a second from being a shouting bully to a whining coward. And in that moment the remnants of Lisa’s love for him died, to be replaced by a pity so overwhelming that the enormity of it made her feel physically sick. When he came round the table, kneeling down on the bright-coloured oilcloth covering the kitchen floor and laid his head in her lap, she stared down at the incipient bald patch on the top of his head.
All at once she was a fifteen-year-old girl again, standing behind her father’s chair on the evening of the Conservative Ball. She was stroking his neck and comforting him in the only way she knew. She had tried to replace that beloved father with this man. And she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
‘I want to sleep alone, Richard,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve both said too much, and it’s very late.’ Fleetingly her hand touched his hair. ‘Nothing will seem as bad in the morning.’
‘It is the morning.’ Pulling himself up by a corner of the table, Richard nodded towards the clock on the wall. ‘But yes, you’re right. After a good sleep you’ll feel different. You’ll see.’
It wasn’t too difficult to avoid being alone with Jonathan. The building permit came through more quickly than anyone could have believed it would, and now the warehouse and the little corner shop reverberated to the sound of hammers and saws, with men in overalls carrying planks, climbing ladders, installing work benches, restoring the neglected building.
Lisa worked long hours. Already she had absorbed the techniques of buying, so that she could cost every single dress down to the last stitch, the price of a zip, every inch of trim, leaving a fair margin for profit.
She interviewed a dozen machinists, choosing them carefully, making sure that, if they were married, arrangements were properly made for their children to be cared for, knowing that on a budget so tight that its implications kept her awake at night, there would be no concession to absenteeism. She accepted without conceit that she had been born with natural good taste. She knew instinctively that accessories made or marred an outfit, and through working in Richard’s shop she knew which designs would appeal to the fashion-starved, more affluent women of the town and its surrounding countryside.
She knew she was not designing for ultra-rich clients who spent their lives at charity balls or travelling down to London to visit the top couturiers. Her clients would be women who saw themselves as the ultra-thin models in the glossy fashion magazines, while still accepting that their clothes were not too outrageously different. A Northerner herself, Lisa knew that value for money was still their first consideration and that a ceiling price of twenty pounds a dress was inevitable.
Just as it was also inevitable that, in spite of her resolution, she would one day find herself alone with Jonathan Grey.
She was waiting on the station platform for a train to take her to Manchester on one of her twice-weekly visits to the war-scarred city, when she saw him making his way towards her. The train was drawing in with a rush of sound. Lisa felt herself urged forward by the touch of Jonathan’s hand on her arm.
‘I’m not travelling First,’ she said weakly, as he opened the door of an empty compartment.
‘Today you are,’ he said grimly, pulling the door to with its leather strap, sitting down opposite her on the shabbily upholstered seat with its little squares of linen for headrests.
By the look on his face she knew that if anyone had tried to get in he would have quelled them with such a glance that they would have felt obliged to move further down the platform, but the train began to move and he leaned forward and took her hands in his own.
‘I followed you,’ he said. ‘Now then, Lisa. What are we going to do?’
She could only stare at him wordlessly. He looked pale and ill, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. There was a bruised look round his dark eyes and a small pulse throbbed in his jaw-line.
‘There is nothing we can do.’ She looked out at the grey morning slipping by the dirty window. ‘I am married
and so are you.’ She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘I won’t let history repeat itself.’
‘I am dying for you, Lisa,’ he said softly. ‘You must know that. It’s taken a long time for us to find each other, but now we have there’s nothing we can do about it.’ He began to stroke the pulse at her wrist. ‘We should have waited, but we both married the wrong people, and now we have a second chance. If we don’t take it we are craven cowards. Don’t you see?’
‘No, I don’t see.’ She spoke so low that the clattering of the train wheels almost drowned the sound of her voice. ‘You have seen Richard. You know I have a son. What are you suggesting? That I leave them and go away with you?’ Her voice rose a little. ‘That you leave your wife who has cared for your father all these years? And what about him? One family was destroyed. Do you want to destroy two more?’ She stared straight into his dark eyes. ‘Oh, Jonathan, we are neither of us the kind who can walk away. I could never emulate my father in doing that. I could never, never do to my child what he did to me.’
He came to sit beside her. ‘Stop being so … so sensible, love. The past is the past, just that. You can’t torture yourself with it for ever.’
‘My past is me.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘No, Jonathan.’
He saw then what he had never seen before – the almost spiritual beauty of her lovely face, and the sight saddened him. He saw in that moment that the years spent with her mother in the little house in Mill Street had made her into a woman of great compassion, and the loving of her brought unmanly tears to his dark eyes.
‘Richard will never let me go,’ she was saying. ‘He would keep Peter from me.’ She sighed deeply. ‘My husband has a ruthless streak in him. Peter is such a joyous little boy, Jonathan.’ Her chin lifted. ‘Thank God I have my work. Without that… .’ She bent her head in a gesture of such melancholy that he felt his heart would break.
The train clattered on. When it reached Darwen a businessman got on, sitting opposite them, opening his briefcase and taking out a sheaf of papers which he studied with an abstract attention. Jonathan stared at him, hating his very guts.
He thought of his wife, of the way she was, the way circumstances had made her, of her slipshod ways, her bitterness at the way life had deprived her of the child she wanted, giving her instead an old man to cherish. He thought about her bouts of drinking when she turned on him, damning his father to hell, and the way she rallied to take up what she called her ‘cross’ again, sinking into a martyrdom which was almost harder to bear.
He glanced sideways at Lisa, at the rise and fall of her full breasts beneath the lilac woollen dress, revealed by her unbuttoning of the fur-trimmed coat in a darker shade. And it seemed the clitter-clatter of the train wheels echoed his frantic questioning. There had to be a way … there had to be a way … a way … a way.
Regardless of the milling crowds, he took her in his arms on the wide platform of Exchange Station at Manchester. For a moment he tasted the sweetness of her lips.
‘You’re crazy,’ Lisa whispered as she pushed him away. ‘You might not care who sees us, but I do!’
Two women, wearing identical camel-hair coats, turned to stare at them strangely, but blind to reason Jonathan gripped Lisa’s arms.
‘You go away from home.’ His eyes were wild in their pleading. ‘You travel. As I do. You don’t have to account for your every moment.’
‘And?’ She glared at him, but he would not meet her eyes.
‘We could be together.’ He shook her none too gently. ‘Lisa. We’re two grown-up people, not children. You’re so locked in the past. You’re casting me in the role of my father, and you’re seeing yourself as your mother. But that’s gone! You’re being as pig-headed as you were when you were a kid with freckles and your hair in plaits. OK, OK, so you can’t leave Peter, and OK, so I can’t leave my wife with my father, but hell’s bells, there’s a way we can take what there is. I’m in love with you, and you’re in love with me. Listen to me! We can both do what’s right and still take time off for loving.’
‘There’s a word for what you mean.’ She was trembling now. ‘Why don’t you say it?’ She jerked away from his grasp. ‘Is that what you want? Furtive phone calls? Clandestine meetings? Lying to your wife? Then tiring of all the messy secretive business and wondering how to end it? Making love to me, then going home and making love to your wife? I suppose you still make love to your wife?’
As he stared at her with despair and disbelief, she saw that her assumption had hit hard. And in that moment her weakening resolve strengthened.
‘Please go,’ she whispered. ‘We’re making a spectacle of ourselves. Besides, I’m going to cry, and I haven’t to cry.’
As angry as he was, as baffled and infuriated, he saw that she could take no more. So he let her go, watching as she walked away, the full skirt of her coat swaying, the heels of her black court shoes making little clicking noises on the platform.
And because she was crying Lisa failed to see the two women in identical camel-hair coats trying to hail a taxi outside the station. Hurrying across the busy street, she saw nothing of the way they nudged each other and narrowed their eyes into suspicious slits.
‘You were holding hands! You were seen, Jonathan! I even know who she was!’ Amy Grey’s face was wrenched out of shape by the force of her emotion. ‘You’ve been seeing her for a long time, that Lisa Logan.’ She faced him with hands clenched over the front of a none-too-clean apron.
‘She’s a married woman, but she calls herself by her maiden name. That shows the sort she is!’ She began to cry. ‘A walking clothes-horse, that’s all she is, and you haven’t the sense to see it. What have you told her? That you have a wife tied to the house, cleaning up after your father when he’s too drunk to know what he’s doing?’ She caught her breath on a sob. ‘Do you know what he did this afternoon? He opened a drawer and peed on his shirts. Too drunk to realize he wasn’t in the bathroom. And all the time you’ve been seeing her. Oh, God, you should have married her, then you’d realize what it’s like. She wouldn’t do what I’ve had to do. Not her, not fancy-pants Logan.’
Amy Grey had once been a big, beautiful girl with a laugh that could be as hearty and infectious as a child’s. Now her auburn hair, streaked with grey, was pulled back from her shiny face, held in the nape of her neck by a rubber band. A long way from being an alcoholic, she still drank too much and the resultant puffiness of her face blurred her features into plainness. At first her caring for her father-in-law had sprung from genuine kindness; now some days she matched him drink for drink, letting the housework go, slopping around in bedroom slippers, swinging from resigned martyrdom to burning resentment.
Jonathan stretched out a hand to her, trying not to see the way she flinched away. ‘You’re wrong, quite wrong,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t been seeing Lisa.’ His voice deepened into sadness. ‘True, I did see her the other day, but I’ve known her a long time, Amy, longer than I’ve known you. She’s a part of my childhood, but I won’t be seeing her again. So you see… .’
‘You promise?’ Amy came closer, so close he could smell the whisky on her breath. ‘I’d die if you left me, Jonathan. You’re all I have.’ She gazed up at him piteously. ‘Perhaps if I see another doctor and maybe have that operation, I’ll be able to have a baby.’ She laid her head on his shoulder, then lifted his arms round her waist. ‘They are bitches, my so-called friends, both of them, trying to make trouble.’ She sighed and snuggled closer. ‘I believe you. It’s just that … just that …’
‘I know.’ Jonathan stared over her head round the gracious room with the curtains Lisa had made so long ago still hanging at the tall windows. ‘I know, Amy.’
His dark eyes closed, so that the anguish in them was hidden.
There were times during the next few years when Jonathan would stop for a moment, look at the man he had become, and be filled with such doubt and self-loathing that he would actually bury hi
s face in his hands and groan aloud.
He would examine his frenetic life-style, his fourteen-hour day at the yard, his sporadic conquests of women who were no more to him than a temporary satisfaction of the flesh, and cringe away from his own weakness.
Inherited from his father? He didn’t know, but with the old man dead and gone, and his wife refusing to sleep with him now that all hope of having a child was abandoned, he felt at times as if he dwelled at the bottom of a well in a sludge of sorrow.
He saw Lisa’s name everywhere. The weekly newspaper ran a regular advertisement of her latest ranges. Lisa Logan dresses. Lisa Logan sheets, pillowcases and bedspreads, all patterned with the dainty designs she had made her trademark.
Once, in a fit of unbearable loneliness, he went into the small shop on the corner of Nelson Street hoping to see her, asking for her by name, only to be told that Mrs Carr was down in London and would be there for another two weeks.
‘If you’d like to leave your name, sir?’ The girl behind the counter had stared at him with open curiosity. ‘I’ll see Mrs Carr gets any message.’
He knew then that he must forget her. He told himself he was lucky to have a business so thriving that work could and must be his salvation. Contracts were flooding in as rows of terraced houses, built over a hundred years ago at the time when the cotton mills were flourishing, were being knocked down. They were being replaced by uniform blocks of flats, destroying the intimacy and close-knit communities of the little streets. And in many cases destroying also the lives of the people who lived in them.
Not that any of that was the concern of this new Jonathan Grey, a man who was making money so fast that he had to employ a full-time accountant if he wasn’t going to hand most of it back to the government in taxes.
And as the years passed, his memories of Lisa faded, as memories do. Just now and again he would stop what he was doing and see, in his imagination, her swaying walk as she left him on the dingy platform, and his heart would contract with longing.