by Marie Joseph
Jonathan stared at the artificial logs glowing red in the ornate electric fire in the hearth. He would have preferred a coal fire, but Amy had wanted to know who would rake the ashes out and cope with the inevitable dust when Mrs Farnworth only obliged three days a week?
What she did with her days puzzled him at times. He knew she had joined a number of societies, vying with the other women in the number of different outfits she could wear in one season, but as far as he could make out she had no hobbies. Pies came from the shop wrapped in cellophane, cakes glistening with lurid pink and green icing came in white boxes from the confectioner’s, and Amy would drive three miles to a chip shop she liked rather than grill a plaice from the fish market or bake a river trout in its own juices in the large and expensive oven in the streamlined kitchen.
‘Most of her models wear boots.’ Amy flipped over the pages of a mail-order catalogue lying on the arm of her chair not taken up by her glass of bitter-lemon. ‘Not that I would ever want to look like them. Matchsticks with hip bones like coat-hangers wearing dresses like sacks. I suppose she’s too toffee-nosed for anyone up here now.’
Jonathan knew his wife was referring to Lisa, but passed no comment. It was a long time since Amy had mentioned her name, and somehow the omission had been more ominous than any of her previous snide remarks. Besides, they were going out to dinner at the house of the town’s Borough Engineer, and he didn’t want to arrive with Amy flushed and ready to put him down whenever he opened his mouth to speak.
His wife stood up, smoothing down the skirt of the emerald-green wild-silk dress over her ample hips. ‘There was a piece about her in the paper the other week.’
Jonathan lost his temper. ‘Why don’t you say who you mean? God damn it, I haven’t seen her for years!’
‘OK. Lisa Carr – sorry, Lisa Logan. The woman you should have married instead of me.’
Jonathan drained his glass, then immediately jumped up to refill it from the decanter on the massive Swedish-style sideboard. It was strange, but when his wife talked like this with that touch of sadness in her voice, making her suddenly vulnerable, he had the almost forgotten urge to put his arms round her, to try and assuage her obvious sense of deep insecurity. He turned round.
‘I married you, love.’ Walking back to his own chair he sat down heavily. ‘I might ask why you married me?’
‘Because you looked so pretty in your army officer’s uniform. Because all my friends were getting married, I suppose.’
Jonathan swilled the whisky round in his glass and stared at it with something akin to distaste. ‘We didn’t have much of a start, did we?’
Amy twisted the gold chains round her finger. ‘You mean the war?’
‘That, of course, but not just that. No, I meant my mother dying and us living with my father, his drinking and all those tests you went through at the hospital.’
He didn’t mention Amy’s years of secret drinking, nor her bitter, frustrated anguish when she was forced to realize she could never have a child. Nor the times he had pleaded with her to adopt a baby, only to be told she wasn’t the sort of woman who could love another woman’s child.
As if reading his thoughts, Amy said suddenly, ‘Her son got married recently. In America. To a lady doctor. It was in the paper. On account of his mother being a so-called celebrity, I suppose. It said your Lisa Logan had been on television down south being interviewed about her range of evening wear.’ Amy sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in one of her creations. You have to look as if you’ve just come out of Belsen to wear one of her skimpy frocks.’
‘It’s time we were going.’ Jonathan took a cigarette from an onyx box on the side-table and lit it from a matching lighter. He eyed his wife’s ample curves, accentuated by the green dress, sensing again her deep insecurity and doubts about her own appearance.
‘You look very nice, love,’ he said, holding out her mink stole. ‘I like the way you’ve done your hair.’
Amy treated him to an icy stare. ‘You’re a bloody liar. You never like the way I look. I see it in your eyes.’ Her face went red. ‘You compare me with other women, and you always find me wanting. You’d like me to wear plain black dresses like Mrs Borough Engineer will no doubt be wearing tonight, looking like a black crow in need of a good feed.’ She snatched a diamanté-encrusted purse from the low table. ‘But I won’t do it, Jonathan! I’ll sit and listen to her talking about her children and how well they’re doing at university, and how their Sally is working for Oxfam, an’ I’ll know all the time she’s patronizing me. You will come home with another contract in your pocket and that will be that. The Greys will have shown themselves to be the respectable married couple the business dictates they must be, and all will be well till the next dinner, or the next Masonic Ladies’ Night, or the next bridge evening with your business buddies. God, but your self-centredness shocks me rigid. You’d kow-tow to the devil if he bought a plot of land for you to build on.’
‘You hate me, don’t you, Amy?’ Jonathan said, as he turned the car out of the semi-circular drive fringed with standard rose bushes spaced like sentinels.
‘Despise would be a better word,’ his wife said, checking her hair in the mirror set in the sun-visor in front of the passenger seat.
‘Would it worry you if I left you?’ Jonathan’s expression was grim as he drove along the tree-lined avenue.
‘Why should it?’ Amy’s voice was very cool, very clear. ‘I would wave you off, if you really want to know.’
That night, lying alone in the second bedroom of the sprawling ranch-type house, Jonathan allowed his thoughts to take him along paths untrodden for a long, long time. Amy’s words had left him drained and sad.
She had enjoyed the dinner; she had been put next to a man Jonathan had never met before. A widower, or a divorcee, Jonathan wasn’t sure which, Adam Compton had laughed uproariously throughout the long, calorie-laden meal, swigging his wine like water, accepting second helpings, recounting anecdotes of his inglorious youth in Canada, where he’d served as a flying instructor during the war.
‘Never clapped eyes on an enemy aircraft,’ he’d bellowed. ‘Cushy Compton, that’s what they called me. Still do, as a matter of fact.’
And Jonathan had suspected that underneath the table, beneath the spread of his hostess’s pink damask tablecloth, his left hand was firmly cupping Amy’s knee.
Adam Compton had been asked to make up the numbers, Jonathan was sure of that, but the woman on his right was obviously not Cushy Compton’s type. She was a quiet, dark-haired woman in her forties, maybe, though she was so slim it was hard to tell.
She reminded Jonathan of Lisa… . He raised himself on an elbow and reached for a cigarette. Why not admit it? Why not admit that every small, dark-haired woman reminded him of Lisa? He drew smoke deep into his lungs and coughed. How ridiculous could a man get at his age? Next year he would be fifty. There were silver wings curling over his ears. He had to wear glasses for reading, and if he didn’t cut down on the beer he’d be developing a paunch.
The capacity for romantic love was the prerogative of the young, not the middle-aged. When Lisa had failed to answer his note after her husband had died, he had faced his moment of truth. Lisa wasn’t prepared to have an affair, and he wasn’t prepared to leave his wife. Stalemate. QED. He was his father’s son and Lisa could never forget that. So … he had let her walk out of his life.
After all was said and done, he wasn’t bloody Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. He was Jonathan Grey, a Lancashire man born and bred, loyal, dependable, as all northern men were supposed to be. Men from his neck of the woods didn’t walk out on their wives because they fancied someone else. Especially when their wives had had a rough deal. He ground out the cigarette with disgust.
There were signs that the new generation would view things differently. Kids born during the war didn’t believe that marriages were made in heaven. Already, only halfway through the sixties, the divorce rate was rising dramatically
. Fail to make a go of things and get out seemed to be the maxim.
Jonathan crossed his arms over his chest, trying to compose himself for the sleep he craved.
But a long time ago Angus Logan had upped and gone, hadn’t he? For a brief moment Jonathan saw himself packing a case and creeping downstairs, leaving his wife sleeping as Captain Logan had done. He shook his head, remembering the trail of sorrow the gallant captain had left behind: his wife dead of misery not two years later, and his daughter marrying the first man who had stretched out a hand to comfort.
And he had let it happen… . Blind to his real feelings, filled with hatred of the Logan family, he had pursued his own ends, married a girl who wouldn’t sleep with him unless …, watched his mother die, and seen his father drink his left-over life away. Because of grief or guilt? He would never know, but the damage done when Angus Logan walked out of his house in the middle of a dark windy night long ago still lingered like the trail of a slimy snail.
Jonathan pulled the sheet over his head as if by doing so his thoughts would be blotted out. Of one thing he was certain. If ever his own marriage ended, it must be Amy who severed the ties. He would never abandon her.
And if that made him a fool, then a fool he was prepared to be.
But in spite of his noble reasonings, his inherent sense of integrity, Jonathan Grey, Master Builder, Rotarian, Mason, sidesman at his local church, whispered a heartfelt prayer: ‘Lisa, if ever you do think of me, please, please, remember me with love.’
It was after two o’clock when Jonathan slept at last, but three thousand miles away in Virginia, USA, it was still only nine o’clock.
‘I’ve never seen a racoon,’ Lisa was telling the broad-shouldered man sitting by her side on the large couch. ‘Oh, my goodness! Do they do a lot of damage in the garden?’
Greg Perry, special correspondent on the Washington Post, twinkled at her through heavy-rimmed spectacles. All evening he’d hardly been able to take his eyes off her. She was so pretty, this Englishwoman, so softly spoken, so vulnerable in spite of the fact he’d been told she was a name to be reckoned with in the London scene of haute couture. He’d accepted the invitation to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Virginian home of his old friends Jan and Bill Orland with pleasure, knowing that the food would be superb and the company equally so, but never had he dreamed he would be meeting such a honey of an Englishwoman.
The Orlands’ daughter Marianne, now qualified as a doctor, was married to this beautiful woman’s son, and there they were, glowing with happiness, whispering together at the other side of the room.
Explaining about the racoons, Greg nodded towards the young couple.
‘It must be very gratifying to see your son so happy. A pity you couldn’t come over for the wedding, but it was so quick and quiet I think even Jan and Bill were taken by surprise.’
‘I was in Paris,’ Lisa told him, and he saw a shadow cross her lovely face. ‘They didn’t give me enough notice to make arrangements, but I’m here now and they’re as happy as you say, so why worry?’
‘That’s exactly my motto. Why worry?’ He grinned, and Lisa thought suddenly what a nice man he was, even though the placing of them together at table and now in the gracious room for coffee had been a more than obvious ploy at matchmaking.
‘He’s a great guy, Lisa,’ Marianne had said. ‘His wife died years ago, but he’s been all over the world on assignments. You name a war, and Greg’s covered it. You two will have an awful lot to say to each other.’
‘The drive out here from Peter and Marianne’s apartment in Washington was absolutely breathtaking,’ Lisa said. ‘The trees must be glorious in your fall, when they’re turning red and gold.’
‘You just about missed them.’ Greg’s strong face softened with pride. ‘The blossom in the spring and the leaves in the fall. Those are the times to be here. I’ve recently acquired a lot not far from here – for my old age, you know.’ An elongated dimple came and went at the corner of his mouth. ‘I have a dock on the lake and a small sailboat plus two canoes. I come out here whenever I can. Did you see the lake as you drove out? No? Well, I’ll tell you now, it’s man-made, Lisa, ’bout two and a half miles long and half a mile wide, wooded on all shores. Y’know this was once a huge swamp in Civil War days. They fought the Battle of the Wilderness here. Then, at the beginning of this year developers began to dam up the streams, so I can see it turning into a vacation resort when they begin building in earnest. So maybe then I’ll just move on again. I don’t like being crowded.’
‘You’d hate my flat in London then.’ Lisa smiled at him. ‘It’s in a huge block with doors leading into silent corridors. We live like rabbits in a warren, except that rabbits are more sociable.’
‘Will you have dinner with me tomorrow evening?’
Startled, Lisa looked round in time to see her son and his wife leaving the room, closely followed by Bill and Jan.
‘It’s OK.’ Greg’s eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘They’ve gone down to the games room in the basement to work off some of that turkey and pumpkin pie. I guess they’re leaving us alone. Do you mind? And will you have dinner with me tomorrow? I’ll pick you up around seven if that’s OK.’
Lisa hesitated. To refuse would be churlish, but to accept too readily might make him think… . And oh, dear God, she was tired of being wined and dined by men who thought she was going to pay for the meal by going to bed with them. Even at her age! She was weary of being told how beautiful she was, how clever, how different from their own wives who did nothing but sit on their bottoms all day.
But this man had never once expressed surprise at her life-style, even when Peter had made her sound like a cross between Coco Chanel and Mary Quant. Maybe it was because women who blazed a trail in their own careers were taken more for granted over here. Greg himself had made them laugh over dinner describing his six a.m. runs before showering and being behind his desk at eight. Even the children started school at a quarter past eight, and Peter’s neighbours’ kids thought nothing of working at their homework until nine-thirty every evening. Go … go … go, that was the way it was, a breathless dashing and striving to achieve. She smiled. ‘Thank you. I would like to have dinner with you. At least we’ll make the young ones happy.’
‘I told you you’d like him, Lisa.’ Marianne twisted round in her seat as Peter drove them back to town. ‘He’s a real nice guy.’
‘Pity you can only stay for a week,’ Peter said, driving confidently on what to Lisa seemed like the wrong side of the road. ‘It doesn’t give you all that time to get acquainted.’
‘Gordon Conway can only be in London for a short while.’ Lisa was glad of the darkness hiding the blush which she could feel warming her cheeks. ‘He’s a bit out of his depth with the London side of the business. Hem-lines aren’t his forté.’
‘He sounds like a real nice boy,’ Peter said in a mincing voice, and Lisa contradicted him with such vehemence that they both burst out laughing.
‘A dark horse my mother.’ Peter turned the car out of a long winding lane into the straight wide freeway. ‘She’s a terrible worry to me. It’s her age, of course.’
‘And only to be expected,’ said his wife. ‘Parents can be a problem.’
Alone in her room Lisa struggled to open the window, then gave up in disgust. The apartment was so warm she decided to sleep with only the sheet for covering. Fresh air was not to be tolerated here apparently. It was central-heating in winter and air-conditioning in summer. Along with overheated shops in downtown Washington, a-glitter with Christmas decorations already; ‘Have a nice day,’ from shop assistants; wide smiles from black lift – no, sorry! – elevator attendants; magnificent white buildings etched against a brilliantly blue sky; shopping malls like indoor fairy grottos, a consumer’s paradise; and a general air of such friendliness that already, after two days, Lisa felt relaxed and happy.
Tomorrow morning she was going alone on the Metro bus, which stopped across the road from the apart
ment, into downtown Washington, to browse round Garfinkel’s store, studying the clothes, the accessories, the buttons, the braids. Peter and Marianne were both working and she’d assured them that she’d be perfectly OK. Then, of course, Greg Perry was coming over in the evening to take her to dinner.
Pushing the single sheet aside, Lisa lay on her back listening to the wail of a police siren, followed by another even as the sound of the first died away. Totally contented, so far away from the business that there was nothing she could do about it even if Gordon Conway insulted her very best clients, Lisa breathed in the warm air. She had been cold for a long time, she decided. The storage heaters in the Kensington flat warmed, but didn’t cosset. Not like this. You could walk around naked, she thought, leaving all the doors wide open, and still not feel a draught. She was thawing, she decided. Slowly and blissfully thawing, bones, muscles, skin. And spirit. She smiled into the darkness. She might flirt a little, even fall in love a little. Temporarily, of course. Greg Perry had the most beautiful hands… . She shivered at the memory of his hands, then fell suddenly asleep.
Oh, yes, she assured herself, sitting opposite Greg Perry in a candle-lit French restaurant in Georgetown that same evening. This man was perfect for a holiday liaison. He’d been around too much to hurt easily, and the way he was looking at her was giving her a newly-minted feeling of beginning something that wouldn’t be spoiled by a serious involvement. In five days she would be flying back in darkness over the Atlantic, and they would never meet again.
‘You look happy,’ he said.
‘I am.’
‘Your smile looks as if it wouldn’t wash off.’
‘Like a cat’s.’
‘That’s right. I like the way you pin your hair up at the back. It’s surprising really, because so many women look stern and forbidding like that. Like actresses in a TV soap opera when they go for a job and want to look plain. They succeed, but you don’t. Look plain, I mean.’ His eyes twinkled at her behind his spectacles. ‘Dear Lisa. You’re very English, did you know? That’s why people are staring at you.’