Lisa Logan

by Marie Joseph

  Anger took over. What was she doing anyway, driving around, when on the wireless that very morning motorists had been warned to keep off the roads in the north? Why had she imagined for a single minute that Irene would be glad to see her? Millie Schofield was dead, but from beyond the grave Millie was still working her cross-eyed vengeance. No, that wasn’t fair, that was cruel. But Irene had been cruel. The days were long gone when Lisa could charm her way into affection. This year she would be forty-five, but like a child she had run back home. And it served her right, because it was always a mistake to go back. Anyone with any sense would tell you that.

  And if she, Lisa Logan, had had any sense she would be three thousand miles away now, held fast in love and affection with Peter and his lovely Marianne. It would be cold there too, but a different kind of cold, a white glittering cold with the Capitol building and the White House etched against a glorious sapphire-blue sky.

  She could be walking with Greg Perry, hand in hand along snow-packed sidewalks. She could be married to him, lying in bed with him, watching him watching her with his lazy eyes, cocooned in centrally-heated contentment. Lisa glanced at her watch. Almost twelve o’clock. Yes, they would just be waking up over there, and yet here she was, an intruder, a ghost returning to a scene from her past, driving through streets in a cold so damp it froze the very marrow in her bones.

  The cough was hurting now, a tearing pain in her chest. Lisa shivered. She knew though, didn’t she, why she wasn’t married to Greg Perry? She tried to catch her breath. Why not be honest about it? Her one subconscious reason for coming back had been to see him, the one with the uptilted dark eyes and teasing voice, the one who had sworn he was dying of love for her.

  She was driving now along a street as familiar as the back of her hand. There was the chip shop where she had queued for two two’s and threepennorth of dabs, taking them home in triumph to her mother sitting by the fire and smoking her life away. And to the left and right of her were the steep little streets sloping down to the mills, cobbled streets that had once rung to the sound of clogged feet hurrying through the early morning darkness to the weaving sheds.

  Now no one wore clogs, or shawls clutched beneath chins, but foam-back coats instead, at fifty-nine shillings and eleven pence, knee-length against the bitter cold. Lisa glanced at a girl scurrying home for her dinner, back-combed hair above a pointed face blue with cold, a hard-faced girl reminding her suddenly of someone she had known a long time ago.

  Signalling left, Lisa drove down a side street, turned right, then left again into Mill Street, coasting down the frozen cobbles.

  She had been so intent on keeping the car on the icy street that the scene of utter desolation hadn’t registered. The houses on her left had been partially demolished, leaving spaces like gaps in a set of teeth, bare walls open to the lowering sky, windows like sightless eyes showing interiors of front parlours still with patterned wallpapers, dirtied and damp from the erosion of wind and rain. On her right the houses were still standing, with every other window boarded up, waiting for the demolition squad to move in.

  Slumped over the wheel, fighting to control the cough shaking her body, Lisa saw with surprise that Number 16, Mrs Ellis’s house, had a lived-in look, with lace curtains at the upstairs windows and a potted plant incongruously in place at the front downstairs window.

  It was a street of ghosts, a Hollywood set with no spark of life. No children playing hop-scotch on the pavements, no small boys swinging on a rope tied to the evenly spaced standard lamps. No neighbours gossiping on doorsteps, their arms folded over cross-over flowered pinnies, no steps and window bottoms mopped and stoned with a neat edging line in cream. Nothing to show that anyone had ever lived there; a frightening manifestation of the fact that no one would ever live there again.

  Getting out of the car, Lisa swayed on legs grown suddenly weak. After she had lifted the iron knocker of Number 16 and heard it bang against the scarred and paint-less door, she stood there staring down at her boots without any expectation that the door would ever open.

  ‘Mrs Ellis?’

  The woman Lisa remembered had been as rounded and squat as a beer barrel, with brown hair waved into ridges by steel kirby-grips. Bird-bright eyes had twinkled behind the thick lenses of her spectacles and her cheeks had shone with red-veined colour. This woman’s hair was as white as milk. She seemed to have shrunk, but when she smiled the eyes were the same, shrewd and warm, welcoming even as they widened in startled disbelief.

  ‘Nay! It’s not young Lisa!’ The eyes crinkled round the outer corners with obvious pleasure. ‘Well, come in, then. No good standing there catching your death. The kettle’s on. Come in, luv, and take that coat off or you won’t feel the benefit when you go. Well, I never! This is a surprise. I thought summat nice was going to happen the minute I opened my eyes this morning, but in all my born days I could never have guessed … well, well. Sit you down, luv, I’ll have the tea brewed in a minute.’

  It was too much. Coming after Irene’s cold rejection, the warmth in Florence Ellis’s Lancashire voice broke Lisa’s self-control. Tears came into her eyes, and though she stared into the fire struggling not to blink unless they fell, she wasn’t quick enough.

  ‘Nay, luv. Don’t upset yourself. I know what it must be like for you coming back to this street after all this time.’ A pointed chin jerked towards the dividing wall. ‘What you went through as a young lass doesn’t bear thinking about. After all this time I still imagine I hear your mother knocking and shouting. Then you finding her dead on the floor like that.’ A cup of tea was held out for Lisa to take. ‘Get that down you, luv, and there’s plenty more where that come from. Strong with plenty of milk, just the way you used to like it.’

  ‘It isn’t that, Mrs Ellis.’ Lisa took a comforting sip, feeling the hot tea trickle down her aching throat. ‘It’s seeing you like this. The street all knocked down. It must be terrible for you, living like this with everyone gone.’

  Mrs Ellis settled herself in her own chair with her own cup of tea. ‘Aye, it’s terrible all right, but not as terrible as if I’d done what them buggers – pardon me – at the town hall said I ought to do.’ She sniffed. ‘Think they know what’s best for folks like me when all the time they know next to nowt. Shifting folks out to flats up by the workhouse.’

  Lisa looked puzzled. ‘Workhouse, Mrs Ellis? You mean the hospital, don’t you. It hasn’t been a workhouse for donkey’s years. There’s no such thing as workhouses these days.’

  ‘It’ll allus be the workhouse to me. Anyroad, I’m not going, and I’ve told them so. They’re not putting me in a box till I’m dead, and that’s what them flats are. Little boxes like what they put eggs in these days. Egg boxes with television aerials sprouting out of them. That’s what they are.’

  ‘Joan?’ Lisa tried to remember the name of the other daughter. ‘And Margaret? It was Margaret, wasn’t it?’

  The white head nodded. ‘Aye, you’re right. Our Margaret’s gone to Australia. Emigrated four years back with her husband and two little boys. And our Joan, she married one of them GIs and went to live in America. He were stationed at that big camp near Lytham, a nice lad.’ She chuckled. ‘Always chewing gum, and wore his trousers too tight, but our Joan broke it off with that lad called Jack at the top house to marry him. Always knew which side her bread was buttered did our Joan.’

  ‘And you’ve never been over to visit either of them?’

  The remembered twinkle was back in the short-sighted eyes again. ‘Nay, lass. I haven’t got the money to go gallivanting all over the world. Besides, they’ve got their own lives to live now. I fetched them up, and as long as they’re happy I’m well content. Nay, the furthest I’ve ever been was to Morecambe for a week’s holiday, and then it rained every day. I’ve never been one for travel, and neither was my Jimmy… .’ She nodded towards a framed photograph on the mantelpiece of a soldier in the uniform of a First World War private. ‘The one and only time he saw abroad was wh
en they shipped him off to France. It’s funny, you know, lass, but while I can’t remember what I did yesterday, he seems to have come back to me these past months. I can hear his voice, an’ see him coming through from the scullery, wiping his hands on a towel and telling me about his day at the paper mill.’ She lifted a brown teapot from the table and held out her hand for Lisa’s cup. ‘He never wanted to go, but like them all he felt it were his duty. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, but they put a gun in his hand, them war-mad generals did, and sent him over the top to kill Germans he’d never had no truck with. Same as the last time. Men fighting with their feet in the mud and their heads filled with slogans to spur them on.’

  She refilled her own cup then sat down, shaking her head at the tragedy of it all. For a while it seemed as if she had almost forgotten that Lisa was there.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ Lisa leaned forward. ‘Mrs Ellis? What are you going to do when the bulldozers move in to finish their job? You can’t really believe they’ll leave you here? Not leave just one house standing on its own.’ Her voice was full of compassion, but Lisa knew what she had to say. ‘I’m surprised they’ve let you stay here as it is.’

  ‘They haven’t let me stop on.’ The old face was twisted with loathing for the nameless ‘they’. ‘Nay, if they’d had their way I would have been out on the street a long time ago. It were that builder chap what stood up for me. Mr Grey.’ A spark of life lit the faded eyes. ‘His father used to own the houses on this side, rented them off in the old days. An’ now his son is contracting a firm to knock them down… .’

  ‘Mr Grey? Jonathan Grey?’ Lisa’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘Aye, that’s him.’ Mrs Ellis nodded again. ‘He says if I’ll be patient he’ll find me a place. A house, not a box. He knows how I feel. There’s a lot of streets they’re leaving alone, and not all that far from here, either. Mr Grey says there’s a lot of Pakistanis coming to live in them. Indians, you know. But he says they’re good-living and quiet, and he knows I don’t mind what colour a face is if there’s a kind heart to go with it.’ She chuckled. ‘I never thought the day would come when I’d have an Indian living next door. Do you remember Gandhi, or was you too young? He came to Darwen in 1931 and stopped in Spring Vale where my mother lived then. He were a funny little man all right. He wore a sheet wrapped round him and walked about in his bare feet, so they say. Then seventeen years later he was shot to death in an ambush. An’ that’s about all I know about Indians, or Pakistanis, or whatever they want to call them.’

  She was talking as the lonely do, rambling from one subject to another, reliving memories and mixing them up even as she remembered. When Lisa got up to go the old woman looked at her strangely for a moment as if she’d forgotten who her visitor was.

  ‘Come again, lass,’ she said, as she stood on the step, face as pale as parchment, eyes behind the thick lenses of her spectacles suddenly alert again. ‘If there’s nobbut a pile of bricks you’ll know they’ve won, but come again.’

  When Lisa got back to the hotel she went straight to her room and picked up the telephone. The number was there, engraved on her memory, his office number, of course, the number she had sworn never to ring. 2956.

  ‘Is that Grey’s, the building contractors?’ Surely that wasn’t her voice, hoarse with the aftermath of her illness, trembling with nerves? Lisa sat down on the edge of her bed, feeling her face flush and the palms of her hands begin to sweat. ‘May I speak to Mr Jonathan Grey, please?’

  The new girl who had replaced Sylvia three years before had no need of a swear box. Quiet and efficient, she ran the office with meticulous attention to detail. Invoices were attended to and filed, letters typed as beautifully as if they’d been printed, tenders received and passed through to her boss’s office the moment they came in. And telephone messages jotted down and handed over as soon as possible.

  ‘Oh, there was a call for you, Mr Grey.’

  Jonathan had rushed into the office at a minute to six o’clock, bringing in with him a rush of cold air, apologizing for his lateness, holding out his hand for the letters to sign, telling his secretary to get herself off home and be careful how she went as the pavements were like glass.

  ‘Important?’ He was already halfway to his own office, shrugging off his car coat, prepared, she knew, to spend at least another couple of hours at his desk.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ His secretary followed him and laid the slip of paper on his desk. ‘A Mrs Carr.’ She studied her writing. ‘Yes, that’s right. A Mrs Carr.’

  ‘Lisa?’ The paper was snatched from her. ‘Where is she? What did she say? God damn it, woman. I can’t read your bloody writing! What the hell does this say?’

  ‘It says the White Bull.’ There was no reproach in the cool clear voice. ‘And the time of the call is also there. Five minutes past one. I told her you were out before she rang off. I assured her you’d get her message.’ A slight touch of grievance crept into her tone. ‘I didn’t know where you were, Mr Grey. You said you had to go and see to some scaffolding reported as unsafe, but you didn’t say where. There was no way I could have contacted you, not with the whole town festooned with scaffolding. It might have been on any one of the sites.’

  ‘The number!’ Jonathan’s face was dark with anger. ‘The bloody number, woman!’

  ‘I’ll get it. Right away.’

  There was no mistaking the grievance now. The straight back was rigid with disapproval as Miss Entwistle, not accustomed to being spoken to like that, walked back to her desk. Tut-tutting to herself, she lifted the telephone directory from a bottom drawer and began to riffle peevishly through its pages.

  She knew her boss was overworked. The hours he spent in his office after long days on building sites overseeing his workmen made her wonder if he had a home to go to. Miss Entwistle ran a finger down a page. But tiredness and its consequent irritability was one thing, swearing like that was quite another. Never before had Mr Grey shouted at her like that. It was most uncalled for, and terribly unfair when her going-home time was half-past five… .

  ‘Leave it, Miss Entwistle!’

  Looking up in astonishment over the turquoise rims of her upswept spectacles, she saw her employer actually running past her desk, dragging on his car coat as he went. The door was wrenched open so violently it was a wonder, Miss Entwistle decided, that it didn’t come adrift from its hinges.

  She called after him. ‘The letters, Mr Grey? You haven’t signed the letters!’

  ‘To hell with the letters! Leave them, girl. Go home and leave them. Sign them yourself if needs be, but don’t bother me with them now!’

  She blinked as the door slammed, shaking the building to its very foundations. Then, muttering to herself, she put the directory tidily away, covered her typewriter, buttoned herself into her sensible tweed knock-about coat, tied a scarf printed with horses’ heads over her neatly rolled hair, changed from her flatties into ankle boots trimmed with fur, switched off the lights and went out into the darkened yard, past the piles of timber and through the outer door into the street. Remembering, in spite of her injured feelings, to tread carefully just as Mr Grey had said she must.

  The winter’s night had closed in, bringing with it a cold so intense that the windscreen iced over as Jonathan switched on the wipers.

  Lisa. Lisa. Lisa. A voice in his head said her name over and over again. She was here, in the town, his lovely Lisa. She had been here all day, and he hadn’t known. How could that be? Why hadn’t he sensed her presence?

  It was his fantasy come true, the fantasy he had played out in his mind over and over again – of seeing her walking down a street, skirt swaying round her slim legs, of hearing her voice on the telephone, a wiping out of all the barren years between as she came into his arms and told him that all that had passed was gone and forgotten, that from now on it would be just the two of them unhampered by ghosts intruding on their dreams.

  Heedless of the road hardened to glass, he stepped
on the accelerator.

  Oh, dear God, but he’d played it all wrong up to now. The years he’d wasted showing misplaced loyalty to a wife who had cared less than nothing for him. Integrity. A good old-fashioned doing of what was right. And where had it got him?

  Feeling the car wheels slide on the skating rink of a road, he turned a corner too quickly, and had to wrench at the wheel to set it back on course again. An enormous sense of elation possessed him. The fur-lined coat was too hot. Impatiently he pushed it away from his neck.

  Amy hadn’t deserved all that loyalty. He should have left her long ago. He’d been soft and weak, blaming himself for foisting his father on her early in their marriage, realizing too late that their flimsy so-called love would have died anyway.

  He was nearly there. Tension mounted in him like a tightened rope. He felt suddenly young again, the way he’d felt as a twenty-year-old driving his dark green Bentley at maniacal speeds round country roads. A red Ribble bus moved out from the kerb causing him to swerve into the middle of the road to avoid it. The slow-moving cars filled him with a tearing impatience as he cursed them for crawling along like sluggish beetles.

  Too late he saw the policeman stepping out into the road, trying to flag him down. Almost standing on the brake pedal to avoid knocking him over, Jonathan felt the car swing powerless and out of control. Frantically he fought the wheel in an attempt to control the steering. He saw the lamp standard looming up in front of him at the same split second that the bonnet of the car rammed into it with a hard grinding crash of metal.

  ‘He was asking for that, the crazy fool,’ the policeman muttered, even as he ran to see what, if anything, he could do.

  At eight o’clock Lisa gave up staring at the telephone on her bedside table. Jonathan wasn’t going to ring.