by Marie Joseph
She had been into the dining-room to toy with the food on her plate, her eyes never leaving the door leading out into the reception area. Surely at any moment she would be summoned to take a call? Surely Jonathan would ring the minute he got back to his office?
It was no use trying to convince herself that her message hadn’t been passed on. The coolly efficient voice of his secretary had assured her that Mr Grey would be told when he came in later in the afternoon.
‘I never leave before he comes in,’ she had said.
But nothing had happened.
Up in her room Lisa took off her shoes, rubbed her cold feet and climbed on to the high bed, piling the pillows against the mahogany headboard. It had been a wasted journey, a desolate homecoming, but it had taught her a lesson. There was no going back. Ever. Forward was the only way.
She knew she ought to ring Gordon Conway. She would have to do just that in the morning, but there was a strange sadness inside her, holding her still, preventing her from making the necessary business call. Gordon would probably insist on coming round to the hotel, and she wasn’t in the mood to talk about profit margins, new spring lines. For the time being she just wanted to be, to stay quietly, trying if possible to rationalize this strange and utter desolation.
Lisa picked up a book, the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, a well-thumbed copy she had picked out at random from the shelves in her London flat.
‘And after all, the weather was ideal,’ she read, and put it down again on the shiny green bedspread.
She would be all right. Well, of course she would. Life had been very good to her. She wasn’t consciously unhappy. It was merely the aftermath of influenza making her feel lethargic, holding her so quietly as if suddenly time itself had ceased to be.
Back in London there were the days in the hustle and bustle of her shop when she felt exhilarated, uplifted, excited by the colours, the scents, the frantic rush to get a new design off the drawing-board and on to the cutting table. Lisa picked up the book again, but the sensitive heart-hurting prose failed to move her, and once more she tossed it aside.
Maybe it was time to do that faintly obnoxious thing and count her blessings. Lisa frowned. Why this sudden feeling of having to reassess, to enumerate her assets? She shrugged. Why not?
OK then. She had some friends, not close and mainly in her own line of business, but they were there none the less. She had money, beautiful clothes, and she could have lovers too if she wanted them. And there was one special man in America who loved her very much. For a moment Greg Perry’s craggy features and thick grizzled hair appeared like a colour print before her eyes. There was a man who would have been so easy to love … so very easy.
There was her flat with its wildly expensive rent, her books, her records. There was eating in luxurious restaurants, walking in the London parks, the city streets on Sundays; alleyways to be explored, steeped in history, the quietness of St Paul’s Cathedral when the tourist season was over, with choirboys rehearsing in the stalls, young pure voices rising to the great high dome.
The list was endless. She could go on and on without mentioning Jonathan Grey once. And all this she had found without him, so she really had no need of him. None at all.
Lisa closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the telephone standing black and squat on the locker beside her bed.
Jonathan had loved the girl she had been once; had offered that love and been sent on his way. So why not accept that to him she had been merely a dream, the kind of dream that many a man likes to cherish against the days when they look at their wives and imagine what might have been.
Perhaps it would have been different if their love had been consummated? Lisa’s mouth curved upwards into a smile at the way her thoughts were once again emerging as platitudes. But there was more than a grain of truth in her reasoning.
If she and Jonathan had slept together then at least their physical hunger for each other might have been assuaged. Like his father before him, Jonathan could have tired of the chase. Slowly Lisa shook her head so that the dark wings of hair fell across her cheeks.
Love and lust. Some would say there was no difference, but they were wrong, totally misguided. Lust was a momentary thing; love was a holding out of hands to the sky.
For a little while Lisa slept, then the silence woke her, a strange eerie silence of winter-cold streets. Through a haze of bewilderment she reminded herself that she was home, back in her birthplace, deep in her grass roots.
And the feeling was terrible. She felt as if she were stranded, completely alone, as if she were on the top of a mountain with dank mist swirling beneath her feet. Shivering, she tried to compose herself into her normal tranquillity.
After tomorrow she must go on alone. Gently she must let the memory of Jonathan Grey slip from her mind, like a dream soon forgotten.
Maybe some day she would love again.
It could be Greg, far away in leafy Virginia, or it could be a man she had still to meet. She could be anywhere in the world. She could afford to travel anywhere she wanted to. To Copenhagen. Yes, why not Copenhagen? Tears misted Lisa’s eyes and she blinked them angrily away. Yes, there she’d be dining with a man in the Tivoli Gardens and he would smile at her, making her fall in love with him.
Or Paris? She could be there, following up her idea of branching out, of going into volume business with a bigger sales staff, a second factory. She would walk the boulevards, staring at the clothes, knowing exactly how she was going to adapt them to her own market, and there in a pavement café a man would raise his glass to her. And she would smile back.
As she was smiling now at the idiocy of it all.
It was no use. Lancashire women didn’t trade in dreams, and she, Lisa Logan, was a northern woman through and through. She sighed deeply.
All her life she had used Jonathan as her yardstick and, measured against him, no other man had stood a chance. For wasn’t he a part of her childhood, a slipping in and out of her life as she grew older, the only one who had known her father and still respected that tall, laughing, dramatic man with hair that blazed red and a fiery gold? Her father… . Lisa trembled as the familiar sense of rejection swamped her again.
Still wearing her woollen dress, she had slept the long hours away, and now the room was paling with an approaching freezing dawn. There were tears on her cheeks as the door opened, and all she saw at first was a tall silhouette framed there. Raising herself on an elbow Lisa stared in disbelief.
‘Father?’ Her voice was a whisper. She was dreaming; she had to be. Sitting up, she stretched out a hand as the figure approached her bed.
‘Jonathan? Is it you? Can it possibly …?’
When he came closer she saw that a long scar made ugly with stitch marks ran from his hair-line down his forehead to the corner of an eye. He touched it, smiling his well-remembered wavy smile.
‘I had an argument with a lamp post on my way to you last night.’ His voice was as teasing as ever. ‘They don’t bandage these days, just spray something on.’ He sat down on the bed beside her. ‘I’ve discharged myself, leaving an Irish Sister doing her nut, and I’ve left a little man downstairs doing the same when I insisted on coming up instead of having him phone you.’
Soberly now he reached for her hand. Lisa’s heart beat so loudly that she was sure he would hear it. She could feel it in every pulse in her body.
‘Oh, Jonathan,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Too long, love.’ His eyes never left her face, those dark, uptilted eyes she had sworn she was going to forget. ‘And now I’m never going to let you go away from me again.’
Suddenly she began to cough, and immediately his arms came round her. ‘Sweetheart, you’re ill.’ Slowly his fingers moved across her back. ‘How thin you are. Oh, love, what have they been doing to you?’
‘They?’ The familiar indignation his teasing had always been able to arouse surfaced. ‘No one’s been doing anything to me! I’ve had flu
, that’s all. It’s fashionable to be thin. Can you imagine a podgy Mary Quant?’
Moving away, Lisa stared into his face. In the half-darkness his eyes seemed almost black. ‘You’re the one who needs taking care of. You should be at home. In bed.’ Her voice faltered. ‘Your wife … Amy … she must be worried sick about you.’
‘I doubt if she would be, even if she knew.’ His expression hardened and for the first time Lisa noticed the silver wings of hair where once sooty-black sideburns had grown – like the imprint of a tarred thumb, she remembered.
‘Amy is living with her boyfriend in Crewe,’ Jonathan was saying, his tone dead-pan. ‘His name is Cushy Compton. They met at a dinner party given by the Borough Engineer, and that was that.’
‘Cushy Compton? In Crewe?’ Laughter bubbled in Lisa’s throat so that she began to cough again. ‘Oh, Jonathan, you’re teasing again.’
‘Quite true, love, and your laughter is most unseemly.’ He winced, putting a hand to his head. ‘Oh, Lisa, my darling, I’ve been the world’s biggest fool.’ He was serious again. ‘You did it, woman, do you know that? You forced your blasted puritanical notions on me so that for years I did what I thought was right. I let you go because you were convinced in that practical mind of yours that we were heading for a replay of our parents’ mistakes.’
The pain in his head mingled with the pain of his loss as he thought about the empty years that had divided them. He was tired almost to death, but what he had come to say must be said: ‘Lisa. I’ve loved you since you were a freckle-faced kid with your hair in pigtails. I’ve dreamed about you at night and ached for you down all the long, lousy years. If I’d been killed last night coming to find you then it would have been a fitting end, wouldn’t it? Because that’s all my life’s been. Endings without beginnings. Longings never satisfied.’
She saw the tears on his cheeks as he struggled to say the words he had wanted to say for a long, long time.
‘It’s almost too late, Lisa, darling. We’re not children any more. We both married the wrong people because of what happened between my father and your mother. Don’t you see?’ His eyes blazed into hers. ‘If you’ve got someone else then I’ll go away. For ever this time. I’m tired, Lisa. I’m so tired of arguments I’ll even marry you and be known as Mr Logan, if that will make you happy. I’ll come with you to your damned cocktail parties and stand by your side holding a glass of bloody champagne and a biscuit topped with a bloody anchovy’s tail if that’s what you want. I’ll sit like a pansy on a little gold chair and stare at mannequins’ legs if that pleases you.’ His voice broke. ‘But don’t leave me again, Lisa. Not again. Never again. Please. I don’t think I want to live if you leave me again.’
‘Oh, Jonathan.’ His name was like a prayer as she whispered it softly. Slowly, as if drugged, she raised a hand and traced the contours of his poor battered face. Gently she lifted the thick, silver-threaded hair away from the stark wound on his forehead. Tenderly she ran a finger down his straight nose, round the long sensitive curve of his mouth, lingering as his lips parted slightly.
It was as sensuous, as deeply erotic as the act of love. Her eyes answered all his unspoken questions, caressing, offering, surrendering joyfully to his adoration.
‘I love you,’ she murmured at last. ‘And I’ll never leave you, ever again.’
‘Never? Not for a moment?’ The teasing was there again, and as they smiled at each other, Jonathan’s pain throbbed into a dull ache as if her touch had made him whole again. He held her close.
Here was no clinging vine of a woman. Here in his arms was a woman of great courage and strength, a mixture of beauty and willpower, tempered with compassion.
‘I’ll put Gordon Conway in charge of the London shop. He’ll like that,’ she said. Puzzled by his shout of laughter, she drew him down on the bed beside her, and felt his fingers tangle in her hair as they kissed.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, the old-fashioned endearment coming easily to his lips. ‘When I came in here at first you thought I was your father. You called me father.’ He held her away from him, tired dark eyes searching her face. ‘You know he is dead, don’t you? You must have heard?’
The little sound she made gave him her answer. Horrified, he cupped her face in his hands, speaking quietly, gently, as if he would take her pain and make it a part of him.
‘It was about six months ago. In Australia. It was just a few lines in the paper. Angus Logan, formerly of The Laurels. No details, merely a mention.’
Sliding his hands down over her shoulders, he drew her close. ‘You didn’t know, did you, love? And I tell you without preparing you. Oh, God, how stupid can a man be? I never dreamed you wouldn’t have heard.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lisa’s voice came muffled. ‘Don’t say anything.’ She stirred in his arms. ‘For a minute, don’t say anything. Please… .’
Carefully, calmly, Lisa examined her thoughts, her reaction. So he was dead, her beloved father. Dead and gone. The dream she had sometimes had of him sending for her as he lay dying, of someone sending for her, would never materialize. She would never see him again, never hear his voice explaining his rejection of her, wiping out in one glorious moment her bewilderment, her long-held sense of loss. She sighed as Jonathan’s arms tightened round her.
Jonathan … oh, Jonathan. Her father was dead, but Jonathan was here. Lisa lifted her head, no trace of tears on her face.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said again. ‘Darling, it honestly doesn’t matter. If I cry now it will be because I feel you are expecting me to cry.’ Her lips curved into a faint smile. ‘I’m still a Logan you know, and passing up a chance of high drama doesn’t come easily. But I feel nothing. Only a fleeting sadness that I’ll never talk to my father again.’
In the half-light her eyes were very clear. ‘It’s taken me a long time to accept the truth of what he did, but now I am able to. My father died for me the day he walked away. My mourning has been over for a long time, and now I know he’s never going to come back I can let him go properly.’ She smiled a twisted smile. ‘I think that’s how he would want it to be. Don’t you?’
The sadness in her voice almost broke his heart. ‘But my father would have been so proud of me, so very pleased for me. The Logan name, you see. I lifted it out of the mud for him, Jonathan. I wish he’d known I’d made it, almost to the top. Is that a conceited way to think?’
‘Maybe he did know, love. Why not believe that?’
Jonathan answered her tenderly, all teasing gone from his voice.
For a brief moment, the tall shadow of the man with red-gold hair was between them, his memory holding them still. Like a blessing, Lisa thought, letting him go from her, willingly, without reproach or bitter condemnation.
‘I’m grateful to you for telling me. It’s better that I know,’ she whispered.
And that was all. As he held her close, Jonathan’s eyes misted over with the tears that should have been hers.
‘I’m here now,’ he whispered.
When the cold northern light crept into the room they were sleeping, the past over and done with, their future promising contentment unhampered at long last by what had gone before.
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First published 1984
© Marie Joseph 1984
ISBN 0 09 155500 0