Looking For Lucy

by Julie Houston

  ‘Problems at work. I mean, that’s bad enough, but it’s Vanessa now as well. I’m going to have to go and see her after we’ve eaten. She’s being totally unreasonable about money—just wants more and more all the time, ringing me constantly at work. She even came to the office today demanding I leave what I was doing and speak to her. Well, I’m not going to her and Justin’s house, I can’t abide the man. Don’t want him putting his damned two penn’oth in as well.’

  ‘What does he do, Justin? For work, I mean?’ I was curious. ‘He seems to have plenty of money himself, swanning around in that huge Merc.’

  Peter frowned again and downed the glass of whisky in one. ‘God knows. He’s a total shyster, total waste of space. He certainly didn’t have a Merc until he married Vanessa…’ He poured two more fingers. ‘It’ll be him that’s put her up to this, demanding more and more all the time.’

  ‘Don’t have any more to drink if you’re going out,’ I said, taking the bottle from him. ‘Where are you meeting her?’

  ‘I said I’d pick her up outside the house—I am not going in. It’s bad enough seeing Justin’s smirking face on the field at weekends. You know, Clem, I’m seriously thinking about moving companies—the Marquess of Newcastle’s Regiment of Foote in Northumberland are still willing to have me. I think you’d like it there, too.’

  I don’t think I would, I thought, but instead said, ‘Oh don’t do anything hasty, Peter, You’d miss Neville and Beefy Brenda if you left your lot and started again further north.’

  ‘Beefy Brenda…?’ Peter looked perplexed for a moment, but his mind was, for once, apparently on more pressing problems than my lack of respect for the pack’s current ‘Good Wife’. He looked at his watch. ‘I said I’d pick Vanessa up in an hour. Is that all right with you, Clem? Have you had a good day, darling? Has Allegra enjoyed school again?’

  While I laid the table, enjoying the sensation of being happy, content, almost at one with my new family and situation, I chatted to Peter telling him about lunch; what The Fear-Bold had said about Allegra; how David Henderson had offered me a little job only to realise, as he tapped away on his laptop at the kitchen table, he really hadn’t listened to a word I was saying.

  ‘Peter, are you all right?’ If he hadn’t even taken in that David Henderson had asked me to work for him, he really wasn’t himself. ‘Peter…?’

  ‘Hmm?’ He continued to scan his screen, not even looking up when Sophie slouched into the kitchen finishing what was left of a McDonald’s.

  ‘Sophie!’ I couldn’t stop the disgruntled tone even though I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t rise to Sophie’s behaviour.

  ‘That’s me.’ She smiled at me with raised eyebrows, daring me to question what she was eating.

  ‘We’re just about to eat. Why on earth are you eating a burger now?’

  ‘Well, it’s a good job I got Mum to drop me off at the drive-in down on Elm Lane. If I’d known you were cooking fish—’ Sophie shuddered as if she’d been told she was about to be served a cup of cold sick ‘—I’d have got Mum to buy me two.’ She shuddered again. ‘You know what they say about fish. Like guests—’ she held my gaze, looking me up and down as she methodically chewed on her burger before swallowing ‘—they both begin to stink after three days.’

  ‘Whatever, Sophie.’ I managed to speak calmly. ‘But I thought you were vegetarian, and junk food, you know, is particularly bad for spots.’ Shit, why had I said that? Why had I come down to a just sixteen-year-old’s level? ‘I’m sure your dad and Max would like you to sit and eat with us.’ I smiled. ‘Particularly as they won’t see you for a few weeks once you’re back at school.’

  Ignoring me, Sophie went over to Peter and put her arms round his shoulders. ‘Daddy, I think I’ll come with you when you go to meet Mummy. It would be really nice for the three of us to be together again. We could go to that champagne bar Mummy goes to with Justin.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Peter looked up, distracted, one eye still on his screen. ‘Sorry, darling, your mother and I have a few things to sort out. You can’t come with us tonight. You stay here with Clem? Hmm? Maybe there’s some girly things you… you girls can do together? Do each other’s nails or… or… hair or something?’

  If I hadn’t been feeling so cross with Sophie, I’d have laughed out loud at that. I stored the little snippet to tell Izzy next time I saw her, and started to load the dishwasher. ‘Food is just about ready, Sophie. Would you go and tell Max and Allegra? They’re in the snug watching TV.’

  Tutting, Sophie dropped the yellow Styrofoam takeaway box with its greasy remains onto the kitchen table and stalked from the room, yelling to Max that his fish was ready. Of Allegra, she made no mention.

  *

  Later, much later, when the younger children were in bed, when I’d dissected the events of that day’s lunch on the phone with Izzy and when I’d asked Sophie if she’d like a cup of tea with me and been royally turned down, I went out into the garden, George at my heels, breathing in the intoxicating smells of the early autumn night. Walking down towards the Secret Garden, as Allegra had christened it, I glanced across the fields to where I could see the lights in David and Mandy Henderson’s house. The downstairs rooms appeared dark but one of the upstairs rooms gave out a gentle glow of light.

  I had a sudden vision of David Henderson in that upstairs bedroom, slowly undoing the buttons on the front of a woman’s white shirt while kissing her neck with an oh-so-soft mouth, his dark hair brushing against her skin…

  Stop it, Clem, you silly bitch, I warned, knowing the woman to be myself. Bloody well stop it. I pulled a couple of pernicious weeds from my rosemary patch before realising all the herbs needed a good watering. I was just deciding whether to make do with the watering can or if I could be bothered, as I really ought, to unravel the garden hose, when I heard the sound of a car coming to a halt on the gravel at the front of the house.

  I walked, with George in my wake, down the path that led from the back to the front of the house to meet Peter. I’d bring him out here to the herbs, fill his senses with the heavenly smells of the garden, get him to discard his shoes and socks even and walk with me, barefoot on the dew-laden grass.

  ‘Mrs Broadbent?’ The woman, and obviously senior of the two police officers, came towards me. ‘Could we have a word?’

  19

  SARAH

  Sarah had spent the next few weeks of that hot summer of 1984 looking for him. She dragged April back to the Red Lion most lunchtimes and as soon as lectures were over. She stayed behind in the cavernous art rooms until long after most of the other students had left for home or their digs in the hope that he was a final-year student and would be, like so many others, behind with a final project, panicked into working late on an unfinished sculpture or canvas.

  Sarah’s own art work became more and more erratic as she veered away from the safe set pieces she’d been working on, compelled, instead, to fill huge—and expensive—canvases with the crimson, cadmium yellow and vermillion oils that flowed effortlessly: an extension, it seemed, of the fire inside her, ignited when those strong brown arms had held her in a tight embrace, and fuelled daily by a longing to see him again.

  For the first time in her nineteen years Sarah felt alive as opposed to just existing. She tried to think of other times down the years when she’d felt anything like the excitement and longing she was experiencing during these last few weeks leading up to the long summer break but, apart from the birthday when she’d been given Raffles, her much longed for spaniel puppy, and the anticipation of holidays and exeats from school, nothing compared to this.

  She took to rereading D. H. Lawrence together with the poetry of Christopher Marlowe and Andrew Marvell, and lost the half stone of puppy fat—a tenacious reminder of the white sliced bread and cake she’d eaten in abundance at boarding school out of boredom and longing to be free from its confines.

  So when, almost ten days later, she spotted him on Albion Street in the city centr
e, she found herself frozen to the spot, her brain apparently unable to send a message to her legs to move away from the double glass doors of Boots she’d been on the point of going through in order to buy Tampax.

  He was with a group of men and women handing out leaflets to the afternoon shoppers but as Sarah stood, rooted as any tenacious weed, he reached into the back pocket of his denim cut-offs for cigarettes and, in the act of lighting up, looked up and saw her. It was plain he knew Sarah’s face, had come across her and recently, but also obvious he couldn’t quite place her. He said something to the others, handed one of them his pile of leaflets and walked over to where Sarah stood in the doorway, obstructing customers intent on their purchase of toothpaste, cosmetics or their picking up of a prescription for hay fever or haemorrhoids.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ He smiled, puzzled.

  ‘Erm… yes, you had your… I mean… it was in The Red Lion… erm… the night of that charity do…’

  He laughed, showing perfectly straight white teeth. ‘“Relax”? Right?’

  ‘You kissed me,’ Sarah said, and then blushed furiously at her inane comment.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he laughed again. ‘You’re gorgeous.’ He continued to smile down at her from his six-foot height until she thought she might just fall to the street, lying in a heap until she was swept up at the end of the day together with the abandoned tab ends, sweet wrappers and spilled ice cream cones.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’

  She didn’t like to say she’d just been going to buy tampons, and shook her head. ‘I’ve just about finished here,’ he said. ‘Do you fancy a drink?’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ she said, longingly. ‘Really lovely.’

  *

  ‘So how come, if you’re a Yorkshire girl, you’ve got such a posh voice?’ Johnny asked as he handed Sarah a half pint of cider and took a long, thirsty pull on his pint. His own accent was southern, London probably, Sarah guessed as they made their way to the tables outside Whitelock’s Ale House in Turk’s Head Yard and found a couple of spare seats.

  ‘Boarding school,’ Sarah said, slightly embarrassed, and then, to change the subject, asked, ‘What were the leaflets you were handing out?’

  ‘Oh, just trying to get support for the miners,’ he said. ‘The strike doesn’t really seem to have affected the people of Leeds. We thought we’d try to get the people round here to see what’s happening just a few miles away in Barnsley and Doncaster.’

  Sarah reddened as she recalled her father, only that morning, harrumphing behind his Telegraph, denigrating Arthur Scargill and the ‘bloody, idle miners.’

  ‘’Bout time Margaret got the damned army in and sorted them out,’ he’d muttered through a mouthful of toast and ginger marmalade to anyone who was listening. As her mother had already left the dining room—there was only so much of Gerald Sykes’s insistently noisy mastication she could take at any one time—and Sarah wasn’t hearing anything except the continual replaying in her head of the few minutes she’d spent in the arms of the beautiful boy in The Red Lion, it was left to a now ageing Raffles to bear the brunt of Gerald’s scathing diatribe.

  ‘So, you’re an art student?’ Johnny Lipton was asking. ‘I got kicked out for not doing any work a couple of years ago but decided to stay round here in Leeds rather than go back to London.’

  ‘But how do you live?’ Sarah asked. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Oh ,bit of this, bit of that. There’s always someone wanting something doing or wanting some gear scoring.’

  Gear? Did he mean clothes? Sarah glanced at his faded knee-length cut-offs and oversized white T-shirt; there was nothing there to give her any clue that Johnny Lipton might be any sort of fashion trendsetter.

  ‘You really are incredibly sexy,’ Johnny said, taking a length of Sarah’s dark curly hair and winding it round his finger, the effect of which brought colour to her cheeks as well as her face nearer to his. ‘How on earth did I let you out of my sight the other Saturday?’

  ‘You sort of just disappeared,’ Sarah said shyly, her heart hammering as he began to stroke her face. ‘One minute you were there and the next you were gone.’

  ‘Well, I can’t believe that. I must have had something on or I would have whisked you off to bed.’ He smiled lazily, enjoying her discomfiture at the suggestiveness of his words as well as the effect he knew he was having on her. He reached for his cigarettes and offered her one.

  ‘Oh, I don’t smoke,’ Sarah said hastily.

  ‘Cigarettes?’

  ‘Anything…’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you’re a virgin as well, are you?’

  Sarah hung her head in shame. ‘There’s not been a great deal of opportunity to… you know… to lose my… you know my …’

  ‘Virginity?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, that.’ Sarah was scarlet-faced, unable to meet his mocking eyes. Oh God, he’d never fancy her now knowing she was so inexperienced. He must have hundreds of beautiful, experienced women knocking on his door. She took a too large gulp of her cider and, in doing so, spilled some down her face and onto her hands.

  Johnny took her hand, licking the spilt alcohol from between her fingers and Sarah felt a warm excitement spreading in the region of her knickers.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she muttered. ‘My mother is expecting me for supper.’

  ‘You live at home? And you’re an art student?’ Johnny was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘All part of the bargain,’ Sarah said miserably. She knew she’d lost Johnny Lipton now; what could this god, this Adonis want with a nineteen-year-old virgin who had to go home to Harrogate to eat her mother’s excuse for shepherd’s pie?

  ‘Bargain?’

  ‘My parents agreed to my doing art college rather than being finished in Switzerland as long as I agreed to live at home.’ Miserably Sarah bent to collect her bag and art portfolio and made to leave. She’d ruined everything by not being the sophisticated, experienced woman he was so obviously used to. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘But, Sarah, I have to see you again. You can’t desert me for a second time.’ He was laughing at her, teasing her. ‘Come out with me tomorrow night?’

  He was asking her out: a date. Sarah felt happiness flood through her. She was going to see him again. She left him ordering another pint before moving over to join a group of people who had hailed him as they walked in, and floated to the station to catch the Harrogate train, a ridiculous grin on her pretty face.

  *

  Johnny Lipton monopolised Sarah for the next couple of weeks, waiting for her outside the art college at lunchtime, refusing to let her go back to lectures and the unfinished projects that were necessary to complete her foundation year. Any guilt Sarah felt at abandoning both her studies and her friendship with April—who, furious at Sarah’s getting off with the enigmatic Johnny Lipton when it was quite obvious it should have been herself and not the gauche, inexperienced Sarah, had turned quite unpleasant—evaporated like early morning mist the minute she saw him lounging against the wall waiting to whisk her away.

  They spent the long afternoons of that wonderfully hot June in, or sitting outside, The Red Lion or Whitelocks or any number of bars where Johnny was always hailed with great enthusiasm by both the landlord as well as the, mainly student, clientele. Johnny would never have been left shivering on the hockey field or netball court desperately waiting his turn to be chosen, Sarah mused one afternoon as Johnny was accosted by a group wanting to buy him a drink the moment they walked into a bar.

  ‘Well, who left you?’ Johnny asked once he’d become free and joined her outside at their table and she’d laughingly told him her thoughts. ‘I’d have chosen you every time, straight away, number one on my list.’ And he’d kissed her so tenderly, Sarah had flung her arms round him, hugging him fiercely.

  Sarah’s happiness was marred, however, when, after drinking rather too much sweet cider, she’
d made her way to the Ladies’, tipsily cannoning off a couple of tables as she went. Waiting for a toilet to come free, she gazed at herself in the chipped, dirty mirror, hardly recognising her face, tanned from a week of sitting in too many pub yards and gardens, or her brown eyes, pupils huge with love for Johnny Lipton.

  ‘I see Johnny’s got a new girlfriend.’

  Sarah stiffened as the words drifted over one of the engaged cubicles.

  ‘Yeah, I saw,’ came the response from the adjacent toilet. ‘Not his usual type, is she? Very pretty though, don’t you think, with all that cloudy dark hair? Johnny must be going for the virginal Madonna look this week.’

  ‘Well, it was Theresa Adamson last week,’ the disembodied Irish-accented voice returned, ‘and she’s certainly no virgin. She reckoned he was the best ride ever.’

  ‘Well, whoever the virgin is, she won’t be much longer.’ Both of them cackled and, heedless of her need to pee, Sarah fled.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Johnny, taking advantage of her absence, was once more chatting to two men inside the pub. He quickly put what looked like a wad of notes into his back pocket, grabbing Sarah’s arm as she dashed past him. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Sarah tried to smile but instead, to her horror, found she was crying. ‘It’s just something someone was saying in the toilet.’

  Johnny glanced up as two girls walked from the Ladies’. ‘About me?’

  Sarah nodded miserably. ‘And me.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  As they walked down The Headrow, busy now with afternoon shoppers, Johnny took her hand. ‘Look, people round here know me. They talk.’ He stopped and turned her face to his. She was quite adorable, he thought. He really had to have her.

  ‘I can’t tell you what you’re doing to me, Sarah. Look.’ Subtly, he moved her hand to his crotch and, mortified, she jumped back in embarrassment.

  ‘This is the effect you have on me.’ He grinned. ‘Come back with me, now. Come on’