by Marie Joseph
The change in Delia was so swift and incredible that Lisa could only sit back on her heels, astonished. ‘Yes, I’ll tell you all about it, Mother.’ She got up and reached for the jacket of the same grey suit she had worn the last time she saw Jonathan Grey. Was her mother really losing her mind, and if so, how could she behave so rationally in between her bouts of forgetfulness? She hovered uncertainly by the door. ‘Mother? I must go now. This meeting at Mr Carr’s house could be a most important step up for us. If he makes it well worth my while then I may stay on at the shop, but he doesn’t know that.’ She gave a tweak to the Peter Pan collar of her silk blouse. ‘If I can work more or less freelance, but with him paying the overheads, I might get a bit put by before I branch out alone.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
To her horror, Delia gave a shrill trill of a laugh. ‘Just like your father. Always off to clinch some business deal.’ Her face sobered. ‘But none of his deals ever came off. They were out to get him, you see, just as they’ll get you. The name of Logan is a dirty word in this town.’
So much in a ferment was Lisa’s mind that the journey by bus out to Mr Carr’s house on the outskirts of the town wasn’t half long enough for her to get herself rightly sorted out, as Miss Howarth would undoubtedly have said.
Her mother’s behaviour baffled and worried Lisa, but then Delia had always behaved unpredictably: up in the clouds, or sunk deep into the depths of depression, and some of the time putting it on.
‘You’re a two-headed woman!’ Angus used to shout. ‘I never know which hat you’re wearing, and neither of them suits you, if the truth be known.’
Resolutely Lisa put aside all thoughts of her father, blanking her mind into stony indifference. Sometimes she marvelled at the fact that his blood even ran in her veins. He had fathered her, that was all. She stared through the window at the quiet Sunday afternoon streets, seeing nothing.
But Jonathan had called to apologize, she was sure of that. He had gone away appalled at Delia’s behaviour, and soon after his own mother had died. The silk curtains, made with such care and delivered by Mr Carr, would be hanging at the tall windows, but Alice Grey would never have the pleasure of drawing them to shut out the dark evenings, never admire the way their pleats fell in a muted extension of the pale washed walls. And yet the rent continued to be paid. Lisa pressed her lips close together. Now that it could no longer be construed as a kind of blackmail to keep the truth from Patrick’s wife, why hadn’t it been stopped? Jonathan had something to do with it. Instinctively she knew that.
But even as Lisa asked herself the question, the answer was plain. She could guess at the things Delia would have shouted through the letter-box, and now more than ever the Greys, father and son, would be determined to play down Delia’s existence in the only way they and their kind knew. By the silent power of money. With money anything was possible. Without it a person was helpless, as helpless as a reed broken by the wind.
When Lisa walked into Richard Carr’s sitting-room at the back of the large, red-bricked, semi-detached house her determination to best him was apparent to him at once in the tilt of her head and the light of battle in her wide grey-blue eyes.
‘This is Irene.’ With obvious pride, Richard drew a chubby, golden-haired little girl into the circle of his arm. ‘Say hello to Miss Logan – to Lisa.’
A pair of cornflower-blue eyes stared up at Lisa without expression, and a rosebud mouth set into an obstinate line.
For a minute Lisa was puzzled. The round face topped with a mop of yellow curls seemed strangely familiar. Then she remembered. Once, a long time ago, her father had given Lisa a doll with a face just like the expressionless one gazing up at her. The doll’s eyes were supposed to have closed when it was laid back, but something had gone wrong with the mechanism so that the vivid blue eyes had stared endlessly at nothing, infuriating her with their pot-hard indifference.
‘Hello, Irene,’ Lisa said, then smiled to show it didn’t matter when the child ducked her head and ran from the room.
‘That’s right, love. Go and tell Millie we’re ready for tea.’ Richard motioned Lisa to a chair, holding out his hand for her jacket. ‘Sorry about that. I’m afraid she’s very spoilt. She chatters away nineteen to the dozen with my housekeeper, but with strangers she clams up. You’ll be lucky if you get a word out of her all afternoon.’
He stood awkwardly, holding the jacket, with its designer label, in his hands. It was the first time he had seen Lisa in anything but the obligatory shop-black, and the sight of her in the silk blouse with her full breasts clearly outlined and straining against the pearl-button fastening made him avert his face, then as suddenly turn to stare at her again. She was so incredibly lovely. There was something very vulnerable about her, in spite of the familiar challenge in those sea-grey eyes. A fervent longing swept through him. He wanted to pull her to her feet and hold her close against him, telling her that if she insisted on leaving nothing would matter to him any more. Not the shop, not his carefully hoarded profits, not the ominous rumble of war clouds on the horizon, nothing at all if she went away, if he did not see her every day. Physical desire, held in careful check since his wife died, rushed the blood to his face.
Now he knew why he had broken his strict rule of never mixing business with pleasure. Of never meeting his assistants out of working hours. Quickly he turned and carried the jacket into the wide hall, curbing a desire to press its satin lining against his face before he hung it on the hallstand. When he went back he avoided Lisa’s eyes, in case his own betrayed his agitation.
As he stood by the fireplace, gripping the edge of the mantelshelf, he was saved by the rattle of teacups as Millie Schofield wheeled the trolley into the room.
Nodding briefly to Lisa, she spoke directly to Richard: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Carr, but there’s no doing anything with her.’ She set a silver teapot down on the tiled hearth and capped it with a quilted cosy. ‘She’s skulking out there and won’t come in. Even her favourite strawberry jam won’t ’tice her out of the kitchen.’
Lisa studied Millie Schofield with interest. She reminded her of Norma Shearer in a film she had seen called The Barretts of Wimpole Street, all oval, unthinking face and eyes not quite true. When she straightened up from the hearth, Lisa saw that she was almost as tall as her employer, or could it have been because of the queenly way she held herself with her brown hair piled up on top of her head, secured at the back by a tortoiseshell comb? Lisa, used to seeing Richard treated with deference and even servility, found herself immensely intrigued by the woman with a Christian name which in no way fitted her face. She surfaced from her assessment in time to hear Richard making the necessary introductions.
And that in itself was strange. Brought up with servants, Lisa tried to imagine her mother introducing one of her small staff to a guest, and failed. Delia had always treated her maids with proper disdain.
‘If you don’t mind, Mr Carr,’ Millie was saying, ‘I’ll take Irene out for a walk. I know you said you have work to be getting on with, so she’ll be better out of your way.’
She doesn’t like me, Lisa told herself. I’ve done nothing but sit here smiling politely, but I’ve made an enemy. Then, as Richard passed her a cup of tea with a hand that trembled imperceptibly, her eyebrows drew together in a frown. What was going on in this strange household where a child was allowed to dictate her own pattern of behaviour? Where a woman who was merely the housekeeper spoke to her employer with such familiarity, and where the master of the house appeared to be on the verge of losing his temper?
Richard ran an impatient hand through his thick hair. ‘When we’ve finished eating we’ll get down to business.’ He passed a plate of thinly cut salmon sandwiches, then sat down opposite her. ‘Before you leave here I want your promise that you’ll stay on at the shop.’ He was staring at her mouth in a way that made Lisa feel a crumb must be lodging indelicately on her chin. Raising a small, embroidered napkin she dabbed at her lips.<
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‘You don’t understand,’ she said quietly. ‘I have to make – it is essential that I make far more money than I can ever earn working for you, Mr Carr.’
‘Richard,’ he said in a strangulated voice.
‘Richard.’ Lisa said his name without a trace of self-consciousness. The atmosphere of the overheated house was getting underneath her skin. The front door had banged behind Miss Schofield and the child, but their presence was still there, hanging in the air like a disapproving cloud.
When they had finished the meal Richard wheeled the trolley back into the kitchen, refusing Lisa’s offer of help with the washing up.
‘Millie will do it.’ He rolled back the top of a bureau and took out a bulging file. He came and sat down beside her, spreading it wide on his knees. ‘These are the figures for the past year.’ He riffled through the papers. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that since you began the scheme of making up curtains free, and since you started making something of a name for yourself as an interior designer …’ he said the last two words with an air of masculine patronage that irritated Lisa, ‘… the profits have almost doubled.’ He nodded and she saw with surprise that his face wore an odd expression, almost of despair. ‘I admit I haven’t been altogether fair to you. Oh, I put your wages up from time to time, but I refused to recognize your true potential. Now I do.’
‘Since I said I’d like to leave and set up on my own.’ Lisa gave a little laugh, holding out her hand for the topmost sheet of figures. ‘That’s understandable. You’re a man, Richard, so you find it hard to accept that a girl could just walk in and put her finger on the obvious remedy for increasing your revenue.’ She was beginning to enjoy herself, now that she could see she held the winning cards. ‘You resent the fact that you weren’t the one to see what could be done, and now you want to cut me in.’ She touched his wrist lightly with her forefinger. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
He flinched at her touch, his fresh complexion flushing to an angry red. ‘You’re always right, damn you, Lisa Logan. I’ve seen you nearly every day for the past two years. I’ve watched you work and I’ve seen the way you can wheedle blood from a stone. I don’t know where you get it from, but it’s there, inherent in you. You look like something off a bloody chocolate box, and yet you’d best a Rothschild in a business deal.’ He ran a hand through his hair, beside himself with tearing emotion. ‘You’d pinch the pennies from a dead man’s eyes if you could add them to your wage packet without anyone seeing!’
She made a sound compounded of hurt and a flaring anger at the injustice of what he was saying. This wasn’t how she had planned it at all. She had come, she realized now, prepared to listen, OK, maybe out of a certain curiosity, to hear a plan she would have the pleasure of turning down. And now the score was all wrong. This man she had thought to be as unemotional as a flat stone was seething with an uncharacteristic emotion in what should have been a meeting controlled by her, motivated as she was by her desire to see him crawl as he finally came to understand that not even he could stand in the way of her ambition.
‘Have you ever been hungry?’ Her voice was deathly quiet. ‘I don’t mean hungry for the next meal, but hungry when there isn’t going to be a next meal?’ She glanced round the over-furnished room. ‘Have you ever seen everything you owned taken from you to pay debts incurred by someone who used money like it grew on trees? Have you ever had to hang your clothes round a fading fire to dry, praying that they wouldn’t be too damp to wear the next day? Have you ever had to exist on seven shillings and sixpence a week, and be grateful every single day that a man you loathed was paying the rent as well as having just enough coal delivered to stop you freezing to death? Oh, yes, Richard, you’re right! I would have snatched the pennies from dead men’s eyes, and spent them too, because twopence would buy a cabbage I could have made into soup.’ She felt her face flame so hotly that her eyes watered. ‘And if I don’t get my mother out of the house we’re forced to live in she’s going to go mad. Insane. So now you see why money is my God! Because without it, as far as I can see, there is no God! He doesn’t live down our street because it’s hard to pray on an empty belly. That’s why!’
As his arms came round her she tried to move away, but he held her fast. Held against his chest she heard his voice, low, roughened with compassion. ‘Lisa. Lisa, oh, my little love. You should have said. You should have told me. I’m not a hard man.’ He raised his head. ‘I must have been blind. I try not to involve myself.’
‘With your workforce?’ she sobbed against his chest, and felt him nod.
‘My father always instilled in me that the dividing line between caring and involvement must never be crossed. And I’ve tried to follow his example, Lisa, though it wasn’t easy taking on the running of the shop at twenty-eight, with a new wife and a baby to keep happy.’
His arms tightened round her, and she made no move to draw away. Her father used to hold her like this when she was troubled, as though his strength was the only thing keeping her from disintegrating. Richard smelled like her father too, a mixture of tobacco and Coal Tar soap, a reassuring scent keeping her safe.
At first his kiss was no more than a brushing of his lips against her skin. A tickling of the fair moustache on her closed eyelids, her nose, her chin. It seemed as if he would never kiss her mouth, but when he did, holding her face still between his hands, the searching movements caught her emotions, blotting out the world outside, soothing and possessing, so that in a strange paradoxical way she became a child again.
He ran her home, insisted on doing so. He had asked her to marry him and she had refused, but he wouldn’t, he said, take no for an answer, and in the meantime he would pay her three pounds a week, a sum that made her gasp.
In the first flush of his declaration of love he had become her master, not in the obvious way of employer and employee, but with a glorying masculine pride of possession, swearing that with him around nothing would ever hurt or worry her again.
And for the time being, because her whole being craved for even a temporary contentment, she relinquished her fighting spirit and was as docile and feminine as this strong man, almost old enough to be her father, obviously wanted her to be.
‘Is this it?’ Richard tried to look noncommittal as he stopped the car outside the little terraced house in Mill Street. Two whey-faced children abandoned their game of hop-scotch chalked out on the flags and came to stare with open curiosity at the black saloon car.
‘Yes, the one with the mucky step.’ Lisa spoke flippantly, hiding what she refused to admit could be shame. She had seen the women in the street down on their hands and knees, mopping not only the step but a semi-circle of flags outside their front doors, and told herself that never, never would she lower herself both physically and mentally to do the same. ‘Thank you for the tea,’ she said, suddenly overcome with shyness. ‘I’ll be thinking over what you said.’ She walked quickly round the car, only to find Richard standing on the pavement beside her.
‘I’ll come in and meet your mother. It might as well be now as later,’ he added, ignoring the way her eyes widened with dismay. ‘There’s no need to look like that, love. From now on your worries are mine. Right?’
The little house was wrapped in silence as they made their way through the front parlour, past the unpolished furniture set out as if it was waiting to be collected by the owner of a saleroom.
‘Mother? I’m back. I’ve brought … .’ Lisa’s voice tailed away as she walked into the back living-room, expecting to see Delia crouched in her chair by the fire, huddled into a shapeless cardigan, a cigarette dangling between her lips. Then, as she saw what lay huddled on the floor, her throat thickened so much that she could hardly speak.
Delia was lying on the floor with the rug rucked up underneath her twisted legs. She was partly beneath the table, and when they pulled her out and Lisa lifted her head gently she saw with a sudden stab of horror that her mother’s mouth was twisted to one side with saliva runnin
g from it.
Delia was conscious, but when she tried to speak the words came out like mirror writing, jumbled back to front, slurring, indecipherable words, stopping short of the end syllables.
‘She’s had a stroke.’ Richard pulled a cushion from a chair and laid the jibbering head on it. ‘Where’s the nearest phone?’
Lisa took her mother’s left hand, shuddering at the leaden weight of it. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know.’ She found she was shivering uncontrollably. ‘The man in the top house on this side will let you use his phone. He’s a secretary of a union, and if he’s out I think there’s a kiosk about three streets on along the main road.’
When Richard had gone she took off her costume jacket and laid it across Delia’s chest, tucking it in round the thin shoulders. As she did so the grotesque lopsided mouth wobbled. ‘An? Ang …?’
Lisa closed her eyes in disbelief. It was her father’s name Delia was trying to say. After all this time, in spite of everything, his was the name she called in that strange guttural moan of a voice.
‘He’s not here just now, Mother.’ Holding her tears tight inside her, Lisa smoothed the hair back from Delia’s furrowed forehead. ‘Just lie still. The doctor will be here soon. He’ll know what to do.’
There was a half-smoked cigarette lying on the oilcloth surround. The ash had burned itself out, but a cylindrical-shaped burn mark showed plain round the edges. Lisa shuddered. If the cigarette had fallen on the rug, her mother could have been … the whole house could have gone up in flames. While she was eating scones spread with strawberry jam and being kissed by Richard Carr, her poor pathetic little mother could have been burned to death.
The face she turned to Richard as he came through the door was a mask of pain.
‘The ambulance is on its way.’ He came and knelt down beside her. ‘It’s what the doctor would have done anyway. This way is quicker.’
‘She’s so cold,’ Lisa whispered. ‘The fire must have gone out long ago. How long do you think she’s been lying here?’
