Lisa Logan

by Marie Joseph

  As her mouth moved against his cheek she felt the slight stubble rough and exciting. ‘There must be a reason why we … why we feel like this, but let’s not talk about it, please. It’s all happened before, can’t you see? We can’t take over where your father and my mother left off. It’s … oh, God, it would be obscene!’

  There was no anger in his face when she pulled away from him, just a sad perplexity. ‘I am not my father, and you are not your mother.’ His eyes were almost black with the intensity of his longing. ‘I have a need of you, Lisa, and you have a need of me.’

  ‘Wasn’t that what they had?’

  For a long moment they clung together, as cobwebs danced in a sudden shaft of sunshine through the dirty window. Their faces were dazed, and when they walked together towards the door into the street they stumbled as if they were sleep-walking.

  They parted on the windy corner, nothing resolved, nothing arranged.

  ‘I’ll be in touch directly,’ he told her, his expression stiff. Then, without further words, he walked away from her with his long, loping stride, his head bent.

  Back at the shop Lisa walked straight through into the workroom at the back, grateful for the dinner hour which meant that May and Miss Howarth were walking round the Market House with its fawn-coloured paving and stalls bordered with fancy green terrazzo patterns.

  Richard was serving. She could see him standing at the counter, a pencil behind a neat ear, his head inclined towards his customer with his usual deference.

  There was a length of sprigged cotton material spilling over a worktable, and Lisa picked up a fold, running it through her fingers.

  Low down in her stomach she could feel a dragging physical pain of longing. Love wasn’t like that, she told herself fiercely. Love didn’t happen suddenly like that. Love was tender, soft and quiet, not a grinding ache of the guts. Deliberately she tried to disgust herself.

  Her mother had been like that. Like a bitch on heat, she told herself, lusting after her lover. Jonathan Grey’s father. And she, Lisa, would have none of it. She wasn’t like that.

  Richard came into the room and at once she turned her head away.

  ‘How did it go? The warehouse,’ he added, seeing the blankness in his wife’s face as she turned to face him.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘If the price is right it’s all settled.’ Then, surprising him, she came and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she whispered. ‘You are so good to me. So good.’

  Nine

  ‘I WOULD HAVE preferred,’ Lisa said, ‘to have talked about this to your father.’

  She was sitting opposite Jonathan in Patrick Grey’s office, the width of the masive desk between them. Something had gone wrong with the oil stove and he was wearing what she took to be a golfing sweater underneath a tweed jacket. Sylvia, showing her in, had advised Lisa to keep her coat on.

  ‘It’s cold enough to freeze your bloody cockles,’ she’d said, then clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Whoops! I’ll never learn.’ She had grinned widely. ‘Anyroad, thanks to you, Mrs Carr, I’ve plenty of swear words to go at yet before I need to put me hand in me pocket.’

  ‘Where is your father?’ Lisa took a firm grip on herself, determined not to betray her agitation by as much as a flicker of an eyelid. She would not meet Jonathan’s eyes. She dare not meet his eyes. She was there, she reminded herself, to talk business. She was the wife of a man who had done nothing to deserve a truant wife. She didn’t want to know anything personal about Jonathan Grey. She refused to look at his ardent mouth, and she had in the past week decided to shut him out of her heart because, dramatic as it sounded even to herself, that was the only way she could go on living.

  Jonathan couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was wearing a winter coat in a dark shade of violet, and with the collar pulled up round her lively, expressive face her eyes took on the same shade. Unlike her, he had made no promises to himself, and desire rose in him like a lick of flame. He stared down at his hands, clasped before him on the blotting pad, imagining what they could do to her. With a great effort of will he forced himself to speak calmly.

  ‘My father has gone into hospital. Voluntarily. What they are doing to him is terrible.’ He didn’t spare her. ‘They are forcing him to drink whisky, then giving him something to make him sick. Violently sick. When he turns his head away from the next drink they force it down him, and so it goes on. Before they’ve finished with him he’ll throw up at the sight of a bottle. So my father’s got his come-uppance, wouldn’t you say?’

  Her great eyes were liquid with compassion. Jonathan clenched his hands together to prevent himself from reaching out to her.

  ‘I’m sorry I told you. The last thing I want to do is hurt you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Oh, Lisa … oh, God … what are we going to do?’

  Now she was looking straight at him; their eyes were holding hard. Neither of them could look away.

  ‘Jonathan.’ It was merely a saying of his name, and in another moment he would have moved round the desk, taken her into his arms, covered her mouth with his own, tasted the sweetness of her, lost himself in the softness and beauty of her… .

  ‘Shall I bring the tea in now, Mr Jonathan?’

  The two faces that turned towards Sylvia as she came through the door were dazed and expressionless. But without a perceptive bone in her squat little body, the typist noticed nothing.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Sylvia.’

  Jonathan sighed. And the moment was gone, the danger past.

  ‘The surveyor must have worked overtime on the report.’ Lisa took a folder from a slim briefcase. ‘My solicitor has it in hand. I’m using the same one your father always dealt with. I can’t see any complications. Apart from the price.’ She tucked a strand of heavy hair back behind an ear. ‘He tells me it is well below the current market value. I don’t want charity, Jonathan.’

  He shook his head, smiling, the ache for her suddenly replaced by a sensation of such tenderness that he felt he could die of it. This was the Lisa he remembered. Fierce, determined, standing up to him, playing the part, he suspected, of a hard-bitten career woman. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. And yet, was she playing? The old dramatic Lisa he had once known had somehow been replaced by this cool and beautiful woman, talking figures to him now, pointing at the columns with pearl-tipped fingernails, sure of her facts, estimating positively, with an optimism tempered with a realistic grasp of the situation.

  ‘D’you know, Lisa Logan, I think you’re going to make a go of this!’ His tone was so suggestive of masculine bewilderment that she laughed out loud.

  ‘Now you’re talking like Richard,’ she said without thinking, then before he could comment she looked up and thanked Sylvia for the cup of tea with a biscuit in the saucer, placed before her on the wide desk.

  ‘I’ve just thought who that girl reminds me of.’ Lisa smiled as the door closed behind the wide bottom encased in a flurry of tartan pleats. ‘Or what she reminds me of. A pantomime babe.’ She put the biscuit to one side and took a sip of the hot tea. ‘One in a row of girls all pretending to be thirteen when they’re past twenty. With young-old faces and turned up noses, and too many teeth.’

  ‘She’s pure gold.’ Jonathan raised an eyebrow. ‘Pure bloody gold.’

  Laughing with him, Lisa was taken off guard. She hadn’t known that laughter between two people could suddenly fade, leaving an intimacy more powerful than before. Jonathan had always laughed like that, tilting his dark head back, showing his strong brown throat – but had the irises of his eyes always been so dark? Almost black, merging with the pupils. Such lazy, beautiful, dreamy eyes, the kindest eyes she ever remembered seeing in a man.

  ‘Have you any children, Jonathan?’

  The question surprised her. She hadn’t been conscious of formulating it, even in her mind. Business was what she had come to talk about. The warehouse, the shop, settling on a fair asking price, perhaps even going on to a proposed estimate for the buildin
g work necessary to make the place decent enough to pass the Factory Buildings Inspector. She frowned and bit her lip. ‘Forget that. I don’t know why I asked.’

  Jonathan looked down at the folder on his desk and she saw a shadow flit across his face. ‘No children,’ he said quietly. ‘Amy can’t have babies.’ He raised his head and smiled at her. ‘Your son? He’ll be a big boy now?’

  ‘Almost nine.’ In spite of her immediate realization of Jonathan’s obvious sadness about his own childless state, Lisa could not keep the pride from her voice. ‘Peter is at the local school. Doing well. He’s so much like my father it’s laughable. Tall, red hair. But he has my husband’s prosaic approach to life. He’s not brilliant, but he gets there by hard slog.’ She smiled. ‘I suppose I am a bit obsessive about him, but he really is a grand lad. You’d like him, Jonathan.’

  Because she regretted her lack of sensitivity in talking about her son to this man who had just told her he would never have a son of his own, Lisa tried to make amends by telling him about Irene.

  ‘She resented me from the beginning, and now she’s away at college I feel a sense of such relief I can’t explain it.’ She frowned. ‘It isn’t a cut-and-dried case of the girl clinging to the memory of her own mother. From what I gather, Irene wasn’t even close to her.’

  She stopped, closing her eyes in an effort to stem the overwhelming urge to confide, to blurt out her despair about a situation growing daily more intolerable.

  ‘Tell me, love.’ Jonathan’s deep voice steadied her, even as the shameful tears pricked behind her eyes.

  ‘I’ve never talked about it before.’

  ‘Then it’s time you did. I’m here, love. Listening.’

  ‘We have a housekeeper.’ Lisa felt for a handkerchief in the pocket of her coat and began to twist it round her fingers. ‘She was there when I married Richard.’

  For a moment Millie’s long-suffering face materialized before her, the uneven eyes watching slyly. Lisa shivered.

  ‘Richard isn’t a weak man, far from it, but she, this housekeeper, has him under some sort of spell. His loyalty is to me, at least on the surface, but I sense he looks to her for approval.’ The lace edging on the handkerchief tore away. ‘I should have sent her away long ago. I almost did once… .’ Lisa’s expression clouded at the memory. ‘But I was young and foolish, so damned foolish. And anyway she runs the home, my home, so expertly I could never replace her. She made it possible for me to do the thing I wanted to do, which wasn’t changing nappies and making creamy rice puddings. So I suppose I’ve got my own come-uppance if you look at it like that.’

  ‘And Richard insists she stays?’

  The softly spoken question was so intuitive that Lisa had to look away. ‘It’s got beyond that,’ she whispered, biting her lips as Sylvia came into the room again with a query about a pile of invoices.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Jonathan stood up as soon as the door had closed behind the typist. ‘I want to have another look at the warehouse before I give you a written estimate. OK?’

  She ought to have let him go alone. Lisa knew that, but already their meeting had progressed far beyond that of builder and client. She felt drained of emotion now, so achingly vulnerable that at that moment she felt had he stretched out a hand she would have let him take her anywhere. When he took her arm outside in the street and pressed her close to his side, her legs felt weak and her heart thudded so loudly she felt he must surely hear it.

  He took her in his arms as soon as the door of the empty warehouse swung to behind them.

  ‘Oh, Lisa. My darling. My own unhappy Lisa. I love you,’ he whispered. ‘I think I have always loved you. What a mess we seem to have made of our lives.’ His lips moved slowly over her face, kissing her closed eyelids, lingering at the corners of her mouth. ‘Tell me you feel the same. Admit you feel the same.’

  Her response to his kiss gave him her answer. After what seemed an eternity, when time ceased to be, Lisa pushed him away, forcing her trembling legs to move backwards, blindly taking her out of his reach.

  ‘We must stop it!’ Her voice was choked with despair. ‘We must never ever be alone again.’ She began to weep, the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I won’t be like my mother, creeping out to meet you, waiting for the telephone to ring; and you, Jonathan, you are not your father, willing to deceive your wife who, like your own poor mother, doesn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Amy?’ The loudness of his voice startled her. ‘Are you trying to compare my wife with my mother?’ He moved quickly to take her in his arms again. ‘Oh, God! How wrong you are!’

  Holding herself stiff in his arms, Lisa looked up into his ravaged face. ‘I don’t want to know, Jonathan! Whatever is wrong between you and Amy, I don’t want to know!’ She shuddered. ‘I said too much, and I’m sorry. Can’t you see, we’re spoiling it already. And I’m not unhappy.’ She avoided his kiss. ‘I’m not happy, but then who is? But I’m not unhappy.’ She looked round the bare building. ‘I’m too busy to dwell on what I am. I’m going to make a go of this, and you must get on with your life and forget me. As I will forget you.’

  Jerking away, she faced him as, long ago, she had faced him on a darkened beach in Brittany, eyes blazing, hands balled into fists as though squaring up for a fight.

  They were no more than two paces apart. To the casual observer coming across them suddenly they were merely two people talking – intimately perhaps – but as Richard opened the warehouse door and stepped inside his nostrils flared as if he were an animal scenting danger.

  He nodded at Lisa. ‘The girl at the office back in Reading Street told me you’d be here.’ He walked towards Jonathan, holding out his hand. ‘Mr Grey? We’ve never met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. The name’s Carr. Richard Carr. Lisa’s husband,’ he added unnecessarily.

  They were getting ready for bed before Lisa had an opportunity to speak to Richard about his rudeness to Jonathan Grey. Dazed and bewildered by the strength of her own emotion, she had listened, unbelieving, as her husband, red of face, the tweed trilby which always seemed too small for his head adding to his bull-like stance, had questioned, argued, almost sneered at any suggestion Jonathan had made.

  ‘He’s a spiv,’ Richard now said. ‘A wide boy. Like his father before him.’ He emerged from his shirt, thick hair tousled, face almost puce. ‘You must have been mad setting him to do the alterations. There are other builders in the town. It’s hardly the time to rake up your past when you’re just starting in business on your own. Folks have long memories. It won’t be long before they begin to put two and two together. The Logans and the Greys? Weren’t they the two families where one bloke hopped it to Australia because his wife was having a bit of that there with his friend?’

  The round blue eyes were shiny with barely controlled anger. When he buttoned his pyjama jacket Lisa saw his fingers shake. There was no point in arguing with Richard when he was in this truculent mood – she had decided that a long time ago; but it wasn’t like him to be crude. She turned her back as she unfastened her bra, before slipping a lace-trimmed nightdress over her head.

  ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I have to catch the eight o’clock train in the morning to Manchester to see about the shop fittings. I could have ordered them from samples, but the firm I’ve chosen has complete mock-up shops set out in the factory. So I feel it will be worth the visit even though I can’t really spare the time.’

  ‘Leave that off.’ Richard’s voice was low, thick in his throat, so low that Lisa thought she had got away with pretending she hadn’t heard. Ignoring him, she adjusted the ribbon straps of the nightdress over her bare shoulders before slipping off her stockings, suspender belt and panties beneath the long satin folds, as if she were undressing on a beach.

  ‘Goodnight, Richard.’ Getting into bed, Lisa presented a cheek for what she hoped against hope would be no more than a husbandly peck. When he fastened his lips over hers, forcing her teeth apart, she beat at him with her fists
, so that he drew away, staring down with astonishment into her set face.

  ‘Do you know how long it is since we made love?’ Roughly he forced a bony knee between her legs. He tightened his embrace. ‘All right, all right, so I might have been a bit abrupt with your builder friend, but I’m only looking after your interests.’

  She couldn’t believe what was happening. In all the years of their loving she had never seen him like this. ‘Richard! Please!’ Her voice shook. ‘Please! I’m tired. I don’t feel like… .’

  ‘But you’d let him, wouldn’t you?’

  Lisa struggled to move away, but he held her fast, his face above hers, eyes blazing.

  ‘I saw you together.’ He gripped her wrist, holding her arm high above her head. ‘I’m no fool. I saw the way you were looking at him. And as long as you’re my wife you don’t look at any other man like that!’

  With an almighty effort she tried to get out of bed, but he pinned her beneath him. She could actually feel the heat from his face, and when he took her roughly she lay still, twisting her head away from him on the pillow, knowing instinctively that to fight back would only inflame him further.

  It was soon over. He rolled away from her, and quickly she slid from the bed.

  In the bathroom she locked the door, tore off her nightdress, dropped it into the linen basket, and ran the taps into the bath. Somehow she had to get clean, to wash away his touch, to lie back in the warm water and let it soothe and restore her to herself.

  The door handle moved, rattled, and she heard his voice from the other side. When she gave no answer he began to pound on the door, softly at first, then with increasing anger.

  Peter would hear. In her imagination Lisa saw him coming on to the landing, his small face puffed with sleep beneath the thatch of red-gold hair, clutching his pyjama trousers round his middle. Quickly she stood up, stepped over the side of the bath and draped herself in a large white towel.