by Marie Joseph
Like a fool he sat outside in the parking lot in his car, waiting until the huge plane, with a pounding roar of powerful engines, lifted into the sky.
And he told himself that never would he have dreamed that the sound could fill him with a hurt so deep he almost cried aloud.
Thirteen
‘EE, BUT THA’S never driven all the way from London in this lot, missus?’
The hotel porter’s Lancashire accent brought shame-making tears pricking behind Lisa’s tired eyes. The little man’s legs were bandied from the rickets he’d suffered as a child, but his lined face was as gentle and kind as if in the course of his long life he had never thought or perpetrated anything wrong.
‘I just wanted to come home,’ Lisa said simply, knowing instinctively that he would understand.
‘Aye, well.’ The little man swung her case on to the stand by the door. ‘Tha looks fair done in.’ He smiled, showing an inadequate number of stained brown teeth. ‘They’ve finished with the dining-room, but I can have some tea sent up and mebbe a sandwich. Tha’s not thinking of going out again?’
‘No.’ Lisa smiled back at him. ‘And tea would be very welcome, thank you. I’d forgotten how severe the weather can be up here.’
Immediately the porter bridled. ‘From what I hear on the wireless it’s been none so good down where you come from, neither! But it’s been a nasty few days hereabouts. I admit to that.’ He stood in the open doorway, eyeing Lisa with frank curiosity. ‘There’s folks living in some of the steep cobbled streets what haven’t been able to get out at all till the ash carts got round to them. There were an ambulance stranded yesterday up Mill Street.’
‘I used to live in Mill Street,’ Lisa told him.
‘Tha never!’ Amazement flickered for an instant in the rheumy eyes. ‘So tha’s not been back for a while?’ He scratched a stubbly chin. ‘They’re knocking down all them streets, boarding up the houses, tha knows. Moving folks out to what they call better accommodation.’ He wrenched his mouth sideways as if to spit. ‘Breaking folks’ hearts if you ask me.’ He took an obviously reluctant backward step. ‘Wait till tha sees what they’re doing to the town centre. It said in the paper that the town wasn’t planned, it were just thrown up, but I’ll tell you something for nothing, missus. Them little houses in them little streets made for happiness, even thirty years ago when half the town was on the dole. Now it’s all shutting themselves in with the television, and them Beatles shouting along with what’s supposed to be music. They knocked the Market House clock down afore Christmas. A hundred-year-old clock that were, and built to last, but down it come.’ He widened his mouth into a twinkling grin. ‘But would tha believe it? That clock face refused to budge for the best part of an hour. That showed ’em!’
When he went at last, closing the door behind him with a deferential click, Lisa sat down on the edge of the bed and stared round the room.
The long journey had been a living nightmare. As she drove through the outskirts of the town the roads were a skating rink of glistening black ice. Three times she had seen cars abandoned where they had skidded into lamp standards, and she had asked herself over and over again why she had given in to the impulse to get into her car and drive north?
‘We will manage,’ Fiona had assured her at the shop. ‘You worked all through Christmas with a nasty dose of flu. This is our least busy time. Please, Miss Logan. Go away for a few days. Forget work. It will still be here when you come back.’
Anxious faces, soft assurances; herself glimpsed in a mirror, grey of face with dulled, lustreless eyes. A middle-aged woman, stuck on a treadmill of work and more work. Weakly emotional, dreaming in the grey hinterland of the aftermath of a neglected bout of influenza, of a man not free.
A desperate homesickness which would not be denied.
And a coming home. At last.
In Washington, DC, a short two months ago, Greg Perry had walked with her along the banks of the Potomac River and told her of his belief that in our lives we grow two-level souls: on the one hand, the level we show to the world, and on the other, dark memories, longings hidden and deep, safely tucked away, never ever surfacing.
But what when they did surface? What of a time when behaviour could no longer be rationalized? What then, wise Greg of the weary eyes? Remembering him as clearly as if he sat beside her, Lisa turned her car the next day into the winding road leading to The Laurels.
It was a clear cold morning following a clear cold night, through which Lisa had slept a sleep so profound that it had been more like a coma. But when she got out of the high bed, with its solid interior-sprung mattress, her legs had almost buckled beneath her, and the breakfast of bacon and eggs served in the not quite warm enough dining-room had turned her stomach even before she had picked up her knife and fork.
‘It’s too cold for snow,’ the receptionist had said from her little cubby-hole in the entrance hall. ‘Mind how you go, Mrs Carr.’
Lisa stopped the car and got out to stare at the house in which she’d been born. In spite of her high leather boots and the silk square tied round her hair, the icy wind bit treacherously through to her bones, penetrating so that her whole body felt numb, without life. Lisa pulled the collar of her mink three-quarter-length coat up round her face, thrust her hands deep into her pockets and, treading carefully, walked up the laurel-fringed drive.
She had never been back to the house since, as a girl of fifteen, battered by circumstances, mourning the father she knew in her bones she would never see again, she had allowed a young and know-it-all Jonathan Grey to drive her away in one of his father’s vans. Lisa shivered, huddled deep into the beautiful coat.
There was the heavy front door her father had closed behind him while she slept in her bedroom at the back of the house, drawing her long hair round her to shut out the memory of her humiliation at the dance, and the sound of voices raised in anger in the sitting-room downstairs.
Now the big windows looked strangely bare, and through the side window of what had once been Angus’s study, Lisa saw a dark-haired woman in a white coat writing busily at a desk. The knot of her silk scarf had loosened and, as she fumbled with frozen fingers to tie it tighter, Lisa turned round to see a small stout woman coming up behind her dressed as if for the wilds of Siberia. A woollen scarf was knotted over a bedraggled fur hat, a voluminous tweed coat reached down to the tops of a pair of suede ankle boots, and the face only just revealed was blue and pinched with cold.
‘By gum, but it’s parky this morning! Cold enough to freeze your bits and pieces solid.’ The woman stared with frank curiosity at Lisa. ‘Coming in, love? You’ll catch your death out here. Did you want to have a word with Matron?’
‘Matron?’ Lisa frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
Agnes Ratcliffe’s sharp mind was ticking over swiftly. There was something fishy about this one, standing there in the cold in her posh fur coat with her big eyes staring at nowt as far as she could see. Talked posh too, like some of the ladies she’d once ‘done for’ before coming to work as an orderly at Evergreen, the private home for old folks who could afford something a bit better than the council provided.
‘You got your mother in here, love?’ Agnes nodded to herself, making up her own theory as she went along. Another of them guilty ones, shoving their old mother in here to get her out of the way, then coming to visit now and again to tell the poor old dear how lucky she was to be in such a nice place. Empty-handed too. No bag of grapes with pips which would get under the old dear’s teeth – that’s if they’d remembered to put them in. Agnes made up her mind.
‘You look proper clemmed, love. Come inside and I’ll see you have a nice hot cup of tea. Come on, now. You’re not going to faint on me, are you?’
Her legs moving without any conscious motivation of their own, Lisa followed the large tweed bottom through the familiar door and into a hall bare of anything but a circular table on which a bunch of russet and gold chrysanthemums were funereally arranged in
a fluted white urn.
‘In there, love. I’ll fetch the tea in a minute. It’s time for the trolley. You can have it with them.’
And there was the door against which Lisa had leaned as she listened to her mother pleading on the telephone with Patrick Grey. Then, the whole house had smelled of flowers, wax polish, and Delia’s lavishly applied perfume. Lisa felt the blood drain from her cheeks. Now, the smell was of urine thinly disguised by disinfectant, the smell of old, old age.
Five white heads turned as she walked in. Five pairs of eyes blank with senility, dazed by the accumulative effects of the sleeping pills ministered each night, faced her with a momentary and desperate eagerness; saw she did not belong to them and went back to contemplating their own particular void of emptiness.
‘They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.’
The memories came flooding back. Angus reciting in his wonderful voice, standing by the fireplace over there. Delia striding round the large room, pleated skirts swinging, laughing or shouting in a tantrum, gloriously alive. The freckle-faced child with long plaits watching them carefully, secure in spite of it all. Mrs Parker cooking in the kitchen, Uncle Patrick joking with Angus, casting furtive glances at Delia… .
Agnes Ratcliffe, half the size now divested of her many wrappings, came into the hall in time to see the lady in the posh fur coat running towards the front door, heels tapping on the tiled floor. A click of the latch and a slamming of the door and she was gone.
‘Couldn’t take it,’ Agnes muttered to herself. Another one what couldn’t accept the fact that it comes to all of us. In time.
Tut-tutting her disapproval, she marched flat-footed into the lounge, tucked a tartan rug more firmly round a pair of bony knees, was rewarded by a quavering toothless smile, and went back to set the trolley for the elevenses which always came at ten.
Shivering with the sweat of utter weakness, Lisa started the car and drove back on to the main road. Strange how Greg’s words spoken by the Potomac River on that sunlit day kept coming back to her. ‘There is no going back; no good trying to recapture the past,’ he had said. ‘If you are lost inside, then you are lost wherever you are.’
She ought not to have come. Lisa tried to blink away the sweat running down into her eyes. The fever she had ignored all over Christmas, working at the shop in an aspirin-induced blankness, was catching up with her now. Surely it was a physical condition she was experiencing, not a fanciful desolation of the spirit as Greg would surely have said.
This was her home. Here were her roots. She felt at one with the bleakness of the winter landscape. Affection was here, warmth of friendship; these were her people, their wide-vowelled intonation her own. Never, she thought, would she be able to say barth for bath, and once at a dinner party when she had said, ‘Pass the butter, please’, the man on her left had laughed and said, ‘Lancashire. Not far from Bolton. I’m right, n’est-ce-pas?’
Nursing the car slowly and carefully down the icy road, Lisa admitted to herself that in her present state of weakness she could be halfway to feeling sorry for herself. And if that were so, then she was denying her heritage. She was passing the town hall now and there, emblazoned above the main door, was a huge sign in vivid colours wishing one and all a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS. She smiled, her spirits lifting. Someone would take it down, maybe before the end of January someone would undoubtedly take it down, but what it was telling her now on almost the last day of the dying year was that she was home.
And somewhere there was someone who would open a door to her knock and widen their eyes in surprised welcome. There had to be. It wasn’t possible to live in a town for so long and not have a single friend to hold a hand and draw her inside.
But since leaving school her life had been one of work and more work, making acquaintances by the dozen, but never having the time to find and cherish a real friend.
Within yards of the hotel Lisa suddenly signalled left, turning the car towards the Chorley side of the town, past a cinema showing Elizabeth Bergner in Escape Me Never. And in a flash she was back on a rainy afternoon almost thirty years before, coming out into the foyer with Leslie Howard’s beautiful voice in her ears, to see Jonathan Grey pinching a brown trilby into shape and teasing her with his wavy smile about going to the dance that night.
The night her father had walked away… . The night everything had changed. For ever.
Instantly Lisa felt a sensation inside her as if she were a stone plummeting down, dropping into a bottomless well.
‘I will go and see Irene,’ she said aloud.
‘Well! Of all the people!’ Irene came to the door of the red-bricked house behind the high privet hedge, wiping her hands on a strip of towelling sewn to her apron. One of Millie’s innovations, Lisa guessed, and smiled.
‘I came up on an impulse,’ she said. ‘I ought to have rung first, but, well, I thought I’d surprise you.’
Irene seemed to hesitate. The expression in the dolly blue eyes was wary, as lacking in warmth as an empty grate on a rainy winter’s day.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, after that telling hesitation. ‘Close the door quietly. I’ve just put the baby down for her morning sleep.’
‘Baby?’ Lisa’s eyes gladdened with surprise. ‘I didn’t know you’d had a baby, Irene. Why didn’t you tell me? There was nothing on your Christmas card about a baby.’
In her mind’s eye she saw the card, the yearly answer to her own letter. ‘From Irene, Edwin and Millie’, hastily scrawled in Irene’s well-rounded schoolteacher’s hand. An acknowledgement, that was all, a politeness in obvious deference to the festive season. A name on a list, to be crossed off with relief if the chain was ever broken.
‘She’s two months old.’ Irene glanced upwards. ‘She cries all night then sleeps all morning. It’s the only time I have to get anything done.’
And I’ve interrupted you, Lisa thought, following the wide hips in the baggy tweed skirt down the hall and into the familiar sitting-room at the back of the house. For a moment she had an urge to turn round and walk straight out again.
‘It looks just the same.’ Swallowing her pride, she walked over to the fireplace. ‘But you’ve had a gas fire put in. That must save a lot of work.’
‘It does.’ Irene snatched a small clothes-horse away from the tiled hearth. ‘Millie didn’t like it at first, but she got used to it after a while.’
‘How is Millie?’ Without being asked, Lisa sat down. The warmth of the room was making her feel sick. She unfastened the large button at the neck of her coat and pushed the silk scarf further back off her head. Irene was folding the nappies now, holding each one against her cheek to make sure it was aired properly.
‘Millie?’ she said, without turning round. ‘Millie’s dead. She died three months ago.’
The shock drained what little colour there was from Lisa’s pale face. ‘But why didn’t you let me know? You could have written, or telephoned.’
‘Why?’ Turning round, Irene looked at Lisa with coldness. ‘What would you have done? Sent a wreath? Or come to the funeral and cried in the crematorium?’
Lisa winced. ‘But your Christmas card? It was from you, Edwin and Millie.’
‘We called the baby Millie.’ Irene’s cool clear voice shook unexpectedly. ‘She never got over my father dying. She was never the same. She mourned him right up to the day she died, and if there’s a heaven I hope she’s with him now!’ She seemed to take a furious control of herself. ‘But then, you wouldn’t understand that kind of devotion, would you? You went gallivanting off to London before he was cold in his grave.’
‘Oh, Irene, Irene… .’ Lisa felt her heart begin to pound. ‘Look at me properly, please. Not with that hate-filled expression in your eyes. I lived here once; I tried to love you, oh, dear God, how I tried. I was married to your father and for a long time we loved each other, though I know that’s the last thing you want to believe.’
‘You stole him from Millie!’ Irene�
��s voice was harsh. ‘You had nothing! Nothing! Not even a decent roof over your head, so you grabbed what was going, and what was going at that time was my father. You were younger than Millie and prettier than Millie, and so he fell for you. To get you into his bed,’ she added crudely. ‘Oh, Millie knew that. She had you weighed up right from the start.’
‘I’m going.’ Lisa stood up, gathering her frayed dignity around her. Inside her head a voice was screaming, but from the closed-in, almost serene expression on her face she might have been utterly devoid of feeling. Hurt always did this to her, froze her into apparent uncaring. In that moment it was as if she looked at Irene through a telescope, seeing her at the end of a tunnel with fair curly hair framing the face of a china doll. She knew then that Irene would always be chained to a way of thinking which no rationalization would change. Hatred could be taught, and Irene had been taught well.
‘Close the door quietly, then.’
So Lisa did as she was told, carefully shutting the door of the house to which she had come as a young bride wearing decent navy-blue because of her mother’s recent death. Edwin Bates, Irene’s husband, was coming up the path carrying a tartan shopping bag with a tin of baby food sticking out, rubber overshoes on his feet, his small face behind the bushy moustache peaked with cold.
‘It’s all right, Edwin,’ Lisa told him before he’d had a chance to speak. ‘I’m glad about the baby, really glad.’
Leaving him gawping after her, Lisa slipped and slithered her way to the car. The windscreen had iced over, and she drew on her gloves and rubbed at it, clearing just enough space to see through.
She didn’t care. If she said it often enough it would be true. So she said it again, aloud, as she started the car, reversed into a side road and headed back to the town.
In the deserted avenues the trees were bare and black, seemingly bereft of life. The heavy grey sky and the icy ribbon of the wide road seemed to be merged in a deathly scene devoid of colour. Even the grass verges were hoary with frost, a frost without sparkle. Lisa’s breathing was laboured, her heart pounding in her chest. The cough that had been with her since her illness shook her body as she drove too quickly, only slowing down when she felt the car’s wheels slide dangerously towards the kerb, out of control.
