Wishing Water (8 page)

‘At least he sings in tune.’
 

Jan held up her hands as if conducting an orchestra with her knife and fork. ‘That’s enough you two. Eat, please. Remember we have a guest.’
 

There was silence as everyone finished off their meal.

Later, Derry and Lissa dried the dishes which Jan washed, Renee and Jimmy having vanished somewhere upstairs.

‘So? How about it?’ Derry persisted. ‘We practise in the school hall. For the Saturday dance tomorrow. Will you come?’
 

Lissa glanced at him and in that brief instant longed, more than anything, to say yes, she would love to come. He looked so friendly and smiling, his brown eyes warmly inviting as if he really wanted her to go with him. She longed to live the life of a normal young person, a teenager as they were now called. Somehow Lissa felt she had missed out on so many things. Her clothes were out of date, her hair style flat and uninteresting. She never wore make up or listened to music. She didn’t own a single record or record player, so how could she? Why, she hadn’t even seen this great film everybody was raving about, ‘Rock Around the Clock’. And had never, in all her life, been kissed by a boy.

Sweet sixteen and never been kissed. It was such a cliché it made her cringe. Going to a girls’ school had of course given few opportunities but then Derry wasn’t asking her for a date, was he? He was merely suggesting she come and watch him practise. Probably only wanted to show off. He would have a girl friend already. Someone pretty and ‘with it’.

Best not to get involved.

‘No, thanks,’ she said airily, lifting her chin so he couldn’t guess how shy and insecure she felt. ‘I have to unpack and I’d like a quiet evening if you don’t mind. It’s been a long day.’
 

‘Give her time to settle in, for heaven’s sake,’ Jan protested.

The expression on his face could have been taken for disappointment had Lissa not known better. ‘What about the dance tomorrow then?’ he asked. ‘Will you come to that?’
 

She lifted her eyebrows and managed to shrug her shoulders with perfect disdain at the same time. ‘I really don’t think so.’
 

But the next day as she watched Jan try on various garments and agonise over what to wear Lissa felt sorely tempted to change her mind. She’d felt very strange inside when Derry smiled at her. A warm, tingly sort of feeling that had been most pleasant.

She pictured his face. It was really not at all bad looking with its long straight nose and curving lopsided smile. Brown eyes, thickly fringed with surprisingly long dark lashes, held an expression of permanent mischief, as if he knew some secret about life that had passed others by. Lissa guessed that he kept his brown hair slicked back with brilliantine in order to achieve that fashionable ‘Tony Curtis’ hair style he wore. It probably wasn’t nearly so dark when just washed, she found herself thinking, and decided on the whole that whatever its colour, the style suited him. Deny Colwith seemed pleasant enough, if a bit full of himself, despite the rather odd clothes he wore.

So why hadn’t she said yes?

Because she couldn’t be sure he really wanted her to accept? Because he would have a circle of friends already and she wouldn’t fit in.

‘You don’t want me hanging on your coat tails,’ she said now.

‘I hadn’t thought of wearing any but it’s not a bad idea. Bit different, eh?’ Jan joked.

‘You know what I mean.’
 

Jan twirled her circular cotton skirt, checking she showed just the right amount of petticoat and no stocking tops. ‘Don’t talk daft. You should come. The white blouse or the blue, do you think?’
 

Lissa considered. ‘The blue. I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.’ She’d decided long since to have nothing at all to do with sex, or love either for that matter. She had no wish to make the same mistake as her mother and bring another unwanted child into the world. She would stay an unmarried virgin, like Queen Elizabeth I. So going to dances with young men was not a good idea. She did wonder though, if that were the case, why the idea of accepting was so very enticing.

Perhaps she really was wicked, just like Kath.

‘You should hear our Derry play,’ Jan was saying. ‘He’s not half bad. Even I, his ever non-loving sister, can tell that much.’ She took out some green eye shadow and began applying it thickly to her lids.

Lissa watched with interest, deciding that although Jan wasn’t pretty in the accepted sense of the word, there was an attractive, homely quality about her. A friendly girl, she was the sort of person you could rely on, or so Lissa hoped. However, the eye shadow would do little for her eyes while she screwed them up in that squinting way she had. Though not for world would Lissa say as much.

‘I’m sure he is,’ she agreed, watching intrigued as Jan outlined her lips with coral pink lipstick. ‘Does he have a girl friend?’ Now why had she asked that?

‘Oh lord, yes, millions. They hang about him like wasps round a jam pot. Sickening it is.’
 

She should have known.

‘But there’ll be loads of talent there. Male talent that is. It’ll be fun.’
 

If Lissa had been about to change her mind the mention of all these unknown friends at once put paid to the idea. She was an outsider. Jan was only feeling sorry for her and she had no intention of joining the crowd round Derry Colwith.

‘I’ve nothing to wear, and no money to buy anything,’ Lissa said, settling the issue.

‘You could borrow something of mine,’ Jan offered, not disagreeing with this statement.

Nevertheless Lissa kept to her decision not to go to the dance and sat at home and felt sorry for herself instead.

Chapter Four

The following weekend Lissa spent searching the village for a flat or even a room of her own which she could afford, but to no avail. The week after, she met with no greater success. After a month or more of fruitless searching Lissa had almost given up hope of ever finding a place of her own. Everywhere was either too big or too expensive. A winter let would have been easy to find, but with summer coming, the landladies could make more money out of the growing numbers of holiday makers.

She paid the Colwith family a small sum each week in return for her bed and board and she and Jan got along famously. Lissa had even grown used to the eccentric behaviour of Jimmy and Renee.

But she avoided any contact with Derry.

Fortunately he was out most of the time, either at work, or with his skiffle group. He enjoyed boasting of their success, of the way the girls would scream whenever he made an appearance. The moment he swaggered in through the door each evening he would jauntily challenge them with his disarming grin and claim to be worn out by their ardent attentions. Lissa refused to listen and would find some excuse to go upstairs.

Every morning Jan and Lissa walked together to work, enjoying the softness of the air as spring gradually changed into summer and the streets of the small town grew busier. At lunchtime they often took their sandwiches down to the lake, sitting on the benches by the band stand, feeding crusts to the mallards and moorhens that crowded the shore line and laughing at the upturned wagging tails in the water.

Their friendship was now teetering on the confiding stage and one morning as they were happily unpacking a new delivery of lingerie, giggling together over old ladies’ pink bloomers and corsets, Lissa felt able to risk a personal question.

‘Does it bother you, your father marrying a girl your own age?’

Jan gave her an old fashioned look. ‘What do you think? Anyway, she wasn’t just any girl, she was Derry’s girl friend. Hasn’t he told you? He brought her home for tea and Derry never had a look in from the moment they set eyes on each other.’
 

‘Goodness!’ Lissa tried not to picture Derry with the voluptuous Renee. It disturbed her somehow. ‘Doesn’t Renee mind? About the age difference, I mean.’
 

Jan shrugged. ‘She’s sixteen. Dad is forty-five. Makes you want to throw up, doesn’t it?’
 

Lissa agreed that it did. ‘No wonder Derry won’t speak to her.’ There had been several unpleasant scenes in the last few weeks when Derry had simply refused to acknowledge Renee’s presence, even so far as not setting a place for her at the dinner table. Jimmy often flared up in fury at his son, accusing him of insolence. But Lissa’s sympathies were now with Derry. She could recognise pain behind the jaunty insolence in his brown eyes. It was how she had felt every birthday when her mother had promised to come and never had.

‘What about your family?’ Jan casually asked. ‘You must miss them. Will you be going to visit them soon?’
 

‘I expect so. Meg will want to know how I’m getting on.’

‘Why do you call your mother Meg?’
 

‘She isn’t really my mother.’ Ever sensitive that people might be disapproving of her true status, Lissa had decided to be perfectly blunt about her illegitimacy. She had no intention of pretending to be what she was not. ‘I was dumped on her as a baby.’

‘Dumped?’
 

Jan forgot all about unwrapping corsets as she became absorbed in Lissa’s swiftly told tale. ‘Oh, how dreadful, to be abandoned.’ Her brown eyes, so like Derry’s, grew round and moist. ‘And this Meg, she’s loved you as her own daughter ever since? How wonderful.’
 

‘Yes, I suppose it was. Not that she was given much choice in the matter.’
 

‘Is that your real name then, Turner, or your adopted one?’

‘I’m illegitimate. A bastard. I don’t have a name?’ Lissa shrugged her shoulders with a laugh to show that she didn’t care one way or the other and met Jan’s sympathetic gaze with belligerence in her own. ‘I wasn’t even adopted.’
 

Jan blinked, alarmed by the sharpness of the tone, then after a moment said, ‘Not your fault though, was it? You didn’t ask to be born. Why be so angry about it?’
 

‘I’m not angry.’

‘You sound it.’
 

‘I don’t need pity or advice, thanks very much.’
 

Jan flushed and paid excessive attention to opening a new package but couldn’t resist asking, ‘Have you ever met her then? Your real ma, I mean?’
 

Lissa shook her head and started to rip up the empty carton, stamping the cardboard flat. It made her feel a lot better. ‘Once, I think, when I was a child. I don’t remember her. She lives in Canada. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.’
 

‘That’s OK.’ Jan smiled. ‘I wouldn’t want sympathy either. Anyway, no one need know if you don’t tell them.’
 

The violet eyes sparkled with the light of battle. ‘I’m not pretending. I am what I am. This is me. Take me or leave me.’
 

Jan looked startled for a minute and then grinned. ‘I’ll take two, ta very much.’ Then they both burst into fits of girlish giggles, the prickly moment past.

‘I wish this shop sold something more interesting than old fashioned corsets,’ Lissa complained, happily changing the subject and holding up a satinette underskirt with straps two inches wide. These slips still have a 1930s look.’
 

‘Some of our stock genuinely is that old, very nearly antique,’ Jan giggled. ‘Miss Stevens wouldn’t hear of “going modern”, as she calls it. She might get
teenagers
in her shop and that would never do. Anyone would think young people were a new invention, a disease, the way she carries on.’
 

They fell about giggling as they priced up the unpretentious underwear and stowed it away in the ranks of glass-fronted drawers that lined the walls of the draper’s shop.

It was then that the idea popped into Lissa’s head, quite out of the blue, and she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. ‘Hey, I know. We could find a place together.’
 

Jan’s eyes opened wider than her myopic vision usually permitted as she gazed in astonished wonder at Lissa. ‘Are you serious?’
 

‘Never more so. Why not’

‘It’s quite the thing for young career girls to do nowadays, or so I read in Jimmy’s newspaper.’
 

‘Is that what we are, career girls?’
 

‘Well, why not? I intend to make something of myself, don’t you? Though I haven’t quite decided how yet. Having a flat together would be a start in the right direction, wouldn’t it? Good fun too, don’t you think?’
 

‘Oh,’ breathed Jan, not able to believe her luck in finding such a friend.

‘We could afford more rent between the two of us. Make it much more economic.’ Lissa grew enthusiastic as she thought of a place she’d looked at just the other day. She tossed aside a pink corset she had been rolling up to grab her friend excitedly. ‘I’ve seen a converted boathouse. Wooden, close to the lake so admittedly horribly damp, small of course, and with a minuscule kitchen, a spiral staircase and two tiny loft bedrooms above. But with the most fabulous views. Two pounds ten shillings a week. We could go and take a look this lunchtime if you like?’
 

‘Ooh, yes. That would be lovely.’ Jan’s smile formed a perfect triangle of delight in her small face, and then almost as suddenly faded away. ‘We’d have to get permission off our parents. They’d have to sign the lease or something.’