Faith (12 page)

Three drinks later they were already feeling tipsy for neither of them was used to drinking, so after a brief confab in the toilets they decided they’d better not have any more, and that Roger and Steven, the two youngest men in the bar, were the ones they should encourage.

They were both undeniably good-looking, tall and smart in their pinstriped suits, and amusing too. Steven worked on the Stock Exchange, Roger for an insurance company, and though Laura privately thought that they were out of their league with a couple of twenty-four-year-olds, she didn’t dare say so because Jackie was really smitten by blond, blue-eyed Roger.

But being left with Steven was hardly like drawing the short straw. He was rather like Dirk Bogarde, with his dark hair and crinkly, smiley eyes, and the way he looked at Laura made her feel really desirable.

Later, the men took them by taxi to an Italian restaurant in Villiers Street, just off The Strand. Jackie kept pinching Laura’s knee under the table, her secret signal that she was prepared to go anywhere, do anything with Roger. Perhaps it was fortunate that both men were going home to their families for Christmas the following day, and didn’t appear to be anxious to stay out half the night.

‘So where do you live then?’ Jackie asked, tucking into spaghetti bolognese as if she hadn’t eaten for a week.

‘In Kensington,’ Roger replied. ‘We share a flat with a couple of other chaps. It’s very squalid, you’d be appalled.’

They made the girls laugh telling them how their landlady raged at them for having a kitchen full of empty beer bottles and never cleaning up, and said she’d seen pigs living in better conditions. ‘We’ll have to do something about it in the New Year,’ Roger said with a wide grin, ‘or we’ll be chucked out.’

‘We’ll come over and help you,’ Jackie volunteered, once again pinching Laura under the table. ‘I don’t believe it can be that bad when you two look so smart.’

‘That’s down to a laundry service,’ Steven said. ‘But it’s a good thing we’re going home tomorrow because I haven’t got one clean pair of socks left. But what about you two? Do you still live at home?’

Laura said nothing while Jackie explained about her family and then went on to tell the men how organized and independent Laura was.

‘Her room is spotless. She cooks proper meals, she hangs her clothes up in groups of colours, and she even cleans the bathroom for everyone else. I wouldn’t be like that. I’m far too messy.’

‘Then perhaps Laura had better come over and sort us out,’ Roger said.

Laura wasn’t sure she liked being portrayed as a paragon of domestic virtue. She thought it made her sound very dull. But Steven leaned across the table and lightly touched her cheek. ‘I’ve always found that beautiful girls are the worst kind of sluts,’ he said. ‘I’m really glad you aren’t one.’

After the meal in the Italian restaurant, the four of them had walked up to Trafalgar Square to see the Christmas tree. Roger and Jackie kept stopping to kiss, but although Steven kissed Laura quite a bit too, mostly they talked. He told her his family lived in Hastings. He even described his younger brother and sister, and explained that his father was a doctor and his mother sang in a choir. She could imagine his family – nice, well-bred, upper-middle-class people, living in a comfortable, well-cared-for house. None of that was extraordinary; just looking at Steven with his good manners, highly polished shoes, immaculate white shirt and well-pressed suit told her about his background.

But what was extraordinary was that he assumed she came from a similar one. Several times he’d said things like, ‘But of course your family must be just the same.’ She had simply smiled and nodded, mainly because she didn’t feel up to launching into her usual story about her dead parents and her Aunt Mabel.

His goodnight kiss before she and Jackie got into the taxi to go home was tender and lingering. He’d held her face in his hands and said that he wished he hadn’t promised to go home for so long, and that he’d ring her as soon as he got back. She knew he would too, for he’d paid the taxi driver in advance, and he’d double-checked that he had her phone number written down right.

Jackie was ecstatic as both girls waved goodbye out of the back window of the taxi. ‘What a couple of dreamboats!’ she squealed. ‘You and I are made, Laura. No more pimply-faced louts for us. A world of glamour and sophistication awaits us.’

As the taxi sped through the streets towards Crouch End, Jackie nodded off against Laura’s shoulder. But Laura was wide awake, her pulse racing and her mind whirling at the possibilities ahead in the New Year.

The taxi dropped Laura off first, Jackie rousing herself enough to say she was to ring and tell her what her works party the following day was like. Laura let herself in, switched on the light in the hall and darted up the stairs to the second floor before it turned itself off.

She’d grown quite fond of her bedsitter. In summer when the trees in the garden below were in full leaf, she could look out on to a sea of green. The room was small and square, but it had everything she needed, and she was always rearranging the furniture to make the most of the space. At present she had the small table in front of the window and her single bed, covered in a dark green bedspread, up against the opposite wall so it looked like a sofa. With the bedside light on and the gas fire lit, it was cosy, and she’d made it more homely with a few posters and bright scatter cushions.

‘I don’t need to be ashamed of it,’ she murmured to herself as she took her coat off and hung it up in the wardrobe.

She took one more look at herself in her dress before taking it off. Her hair was coming loose now and she had specks of mascara under her eyes, but she decided she didn’t have to be ashamed of how she looked either. Steven had said he thought she was beautiful, and that was how she felt. As she carefully hung her dress up on a hanger she smiled to herself, feeling a little like Cinderella after the ball.

That Christmas, which Laura spent with the Thompson family, was the happiest she’d ever known. Not just because she was surrounded by good people and stuffed with delicious food, not even because the decorations, presents and games were far better than anything she was used to. The source of her happiness was the way Steven had treated her.

Jackie was convinced she was in love with Roger. She kept drifting off while she mooned about him, and she was counting the hours until 27 December, when she was going to see him again. She assumed that Laura felt the same about Steven, but Laura couldn’t quite bring herself to admit how it really was for her.

On Boxing Day night when the girls went to bed, Jackie could talk about nothing except Roger. ‘I gave him my number at work and at home. Which do you think he’ll phone me on tomorrow?’

‘Here, in the evening, I expect,’ Laura replied. ‘But be careful what you say about me, won’t you?’

Jackie sat up in her bed, looking across at her friend with a puzzled expression. ‘What do you mean?’

Laura was putting some rollers in her hair. ‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t say too much about my parents dying and my aunt leaving. It makes me sound a bit tragic.’

‘I don’t think it does. It just makes people admire you more for being strong,’ Jackie said a little indignantly.

Laura was embarrassed then. She went over and sat on her friend’s bed, but didn’t really know what to say.

She couldn’t tell Jackie the truth about herself, not after so long, but she was afraid of this lie going on and on, repeated again and again for the rest of her life. ‘I just want to be like anyone else,’ she said eventually. ‘You know what I mean. Normal.’

‘Well, you certainly can’t invent a family you haven’t got,’ Jackie said. ‘You weren’t think of doing that, were you?’

‘No, of course not,’ Laura said quickly. ‘But I did want to play down what happened.’

‘I won’t say anything more than that you are my best friend,’ Jackie replied. ‘I’ll leave it up to you to tell Steven as much or as little as you like. But for all we know we may never get the opportunity to tell either Roger or Steven anything. They might have girlfriends, they might not even like us.’

Laura put down her Biro and rubbed her eyes. She had only jotted down the major points of those early days with Jackie, barely a whole page. But the meeting with Steven and Roger was an important milestone in both their lives for more reasons than that they became their first lovers, and that much later Jackie would marry Roger.

Laura hadn’t of course known then what was in store for either of them, but that wasn’t the point when she should, and could, have come clean about her background to Jackie.

But she didn’t, and so the lie was spread further and further like a tumour. It was of course benign back then, but she might have known that if she didn’t cut it out it would become malignant.

It was one of the newspapers who exposed it at the start of her trial. She didn’t know who told them the story of her parents being killed while she was still a child, but they obviously checked it out and found it wasn’t true. It didn’t take them long to discover her real father had been a criminal, or for that matter to find plenty of people who were prepared to reveal she had lied to them too.

‘A life built on lies’ was one of the headlines, and Laura could remember thinking that would make an appropriate epitaph for her.

4

Belle got up from her chair as the telephone rang. ‘I’ll just answer that,’ she said, smiling at Stuart. ‘It might be someone wanting to come and stay.’

Stuart was glad of a moment or two alone to consider how he should proceed with Belle. She had been very surprised when he turned up unannounced at the door of Kirkmay House in Crail. In fact she had been almost giddy with excitement until he told her he’d only just heard about her sister’s death as he’d been out of the country, and that he’d come to offer his condolences. He found it rather disquieting that on opening the door to him she didn’t immediately realize that was why he’d come. Had she forgotten what good friends he and Jackie had been when he worked for her?

He gazed reflectively out of the window to Marketgate beyond, thinking what a coincidence it was that Belle’s house was the one he remembered from when he used to come here on holiday as a child. He and his family never stayed in this village; they rented a cottage by the harbour in Cellardyke, a smaller fishing village further back down the coast. But they would walk here sometimes, clambering over rocks along the beach, and his father always used to buy crab to take home for their tea.

Sometimes they came up the steep wynds from the harbour to the main road so his parents could have a drink in the East Neuk Hotel, and he and his brother and sister would go exploring. Once they had slipped into this very garden to pick some apples from a tree, and an old lady had chased them out brandishing a stick. They were sure she was a witch, and that the big old house was haunted; his sister used to have nightmares about it, prompted by stuff he and his brother made up about the place.

It was weird enough that Belle and Charles had uprooted themselves from London to open a guest house here, but even weirder that they’d bought the very house which was imprinted on his memory.

Crail was very quaint and pretty, perhaps the prettiest of all the villages along this stretch of the Fife coast, but it was hardly the kind of place he would expect Belle and Charles to be attracted to. Belle had always been the kind of woman who craved excitement, sophisticated entertainment, smart shops and hordes of people around her. As for Charles, he was the original city slicker, with handmade suits, fast sports cars, and an eye for the ladies. Neither of them had the kind of servile mentality to run a guest house successfully, and as far as he knew they had no great love of Scotland either, not like Jackie.

Jackie had fallen for its charms twenty years ago when she was visiting Laura in Edinburgh. It had been Stuart’s idea to take the girls and Barney over the bridge to Fife to show them around, but he hadn’t expected the elegant and poised Jackie to be so enthusiastic. She had raved about Fife all the way back to Edinburgh, and though he was pleased he had found something to impress Laura’s very worldly friend with, he didn’t realize that she really had lost her heart to the place.

She bought a tiny fisherman’s cottage in Cellardyke soon afterwards and her passion for the area grew with every visit. Then she bought tumbledown Brodie Farm, a few miles inland from Crail. A great many people laughed at her grandiose plans for it, and her claims that she was going to live there permanently once the renovations were complete. But she had done exactly as she said she would, in fact she’d told Stuart once that she felt Fife was her spiritual home and nowhere else made her feel quite so happy.

Stuart was still puzzled as to why Belle followed her sister here. He could understand her wanting to be nearer Jackie, and that Charles was lured by the golf in nearby St Andrews. But it would have made far more sense for them to buy a place in Edinburgh where they could still live as they had in London, with all this on their doorstep.

So far he and Belle had only made small talk. He’d admired her house and garden, mentioned his childhood holidays here, and she asked what he had been doing over the past few years and seemed surprised he’d never married. He had expected her to launch into a graphic account of the murder and trial, for as he remembered Belle had been a drama queen, and dramas didn’t get any bigger than your sister’s murder. Yet apart from saying ‘I’ve had a terrible time,’ she hadn’t enlarged on it.

He wanted and needed her to talk about it, to pour it all out so he could see another perspective, but he had to be very careful, because if he let it slip that he’d studied the case, and been to see Laura, she might suspect he had a hidden agenda.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked, hoping that might make her open up. ‘Are you thinking of selling up and going back to London? Or will you stay?’

Belle lit up a cigarette. ‘We can’t make our minds up,’ she said somewhat guardedly, blowing the smoke up to the ceiling. ‘I’m sure you can imagine what we’ve been through since Jackie’s death. There have been many times when we’ve just wanted to run away to a place where there are no reminders. But this house and the friends we’ve made here are precious to us.’