Faith (32 page)

When the first light of dawn came peeping through the grimy window, he was kneeling between her legs, his hands on her breasts, just looking at her. Everything she felt at that moment was mirrored in his face – wonderment, exultation and love. Nothing needed to be said; they knew that tomorrow, next week and even next year they would be bound together as tightly as they were now.

She remembered then how just before she married Greg, she’d asked Meggie’s opinion on how you knew if you were truly in love. She thought it had to be love she felt for Greg, but she wasn’t absolutely certain. She told Meggie she’d always imagined that real love would make you melt into each other.

It did with Stuart. She loved everything about him, from his loping walk, his tangled hair, the smell of his sweat, to his voice and kisses. She wouldn’t want to change a single thing.

It was a dream of a summer. It must have rained some days, but Laura didn’t remember anything but blue skies, warmth and happiness. Such happiness!

She did all kinds of things she’d never done before: bathing in a stream, which Stuart called a burn, making bread in the old range, collecting wood for the fire, and making love in woods and fields. Sometimes they drove to a beach, sometimes they walked in forests, and Stuart would carry Barney on his shoulders for miles.

In the evenings they lit a bonfire and lay around it with the rest of the gang, singing, laughing and chatting. Stuart often urged her to sing as he played his guitar, but she preferred just to listen to him. Whether he was evoking the fire of flamenco, or playing heart-rending love songs, happy folk music or joyful rock and roll, to see his head bent over his instrument, his eyes dreamily half closed and his fingers like quicksilver on the strings, made her heart contract with love for him.

She realized then she’d never truly loved before. She cared far more for Stuart than she did for herself, and never wanted to be apart from him. The way he was with Barney, natural, easy and loving, seeing him not as a slightly irritating accessory of hers, but a major part of her, was so soothing. And Barney responded to him gleefully, sensing this was one man he could trust implicitly.

She found it odd that she no longer cared about material things. She wore the same old clothes day in, day out, she didn’t crave restaurant meals, night clubs or trips to the cinema. They had nothing, only each other, and it was the purest, sweetest thing she had ever known.

By the end of September they were waking to chilly mist and the nights were drawing in; suddenly everyone began to talk about moving on. Some thought they’d go to Morocco, others just back to London.

‘We have to be sensible,’ Stuart said when Laura suggested they went to Morocco too. ‘That’s no place to take Barney, he might get sick there. Besides, I’ve got very little money left, and I must get back to work to look after you both.’

‘But where will we live?’ she asked.

Stuart smiled and patted her cheek the way he always did when she looked worried. ‘We can’t live in a squat through a Scottish winter, but I’ll find us somewhere cosy in Edinburgh.’

Laura smiled to herself at all those wonderful memories; reliving them had made her relaxed and peaceful. She wondered if Stuart thought back on them in the same way, or whether what happened later had destroyed them for him.

She often told people who knew Stuart in those days that the reason they broke up was because he was too young and naive for her, and that was a small part of it. Another part was the cultural differences between them when they moved to Edinburgh.

The south had had a huge shake-up during the late sixties. Feminism, the Pill and the hippie culture had all changed the traditional family values and moral codes Laura remembered from the 1950s. No one batted an eye at unmarried mothers or couples living together before marriage any more. Women had moved into traditionally male jobs and they could rise much higher in most companies and professions. While there was still inequality in male and female wages, things were moving in the right direction and society was becoming much fairer.

Laura had assumed the same had happened in Scotland, so it was something of a shock, after the free and easy life in Castle Douglas, to find Edinburgh still had one foot in the Dark Ages and the women were still subservient to their men.

She could hardly believe that men could come home from work, eat their tea, put on the clean ironed shirt their wife had ready for them and then disappear off to the pub, night after night. It was an unwelcome echo of her own childhood, and she couldn’t understand why their women didn’t protest.

She found it odd, too, that the Scots she met at that time seemed to have little interest in the decor of their homes. Going into one was like stepping back into the fifties. Even people with quite good jobs had very shabby homes, and few owned their own houses.

Her very first impression of Edinburgh was one of wonder. She gazed at the majestic Castle standing proud up on a vast rock as they drove into the city and could hardly wait to explore it. She saw, too, the elegant Georgian New Town with its wide streets and leafy squares and felt this was a city she could give her heart to.

But there was no time to explore. Stuart was anxious to find work quickly and in the meantime they were to stay with his parents.

Mr and Mrs Macgregor were welcoming enough, especially to Barney, but Laura sensed an undercurrent of disapproval that their son was involved with an older married woman. Mrs Macgregor showed Laura and Barney to Stuart’s old bedroom and made it quite plain that he would be sleeping on the sofa.

‘I will not have carrying on in my house,’ she said quietly but firmly.

Laura wished then that she’d anticipated this and found a room to rent. She felt badly about starting off on the wrong foot with this softly spoken, sweet-faced woman.

In most ways Stuart’s parents were what she expected, for his honesty, dignity and good manners were clearly the result of a careful upbringing. They were in their late fifties, both with grey hair, his mother small and tubby and his father around five feet eight with a craggy face and the same strong jawline as Stuart. But Laura was surprised by the humbleness of their two-bedroom flat. Knowing Mr Macgregor was a first-class tradesman, she had imagined he earned very good money. Yet they had no washing machine, their fridge was ancient, and the kitchen, though scrupulously clean, was very old-fashioned. Even more surprisingly, Stuart told her that they moved there when he was ten, and at that time his brother and sister were still living at home. She wondered how they had all fitted in.

Laura wasn’t happy staying with the Macgregors, as by day Stuart was out hunting for work, and she was left with his mother. It seemed rude to take Barney out and explore Edinburgh when she was an uninvited guest. Stuart didn’t seem to want her to look for a flat for them until he’d got a job, so she had to spend the days helping his mother with her chores and going out to the local shops to buy food for dinner.

Right from a child Laura had always been the one who cleaned, cooked and tidied up, and she found Mrs Macgregor’s assumption that she was undomesticated irritating. There was no variety in the meals she cooked either, meat and vegetables ruled, and she looked alarmed when Laura tentatively suggested that a pasta or rice dish might make a pleasant change.

Even more irritating was that she had no time alone with Stuart. The minute his father had eaten his dinner he went to the pub, expecting Stuart to go with him. When she asked if she could go too, Mr Macgregor looked at her in astonishment.

‘Nay, lassie,’ he said. ‘’Tis all men there.’

When Stuart got taken on to do the joinery in a school which was being modernized, they were both overjoyed. As he had a few days before he was needed, he began looking for a home for them. Again it was made quite clear by the Macgregors that this was a man’s job and Laura was to keep out of it.

On the Friday before he was due to start the new job, he came home with a key. ‘I’ve got us a hoose,’ he said, grinning delightedly. ‘We can move in as soon as we’ve found some furniture.’

It never occurred to Laura to ask him to define ‘hoose’, and she was soon to discover that the word meant merely ‘home’ to him.

He took her to Caledonian Crescent that evening, and although Laura was delighted to find it was in the central, Haymarket area of the city, her heart sank a couple of notches when she saw it was a tenement, with a central staircase and four flats on each of the four floors. Their ‘hoose’, number 7, was on the second floor overlooking the street.

Compared to her old home in Shepherds Bush it was gracious, and luxurious, by comparison with the squat in Castle Douglas, but the climb up the dingy stairs put her off before she’d even seen inside the flat. The poky hallway led into one gloomy room with a kitchen in a recess, one bedroom and a tiny bathroom, but the fact it was self-contained did nothing to lift her spirits. She felt ashamed she couldn’t be overjoyed – Stuart might very well have found a place where they had to share the bathroom.

Yet she bit back her disappointment and suggested they painted it all white to brighten it up. With the £200 she’d still got in the bank, they could buy a second-hand bed, a little one for Barney, some cheap carpet, and maybe a settee too. They could make it nice.

By Saturday night the bedroom was painted. They had a double bed and a single one for Barney, made up with sheets and blankets Mrs Macgregor had given them. Stuart had fixed a pole across the alcove to hold their clothes in and they even had curtains at the window and a bedside light made with a Chianti bottle.

‘We’ll make it all grand in time,’ Stuart said as he hugged her. ‘I’ll be making good money, we can buy a telly and a stereo before long, and till then I’ll entertain you with lovemaking and my guitar.’

That was all she wanted or needed then. All through October, November and December while Stuart was working, she spent her days scouring the second-hand shops for oddments they needed, copying recipes from magazines in the library to cook economical, tasty meals for them, taking Barney on exploratory walks, and working on the flat to prettify it.

She loved Edinburgh with her whole being, from the steep cobbled wynds and the extraordinary towering ancient tenements in the Old Town, to the magnificence of the Castle and Holyrood palace. She got books on the city’s history from the library and made Stuart laugh when she gleefully revelled in the darker side of it, with Burke and Hare the notorious body-snatchers, or the ghosts said to frequent the Old Town. She cried when she heard the story of Bobbie of Greyfriars churchyard, the dog who sat on his master’s grave for years after his death, and she felt indignant that Mary, Queen of Scots had been treated so badly. She couldn’t wait for spring so they could climb up to Arthur’s Seat, or go to the beach at Portobello.

She was happy, really happy. She soon grew used to the other people who lived ‘on the stair’ taking an inordinate amount of interest in her, and the cooking smells which wafted up and remained trapped. She didn’t mind the biting cold, going to tea with Stuart’s parents almost every Sunday and living on far less housekeeping money than she had with Greg.

There was a cosiness about living with Stuart which she’d never experienced before. He took care of her in every way, from a cup of tea when he got up to go to work, to insisting she wasn’t to carry heavy shopping home but to wait for him to go with her. He was always enthusiastic about the meals she cooked him, he wanted to play with Barney when he got home, and though they couldn’t afford to go out much, the evenings and weekends with him were joyful times.

But happy as she was with Stuart, she found it hard to accept that most Scots males were chauvinists. She had no problem with the ‘You’re just a wee lassie, let me lift that for you’ attitude of gentlemanly Scotsmen, for Stuart was like that too, but she hated the way so many of them showed little regard for their wives and took no part in their children’s upbringing.

She got to know many women with children around the same age as Barney, but friendly and warm as these women were, it irritated her that they were resigned to an endless round of cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing and living on the tightest budget, while their man did as he pleased. They spoke longingly of wanting to go and visit relatives, to have a family holiday, or just having their husband home long enough one evening so they could discuss how the kids were doing at school. On the odd occasion when Laura expressed her view that they should take a firmer line with their men and demand the kind of equal relationship she had with Stuart, they just shrugged. ‘You an’ your London ways,’ they’d say, as if she came from another planet.

She heard men out in the street stumbling home drunk from the pub on a Friday or Saturday night, and the violent rows that often broke out when they got in. She would listen to her friends’ complaints that their television had been repossessed because their husband hadn’t met the payments, or that they’d had to pawn something to pay the rent.

Laura felt a smug superiority that Stuart was not like that. He rarely went out without her, and since they’d moved into the flat he’d built bookcases, a proper wardrobe, and more cupboards for the kitchen. On the odd occasion when he did go out for a drink with a friend he always asked first if she minded. And when he did come home drunk, he was never nasty, quite the reverse – he would make love to her for hours and hours.

She was irritated, though, by the influence his parents had over him. They didn’t really approve of them living together when they weren’t married, they were suspicious of Laura’s worldliness, and perhaps afraid she was going to tempt Stuart away from them and the kind of sober, industrious life they wanted for him.

In January of ’73, the work on the school was finished, and it didn’t lead on to another job as Stuart had hoped. Right through that month and half-way through February he couldn’t get another job and they had to apply for dole. It was tough living on less than half the amount of wages he’d been used to, but they managed. It was bitterly cold then, and Laura liked the cosiness of having him home with her and Barney.