Faith (5 page)

That day at school Laura kept thinking about it, and remembered that a couple of weeks earlier she’d woken up to find her mother fully dressed making a cup of tea in the kitchen. At the time she’d believed her story that she couldn’t sleep so she’d washed and dressed, but now it looked as if she’d been out all night both times. It could only mean she’d been with a man.

As soon as she got home, she asked her mother point-blank.

‘What do you mean, have I been with a man?’ June replied, getting up and looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace, which was what she always did when faced with something awkward.

‘I know you have, Mum,’ Laura said. ‘And you’re married, so that’s wicked.’

June whipped round, her small face sharp with spite. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wicked,’ she said. ‘A daughter who can’t bear to see her mother have a bit of life. Do you know what it’s like to be stuck in here day after day with only you four kids? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s enough to drive anyone mad.’

Laura was mature enough to understand why June had been tempted by another man; she was after all well aware of her father’s shortcomings. She might even have been glad for her if she hadn’t been so nasty.

What hurt was that she had been lumped together with the three younger children as a burden, when she had been her mother’s sole friend and helper in the past year.

She was also scared that this new man, whoever he was, might want to move in with them.

His name, Laura discovered three or four weeks later, was Vincent Parish. He was a sixty-year-old widower and he had an office in the block June cleaned in. He was, according to her mother, everything Bill Wilmslow wasn’t: successful, well-bred and a gentleman.

On 3 January 1959, two days before her fourteenth birthday, Laura met Vincent for the first time. He invited them all to Lyons Corner House in the Strand, and bought them knickerbocker glories. Laura was rather impressed by his posh voice, his hand-tailored suit and gold watch, but less by his wide girth, lack of hair, and the coldness in his pale blue eyes.

‘I am so glad to meet you all at last,’ he said with a tight-lipped smile. ‘Your mother and I have made so many plans for you all.’

Laura sensed immediately that all he really wanted was her pretty young mother, but as he couldn’t have her without her children, he was pretending that he was happy to have them too.

She watched as he fawned over Ivy and Meggie, who did look sweet in blue velvet dresses bought specially for the occasion. He winced at Freddy smearing the ice cream all around his face, and went bright red when he started screaming to get out of the high chair he’d been put in. Laura didn’t hold that against Vincent for she was embarrassed herself that Freddy was showing them up, but she really didn’t like the way he kept smirking at her across the table.

She had a new dress too, and she was thrilled with it, for it was red wool, with a full circular skirt and a low scooped neckline trimmed with satin ribbon. Beneath it she had a net can-can petticoat, and her first pair of high heels. Her mother had even let her have her hair cut at the hairdresser’s, and put it in curlers for her. But the way Vincent was looking at her made her all too aware of her breasts which had appeared out of nowhere in the past three months.

‘Seeing Laura is like having a glimpse of how you must have looked as a young girl,’ he said to June. ‘I’m sure she’ll grow into a beautiful woman too.’

Her mother glowed at the compliment, but to Laura it sounded as if he was implying her daughter was an ugly duckling. It was on the tip of her tongue to make some retort about how she could copy her mother by bleaching her hair, but she bit that back because she didn’t want to spoil the day for June.

‘I want you all to come and live with me,’ Vincent said a little later, beaming at them all. ‘I have a very nice house in Barnes, right on the river. Meggie can go to the school there, and Ivy and Freddy will follow when they are old enough. But you, Laura, your mother and I think you should stay at your present school. It’s not that far on the tube.’

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ her mother interrupted, her face alight with excitement. ‘You just wait till you see it! It’s got two bathrooms, can you believe that! Ivy and Meggie will have a room together, and there’s a little one for Freddy and another one just for you, Laura. Vincent is going to get you a real desk too so you can do your homework in peace.’

‘What’s Dad going to say about this?’ Laura asked. Part of her was delighted that they’d be leaving Thornfield Road: the thought of a real bathroom and a room of her own was like a glimpse of heaven. If her mother had just talked about this to her first, before today, maybe she could have been really happy about it. But as it was, Laura felt her feelings and opinions meant nothing at all.

‘I couldn’t care less what he says,’ her mother snapped. ‘He didn’t think of me and you kids when he went off holding up that post office. The chances were he was planning to run off from us with that box of money.’

‘Your mother has had a very difficult time,’ Vincent chimed in reprovingly. ‘And you are old enough to understand that, Laura.’

Laura leapt up from her seat. ‘Understand it! I’ve supported her through it! If it wasn’t for me these three would have gone hungry and had no clothes to wear. You’ll soon find out how she is! All she cares about is her fags and getting her hair bleached. She can’t even clean up.’

She ran out of the Corner House then, ignoring her mother calling her back, and kept on running until she came to Regent Street, where she was too out of breath to run any further.

Leaning against a wall to catch her breath, she knew she’d said too much and that her mother was unlikely to forgive her. What’s more, she’d left her coat at the Corner House and the wind was icy. And she had no money to get on the tube, or even a key for the front door; that was in her coat pocket.

An hour later Laura arrived home. She’d got on the tube without a ticket easily enough, but when she got off at Goldhawk Road she had to spin a yarn to the ticket collector that she’d had her coat stolen, and ask if she could bring the fare along to him the next day. He let her off, but as she walked up the road shivering in her thin dress, she was really frightened about the reception she would get at home.

Meggie opened the front door to her. ‘Mum’s really angry with you,’ she whispered, her dark eyes wide with anxiety. ‘Uncle Vincent put us in a taxi to come home. He said you needed taking in hand.’

Laura gave her little sister a squeeze. Meggie was a worrier; at only seven she already had frown furrows in her little brow. She and Ivy were prettier than Laura had been; their hair was dark brown and very shiny, and their eyes were bigger. But Meggie’s worrying spoiled her looks – right now she looked like a little old lady.

‘I don’t care if I’m in trouble,’ Laura said loud enough for her mother to hear. ‘And that man isn’t your uncle, he’s just Mum’s fancy man.’

Her mother appeared in the doorway. ‘How could you be so nasty?’ she asked, her voice sharp with hurt. ‘Why can’t you be glad for me, and that you’ll all live in a nice warm, comfortable home? He’ll make a much better father to you all than Bill.’

‘Will he?’ Laura replied insolently. ‘He doesn’t want any of us, only you. How long will it be before he’s picking on Freddy, telling Ivy off for wetting her knickers, or getting angry with Meggie because she’s timid?’

‘He’ll grow to love you all once he’s got to know you. But he’ll be out at work all day so you won’t see much of him except at weekends.’

In a flash Laura saw that her mother wasn’t entirely convinced about Vincent. She could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She loved his house, she loved what he could do for her, but she didn’t love him.

‘I think you’re making a mistake, Mum,’ Laura said. ‘Once we’re in his house, if anything goes wrong and he throws you out, where will you go then?’

‘Nothing will go wrong unless you mess it up for us,’ she replied. ‘He’s a good man, Laura. A kind and decent one with a bit of brass too. Don’t go looking for problems.’

Laura went on into the living room and flopped down on the bed. She remembered only too well how her dad used to moan about the noise his children made, so it was obvious a man who had never had any of his own would have no real idea of what it meant to have four readymade ones suddenly swarming round his house. She thought her mother must be stupid if she hadn’t thought about that.

Her mother followed her into the front room and stood there silently looking at her for a couple of minutes.

‘Can’t you try to like him?’ she said eventually, her voice quivering as if she was going to cry.

‘Can’t you just be his mistress and we carry on living here?’ Laura asked, thinking that was the perfect solution. ‘I could babysit on the nights you want to be with him.’

‘You silly mare,’ her mother exclaimed. ‘Don’t you understand that I want to get us all out of this rat trap? You’ve got no chance in life living here. I know you get called names at school because of the way we live and it makes me feel really bad. You’re clever, and I want you to go on to university and have all the chances I never had. This is the only way I can see you getting that.’

Laura was stunned that her mother had actually considered her future, and it made her feel ashamed of herself.

‘Okay, Mum, I’ll try my best to like him,’ she said, feeling as though she might burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry about today.’

‘That doesn’t matter now,’ her mother said, coming over to the bed and sitting beside her. She put her hand on Laura’s shoulder and squeezed it. ‘I know it isn’t going to be easy adjusting to a new life, especially for me. I’m not a very good housewife, am I? But I’ll have to learn to be because we might never get a chance like this again.’

It was the Easter holidays before they moved to Barnes, and on the night before they were due to leave, as Laura took yet another bag of old clothes and rubbish out to the dustbins for collection, she was excited and happy.

They had all visited the new house back in February and it was all her mother had said, and more: a detached thirties house, backing on to the Thames, and the kind of elegant, spacious and sun-filled home that Laura had only ever previously glimpsed in films and glossy magazines. It had all those luxuries like a television, refrigerator, washing machine, fitted carpets and vacuum cleaner that her mother used to reel off when she imagined winning the pools. Nothing was shabby; it had huge comfy settees and armchairs, a dining room with chairs for eight people, and the kitchen had at least twenty cupboards. Laura was thrilled to find she was to have a room which looked out on to the river. There was the kind of triple-mirrored dressing table like a film star’s and she even had her own small armchair and the desk Vincent had promised her.

She had spent ages in the bathroom she would share with the little ones, drinking in every detail of the shiny pale pink tiles, the heated towel rail and the lights either side of the mirror. Yet it was the things Vincent had done for the little ones which made her lose all her reservations about him. He’d redecorated the room for Ivy and Meggie with a wallpaper covered in flowers and fairies. They had new twin beds and there was a lovely doll sitting on each one. Freddy’s room was tiny but Vincent had got a specially made small bed for him, and the curtains had jungle animals on them. He’d also bought him a shiny red tricycle. No one would go to such trouble if they really didn’t want children living in their house.

Vincent had also said they should start out afresh and so they were only taking their best clothes and most treasured possessions with them to his house. He was going to get them everything else they needed. For the last couple of weeks they had been getting rid of things; they sold a few bits of furniture to a neighbour, and outgrown clothes, pots, pans and china went to a jumble sale. The rest of the stuff was just rubbish and they had filled over twenty sacks with it.

Laura didn’t feel the least bit sad to be leaving Thornfield Road. They were going up in the world at last, and even if the girls at school didn’t come round when they saw her in her new summer uniform dress after Easter, she was too happy to care.

Ten months later, as Laura sat down for her special tea for her fifteenth birthday in January and looked at the beautiful cake with icing roses, and Meggie, Ivy and Freddy’s plump, healthy, smiling faces, she wished she could wholeheartedly believe, as they did, that they really were in paradise.

To be fair to Vincent, he was generous and affectionate to them all. He didn’t complain when the children were noisy, and he showered them all with new clothes, toys, books and anything else they so much as hinted at wanting. As for their mother, she had blossomed; she had her hair and nails done every week, she wore the kind of clothes and shoes rich women wore, and she no longer had that weariness about her which had been so much a part of their old life.

But Laura was always aware of a kind of undercurrent, as if her mother was acting out a role which wasn’t entirely to her liking. She was often nervy, particularly when Vincent was due home from the office, and he didn’t help by commenting on anything which was untidy or dirty.

Laura was by nature tidy-minded, and she loved things to be clean, but she was aware that some people were not like that. June was one of them. Even the modern labour-saving appliances in Grove House couldn’t transform her into a super-housewife. She failed to see fingermarks on paintwork, or an overflowing kitchen bin, and her cooking skills were very limited.

So Laura covered for her by rushing home from school and running around the house picking things up, cleaning this, tidying that, and more often than not supervising whatever her mother was preparing for the dinner she would eat with Vincent later.

It was hard for Laura to understand what her mother found so difficult about cooking; after all, she was no longer on a tight budget and all she had to do was read a recipe book and follow the instructions. But perhaps she was intimidated because Vincent was used to more sophisticated food than she had ever eaten. She certainly seemed very afraid that he would find out her failings.