Faith - Lesley Pearse [110]
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