Faith - Lesley Pearse [39]
‘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