Faith - Lesley Pearse [65]
‘We can do even better,’ Laura replied, clinking Jackie’s glass. ‘Here’s to one day having our own company and becoming millionaires!’
This was their private little dream, and hardly a week passed without them coming up with an idea that might make it come true. But however good their ideas were, they had no capital to get launched. One of the reasons they liked coming to parties like this one was because they might well meet someone prepared to back them.
‘So what resolutions are we going to make this year?’ Jackie asked.
‘Maybe to save some money,’ Laura suggested. ‘Or perhaps we should learn to drive?’
‘Good thinking, wonder girl,’ Jackie giggled. ‘If we had a car we could spend the summer doing outside promotions all over England. But right now my only resolution is to get drunk on champagne. Someone told me it doesn’t give you a hangover.’
A few weeks later, in early February, Jackie got a couple of weeks’ work in Leeds promoting a new range of nail products. As she had met a man she fancied, she decided to stay over instead of coming home for Sunday and Monday.
Laura had been on a training course for a cosmetics company, but it finished on Wednesday and she didn’t have to start work with the company until the following Tuesday. She was pleased to have a few days by herself. Jackie was never very good at cleaning up or doing her washing, and she moaned when Laura tried to do it when she was there. She spent Thursday going to the laundrette, and then spring-cleaned the flat. But by Saturday she had run out of things to do, and it was too cold and wet to go out to the shops.
It was the tidiness of the flat that set her off thinking about her family. She always felt soothed when the whole flat was immaculate, the kitchen smelling fresh and clean, and the bathroom sparkling. Jackie often teased her about her love of cleanliness and order and Laura would laugh it off, but she had a real fear that if she ever allowed things to really slide, she could become the way her mother was.
Now, as she looked at the magazines tidily stacked in a rack, the fringe on the rug in front of the gas fire neatly brushed out, and the cushions on the couch just so, she wondered if her mother had finally learned to clean the house in Barnes properly. Or if Meggie had been pressed into doing everything Laura used to do.
In the six years since she left there, she’d thought about her mother and the little ones a great deal, especially on birthdays and at Christmas. In a way it was worse than losing her family through bereavement because she knew they were out there getting on with their lives, but she could have no part in it.
She wondered whether Mark and Paul went straight when they got out of borstal, how Meggie, Ivy and Freddy were doing at school, and what they all looked like six years on. There had been many times when she was tempted to go over to Barnes and hang around in the hopes she’d see them. But she never had because she knew a glimpse of them wouldn’t be enough, she’d have to talk to them.
She was totally aware that daydreams of happy reunions, June throwing her arms around her and the kids all cuddling her, were just fantasy. The reality was that June would almost certainly resent her turning up again and complicating her life with Vincent, and Laura knew she couldn’t handle seeing him again.
But remembering what he did to her suddenly made her realize that Meggie was fifteen now and Ivy thirteen, the ideal ages for a man with a fondness for young girls. The thought that her pretty little sisters might suffer that was horrific, and all at once she knew she had to go over to Barnes and warn June.
All Saturday night she could think of nothing else. She had always been wary of Vincent, but her sisters hadn’t. So how much easier would it be to lure them into it?
By Sunday morning she no longer cared if June sent her away with a flea in her ear. She had to go, whatever the consequences, or spend the rest