Faith - Lesley Pearse [73]
Stuart nodded. ‘She genuinely loved you and Frank though. She used to talk about you such a lot when we first met. You had clearly been a tremendous influence on her. And she didn’t exaggerate any of that, for the first time I came to Duke’s Avenue with Jackie, it was, and you were, exactly how she’d described.’
‘We loved her,’ Lena said simply. ‘She was easy to love. Frank once said she was like Judy, a stray dog we took in when the children were tiny. We saw her up at Alexandra Park and stroked her, and she followed us home. We didn’t want a dog, but Judy seemed to know that and made herself as inconspicuous as possible until we’d come round to her being there. Laura was the same, she would wash up, do my ironing, put Belle and Toby to bed, she tidied Jackie’s room, all without us really noticing. When she came to live here for a while after she and Jackie returned from a summer job in a holiday camp, she never encroached on any of our space, she made life easier and more ordered for me and all of us.’
She paused for a moment as if gathering herself. ‘How can anyone feel betrayed that she lied? She was just fifteen when she left home, and she wanted something better than she’d been born to. A weaker person would have tried to gain sympathy for herself, but instead she rubbed it all out and began again. I actually think that is courageous. Don’t you?’
‘Yes, when you put it like that,’ Stuart said. ‘But what do you think changed her from the sweet and eager-to-please stray?’ he asked.
‘Ambition, bad influences and more hard knocks,’ Lena said. ‘When she and Jackie moved on to doing promotion work, the girls they worked with and the businessmen they met gave them the idea that wealth was the thing to strive for. In a way I was proud that they became a pair of go-getters, but I was worried about their increasing cynicism and avarice.’
‘The sixties kind of encouraged that attitude.’ Stuart shrugged. ‘I know most people only remember the peace and love bit, but it was also a time for grabbing what you wanted.’
‘I thought Laura would make it all by herself, she certainly had the hunger and the determination, and she had a good business head, but instead she tried to take a short cut to it by marrying Gregory Brannigan,’ Lena stated and looked at Stuart as if she expected him to contradict her.
‘I hardly know anything about Greg,’ Stuart replied. ‘When I first met Laura she said she left him because there was another woman, and that she didn’t want to talk about it. She did tell me odd things later, that he was the owner of a toy company and that she worked for him. But mostly the lack of information about him made me afraid she still had feelings for him.’
‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ Lena said stoutly. ‘She hated him come the end, and she was very afraid of him. I only met him a few times but I could see that he was a very forceful, controlling man. In my opinion if it hadn’t been for Jackie meeting up with Roger again, I don’t think Laura would have even gone out with him for very long, much less married him.’
She smiled at Stuart’s puzzled expression. ‘You do know that Roger was Jackie’s first real boyfriend, but they’d split up years before?’
‘Yes. Laura told me that.’
‘Well, she and Jackie were having the time of their lives until Roger came back on the scene and broke it up by asking Jackie to marry him. He had a down on Laura for some reason and suddenly she was left right out in the cold, lonely and rudderless. Greg seized the opportunity, whisking Laura off for weekends, dinner in smart places, and the next thing she was engaged to him. Both Jackie and I warned her that he was far too controlling, but I don’t think she could see beyond his house in Chelsea, the toy company and the