Faith - Lesley Pearse [85]
Stuart gave a shrug. ‘Why not? You’re Laura’s sister and you’ve let me into your house and shared your past with me. I think mending your little roof is the least I can do in return.’
To his astonishment her face began to crumple. ‘I’m her sister but I didn’t lift a finger to help at her trial,’ she sobbed. ‘I didn’t even go to give her some kind of support. I haven’t written to her, I haven’t done anything for her. All because I was afraid for myself.’
Stuart did what he always did when women cried. He went over to her and enfolded her in his arms. ‘There, there,’ he said, rocking with her. ‘Laura would understand, she wouldn’t have wanted you to be caught up in the publicity circus.’
Meggie sobbed for some minutes. Stuart continued to hold her, murmuring little platitudes about how difficult it was for people to know what to do when something so serious happens.
Her sobs gradually abated and she wriggled out of his arms and took a step backwards away from him. Her face was wet with tears but there was a hunted look in her eyes.
‘I haven’t told you the whole truth about me, Stuart. All this time I’ve been thinking I didn’t need to, that it’s all in the past and it’s nothing to do with the present. But that isn’t so. It is relevant. Both Laura and I were damaged by Vince. It made us do things other normal women would never do. We have problems with relationships, it left us with a hardness, something nasty at the core of us.’
Stuart shrugged. ‘I’m sure it did, Meggie. I know when Laura told me about Vince I understood a great many things about her that had puzzled me before. But I didn’t come here today to interrogate you. I only wanted a different perspective on your shared childhood.’
‘I was a prostitute,’ she shouted at him.
Stuart was astounded. It was the last thing he expected to hear, especially thrown at him so suddenly. He didn’t know how to respond, so he said nothing.
‘Have you taken it in?’ she snapped at him. ‘That was the reason I stayed away from the trial because I was afraid it would be exposed. I stopped Ivy from going too because she didn’t know what I did. I said we were better out of it.’
‘If you think I’m going to throw my hands up in horror, you are mistaken,’ he said gently. ‘I’ve already seen how bleak your childhood was, I can see from this house what you aspired to. To get from one to the other took a monumental will, and in my mind there are far worse ways you could have done it.’
‘But I can’t forgive myself for it,’ she retorted. ‘I can find excuses, that I was very young, I had no qualifications for a good job, that I had Ivy to take care of too. But I’m so ashamed that while I was lecturing Ivy about not letting boys use her, making her go to night school to learn shorthand and typing, I was flitting off every night and taking money from seedy men who couldn’t get a woman any other way.’
Stuart made no comment, just waited for her to resume where she left off.
‘Ivy and Laura believed I was the assistant manager in a smart West End night club.’ She gave an anguished kind of giggle. ‘I was often there all right, but the only thing I managed was peeling my clothes off later in a hotel room. Okay, so I stopped it as soon as I sold the first house and bought the other two, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone ever since, yet however long ago it was, however lovely I make this house and the garden, I feel I’m tainted and don’t deserve all this.’
The depth of her shame touched Stuart and brought a lump to his throat. ‘Of course you deserve it,’ he insisted. ‘You didn’t hurt anyone by what you did. It was just supply and demand – you needed money, the men wanted sex and they could afford to pay for it. I see that as a fair exchange.’
‘There was nothing fair about it to me,’ she exclaimed. ‘Every single man I went with was like doing it with Vince! I had to pretend to each one of them that they were the absolute best, that I really loved doing it with them. It made me sick to my stomach. I knew I could never fall in love, get married and have children. That