Faith - Lesley Pearse [88]
Meggie laughed. ‘What you want is a man who will kowtow to you!’
‘So she kind of started off on the wrong foot,’ Meggie said after she’d told Stuart the gist of her memory of that day. ‘Ivy and I couldn’t be at the wedding for obvious reasons, but by all accounts Greg got a bit of a shock when Laura didn’t arrive at the church in a meringue. He asked her what she thought she was doing turning up looking like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical.’
‘Jackie once showed me a wedding photo,’ Stuart said. ‘I thought Laura looked fabulous. I think my heart would have stopped if I’d been waiting in the church and she turned up looking like that. But I guess Greg was a traditionalist.’
‘She told me some time later that he spent most of their honeymoon sulking, and said she’d made him look a prat,’ Meggie said, pursing her lips. ‘She felt really bad about it, she wanted to be a good wife to him, so I suppose she decided to bend to his will thereafter. By the time she was pregnant with Barney, she was wearing Greg’s choice of clothes, cooking the kind of meals he approved of; even their house in Chelsea was furnished in his conventional taste. She couldn’t have floor cushions, candles or bead curtains, the kind of hippie stuff she loved, it was all G-Plan, red curtains and shag pile. She once joked that she didn’t know why it was called shag pile, because he never wanted to shag her on it.’
Stuart laughed and poured Meggie another glass of wine. ‘Laura never really talked about him when we were together, but I did get the idea he was preoccupied with his business, and that she spent a great deal of time on her own. Did you and Ivy see much of her?’
‘We could only visit when Greg was safely away on business, and I guess I was too young and preoccupied with my own worries and trying to keep what I was doing from her to notice much. But she did seem a bit wistful sometimes, she was always going on about how many new opportunities there were out there for women. She used to urge me to grab them while I still could.’
Meggie paused. ‘Then Barney was born. Laura didn’t want to give him a name like Barnabas, that was Greg’s choice, just as he had to have a conventional nursery, not the wacky, jolly room full of mobiles and bright pictures that Laura envisaged. She’d had a long and difficult labour, and with the benefit of hindsight I’d say she had postnatal depression. But in those days that wasn’t really recognized, and there she was stuck at home alone with a new baby, without anyone to reassure or help her.
‘Greg was no help, Laura said he looked like he was in pain every time he was forced to hold his son. He got angry when he cried, he took no real interest in his development.’
Stuart frowned. His memories of Barney were so sharp and dear to him that he felt hurt that the little boy’s real father hadn’t felt twice as much love for him.
‘Somehow she staggered through Barney’s first year,’ Meggie said. ‘She once said she felt she was in a black hole scrabbling with her fingertips to climb out. Then just as she was beginning to get her figure back and find herself again, Greg dropped the bombshell that he was going to buy a house in the country. Laura got really scared then, she told me she felt he was going to bury her alive. I advised her, rightly or wrongly, that she should put her foot down and refuse to go.’
‘Which she did?’
‘Yes, and it was at that point everything went pear-shaped. It transpired later that he had a mistress and his family were fanatically opposed to divorce, so I suppose sticking his wife and baby out in the country was plan A. When Laura dug her heels in and refused to go, I guess he had to resort