Faith - Lesley Pearse [89]
‘Surely not!’ Stuart exclaimed.
‘You are sweetly naive,’ Meggie retorted. ‘One thing I really do know about is men, and believe me, Stuart, some of them can be utterly ruthless. Why else did he suddenly start scoring drugs and bringing them home? Laura had often taken speed when she was doing promotions, lots of the girls did. But Greg always disapproved of that. Yet all at once he was bringing it home, encouraging her back into it. I’ll tell you why, so that he could then slip her something really dangerous, and if she died it would look like it was her own doing.’
She laughed mirthlessly at Stuart’s expression of disbelief. ‘I was there, I saw it,’ she insisted.
Meggie closed her eyes for a moment, thinking back to January of 1972, trying to picture everything so she could describe it in such a way that Stuart would understand how it was not just for Laura, but her and Ivy too.
When she and Ivy had moved into the little two-up, two-down terraced house in Islington, it was little more than a slum. The floorboards were full of dry rot, the wiring was dangerous, and the bathroom was a lean-to at the back with floor-to-ceiling black mould. All the other houses around them were much the same, built cheaply for working-class people at the turn of the century, and a far cry from the big houses nearby built for the wealthy. But however seedy it was, the rent was low, so they painted over the ancient wallpaper, washed the mould off the bathroom walls, and felt they were lucky to have a whole house to themselves.
Meggie had never imagined herself owning her own house then. As a single girl of only twenty-one she would never have got a mortgage. But when she was offered the house for £1,200, a real bargain, and Laura gave her £300 for a deposit, her bank was willing to help her.
Once the house was legally hers she was determined to get tradesmen to come in and do it up. For that she needed cash, so along with her work at night from the club, she also joined a call-girl service to take some extra clients in the afternoons. All through the autumn and the start of the winter, she and Ivy holed up in one bedroom while the kitchen, bathroom and living room were renovated. Day after day they were subjected to hammering and banging, dust and mess. Sometimes there was no electricity and for a time they had no toilet either. With men trooping in and out and the stink of wet plaster and gloss paint it was misery. Sometimes they even began to think they should have accepted the £200 they were offered from the previous owners to give up their tenancy.
Yet by the end of January when at last they had got a pretty pink bathroom, a pale blue kitchen with a brand-new cooker and fridge, and gas central heating, they felt it was all worth it. Nothing had ever been as good as seeing the sage-green carpet laid in the living room, and awaiting the two big comfy sofas that would transform it into their own real home and give them the security they’d never had before.
By then Ivy was nineteen and she had got her secretarial diploma and landed a job as a secretary with a firm of accountants. She also began a night-school course in bookkeeping. Fortunately she was still naive enough to believe it cost very little to get all the work done, and she happily swallowed her sister’s story that she spent her afternoons at the club doing paperwork and ordering drinks for her boss.
But Meggie was all too aware that Ivy wouldn’t stay naive for much longer, and if she ever did work out what her older sister did for a living, she might very well walk away from her. It was bad enough having Laura separated from them because she had to keep her family secret, but Ivy wasn’t just a sister, she was Meggie’s only real friend and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.
Physically they were very alike – the same height, slim build and dark eyes, though Ivy’s hair was mousey as Laura’s had once been – but Ivy was unscarred, easygoing, warmhearted and confident in her own abilities.
She didn’t agonize over anything. If a boyfriend