Faith - Lesley Pearse [92]
‘Maybe she was scared that she’d look too needy and frighten you off,’ Meggie suggested. ‘I got a letter from her soon after she met you. She said that you were wonderful, but she was afraid it would fall apart because you were so young and innocent. But you must ask her about that. I can only guess at what was going on in her mind.’
Stuart drank some more wine, silently mulling over what Meggie had told him. ‘I’m going to make a start on your summer house,’ he said after a few moments. ‘I think better with tools in my hands.’
Meggie protested, but Stuart insisted. ‘It needs doing and today is as good as any to get cracking on it. Unless of course you want me to push off?’
‘No, I don’t.’ She smiled. ‘It’s nice having you here.’
Two hours later, Stuart had removed the old roofing felt and secured all the loose shingles. As he climbed up the ladder to spread the new felt over the roof timbers, he glanced back up the garden and saw that Meggie was on her knees close to the house, pulling out weeds.
She’d got him her tools and offered to help him but he’d said he could manage alone. Apart from bringing him a cup of coffee about an hour ago, she’d stayed well away. But now as he looked at her he realized he ought to have accepted her help, for even viewing her from a distance he could sense her isolation. He was pretty certain she had no real friends; she’d probably never had anyone much in her life other than Ivy and Laura.
A wave of sympathy washed over him, for she was a good person with a lively mind and she certainly wasn’t lacking in personality. But he supposed her guilt about her past made it impossible for her to let anyone get close to her.
It had been a day of revelations, and he would need a great deal more time to think through them all. Yet the one thing which stood out for him above all else was that Laura had feared their relationship couldn’t last because he was so young and innocent.
He hadn’t of course seen himself as innocent back then. But if innocence meant not understanding that some people are damaged, that events in their past could colour the rest of their lives, then he was definitely guilty of that.
Falling hard and fast for Laura as he did, he never questioned anything she told him, and he didn’t ask about her past because he was afraid she might tell him something that would make him jealous. Indeed, the very fact that she didn’t want to talk about Gregory had convinced him that she’d loved her husband deeply. When she made no attempt to get a divorce, he felt insecure, for to him that looked as if she hoped to get back with the man.
Later, when they got the flat in Edinburgh and he was unable to find work, he was aggrieved when she took a job at the casino. If she’d got work in a shop or an office he wouldn’t have minded so much, even though back in those days he believed it was a man’s role to be sole breadwinner. But casinos to him were dens of vice and the women who worked in them were honey traps to lure the suckers in and fleece them. He believed Laura was out looking for a rich man so she could have a glamorous life – he even saw her leaving him to mind Barney as evidence she didn’t really care about her son either.
But in the light of what he now knew about her marriage, perhaps his views on how she behaved back then were distorted. She might have been afraid to file for divorce because she was frightened of Greg finding out where she was. There was no doubt the money she earned at the casino helped them through a lean time, and maybe it was better for Barney that she worked at night so he didn’t have to go and stay with a stranger.
As he tacked down the roofing felt he was reminded of his first year in London. He would be doing jobs like this one, but his mind was always on Laura and dwelling on the many rows they’d had in this last year together.
He could see her now, sitting at the dressing table doing her face, all dressed up in a glamorous dress and high heels, while he ranted at her preferring the company of gamblers