Faith - Lesley Pearse [98]
Laura didn’t feel much more than a twinge of sadness about Freddy, but then he was only three at the time she left Barnes and apart from that one meeting all those years ago, she hadn’t seen him since. But her sisters were different; she had so many memories of them and she had always cared what they thought of her.
Meggie had described in her letter how Stuart had tracked her down, and how good he’d been to her, letting her get things off her chest and mending her summer house too. That made Laura smile, for she remembered how when they visited his friends, he often mended things for them. Good listener as he was, he was a great believer in doing something practical too.
She wondered what Meggie had said to him about her. She was bound to have told the story about Greg poisoning her – it was something she often brought up because she wished she’d taken Laura seriously the first time and removed the remainder of those pills to get them tested. Maybe she’d told Stuart about Greg hitting her, and refusing to give her any money too. But Meggie couldn’t have told him what finally made her leave the louse, because she didn’t know. Laura had kept that to herself.
It was February ’72 when she was admitted to hospital with poisoning for the second time. She could still remember in vivid detail the agonizing cramps, and the certainty that she was going to die. But she had recovered, and when she got home Greg was so nice to her, convincing her that not only was she mistaken in believing he had a hand in it, but that his affair was over and he wanted to start again and make their marriage a good one.
She could see him and the Chelsea house so clearly on the bitterly cold day when he brought her home from hospital. She had to lean on him for support because she was still so weak.
‘I thought you’d rather lie down on the sofa in the sitting room than be upstairs alone,’ he said as he helped her in. ‘Look, I’ve brought down an eiderdown and pillows for you, so you can be cosy and watch television. Mum’s going to keep Barney for a few days until you feel up to looking after him. We’ve all been so worried about you.’
Laura had never liked the decor or furniture in their house. Greg had bought the place a few years before she met him, and it was all his taste. It wasn’t hideous, just dull. Almost everything was cream, with teak wall units fitted with lights to illuminate his various sporting trophies. His pictures were equally dull, sombre landscapes and one with a depressing old crone sitting in a doorway.
In the first few days at home when she still felt so ill, lying there looking at the room which held nothing of her personality, she came to the conclusion that it was her own fault Greg had become so controlling. Before they were married she should have asserted her opinion about his house, and made it clear that she wanted more than to be a stay-at-home wife. That way they would have started out on an equal footing.
But the unpalatable truth was that when she met Greg she was in fact a gold-digger. She only ever went out with wealthy men. If a man couldn’t afford to take her to swish places and buy her expensive presents, they got nowhere with her.
When Jackie met up with Roger again and said she was going to marry him, Laura panicked. Roger didn’t like her, he’d never got over what she did to his friend Steven, and she was afraid that Jackie would bow to his opinion and abandon her. So she cold-bloodedly looked for someone to marry her.
She didn’t have to look very far, for Greg was her boss. Unlike most of the men in her life he wasn’t married, he was very successful, he had a house in Chelsea and an expensive car, and he could give her the sort of glamorous life she wanted.
There was also the fact that he was out of the top drawer. He’d gone to a good public school and to Cambridge, and his family, who lived in Essex,