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 door was closed to me. I was just a dirty whore.’
‘Oh, Meggie.’ Stuart went over to her and hugged her again. ‘You shouldn’t feel that way. I’ve met women who married for money alone, and to my mind that’s far worse because they are living a lie. You should put all the blame on Vince, he was the one that destroyed your innocence, and your mother is to blame too because she didn’t protect you.’
‘But we are all responsible for ourselves,’ she said against his shoulder. ‘Ivy and Freddy had the same upbringing, but they didn’t turn bad.’
Stuart gripped both her arms and looked right into her eyes. ‘They were not abused by Vince. He was dead by the time they were in their most formative years. And they were sheltered by you. Be proud that because of you Ivy has had a happy life, you gave her that.’
She turned away from him, found a tissue in a drawer, blew her nose and dried her eyes. She was silent for a minute or two, and Stuart realized she was trying to pull herself together again.
She turned back to face him, her lips still quivering. ‘Thank you, Stuart,’ she said. ‘I can hardly believe I’ve blurted all this out to a stranger. Promise me you will never tell anyone, especially not Ivy.’
‘Of course I promise. I didn’t come here to see you to cause trouble. You’ve all had more than enough of that. But tell me, did Laura know?’
‘She suspected, but I always denied it. We Wilmslows are good at keeping secrets, and we can be very plausible liars. Mum knew though, she used to ask me for money with a kind of smirk on her face. I knew if I didn’t give it to her she’d tell Ivy. God, I hate her! I was with her when the news first broke in the papers about Laura’s trial. She was practically gleeful. For years she blamed her for how she ended up, she was like a stuck record saying the same old stuff over and over again. Yet Laura had often sent her money, presents too. Mum never even showed any sympathy when I told her Barney had died. All she said was, “Why should I care, she never invited me to her wedding.”’
Stuart felt he could easily hate June Wilmslow too. To him she was the root of all the unhappiness Laura and Meggie had gone though.
They took the tray out into the garden, and after they’d drunk some wine and chatted about more trivial things, Stuart broached the question about Gregory again.
‘You’ve got to understand first that I never actually met him,’ Meggie said. ‘But I saw photos of him, I went to his house when he was away, and I read between the lines of what Laura told me. He was a control freak, though back in those days we called men like him bullies. He was rich – as you probably know, he owned a toy company. Laura met him when she was demonstrating some of his toys in Harrods.’
Stuart nodded. He did know that much.
‘If it hadn’t been for Jackie meeting up with Roger again, and suddenly spending all her time with him, I doubt Laura would have gone out with him more than a few times. She often told me that they had nothing in common,’ Meggie continued. ‘But Gregory kept wining and dining her, buying her expensive presents and taking her away to nice places. Apparently he was charm itself, very suave and handsome.’
‘How old was she then?’
‘Twenty-three,’ Meggie said. ‘He was in his mid-thirties. She was absolutely gorgeous then, tiny little mini skirts, long hair, that real sixties wide-eyed look. Gregory was under pressure from his family to settle down, and I suppose he saw her as some kind of Stepford Wife, beautiful, sexy, domesticated and utterly compliant. That of course was his big mistake. Laura wanted to help him run his company, she hadn’t planned on being forced to be a stay-at-home wife.’
‘I was guilty of that too,’ Stuart said ruefully.
‘But you weren’t a bully, and anyway, she had Barney to look after then,’ Meggie rebuked him. ‘Gregory asked Laura to marry him around the same time Jackie and Roger got engaged and it wasn’t a coincidence, he knew she’d be vulnerable. He got her a diamond ring as big as the Ritz, and began planning the wedding.’
Meggie slipped back in time, remembering the day she met Laura to go to Kensington Market. The indoor market was the trendy alternative to the boutiques of Kensington Church Street and Kings Road in Chelsea. Most of the stallholders were hippies, and you could buy anything there from patchwork floor cushions to joss sticks and Afghan coats. But there were also many stalls which specialized in handmade or antique clothing, and Laura had her heart set on an original thirties dress to get married in.
She found the perfect one, a lovely cream crêpe number with intricate beadwork. Cut on the bias, it clung to her slim hips and accentuated her cleavage. With a little feather ‘fascinator’ pinned in her dark hair, she looked like a Hollywood star. She insisted on buying Meggie a gorgeous twenties black velvet jacket trimmed with jet beads, and afterwards they went to the roof garden at Derry and Toms department store, and had afternoon tea.
Meggie had never been there before, and she could hardly believe there could be a real Italian garden, complete with streams and even real live flamingos, on the top of a tall building. She was so excited she could hardly sit down, but Laura seemed a bit preoccupied and Meggie asked what was on her mind.
‘It’s the wedding really,’ Laura sighed. ‘Am I doing the right thing marrying Greg?’
Meggie was only eighteen then and she’d been working as a prostitute for almost a year. While other girls of her age were having fun, camping out at rock concerts, smoking dope and dropping acid and sleeping with anyone they fancied, she had to spend every evening with men old enough to be her father. It was hell forcing herself to sparkle when she knew that a glass of watered-down champagne would lead to yet another loveless, sordid scene in a hotel room. She always told herself that at least she was at the top of her profession, that she didn’t have the indignity of having to work the streets. But as she came home in the early hours of the morning in a taxi, still smelling of her clients’ sweat, sometimes bearing bruises where they’d been rough with her, she often thought that she would happily settle for marriage with a rich man, even if she didn’t love him, just as long as he was good to her.
‘Do you like Greg?’ she asked her sister.
‘Of course I do,’ Laura replied with some indignation.
‘And you fancy him?’
‘Yes, a lot as it happens.’
‘Well, that’s what love is, isn’t it?’ Meggie replied.
Laura laughed. ‘Other people seem to think there’s a lot more to it than that,’ she said.
‘Well, he’s rich, good-looking too, that is if that photo you showed me is a good likeness,’ Meggie went on. ‘What more could anyone want?’
‘I kind of thought that when I met Mr Right we’d sort of melt together, that there would be no doubts, no what-ifs,’ Laura said wistfully.
‘That’s just the claptrap they write in books,’ Meggie insisted.
‘You are so cynical sometimes,’ Laura said, looking hard at Meggie. ‘Was it Vince that did that to you?’
‘Maybe, but I observe people too. Okay, you see couples mooning over one another when they first meet, but that soon fades. I expect even Mum felt that way about Dad once, and look where it got her. You can be a whole lot happier with money than without it.’
‘But Greg always seems to want me to be something I’m not,’ Laura said sadly. ‘Take our wedding – he will really want me in one of those crinoline, long-train numbers, a veil and all that, but
that isn’t me. I’m not a pure little virgin that went to church every Sunday and I’d feel a fraud dressed like one. That dress I’ve bought is me, I want glamour, excitement and to look sensational. He should know what he’s getting.’
‘Are you afraid he wants the little woman who will kowtow to him?’
‘I know he does. I dare say he’s got dreams of burying me in the country with half a dozen kids around me too. But he doesn’t tell me these things, I guess that’s the real problem, we don’t ever talk about what we both want.’
‘Then maybe you should put the wedding off?’ Meggie suggested. ‘Tell him you can’t go through with it until you have discussed everything.’
‘I’m not good at explaining my feelings and anyway, they say men like women to be intriguing, to never know exactly how they will react. I mean, I might like to live in the country one day, I might want six kids. Just because at the moment I want to live in Chelsea and drive a sports car with the hood down doesn’t mean I’ll want it for ever. So if I pinned him down now and made him make promises, I’d be stuck with them.’
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 to plan B, killing her off.’
‘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 l
iving, 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 didn’t ring when he said he would, she just shrugged. If someone was unkind to her at work she found a reason for it. She never complained at being alone in the house every evening; she was happy to watch television, read a book or do the washing and the ironing for both of them.
Ivy made friends easily too, yet whoever she was friends with, or whatever boyfriend she currently had, she always kept Sundays free to spend with Meggie. The only sadness in her was because of Laura. She worried that as Barney grew older Laura might be forced to keep him away from her and Meggie in case he inadvertently spoke of them to his father.
It was on one of those stay-at-home Sundays that Laura turned up unexpectedly at the door with Barney. Coincidentally, Ivy and Meggie had just been discussing the possibility of getting Laura to invent some new story to Greg. The one they favoured was that she and Ivy were the fictitious Aunt Mabel’s nieces. Meggie thought that maybe she could write a letter to Laura saying that they hadn’t known of her existence until Mabel died, and they’d traced her through the records at Somerset House.
When the doorbell rang and there was Laura, they couldn’t wait to launch into their plan. But Laura was in no state to have a serious discussion about anything. The moment Meggie looked at her she knew she was high as a kite on speed. She knew the signs well as many of the girls she worked with took it to keep going, and Meggie had taken it herself occasionally.
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