Faith Read online

  ‘You’ll go far,’ she said, giving Laura a cuddle. ‘You are bright, level-headed and practical. And if you want a stand-in mother, then you’ve got me.’

  All through that first summer of 1961, the two girls spent at least two evenings a week together, and all day on Sundays. Jackie worked as a copy typist in the City, so she only worked Monday till Friday, and Laura hated that she had to work in the shop on Saturdays. But Jackie invariably came to meet her after work so that they could get dressed and do each other’s hair together before going out.

  Too young to go into pubs, they mostly hung about in coffee bars and parks and went to the rollerskating rink looking for boys. They giggled and flirted, but the relationships they formed with boys never went beyond necking in the park or going to the pictures. Jackie always said she wasn’t going to go ‘all the way’ until she met the boy she intended to marry, and that he would have to be very rich as well as handsome because she had no intention of living in poverty, even for love.

  Laura agreed that she felt the same, but she never told Jackie she had real, first-hand experience of poverty and had been put off the idea of any kind of intimacy with men because of Vincent. Sometimes she ached to spill out the truth about her background, especially how much she missed her younger siblings, but she was afraid to. As each week passed she seemed to add more embroidery to the life she’d shared with dotty Aunt Mabel, and the house they’d lived in on Holland Park. She felt she was too far down the road to do a U-turn and admit it wasn’t true because Jackie might despise her for lying.

  As the summer slipped by Laura had another problem beyond the lies she’d told. Her wages at the Home and Colonial were very low, and by the time she’d paid the rent on her room and bought food, there was precious little money left for clothes, bus fares or any kind of entertainment.

  Jackie’s parents let her keep her entire wages to spend on herself. Laura felt compelled to keep up with her, and the only way she could do it was by stealing. Even before she met Jackie she had been in the habit of helping herself to a few groceries and the odd blouse, skirt or the swimsuit she’d been wearing when she met her friend, but suddenly she found that she needed more cash.

  The solution presented itself when she had gone up to Oxford Street to steal a new dress. She found a pretty blue one in Selfridges, which she just tried on in the changing room, then put her own clothes over it and walked out, but then she wished she had money for some new shoes.

  While wandering around Marks and Spencer she observed a woman getting a cash refund for a garment which didn’t fit. The assistant didn’t ask for the woman’s receipt, just opened the till and gave her the money back. There and then Laura slipped a cardigan into her bag and left the shop. An hour later she was at the other Marks and Spencer down the bottom of Oxford Street claiming a refund for it.

  It was so simple and easy that she hugged herself with delight at her cleverness. She felt no guilt – after all, Marks and Spencer was a big company and they could afford it.

  From then on she had a regular source of cash. She varied the branches she went to, always making certain she claimed her refunds at times when the shops were busy, and on these expeditions she invariably helped herself to items in other shops too. Having a wardrobe full of beautiful, expensive new clothes helped her to forget the image of ‘Stinky Wilmslow’, and gave her the confidence she needed to keep up the fictitious background she’d created for herself.

  Laura shook her head despairingly as she thought back to those days. It was a miracle she was never caught, and even more surprising that Jackie was never suspicious of how she managed to live and dress so well on a shop assistant’s wages. But then, Jackie was an innocent in those days; she buried her head in glossy magazines and aspired to the kind of glamorous life she saw depicted there. She saw her family as being quite poor because they had no car, didn’t eat out in fancy restaurants or go abroad, and she had no idea of what a struggle life was for most ordinary people.

  Yet it was Jackie who persuaded Laura she could do far better than working on the bacon counter of the Home and Colonial, and with her friend’s encouragement she got a job as a junior wages clerk in Pawson and Leaf, a wholesale company by St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Pawson and Leaf was an old-fashioned company that supplied everything from corsets to haberdashery to the retail trade. It had a Dickensian atmosphere in its four or five dusty, gloomy floors filled with goods which had to be picked out when a customer rang in with an order. The wages department was on the top floor, with a wonderful panoramic view of London, but when Laura was sent with inquiries to any of the various departments below, she found it all quite fascinating. There was a huge steel chute, something like a helter-skelter, and once the goods had been picked out and invoiced, they were tied up and dropped down the chute to the packing department in the basement. Quite often the younger lads would slide down it during the lunch hour or at the end of the day, accompanied by shrieks and yells.

  Yet it wasn’t just that it was a more fun place to work, or that she earned two pounds more a week and had the whole weekend off that delighted Laura, it was the whole package of working in the City. It felt so sophisticated to catch the tube to work and never again to have to wear an overall and a net covering her hair. She was proud to say she was ‘in wages’, it was good working alongside people of a similar age, and she often met Jackie straight from work so they could go home together.

  She had begun work at Pawson and Leaf in early December and there was already a buzz of excitement in the air about the Christmas party to be held on Christmas Eve. Laura heard it was always a great opportunity to get off with someone you fancied, and she was told many stories about staff who had ‘had it off’ in the post room, a drunken telephonist who was put down the chute, and an elderly floor manager who’d had too many drinks and fell asleep and got locked in the building for the whole of the Christmas holiday.

  The girls, it seemed, were in the habit of bringing in their party dresses to change into, so when Jackie suggested the night before the Christmas party that they should go to a pub she knew in Moorgate frequented by bankers and stockbrokers, Laura was all for it. That meant she’d get two opportunities to wear the stunning midnight-blue lace dress she’d recently stolen from a West End shop.

  ‘It’s time we moved on from boys,’ Jackie said airily. ‘We are never going to meet anyone rich in Crouch End. All the local boys want is sex and they don’t even take you out anywhere. The blokes that stop in this pub for a few drinks before going home are all men of the world, they’ll know how to treat us properly.’

  Although the girls had had a lot of fun locally during the summer, since the weather got colder and wetter they’d been stuck for places to go in the evenings. On Saturday nights they often went dancing at The Empire in Leicester Square, but they rarely met anyone they liked enough to make a further date with. Jackie had been saying for quite some time that she thought the best men, the ones with smart suits, good jobs and cars, went to pubs. But it wasn’t really done for girls to go into pubs as it sent out a signal they were there to be picked up. However, at the pub in Moorgate they could pretend they’d just left an office party and were on their way home.

  Laura chuckled to herself when she recalled how she’d changed into her dress at the end of the day in the toilets at Pawson and Leaf. Even now, when over the years she’d had many gorgeous dresses, that one was still in her top five. The diaphanous lace sheath dress had a deep scooped neck and three-quarter sleeves, but for decency’s sake it had a built-in skimpy petticoat beneath it. With a mahogany rinse on her hair, which she’d put up in a beehive, sheer black stockings and four-inch stilettos, Laura could have passed for twenty-one, when in fact she was only a couple of weeks short of seventeen.

  It wasn’t far to go down Cheapside to Moorgate to meet Jackie but her excitement grew even stronger because several men whistled at her, even though she was clutching her coat round her tightly because it was so cold. Jacki
e was waiting for her at the tube station, and she got two little crowns of tinsel out of her pocket for them to wear.

  Once in the pub they went straight to the toilets to take off their coats, put on more lipstick and check each other’s appearance.

  Jackie was wearing an emerald-green satin dress with a boat neck, her auburn hair in loose waves on her shoulders, and she looked like a film star, but when she saw what Laura was wearing she looked stunned.

  ‘You’re not just pretty, you’re beautiful,’ she gasped. ‘That dress, your hair! I can’t believe it!’

  Jackie had often told her she was pretty, but Laura had never really believed it. This was partly because of being insulted at school, but also, next to her friend with her vivid colouring, poise and bounce, she had always felt drab. But she could see in the mirror that the colour of the dress seemed to make her skin glow, and the rinse made her hair shine with coppery lights. Maybe ‘beautiful’ was an exaggeration, but she had certainly never seen herself looking so good before.

  As Jackie had predicted, The Plume of Feathers was full of businessmen, and from the moment the girls walked out of the toilets, they got attention. They were not the only girls in the bar, there were perhaps ten or so others, but they were certainly the two most attractive ones. They didn’t even have to buy a drink; the barman just waved their money away when they asked for two Babychams and gestured vaguely to one end of the bar to say it had already been taken care of.

  Three drinks later they were already feeling tipsy for neither of them was used to drinking, so after a brief confab in the toilets they decided they’d better not have any more, and that Roger and Steven, the two youngest men in the bar, were the ones they should encourage.

  They were both undeniably good-looking, tall and smart in their pinstriped suits, and amusing too. Steven worked on the Stock Exchange, Roger for an insurance company, and though Laura privately thought that they were out of their league with a couple of twenty-four-year-olds, she didn’t dare say so because Jackie was really smitten by blond, blue-eyed Roger.

  But being left with Steven was hardly like drawing the short straw. He was rather like Dirk Bogarde, with his dark hair and crinkly, smiley eyes, and the way he looked at Laura made her feel really desirable.

  Later, the men took them by taxi to an Italian restaurant in Villiers Street, just off The Strand. Jackie kept pinching Laura’s knee under the table, her secret signal that she was prepared to go anywhere, do anything with Roger. Perhaps it was fortunate that both men were going home to their families for Christmas the following day, and didn’t appear to be anxious to stay out half the night.

  ‘So where do you live then?’ Jackie asked, tucking into spaghetti bolognese as if she hadn’t eaten for a week.

  ‘In Kensington,’ Roger replied. ‘We share a flat with a couple of other chaps. It’s very squalid, you’d be appalled.’

  They made the girls laugh telling them how their landlady raged at them for having a kitchen full of empty beer bottles and never cleaning up, and said she’d seen pigs living in better conditions. ‘We’ll have to do something about it in the New Year,’ Roger said with a wide grin, ‘or we’ll be chucked out.’

  ‘We’ll come over and help you,’ Jackie volunteered, once again pinching Laura under the table. ‘I don’t believe it can be that bad when you two look so smart.’

  ‘That’s down to a laundry service,’ Steven said. ‘But it’s a good thing we’re going home tomorrow because I haven’t got one clean pair of socks left. But what about you two? Do you still live at home?’

  Laura said nothing while Jackie explained about her family and then went on to tell the men how organized and independent Laura was.

  ‘Her room is spotless. She cooks proper meals, she hangs her clothes up in groups of colours, and she even cleans the bathroom for everyone else. I wouldn’t be like that. I’m far too messy.’

  ‘Then perhaps Laura had better come over and sort us out,’ Roger said.

  Laura wasn’t sure she liked being portrayed as a paragon of domestic virtue. She thought it made her sound very dull. But Steven leaned across the table and lightly touched her cheek. ‘I’ve always found that beautiful girls are the worst kind of sluts,’ he said. ‘I’m really glad you aren’t one.’

  After the meal in the Italian restaurant, the four of them had walked up to Trafalgar Square to see the Christmas tree. Roger and Jackie kept stopping to kiss, but although Steven kissed Laura quite a bit too, mostly they talked. He told her his family lived in Hastings. He even described his younger brother and sister, and explained that his father was a doctor and his mother sang in a choir. She could imagine his family – nice, well-bred, upper-middle-class people, living in a comfortable, well-cared-for house. None of that was extraordinary; just looking at Steven with his good manners, highly polished shoes, immaculate white shirt and well-pressed suit told her about his background.

  But what was extraordinary was that he assumed she came from a similar one. Several times he’d said things like, ‘But of course your family must be just the same.’ She had simply smiled and nodded, mainly because she didn’t feel up to launching into her usual story about her dead parents and her Aunt Mabel.

  His goodnight kiss before she and Jackie got into the taxi to go home was tender and lingering. He’d held her face in his hands and said that he wished he hadn’t promised to go home for so long, and that he’d ring her as soon as he got back. She knew he would too, for he’d paid the taxi driver in advance, and he’d double-checked that he had her phone number written down right.

  Jackie was ecstatic as both girls waved goodbye out of the back window of the taxi. ‘What a couple of dreamboats!’ she squealed. ‘You and I are made, Laura. No more pimply-faced louts for us. A world of glamour and sophistication awaits us.’

  As the taxi sped through the streets towards Crouch End, Jackie nodded off against Laura’s shoulder. But Laura was wide awake, her pulse racing and her mind whirling at the possibilities ahead in the New Year.

  The taxi dropped Laura off first, Jackie rousing herself enough to say she was to ring and tell her what her works party the following day was like. Laura let herself in, switched on the light in the hall and darted up the stairs to the second floor before it turned itself off.

  She’d grown quite fond of her bedsitter. In summer when the trees in the garden below were in full leaf, she could look out on to a sea of green. The room was small and square, but it had everything she needed, and she was always rearranging the furniture to make the most of the space. At present she had the small table in front of the window and her single bed, covered in a dark green bedspread, up against the opposite wall so it looked like a sofa. With the bedside light on and the gas fire lit, it was cosy, and she’d made it more homely with a few posters and bright scatter cushions.

  ‘I don’t need to be ashamed of it,’ she murmured to herself as she took her coat off and hung it up in the wardrobe.

  She took one more look at herself in her dress before taking it off. Her hair was coming loose now and she had specks of mascara under her eyes, but she decided she didn’t have to be ashamed of how she looked either. Steven had said he thought she was beautiful, and that was how she felt. As she carefully hung her dress up on a hanger she smiled to herself, feeling a little like Cinderella after the ball.

  That Christmas, which Laura spent with the Thompson family, was the happiest she’d ever known. Not just because she was surrounded by good people and stuffed with delicious food, not even because the decorations, presents and games were far better than anything she was used to. The source of her happiness was the way Steven had treated her.

  Jackie was convinced she was in love with Roger. She kept drifting off while she mooned about him, and she was counting the hours until 27 December, when she was going to see him again. She assumed that Laura felt the same about Steven, but Laura couldn’t quite bring herself to admit how it really was for her.

  On Boxing Day night wh
en the girls went to bed, Jackie could talk about nothing except Roger. ‘I gave him my number at work and at home. Which do you think he’ll phone me on tomorrow?’

  ‘Here, in the evening, I expect,’ Laura replied. ‘But be careful what you say about me, won’t you?’

  Jackie sat up in her bed, looking across at her friend with a puzzled expression. ‘What do you mean?’

  Laura was putting some rollers in her hair. ‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t say too much about my parents dying and my aunt leaving. It makes me sound a bit tragic.’

  ‘I don’t think it does. It just makes people admire you more for being strong,’ Jackie said a little indignantly.

  Laura was embarrassed then. She went over and sat on her friend’s bed, but didn’t really know what to say.

  She couldn’t tell Jackie the truth about herself, not after so long, but she was afraid of this lie going on and on, repeated again and again for the rest of her life. ‘I just want to be like anyone else,’ she said eventually. ‘You know what I mean. Normal.’

  ‘Well, you certainly can’t invent a family you haven’t got,’ Jackie said. ‘You weren’t think of doing that, were you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Laura said quickly. ‘But I did want to play down what happened.’

  ‘I won’t say anything more than that you are my best friend,’ Jackie replied. ‘I’ll leave it up to you to tell Steven as much or as little as you like. But for all we know we may never get the opportunity to tell either Roger or Steven anything. They might have girlfriends, they might not even like us.’