Faith (72 page)

‘And how long will that last?’

‘Until the spring. By then I hope I’ll be able to get cracking here. I thought I might get a caravan to live in while I’m doing it.’

Laura told him several ideas she’d had during the day; she was brimming over with all the possibilities.

‘You could come up for the summer and help me,’ he said. ‘That is, if you aren’t tied up with the shop in Bromley.’

‘I think I need another kiss to remind me what the fringe benefits would be,’ she said.

He cleared the food away into the box in a trice, put another couple of logs on the fire, and took her in his arms. All daylight was gone now, just the flickering fire and the candles creating a circle of warmth and light around them. As he began to kiss her, lowering her back on to the blanket, Laura thought there couldn’t be a better place in the whole world to make love.

There was something about the groping beneath thick sweaters which added a new dimension to it, as though they were still teenagers furtively fumbling in a park. When Stuart stripped off her jeans she didn’t care that it was cold, for his caressing hands were hot and tender, and she felt as if she was on fire anyway.

Everything that had gone before disappeared. The future didn’t matter either; all that counted was here and now, his skin on hers, their lips searching hungrily for each other.

Stuart’s body was as lean and muscular as it had been twenty years ago; hers might not be as firm as it had been then, but it still fitted into him in exactly the same way. Her fingers found the little scar on his right side, which he had told her once he’d got falling out of a tree when he was little. But when she ran her finger up the front of his shirt, she found the more recent scar, the one he’d got trying to rescue her, and tears of gratitude came into her eyes.

Maybe they weren’t as frantic and energetic as they had been that first night in Castle Douglas, but for Laura at least it was far more sensual. Stuart’s stubble rasped against her cheek and shoulders, and he smelled of sweat and the mildew from the cottage, but they were honest, natural smells, just like the leaf mould all around them, and the wood smoke. She loved the slow, tender way he was exploring her body, the little endearments, the moans of pleasure, and the way he seemed to know exactly what turned her on most.

She wasn’t even aware of the hard ground or the cold when he entered her, all she knew was that she wanted him as badly as he wanted her.

Her orgasm took her by surprise, a fiery eruption that made her cry out. He said he loved her as he came, and suddenly she was crying and clinging to him and telling him that he was the only man in the world for her.

When she opened her eyes the moon had come out from behind a cloud, and the trees above them were bathed in a silver light. Stuart wrapped one of the blankets round her tightly and his cheek against hers was damp with tears.

‘The magic is still there,’ he whispered. ‘You brought it back with you.’

They put their clothes back on, and wrapping the blankets round them went to sit on the bench. The moon was casting a silver path across the black water of the loch and an owl hooted somewhere nearby.

‘What was your contingency plan?’ he asked, as she snuggled into his shoulder.

‘I’ve booked a room back in Taynuilt for two nights,’ she said.

‘How resourceful of you! And after that?’

‘I’ll go back to London on Monday when you go off to Oban.’

He looked down at her, and she could feel his anxiety. ‘And then?’ he asked.

‘Whatever you want,’ she said, reaching up to trace around his lips with one finger.

‘I want you here, with me, for ever,’ he said, taking her fingertips and kissing them.

Other men, both before she first met Stuart and after they split up, had said such things after lovemaking, but invariably she sensed they said it to all their lovers. She believed Stuart meant it, though. He never said anything he didn’t mean.

‘That’s what I hoped you’d say,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll give you a cooling-off period first, but if you still want me, then I’ll come back. I expect we could rent a little place in Oban for the winter, couldn’t we?’

‘You’d better buy some warm clothes in London then,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘Next spring we’ll come back here with a caravan and live like a couple of hippies while we do it up.’

Laura glanced around her, saw the bushes lit up by the candles and the fire, and she could imagine how lovely it would be in summer. She would love to learn to lay bricks, to mix concrete and study the mysteries of plumbing; it would be the greatest challenge of her life to help make their own paradise.

‘I think we’d better go now, before we turn to blocks of ice,’ she said. She got up and tipped the pail of water over the fire to put it out.

Stuart handed her one candle, but blew out all the others, and picking up the box of remaining food led her back to the cottage to lock it up.

She waited outside while he went in to collect a bag, and she turned to look at the loch again. The moonlight on the water brought a lump to her throat for it looked like a beautiful silver path, and it seemed to confirm that she had finally found her right road in life. The past was no importance, she could let it go and look only to the future.

Stuart had told her to have faith in him. It had wavered sometimes, but she knew now, without any doubt, that if you had enough faith, all dreams could come true.

She could hear Stuart shuffling about in the cottage and a bright beam of light came on as he found his torch. She knew with utter conviction that she loved him and belonged with him, and that she was prepared to go with him anywhere he wanted to be.

It was a defining moment for her, for she’d never had that kind of certainty and faith before.

He came out of the cottage and locked the back door.

‘Ready?’ he said.

‘For anything,’ she replied.

Epilogue

1997

Laura paused as she came out through the French windows into the garden with a tray loaded with a bottle of wine, a jug of fruit squash, glasses and a platter of nibbles for her guests.

It was a glorious August morning, warm and sunny without a cloud in the sky. Jack and Harry, her two nephews, were out on the loch in the rowing boat with Stuart. The boys’ shrill, excited voices carried clearly on the slight breeze as they struggled with learning to row in tandem. Stuart was seated in the stern and every now and then his much deeper voice could be heard giving instructions.

Meggie and Ivy were sitting on steamer chairs down by the small jetty, but Laura thought Ivy looked a little tense as she kept a close eye on her sons.

‘They are perfectly safe,’ Laura called out as she came down the garden with her tray. ‘They’ve got life jackets on, and they can swim, but Stuart won’t let them fall in, so you can relax.’

Ivy looked round, flipping her sunglasses up on to her head. ‘It’s the mother’s curse, always thinking our kids are in permanent danger,’ she said with a grin.

‘That curse must have missed out on our mother then,’ Meggie said drily. ‘I don’t remember her ever worrying about us.’

‘That’s because she rarely came out of the house to see what we were up to,’ Ivy retorted. ‘Anyway, it’s one thing to learn to row on a pond in a park, quite another to be out on a vast loch. I’d just feel happier if Derek and James were here too.’

‘They’ll be back soon,’ Laura said, putting the tray down on a small table by her sisters. ‘In the meantime have a glass of wine and a little faith in Stuart. Boys need to do stuff like rowing, climbing trees and lighting fires, it’s character-building.’

Her sisters, their men and the boys had arrived two days ago for a holiday. The year before, Meggie had come up with James, the policeman she’d met after Robbie Fielding attacked Laura, but the cottage wasn’t finished then and they’d stayed nearby in a guest house. But all the work was completed now, and it was thrilling for Laura to be able to have her family here together. Ivy, Derek and the boys were staying in the caravan that had been Laura and Stuart’s home for over a year, and Meggie and James had the spare room in the cottage.

Derek and James had gone off to buy some beer and a few groceries in the village, and they had a barbecue planned for later in the afternoon. Laura was so happy that she felt she might burst with it.

The last two years hadn’t all been plain sailing for her and Stuart. The two snatched years of her life in prison had made her introspective, insecure and often irrational. She had come back from London to live with Stuart in Oban just a month after she was exonerated, because she couldn’t bear to be apart from him. But though it was wonderful to be together, she hadn’t taken into account the long hours of separation while he was working, the bitter winter weather, or how bored she’d become in the little seaside town without any work or even friends.

They’d had a few very heated arguments when she accused him of caring more about his work than her. But fate stepped in just in time, when she saw an article in a magazine about a drug project in Glasgow that needed volunteers interested in helping young people.

She applied and was accepted, and after a short induction, found herself spending two days a week at a drop-in centre where addicts could go to exchange dirty needles for clean ones, receive some counselling and discuss their problems.

From her first day there, Laura sensed that she had all the right credentials to become a counsellor herself. She knew why people took the first step on the road to addiction, and the forces which kept them there. She recognized her younger self in so many of the younger addicts she met.

In February 1996 Belle stood trial. The charge had been dropped to manslaughter in the case of Jackie’s death, but still held at attempted murder of Stuart. Both Laura and Stuart were witnesses for the prosecution, but once they had given their evidence they left the court, not staying to watch the rest of the trial or hear the guilty verdict.

For Laura it was a trip back to a dark place she wanted to forget she’d ever been in. She could take no pleasure in seeing Belle stripped of her former glamour, gaunt, stringy-haired and with dark-ringed eyes, knowing that even her mother and brother had abandoned her. Toby had made a statement to the police that she had taken full advantage of getting power of attorney over her mother’s finances, and plundered a great deal of the money from the sale of the house in Duke’s Avenue. Toby hadn’t discovered this until Belle was arrested, but as soon as he found out, he came over to England and after making his statement, took Lena back to live with him, his wife and new baby in Australia.

Belle received an eighteen-year prison sentence. People remarked that they thought it was too lenient, but then they didn’t know that eighteen years or life made little difference at Belle’s age. She had even fewer reserves with which to cope with prison life than Laura had; she would spend each day in abject misery, and that was the real punishment.

As for Charles, he received ten years in total for concealing a crime in the case of Jackie, for aiding and abetting the attempted murder of Stuart, and for dangerous driving and failing to stop when he killed Barney.

Laura had mixed feelings about his sentence. It didn’t seem much for the loss of her son, yet he had pleaded guilty to that, and showed real remorse. Stuart, who had seen him in the dock, said he looked so old and sick he doubted he’d live to finish his sentence.

In May of the previous year, Stuart had finished his work in Oban and was ready to start work on the cottage. They bought a caravan and tucked it down amongst the trees at the side of the garden, and with two local men, Stuart began to dig the foundations for the extension to the cottage.

Around that time all the legalities of Jackie’s will had been finalized and Laura and her sisters put Brodie Farm and Kirkmay House in the hands of a lawyer in Fife for them to be sold.

All through that summer Laura was away in Glasgow for three days a week, staying overnight in a small guest house. Along with her volunteer work at the centre, she got herself on a counselling course and studied hard. The other four days of the week she was home with Stuart, helping to mix concrete, collecting building materials, and tending the areas of the garden that weren’t part of the building site.

In October Brodie Farm was finally sold, and Laura passed her counselling course with flying colours. The cottage was coming on in leaps and bounds, and Stuart predicted they’d be able to be in there by Christmas. Laura got back from Glasgow one evening to find the plastering had been finished and the bathroom suite installed. Nothing was more exciting than their first bath, even if the floor was still rough concrete, for the shower in the caravan was tiny and the hot water erratic. They lit dozens of candles and lay either end of the bath drinking wine, and she told Stuart how clever and hard-working he’d been, and he said she was his inspiration.

It was just before Christmas in the drop-in centre, as she listened to a group of addicts talking amongst themselves, that she suddenly realized she wasn’t entirely committed to the work there.

Maybe, as several friends suggested, she wanted to be at home looking at paint charts, watching Stuart painstakingly build their kitchen, or choosing curtains and furniture, but she didn’t think so.

While it was true she didn’t like being away from him, it was more than that. She could see so clearly that in five or ten years from now, some of the group she heard talking would be dead. The rest would have slid even further down the slope, and she doubted that any of them would have recovered and be leading useful, happy and healthy lives.

She felt ashamed that she couldn’t be more optimistic, but the statistics of recovery amongst addicts from deprived backgrounds proved she was right. It struck her that she should put her energy into some project that dissuaded youngsters from taking that first step on the rocky road to addiction.

They moved into the cottage for Christmas. The newly plastered walls were all white, they had the wood floors Laura had suggested, and the kitchen and sitting room, now the cottage had been extended at the back, seemed vast because they had so little furniture. They bought a huge Christmas tree, adorned the mantelpiece of the lovely old fireplace with green garlands, and laid a big shaggy cream rug in front of it, on which they made love on Christmas Eve by the light of the tree lights. There were no curtains, but then they didn’t want to shut out the view of the moonlight on the loch. And later that evening, as Laura lounged on a bean bag while Stuart played his guitar, she thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.