Singled Out (7 page)

There were few people at the service. The prison governor introduced himself to them and introduced them to a couple of prison visitors, whose rigid smiles bespoke their determination to make the best of the situation, as they had of many other situations. None of the other prisoners had requested permission to attend the service, but then it was unlikely that Richard Fisher would have made many friends during his incarceration.

When the coffin was brought in – a moment Laura had been dreading – she found herself able to look at it dispassionately. The polished wood had become emblematic, anonymous. Whether or not it actually contained the remains of her father, sewn up again after the post-mortem, seemed unimportant. He was dead. He had no power to hurt any more. The shiny wooden box held no fears for her.

The optimism within her grew to a positive glow of well-being. She had escaped the past. The future was hers.

The officiating clergyman, snuffling with a slight cold, maintained the anonymity of the proceedings. As is usually the case when the priest has never met the occupant of the coffin, he restricted his remarks to impersonal platitudes. He emphasized the vague heavenly rewards ahead and concentrated on the generalized good qualities of the deceased. In the second part of this mission, he was more circumscribed than many clergymen in similar situations. What can you say good about a man who abused both his children and was imprisoned for strangling his wife?

His hands were hard and she could feel the hairs on their knuckles as they reached for the elastic of her school knickers and pulled them down. She knew the hopelessness of resistance, but still the repulsion engendered by his flesh, by the object that poked through a frill of Aertex from his unbuttoned tweed trousers, was so strong that her body recoiled and her fists rose instinctively to fight him off.

‘Don't you hit me!' her father's voice hissed. ‘I'll kill you if you hit me! And I'll kill you if you ever tell anyone about this!'

She froze as he lifted and deposited her without gentleness on to the sofa. Again she felt the tickle of knuckle hairs as he flipped the pleats of her navy school skirt above her waist. Then the hands took firm hold of her upper thighs. She tried as always to detach herself, move the real Laura Fisher away to stand aside and look down dispassionately on what was happening to the other, anonymous Laura Fisher on the sofa.

As he brought his groin towards hers, there was a commotion – the door opening, the dull thud of her father being hit over the head with something. A muffled curse as he turned in fury to face Kent.

The boy in short-trousered school uniform stood his ground while the blows rained into him. Not into his face, nowhere that the marks would show, but hard into the chest and abdomen. Nothing must be seen at school. Nothing must be allowed to make the boy's mother embarrassed to be seen out with him. The façade of middle-class gentility must never be threatened.

Kent let out no sound, but stumbled under the onslaught. Richard Fisher grabbed his son by the shoulders and swung him round like a rag doll. Laura just had time to scramble off the sofa before her brother was slammed face-down on to its cushions. She saw a bead of blood on his lip, and she knew it had not been caused by their father's blows but by the boy's own determination not to allow any cry to escape.

‘You get out!' Richard Fisher snarled at her. ‘I'll deal with you later.'

Laura did not need a second bidding. She made no attempt to defend Kent – that was not part of their relationship – but, snatching up her knickers, stumbled blindly out of the room. Though she knew the pain it would engender, she could not stop herself from lingering in the hall, the neat middle-class hall with its slightly convex oval mirror, its polished oak telephone-table and anodyne flowered curtains. From inside the sitting room she heard the familiar sounds, the rough accelerating grunts from her father and from Kent the muffled sighs as he bit into his lip to resist the pain.

This was always the worst bit. The sound was more shocking than the sight. She stood frozen, incapable of escape. Her arms would not move to bring her hands up over her ears to shut out the appalling noises.

A tremor ran through Laura's body and she found herself sitting up in bed, nauseous and drenched in sweat. It was a long time since she had had the dream. Since the period of maximum reaction, in her late teens following her mother's murder, it had come less and less frequently. Sometimes, in moments of erupting confidence, she even thought the dream had gone for good. And when, inevitably, it did recur, she was quicker at rationalizing it, more efficient at limiting its after-shock.

She knew what had prompted the nightmare's return. Though nearly a month past, her father's funeral still reverberated through her mind. Laura took a deep breath and contrived, with surprising ease, to force the dream out of her thoughts.

Outside her curtains a thin light glowed. She switched on the bedside light and looked at her watch. A quarter to seven. She swung her legs round to get out of bed. In sitting position she paused for a moment. Her head felt light and the nausea remained. A little surge of excitement told her that reaction to the nightmare was not the reason why she still felt sick.

Cautiously she rose to her feet. Her mouth was dry. She crossed to the kitchenette and took out a packet of coffee beans. But their sharp smell immediately conjured up the metallic taste of vomit in her mouth. Laura returned the packet to the cupboard, filled a glass of water from the tap and, sipping it, went through into the bathroom.

She took off her nightdress and looked at herself in the long mirror. During her teens it had seemed impossible to Laura that she would ever love the body that had prompted so many disgusting encounters. Marriage to Michael had not changed her attitude one iota, though with Philip at times, just for a little while, she had ceased to see herself as dirty and defiled.

Now, as she looked in the mirror, Laura positively loved what she saw. She put her hands to her breasts, cupping them slightly away from the tingling nipples. She ran her hands down her sides, till they rested together on the smooth flatness of her stomach. The nightmare was forgotten. Well-being flooded through her.

She turned to the sink to clean her teeth. As she opened the tube, the peppermint tang of toothpaste rushed up her nostrils. She only just had time to poise herself over the lavatory bowl before she threw up.

Laura knew, but needed formal confirmation. She wished there was some kind of simple do-it-yourself test that could be bought over the chemist's counter, but there wasn't, so she had to go to the doctor.

She knew during the days of waiting for the test results to come back. She had known from the moment she missed her period. Her body had always worked with metronomic accuracy. Even during the worst traumas of her teenage years, the curse had never failed to arrive on time, accurate to the day, almost to the hour.

She rang the surgery at the appointed time and discovered, with very little surprise, that she was officially pregnant.

‘Michael's not the father,' said Laura.

‘Never occurred to me for one
teensy
moment that he might be.' Rob was in one of his high moods. His voice swooped down dramatically on to individual words. ‘You wouldn't want to reproduce anything like
that
, would you?'

‘No.'

‘So am I going to be let into the
bijou secretette
of who it is?'

‘The father?'

‘Mm.'

‘No.'

‘Oh. Oh well, there you go. It's not that you don't know, is it? I mean, you haven't been putting it around
so
much that it could be virtually any cock in the London telephone directory?'

‘No.'

‘No, thought not. Not your style, is it, Laura sweetie? Now if it'd been
me
…' He spread his hands wide in a gesture of mock-modesty. ‘I mean, where would one begin? In the last week alone the candidates must be in double figures. Oh dear, I have been a bit
reckless
recently. Still, what can a chap do? It's the penalty of being absolutely
gorgeous
– something I have to live with. Men just swarm round me – positively
swarm
– bees round a honey-pot … and, though I say it myself, a very nice little honey-pot I've got too. No, I think, all things considered, it's just as well there isn't a womb at the end of my arsehole.
So
many suspects … I don't think Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes,
pooling
their resources, would ever find out whodunnit.'

Laura giggled. Now the doctor had confirmed the news, she felt vindicated. All the planning had paid off. She should give birth in July 1974. As intended, she'd make it before her thirtieth birthday on 4 September. Laura Fisher was once again in control of her life.

‘So is the father going to be involved in the child's upbringing?'

‘No.'

‘Does the father even know that he is to be a father?'

‘No,' said Laura.

She phoned Kent the next day to tell him the news. He wasn't at his desk and rang back to her flat in the evening. She told him simply that she was pregnant.

She could feel from his voice the way the shutters had come down, and could visualize the stony deliberate lack of reaction in his eyes. ‘Are congratulations in order?' he asked with the minimum of intonation.

‘Yes, they are.'

‘Congratulations then.' He did not ask for any supplementary information, but apologized that he was busy and would have to get on.

‘Still working on the Melanie Harris case? I haven't seen anything in the press about an arrest.'

‘Working on that and others,' he replied cagily. ‘Must go. Goodbye.'

Laura wondered what her brother really thought about the news. But twenty-nine years of knowing Kent had taught her the impossibility of discovering what actually went on inside his mind.

‘Oh, for God's sake!' Dennis Parker downed the remains of his Scotch in one gulp. ‘What is the point of employing bloody women? Just when they're beginning to learn something, they get themselves bloody knocked up and suddenly it's all “Oh, I never really wanted a career, anyway. All I really want is to be a wife and mother.”'

‘That's certainly not true in my case,' said Laura evenly. ‘I want a career, too. I'm going to have a child and continue with my career.'

‘You'll be lucky. If you think I'm going to have you breastfeeding round the
Newsviews
studio, you've got another thing coming.'

‘That will not happen, Dennis.'

‘But, look, you're going to be out of action for years.'

‘No. I'll work up until the baby arrives and –'

‘I'm not that keen on having the
Newsviews
studio turned into a labour ward either, come to that.'

‘I will work until the baby arrives,' Laura repeated, ‘and then I'll come back six weeks later.'

‘You can't leave a six-week-old baby on its own.'

‘I will not leave it on its own, Dennis,' she said patiently. ‘I will employ a full-time nanny.'

‘Huh. And then every time the bloody sprog has a snuffle, you'll be pissing off home early to look after the little bugger.'

‘I will not, Dennis. I can assure you that, except for the six weeks I'm away, you will not notice any difference in the amount or quality of work that I put in on
Newsviews
.'

‘Hm.' He nodded to the barman for a refill. ‘You want anything … or don't you think you should be drinking
in your condition
?'

She didn't actually want a drink, but, to counter the sneer in his voice, asked for a dry white wine. It tasted oddly acid on her tongue.

Dennis took a big swallow from his Scotch. ‘And what makes you think I'll keep your job open for the six weeks when you choose to go off and have a baby?'

‘I think you'll find that you're contractually obliged to, Dennis.'

‘I don't give a shit about contracts. I'm editor of
Newsviews
and if I want someone off the team I get them off.'

‘I'm sure you do, but you don't want me off the team.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I'm good.'

‘Modest too, I see,' Dennis snorted.

‘Modesty or lack of modesty doesn't come into it. I just have an accurate assessment of my own abilities. I know how many ideas I contribute to the programme, and I know you'd get a lot fewer good ones if I wasn't there.'

‘Huh. There are other people around with good ideas.' But he didn't pursue it. Tacitly he had accepted her point. He chuckled. ‘Must say it's a bit of a turn-up. Didn't think Michael had it in him. I'd assumed he'd been firing blanks all these years.'

Laura was surprised Dennis didn't know she was living apart from her husband. They were both members of the same continuation-of-public-school gentlemen's club and she knew they met there from time to time. On reflection, though, she realized how characteristic it would be of such masculine encounters for nothing personal to be discussed, and also how typical of Michael it would be to maintain the front that nothing was wrong with his marriage.

Dennis's words reminded her, though. Michael would have to be told about her condition. And she didn't particularly look forward to his reaction.

After their father was arrested for murdering their mother, the Fisher children were put into care. For a few weeks, while the authorities still reeled from the shock of what had happened, the two were in separate establishments, but Kent's behaviour was so disruptive that, on the advice of the psychologist monitoring their case, they were quickly reunited. Kent was then fifteen, and Laura fourteen.

A series of short-term fostering experiments led to the children finally being placed with a Mr and Mrs Hull. The couple had tried to persuade Kent and Laura to call them something less formal, but without success. In both children's minds they always remained ‘Mr and Mrs Hull'.