Singled Out (8 page)

They were a well-meaning childless couple, whose attempts to break through their charges' reserve never stood a chance. Kent and Laura were too traumatized to begin to trust anyone, and the style of Mr and Mrs Hull's earnest overtures to them could not have been less calculated to appeal. The foster parents had been carefully matched to the social background of the children, but Kent and Laura knew only too well what could be hidden behind a façade of middle-class gentility and did not give the Hulls the smallest comfort of their confidence.

After they had left their foster home, neither child attempted to make further contact. Mr and Mrs Hull valiantly phoned and wrote encouraging letters for a couple of years, but then gave up the hopelessly one-sided desire for communication. They consigned their relationship with the two children to the catalogue of other disappointments that had been their lives, and comforted themselves with the thought that they had at least given Kent and Laura practical help during ‘a very difficult period'. All things considered, the two young people had ‘turned out pretty well'.

This had also been the view of the psychologist a few months after the children had started living with the Hulls. Once reunited with his sister, Kent's behaviour had improved instantly. He had buckled down to work at his new private school and, to everyone's surprise, performed creditably at ‘A'-Level. He did not say a great deal, but then he had never been a communicative child. And not even his sister knew much about what went on behind his dull, ungiving eyes.

Kent's decision to go into the police force had first been formulated soon after his mother's murder. Whether the investigation of her death had stimulated the boy's interest in police work, or whether its injustice had prompted him to devote his life to the battle against crime, was impossible to know. Such confidences were among the many that Kent never released.

On his nineteenth birthday he started at Hendon Police College, and during the basic course showed himself to be a doggedly efficient if unspectacular student. From the moment he began training, he moved out of Mr and Mrs Hull's house and stayed out, not even returning for Christmas. He still kept in touch with Laura, taking her out every couple of weeks for a meal. On these occasions he would say little, while Laura might chatter or, more often, allow the restful silence to extend between them. She felt, as she had felt all her life, that Kent was there to protect her. The fact that he was now in uniform only reinforced that feeling.

Laura's difficulties in growing up with the Hulls were different from Kent's. Mrs Hull, who had always wanted a daughter of her own, attempted to fit Laura Fisher into this preordained mould. She would take the girl off on generous shopping trips and try to engender an atmosphere of all-girls-together matiness between them. Nothing could have appealed to Laura less, but Mrs Hull seemed unaware of the girl's repeated recoil from intimacy. The older woman went on confiding and giving herself, perhaps in the expectation that Laura would eventually follow her example and open up a little. It was a forlorn hope.

Mrs Hull, without children of her own, also had a slightly dated notion of morality. She still subscribed to the fifties view that teenage girls must be rigidly chaperoned to protect them from the predatory intentions of teenage boys. As a result, Laura was guarded as rigidly from romantic adventure as any medieval princess locked up in a castle.

Laura did not enjoy this. It was not that she had any desire for sexual experimentation – her early experiences had left her numbed and apathetic – but she did resent the curbing of her freedom. The control her father exerted over her life had been inescapable, but she did not see why she should submit to similar restraints from a woman who had, in Laura's view, nothing to do with her.

Mrs Hull had a strong will, however, and an equally strong determination to produce as her own a young woman of impeccable social demeanour. To this end, Laura was groomed and educated as a young lady should be. She completed her education at a socially correct girls' private school, where she was totally indifferent to the social and sexual aspirations of her class-mates; and was then sent to an upper-class secretarial college, where her fellow-students inspired in her the same lack of interest.

But she could not help noticing how much more freedom the other girls had. They were sharing flats, even in some cases moving in with boyfriends. They were allowed to behave as grown-ups, while Mrs Hull still insisted on Laura living at ‘home' and seemed to keep a continual surveillance on her. Whether this protectiveness arose from Mrs Hull's knowledge of her charge's troubled past, or from fulfilment of the fantasy of her own perfectly behaved daughter, Laura neither knew nor cared. She had no emotional reaction to Mrs Hull, simply a resentment of the way the older woman restricted her freedom.

In retrospect, Laura could not understand why she hadn't just walked out. It would have been easy enough. At first Kent would have helped her out financially – he had frequently offered to do so – and then she could have got a job and never seen Mrs or Mr Hull again. But at the time she had had no will. Looking back on it, Laura decided that for the four years after her mother's murder she had been in shock. She had felt emotions and resentments, but all through a gauze of apathy. She had wanted to break away from the Hulls, she had felt chafed by the way her foster mother circumscribed her life, and yet the effort of doing anything to change her situation had seemed insurmountable.

So she had done what was expected of her, nodded, smiled, fallen in with Mrs Hull's arrangement of her social life, while all the time a dormant pilot light of anger glowed quietly within her. That her compliant performance had been convincing could be judged by the Hulls' reaction when she finally stated that she didn't want to see them again. For the couple this desertion was a totally unexpected body-blow; for Laura it was a logical step she had been contemplating from the first moment she met them.

The escape from Mr and Mrs Hull's smothering gentility, however, had been effected according to their rules. By her foster mother's somewhat dated standards, the only respectable reason for a daughter to depart the parental home was to get married. Laura was eighteen, young perhaps by middle-class standards to embark on matrimony, but it was Mrs Hull's view that such a step might ‘settle' the girl.

So Laura had been introduced to Michael Rowntree with marriage in mind – at least in Mrs Hull's mind. He had been selected as the son of a family she knew, as someone who had been to the right schools and who was already a partner in a rather condescending West End estate agents. He had been appropriately stunned by Laura's beauty, to which the dazed state of her late teenage years gave an additional, appealing fragility.

He took her out the appropriate number of times, planted an appropriate number of kisses on her numb lips, and at the appropriate time proposed to her. Laura had no recollection of the moment when she consented to his offer, but Mr and Mrs Hull had been delighted by the outcome and instantly turned the ignition key on the Centurion tank of wedding preparations. From that moment, doubts and anxieties were swept aside; nothing could halt the tank's inexorable progress to the altar of middle-class convention. Mrs Hull was delighted that, after the ‘difficulties' of her upbringing, Laura's life had ‘turned out so well', and she felt quietly proud of the contribution she and her husband had made to that progress.

In keeping with the sweet, old-fashioned values of the Hulls, Michael and Laura did not sleep together before they were married. The reasons for this had in fact nothing to do with the foster parents' wishes. Laura, who had long ago simply sealed over that part of her mind which contained memories of her father's abuse, had no interest in sex. And Michael, who was spoiled by the devotion of a possessive mother and whose early carnal encounters had all been with prostitutes, was one of those dangerous men who set the women they were to marry on a pedestal. Commercial sex had been a grubby, secretive transaction; sex with his wife would be a thing of beauty and purity, almost a sacrament.

Given the widely divergent attitudes with which the newly-weds had approached the event, it was not surprising that their wedding night had been a total disaster.

Laura could not help thinking back to that night as she sat opposite Michael in the restaurant she had chosen for their potentially awkward encounter. It was an American hamburger joint, recently opened, with uncovered wooden floors and dark bentwood chairs. On screens set high up the walls, silent films flickered. The menu featured such phrases as ‘animated by the tang of dill', ‘caressed with garlic butter' and ‘embosomed in soft Swiss cheese'. The waiters were – or at least sounded like – sassy New Yorkers and flirted with diners of both sexes. Laura knew Michael would hate it. She wasn't certain why she had set out to antagonize him from the start. Perhaps she hoped his disapproval of the venue would dilute his fury at the news she had to tell.

‘Not as if we haven't got enough bloody American influences here already,' he had complained predictably enough when he arrived. ‘Why don't they bloody stay home and sort out their own messes? God, we don't want to take anything from a country which has a bloody shyster for a President.'

The waiter arrived with a bottle of wine. Michael looked at Laura. ‘What the hell's happening?'

‘I ordered it.'

‘Oh, did you?' Ungraciously he took the bottle from the waiter and looked at it. ‘God, this is some bloody Californian gnat's piss. You shouldn't let them take advantage of you like this, Laura. You should have waited till I got here to order.'

‘This is what the lady asked for,' the waiter said perkily.

‘Well, the lady doesn't know anything about wine, so take the bloody bottle away and get us something decent. Presumably you do do French wine?'

‘Oh, certainly, sir,' replied the waiter, imperturbably polite, and fanned a cardboard menu in front of Michael.

‘That.' He stabbed at the list. ‘And make it quick.'

Laura wondered how she had ever convinced herself that this man would make a suitable husband. Within thirty seconds of any meeting he had the ability to make her instantly grateful for their separation.

Again she thought back to the awfulness of her wedding night. In a way, though, it had been a blessing. That shock had begun the process of waking her from her long trauma. It had been a necessary part of her development.

Michael looked derisively round the restaurant. ‘God, what a bloody gimmicky place. I suppose this is the kind of thing
television people
go for, is it? The new trendy place, eh?'

‘It's convenient, and the burgers are good,' said Laura.

‘Huh. Overpriced foreign rubbish. Just another symptom of what's happening to London, a place like this. Bloody foreigners everywhere. Bond Street'll soon end up looking like a Middle Eastern bazaar. You can't walk two steps without bumping into a bloody Arab.'

‘I'm surprised you complain. I thought it was the “bloody Arabs” who were buying all your expensive properties.'

‘That's true. And very grateful to them we are. Helping us over a potentially sticky patch. Not that it'll go on like this. Market'll soon pick up. You can never go wrong in the long term with bricks and mortar. Oh no, I don't mind bloody Arabs buying the places, but I'm buggered if I actually want them living here.'

The waiter arrived with another bottle of wine, which Michael again grabbed and inspected suspiciously. ‘Looks all right. I'll want to taste it. Presumably you're not used to customers asking to do that in a place like this?'

‘We always pour wine to be tasted, sir,' replied the waiter, unfailingly courteous. He drew the cork, wiped the bottle's neck with a cloth and neatly decanted a little into Michael's glass. Michael took a sip and grudgingly admitted that the wine was all right.

‘Are you ready to order yet, madam? Sir?'

‘I've only just bloody arrived, haven't I?' Michael picked up the large, colourful menu. ‘Give us five minutes.'

‘Certainly, sir.'

The waiter withdrew. Michael followed his departure with narrowed eyes, then looked down at the menu. ‘God, I hate being taken for a ride in places like this. You're only paying for the gimmicks, you know.'

‘As a matter of fact,' said Laura evenly, ‘the prices here are very reasonable. And I'm paying, anyway, so it's not your problem.'

‘And no doubt if I did insist on paying, I'd be condemned yet again as a Male Chauvinist Pig, wouldn't I?'

‘Yes,' said Laura.

‘Oh, God, what's happening in this country? Everything's bloody arse-about-tit. Men are no longer allowed to behave like men, women have completely lost their femininity, the place is being taken over by bloody Yanks and Arabs. And now we've even got the Arabs messing up our fuel supplies. Do you know, I had to queue for nearly an hour to get a full tank of petrol this morning?'

‘Yes, we've done a few features for
Newsviews
on what's going on at the pumps.'

‘Really? Well, I'm sure those must've been jolly interesting. Sorry I missed them.' His voice was heavy with sarcasm. He turned his attention to the menu. ‘So … let's see if they do anything mildly edible.'

He huffed and puffed disapprovingly through the list of hamburgers, then called the waiter across and elaborated his demands for a plain rare steak ‘without any of that filthy garnish muck on it'. One of the very few tastes he and Kent had in common.

While Michael detailed his demands, Laura found her mind going back again to their wedding night. She had known what was required of her as a bride and, had her new husband shown even the smallest gesture of tenderness, might have overcome the revulsion for male flesh that her father's actions had generated within her. But Michael's only experiences – of masturbation and, with prostitutes, its interactive equivalent – gave him no consideration for a partner's feelings.