Faith by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online

thrilled to find she was to have a room which looked out on to the river. There was the kind of triple-mirrored dressing table like a film star’s and she even had her own small armchair and the desk Vincent had promised her.
    She had spent ages in the bathroom she would share with the little ones, drinking in every detail of the shiny pale pink tiles, the heated towel rail and the lights either side of the mirror. Yet it was the things Vincent had done for the little ones which made her lose all her reservations about him. He’d redecorated the room for Ivy and Meggie with a wallpaper covered in flowers and fairies. They had new twin beds and there was a lovely doll sitting on each one. Freddy’s room was tiny but Vincent had got a specially made small bed for him, and the curtains had jungle animals on them. He’d also bought him a shiny red tricycle. No one would go to such trouble if they really didn’t want children living in their house.
    Vincent had also said they should start out afresh and so they were only taking their best clothes and most treasured possessions with them to his house. He was going to get them everything else they needed. For the last couple of weeks they had been getting rid of things; they sold a few bits of furniture to a neighbour, and outgrown clothes, pots, pans and china went to a jumble sale. The rest of the stuff was just rubbish and they had filled over twenty sacks with it.
    Laura didn’t feel the least bit sad to be leaving Thornfield Road. They were going up in the world at last, and even if the girls at school didn’t come round when they saw her in her new summer uniform dress after Easter, she was too happy to care.
    Ten months later, as Laura sat down for her special tea for her fifteenth birthday in January and looked at the beautiful cake with icing roses, and Meggie, Ivy and Freddy’s plump, healthy, smiling faces, she wished she could wholeheartedly believe, as they did, that they really were in paradise.
    To be fair to Vincent, he was generous and affectionate to them all. He didn’t complain when the children were noisy, and he showered them all with new clothes, toys, books and anything else they so much as hinted at wanting. As for their mother, she had blossomed; she had her hair and nails done every week, she wore the kind of clothes and shoes rich women wore, and she no longer had that weariness about her which had been so much a part of their old life.
    But Laura was always aware of a kind of undercurrent, as if her mother was acting out a role which wasn’t entirely to her liking. She was often nervy, particularly when Vincent was due home from the office, and he didn’t help by commenting on anything which was untidy or dirty.
    Laura was by nature tidy-minded, and she loved things to be clean, but she was aware that some people were not like that. June was one of them. Even the modern labour-saving appliances in Grove House couldn’t transform her into a super-housewife. She failed to see fingermarks on paintwork, or an overflowing kitchen bin, and her cooking skills were very limited.
    So Laura covered for her by rushing home from school and running around the house picking things up, cleaning this, tidying that, and more often than not supervising whatever her mother was preparing for the dinner she would eat with Vincent later.
    It was hard for Laura to understand what her mother found so difficult about cooking; after all, she was no longer on a tight budget and all she had to do was read a recipe book and follow the instructions. But perhaps she was intimidated because Vincent was used to more sophisticated food than she had ever eaten. She certainly seemed very afraid that he would find out her failings.
    Vincent, it transpired, had two adult sons from whom he was estranged. They had parted company with him after their mother died, and Laura wondered if this was because Vincent had been unkind to her.
    He did have a very hard streak. Back in September,