her with his motorcycle at the end of the lane on Saturday afternoon at two-thirty—there was this little place he wanted to show her, his favourite spot along the coast.
Laurel checked her wristwatch. Less than two hours to go.
He’d nodded when she told him about the performance of The Birthday Party and how it made her feel; he’d spoken about London and theatre and the bands he’d seen in nameless nightclubs, and Laurel had glimpsed gleaming possibilities. And then he’d kissed her; her first proper kiss, and the electric bulb inside her head had exploded so that everything burned white.
She shifted to where Daphne had propped the little hand mirror from her vanity set and stared at herself, comparing the black flicks she’d drawn with painstaking care at the corner of each eye. Satisfied they were even, she smoothed her fringe and tried to quell the dull sick-making sense that she’d forgotten something important. She’d remembered a beach towel; she wore her swimsuit already beneath her dress; she’d told her parents that Mrs Hodgkins needed her for some extra hours in the salon, sweeping and cleaning.
Laurel turned from the mirror and nibbled a loose snag of fingernail. It wasn’t in her nature to sneak about, not really; she was a good girl, everybody said so—her teachers, the mothers of friends, Mrs Hodg- kins—but what choice did she have? How could she ever explain it to her mother and father?
She knew quite certainly that her parents had never felt love; no matter the stories they liked to tell about the way they met. Oh, they loved each other well enough, but it was a safe old-person’s love, the sort expressed in shoulder rubs and endless cups of tea. No—Laurel sighed heatedly. It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physi- cal—she flushed—desires.
A warm gust brought with it the distant sound of her mother’s laughter, and awareness, however vague, that she stood at a precipice in her life, made Laurel fond. Dear Ma. It wasn’t her fault her youth had been wasted on the war. That she’d been practically twenty-five when she met and married Daddy; that she still trotted out her paper-boat- making skills when any of them needed cheering up; that the highlight of her summer had been winning the village Gardening Club prize and having her picture in the paper (not just the local paper either—the article had been syndicated in the London press, a big special about regional happenings. Shirley’s barrister father had taken great pleasure in trimming it out of his newspaper and bringing it round to show them).
Ma had played at embarrassment and protested when Daddy pasted the clipping on the new refrigerator, but only half-heartedly, and she hadn’t taken it down. No, she was proud of her extra-long runner beans, really proud, and that was just the sort of thing that Laurel meant. She spat out a fine shard of fingernail. In some indescribable way it seemed kinder to deceive a person who took pride in runner beans than it was to force her to accept the world had changed.
Laurel hadn’t much experience with deceit. They were a close family—all of her friends remarked upon it. To her face and, she knew, behind it. As far as outsiders were concerned, the Nicolsons had committed the deeply suspicious sin of seeming genuinely to like one another. But lately things had been different. Though Laurel went through all the usual motions, she’d been aware of a strange, new distance. She frowned slightly as the summer breeze dragged loose hairs across her cheek. At night, when they sat around the dinner table and her father made his sweet unfunny jokes and they all laughed anyway, she felt as if she were on the outside looking in; as if the others were on a train carriage, sharing the same old family rhythms, and she alone stood at the station watching as they pulled away.
Except that it was she who would be leaving them, and soon. She’d done her research: the Central School of Speech and Drama was where she needed to go. What, she wondered, would her parents say when she told them that she wanted to leave? Neither of them was particularly worldly—her mother hadn’t even been as far as London since Laurel was born—and the mere suggestion that their eldest daughter was considering a move there, let alone a shadowy existence in