Free Singled Out by Simon Brett

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