Free Singled Out by Simon Brett Page A

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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I ordered it.’
    â€˜Oh, did you?’