Silly Games

Part Nine

The trip back to London...again, was slow. Laura had opted for the train as the roads on a Friday were likely to be horrendous, but once she arrived at Paddington she’d had to endure the tube and bus to get to her parents. These repeated trips were getting expensive; she couldn’t waste her money on a taxi.

Her mother was flustered when she opened the door, dressed elegantly in an off white dress that flowed from her body.  She was flawless, but there were lines of tensions that marked her face in places that had been unadorned the previous week.  Their hug was longer than normal and Laura felt she needed that moment with her mother more than any other time in her life. They both did.

                “You ok?”

Her mother nodded, “I’ve had a caterer in since lunchtime, your father is coming home for seven with...”

Laura nodded, neither of them knew how to refer to the man who was suddenly part of their lives from nowhere. “So I’ll go get changed...is he staying here?”

                “No, apparently he is staying in a place in Fulham, I don’t know if it’s a hotel or apartment.”

Her mother seemed less nervous as she sat on Laura’s bed in her childhood room and watched her daughter tidy her hair and apply some make up. She described animatedly the meeting earlier in the week where she’d met the man, Laura didn’t even know his name, and that he seemed genuinely nice. Laura knew she’d be sceptical, she’d not been interested in finding her birth parents, she had all she needed here, but she couldn’t help but wonder if her father’s status and wealth had been an influence in all this. Would this mystery son have contacted Stafford Marshall if he had been unemployed or even a less senior worker? No, she had a sneaky suspicion that her father being CEO of one of the biggest manufacturing conglomerates in Europe made him a very attractive Daddy figure.

A small voice warned her that things were never that simple, and that not everyone had the same happy and comfortable life as she had, maybe this man had had a hard life, felt unloved.

She shook her head, no, she couldn’t believe that. He was older than her, presumably in his thirties, that wasn’t the age for a man looking for a father figure, a stable male influence or someone to love.

Male voices in the hallway alerted her to the fact that they’d arrived. Suddenly there was a pulsing in her throat; Laura found it difficult to swallow. She hoped he’d be some geek, lacking the social skills her education had given her or the natural charm that people always talked about. She wanted to shine in this stranger’s presence just so that her parents’ appreciated her, valued her.  When had she become so self conscious?

Maggie Marshall clapped her hands trying to look enthusiastic, but the chinks in her armour were there for all to see, they were having dinner, at home, a quiet evening, but this stranger had precipitated caterers and dinner attire. Her mother had never gone to these lengths for parties when they’d hosted more than fifty people. This nervousness in her mother scared her, it hinted at a weakness in a marriage she’d almost mocked for being so stable. Everything she knew hung by a balance, all because of the emergence of one man.

                “Whisky, beer or wine?”

Laura could hear her father in the lounge and had heart raced. Her mother reached out and took her hand, and suddenly appearing as a united front meant everything.

Her father was at the bar that took up one corner of the huge lounge, his head stooped as he poured whisky into two glasses, adding a couple of cubes of ice. Hearing them approach his head snapped up and he smiled at the two women.