Looking up, Laura blinked as Bernie took a rapid succession of pictures of her.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ The gym teacher Mrs Heinz, who was their chaperone that day, marched up to him, bristling. Short and muscled with crew-cut hair and a ginger moustache when she forgot to wax it, she was full of energy and often aggressive and overbearing. ‘Stop that at once and go away, or I’ll call the police!’
Bernie shrugged and went, but a week later he drove up to Laura’s home with a pile of glossy photos.
When she saw them she was silent. Was that really her, that beautiful girl with pale breasts partially visible at the open neck of her shirt, lying back against a bed of long grass, her eyes half closed, languid and sultry?
Her face went bright red. She was so hot she could scarcely breathe, and she felt embarrassed, with her parents staring at the pictures then at her. What were they thinking?
Then she had wondered how he had made her look like that. And how he had got her name and address. That gave her a sense of Bernie’s ominiscience, which never quite left her even when she knew him well and had discovered that he had asked one of the other girls which school they had come from. When he had processed the pictures he had gone there, had waited until some girls came out, shown then the photos and found out who Laura was that way. Simple when you know how.
It had taken her parents quite a while to get over their first view of those pictures. When Bernie had talked about a modelling career for Laura, her mother’s reaction had been immediate. ‘She’s far too young. And even if she wasn’t I wouldn’t want her to get involved in that sort of life. She’s going to college.’
Bernie ignored her and said to Mr Erskine, ‘The camera loves her – I knew it would, the minute I set eyes on her. It’s the bone structure. She could have a brilliant career as a model, earn a fortune.’
Laura’s father was a shrewd, down-to-earth man who had had to work hard from dawn till dusk to earn his daily bread. ‘What sort of money are we talking about?’ he asked.
Bernie grinned, knowing that the fish had taken his bait. ‘The sky’s the limit, if she gets taken up by all the magazines and advertisers. She could be making a hundred thousand a year, or it could go up to a million.’
‘A million?’ Laura’s father had been impressed, his eyes brightening. Then, catching his wife’s angry, disapproving eye, he added, ‘But she’s still at school, you know, and we couldn’t let her leave until she’s taken her exams.’
Mrs Erskine interrupted angrily, ‘She isn’t going to be a model, now or later. She should never have posed for those disgusting pictures in the first place!’
‘She’s a natural, she didn’t need to pose. I just took pictures of her as she was and look at the result! Stunning, isn’t she? A beautiful girl. She takes after you, I can see that.’
He had wasted his flattery. ‘She’s too young and I won’t have her going off to London!’ Mrs Erskine snapped.
Bernie turned back to her husband. ‘If you’re worried I’ll find someone to chaperone her. I’m a happily married man, Mr Erskine. I see beautiful girls all day long. I don’t have to chase after them, they chase after me. I swear to you, your daughter will be as safe with me as if she was my own kid. I think it would be a crying shame if she didn’t get her chance. She has terrific potential – I’m convinced she could get to the top and make a fortune.’
Laura had never had any self-confidence about her looks so she had never even daydreamed about being a model. She couldn’t believe the startling metamorphosis Bernie had wrought in her, changing the gangling schoolgirl she knew from her mirror into a languid-eyed siren, but nothing would have stopped her grabbing Bernie’s offer with both hands.
‘I want to do it,’ she said, an obstinate expression settling over her eyes and mouth. ‘I don’t want to go to college, I want to be a model, if he says I can.’
She had to finish her exams first, however, because neither of her parents would hear of her leaving before the end of that school year. Her mother hoped she might change her mind, and continued throughout those months to point out she was not a swan but an ugly duckling, clumsy, graceless, awkward.
‘You’ll never be pretty, so don’t let that man pull the wool over your eyes. I don’t know what his game is, but I don’t trust him. Don’t be a fool, Laura. Go to college, get a good education and a good job afterwards.’
But Laura was counting the days. She couldn’t wait to leave for London and get away from her mother’s drip, drip, drip of criticism.
When she began modelling, success came almost immediately and, with it, temptations of the kind her parents had feared, but Laura was always too tired to stay out late after working all day on her feet, and the clubs only began to swing at around ten or eleven at night. She wasn’t attracted by smoky nightclubs, drugs or drink. She had one or two brief relationships with men, but they didn’t mean much to her. She had fun with them, enjoyed their company, but never fell in love. Then, when she was twenty-one, she was chosen to be the ‘face’ of a famous perfume house for a year.
‘You’ll have to turn down any other offers during the run of the contract. We can’t have your face appearing anywhere else,’ she was told. ‘That’s why you’ll be paid such big fees. You can’t earn anything from anyone else. From now on you’re ours exclusively.’
She didn’t hesitate – the money involved was far too big and the coverage was saturating. Everywhere she went Laura saw her own face, huge and terrifying, barely recognisable at that size, staring down from billboards. She saw it on the backs of glossy magazines, alive and shimmering on television screens – you couldn’t miss it unless you lived on a desert island. It made it impossible for her to go out alone.
She couldn’t walk through the streets, take a peaceful stroll in one of the beautiful London parks, visit Harrods or Selfridges. She was driven everywhere, and suddenly acquired minders: big, muscled men with faces like scrubbed turnips who could toss people aside as if they were matchsticks.
The casual, light
-hearted relationships she had had with young men, more friends than lovers, ended – the strain of being followed everywhere by the paparazzi made them irritable, and none of them wished to see themselves photographed with her and speculated about in the tabloid gossip columns.
‘It’s like being under siege! I’m sick of it!’ she complained to Bernie.
‘Go back home for a while, visit your family. It’s time for some rest and recuperation,’ he advised, and that was what she did. It felt strange, at first, to be back there, treated as a child again, with her parents, in the wild, green, lonely places of her childhood after the four years she had spent in London, but she gradually felt her pulse slow to the quiet beat of days that were always the same.
Since the moment when she had first met Bernie, Laura had believed in fate. You could call it chance, good luck, or pure coincidence, but whatever it was Laura believed some agency operated in her life that made the wheels of opportunity turn and directed her along the right path. During those days in the old farmhouse she felt as it she was drifting, waiting for a tide to turn and carry her onward. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next, she simply felt that a future was waiting for her, to which she would shortly be directed. Meanwhile she read new novels, watched TV, helped her mother feed the animals and cook, went walking across the hills to gaze in breathless pleasure at the landscape, the heather moorland and green valleys, the bony hills, the clouds tearing overhead.
Sometimes she visited her sister in Carlisle, played with her little nephew and nieces, baby-sat while Hamish and Angela had an evening out. One day she took her parents with her. They had lunch with Angela and the children, and in the evening went to the local cinema to see Back Streets, a film about gangsters in Chicago, full of vice and drugs and murder. Mr and Mrs Erskine hated the film, wanted to leave half-way through, but although it was so violent it was witty and melancholy, full of insight, and Laura was deeply impressed by it.