‘What’s she like?’
‘Sara? She’s …’ For the first time Laurel sees a light veil fall across Floyd’s natural effervescence. ‘She’s unusual. She’s, er …’ He appears to run out of words. ‘Well,’ he says eventually. ‘I guess you’d just have to meet her.’
‘How often do you see her?’
‘Oh, quite a lot, quite a lot. She still lives at home, with my ex; they don’t get on all that well so she uses me as an escape hatch. So, most weekends, in fact. Which is a mixed blessing.’ He smiles wryly.
‘And your other daughter? What’s her name?’
‘Poppy.’ His face lights up at the mention of her.
‘And what’s she like? Is she very different to Sara-Jade?’
‘Oh God yes.’ He nods slowly and theatrically. ‘Yes indeed. Poppy is amazing, you know, she’s insanely brilliant at maths, has the driest, wickedest sense of humour, takes no shit from anyone. She really keeps me on my toes, reminds me that I am not the be-all and end-all. She wipes the floor with me, in all respects.’
‘Wow. She sounds great!’ she says, thinking that he could have been describing her own lost girl.
‘She is,’ he says. ‘I am blessed.’
‘So how come she lives with you?’
‘Yes, well, that’s the complicated part. Poppy and Sara-Jade do not have the same mother. Poppy’s mum was … I don’t know, a casual relationship that rather overran its limitations. If you see what I mean. Poppy wasn’t planned. Far from it. And we did try for a while, to be a normal couple, but we never quite managed to pull it off. And then, when Poppy was four years old, she vanished.’
‘Vanished?’ Laurel’s heart races at the word, a word so imbued with meaning to her.
‘Yeah. Dumped Poppy on my doorstep. Cleared out her bank account. Abandoned her house, her job. Never to be seen again.’ He picks up his wine glass and takes a considered sip, as if waiting for Laurel to pick up the commentary.
She has her hand to her throat. She feels suddenly as though this was all fated, that her meeting with this strangely attractive man was not as random as she’d thought, that they’d somehow recognised the strange holes in each other, the places for special people who had been dramatically and mysteriously plucked from the ether.
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Poor Poppy.’
Floyd turns his gaze to the tablecloth, rolls a grain of rice around under his fingertip. ‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘Indeed.’
‘What do you think happened to her?’
‘To Poppy’s mother?’ he asks. ‘Christ, I have no idea. She was a strange woman. She could have ended up anywhere,’ he says. ‘Literally anywhere.’
Laurel looks at him, judging the appropriateness of her next question. ‘Do you ever think maybe she’s dead?’
He looks up at her darkly and she knows that she has gone too far. ‘Who knows?’ he says. ‘Who knows.’ And then the smile reappears, the conversation moves along, an extra glass of wine each is ordered, the fun recommences, the date continues.
Fifteen
When she gets home, Laurel goes straight to her laptop, pulls on her reading glasses and googles Floyd Dunn. They’d talked all night, until the restaurant had had to ask them very politely to leave. There’d been a gentle suggestion of going on somewhere else, Floyd Dunn was a member at a club somewhere (‘Not one of those flashy ones,’ he’d said, ‘just a bar and some armchairs, a few old farts drinking brandy and growling’) but Laurel had not wanted to travel back to High Barnet after the tubes stopped running so they’d said goodbye at Piccadilly Circus and Laurel had sat smiling dumbly, drunkenly at her reflection in the Tube window all the way up the Northern line.
Now she is in pyjamas with a toothbrush in her mouth. The clothes she’d left on her bed are in a pile on the armchair and her make-up is still scattered across her dressing table; she has no energy for practicalities; she just wants to keep herself tight inside the bubble that she and Floyd made together tonight, not let life crawl in through the gaps.
Within a few seconds Laurel discovers that Floyd Dunn is not just a mathematician, as he’d told her over dinner, but is in fact the author of several well-reviewed books about number theory and mathematical physics.
She clicks on Google Images and stares at Floyd’s face in varying stages of life and appearance; in some photos he is visibly younger: late thirties, long-haired, wearing a low-buttoned shirt. This is his author photo from his first few books and is slightly unsettling. She would not have shared a slice of cake with this man who resembles a lonely Open University lecturer from the early eighties. Later photos show him more or less as he is now, his hair slightly scruffier and darker, his clothing not quite so smart, but fundamentally the man she just had dinner with.
She wants to know more about him. She wants to envelop herself in him and his fascinating world. She wants to see him again. And again. And then she thinks of Paul, and his Bonny, the numb disbelief she’d felt when he’d come to her to inform her that he’d met a woman and that they were moving in together. She had been unable to comprehend how he had managed to get to such a place, a place of softness and butterflies in your stomach, of making plans and holding hands. And now it is happening to her and all of a sudden she aches to call him.
Paul, she imagines herself saying, I’ve met a fabulous guy. He’s clever and he’s funny and he’s hot and he’s kind.
And she realises that it’s the first time in years she’s wanted to talk to Paul about anything other than Ellie.
The next day is an agony of silence.