She covers all her bases for pudding. He’s American, so she chooses a New York-style cheesecake, but he’s also an Anglophile, so she picks up a sticky toffee pudding too. But what if he’s too full for pudding? What if he doesn’t like pudding? She buys a box of After Eight mints, imagining some kind of well, you’re not really English until you’ve eaten an After Eight mint type of conversation and then finally she pays for everything and loads it all into the back of her car with a sigh of relief.
Her flat is another hurdle to cross. It’s fine, essentially. She’s neither messy nor tidy. Her flat is usually only a ten-minute run around with a hoover and bin bag away from looking perfectly presentable. But it’s the lack of personality that worries her. Her flat is smart but soulless. Shiny, new, low-ceilinged, small-windowed, featureless. She’d let the children take most of the things from the old house. She’d given a lot to charity too. She’d brought the bare minimum with her. She regrets that now. It was as though she’d thought she’d only be here for a short time, as though she’d thought that she would just fade away here until there was nothing left of her.
She showers and shaves and buffs and plucks. She cooks in her pyjamas to save her clothes and she finds the process of chopping and weighing and measuring and checking and tasting and stirring more enjoyable than she’d expected and she remembers that she used to do this. She used to do this every day. Cook interesting, tasty, healthy meals. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. She’d cooked for her family, to show them that she loved them, to keep them healthy, to keep them safe. And then her daughter had disappeared and then reappeared as a small selection of bones, and the body that Laurel had spent almost sixteen years nurturing had been picked apart by wild animals and scattered across a damp forest floor and all of those things had happened in spite of all the lovely food Laurel had cooked for her.
So, really. What was the point?
But she is remembering now. Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef.
At seven o’clock she gets dressed: a black sleeveless shirt and a full red skirt and, as she’s not leaving the house and won’t have to walk in them, a pair of red stilettoes. At seven fifteen her phone pings.
Disaster. SJ blown us out. Can either come with Poppy or reschedule. Your call.
She breathes in deeply. Her initial reaction is annoyance. Intense annoyance. All the effort. All the hair removal. Not to mention the changing of her bed sheets.
But the feeling passes and she thinks, actually, why not? Why not spend an evening with Floyd and his daughter? Why not take the opportunity to get to know her a bit better? And besides, the bed sheets needed changing.
She smiles and texts back. Please come with Poppy. It would be an absolute pleasure.
Floyd replies immediately.
That’s fantastic. Thank you. One small thing. She’s obsessed with other people’s photos. If you have any of Ellie, maybe best to put them away. I haven’t told her about Ellie and think it’s best she doesn’t know. Hope that’s OK. ?
Nineteen
Poppy is wearing a knee-length black velvet dress with a red bolero jacket and red shoes with bows on them and Laurel feels another jolt of unease about the way the girl is dressed. It screams of lack of peer influence and a mother’s touch. But she puts the unease to one side and brings Floyd and Poppy into her living room where candles flicker and cast dancing shadows on the plain white walls, where bowls of crisps and Tex-Mex dips decanted into glass dishes sit on the coffee table, where soft background music blunts the hard edges of the small square room and where a bottle of Cava sits in a cooler and glasses sparkle in the candlelight.
‘What a lovely flat,’ says Floyd, passing her a bottle of wine and prompting Poppy to pass her the bunch of lilies she’d been clutching when she arrived.
‘It’s OK,’ says Laurel. ‘It’s functional.’
Poppy looks around for a moment, taking in the family photos on the window sills and the cabinets. ‘Is this your little girl?’ she says, peering at a photo of Hanna when she was about six or seven.
‘Yes,’ says Laurel. ‘That’s Hanna. She’s not a little girl any more though. She’s going to be twenty-eight next week.’
‘And is this your son?’
‘Yes. That’s Jake. My oldest one. He’ll be thirty in January.’
‘He looks nice,’ she says. ‘Is he nice?’
Laurel puts the wine in the fridge and turns back to Poppy. ‘He’s … well, yes. He’s very nice. I don’t really see much of him these days unfortunately. He lives in Devon.’
‘Has he got a girlfriend?’
‘Yes. She’s called Blue and they live together in a little gingerbread cottage with chickens in the garden. He’s a surveyor. I’m not sure what she does. Something to do with knitting, I think.’
‘Do you like her? It sounds as if you don’t like her.’
Laurel and Floyd exchange another look. She’s waiting for him to pull Poppy back a bit, rein her in. But he doesn’t. He watches her in something approaching awe as though waiting to see just how far she will go.
‘I barely know her,’ Laurel says, trying to soften her tone. ‘She seems perfectly OK. A bit, maybe, controlling.’ She shrugs. ‘Jake’s a grown man, though; if he wants to be controlled by another human being I guess that’s his lookout.’
She invites them to sit down and eat some crisps. Floyd does so but Poppy is still stalking round the room, investigating. ‘Have you got a picture of your husband?’ she says.
‘Ex-husband,’ Laurel corrects, ‘and no. Not on display. But somewhere, I’m sure.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Paul.’
Poppy nods. ‘What’s he like?’
She smiles at Floyd, looking to be rescued, but he looks as keen to find out about Paul as his daughter. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Paul? He’s lovely, actually. He’s a really lovely man. Very gentle. Very kind. A bit daft.’
‘Then why did you split up?’
Ah. There it was. Silly her, not to have seen the conversational cul-de-sac she was walking straight into. And still Floyd does not come to her rescue, simply scoops some dip on to a pitta chip and pops it into his mouth.
‘We just … well, we changed. We wanted different things. The children grew up and left home and we realised we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives together.’
‘Did he marry someone else?’
‘No. Not quite. But he has a girlfriend. They live together.’
‘Is she nice? Do you like her?’
‘I’ve never met her. But my children have. They say she’s very sweet.’
Poppy finally seems sated and takes a seat next to her father, who grips her knee and gives it a quick hard squeeze as if to say good job on grilling the lady. Then he leans towards the coffee table and places a hand on the neck of the Cava and says, ‘Well, shall I?’
‘Yes. Please. How did you get here? Are you driving?’
‘No. We got the Tube. Do you have an extra glass?’
She’s confused for a moment and then realises that he wants the extra glass for Poppy. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I didn’t think. It’s the French way, isn’t it?’
‘What’s the French way?’ asks Poppy.
‘Children drinking,’ she explains. ‘Not something that happens much in other countries.’
‘Only champagne,’ says Floyd. ‘Only a sip. And only on very special occasions.’