Laurel pours the Cava and they make a toast to themselves and to her and to SJ for not showing up and meaning that Poppy gets to stay up late and wear her nice dress.
‘That is a really lovely dress,’ Laurel says, sensing an opening. ‘Who takes you shopping for clothes?’
‘Dad,’ she replies. ‘We shop online together mostly. But sometimes we go to Oxford Street.’
‘And what’s your favourite clothes shop?’
‘I haven’t really got one. Marks & Spencer is really good, I suppose, and we always go into John Lewis.’
‘What about H&M? Gap?’
‘I’m not really that kind of girl,’ she says. ‘Jeans and hoodies and stuff. I like to look … smart.’
Floyd’s hand goes to the knee again, gives it another encouraging that’s my girl squeeze.
‘So,’ says Laurel. ‘Tell me about the home-schooling? How does that work?’
‘Just like real schooling,’ she responds. ‘I sit and learn. And then when I’ve learned I relax.’
‘How many hours a day do you study?’
‘Two or three,’ she says. ‘Well, two or three hours with Dad. Obviously he has to work. The rest of the time by myself.’
‘And you don’t ever get lonely? Or wish you had kids your own age to hang out with?’
‘Noooo,’ she says, shaking her head emphatically. ‘No, no, never.’
‘Poppy is basically forty years old,’ says Floyd admiringly. ‘You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life. Well, Poppy’s already there.’
‘When I’m with kids my own age I tend to roll my eyes a lot and look at them like they’re mad. Which doesn’t really go down too well. They think I’m a bitch.’ Poppy shrugs and laughs and takes a mouthful of Cava.
Laurel simply nods. She can see how this self-possessed child might appear to other children. But she doesn’t believe that it’s the way it must be; she doesn’t believe that Poppy couldn’t learn to enjoy time with her peers, to stop rolling her eyes at them and alienating them. She doesn’t know, thinks Laurel, she doesn’t know that this isn’t how you grow up. That wearing shiny shoes with bows on and rolling your eyes at other kids is not a sign of maturity, but a sign that you’ve missed a whole set of steps on the road to maturity.
This child, Laurel suddenly feels with the immediacy of a kick to the gut, needs a mother. And this mother, she acknowledges, needs a child. And Poppy, she is so like Ellie. The planes and lines of her pretty face, the shape of her hairline, of her skull, the way her ears attach to her head, the shapes her mouth makes when it moves, the precise angle of her cupid’s bow, they’re almost mathematically identical.
The differences are pronounced too. Her eyebrows are thicker, her neck is longer, her hair parts differently and is a different shade of brown. And while Ellie’s eyes were a hazel brown, Poppy’s are chocolate. They are not identical. But there is something, something alarming and arresting, a likeness that she can’t leave alone.
‘Maybe you and I could go shopping together?’ Laurel says brightly. ‘One day? Would you like that?’
Finally Poppy looks to her dad for his approval before turning back to Laurel and saying, ‘I would absolutely love that. Yes please!’
Laurel goes to work on Friday. She works Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays at the shopping centre near her flat. Her job title is ‘marketing coordinator’. It’s a silly job, a mum job, a little local thing to fill some hours and make some money to pay for clothes and the like. She comes, she smiles, she makes the phone calls and writes the emails and sits in the meetings about the inconsequential things she’s being paid to pretend she cares about and then she goes home and doesn’t think of any of it again until the next time she walks through the door.
But she’s glad to be there today. She’s happy to be surrounded by familiar people who like her and know her, even if it’s only on a superficial level. The previous evening had been strange and unsettling and she’d awoken thinking that maybe she’d dreamed it. Her flat had felt odd in the wake of her dinner guests, as though it didn’t really belong to her. The cushions on the sofa were in the wrong order, the result of Poppy’s attempt to tidy up after themselves, food was stacked in the wrong parts of the fridge and there was a pile of washing up on the draining board that Poppy had insisted on doing in spite of Laurel trying to persuade her that she needn’t, that it would all just go in the dishwasher. The lilies on the dining table gave off a strange deathly perfume and Floyd had left his scarf in her hallway, a soft grey thing with a Ted Baker label in it that hung from a hook like a plume of dark smoke.
She’d been glad to leave the flat, to put some distance between last night and herself. But even as she switches on her computer and stirs sweeteners into her coffee, as she listens to the messages on her voicemail, it’s there, like a dark echo. Something not right. Something to do with Floyd and Poppy. She can’t pin it down. Poppy is clearly a strange child, who is both charmingly na?ve and unsettlingly self-possessed. She is cleverer than she has any need to be, but also not as clever as she thinks.
And Floyd, who in the time that Laurel has spent alone with him, is virtually perfect, warps into something altogether more complicated when he’s with his daughter. Laurel finally crystallizes the issue while discussing her evening with her colleague, Helen.
‘It was like,’ she says, ‘you know, like when you’re supposed to be having drinks with a friend and they bring their partner along and suddenly you’re at the pointy end of a triangle?’
The evening had essentially been the Floyd and Poppy Show with Poppy as the star turn and Laurel as the slightly dumbfounded audience of one. Floyd and Poppy shared the same sense of humour and lined up jokes for each other. And Floyd’s eyes were always on his precocious child, sparkling with wonder and pride. There was not one conversation that had not involved Poppy and her opinions and there had not been one moment during which Laurel had felt more important, special or interesting than her.
She’d closed the door on them at midnight feeling drained and somewhat dazed.
‘Sounds like she’s got the classic only-child syndrome,’ says Helen, neatly shrinking the issue down to a digestible bite-sized chunk of common sense. ‘Plus, you know, some fathers and daughters just have that sort of thing, don’t they? Daddy’s girls. They usually turn into the sort of women who can only be friends with men.’
Laurel nods gratefully. Yes, that all makes perfect sense. She has seen that bond before between fathers and daughters. Not with her own daughters. Ellie was both a mummy’s and a daddy’s girl and Hanna is just a law unto herself. And maybe the surprise she is feeling is due to her own issues and nothing to do with Floyd and Poppy. Poppy is entertaining in a gauche kind of way and Floyd is clearly a wonderful, nurturing and loving father.
By the time Laurel leaves the office at five thirty and gets into her car in the underground car park she is feeling clear-headed and right-footed.