She cannot wait to see Floyd again.
Laurel and Floyd spend the whole of the following weekend together. It wasn’t planned that way, but there never seemed to be a point at which leaving his house made any sense. They had dinner out on Friday night, a late breakfast on Saturday morning, a trip to the cinema with Poppy that afternoon followed by a detour to M&S for new underwear and a toothbrush, a Chinese takeaway on Saturday night and then brunch in a café round the corner on Sunday before Laurel managed to tear herself away and back to her flat on Sunday evening ready for work on Monday morning.
At the office Laurel feels as though she has shed a skin, that she is somehow reborn and that she needs to mark the transition in some landmark way.
She calls Hanna.
‘How would you feel …’ she starts tentatively, ‘if I invited my new boyfriend to our birthday dinner?’
The silence is black and heavy.
Laurel fills it. ‘Totally don’t mind if you say no. Totally understand. I just thought, in the spirit of us all moving on? In the spirit of a brave new world?’
The silence continues, growing in depth and darkness.
‘Boyfriend?’ says Hanna eventually. ‘Since when did you have a boyfriend?’
‘The guy,’ says Laurel, ‘the guy I told you about? Floyd.’
‘I know the guy,’ she replies. ‘I just wasn’t aware that he’d made boyfriend status.’
‘Yes, well, if you ever answered your phone …’
Hanna sighs. Laurel sighs too, realising she has just done the thing she always promised herself she would never do. When the children were small, Laurel’s mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel’s conscience. I will never guilt-trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean to nag. It’s just, yes, things are moving quite fast. I’ve met his kids. I’ve stayed at his. We talk all the time. We’ve just spent the whole weekend together. I just …’ Ridiculous, she suddenly realises. A ridiculous idea. ‘But forget I mentioned it. I mean, I haven’t even asked Floyd yet if he’d like to come. He’d probably rather saw his legs off. Forget I said anything.’
There’s another silence. Softer this time. ‘Whatever,’ Hanna says. ‘Invite him. I don’t mind. It’s going to be so fucked up anyway, we may as well go the whole hog.’
Floyd says yes. Of course Floyd says yes. Floyd has made it very clear from the moment she headed home after their second date that he is wholly committed to their romance and that he is not interested in playing games or hard to get.
‘I would love that,’ he says. ‘As long as your family are OK with it?’
Paul had been OK about it. Hugely surprised, but OK. Jake had said it was fine. No one was jumping up and down about it but no one had said it was a mistake.
‘And Poppy?’ Laurel adds. ‘Would Poppy like to come too?’
She half hopes he’ll say no.
‘She’ll be thrilled,’ Floyd says. ‘She keeps saying how much she’d like to meet your children.’
‘And my ex-husband. And my ex-husband’s girlfriend.’
‘The whole shebang.’
The whole shebang. The whole hog.
She books a table for eight at a restaurant in Islington, a legendarily chichi place down a narrow cobbled alleyway off Upper Street.
She must be mad, she tells herself. She must be absolutely insane.
Twenty
On her birthday, Laurel receives a large bouquet of purple hyacinths and laurel from Floyd. Paul always used to put laurel in her bouquets. But this doesn’t take away from the pleasure of it, the startle of his thoughtfulness. And a comparison to her ex-husband is no bad thing, no bad thing at all.
Later on he takes her to a bar in Covent Garden called Champagne & Fromage, which delivers what its name promises. Throughout the evening Laurel keeps her eyes on her surroundings, hoping for a glimpse of Hanna who said she was ‘going somewhere in town with mates’ when Laurel had enquired about her birthday plans. But she doesn’t see Hanna anywhere and so the mystery of the man called ‘T’ stretches on.
‘When’s your birthday?’ she asks Floyd, her knife breaking into a tartine.
‘The thirty-first of July,’ he replies. ‘Roughly.’
‘Roughly?’
He shrugs and smiles. ‘Things were a bit chaotic when I was born.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. It was a steep trajectory for my parents. From the gutter to the stars.’
‘And the gutter was …?’
He narrows his eyes and she hears a small intake of breath. ‘My mum was fourteen when I was born. My dad was sixteen. No one wanted to know. They were homeless for a time. I was born in a public toilet, I believe. In a park. They took me to a hospital … and left me there.’
Laurel’s breath catches.
‘I was dressed in a blue suit and a fresh nappy, wrapped in a blanket. I had on a soft hat and mittens. I was in a box lined with a cushion. They’d written my name on a piece of paper. “This is Floyd, please look after him.” My parents came back for me three days later. By that time I’d been taken into emergency foster care. There was no way they were giving an abandoned baby back to a pair of scrawny teens with no means of support. It took them nearly a year to get me back. I think it was the fight to do so that fuelled my parents’ ambition.’
‘And how did you find out about it? Did they tell you?’
‘Yes, they told me. My God, they told me. All the time. Whenever I was misbehaving they’d march it out: ‘We should have left you there in the hospital. We’ll take you back there, shall we?”’ A muscle twitches in Floyd’s cheek.
‘But do you remember anything about it?’ she asks. ‘Anything about those days?’
‘Nothing at all,’ he replies. ‘My very first memory is my dad bringing home a plastic car. It had a little ignition’ – he mimes turning a key in a lock – ‘and it made a noise when you turned it, an engine starting. And I remember sitting in that car for an hour, maybe more, just turning that ignition, over and over. I was about four then and we were living in an apartment in Boston with a balcony, views across town, all the bright lights and the ocean. So, no, I don’t remember the bad days. I don’t remember them at all.’
‘You know,’ she says, ‘you’re the first person I ever met in my whole life who didn’t know their birthday.’
He smiles. ‘Yup. Me too.’
Laurel glances about herself. For so long she has been the story: the woman whose daughter disappeared, the woman at the press conference, the woman in the papers, the woman who had to bury her daughter in tiny fragments. But now here is another human with a terrible story. What other stories surround her? she wonders. And how many stories has she missed all these years while she’s been so wrapped up in her own?