‘I can come back later?’ she says. ‘If you can find it in your heart to let me, after my betrayal.’
He curls his pale naked body across the bed and he grasps Laurel’s hands inside his, pulls them to his mouth and kisses each of her knuckles in turn. ‘I would really, really love it if you came back later. You know,’ he says, running her hands against the soft stubble on his cheeks, ‘I’m getting quite close to the can’t-live-without-you zone. Really, really quite close. Is that pathetic?’
The pronouncement is both surprising and completely predictable. She can’t process it fast enough and there is a small but prominent silence.
‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘have I blown it? Have I broken a rule that someone somewhere wrote about dating that I don’t know about?’
‘No,’ Laurel says, bringing his hands to her mouth and kissing them very hard. ‘Just – I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to matters of the heart. I can feel things, but never say them. And want things but then not want them. I’m …’
‘A pain in the arse?’
‘Yes.’ She smiles, relieved. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I am. But for what it’s worth, you are absolutely allowed to not want to live without me. I don’t have a problem with that at all.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I guess I’ll just wait here patiently for your return and hope that by the time you get back you won’t be able to live without me either.’
She laughs and extricates her hands from his.
‘See,’ he says, ‘you took your hands from mine. Is this how it is destined always to be for us? You take your hands from mine? You close the door without looking back? You put the phone down first? You leave first? You have the last word? I linger behind, in your wake?’
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s how I work.’
‘I’ll take what I can get,’ he says, rolling back to his side of the bed and pulling the duvet back over himself. ‘I’ll take what I can get.’
Downstairs the house is quiet and filled with pools of morning sun. Laurel pokes her head around the kitchen door; Poppy is not in there. She walks in, the soles of last night’s tights catching against splinters in the soft floorboards, and she switches on the kettle. Beyond the kitchen window a cat sits on the garden wall and observes her. There’s a loaf of bread on the counter, a white bloomer, half gone. She cuts a slice and searches the fridge for butter. Inside is evidence of the life that Floyd and Poppy live when she’s not here: the remnants of half-eaten meals, the tin-foil containers of leftover takeaways, open packets of ham and cheese and paté and pots of yogurt. She takes the butter and spreads the bread thickly. Then she makes herself a mug of tea and takes the bread and the tea to the table by the window. In solitude she thinks about Floyd’s pronouncement. She’d been half expecting it. She’d wanted it. But now she’s got it she’s worrying at it, picking at it, overthinking it.
Why, she wonders, does he want me? What did he see when he walked into that café last month, what did he see that he liked so much? And why can’t he live without me? What does it even mean anyway? When her children were small they’d sometimes say, ‘What would you do if I died?’ And she would reply, ‘I would die too, because I could not live without you.’ And then her child had died and she had found that somehow, incredibly, she could live without her, that she had woken every morning for a hundred days, a thousand days, three thousand days and she had lived without her.
So maybe what Floyd meant was that he felt his life did not make as much sense without her and if that was what he meant then maybe, yes, maybe she did feel that way too. Paul had never made such proclamations. A simple ‘I love you’ was how he’d announced the depth of his feelings. Still, she’d made him wait months before she’d reciprocated.
She wipes the crumbs from the plate into the bin, places her mug in the sink and picks up her handbag and her coat. In the hallway she finds her shoes: last night’s heels. She slips them on wishing she’d thought to bring a flat pair. She is about to leave when she remembers the bag of birthday gifts sitting in the kitchen: Paul’s book, a necklace from Jake and Blue, a bottle of her favourite perfume from Hanna. When she comes back into the hallway she sees a figure beyond the front door, and then there is the clatter of metal as a bunch of letters is forced through the letterbox and lands on the doormat. She picks them up and places them on the console.
Her eye is caught, as she turns to leave, by the letter on the top. It looks formal, probably financial: a fat white A4 envelope.
‘Miss Noelle Donnelly’.
The name rings a bell.
She wonders for a moment why mail addressed to a complete stranger would be delivered here. But then she realises. Of course. Noelle Donnelly must be Poppy’s mum.
In the front garden she looks up and sees Floyd standing in his bedroom window, his mouth turned downwards into a sad face, his hands pressed against the glass. She smiles and waves at him. He smiles and waves back, blows her a kiss, draws a heart in his breath on the windowpane.
Paul was right, she thinks; she is allowed this. She just needs to work out how to believe it.
There are more gifts for Laurel at Jackie and Bel’s house that day. The twins have made her a box of chocolate truffles, some more successfully truffle-shaped than others, and Jackie and Bel have bought her gift vouchers for a spa in Hadley Wood. They’ve made her a cake, too, the first cake of her birthday. It’s a Victoria sponge, her favourite. She blows out the candles and smiles at the boys’ singing of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. She drinks a glass of champagne and she tells her friends all about the previous evening, the relating of which has them both agog. They tell her that she looks glowing, that her hair is shining, her eyes are sparkling, that she has never looked better. They say that they will invite them over for lunch next week, her and Floyd, and Poppy too maybe, that they cannot wait to meet this man who has brought light back into their friend’s world.