‘We should give you a tour, wouldn’t you say? What do you think?’
Poppy glances again at Laurel, who nods, and they follow Joshua and Sam through the house. Poppy is uncharacteristically quiet at first, peering nervously around doorways.
Joshua pushes a door at the top of the landing, ‘This must have been your room. Look, it still has the wallpaper.’
Poppy falters for a moment on the threshold and then she steps in, her eyes wide, her hands running across the wallpaper. It’s pale grey with a repeated pattern of pink rabbits and green tortoises on it, engaged in a running competition. The tortoises are all wearing sweatbands and the rabbits have on running shoes.
‘I remember this wallpaper,’ she says breathlessly. ‘The hares. And the tortoises. I used to see them running in the night. I’d stare at them and then I’d shut my eyes and they’d be running. Hundreds of them. Through my dreams. I remember it. I really do.’
‘You want to see some more?’ says Joshua, giving Laurel a knowing look. ‘There’s another room downstairs. I wonder if you’ll remember that, too?’
Quietly they descend back to the ground floor, through the kitchen and then down into the basement.
Poppy stops once more on the threshold, grips the outside of the door with her fingertips. She gasps and says, ‘I don’t want to go in there.’
‘Oh, but it’s fine,’ says Joshua. ‘It’s just a room.’
‘But … but …’ Her eyes are wide and her breathing is audible. ‘I’m not allowed in there. My mum told me never to go in there.’
Laurel touches her shoulder softly. ‘Wow, that’s an interesting memory. Why do you think that was?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Poppy, sounding vaguely tearful. ‘I don’t know. I just remember thinking there was a monster down there. A big, scary monster. But that’s just silly, isn’t it? There was no monster down there, was there?’
‘Did you have pets?’ asks Laurel. ‘When you were tiny? Do you remember having some hamsters?’
Poppy shakes her head slowly and walks out of the kitchen and towards the front door.
Thirty-five
Laurel takes Poppy home after their visit to Noelle’s house. They walk in silence for a while. Laurel has never known Poppy to be so quiet.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks as they wait at a crossroads for the lights to change.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I feel all weird.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs. ‘Just remembering things I haven’t remembered before. Thinking about my mum when I haven’t thought about her for so long. Meeting cousins I didn’t know I had. It’s been a bit overwhelming.’
‘Yes,’ says Laurel, cupping the crown of Poppy’s head with her hand. ‘Yes. I bet it has.’
Laurel swallows away the lump in her throat. She needs to stay focused. She cannot jump to fantastical conclusions. In the scheme of things it is far more likely that the monster in Noelle’s basement was actually twenty dead hamsters, not Ellie. She needs to assume that this was the case and then find the evidence that it was not. She needs to stay sane.
Floyd is there when they get back. Poppy starts to babble immediately about cake and tea and then disappears very quickly to her room before, she assumes, Floyd can ask her anything else.
Laurel watches Floyd unpacking carrier bags of shopping. For a moment, as he reaches for a tall cupboard to slide in a box of teabags, his shirt slips from the moorings of his waistband, flashing a slice of pale flesh, and she feels herself sliding back through time again, as she’d felt in Nando’s the week before last with Poppy. She’s back in her own kitchen in Stroud Green. In front of her is Paul. He’s wearing the same shirt, it tugs itself briefly from his waistband, he slides the teabags into the cupboard, he turns to face her. He smiles. For a second the two moments blend in her mind, the two men merge into one.
‘Are you OK?’ Floyd asks.
She shakes her head once, to dislodge the glitch. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am. I’m fine.’
‘You looked like you were miles away.’
She smiles as widely as she can, but she suspects it is not wide at all. She knows she should say something about her visit to Noelle’s house with Poppy but she can’t. And she can’t ask him any of the questions she wants to ask him – Did you know that Sara-Jade claims to have seen Noelle at eight months pregnant without a bump? Do you never want to find out what happened to Noelle? Would you not like to find her? Do you never ask yourself questions about the strangeness of everything? – because then everything about them, about Floyd and Laurel, all of it would be squashed and remade, like a clay pot on a wheel. And it’s such a lovely pot and she’s worked so hard on it and so much depends on it staying exactly as it is.
‘Tell me,’ she says, turning the conversation round 180 degrees, back to a place that nurtures intimacy and growth. ‘Tell me about your first marriage. How was it? How did you and Kate meet?’
He smiles as she’d known he would and tells her a story about a beautiful young girl at a bus stop, totally out of his league in every way, a charmingly gauche conversation and an invitation to a party that turned out to be a rave in an abandoned car park, a lost night of neon lights and recreational drugs, a full moon, a fur coat. And at some point Laurel zones out of the detail and fixates instead on the feeling of jealousy that seeps out from deep inside her, the dark, bleak stab of pain that for a short while at least overpowers her creeping sense of unease, that stops her asking questions.
Laurel leaves the next morning. Floyd tries to persuade her to stay, tempts her with suggestions of gastro-pub Sunday lunches and riverside walks, but her mind is elsewhere, she can no longer force herself to stay focused on their romance; she needs to be alone.
She’d parked her car in the next road down the day before because there was no space on Floyd’s street. To get to it she has to loop back on to the high street and then left again. Her eye is caught by a man standing outside the small branch of Tesco on the corner. He has a little black dog on a lead. He’s tall; in his mid-twenties, Laurel guesses. He’s wearing a huge parka with a fur-trimmed hood and dark jeans with trainers. He’s extremely good-looking, rangy and eye-catching. But as she glances at him Laurel realises that it’s not his good looks that have caught her eye. She realises that she recognises him and it takes a moment for the details to slot into place and form a solid memory before it hits her. It’s Theo. Theo Goodman. Ellie’s boyfriend.