Then She Was Gone Read online

  “I hope you haven’t read it?”

  “No,” she says, turning it over to read the back cover blurb. She hasn’t read a book for ten years.

  “Ooh, that book is brilliant,” says Poppy.

  “Oh,” says Paul, “you’ve read it?”

  “Yes,” she replies. “I read two books a week. At least.”

  “Wow,” says Paul. “And you enjoyed it?”

  “Loved it.” She picks the book up and holds it between her hands, caressing the sides of it lovingly. “It’s about a boy who goes to a museum and his mum gets blown up by a bomb. He steals a small painting in the midst of the chaos and then spends the rest of his life trying to hide it from everyone. It’s set in New York.”

  “Sounds brilliant,” says Laurel.

  Poppy nods. “It really, really is.” Her face lights up as she talks.

  “I must say,” says Laurel, “that for a girl who thinks humanity is just a tedious mistake, you seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for novels. What is it about fiction that you enjoy?”

  Poppy’s hands fall onto the book. “Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.”

  Laurel and Paul smile and nod. Then they turn to each other and exchange a look. Not a wry look this time, but one of disquiet.

  Ellie used to read two books a week and when they teased her about always having her nose in a book, Ellie used to say, “When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

  Laurel picks up her champagne and raises it to Poppy. “Cheers to that, Poppy,” she says, “cheers to that.”

  The evening is enjoyable. A success. Poppy does slightly attempt to hijack proceedings but as she is so obviously the youngest at the table and everyone is looking for some extra social glue to keep the whole precarious thing stuck together, she gets away with it.

  “What a delightful girl,” Paul whispers in her ear as they’re filing out of the restaurant at eleven o’clock. “Doesn’t she remind you in a funny way of . . .”

  Laurel knows what he’s going to say before the word is out of his mouth. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, in some ways. She really does.”

  “That thing about the book. The reality and the dreams.” He shakes his head wonderingly.

  “I know. I know. Weird.”

  “And looks like her, a bit, too?”

  “A bit,” she agrees. “Yes.”

  “Funny,” he says, plucking his coat from a coat rack, “that you’ve found yourself in a lookalike family.”

  “A what?”

  “Well, he looks a bit like me, too, doesn’t he?”

  His tone is light but Laurel blanches.

  “Er, no,” she says, “not really. Just the hair. And the clothes.”

  Paul looks at her fondly, realizing that he’s crossed one of her many lines, the lines he knows so well. “Yes,” he says. “That’s true. I like him,” he adds conciliatorily. “He seems like a good man.”

  “Well,” she says, briskly, “it’s early days yet. We’ll see, won’t we?”

  “Yes.” He smiles. “Of course, there’s still plenty of time for him to prove himself to be an utter psychopath. Plenty of time.”

  She laughs. It’s nice talking to someone who knows her better than anyone else in the world. It’s nice talking to Paul.

  “You know,” he continues, “you know you deserve this, don’t you? You know you’re allowed it?”

  She shrugs, feeling a rush of heat up the back of her sinuses. “Maybe,” she manages quietly. “Maybe.”

  23

  Laurel pulls herself from Floyd’s bed at eight o’clock the following morning. He groans and turns to glance at his bedside alarm clock. “Come back,” he growls, throwing an arm across the bed. “It’s the weekend. It’s too early!”

  “I need to get home,” she says, wrapping her hand around his where it lies on the wrinkled sheets.

  “No you don’t.”

  She laughs. “Yes I do! I told you, remember. I’m going for lunch at my friends’ house.”

  He feigns defeat and throws himself back onto his pillow. “Use me for sex and then just abandon me,” he says. “See if I care.”

  “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 before I do? 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 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 pâté 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 that 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 mon
ths 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 favorite 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 realizes. 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 downward 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 favorite. 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.

  And all the time Laurel is thinking that this feels like a normal Saturday at Jackie and Bel’s, but also not like a normal Saturday at Jackie and Bel’s. Because for the first time in years there’s an energy somewhere outside her own body, an energy that belongs to her yet isn’t of her. It calls her and it pulls her, and instead of lingering after tea and cake as she normally would, instead of trying to squeeze as much normality out of her time with her oldest friends as possible, she finds her hand on her handbag at five o’clock, words of thanks and farewell coming from her mouth. Her friends squeeze her hard in their hallway and there’s a sense shared by all of them that things have changed, as they changed all those years ago when Jackie and Bel told her they were a couple, as they did when Ellie disappeared, as they did when the twins were born, and as they did when Paul left. The ebb and flow of need and priorities was moving things along again and Laurel knows that she will not need her Saturdays here as much as she once did.

  She climbs into her car and she drives as fast as she can back to Floyd’s house.

  The letter is still there, on the console when she walks in, but someone has crossed out the address and written “Return to Sender/Not known at this address” on it.

  The name shouts out at her again.

  Noelle Donnelly. Noelle Donnelly.

  Why does she know that name?

  “How was your lunch?” asks Floyd.

  “Lovely,” she says, “really lovely. Look”—she shows him the box of homemade truffles—“the boys made these for me. Isn’t that sweet? And we’re invited as a couple next weekend. If you want to go?”

  “I’d love to,” he says, hanging up her coat for her, and then her scarf.

  Poppy rushes downstairs at the sound of Laurel’s return and throws her arms around her.

  “Oh!” says Laurel. “That’s nice!”

  “I missed you this morning,” she says. “I thought I’d see you.”

  “Sorry,” says Laurel. “I had to rush home to get ready for lunch.”

  Floyd has opened a bottle of wine in the kitchen and poured Laurel a large glass, which sits on the kitchen counter waiting for her.

  “Funny,” she says absentmindedly, swinging herself onto a stool. “I think maybe I might know someone who used to live in this house.”

  He puts the wine bottle back in the fridge and turns to her, an eyebrow raised. “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. There’s a letter on your console. For Noelle Donnelly. And I can’t for the life of me remember how I know the name, but I do. I thought . . .” She treads carefully. “For a moment, I thought maybe it was Poppy’s mum.”

  Floyd doesn’t move. After a minute he turns toward the fridge and says, “Well, actually, it is.”

  Laurel blinks. She remembers Poppy’s description of her mother’s red hair, the smell of grease. “Was she Irish?” she asks.

  “Yes. Noelle was Irish.”

  Laurel stares into her glass at the undulating reflections of halogen lights in the surface of the liquid. There’s something wriggling beneath her consciousness. Something about the combination of the name and the hair color and an Irish accent—and she knows this woman. She knows her.

  “Did she have any other children?” she asks. “Older children?” Maybe she was a mum at the school.

  “No. Just Poppy.”

  “Did she work round here? Locally?”

  “Well, kind of,” says Floyd. “She was a tutor. Maths. I think she taught a lot of the local kids around here.”

  “Oh!” says Laurel. “Of course. That’s it! She must have taught Ellie. Ellie did have a tutor for a while. A short while anyway. Just before . . .” Her words peter out.

  “Well,” says Floyd. “What a remarkable coincidence! That really is. To think that our paths came so close to crossing. Just one degree of separation.”

  “Yes,” says Laurel, her hand tightening around the wineglass. “What a coincidence.”

  She mentions it to Hanna when she phones her on Monday. “Remember,” she says, “when Ellie had that tutor, the year she disappeared?”

  “No,” says Hanna.

  “You must do. She was Irish—tall woman, red hair? She used to come on Tuesday afternoons?”

  “Maybe.”

  Laurel can hear her typing as she talks. She swallows down a swell of irritation. “Well, weird thing,” she continues, “but turns out that she was Poppy’s mum.”

  “Who was?”

  “The tutor! The maths tutor!”

  There’s a small silence and then Hanna says, “Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember her. Ellie hated her.”

  Laurel laughs nervously. “No,” she says, “she didn’t hate her. She thought she was wonderful. Her savior.”

  “Well,” says Hanna, “that’s not how I remember it. I remember her saying she was weird and creepy. That’s why she stopped the lessons.”

  “But . . .” Laurel begins, pausing to try to order her memories. “She didn’t say any of that to me. She said she needed more time to study other things. Or something like that.”

  “Well, she told me she didn’t like her and that she was creepy.” There’s a note of triumph in Hanna’s tone. She and Laurel had always vied for Ellie’s attention.

  “Anyway,” says Laurel. “Isn’t that strange? What a small world!”

  She’s talking in lazy clichés, using words that don’t quite add up to the sum of her disquiet. In the hours since discovering that Noelle Donnelly was Poppy’s mum, Laurel has remembered more and more about her: the slightly hunched back, the stale-smelling anorak and sensible rubber-soled shoes that squeaked against the tiled floor in the hallway, the nervous imperiousness, the pretty red hair left unbrushed and pushed back into clips and claws. She cannot reconcile that woman with Floyd, who may not be a classically handsome man but is
groomed and stylish, fragrant and clean. How did they come together? How did they meet? How did they fit? And how, more than anything, did they make a baby together?

  But she doesn’t say any of this to Hanna. She sighs. She’s been overthinking things as usual and now she’s run out of steam. “How did you enjoy Friday night?” she asks. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was nice, actually. Just to be together like that. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For organizing it. For suggesting it. For being the first person in this family to do something brave since Ellie went missing.”

  “Oh,” says Laurel, taken aback. “Thank you. But I think you have Floyd to thank. He’s the one who’s given me courage. He’s the one who’s changed me.”

  “No,” says Hanna. “You’ve changed you. You wouldn’t be going out with him otherwise. I’m really pleased for you, Mum. Really pleased. You deserve it.”

  “Did you like him, Hans?”

  “Floyd?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah,” says Hanna. “Yeah. He seems OK.”

  And that, coming from Hanna, is praise indeed.

  24

  Laurel doesn’t see Floyd that evening. But he calls her at seven o’clock, just as he’d said he’d do, and Laurel is surprised to feel a little pulse of annoyance.

  “I’ll call you at seven,” he’d said. And here he is, calling her at seven. She might have enjoyed a few moments’ indulgent anticipation. For a minute she toys with the idea of not answering her phone, but then she checks herself. She’s doing it again, keeping too much of herself back. And this was exactly why she and Paul had not survived the years of Ellie’s disappearance, because of her, because she’d never allowed herself to be properly subsumed into her relationship with him, had disapproved of him for loving her so deeply and unquestioningly, felt gently suffocated by the lack of gaps in his feelings for her. At the first moment of mutual desperation, she’d escaped into the airlock inside herself that she’d deliberately kept empty all those years.