Then She Was Gone Page 5

  She passes her thumb over her girl’s smiling face, over the giant pompom.

  That’s awesome, Mum, she hears her say, I’m so happy for you. Have fun!

  “I’ll try,” she replies to the emptiness. “I’ll try.”

  The light is kind in the restaurant that Floyd’s chosen for their date. The walls are lacquered black and gold, the furniture is dark, the lampshades are made of amethyst beads strung together over halogen bulbs. He’s already there when she arrives, two minutes late. She thinks, He looks younger in this light, therefore I must look younger, too. This bolsters her as she approaches him and lets him stand and kiss her on both cheeks.

  “You look very elegant,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she says. “So do you.”

  He’s wearing a black and gray houndstooth-checked shirt and a black corduroy jacket. His hair looks to have had a trim since their first meeting and he smells of cedar and lime.

  “Do you like the restaurant?” he asks, faking uncertainty and fooling nobody.

  “Of course I like the restaurant,” she says. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “Phew,” he says and she smiles at him.

  “Have you been here before?” she asks.

  “I have. But only for lunch. I always wanted to come back in the evening when it was all gloomy and murky and full of louche people.”

  Laurel looks around her at the clientele, most of whom look like they just came straight from the office or are on dates. “Not so louche,” she says.

  “Yeah. I noticed. I am very disappointed.”

  She smiles and he passes her a menu.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m ravenous,” she says. And it’s true. She’s been too nervous to eat all day. And now that she’s seen him and remembered why she agreed to share his cake with him, why she called him, why she arranged to meet him, her appetite has come back.

  “You like spicy food?”

  “I love spicy food.”

  He beams at her. “Thank God for that. I only really like people who like spicy food. That would have been a bad start.”

  It takes them a while even to look at the menu. Floyd is full of questions: Do you have a job? Brothers? Sisters? What sort of flat do you live in? Any hobbies? Any pets? And then, before their drinks have even arrived, “How old are your kids?”

  “Oh.” She bunches her napkin up on her lap. “They’re twenty-seven and twenty-nine.”

  “Wow!” He looks at her askance. “You do not look old enough to have kids that age. I thought teens, at a push.”

  She knows this is utter nonsense; losing a child ages you faster than a life spent chain-smoking on a beach. “I’m nearly fifty-five,” she says. “And I look it.”

  “Well, no you don’t,” he counters. “I had you at forty-something. You look great.”

  She shrugs off the compliment; it’s just silly.

  Floyd smiles, pulls a pair of reading glasses from the inside pocket of his nice jacket and slips them on. “Shall we get ordering?”

  They overorder horribly. Dishes keep arriving, bigger than either of them had anticipated, and they spend large portions of the evening rearranging glasses and water bottles and mobile phones to free up space for them. “Is that it?” they ask each other every time a new dish is delivered. “Please say that that’s it.”

  They drink beer at first and then move on to white wine.

  Floyd tells Laurel about his divorce from the mother of his elder daughter. The girl is called Sara-Jade.

  “I wanted to call her Sara-Jane, my ex wanted to call her Jade. It was a pretty simple compromise. I call her Sara. My ex calls her Jade. She calls herself SJ.” He shrugs. “You can give your kids any name you like and they’ll just go ahead and do their own thing with it ultimately.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Sara? She’s . . .” For the first time Laurel sees a light veil fall across Floyd’s natural effervescence. “She’s unusual. She’s, er . . .” He appears to run out of words. “Well,” he says eventually. “I guess you’d just have to meet her.”

  “How often do you see her?”

  “Oh, quite a lot, quite a lot. She still lives at home, with my ex; they don’t get on all that well so she uses me as an escape hatch. So, most weekends, in fact. Which is a mixed blessing.” He smiles wryly.

  “And your other daughter? What’s her name?”

  “Poppy.” His face lights up at the mention of her.

  “And what’s she like? Is she very different to Sara-Jade?”

  “Oh God yes.” He nods slowly and theatrically. “Yes indeed. Poppy is amazing, you know, she’s insanely brilliant at maths, has the driest, wickedest sense of humor, takes no shit from anyone. She really keeps me on my toes, reminds me that I am not the be-all and end-all. She wipes the floor with me, in all respects.”

  “Wow. She sounds great!” she says, thinking that he could have been describing her own lost girl.

  “She is,” he says. “I am blessed.”

  “So how come she lives with you?”

  “Yes, well, that’s the complicated part. Poppy and Sara-Jade do not have the same mother. Poppy’s mum was . . . I don’t know, a casual relationship that rather overran its limitations. If you see what I mean. Poppy wasn’t planned. Far from it. And we did try for a while to be a normal couple, but we never quite managed to pull it off. And then, when Poppy was four years old, she vanished.”

  “Vanished?” Laurel’s heart races at the word, a word so imbued with meaning to her.

  “Yeah. Dumped Poppy on my doorstep. Cleared out her bank account. Abandoned her house, her job. Never to be seen again.” He picks up his wineglass and takes a considered sip, as if waiting for Laurel to pick up the commentary.

  She has her hand to her throat. She feels suddenly as though this was all fated, that her meeting with this strangely attractive man was not as random as she’d thought, that they’d somehow recognized the strange holes in each other, the places for special people who had been dramatically and mysteriously plucked from the ether.

  “Wow,” she says. “Poor Poppy.”

  Floyd turns his gaze to the tablecloth, rolls a grain of rice around under his fingertip. “Indeed,” he says. “Indeed.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “To Poppy’s mother?” he asks. “Christ, I have no idea. She was a strange woman. She could have ended up anywhere,” he says. “Literally anywhere.”

  Laurel looks at him, judging the appropriateness of her next question. “Do you ever think maybe she’s dead?”

  He looks up at her darkly and she knows that she has gone too far. “Who knows?” he says. “Who knows.” And then the smile reappears, the conversation moves along, an extra glass of wine each is ordered, the fun recommences, the date continues.

  15

  When she gets home, Laurel goes straight to her laptop, pulls on her reading glasses, and googles Floyd Dunn. They’d talked all night, until the restaurant had had to ask them very politely to leave. There’d been a gentle suggestion of going on somewhere else; Floyd Dunn was a member at a club somewhere (“Not one of those flashy ones,” he’d said, “just a bar and some armchairs, a few old farts drinking brandy and growling”), but Laurel had not wanted to travel back to High Barnet after the tubes stopped running, so they’d said good-bye at Piccadilly Circus and Laurel had sat smiling dumbly, drunkenly at her reflection in the tube window all the way up the Northern line.

  Now she is in pajamas with a toothbrush in her mouth. The clothes she’d left on her bed are in a pile on the armchair and her makeup is still scattered across her dressing table; she has no energy for practicalities; she just wants to keep herself tight inside the bubble that she and Floyd made together tonight, not let life crawl in through the gaps.

  Within a few seconds Laurel discovers that Floyd Dunn is in fact the author of several well-reviewed books about number theory and mathematical physics.

  She clicks
on Google Images and stares at Floyd’s face in varying stages of life and appearance; in some photos he is visibly younger: late thirties, long-haired, wearing a low-buttoned shirt. This is his author photo from his first few books and is slightly unsettling. She would not have shared a slice of cake with this man who resembles a lonely Open University lecturer from the early eighties. Later photos show him more or less as he is now, his hair slightly scruffier and darker, his clothing not quite so smart, but fundamentally the man she just had dinner with.

  She wants to know more about him. She wants to envelop herself in him and his fascinating world. She wants to see him again. And again. And then she thinks of Paul, and his Bonny, the numb disbelief she’d felt when he’d come to her to inform her that he’d met a woman and that they were moving in together. She had been unable to comprehend how he had managed to get to such a place, a place of softness and butterflies in your stomach, of making plans and holding hands. And now it is happening to her and all of a sudden she aches to call him.

  Paul, she imagines herself saying, I’ve met a fabulous guy. He’s clever and he’s funny and he’s hot and he’s kind.

  And she realizes that it’s the first time in years she’s wanted to talk to Paul about anything other than Ellie.

  The next day is an agony of silence.

  On Saturdays Laurel usually sees her friends Jackie and Bel. She’s known them since they were all at school together in Portsmouth, where they were an inseparable gang of three. About thirty years ago, when they were all in their twenties and living in London, Laurel had met up with them in a bar in Soho and they’d told her that they had come out to each other and were now a couple. And then eleven years ago, in her early forties, Bel had given birth to twin boys. Just as Laurel was exiting the parenting zone, they’d walked straight into it, and in the years after Ellie disappeared, their home in Edmonton full of nappies and plastic and pink yogurt in squeezy tubes had been a refuge to her.

  But they are away this weekend, taking the boys to a rugby tournament in Shropshire. And so the minutes pass exquisitely and the air in the flat hangs heavy around her. The sounds of her neighbors closing doors, calling to their children, starting their cars, walking their dogs, ratchets up the feeling of aloneness, and there is no call from Floyd, no text and she is too old, far too old for all this, and by Saturday night she has talked herself out of it. It was a mad idea. Nonsensical. She is a damaged woman with a ton of ugly baggage and Floyd was clearly just using his effortless charm to secure a night out with a woman, something he could probably manage every night of the week if he so chose. And he was probably sitting in a café somewhere right now, sharing a slice of carrot cake with someone else.

  On Sunday Laurel decides to visit her mother. She usually visits her mother on a Thursday; having it as a weekly slot makes it less likely that she’ll find an excuse not to go. But she cannot spend another day at home alone. She just can’t.

  Her mother’s care home in Enfield, a twenty-minute drive away, is a new-build, redbrick thing with smoked-glass windows so that no one can peer in and see their own devastating futures. Ruby, her mum, has had three strokes, has limited vocabulary, is half-blind, and has very patchy recall. She is also very unhappy and can usually be counted upon to find the words to express her wish to die.

  Her mother is in a chair when she arrives at half eleven. By her side is a plate of oaty-looking biscuits and a cup of milk as though she was four years old. Laurel takes her mother’s hand and strokes the parchment skin. She looks into her dark eyes and tries, as she always does, to see the other person, the person who would pick her up by one arm and one leg and throw her in swimming pools when she was small, who chased her across beaches and plaited her hair and made her eggs over easy when she requested them after she’d seen them on an American TV show. Her mother’s energy had been boundless, her curly black hair always coming loose from grips and bands, her heels always low so that she was free to run for buses and jump over walls and pursue muggers.

  Her first stroke had hit her four months after Ellie’s disappearance and she’d never been the same since.

  “I went on a date last week,” Laurel tells her mother. Her mother nods and pinches her mouth into a tight smile. She tries to say something but can’t find the words.

  “F-F-F-F . . . F-F-F . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Mum. I know you’re pleased.”

  “Fantastic!” she suddenly manages.

  “Yes,” says Laurel, smiling broadly, “it is. Except now of course I’m really nervous, behaving like a teenager; I keep staring at my phone, willing him to call. It’s pathetic . . .”

  Her mum smiles again, or the facsimile of a smile that her damaged brain will allow. “N . . . Name?”

  “His name is Floyd. Floyd Dunn. He’s American. He’s my age, ludicrously clever, nice-looking, funny. He’s got two daughters; one of them lives with him, the other is grown up.”

  Her mother nods, still smiling. “You . . . you . . . you . . . you . . .”

  Laurel runs her thumb across the top of her mother’s hand and smiles encouragingly.

  “You . . . you . . . you call him!”

  Laurel laughs. “I can’t!”

  Her mum shakes her head crossly and tuts.

  “No. Honestly. I called him the first time. I already made the first move. It’s his turn now.”

  Her mum tuts again.

  “I suppose,” Laurel ponders, “I could maybe send him a text, just to say thank-you? Leave the ball in his court?”

  Her mum nods and clasps Laurel’s hand inside hers, squeezing it softly.

  Her mother adored Paul. From day one she’d said, “Well done, my darling, you found a good man. Now please be kind to him. Please don’t let him go.” And Laurel had smiled wryly and said, “We’ll see.” Because Laurel had never believed in happy ever afters. And her mum had been sanguine about Paul and Laurel splitting up; she’d understood, because she was both a romantic and a realist. Which in many ways was the perfect combination.

  Her mother puts out a hand to feel for Laurel’s handbag. She puts her hand into it and she pulls out Laurel’s phone and hands it to her.

  “What?” says Laurel. “Now?”

  She nods.

  Laurel sighs heavily and then types in the words.

  “I will hold you fully responsible,” she says, mock-sternly, “if this all blows up in my face.”

  Then she presses the send button and quickly shuts her phone down and stuffs it into her handbag, horrified by what she has just done. “Shit,” she says, running her hands down her face. “You cow,” she says to her mum. “I can’t believe you made me do that!”

  And her mother laughs, a strange, warped thing that comes from too high up her throat. But it’s a laugh. And the first one Laurel can remember hearing from her mother in a very long time indeed.

  Seconds later Laurel’s phone rings. It’s him.

  16

  Laurel and Floyd have their second date that Tuesday. This time they stay local, and go to an Eritrean restaurant near Floyd that Laurel had always wanted to try but Paul would never agree to because they had a three-star hygiene rating taped to their window.

  Floyd is dressed down, in a bottle-green polo shirt under a black jumper, with jeans. Laurel is wearing a fitted linen pinafore over a white cotton blouse, her hair clipped back, black tights and black boots. She looks like a trendy nun. She had not realized, until she met Floyd, how stern, virtually clerical all her clothes were.

  “You look amazing,” he says, clearly missing all the signs of her sartorial struggle. “You are far too stylish for me. I feel like an absolute bum.”

  “You look lovely,” she says, taking her seat, “you always look lovely.”

  She’s amazed by how relaxed she feels. There are none of the nerves that plagued their first meeting last week. The restaurant is scruffy and brightly lit, but she feels unconcerned about her appearance, about whether or not she looks old.

 
She stares at his hands as they move and she wants to snatch them in midair, grab them, hold them to her face. She follows the movement of his head, gazes at the fan of smile lines around his eyes, glances from time to time at the just visible spray of chest hair emerging from the undone top button of his polo shirt. She wants, very badly, to have sex with him and this realization shocks her into a kind of flustered silence for a moment.

  “Are you OK, Laurel?” he asks, sensing her awkwardness.

  “Oh, God, yes. I’m fine,” she replies, smiling, and he looks reassured by this and the conversation continues.

  He talks warmly to the waitstaff, who seem to know him well and bring him bonus dishes and morsels of things to taste.

  “You know,” she says, tearing off a piece of flatbread and dipping it into a mutton stew, “my ex refused to bring me here because of the poor hygiene rating.” She feels bad for a moment, belittling Paul, painting a one-note picture of him for a stranger when there is much more to know about him.

  “Well, hygiene, schmygiene, I have never had a dodgy tummy after eating here and I’ve been coming for years. These people know what they’re doing.”

  “So how long have you lived around here?”

  “Oh, God, forever. Since my parents went back to the U.S. They gave me a piece of money, told me to put it down somewhere scruffy but central. I found this house; it was all split up into bedsits, just disgusting. Jesus, the way people live. Dead rats. Blocked toilets. Shit on the wall.” He shudders. “But it was the best decision I ever made. You would not believe how much the place is worth now.”

  Laurel could believe it, having sold her own Stroud Green house only a few years earlier. “Do you think you’ll ever go back to the States?”

  He shakes his head. “No. Never. It was never home to me. Nowhere ever felt like home to me till I came here.”

  “And your parents? Are they still alive?”

  “Yup. Very much so. They were young parents so they’re still pretty spry. What about you?” he asks. “Are your parents still with you?”