Then She Was Gone Read online

  But now his tone matches her own state of mind. Now she can appreciate him afresh. Lovely, lovely Paul Mack. Such a nice man.

  “How are you?” he says.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she says. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  She does know. “I wondered,” she began, “it’s mine and Hanna’s birthday next week. I was thinking maybe we could do something. Together? Maybe?”

  Hanna had arrived in the world at two minutes past midnight on Laurel’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was family lore that she’d been born determined to steal everyone’s limelight.

  “You mean, all of us? You, me, the kids?”

  “Yes. Kids. Partners, too. If you like.”

  “Wow. Yes!” He sounds like a small boy being offered a free bicycle. “I think that’s a great idea. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And I haven’t asked her yet. It’s possible she may be busy. But I just thought, after the year we’ve had, after, you know, finding Ellie, saying good-bye, we’ve been so fractured, for so long, maybe now it’s time to—”

  “To come back together,” he cuts in. “It’s a brilliant idea. I’d love to. I’ll talk to Bonny.”

  “Well,” she says, “wait till I’ve spoken to the kids. It’s hard, you know, they’re so busy. But fingers crossed . . .”

  “Yes. Definitely. Thank you, Laurel.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “It’s been a long journey, hasn’t it?”

  “Arduous.”

  “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you, too. And Paul—”

  He says, “Yes?”

  She pauses for a moment, swallows hard, and then reaches down into herself to retrieve the word she never thought she’d say to Paul. “I’m sorry.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Oh, you know, Paul. You don’t have to pretend. I was a bitch to you. You know I was.”

  “Laurel.” He sighs. “You were never a bitch.”

  “No,” she says, “I was worse than a bitch.”

  “You were never anything other than a mother, Laurel. That’s all.”

  “Other mothers lose children without losing their husbands, too.”

  “You didn’t lose me, Laurel. I’m still yours. I’ll always be yours.”

  “Well, that’s not strictly true, is it?”

  He sighs again. “Where it counts,” he says. “As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”

  Now Laurel sighs, an awkward smile twisting the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Paul. Thank you.”

  She hangs up a moment later and she holds her phone in her lap for a while, tenderly, staring straight ahead, feeling a sense of peace she never thought would be hers to feel again.

  Hanna sounds annoyed even to be asked about it.

  “What do you mean, all of us?” she asks.

  “I mean, me, you, Dad, Jake, Bonny, Blue.”

  “Oh God,” she groans.

  Laurel stands firm. She’d known Hanna wouldn’t leap headfirst into the concept. “Like you said,” she explains, “it’s time for us all to move on. We’re all healing now, and this is part of the process.”

  “Well, for you maybe. I mean, you’ve never even met Bonny. How awkward is that going to be?”

  “It won’t be awkward because me and your father won’t let it be awkward.” How long had it been since she’d used those words? Me and your father. “We’re all grown-ups now, Hanna. No more excuses. You’re almost twenty-eight. I’m virtually an OAP. We’ve buried Ellie. Your father has a partner. He loves her. I have to accept that and embrace her as part of this family. The same with Jake and Blue. And, of course, with you . . .”

  “With me?”

  “Yes. You. And whoever sent you those beautiful flowers.”

  There’s a cool beat of silence. Then: “What flowers?”

  “The bouquet on your kitchen table.”

  “There is no bouquet.”

  “Oh, well, then, the imaginary bouquet with the imaginary pink roses in it. That one.”

  Hanna tuts. “That’s not a bouquet. It’s just a bunch. I bought them for myself.”

  Laurel sighs. “Oh,” she says, breezily, disingenuously, “my mistake then. Sorry.”

  “Will you just stop trying to invent a boyfriend for me, Mum? There is no boyfriend, OK?”

  “Fine. Yes. Sorry.”

  “And I really don’t like the idea of this big family meal. It’s too bizarre.”

  “Are you free?”

  She pauses before she replies. “No.”

  “No?”

  “Well, not on my actual birthday. On our birthday. No. But I could do another day next week.”

  “What are you doing on our actual birthday, then?”

  “Oh, you know, just drinks after work. Nothing special.”

  Laurel blinks slowly. She knows her daughter is lying. That “T” is taking her out somewhere special. But she says nothing. “Well, then,” she says measuredly, “how about the Friday?”

  “Fine,” says Hanna. “Fine. But if it’s all a hideous disaster, I’ll blame you for the rest of my life.”

  Laurel smiles.

  As if that was anything new.

  Laurel arranges to see Floyd again on Thursday night. She didn’t need to fret and simmer this time. He’d texted her within half an hour of her leaving his house on Wednesday morning. That was the best date I’ve ever been on. And Poppy loves you. Could I see you again? Please? Tomorrow?

  It had arrived on her phone as the tube burst out of the tunnel and into the daylight at East Finchley. She’d sucked her smile deep inside herself and texted back: Maybe. Unless . . .

  She asked him if he’d like to come to her flat for dinner. He said that would be lovely, he’d ask SJ to sleep over at his.

  And now she is shopping for that dinner, alarmed and exhilarated by the litany of choices she is having to make. For so long she has done everything by rote, out of necessity. She has eaten the same meals cooked from the same ingredients that she has picked up in the same aisles. All her meals are roughly calorie controlled. Three hundred for breakfast, four hundred for lunch and three hundred for dinner. Enough left over for a chocolate bar or some biscuits at work, two glasses of wine at the tail end of the day. That is how she views food: as calories.

  She stopped cooking for Paul and the kids the day Ellie disappeared. Slowly they’d finished the contents of the fridge, and then the freezer, and then at some point Paul and Hanna had gone to Asda and filled a giant trolley to the brim with “staples”—pasta, canned fish, sausages, frozen meat—and Paul had, without any form of official handover or agreement, taken over the kitchen. And, God bless him, he was a terrible cook—no sense of taste, no idea about balanced meals—but the bland, well-intentioned food had appeared and the family had eaten and no one got rickets or died of malnutrition, and that was all that mattered, she supposed.

  But now she has to cook a meal for a man. A man she’s had sex with. A man she would be having sex with again. A man who took his daughter to an Eritrean restaurant when she was a toddler. And she feels completely out of her depth.

  She’s clutching a computer printout of a Jamie Oliver recipe for jambalaya.

  Rice. How hard can it be?

  She collects peppers, onions, chicken, chorizo. But it’s the other elements that throw her. Nibbles. Aperitifs. Puddings. Wine. She has no idea. None. She piles her trolley with strange-sounding crisps made out of pita bread and lentils, then throws in some Walkers ready salted, just to be safe. Then tubs of taramasalata, hummus, tzatziki, all of which she throws back when she realizes that they didn’t go with the main course. But what does go with jambalaya? What do they nibble on in Louisiana before dinner? She has no idea a
nd picks up a Tex-Mex dip selection pack, which feels like something a student might buy for a house party.

  She covers all her bases for pudding. He’s American, so she chooses a New York–style cheesecake, but he’s also an Anglophile, so she picks up a sticky toffee pudding, too. But what if he’s too full for pudding? What if he doesn’t like pudding? She buys a box of After Eight mints, imagining some kind of well, you’re not really English until you’ve eaten an After Eight mint type of conversation and then finally she pays for everything and loads it all into the back of her car with a sigh of relief.

  Her flat is another hurdle to cross. It’s fine, essentially. She’s neither messy nor tidy. Her flat is usually only a ten-minute run around with a vacuum and bin bag away from looking perfectly presentable. But it’s the lack of personality that worries her. Her flat is smart but soulless. Shiny, new, low-ceilinged, small-windowed, featureless. She’d let the children take most of the things from the old house. She’d given a lot to charity, too. She’d brought the bare minimum with her. She regrets that now. It was as though she’d thought she’d be here for only a short time, as though she’d thought that she would just fade away here until there was nothing left of her.

  She showers and shaves and buffs and plucks. She cooks in her pajamas to save her clothes and she finds the process of chopping and weighing and measuring and checking and tasting and stirring more enjoyable than she’d expected, and she remembers that she used to do this. She used to do this every day. Cook interesting, tasty, healthy meals. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. She’d cooked for her family, to show them that she loved them, to keep them healthy, to keep them safe. And then her daughter had disappeared and then reappeared as a small selection of bones, and the body that Laurel had spent almost sixteen years nurturing had been picked apart by wild animals and scattered across a damp forest floor and all of those things had happened in spite of all the lovely food Laurel had cooked for her.

  So, really. What was the point?

  But she is remembering now. Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient; it nurtures the chef.

  At seven o’clock she gets dressed: a black sleeveless shirt and a full red skirt and, as she’s not leaving the house and won’t have to walk in them, a pair of red stilettoes. At seven fifteen her phone pings.

  Disaster. SJ blown us out. Can either come with Poppy or reschedule. Your call.

  She breathes in deeply. Her initial reaction is annoyance. Intense annoyance. All the effort. All the hair removal. Not to mention the changing of her bedsheets.

  But the feeling passes and she thinks, actually, why not? Why not spend an evening with Floyd and his daughter? Why not take the opportunity to get to know her a bit better? And besides, the bedsheets needed changing.

  She smiles and texts back. Please come with Poppy. It would be an absolute pleasure.

  Floyd replies immediately.

  That’s fantastic. Thank you. One small thing. She’s obsessed with other people’s photos. If you have any of Ellie, maybe best to put them away. I haven’t told her about Ellie and think it’s best she doesn’t know. Hope that’s OK.

  19

  Poppy is wearing a knee-length black velvet dress with a red bolero jacket and red shoes with bows on them, and Laurel feels another jolt of unease about the way the girl is dressed. It screams of lack of peer influence and a mother’s touch. But she puts the unease to one side and brings Floyd and Poppy into her living room where candles flicker and cast dancing shadows on the plain white walls, where bowls of crisps and Tex-Mex dips decanted into glass dishes sit on the coffee table, where soft background music blunts the hard edges of the small square room and where a bottle of Cava sits in a cooler and glasses sparkle in the candlelight.

  “What a lovely flat,” says Floyd, passing her a bottle of wine and prompting Poppy to pass her the bunch of lilies she’d been clutching when she arrived.

  “It’s OK,” says Laurel. “It’s functional.”

  Poppy looks around for a moment, taking in the family photos on the windowsills and the cabinets. “Is this your little girl?” she says, peering at a photo of Hanna when she was about six or seven.

  “Yes,” says Laurel. “That’s Hanna. She’s not a little girl anymore though. She’s going to be twenty-eight next week.”

  “And is this your son?”

  “Yes. That’s Jake. My oldest one. He’ll be thirty in January.”

  “He looks nice,” she says. “Is he nice?”

  Laurel puts the wine in the fridge and turns back to Poppy. “He’s . . . well, yes. He’s very nice. I don’t really see much of him these days unfortunately. He lives in Devon.”

  “Has he got a girlfriend?”

  “Yes. She’s called Blue and they live together in a little gingerbread cottage with chickens in the garden. He’s a surveyor. I’m not sure what she does. Something to do with knitting, I think.”

  “Do you like her? It sounds as if you don’t like her.”

  Laurel and Floyd exchange another look. She’s waiting for him to pull Poppy back a bit, rein her in. But he doesn’t. He watches her in something approaching awe as though waiting to see just how far she will go.

  “I barely know her,” Laurel says, trying to soften her tone. “She seems perfectly OK. A bit, maybe, controlling.” She shrugs. “Jake’s a grown man, though; if he wants to be controlled by another human being, I guess that’s his lookout.”

  She invites them to sit down and eat some crisps. Floyd does so, but Poppy is still stalking the room, investigating. “Have you got a picture of your husband?” she says.

  “Ex-husband,” Laurel corrects, “and no. Not on display. But somewhere, I’m sure.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Paul.”

  Poppy nods. “What’s he like?”

  She smiles at Floyd, looking to be rescued, but he looks as keen to find out about Paul as his daughter. “Oh,” she says. “Paul? He’s lovely, actually. He’s a really lovely man. Very gentle. Very kind. A bit daft.”

  “Then why did you split up?”

  Ah. There it was. Silly her, not to have seen the conversational cul-de-sac she was walking straight into. And still Floyd does not come to her rescue, simply scoops some dip onto a pita chip and pops it into his mouth.

  “We just . . . well, we changed. We wanted different things. The children grew up and left home and we realized we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives together.”

  “Did he marry someone else?”

  “No. Not quite. But he has a girlfriend. They live together.”

  “Is she nice? Do you like her?”

  “I’ve never met her. But my children have. They say she’s very sweet.”

  Poppy finally seems sated and takes a seat next to her father, who grips her knee and gives it a quick hard squeeze as if to say good job on grilling the lady. Then he leans toward the coffee table and places a hand on the neck of the Cava and says, “Well, shall I?”

  “Yes. Please. How did you get here? Are you driving?”

  “No. We got the tube. Do you have an extra glass?”

  She’s confused for a moment and then realizes that he wants the extra glass for Poppy. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I didn’t think. It’s the French way, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the French way?” asks Poppy.

  “Children drinking,” she explains. “Not something that happens much in other countries.”

  “Only champagne,” says Floyd. “Only a sip. And only on very special occasions.”

  Laurel pours the Cava and they make a toast to themselves and to her and to SJ for not showing up and meaning that Poppy gets to stay up late and wear her nice dress.

  “That is a really lovely dress,” Laurel says, sensing an opening. “Who takes you shopping for clothes?”

  “Dad,” she replies. “We shop online together mostly. But sometimes we go to Oxford Street.”

  “And what’s your favorite clothes shop?”

 
“I haven’t really got one. Marks & Spencer is really good, I suppose, and we always go into John Lewis.”

  “What about H&M? Gap?”

  “I’m not really that kind of girl,” she says. “Jeans and hoodies and stuff. I like to look . . . smart.”

  Floyd’s hand goes to the knee again, gives it another encouraging that’s my girl squeeze.

  “So,” says Laurel. “Tell me about the home-schooling? How does that work?”

  “Just like real schooling,” Poppy responds. “I sit and learn. And then when I’ve learned I relax.”

  “How many hours a day do you study?”

  “Two or three,” she says. “Well, two or three hours with Dad. Obviously he has to work. The rest of the time by myself.”

  “And you don’t ever get lonely? Or wish you had kids your own age to hang out with?”

  “Noooo,” she says, shaking her head emphatically. “No, no, never.”

  “Poppy is basically forty years old,” says Floyd admiringly. “You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life. Well, Poppy’s already there.”

  “When I’m with kids my own age I tend to roll my eyes a lot and look at them like they’re mad. Which doesn’t really go down too well. They think I’m a bitch.” Poppy shrugs and laughs and takes a mouthful of champagne.

  Laurel simply nods. She can see how this self-possessed child might appear to other children. But she doesn’t believe that it’s the way it must be; she doesn’t believe that Poppy couldn’t learn to enjoy time with her peers, to stop rolling her eyes at them and alienating them. She doesn’t know, thinks Laurel, she doesn’t know that this isn’t how you grow up. That wearing shiny shoes with bows on and rolling your eyes at other kids is not a sign of maturity, but a sign that you’ve missed a whole set of steps on the road to maturity.