Лайза Джуэлл - Then She Was Gone

“No. No school any day. I don’t go to school.”

“Oh,” says Laurel, “that’s . . . I mean . . .”

“Dad teaches me.”

“Has he always taught you?”

“Yes. Always. You know I could read chapter books when I was three. Simple algebra at four. There was no normal school that would have coped with me really.” She laughs, a womanly tinkle, and she flicks the switch on the filter machine. “Can I interest you in some granola and yogurt? Maybe? Or a slice of toast?”

Laurel turns to look behind her again. There’s still no sign of Floyd. “You know,” she says, “I might just have a quick shower before I eat anything. I feel a bit . . .” She grimaces. “I won’t be long.”

“Absolutely,” says Poppy. “You go and shower. I’ll have your coffee waiting for you.”

Laurel nods and smiles and starts to back out of the kitchen. She passes Floyd on the stairs. He’s fresh and showered, his hair damp and combed back off his face, his skin uncooked-looking where he’s shaved away yesterday’s stubble. He encircles her waist with his arm and buries his face in her shoulder.

“I met Poppy,” she says quietly. “You didn’t tell me you home-schooled her.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No.” She pulls away from another attempt at affection. “I’m going to have a shower,” she says. “I can’t sit chatting to your daughter smelling like an old slapper who’s been up all night shagging her dad.”

Floyd laughs. “You smell delicious,” he says, and his hand goes between her legs and she’s torn between pressing herself hard against it and slapping it away.

“Stop it,” she says affectionately and he laughs.

“What did you think?” he says. “Of my Poppy?”

“She’s charming,” she says. “Totally delightful.”

He glows at the words. “Isn’t she just? Isn’t she just magnificent?”

He leans down and he kisses her gently on the lips before descending the stairs and heading into the kitchen where Laurel hears him greeting his daughter with the words, “Good morning, my remarkable girl, and how are you today?”

She continues up the stairs and takes a long slow shower in her lover’s en-suite bathroom, feeling a peculiarity and wrongness that she cannot quite locate the cause of.

Later that day Laurel goes to Hanna’s flat to clean it. Other people might find the thirty pounds pinioned beneath a vase of flowers on the table slightly peculiar. Laurel is aware that being paid in cash to clean her daughter’s flat is not entirely normal, but all families have their idiosyncrasies and this is just one of theirs. As it is, every week she puts the thirty pounds into a special bank account that she will one day use to spoil her as-yet-unborn grandchildren with treats and days out.

She folds up the notes and slots them into her purse. Then she does the detective sweep of Hanna’s flat that she has begun to do since Hanna stopped sleeping here every night. She remains unconvinced by Hanna’s explanation of late nights and sleepovers, this sudden rush of parties and good times. That is simply not the daughter she knows. Hanna has never liked having fun.

The flowers are of particular interest: not a hastily bought bunch of Sainsbury’s tulips or Stargazer lilies, but a bouquet. Dusky roses, baby’s breath, lilac hyacinths, and eucalyptus. The stems are still spiraled together in the middle where the twine would have tied them together.

In the kitchen she takes out the cleaning products and eyes the work surfaces, looking for clues. Hanna was not home the night before, as evidenced once again by the lack of cereal bowl and makeup detritus. The problem, Laurel can see, is that if there is a man, then Hanna is spending all her time at his house so there will be no evidence to find at her house. She sighs and leans down to the swing bin to pull out the half-full bag, which, as always, weighs nothing, as Hanna has no life. She scrunches it down to tie the top in a knot and notices the crackle of cellophane. Quickly she puts her hand into the bag and locates the flower packaging. She pulls it out and unfurls it, and there is a tiny card taped to it, a message scrawled on it in scruffy florist’s handwriting:

Can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Please don’t be late!

I love you so much,

T x

Laurel holds the card between her thumb and forefinger and stares at it for a while. Then she shoves it back into the bin bag and ties a knot in it. There, she thinks, there it is. Hanna has moved on. Hanna has a man. But why, she wonders, is she not talking to me about it?

18

Laurel has not seen Paul since Ellie’s funeral. There they had stood side by side; Paul had not brought Bonny and had not even asked if he could.

Yes, he is a good man.

A good man in every way.

He had held her up that day when she felt her legs weaken slightly beneath her at the sight of the box going through the curtains to the sound of “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane. He’d passed her cups of tea at his mother’s house afterward, and then found her in a corner of the garden and lured her back into the house with the promise of a large Baileys and ice, her all-time favorite treat. They’d sat together after everyone else had gone and rolled the ice around the insides of their glasses and made each other laugh, and Laurel’s feelings had warped and contorted and turned into something both light and dark, golden and gray. He hadn’t once checked his phone or worried about being late for Bonny and they’d left his mother’s house together at ten o’clock, weaving slightly toward the minicabs that rumbled and growled on the street outside. She let him hold her deep inside his arms, her face pressed hard against his chest, the clean, familiar smell of him, the softness of his old Jermyn Street shirt, and she’d almost, almost turned her face toward him and kissed him.

She’d woken the following day feeling as though her world had been upended and reordered in every conceivable way. And she hadn’t spoken to him since.

But now she feels as though all that ambiguity has melted away. She is a clean slate and she can face him once more. So when she gets back from Hanna’s flat, she calls him.

“Hello, Laurel,” he says warmly. Because Paul says everything warmly. It’s one of the many things that made her hate him during Ellie’s missing years. The way he’d smile so genuinely at the police and the reporters and the journalists and the nosy neighbors, the way he’d reach out to people with both of his warm hands and hold theirs inside his, keeping eye contact, asking after their health, playing down their own nightmare, trying, constantly, to make everyone feel better about everything all the time. She, meanwhile, had pictured herself with her hands around his soft throat, squeezing and squeezing until he was dead.

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—”