Лайза Джуэлл - Then She Was Gone

“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.

This child, Laurel suddenly feels with the immediacy of a kick to the gut, needs a mother. And this mother, she acknowledges, needs a child. And Poppy, she is so like Ellie. The planes and lines of her pretty face, the shape of her hairline, of her skull, the way her ears attach to her head, the shapes her mouth makes when it moves, the precise angle of her cupid’s bow, they’re almost mathematically identical.

The differences are pronounced, too. Her eyebrows are thicker, her neck is longer, her hair parts differently and is a different shade of brown. And while Ellie’s eyes were a hazel brown, Poppy’s are chocolate. They are not identical. But there is something, something alarming and arresting, a likeness that she can’t leave alone.

“Maybe you and I could go shopping together?” Laurel says brightly. “One day? Would you like that?”

Finally Poppy looks to her dad for his approval before turning back to Laurel and saying, “I would absolutely love that. Yes, please!”

Laurel goes to work on Friday. She works Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays at the shopping center near her flat. Her job title is “marketing coordinator.” It’s a silly job, a mum job, a little local thing to fill some hours and make some money to pay for clothes and the like. She comes, she smiles, she makes the phone calls and writes the emails and sits in the meetings about the inconsequential things she’s being paid to pretend she cares about and then she goes home and doesn’t think of any of it again until the next time she walks through the door.

But she’s glad to be there today. She’s happy to be surrounded by familiar people who like her and know her, even if it’s only on a superficial level. The previous evening had been strange and unsettling and she’d awoken thinking that maybe she’d dreamed it. Her flat had felt odd in the wake of her dinner guests, as though it didn’t really belong to her. The cushions on the sofa were in the wrong order, the result of Poppy’s attempt to tidy up after themselves, food was stacked in the wrong parts of the fridge, and there was a pile of washing up on the draining board that Poppy had insisted on doing in spite of Laurel trying to persuade her that she needn’t, that it would all just go in the dishwasher. The lilies on the dining table gave off a strange deathly perfume and Floyd had left his scarf in her hallway, a soft gray thing with a Ted Baker label in it that hung from a hook like a plume of dark smoke.

She’d been glad to leave the flat, to put some distance between last night and herself. But even as she switches on her computer and stirs sweeteners into her coffee, as she listens to the messages on her voicemail, it’s there, like a dark echo. Something not right. Something to do with Floyd and Poppy. She can’t pin it down. Poppy is clearly a strange child, who is both charmingly naïve and unsettlingly self-possessed. She is cleverer than she has any need to be, but also not as clever as she thinks.

And Floyd, who in the time that Laurel has spent alone with him, is virtually perfect, warps into something altogether more complicated when he’s with his daughter. Laurel finally crystallizes the issue while discussing her evening with her colleague, Helen.

“It was like,” she says, “you know, like when you’re supposed to be having drinks with a friend and they bring their partner along and suddenly you’re at the pointy end of a triangle?”

The evening had essentially been the Floyd and Poppy Show with Poppy as the star turn and Laurel as the slightly dumbfounded audience of one. Floyd and Poppy shared the same sense of humor and lined up jokes for each other. And Floyd’s eyes were always on his precocious child, sparkling with wonder and pride. There was not one conversation that had not involved Poppy and her opinions and there had not been one moment during which Laurel had felt more important, special, or interesting than her.

She’d closed the door on them at midnight feeling drained and somewhat dazed.

“Sounds like she’s got the classic only-child syndrome,” says Helen, neatly shrinking the issue down to a digestible bite-sized chunk of common sense. “Plus, you know, some fathers and daughters just have that sort of thing, don’t they? Daddy’s girls. They usually turn into the sort of women who can only be friends with men.”

Laurel nods gratefully. Yes, that all makes perfect sense. She has seen that bond before between fathers and daughters. Not with her own daughters. Ellie was both a mummy’s and a daddy’s girl and Hanna is just a law unto herself. And maybe the surprise she is feeling is due to her own issues and nothing to do with Floyd and Poppy. Poppy is entertaining in a gauche kind of way and Floyd is clearly a wonderful, nurturing, and loving father.

By the time Laurel leaves the office at five thirty and gets into her car in the underground car park she is feeling clearheaded and right-footed.

She cannot wait to see Floyd again.

Laurel and Floyd spend the whole of the following weekend together. It wasn’t planned that way, but there never seemed to be a point at which leaving his house made any sense. They had dinner out on Friday night, a late breakfast on Saturday morning, a trip to the cinema with Poppy that afternoon followed by a detour to M&S for new underwear and a toothbrush, Chinese take-out on Saturday night, and then brunch in a café around the corner on Sunday before Laurel managed to tear herself away and back to her flat on Sunday evening, ready for work on Monday morning.

At the office Laurel feels as though she has shed a skin, that she is somehow reborn and that she needs to mark the transition in some landmark way.

She calls Hanna.

“How would you feel . . .” she starts tentatively, “if I invited my new boyfriend to our birthday dinner?”

The silence is black and heavy.

Laurel fills it. “Totally don’t mind if you say no. Totally understand. I just thought, in the spirit of us all moving on? In the spirit of a brave new world?”

The silence continues, growing in depth and darkness.

“Boyfriend?” says Hanna eventually. “Since when did you have a boyfriend?”

“The guy,” says Laurel, “the guy I told you about? Floyd.”

“I know the guy ,” she replies. “I just wasn’t aware that he’d made boyfriend status.”

“Yes, well, if you ever answered your phone . . .”

Hanna sighs. Laurel sighs too, realizing she has just done the thing she always promised herself she would never do. When the children were small, Laurel’s mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel’s conscience. I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to nag. It’s just, yes, things are moving quite fast. I’ve met his kids. I’ve stayed at his. We talk all the time. We’ve just spent the whole weekend together. I just . . .” Ridiculous, she suddenly realizes. A ridiculous idea. “But forget I mentioned it. I mean, I haven’t even asked Floyd yet if he’d like to come. He’d probably rather saw his legs off. Forget I said anything.”