Then She Was Gone(32)

‘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, realising 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.’





Twenty-three


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 on to 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 first? 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 back 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 paté 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 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.