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 and 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’tlikepudding? She buys a box of After Eight mints, imagining some kind ofwell, you’re not really English until you’ve eaten an After Eight minttype 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.