to Laurel once more, her eyes wide with fear and says, “Is she dead?”
Laurel nods.
“Is my dad dead?”
“Your dad . . . ?”
“My real dad.”
“You mean . . .”
“The man who made a baby with Ellie. Not my dad who brought me up.”
“Your dad told you?”
“Yes. He told me. He said he doesn’t know who my real dad is. He says no one knows. Not even you.”
Laurel turns her attention back to Poppy’s hair. She pulls it as high as she can and then she twists the elastic band around it three times. “I don’t know if your real dad is dead, Poppy. It’s possible we’ll never know.”
Poppy is silent for a moment. Then she says, “Have you finished?”
“Yes,” says Laurel. “All done.”
Poppy slides from the chair and goes to the mirror on the wall outside Floyd’s study. She touches her hair with her fingertips in her reflection. “Do I look like her?” she says.
“Yes. You look just like her.”
She turns back to her reflection and appraises it again, her chin tipped up slightly. “Was she pretty?”
“She was extraordinarily pretty.”
“Was she as pretty as Hanna?”
Laurel is about to say, Oh, she was much prettier than Hanna. But catches herself. “Yes,” she says. “She was as pretty as Hanna.”
Poppy looks satisfied with this.
“Are we still going to the party?” she says.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes. I want to see my family,” she says. “I want to see my real family.”
“In which case then definitely.”
“Laurel?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Is Dad ever coming back?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
Poppy glances down at her shoes and then back at Laurel. Her eyes fill with tears and suddenly the unnerving stoicism passes and Poppy is sobbing, her shoulders heaving up and down, her hands pressed hard into her eye sockets.
Laurel takes her in her arms, holds her tight, kisses the top of her head, feels her love for this child flow through her like a sudden, glorious summer storm.
64
I have both my passport and a handgun. I have a change of clothes in a small bag and a fully charged phone. My plan is to get as far away from London N4 as I can and then either blow out my brains or leave the country. I will see how I feel when it comes down to it. At this juncture I have no idea what is worse: to break my daughter’s heart or to break my daughter’s heart and then spend the rest of my life either in hiding or in jail. Plan B at least does not involve a funeral.
And so finally I have cleared up your shitty disgusting mess, Noelle. As I speak (or think, or write, or whatever the hell it is I’m doing with a dead person) Laurel will be introducing herself anew to her granddaughter and then they will go together to the twinkling Richard Curtis Christmas meal in the twinkling mews house in twinkling Belsize Park—and imagine everyone’s faces, Noelle, when they walk in together, those two fine women with their strong brows and their big brains and all that golden light dazzling the bejesus out of everyone. Just imagine.
I wish I could be there to see it.
But I denied myself that privilege when I chose my own happiness and my own needs over Laurel’s.
I’m out of London now, Noelle. I appear to be heading west. Yep, there goes Slough. And I’m feeling good. In fact I’m feeling amazing. I’ve finally shed you, like a dead skin.
I touch the gun in the innocuous Sainsbury’s carrier bag on the passenger seat. I caress its solid lines, feel the cool of the metal through the plastic. I imagine the barrel of the gun, hard against the roof of my mouth, the pressure of the trigger against my fingertip. The day is still bright and clean. I imagine myself pulling off the road a few hours hence and driving into a dark-skied, sleepy Cornish village, finding a bed for the night, or sleeping in my car. Tomorrow I would awake and it would be Christmas Day. The world would fall silent as it always does at Christmas, all those big loud lives sucked up behind a million closed doors. And where would I go? Where would I be? And the day after that? And the day after that?
I feel clean and pure, purged and new. I have just done the best and greatest thing I have every done or ever will do. Do I want to be here when this breaks in the newspapers?