people who had been dramatically and mysteriously plucked from the ether.
“Wow,” she says. “Poor Poppy.”
Floyd turns his gaze to the tablecloth, rolls a grain of rice around under his fingertip. “Indeed,” he says. “Indeed.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
“To Poppy’s mother?” he asks. “Christ, I have no idea. She was a strange woman. She could have ended up anywhere,” he says. “Literally anywhere.”
Laurel looks at him, judging the appropriateness of her next question. “Do you ever think maybe she’s dead?”
He looks up at her darkly and she knows that she has gone too far. “Who knows?” he says. “Who knows.” And then the smile reappears, the conversation moves along, an extra glass of wine each is ordered, the fun recommences, the date continues.
15
When she gets home, Laurel goes straight to her laptop, pulls on her reading glasses, and googles Floyd Dunn. They’d talked all night, until the restaurant had had to ask them very politely to leave. There’d been a gentle suggestion of going on somewhere else; Floyd Dunn was a member at a club somewhere (“Not one of those flashy ones,” he’d said, “just a bar and some armchairs, a few old farts drinking brandy and growling”), but Laurel had not wanted to travel back to High Barnet after the tubes stopped running, so they’d said good-bye at Piccadilly Circus and Laurel had sat smiling dumbly, drunkenly at her reflection in the tube window all the way up the Northern line.
Now she is in pajamas with a toothbrush in her mouth. The clothes she’d left on her bed are in a pile on the armchair and her makeup is still scattered across her dressing table; she has no energy for practicalities; she just wants to keep herself tight inside the bubble that she and Floyd made together tonight, not let life crawl in through the gaps.
Within a few seconds Laurel discovers that Floyd Dunn is in fact the author of several well-reviewed books about number theory and mathematical physics.
She clicks on Google Images and stares at Floyd’s face in varying stages of life and appearance; in some photos he is visibly younger: late thirties, long-haired, wearing a low-buttoned shirt. This is his author photo from his first few books and is slightly unsettling. She would not have shared a slice of cake with this man who resembles a lonely Open University lecturer from the early eighties. Later photos show him more or less as he is now, his hair slightly scruffier and darker, his clothing not quite so smart, but fundamentally the man she just had dinner with.
She wants to know more about him. She wants to envelop herself in him and his fascinating world. She wants to see him again. And again. And then she thinks of Paul, and his Bonny, the numb disbelief she’d felt when he’d come to her to inform her that he’d met a woman and that they were moving in together. She had been unable to comprehend how he had managed to get to such a place, a place of softness and butterflies in your stomach, of making plans and holding hands. And now it is happening to her and all of a sudden she aches to call him.
Paul, she imagines herself saying, I’ve met a fabulous guy. He’s clever and he’s funny and he’s hot and he’s kind.
And she realizes that it’s the first time in years she’s wanted to talk to Paul about anything other than Ellie.
The next day is an agony of silence.
On Saturdays Laurel usually sees her friends Jackie and Bel. She’s known them since they were all at school together in Portsmouth, where they were an inseparable gang of three. About thirty years ago, when they were all in their twenties and living in London, Laurel had met up with them in a bar in Soho and they’d told her that they had come out to each other and were now a couple. And then eleven years ago, in her early forties, Bel had given birth to twin boys. Just as Laurel was exiting the parenting zone, they’d walked straight into it, and in the years after Ellie disappeared, their home in Edmonton full of nappies and plastic and pink yogurt in squeezy tubes had been a refuge to her.
But they are away this weekend, taking the boys to a rugby tournament in Shropshire. And so the minutes pass exquisitely and the air in the flat hangs heavy around her. The sounds of her neighbors closing doors,