breath slightly—“I wanted to say that I saw you the other day, I saw you with Theo, and I think it’s wonderful and I think he’s a very, very lucky man. A very lucky man indeed. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say and I’m sorry I haven’t said it before and I love you and I’ll see you on Christmas Eve. I love you. Bye.”
She turns off her phone and she rests it on the kitchen counter and feels a wave of relief and weightlessness pass through her. She is unburdened of something she hadn’t even known she was carrying.
54
When Laurel arrives at Floyd’s house that evening she feels lighter, more present, in the moment. And she notices for the first time that although there are only three days till Christmas, there is no tree in the house. In fact, there are no decorations of any kind.
“Do you not do Christmas trees?” she asks as Floyd helps her off with her coat in the hallway.
“Do Christmas trees?”
“Yes, do you not put one up?”
“No,” he says. “Well, we used to, but we haven’t for years. But we can if you want one. Do you want one? I’ll go and get one now.”
She laughs. “I was thinking more of Poppy,” she says.
“Pops!” he calls up the stairs. “Would you like a Christmas tree?”
They hear her footsteps, loud and fast. She appears at the top of the stairs and says, “Yes! Yes please!”
“Right then,” says Floyd. “That’s settled then. I will go out now, like a proper father, and I will bring home the mother of all Christmas trees. Want to come with me, Pops?”
“Yes! Let me just get my shoes on.”
“We’ll need fairy lights,” says Laurel, “and baubles. Have you got any?”
“Yes, yes, we do. In the attic. We always had a tree when Kate and Sara lived here. There’s boxes of the stuff up there. Let me go and get it.”
He bounds up the stairs two at a time and returns a few minutes later with two large paper shopping bags full of tree decorations. Then he and Poppy get into the car and disappear into the dark night together and Laurel looks around and realizes that she is alone in Floyd’s house for the very first time.
She turns on the TV and finds a satellite channel that is playing Christmas songs. Then she pulls some things from the bags; random is the word she’d use to describe them. Scuffed plastic balls, a knitted reindeer with three legs, a huge spiky snowflake that snags a hole in her jumper, stern-faced wooden soldiers, and a group of slightly alternative-looking wood nymphs in pointy hats with curled toes on their shoes.
She leaves them in the bag and takes out the fairy lights. There are two sets: one multicolored and the other white. The white ones work when she plugs them in at the wall. The multicolored ones don’t.
She goes through some of the drawers in the kitchen, looking for a spare fuse. She looks in the drawers in the console table in the hallway. Takeaway menus, parking permits, spare keys, a roll of garden refuse bags. But no fuses.
Then she looks at the door to Floyd’s study. This is where he and Poppy do their home-learning together, where he writes his books and his papers. In her own version of this house, they’d knocked through from the front to the back to make a double reception. But Floyd has left the two rooms separate, as they would have been in Victorian times. She hasn’t been in Floyd’s study yet, just viewed it fleetingly as he’s walked in or out. She feels, quite strongly, although she’s not sure why, that Floyd would not want her in his study without his permission, so she stands for a moment or two, her hand on the doorknob, persuading herself that it is just another room in the house, that Floyd cannot live without her, that of course she can go into his study to look for fuses.
She turns the handle.
The door opens.
Floyd’s study is well furnished and cozy. The floorboards are covered over with threadbare kilims. The furniture is solid and old; there are two chrome table lamps with arced necks, one with a green glass shade, the other white. A laptop is open on his desk showing a screen saver of changing landscapes. She quickly starts to sift through his drawers.
Pens, notebooks, foreign coins, computer disks, CDs, memory sticks, everything organized in internal compartments. She