ensued, accompanied by scrutiny in the rear-view mirror, and then, as the car lurched into traffic, ‘You look familiar. What do you do then?’
You’re Daddy’s lady—now what on earth did that mean? ‘I work in a bank.’
As the driver launched an invective against bankers and the global credit crunch, Laurel pretended great focus on the screen of her mobile phone. She scrolled randomly through the names in her address book, stopping when she reached Gerry’s.
He’d arrived late to Ma’s party, scratching his head and trying to remember where he’d left her present. No one expected anything different from Gerry and they were all as thrilled as ever to see him. Fifty-two now, but somehow still an adorable scatty boy wearing ill- fitting trousers and the brown slub jumper Rose had knitted him thirty Christmases before. A great fuss was made, the other sisters falling over one another as they fetched him tea and cake. And even Ma had woken from her doze, her tired old face briefly transformed by the dazzling smile of pure joy she’d been saving for her only son.
Of all her children, she missed him specially. Laurel knew this because the kinder nurse had told her so. She’d stopped Laurel in the hallway when they were setting up for the party and said, ‘I was hoping to catch you.’
Laurel, always quick to raise her guard: ‘What is it?’
‘No need to panic, nothing awful. It’s just your mum’s been asking after someone. A fellow, I think. Jimmy? Would that be it? She wanted to know where he was, why he wasn’t visiting.’
Laurel had frowned and shaken her head and told the nurse the truth. She couldn’t think that Ma knew any Jimmys. She hadn’t added that she was the wrong person to ask, that there were far more dutiful amongst the sisters. (Though not Daphne. Thank God for Daphne. In a family of daughters it was a happy thing not to be the worst.)
‘Not to worry.’ The nurse had smiled reassurance. ‘She’s been going in and out a bit lately. It’s not unusual for them to get confused, not at the end.’
Laurel had flinched at the general ‘them’, the ghastly blunt-ness of ‘end’, but Iris had appeared then with a faulty kettle and a frown for England, and so she’d let the matter go. It was only later, when she was sneaking a cigarette in the hospital portico, that Laurel had realised the mix-up, that of course Gerry was the name Ma was saying, and not Jimmy at all.
The driver swerved off the Brompton Road and Laurel clutched her seat. ‘Building site,’ he explained, skirting round the back of Harvey Nichols. ‘Luxury apartments. Twelve months it’s been, and still that bloody crane.’
‘Irritating.’
‘Sold most of ’em already, y’know. Four million quid a pop.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘Four million quid—I’d buy m’self an island for that.’
Laurel smiled with what she hoped was not encouragement—she loathed being drawn into conversation about other people’s money— and held her phone closer to her face.
She knew why she had Gerry on her mind; why she was spotting his likeness in the faces of strange little boys. They’d been close once, the pair of them, but things had changed when he was seventeen. He’d come to stay with Laurel in Lon-don on his way up to Cambridge (a full scholarship, as Laurel told everyone she knew, sometimes those she didn’t) and they’d had fun—they always did. A daytime session of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and then dinner from the curry house down the road. Afterwards, riding a delectable tikka masala high, the two of them had climbed out through the bathroom window, dragged pillows and a blanket after them, and shared a joint on Laurel’s roof.
The night was unusually clear—stars, more stars than usual, sure- ly?—and down on the street, the distant easy pleasantness of other people’s revelry. Smoking made Gerry unusually garrulous, which was fine with Laurel because it made her wondrous. He’d been trying to explain the origins of everything, pointing to star clusters and galaxies and making explosion gestures with his delicate febrile hands, and Laurel had been narrowing her eyes and making the stars blur and bend, letting his words merge together like running water. She’d been lost in a current of nebulas and penumbras and supernovas and hadn’t realised his monologue was ended until she heard him say, ‘Lol’ in that pointed way people have when they’ve already said the word more than once.