that this moment, this beautiful, starry moment, had been waiting for her all her life—
‘Oh, suit yourself.’ Iris’s tone was clipped now, cross. ‘But don’t blame me when there’s no birthday cake left.’
The sun had slipped past noon and a slice of heat fell through the tree-house window, firing Laurel’s inner eyelids cherry cola. She sat up but made no further move to leave her hiding spot. It was a decent threat—Laurel’s weakness for her mother’s Victoria sponge was legendary—but an idle one. Laurel knew very well that the cake knife lay forgotten on the kitchen table, missed amid the earlier chaos as the family had gathered picnic baskets, rugs, fizzy lemonade, swimming towels, the new transistor, and burst, stream-bound, from the house. She knew because when she’d doubled back under the guise of hide-and-seek and sneaked inside the cool dim house to fetch the package, she’d seen the knife sitting by the fruit bowl, red bow tied around its handle.
The knife was a tradition—it had cut every birthday cake, every Christmas cake, every Somebody-Needs-Cheering-Up cake in the Nicolson family’s history—and their mother was a stickler for tradition. Ergo, until someone was dispatched to retrieve the knife, Laurel knew she was free. And why not? In a household like theirs, where quiet minutes were rarer than hen’s teeth, where someone was always coming through one door or slamming shut another, to squander privacy was akin to sacrilege.
Today, especially, she needed time to herself.
The package had arrived for Laurel with Thursday’s post and in a stroke of good fortune Rose had been the one to meet the postman, not Iris or Daphne or—God help her—Ma. Laurel had known immediately whose name she’d find inside the wrapping. Her cheeks had flushed crimson, but she’d managed somehow to stutter words about Shirley and a band and an EP she was borrowing. The effort of obfuscation was lost on Rose whose attention, unreliable at best, had already shifted to a butterfly resting on the fence post.
Later that evening, when they were piled in front of the television watching Juke Box Jury, and Iris and Daphne were de-bating the comparative merits of Cliff Richard and Adam Faith and their father was bemoaning their false American accents and the broader wastage of the entire British Empire, Laurel had slipped away. She’d fastened the bathroom lock and slid to the floor, back pressed firm against the door.
Fingers trembling, she’d torn the end of the package.
A small book wrapped in tissue had dropped into her lap. She’d read its title through the paper—The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter—and a thrill had shot along her spine. Laurel had been unable to keep from squealing.
She’d been sleeping with it inside her pillowcase ever since. Not the most comfortable arrangement, but she liked to keep it close. She needed to keep it close. It was important.
There were moments, Laurel solemnly believed, in which a person reached a crossroads; when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life’s events. The premiere of Pinter’s play had been just such a moment. She’d read about it in the newspaper and an inexplicable sense had urged her to attend. She’d told her parents she was visiting Shirley and sworn Shirley to deepest secrecy, and then she’d caught the bus into Cambridge.
It had been her first trip anywhere alone, and as she sat in the darkened Arts Theatre watching Stanley’s birthday party descend into nightmare, she’d experienced an elevation of spirits the likes of which she’d never felt before. It was the sort of revelation the flush-faced Misses Buxton seemed to enjoy at church each Sunday morning, and while Laurel suspected their enthusiasm had more to do with the new young rector than the word of God, sitting on the edge of her cheap seat as the lifeblood of the onstage drama reached inside her chest and plugged into her own, she’d felt her face heat blissfully and she’d known. She wasn’t sure what exactly, but she’d known it certainly: there was more to life and it was waiting for her.
She’d nursed her secret to herself, not entirely sure what to do with it, not remotely sure how to go about explaining it to someone else, until the other evening, with his arm around her and her cheek pressed firmly against his leather jacket, she’d confessed it all to Billy …
Laurel took his letter from inside the book and read it again. It was brief, saying only that he’d be waiting for