Of course I could tell him.
‘I have an idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s camp out here tonight. Pretend we’re still young. We can make a fire, cook sausages, tell stories. Assuming you have a tent, that is? You seem like a man who’d have a tent.’
‘I am a man who has a tent,’ he confirmed.
‘Good! Well then, let’s do it, and I’ll tell you everything. I . . .’ I rolled over, looking out into the night. The last fat candles of blossom glowed dully on the horse chestnut at the edge of the woods. A buttercup swayed in the darkness near our faces. For reasons she’d never deigned to share, Hannah had always hated buttercups.
I felt something rise in my chest. ‘It’s just so lovely, being out here. Brings back so many memories.’
‘OK,’ Eddie smiled. ‘We’ll camp. But first, come here, please.’
He kissed me on the mouth and for a while the rest of the world was muted, as if someone had simply pressed a button or turned a dial .
‘I don’t want tomorrow to be our last day,’ he said, when the kissing came to an end. He bandaged his arms more tightly around me and I felt the cheerful warmth of his chest and belly, the soft tickle of his cropped hair under my hands.
Closeness like this had become a distant memory, I thought, inhaling the clean, sandy smell of his skin. By the time Reuben and I had called it a day, we were sleeping like bookends on either side of our bed, the stretch of untouched sheets between us an homage to our failure.
‘Till mattress us do part,’ I’d said, one night, but Reuben hadn’t laughed.
Eddie pulled away so I could see his face. ‘I did . . . Look, I did wonder if we should cancel our respective plans. My holiday and your London trip. So we can roll around in the fields for another week.’
I propped myself up on an elbow. I want that more than you will ever know, I thought. I was married for seventeen years and in all that time I never felt the way I do with you.
‘Another week of this would be perfect,’ I told him. ‘But you mustn’t cancel your holiday. I’ll still be here when you get back.’
‘But you won’t be here. You’ll be in London.’
‘Are you sulking?’
‘Yes.’ He kissed my collarbone.
‘Well, stop it. I’ll be back down here in Gloucestershire soon after you get back.’
He seemed unappeased.
‘If you stop sulking, I might even come and meet you at the airport,’ I added. ‘I could be one of those people with a name on a board and a car in the short-stay.’
He seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘That would be very nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice indeed.’
‘Done. ’
‘And . . .’ he paused, looked suddenly uncertain, ‘and I know it’s maybe a bit soon, but after you’ve told me your life story and I’ve cooked sausages that may or may not be edible, I want us to have a serious conversation about the fact that you live in California and I live in England. This visit of yours is too short.’
‘I know.’
He tugged at the dark grass. ‘When I get back from holiday, we’ll have – what, a week together? Before you have to go back to the States?’
I nodded. The only dark cloud over our week together had been this, the inevitability of parting.
‘Well then, I think we have to . . . I don’t know. Do something. Decide something. I can’t just let this go. I can’t know you’re somewhere in the world and not be with you. I think we should try to make this work.’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘Yes, me too.’ I slid a hand inside his sleeve. ‘I’ve been thinking the same, but I lost my nerve every time I tried to bring it up.’
‘Really?’ Laughter and relief spilled into his voice, and I realized it must have taken some courage for him to start the conversation. ‘Sarah, you’re one of the most confident women I’ve ever met.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘You are. It’s one of the things I like about you. One of the many things I like very much about you.’
It had been a great many years since I’d had to start nailing confidence to myself like a sign on a shop. But even though it came naturally now – even though I spoke at medical conferences around the world, gave interviews to news crews, managed a team – I felt unsettled when people remarked on it. Unsettled or perhaps exposed, like a person on a hill in a thunderstorm .
Then Eddie kissed me again and I felt it all dissolve. The sadness of the past, the uncertainty of the future. This was what was meant to happen next. This.
Chapter Three
FIFTEEN DAYS LATER
‘Something terrible has happened to him.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like death. Maybe not death. Although, why not? My grandmother dropped dead at the age of forty-four.’
Jo turned round from the passenger seat. ‘Sarah.’
I didn’t meet her eye.
She looked instead at Tommy, who was driving us west along the M4. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked.
He didn’t respond. His jaw was clenched shut, the pale skin by his temple pulsing as if someone were in there, trying to break out.
Jo and I shouldn’t have come , I thought again. We’d been convinced Tommy would want the support of his two oldest friends – after all, it wasn’t often that you had to stand shoulder to shoulder with your school bully while the press took photos – but as each dreary, rain-spattered mile passed, it had become evident that we were doing little more than augmenting his anxiety.
What he needed today was the freedom to peddle synthetic confidence without being watched by those who knew him best. To pretend it was all water under the bridge. Look how I became a successful sports consultant, delivering a programme to my old school! Look how happy I am to be working alongside the head of PE, the very man who punched me in the stomach and laughed when I turned my face into the grass and cried!
To make matters worse, Jo’s seven-year-old, Rudi, was next to me on the back seat. His father had been offered a job interview and Jo hadn’t had time to find childcare. He had been listening with great interest to our conversation about Eddie’s disappearance.
‘So, Sarah thinks her boyfriend’s dead and Mum’s getting cross,’ Rudi surmised. He was going through a phase of distilling awkward adult conversations into neat one-liners, and he was very good at it.
‘He’s not her boyfriend,’ Jo said. ‘They spent seven days together.’
The car fell silent again. ‘Sarah. Think seven-day boyfriend dead,’ Rudi said, in his Russian voice. Rudi had a new friend at school, Aleksandr, who had recently come to London from somewhere near the Ukrainian border. ‘Killed by secret service. Mum disagree. Mum cross with Sarah.’
‘I’m not cross,’ Jo said crossly. ‘I’m just worried.’
Rudi considered this, and then said, ‘I think you tell lie.’
Jo couldn’t deny it, so remained silent. I didn’t wish to antagonize Jo, so I remained silent as well. And Tommy hadn’t said anything for two hours, so he remained silent, too. Rudi lost interest and returned to his iPad game. Adults were rife with baffling and pointless problems.
I watched Rudi obliterate what looked like a cabbage and was blasted suddenly by a great longing: for his innocence, his seven-year-old’s worldview. I imagined Rudi Land, in which mobile phones were gaming stations rather than instruments of psychological torture, and the certainty of his mother’s love was as solid as a heartbeat .
If there was any point to becoming an adult, it eluded me today. Who wouldn’t prefer to be killing cabbages and talking in a Russian accent? Who wouldn’t prefer to have had their breakfast made and their outfit chosen, when the alternative was malignant despair over a man who’d felt like everything and somehow become nothing? And not the man I’d been married to seventeen years; a man I’d known precisely seven days. No wonder everyone in this car thought I was mad.
‘Look, I know it sounds like a teenage saga,’ I said eventually. ‘And I don’t doubt that you’re pissed off with me. But something has happened to him, I’m certain of it.’