I felt my face collapse. My heart.
I made myself look at Kaia, who was talking to me. ‘I saw two of your Clowndoctors in an oncology ward a couple of years ago,’ she was saying. This couldn’t be happening. Where is the message? ‘There was this little boy and he was so sick and sad and pissed about his chemo programme and he shut down when your guys showed up. Just turned his face to the wall and pretended they weren’t there.’
‘I explained that that often happens,’ Reuben said proudly. ‘It’s why they work in pairs.’
‘So clever !’ Kaia beamed. ‘They work with each other so the child can decide whether or not to join in. Right?’
‘Right,’ Reuben said. ‘That way, the kids are in charge.’
Oh my God. Who was this tedious double act, and where was my message?
‘So he turned away and your clowns started doing all these improvisations together, and he couldn’t resist them. I mean, they had me in stitches! By the time they left the ward, he was laughing non-stop.’
Grudgingly, I nodded. I’d seen it often enough.
Desperate for something – anything – to concentrate on that wasn’t Eddie, I launched into a tale about the first time I’d seen Reuben working with kids after he’d trained as a Clowndoctor. Kaia watched me as I rambled on, her little brown chin resting on her little brown hand, the other holding Reuben’s. I stopped eventually and looked at my phone, already picturing the physical shape of his reply, the length of the message, the grey oblong that held it.
But it was not there. It was not there, and Eddie was offline again.
‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ I asked, pulling my purse out of my bag. ‘Wine?’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’s a quarter past twelve. Perfectly respectable.’
I wrapped my hands around my torso as I waited at the bar, although whether it was to comfort myself or hold myself together I didn’t know.
Twenty minutes later, by which point my solo glass of wine had begun to offer a faint numb, Kaia excused herself and went off to the toilet. I watched her slender legs move under her skirt and tried to imagine Kaia coming to pick Reuben up after work so they could go for dinner, or maybe an evening hike in Griffith Park. Kaia coming to our Christmas party or our summer barbecue; having lunch with Reuben’s sweet, nervous parents at their house in Pasadena. Because all of that would be happening. (A much better choice , I imagined Roo’s mum saying. She had never quite trusted that I wouldn’t eventually return to England with her son.)
‘She’s lovely,’ I told Reuben.
‘Thank you.’ He turned gratefully towards me. ‘Thank you for being so friendly. It means a lot.’
‘We needed each other,’ I said, after a pause, surprising us both. ‘And now we don’t. You’ve met a nice girl and I’m happy for you, Roo. I mean it.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, and I could hear the joy deep in his heart. It was like Reuben had taken one of those long, slow breaths you had to do at the beginning of a yoga class, but he’d never gone back to his normal rhythm .
‘Hey,’ Reuben began. He looked uncomfortable. ‘Hey, look, Sarah, I . . . I have to say, your emails yesterday were kind of out of character. You sounded . . . not very businesslike. And you sent those documents to our trustees without talking to any of us. Not to mention agreeing with a child that you’d send some of our clowns to her sister without even calling the hospital in question. I was at a loss.’
Kaia was weaving her way back to our table. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had a bad day. It won’t happen again.’
He watched me. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine. Just tired.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Well, shout if you need me. We make mistakes when we don’t follow protocol.’
‘I know. Hey, look, we need to talk about the hospice pitch.’
‘Sure,’ Reuben said. ‘Now?’
‘We can’t talk about it with Kaia here.’
Reuben frowned. ‘Oh, she won’t mind.’
‘I do. This is business, Roo.’
‘No,’ Reuben said gently. ‘No, it’s charity. Not business. And Kaia gets it. She’s a friend, not a foe, Sarah.’
I made myself smile. He was right. Everyone except me was right these days.
Reuben and Kaia left forty minutes later. Reuben insisted on making a plan for our hospice pitch, in spite of what I’d said. And I’d gone along with it, because how could I not? Kaia had at least offered to go and sit outside while we talked. (‘No, no!’ Reuben said. ‘There’s nothing secret about this.’)
Kaia kissed me and then gave me a hug. ‘So great to meet you,’ she said. ‘So great. ’
And I said ditto, because there really was nothing about this woman that wasn’t nice.
After they’d left, I turned my phone off and my laptop on and I worked. People came and went; tuna salads and chips with wobbling pyramids of mayonnaise; wine glasses smudged with workday lipstick and pints of hoppy ale. Outside, the sun was covered with grey sheets. Rain fell, wind blew, the sun returned. The South Bank steamed; umbrellas were shaken.
It was on day five of our affair that I’d looked at Eddie David and thought, I would spend the rest of my life with you. I would commit to it, right now, and know I wouldn’t regret it.
The boiling weather had finally broken and a storm was rampaging across the countryside, flashing and bellowing, hammering on the roof of Eddie’s barn. We were lying on his bed under a skylight, which he said he used mostly for stargazing and weather-watching. Lying top to toe, Eddie massaging my foot absent-mindedly as he stared up at the wild sky.
‘I wonder what Lucy the sheep thinks of all this,’ he said. I laughed, imagining Lucy standing under a tree, baaing disconsolately.
‘The storms we get in LA are crazy,’ I said. ‘Like Armageddon.’
After a pause he said, ‘How do you feel about going back there?’
‘Uncertain.’
‘Why?’
I propped my head up so I could see him properly. ‘Why do you think?’
Pleased, he tucked my foot under his head and said, ‘Well, you see, that’s the thing. I’m not sure I’m willing to let you go back.’
And I smiled back at him and thought, If you told me to stay, if you told me we could start a life together here, I’d stay. Even though I’ve known you only a few days, even though I swore I’d never come back. For you, I’d stay.
It was nearly four by the time I packed up to leave. I switched my phone on, although by now I had no expectations. But there was a text message, from a number I didn’t know.
stay away from eddie , it said.
No punctuation, no greeting, no capitals. Just, stay away .
I sat back down. Read it a few more times. It had been sent at exactly three o’clock.
After a few minutes I decided to call Jo.
‘Come to mine,’ she said immediately. ‘Come straight to mine, babe. Rudi’s at his granddad’s. I’m going to give you a glass of wine and then we’re going to call this person, this freak, and find out what’s going on. OK?’
The rain had closed in again. It raged at the Thames like a grey tantrum, pelting, hammering, screaming, just like the storm Eddie and I had watched from his bed. I waited for a few minutes before giving up and walking out, coatless, in the direction of Waterloo.
Chapter Nineteen
Dear Eddie,
You started writing to me earlier. What were you going to say? Why did you change your mind? Can you really not find it within yourself to talk to me?
I’ll pick up where I left off.
A few months after turning seventeen, I was in a terrible car accident on the Cirencester Road. I lost my sister, that day, and I lost my life – or at least the life that I’d always known. Because after a few weeks I realized I couldn’t live there anymore. Frampton Mansell. Gloucestershire. England, even. It was a very dark time.
I was broken. I called Tommy. He’d been in LA for two years. He said, ‘Get on the first plane you can,’ and I did. Quite literally: I flew the next day. Mum and Dad were so good about it. So extraordinarily unselfish, letting me go at a time like that. Would they have been so generous if they’d known what it would do to our family? I don’t know. But regardless, they put my needs first, and the next morning I was at Heathrow.