Had that been a face-off, or had the woman simply decided to finish her walk and go home? After all, there was no way of circling back from that section of the path: you either did a round trip of quite a few miles via Frampton Mansell or you turned round and went straight back to Sapperton.
I turned for home. Several times, I felt convinced that Eddie was walking along the footpath behind me. But the footpath was empty every time. Even the birds seemed silent.
I can’t stand this , I thought, as I arrived in my parents’ porch a few minutes later. I can’t stand it. How did I end up here again? Scrabbling around this valley after someone I’ve already lost?
Next to the coat pegs by the front door was a framed photograph of Hannah and me in the field behind our house. I was sitting in a cardboard box, Hannah next to it, a bunch of flowers in her small fist. Trails of mud and roots from the flowers dirtied her dungarees. She was scowling at the camera, scowling with a comic intensity that made my heart hurt. I stared at her, at my precious little Hannah, and loss thickened like glue in my chest.
‘I miss you,’ I whispered, touching the cold glass of the frame. ‘I miss you so much.’
I imagined her sticking her tongue out at me and was crying by the time I came face to face with my grandfather at the top of the stairs .
I froze. ‘Oh! Granddad!’
He said nothing.
‘I’ve just been for a run. I came to see you after lunch, but you were asleep, so I thought I’d . . .’
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t talk, not even to appease Granddad. I stood there in front of him, me in my running gear, he in a dressing gown that he’d been too weak to do up properly, beneath it the worn cotton of his old blue pyjamas. The edges were piped in navy. My heart was broken. Granddad smelled of deep tiredness. I wept silently, my face crumpled around the flattened shape of my crying mouth. I’d lost Hannah, and now Eddie: I knew it, I couldn’t pretend any longer, and here was my poor grandfather who’d been on his own for nearly fifty years, since Granny had had a heart attack and died in her chair with a ham sandwich in front of her, and now Granddad must be taking his daily exercise, because he had a Zimmer in front of him, and neither of us knew what to say to each other. Neither of us had a clue.
‘Come to my room,’ he said eventually.
It took Granddad a long time to get himself into the armchair Mum and Dad had installed for him. I used the time to try to clean up my face, then sat down on the edge of Hannah’s old bed.
For a short while I thought he was actually planning to talk to me, to ask me what was the matter. But, of course, he was Granddad, and he did not. He saw my pain, wanted to help, but couldn’t. So he sat there, looking out of the window, and occasionally at a spot on the wall near my face, until I started to talk.
I told him about the family at the pub at lunchtime, and the sense of dread I felt being in this valley, even after all these years. ‘There isn’t a day,’ I told him, ‘when I don’t think about Hannah. When I don’t long to see her again, even just for five minutes. Hug her, you know?’
Granddad nodded curtly. I noticed that he had pulled his bedsheets straight and managed to pat down his pillow prior to his walk along the landing. I was moved. A need for order, even amid the densest chaos, was something I understood.
‘And then I thought something was changing, Granddad. I met a man, down here in Gloucestershire, while Mum and Dad were looking after you.’
If I wasn’t mistaken, there was the faintest elevation of an eyebrow.
‘Go on, please,’ he said, after what felt like an age.
I paused. ‘I take it you know about my husband and me splitting up.’
Again, a slow nod. ‘Although I had to drag it out of your mother,’ he said. ‘There’s something about being above the age of eighty that convinces people you will die of shock if you are party to bad news.’ He paused. ‘I mean, who in your generation doesn’t get a divorce these days? I’m surprised you people even bother marrying.’
A blue tit whirled onto the feeder hanging outside the spare-room window, pecked at the nut hole and whirled away again. Kaleidoscopic discs of evening sun played on the window seat, where Hannah used to keep her toy hedgehog collection. The room was warm and silent.
‘You were saying.’
I was saying nothing , I nearly retorted, but there was something about his posture, his eyes, that told me he wanted to know. That he might actually care. And if I’d chosen to talk to him, I had to expect the odd grenade.
So I told him everything. From the moment I heard Eddie’s laughter on the village green to my run along the canal just now, and all the desperate, shameful things I’d done since he disappeared.
‘Luckily you were spared the indignities of online stalking, growing up when you did,’ I told him. ‘But it’s not a nice experience. It never delivers what you’re hoping for.’ It was too therapeutic, this business of talking to a silent person; I couldn’t stop. ‘It never gives you control of the situation.’
Granddad didn’t say anything for a long time. ‘I don’t condone your actions,’ he said. ‘They sound asinine and entirely self-defeating.’
‘Agreed.’
‘But I do understand, Sarah.’
I glanced up; for once he was looking straight at me.
‘I fell in love with a woman for whom I would have torn down buildings, if I could. I loved her until the day she died. I still love her, years later. Even now it is painful.’
‘Granny.’
He looked away. ‘No.’
A big cupboard of silence opened up between us. Downstairs, Mum and Dad were laughing; muffled noises gave way to the sound of Patsy Cline spilling out of Dad’s speakers.
‘Ruby Merryfield,’ Granddad said eventually. ‘She was the love of my life. Everyone told me I couldn’t marry her, and so I didn’t. She’d had a lover when she was younger, had had a child. It was placed in an adoptive family. It broke her heart. Nobody knew, other than my parents, because, of course, my father was her doctor. He forbade me from marrying her. I fought a spirited battle, Sarah, but in the end I had to give in because I was at medical school and I needed his support.’
He made a quivering spire with his hands. ‘And so I stopped calling for her, and I married your grandmother a year later, and we had a nice life together, Diana and I. But I thought about Ruby every day. I missed her. I wrote her letters I didn’t dare send. And when I heard she’d died of influenza, I took myself off on a fishing trip for several days because I was ill with the grief. Over near Cannock. It was far too beautiful. I wished I’d gone somewhere ugly.’
Granddad’s eyes swam. ‘She had this laugh, like a little bird at first, only then it would broaden to something so unladylike. She saw the joy in life, wherever she went.’
Granddad pressed the back of his hand, where the skin was pouchy and liver-spotted, into his eyes. Light was fading fast from the room.
‘I should never have given up on her,’ he said.
The blue tit came back and we sat in silence, watching it.
‘I don’t entirely regret my decision,’ he went on. ‘As I said, I cared for Diana very much, and I mourned her when she died. And without her I could not have had your mother and her sister, although, God knows, your aunt has been a handful.’
My aunt’s latest husband was called Jazz.
‘But if I had my time again, I would not have given up,’ Granddad said. ‘I don’t believe that love is meant to be like an explosion. It is not meant to be dramatic, or ravenous, or any of the silly words ascribed it by writers and musicians. But I do believe that when you know, you know. And I knew, and I let it go without any real sort of a fight, and I will never forgive myself that.’
He closed his eyes. ‘I need to go to bed now. And no, I do not need your help. Please could you shut the door on your way out? Thank you, Sarah.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Dear Eddie,
In the absence of a request to stop writing, I’m going to continue.
It had been agreed that I would stay in LA for another few months, even though this would mean missing out on my final A-level year. I didn’t care: I couldn’t go back.