Jo opened Tommy’s glove compartment to extract a large bar of chocolate, from which she snapped off a chunk with some force.
‘Mum?’ Rudi said. ‘What’s that?’
He knew perfectly well what it was. Jo handed her son a square without saying anything. Rudi smiled at her, his biggest, toothiest smile, and – in spite of her growing impatience – Jo smiled back. ‘Don’t ask for more,’ she warned. ‘You’ll only end up being sick.’
Rudi said nothing, confident she’d give in.
Jo turned back to me. ‘Look, Sarah. I don’t want to be cruel, but I think you need to accept that Eddie is not dead. Nor is he injured, or suffering a broken phone, or battling a life-threatening illness.’
‘Really? You’ve called the hospitals to check? Had a chat with the local coroner?’
‘Oh God,’ she said, staring at me. ‘Tell me you haven’t done any of those things, Sarah! Jesus Christ!’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Rudi whispered.
‘Stop that,’ Jo told him.
‘You started it. ’
Jo gave Rudi more chocolate and he went back to his iPad. It had been my present to him from America, and he told me earlier on that he loved it more than anything else in the world. Which had made me laugh and then, to Rudi’s bafflement, cry a little, because I knew he’d have learned that phrase from Jo. She had turned out to be a remarkable mother, Joanna Monk, in spite of her own upbringing.
‘Well?’
‘Of course I haven’t been calling hospitals,’ I sighed. ‘Come on, Jo.’ I watched a row of crows scattering from a telephone wire.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. My point was just that you don’t know any more than I do what’s happened to Eddie.’
‘But men do this all the time!’ she exploded. ‘You know they do!’
‘I don’t know anything about dating. I’ve been married the last seventeen years.’
‘Well, you can take it from me: nothing’s changed,’ Jo said bitterly. ‘They still don’t call.’
She turned to Tommy but found him unresponsive. Any residual confidence he’d feigned about today’s big launch had evaporated like the morning mist and he’d barely said a word since we’d set off. There had been a brief display of bravado at Chieveley Services when he’d had a message telling him that three local newspapers had confirmed attendance, but a few minutes later he’d called me ‘Sarah’ in the queue at WHSmith, and Tommy only called me Sarah when he was extremely anxious. (I had been ‘Harrington’ since we turned thirteen and he’d started doing press-ups and wearing aftershave.)
The silence thickened, and I lost the battle I’d been fighting since we left London.
I’m on my way back to Gloucestershire , I texted Eddie, quick as a wink. Supporting my friend Tommy; he’s launching a big sports project at our old school. If you wanted to meet up, I could stay at my parents’. Would be good to talk. Sarah x
No pride, no shame. I’d somehow moved beyond that. I tapped the screen of my phone every few seconds, waiting for a delivery report.
Delivered , it announced perkily.
I watched the screen, checking for a text bubble. A text bubble would mean he was writing back.
No text bubble.
I looked again. No text bubble.
I looked again. Still no text bubble. I slid my phone into my handbag, out of sight. This was what girls did when they were still in the tender agonies of adolescence, I thought. Girls, still learning to love themselves, waiting in mild hysteria to hear from a boy they’d kissed in a sweaty corner last Friday. This was not the behaviour of a woman of thirty-seven. A woman who’d travelled the world, survived tragedy, run a charity.
The rain was clearing. Through the crack of open window I could smell the tang of wet tarmac and damp, smoky earth. I am in agony. I stared vacantly at a field of round hay bales, squeezed tightly into shining black plastic like pudgy legs into tights. I would tip over the edge soon. I would tip over the edge and go into free fall if I didn’t find out what had happened.
I checked my phone. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d taken out my SIM card and rebooted. Time to try again.
Half an hour later we were on the dual carriageway coming into Cirencester and Rudi was asking his mother why the clouds were all moving in different directions .
We were a matter of mere miles from where I’d met him. I closed my eyes, trying to remember my walk that hot morning. Those uncomplicated few hours Before Eddie. The sour-milk sweetness of elderflower blossom. Yes, and scorched grass. The drift of butterflies, stunned by the heat. There had been a barley field, a feathered, husk-green carpet panting and bulging with hot air. The occasional explosion of a startled rabbit. And the strange sense of expectation that had hovered over the village that day, the boiling stillness, the littered secrets.
Unbidden, my memory fast-forwarded a few more minutes to the moment I actually met Eddie – a straightforward, friendly man with warm eyes and an open face, holding court with an escaped sheep – and misery and confusion tangled like weeds over everything else.
‘You can tell me I’m in denial,’ I said to the silent car. ‘But it wasn’t a fling. It was . . . it was everything. We both knew. That’s why I’m sure something’s happened to him.’
The idea made my breath stick to the inside of my throat.
‘Say something,’ Jo said to Tommy. ‘Say something to her.’
‘I work in sports consultancy,’ he muttered. Embarrassment bloomed on his neck. ‘I do bodies, not heads.’
‘Who does heads?’ Rudi asked. He was still keeping close tabs on our conversation.
‘Therapists do heads,’ Jo said wearily. ‘Therapists and me.’
Ferapists. She pronounced it ferapists . Jo was born and bred in Bow, was a proper, salt-of-the-earth cockney. And I loved her; I loved her bluntness and mercurial temper, I loved her fearlessness (lack of boundaries, others might say), and most of all I loved the tremendous fury with which she adored her son. I loved everything about Jo, but I would still have preferred not to be in a car with her today.
Rudi asked me if we were nearly there yet. I told him yes. ‘ Is that your school?’ he asked, pointing at an industrial estate.
‘No, although there are some architectural similarities.’
‘Is that your school?’
‘No. That’s Waitrose.’
‘How long till we get there?’
‘Not long.’
‘How many minutes?’
‘About twenty?’
Rudi slumped back into his seat in self-conscious despair. ‘That’s ages ,’ he muttered. ‘Mum, I need some new games. Can I have some new games?’
Jo said he could not, and Rudi set about buying some anyway. I watched in awe as he matter-of-factly typed in Jo’s Apple ID and password.
‘Er, excuse me,’ I whispered. He looked up at me, his little blond Afro an unlikely halo, his almond-shaped eyes cartwheeling with mischief. He mimed a zip being shut across his mouth and then pointed a warning finger at me. And because I loved this child far more than I wanted to, I did what I was told.
His mother turned her attention to the other child on the back seat. ‘Now look,’ she said, putting a plump hand on my leg. Her nails had been painted in a colour called Rubble for today. ‘I think you have to face facts. You met a bloke; you spent a week with him; then he went on holiday and never called you again.’
The facts were too painful at the moment; I preferred theories.
‘Fifteen days he’s had to get in touch, Sarah. You’ve been sending him messages, calling him, all sorts of other things that quite frankly I’d never expect of someone like you . . . and yet – no response. I’ve been there, love, and it hurts. But it doesn’t stop hurting until you accept the truth and move on.’
‘I’d move on if I actually knew that he simply wasn’t interested. But I don’t.’
Jo sighed. ‘Tommy. Please help me out here.’
There was a long pause. Was there any humiliation greater than this? I wondered. A conversation like this, at the age of nearly bloody forty ? This time three weeks ago I’d been a functional adult. I’d chaired a board meeting. I’d written a report for a children’s hospital with which my charity was soon to start working. I’d fed and groomed myself that day, made jokes, fielded calls, responded to emails. And now here I was with less command of my emotions than the seven-year-old sitting next to me.