I checked Tommy’s eyebrows in the rear-view mirror to see if he was likely to throw anything in. His eyebrows, which had taken on a life of their own when he’d lost his hair in his early twenties, were nowadays more reliable barometers of his thoughts than his mouth.
They were creased together. ‘The thing is,’ he said. He paused again, and I sensed the effort it was taking to extract himself from his own problems. ‘The thing is, Jo, you’ve assumed I agree with you about Sarah. But I’m not sure I do.’ His voice was soft and careful, like a cat skirting danger.
‘What?’
‘I predict a riot,’ Rudi whispered.
Tommy’s eyebrows worked up his next sentence. ‘I’m sure the reason most men don’t call is that they’re just not interested, but it sounds to me like there might be more to this. I mean, they ended up spending a week together. All that time, can you imagine? If Eddie was just after you-know-what, he’d have disappeared after one night. ’
Jo snorted. ‘Why leave after one night if you can pack in seven days’ you-know-what?’
‘Jo, come on! That’s what twenty-year-old boys do, not men of nearly forty!’
‘Are you talking about sex?’ Rudi asked.
‘Er, no?’ Jo was thrown. ‘What do you know about sex?’
Rudi, terrified, returned to his fraudulent iPad activity.
Jo watched him for a while, but he was bent studiously over the screen, muttering in his Russian voice.
I took a long breath. ‘The one thing I keep thinking about is that he offered to cancel his holiday. Why would he—’
‘I need to wee,’ Rudi announced suddenly. ‘I think I’ve got less than a minute,’ he added, before Jo had time to ask.
We pulled up outside the agricultural college, right across the road from the comprehensive Eddie had gone to. A grey mist of pain hovered as I stared at its sign, trying to imagine a twelve-year-old Eddie bouncing through the gates. A round little face; the smile that would crease his skin into laughter lines as the years passed.
Just passing your school , I texted him, before I had time to stop myself. I wish I knew what happened to you.
Jo was suspiciously upbeat when she and Rudi got back in the car. She said it was turning into a lovely day and that she was very happy to be out in the countryside with us all.
‘I told her she was being mean to you,’ Rudi whispered to me. ‘Do you want a piece of cheese?’ He patted a Tupperware of rejected cheese slices from the sandwiches Jo had given him earlier.
I ruffled his hair. ‘No,’ I whispered back. ‘But I love you. Thank you.’
Jo pretended not to have heard the exchange. ‘You were saying that Eddie offered to cancel his holiday,’ she said brightly .
And I felt the fissures of my heart open wider, because, of course, I knew why she was finding it so hard to be patient. I knew that of the many men to whom Jo had given her heart and soul (and, often, her body) in the years before Rudi, almost none had called her. And the ones who had called always turned out to have a collection of other women on the go. And each and every time she had let them string her along, because she could never quite give up the hope of being loved. Then Shawn O’Keefe had arrived on the scene, and Jo had got pregnant, and Shawn had moved in, knowing Jo would feed and house him. He hadn’t had one single job in all that time. He’d disappear for whole nights without telling her where he was. His ‘job interview’ today was pure fiction.
But Jo had been allowing this for seven years, because she somehow convinced herself that love would blossom if she and Shawn worked just a little harder, if she waited just a little longer for him to grow up. She’d convinced herself they could become the family she’d never had.
Yes, Jo knew all about denial.
But my own situation seemed to be too much for her. She’d tried to humour me since Eddie had disappeared off the face of the earth, forced herself to listen to my theories, told me he might just call tomorrow. But she hadn’t believed a word of it, and now she’d cracked. Don’t allow yourself to be used the way I have , she was saying. Walk away now, Sarah, while you still can.
The problem was, I couldn’t.
I had tried out the idea of Eddie simply not being interested. Each and every one of the fifteen days my phone had remained silent. I’d combed through every glowing, lambent moment of my time with him, searching for cracks, tiny warning signs that he might not have been as certain as I was, and I’d found nothing.
I barely used Facebook these days, but suddenly I was on it, all of the time, scouring his profile for signs of life. Or, worse – someone else.
Nothing.
I phoned and messaged him; I even sent him a pathetic little tweet. I downloaded Messenger and WhatsApp and checked throughout the day to see if he’d surfaced. But they told me the same thing every time: Eddie David had last been seen online just over two weeks ago, the day I left his house so he could pack for Spain.
Flattened by both shame and desperation, I’d even downloaded a bunch of dating apps to find out if he was registered.
He wasn’t.
I craved control over this uncontrollable situation. I couldn’t sleep; the thought of food made my insides convulse. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and I jumped on my phone with the frenzy of a starving animal when it buzzed. Exhaustion pressed at me throughout the day – great fibrous wads of it; a suffocation, at times – and yet I spent most of the night wide awake, staring into the pitchy darkness of Tommy’s spare room in West London.
The strange thing was, I knew this wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t sane behaviour, and I knew it was getting worse, not better, but I had neither the will nor the energy to stage an intervention on myself.
Why didn’t he call? I typed into Google one day. The response was like an online hurricane. For the sake of any remaining sanity, I had shut down the page.
Instead, I’d googled Eddie, again, had gone through his carpentry website, looking for . . . By that point I didn’t even know what I was looking for. And of course I hadn’t found a thing.
‘Do you think he told you everything about himself?’ Tommy asked. ‘Are you certain he isn’t with another woman, for example?’
The road dipped down into a little bowl of parkland, in which stately oaks had gathered like gentlemen in a smoking lounge.
‘He’s not with another woman,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I know because . . . I know. He was single; he was available. Not just literally, emotionally.’
The flash of a deer vanishing into a beech wood.
‘OK. But what about all the other warning signs?’ Tommy persisted. ‘Were there any inconsistencies? Did you sense he was holding anything back?’
‘No.’ I paused. ‘Although, I suppose . . .’
Jo turned round. ‘What?’
I sighed. ‘The day we met, he cancelled a few incoming calls. But that was the only time it happened,’ I added quickly. ‘From then on he answered every time his phone rang. And he didn’t have anyone strange calling him, either; it was all friends, his mum, business queries . . .’ And Derek , I thought suddenly. I had never quite got to the bottom of who Derek was.
Tommy’s eyebrows were engaged in some complicated triangulation.
‘What?’ I asked him. ‘What are you thinking? It was just the first day, Tommy. After that he picked up when anyone rang.’
‘I believe you. It’s more that . . .’ He trailed off.
Jo was noisily silent, but I ignored her.
‘It’s more that I’ve just always thought Internet dating to be risky,’ Tommy said eventually. ‘I know you didn’t meet him online, but it’s a similar situation – you have no friends in common and no shared history. He could have recast himself as almost anyone.’
I frowned. ‘But he made friends with me on Facebook. Why would he do that if he had anything to hide? He’s on Twitter and Instagram for his work, and he’s got a business website. Which includes a photo of him. And I stayed at his house for a week, remember? His post was addressed to Eddie David. If he wasn’t Eddie David, cabinetmaker, I’d know.’