We were now deep in the old woods that spread across Cirencester Park. Pennies of light flashed across Jo’s bare thighs as she gazed out of the window, apparently at a loss. Before long we’d emerge from the woods, and soon after that we’d reach the bend in the road where the accident had happened.
At that thought, I felt my breathing change, as if someone had thinned out the car’s oxygen.
A few minutes later we emerged into the post-rain brightness of country fields. I closed my eyes, still unable, after all these years, to look at the grass verge where they said the ambulance crew had laid her out, tried to stop the inevitable.
Jo’s hand found its way to my knee.
‘Why are you doing that?’ Rudi’s antenna was up. ‘Mum? Why is your hand on Sarah’s leg? Why are there flowers tied to that tree? Why is everyone being—’
‘Rudi,’ Jo said. ‘Rudi, what about I spy? I spy with my little eye something beginning with “W”!’
There was a pause. ‘I’m too old for that,’ Rudi said humpily. He didn’t like being kept out.
My eyes were still pressed shut, even though I knew we’d passed the spot .
‘A whale,’ Rudi began reluctantly. ‘A watering can. A wobile phone.’
‘OK, Harrington?’ Tommy asked, after a respectful pause.
‘Yes.’ I opened my eyes. Wheat fields, tottering dry-stone walls, footpaths like lightning forks across horse-cropped grass. ‘Fine.’
It never got any easier. Nineteen years had sanded down its edges, planed over the worst of the knots, but it was still there.
‘How’s about we discuss Eddie some more?’ Jo suggested. I tried to say yes, but my voice trailed off. ‘In your own time,’ she said, patting my leg.
‘Well, I do keep wondering if he’s had an accident,’ I said, when speech felt possible. ‘He was off to southern Spain to windsurf.’
Tommy’s eyebrows considered this. ‘I suppose that’s a reasonable theory.’
Jo pointed out that I was friends with Eddie on Facebook. ‘She’d have seen something on his page if he’d got hurt.’
‘We shouldn’t underestimate his phone having died, though,’ I said. My voice wilted as each avenue of hope shut down. ‘It was a mess. He—’
‘Babe,’ Jo cut in gently. ‘Babe, his phone isn’t dead. It rings when you call him.’
I nodded miserably.
Rudi, eating crisps, kicked the back of Jo’s seat. ‘Borrrrrrrrred.’
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘And remember what we agreed about speaking with your mouth full.’
Rudi, unseen to Jo, turned towards me and offered me a view of his half-masticated crisps. Unfortunately, and for reasons unclear, he had decided that this was an in-joke between us .
I slid my hand into the side pocket of my bag, closing my fingers around the last piece of hope I had. ‘But Mouse,’ I said pathetically. Tears were hot and close. ‘He gave me Mouse.’
I cupped her in the palm of my hand; smooth, worn, smaller than a walnut. Eddie had carved her from a piece of wood when he was just nine years old. She’s been with me through a lot , he’d said. She’s my taliswoman.
She reminded me of the brass penguin Dad had given me as a desk-mate during my GCSE exams. It was a stern-looking thing that had scowled ferociously at me from the moment I’d opened each paper. Even now, I loved that penguin. I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone with it.
Mouse meant the same to Eddie; I knew it – and yet he had given her to me. Keep her safe until I get back , he’d said. She means a lot to me.
Jo glanced back and sighed. She already knew about Mouse. ‘People change their minds,’ she said quietly. ‘It might just have been easier for him to lose the key ring than to get in touch.’
‘She’s not just a key ring. She . . .’ I gave up.
When Jo resumed, her voice was gentler. ‘Look, Sarah. If you’re certain something bad has happened to him, how’s about you scrap all these private communications and write something on his Facebook wall? Where everyone can see it? Say that you’re worried. Ask if anyone’s heard from him.’
I swallowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean exactly what I just said. Appeal to his friends for information. What’s stopping you?’
I turned to look out of the window, unable to reply.
Jo pressed on. ‘I think the only thing that would stop you is shame. And if you really, truly, honestly believed something terrible had happened to him, you wouldn’t give a rat’s about shame.’
We were passing the old MOD airfield. A faded orange wind sock frilled over the empty runway and I suddenly remembered Hannah’s great hoots of laughter when Dad once observed that it was like a big orange willy. ‘Willy sock!’ she’d yelled, and Mum had been torn between helpless laughter and reproach.
Rudi opened Jo’s music library on the iPad and selected a playlist called ‘East Coast rap’.
If I was as worried as I said, why hadn’t I written something on Eddie’s wall? Was Jo actually right?
The Cotswold-stone cottages of Chalford were sliding into view, clinging determinedly to their hillside as if awaiting rescue. Chalford would give way to Brimscombe, which would turn into Thrupp and then Stroud. And in Stroud a large committee of teachers, pupils and press were waiting for Tommy at our old school. I had to pull myself together.
‘Hang on,’ Tommy said suddenly. He turned down Rudi’s rap and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Harrington, did you tell Eddie you were married?’
‘No.’
His eyebrows had become quite wild. ‘I thought you said you told him everything!’
‘I did! But we didn’t go through our roster of exes. That would have been . . . well, tacky. I mean, we’re both nearly forty . . .’ I trailed off. Should we have done? ‘We were meant to tell each other our life stories, but we never got round to it. Although we did establish that we were both single.’
Tommy was watching me through the rear-view mirror. ‘But have you and Reuben updated your website?’
I frowned, wondering what he could be getting at .
Then: ‘Oh no, ’ I whispered. Freezing fingers brushed my abdomen.
‘What?’ Rudi shouted. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sarah’s charity’s website,’ Jo told him. ‘There’s a whole page about Sarah and Reuben, about how they started the Clowndoctor charity in the nineties when they got married. And how they still run it together today.’
‘Oh!’ said Rudi. He put the iPad down, delighted at last to have been able to solve the mystery. ‘Sarah’s boyfriend read it and his heart got broken! That’s why he’s dead, because you can’t be alive if your heart doesn’t work.’
But: ‘I’m sorry – I don’t buy it,’ Jo said quietly. ‘If he spent a week with you, Sarah, if he was as serious about you as you are about him, that wouldn’t be enough to put him off. He’d confront you. He wouldn’t just slink off like a dying cat.’
But I was already on that confounded Messenger app, writing to him.
Chapter Four
DAY ONE: The Day We Met
It was furnace-hot the day I met Eddie David. The countryside had begun to melt and pool into itself; birds holed up in stock-still trees and bees drunk on soaring centigrade. It didn’t feel like the sort of afternoon for falling in love with a complete stranger. It felt exactly like every other 2 June on which I’d made this walk. Quiet, sorrowful, loaded. Familiar.
I heard Eddie before I saw him. I was standing at the bus stop, trying to remember what day of the week it was – Thursday, I decided, which meant I had nearly an hour to wait. Here in the livid heat of the day, for a bus in which I would certainly fry. I started to wander down the lane towards the village, looking for shade. On a boiling current I heard the sound of children in the primary school.
They were interrupted by the blast of a sheep from somewhere up ahead. BAAA , it shouted. BAAA!
The sheep was answered by a great gale of male laughter, which barrelled off into the compressed heat like a jet of cool air. I started to smile, before I’d even seen the man. His laughter summed up everything that I felt about sheep, with their silly faces and daft side-eyes.