They were a little way away, on the village green. A man sitting with his back to me, a sheep a few feet away. Staring at the man through those side-eyes. It tried another baa and the man said something I couldn’t hear.
By the time I’d reached the green, they were deep in conversation.
I stood on the edge of the scorched grass, watching them, and felt an old slide of recognition. I didn’t know this man, but he was a charming replica of so many of the boys with whom I’d been to school: a big, pleasant loaf of a thing; cropped hair and biscuity-brown skin; the West Country uniform of cargo shorts and faded T-shirt. He would be capable of putting up shelves, would doubtless know how to surf and would quite probably drive a clapped-out Golf donated by his pleasant but batty mother.
The sort of boy whom, I’d stated in my teenage diaries, I would one day marry. (The ‘one day’ referred to an unspecified time in the future when, like a butterfly from a scrubby chrysalis, I would resign my post as average-looking, socially unsuccessful sidekick to Mandy and Claire, and would emerge a bold and beautiful woman with the power to attract any man she had time to notice.) The husband would come from this village – Sapperton, or one of the others nearby – and he would definitely drive a Golf. (The Golf was quite a thing, for some reason. In the fantasy, we drove it down to Cornwall for our honeymoon, where I amazed him by charging fearlessly into the sea with a surfboard under my arm.)
Instead I’d married an effete American clown. An actual clown, with boxes of red noses and ukuleles and silly hats. In a couple of hours he’d be stirring, as the bright Californian sunshine began to bleach the walls of our apartment. Maybe he’d yawn, roll over and nuzzle at his new girlfriend before padding off to ramp up the air-conditioning and make her some gruesome green juice .
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Oh, hello,’ the man said, glancing round. Oh, hello. As if he’d known me for years. ‘Found myself a sheep.’
The sheep let off another foghorn baa, never turning from the man’s face. ‘It’s only been a few minutes,’ the man told me, ‘but we’re both very serious about each other.’
‘I see.’ I smiled. ‘Is that legal?’
‘You can’t legislate love,’ he replied cheerfully.
An unexpected thought came to me: I miss England.
‘How did you two meet?’ I asked, stepping onto the green.
He smiled at the sheep. ‘Well, I was sitting here, feeling a bit sorry for myself, when this young lady appeared as if from nowhere. We started talking. And before I knew it, we were discussing moving in together.’
‘This young man ,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about sheep, but even I can tell you he’s not a lady.’
After a moment the man leaned backwards and checked the sheep’s undercarriage.
‘Oh.’
The sheep stared at him. ‘Is your name not Lucy?’ he asked. The sheep remained silent. ‘He told me his name was Lucy.’
‘His name is not Lucy,’ I confirmed.
The sheep baaed again and the man laughed. A delirious jackdaw flapped out of a tree on the lane behind us.
Somehow I was standing right by them. The man, the sheep and me all together on the bleached village green. The man was looking up at me. He had eyes the colour of foreign oceans, I thought, full of warmth and good intentions.
He was rather lovely.
It will be many months before you can expect to develop authentic feelings towards another man , I’d been told this morning. The advice had come courtesy of a preposterous app called the BreakUp Coach, which my closest friend in LA, Jenni Carmichael, had downloaded (without permission) to my phone, the day after Reuben and I had announced our separation. Every morning it sent me dire push notifications about the state of emotional trauma I was in right now, and how that was totally OK.
Only I wasn’t in any sort of emotional trauma. Even when Reuben told me he was sorry but he felt we should divorce, I’d had to force myself to cry so as not to hurt his feelings. When the app told me about my shattered heart and my broken spirit, I felt as if I were the recipient of someone else’s mail.
But it made Jenni happy when she saw me reading the messages, so I kept the app. Jenni’s emotional well-being – increasingly delicate, as her thirties came to a close, taking with them her hopes of reproduction – was heavily dependent on her ability to look after the needy.
The man turned back to the sheep. ‘Well, it’s a shame. I thought we had a future, Lucy and I.’ His phone started to ring.
‘Do you think you’ll be OK?’
He pulled his phone a little way out of his pocket and cancelled the call. ‘Oh, I expect so. At least, I hope so.’
I busied myself scanning around for another sheep, a farmer, a helpful sheepdog. ‘I feel like we should do something about him, don’t you?’
‘Probably.’ The man pulled himself up to standing. ‘I’ll call Frank. He owns most of the sheep around here.’ He dialled a number on his phone and I swallowed, suddenly uncertain. Once the sheep had been dealt with, we would have to stop joking and conduct an actual conversation.
I stood on the green and waited. The sheep was picking unenthusiastically at the coarse spokes of grass around him, keeping tabs on us. He’d been shorn recently, but even his cropped coat looked suffocating.
I wondered why I was here. I wondered why the man had been feeling sorry for himself earlier. I wondered why I was raking a hand through my hair. He was talking to Frank on the phone now, chuckling easily. ‘OK, mate. I’ll do my best. Right,’ he said, looking at me. He really did have lovely eyes.
(Stop it!)
‘Frankie’s not going to get here for a good hour. He says Lucy’s broken out of a field down by the pub.’ He turned to the sheep. ‘You came a long way. I’m impressed.’
The sheep carried on eating, so he looked at me instead. ‘I’m going to try and get him back down the lane. Fancy helping me?’
‘Sure. I was heading down there for lunch anyway.’
I hadn’t been heading down there for lunch. I’d actually been waiting for the 54 to Cirencester, because there were people in Cirencester and there was no one at my parents’ house. Last night an A&E nurse from the Royal Infirmary in Leicester had called to say my grandfather had been admitted with a hip fracture. Granddad was ninety-three. He was also infamously offensive, but had nobody other than Mum and her sister, Lesley, who at the moment was in the Maldives with her third husband.
‘Go,’ I’d told Mum when she wavered. Mum didn’t like letting me down. Every June she would put on a towering production for my visit: seamless logistics, a house full of flowers, exquisite food. Anything to persuade me that life in England was far better than anything California could offer.
‘But . . .’ I watched her sag. ‘But you’ll be on your own.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Besides, Granddad will be thrown out of hospital if he doesn’t have you there to apologize for him.’
Last time my grandfather had been admitted to hospital, he’d had an unfortunate showdown with a consultant to whom Granddad kept referring as an ‘imbecilic medical student’.
There was a pause as Mum struggled with her filial and parental responsibilities.
‘Let me get the next couple of days out of the way,’ I’d said, ‘and then I’ll come up to Leicester.’
She looked at Dad, neither of them able to choose. And I thought, When did you two become so indecisive? They looked older this time, smaller. Especially Mum. As if she didn’t quite fit her body anymore. (Was this my fault? Had I shrunk her, somehow, with my insistence on living abroad?)
‘But you don’t like being in our house,’ Dad said, unable to find a better way of putting it. And his inability to find something funny to say – for once – made the space in my throat swell until it felt like nothing could get past.
‘Of course I do! What nonsense!’
‘And we can’t leave you our car. How will you get anywhere?’
‘There’s the bus.’
‘The bus stop’s miles away.’