‘I like walking. Seriously, please go. I’ll relax, like you’re always telling me to. Read books. Eat my way through this mountain of food you’ve brought in.’
And so this morning I’d waved them off down the track and found myself alone suddenly, in – yes – a house I didn’t like being in. Especially on my own.
Which meant I had not been heading to the Daneway for a solo pub lunch. The fact of the matter was that I was trying to coerce this complete stranger into having a drink with me, in spite of this morning’s app notification that flirtation with other men would only end in tears. Try to remember, you’re stratospherically vulnerable right now , it had said, with an accompanying soft-focus picture of a girl crying into a mountain of comfy pillows.
The man’s phone rang again. This time he let it ring out.
‘Right, let’s be having you,’ he said. He moved towards Lucy, who glared at him before turning and running. ‘You go over there,’ the man called at me. ‘Then we can funnel him into the lane. Ow! Shit!’ He hopped awkwardly over the grass and then ran back for his flip-flops.
I swung round to the left, as fast as I could in the syrupy heat. Lucy swerved off to the right, where the man was waiting, laughing. Accepting he was trapped, Lucy grumbled off towards the little lane that led down to the pub, offering the odd baa of protest as he went.
Thank you, God, or the universe, or fate , I thought. For this sheep, this man, this English hedgerow.
What a relief to talk to someone who knew nothing of the sadness I was meant to be suffering. Who didn’t put his head sympathetically to one side when he talked to me. Who simply made me laugh.
Lucy made several breaks for freedom on the road down to the pub, but with some strong teamwork we managed to return him to his field. The man snapped off a branch from a tree and braced it across the gap in the fence through which the sheep had escaped, then turned to me and smiled. ‘Done.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. We were standing right next to the pub. ‘You owe me a pint.’
He laughed and said that seemed reasonable.
And so that was that.
Chapter Five
Seven days later Eddie and I had said goodbye. But it was a French goodbye: an au revoir . An until the next time! It was not a farewell. It was not even remotely a farewell. When did ‘farewell’ involve the words ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you’?
I had followed the River Frome home to my parents’ house, happy and humming. The water was brilliantly clear that day, brindled with green, mossy cushions and clean gravel riffles, watched over by spiked clusters of cattails. I passed the spot where Hannah had once fallen in trying to pick crowfoot flowers and surprised myself by laughing out loud. My heart was full, singing with memories of the last week: late-night conversations, cheese sandwiches, belly laughs, bath towels drying on a rail. The broad mass of Eddie’s body, the wind sifting gently through the trees outside his barn like fine trails of flour and, over and over again, the words he had said when I’d left.
I’d arrived that evening in Leicester. In the taxi to the hospital, a rainstorm had broken; the town turned dark and the red lights of A&E had slid down the windscreen like soup. I’d found my grandfather up in a hot ward, surly but shaken, and my parents exhausted.
There had been no call from Eddie that night. No message detailing his return flight. Briefly, as I put my pyjamas on, I’d wondered why. He was probably in a hurry , I told myself. He was with his friend. And: He loves me. He’d call!
But Eddie David hadn’t called. And he hadn’t called, and he hadn’t called.
For a couple of days I’d convinced myself it was fine. It would be absurd – deranged, even – to doubt what had happened between us. But as the days bled painfully into a week, I found it harder to hold at bay the rising ocean of panic.
‘He’s having a great time in Spain,’ I lied, when I arrived in London for my planned stay with Tommy.
A few days later, over lunch with Jo, I’d cracked. ‘He hasn’t called,’ I admitted. Tears of panic and humiliation fattened in my eyes. ‘Something must have happened to him. It wasn’t just a fling, Jo; it changed everything.’
Tommy and Jo were kind to me; they listened, told me I was ‘doing really well’, but I sensed they were shocked by the disintegration of the Sarah they knew. Was I not the woman who’d turned her life around after running off to LA in a black cloud of tragedy? The woman who’d started a brilliant children’s charity, married an all-American man; the woman who now flew round the world making keynote speeches?
That same woman spent two weeks skulking around Tommy’s flat, reduced to stalking a man with whom she’d spent seven days.
In that time Britain had nearly exploded in the pressure cooker of the EU referendum, my grandfather had undergone two operations and my parents had become virtual prisoners in his house. My charity had won a substantial grant, and Jenni was well into the last cycle of IVF for which her insurers would pay. I was in a landscape of very real human highs and lows, yet I’d struggled to register any of it.
I had seen friends do this. I’d watched in amazement as they claimed that his phone was broken; his leg was broken; he was broken, wasting unseen in a ditch. They insisted that some careless comment they’d made must have ‘scared him off’, hence the need to ‘clear up any misunderstandings’. I had watched them shred their pride, break their heart, lose their mind, all over a man who would never call. Worse, a man they barely knew.
And here I was. Sitting in Tommy’s car, my pride shredded, my heart broken, my mind lost. Composing a desperate message saying that I really wasn’t married anymore. That it had been a very amicable break-up .
Tommy pulled up near the gates of our old school just as rain began to print gentle patterns on the windscreen. He parked uncharacteristically badly, one wheel on the kerb, but – even more uncharacteristically – made no attempt to straighten out. I took in the fat beech hedge, the yellow zigzags on the road, the sign up by the gates, and an old bass line of unease strummed in my pelvis. I put my phone in my handbag. Texting Eddie would have to wait.
‘So, here we are!’ The weight of unfelt enthusiasm made Tommy’s voice sag in the middle like an overburdened washing line. ‘We should get going. I’m due to speak in five minutes!’
He didn’t get going, so neither did we. Rudi stared at us. ‘Why aren’t you getting out of the car?’ he asked, incredulous. Nobody answered. After a few seconds he exploded from the back seat, running at speed towards the school gates. We watched in silence as he slowed to a hands-in-pockets saunter, stopping casually at the entrance to assess the possibility of fun on the school field. After squinting for a while, he turned back to the car. He wasn’t pleased.
Poor Rudi. I didn’t know how Jo had sold today to him, but I doubted she’d told the whole truth. A sports programme launch at a secondary school might have held some appeal if he’d been in with a chance of wearing one of the fitness watches or heart-rate vests that were part of the project, or even if there had been children his age to play with. But the tech toys that formed the centrepiece of Tommy’s programme were to be showcased by a tribe of ‘promising athletes’ selected by the head of physical education, and the youngest participant was fourteen.
Rudi stood near the car looking grumpy. Jo got out to talk to him, and Tommy, suddenly wordless, leaned over to check his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He’s terrified , I thought, with a swell of sympathy.
The boys at our mixed grammar had not been kind to little Thomas Stenham. One of them, Matthew Martyn, had accused Tommy of being gay when he had turned twelve and his flashy mother installed a fashion hairstyle on his head. Tommy had cried, and so, of course, it had stuck. Matthew and company had sprayed Tommy’s seat with a ‘de-gaying’ formula every day; they stuck pictures of naked men to the inside of his desk lid. He had started going out with Carla Franklin when he was fourteen; they had called her a beard. Tommy had taken to spending hours in his mother’s home gym, but his new muscles made things a good deal worse: they took to casually punching him on the school field. By the time his family emigrated to the States in 1995, he had had an exercise disorder, a mild stammer and no male friends.