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.’
‘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: anau revoir. Anuntil 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’dwondered 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.’
