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, tinywarning 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, Iknewthis 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 evenknow 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 tobe 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.’
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.
