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, whyhadn’tI 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: ‘Ohno,’ 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.
They were a little way away, on the village green. A man sitting with his back to me, a sheep a few feet away. Staringat 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?’
