The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  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.

  Years later – long after he’d returned to England – a wealthy tech lawyer named Zoe Markham had hired Tommy to be her personal trainer. He’d had a large number of successful London women on his books at the time, many of whom flirted quite openly with him. ‘I think it’s a sort of fantasy,’ he’d told me. He was caught somewhere between flattery and disgust. ‘I’m like a sexy handyman with a tool belt. Blue collar with muscles. ’

  Zoe Markham, apparently, was different. They got on ‘fantastically well’ and had a ‘genuine connection’, and, crucially, she saw him as a ‘whole person’, not just an employee who had the power to make her look slim and beautiful. (She was already both.)

  After a few months of casual flirting she had offered him a leg up into sports consultancy via an old friend. Tommy had taken her to dinner to thank her. She had taken him home and removed her clothes. ‘I think it’s time for a real one-on-one, don’t you?’ she’d said.

  She was his first girlfriend of any real significance; certainly the first he believed to be entirely out of his league. To him, she was a goddess, a marvel – the liniment for each and every one of his old wounds. ‘I wish I could tell those bastards at school,’ he’d told me, the day she invited him to move into her Holland Park flat. ‘I wish I could show them I’m capable of attracting a girl like Zoe.’ And I’d said, ‘Yes, wouldn’t that be brilliant?’ because I never imagined it could happen. That sort of thing never did.

  Except, in Tommy’s case, it did.

  About a year ago he’d sent a brochure for his secondary sports programme to every head teacher in the UK. The programme included a donation of wearable sports technology – heart-rate vest, fitness watches, that sort of thing – from one of Zoe’s biggest clients, a tech multinational, and was Tommy’s pride and joy. When he received a call from the head of our old school, he was touchingly delighted. ‘She wants me to come and meet her head of PE!’ he told me during one of our Skypes. ‘Isn’t that brilliant ?’ He had found the situation to be marginally less brilliant when he discovered that the head of PE was his teenage bully, Matthew Martyn.

  But it had been a good chat, Tommy assured me. A bit awkward, at first, but Matthew had said something about how they’d all been dickheads when they were teenagers, and punched Tommy on the arm and called him ‘mate’. Later, like two old friends, they had compared notes: Matthew showed Tommy a photo of his family, and Tommy – unable to believe his luck – showed Matthew a picture of his beautiful, smartly liveried, fiercely toned girlfriend in her splendid London kitchen.

  By the time I arrived at Tommy and Zoe’s London flat earlier in June, already distraught about Eddie, Tommy had delivered the programme. He told me his old ghosts had been laid to rest; that he was ‘over’ what had happened to him at school; that he was actually looking
forward to seeing Matthew Martyn again at the programme launch. Then: ‘Zoe’s coming,’ he added, as if it were a mere afterthought. ‘It’ll be great to introduce her to Matt.’

  I had wanted to hug him then. To tell him that he was fine, just as he was. That he didn’t need Zoe on his arm to increase his stock. But I went along with it, of course, because he needed me to.

  Zoe had pulled out four days before the launch. ‘I have to go to Hong Kong for one of my clients,’ she’d said. ‘It’s really important. Sorry, Tommy.’

  Not sorry enough , I thought. She knew what this meant. Tommy’s face was the colour of recycled paper.

  ‘But . . . but the school’s expecting you!’

  She frowned. ‘I’m sure they’ll survive. They’re showing off to the rural press, not to me.’

  ‘Can you not fly a day later?’ he pleaded. I could hardly bear to watch.

  ‘No,’ she said levelly. ‘I can’t. But you’ll thank me for going on this trip. There’s going to be a delegation from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. I still think I’ve got a good chance of getting you onto one of their advisory committees.’

  Tommy had shaken his head. ‘But I told you. I’m not interested.’

  ‘And I told you , Tommy, that you are.’

  Jo and I had stepped in to replace her.

  Did I want to return to my old school? Of course not. I’d hoped never to see the place again. But Tommy, I thought, needed me, and helping someone in need was just about the only decent distraction I knew. Besides, what did I have to fear? Mandy and Claire had left that school in the nineties. Neither they nor any of the people I’d fled would be there today.

  ‘Harrington. ’ Tommy had twisted round to look at me. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’

  ‘Look, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  I watched him. Tommy’s eyebrows were not carrying glad tidings.

  ‘When I got that message about the local press earlier, Matthew told me something else. He—’ Tommy broke off, and I knew then that it was bad.

  ‘Matthew married Claire Peddler. I didn’t mention it before because I didn’t think you’d want to hear her name. But when he texted to say that the local press were coming, he also said that . . .’

  No.

  ‘. . . that Claire had decided to come, too. And she’s . . .’

  Bringing Mandy.

  ‘. . . bringing a little group of friends from our year. Including Mandy Lee.’

  I sank forward and rested my head against the back of his seat.

  Chapter Six

  DAY ONE: The Drink That Lasted Twelve Hours

  ‘Sarah Mackey,’ I said. ‘M-A-C-K-E-Y.’

  The landlord handed me a pint of cider.

  The man from the village green just laughed. ‘As it happens, I know how to spell Mackey. But thank you. My name’s Eddie David.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I smiled. ‘I live in America. It’s a more American surname, I think: when I’m over here, I often have to spell it. Plus I’m fond of clarity.’

  ‘So I see,’ Eddie said. He was leaning sideways on the bar, watching me. Tenner folded between large brown fingers. I liked the scale of this man. That he was so much taller, so much broader, so much stronger than me. Reuben and I had been the same height.

  We sat in the pub garden, an oasis of flowers and picnic tables in the little valley below Sapperton village. The thin ribbon of the River Frome spooled unseen around the meadow fringing the pub’s car park; briar roses toppled from a tree. A couple of walkers were slumped over half-pints, a panting cocker spaniel staring at me from under their legs. As soon as I sat down under a large umbrella, the dog came and sat by my feet, settling itself with a great huff of self-pity.

  Eddie laughed .

  Somewhere along the valley, the abrasive cracking of a chainsaw started and stopped. A few stunned birds called dazedly from the woods above us. I sipped the cold cider and groaned. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Eddie agreed. We clinked glasses and I felt an uncurling of pleasure. Being alone in my parents’ empty house this morning had been more upsetting than I was willing to admit, and the walk along Broad Ride had done nothing to improve my mood. But here, taking the rough edge off it all, was cold cider and a very agreeable man. Maybe it could be a good day.

  ‘I love this pub,’ I said. ‘We used to come here when I was a kid. My little sister and I would roam feral and poke around in the stream while my parents and their friends got a little too jolly.’

  Eddie took a good draught from his pint. ‘I grew up in Cirencester. Bit trickier to roam feral in the middle of a town. But we did come here once or twice.’

  ‘Oh, really? When would that have been? How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ Eddie said comfortably. ‘Although people say I look younger.’

  He didn’t mind when I laughed. ‘Thirty-nine,’ he said eventually. ‘I remember running around this garden when I was about – what, ten? Then my mum moved here in the late nineties, so I started coming here quite a lot. How old are you? Maybe you and I were feral together.’

  A small fleck of suggestion. My app must be going mad.

  ‘Oh, probably not. I moved to Los Angeles when I was still a teenager.’

  ‘Really? That’s quite a move.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Did one of your parents take a job out there? ’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And are they still out there?’

  ‘No. They live near here. Over towards Stroud.’

  I angled my face away, as if that excused me skirting the edge of a lie. ‘So. Eddie. Tell me what you were doing on Sapperton Green on a weekday afternoon.’

  He leaned down to stroke the walkers’ dog. ‘Visiting my mum. She lives up near the school.’ A tiny hairline fracture passed through his voice. ‘What were you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘I walked from Frampton Mansell.’ I nodded in the direction of my parents’ village.

  He frowned. ‘But you didn’t come along the valley – you came from up the hill.’

  ‘Well . . . I wanted to get some proper exercise, so I hiked up the hill and walked along the top. Along Broad Ride, in fact – it’s changed a lot,’ I added quickly. This is becoming a minefield. ‘So overgrown! It used to be so wide and stately; people would bring their horses from all over for a gallop. Now it’s little more than a pathway.’

  He nodded. ‘They do still gallop up and down it, even though it’s been banned. One of them came very close to mowing me down earlier.’

  I smiled at the thought of anyone being able to mow down this big mass of man, horse or otherwise. It pleased me that he, too, liked to walk along that secret green corridor.

  ‘I was like Moses of Sapperton,’ he said. ‘Parting a Red Sea of cow parsley.’

  We both sipped our drinks.

  ‘So do you live round here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eddie said, ‘although I get a lot of commissions from London, so I’m there a fair bit.’ He slapped me suddenly on the calf .

  ‘Horsefly,’ he said softly, flicking the dead insect off his palm. ‘Eating your leg. Sorry.’

  I took a long draw on the cider and felt the heady, sensual purr of alcohol and mild shock. ‘They’re bastards here in June,’ he said. ‘They’re bastards all year, but especially in June.’

  He showed me two angry bumps on his forearm. ‘One of them got me this morning.’

  ‘I hope you bit it back.’

  Eddie smiled. ‘I didn’t. They spend quite a lot of time sitting on horses’ private parts.’

  ‘Of course. Yes.’

  Before I’d asked permission of myself, I touched the bites on his skin. ‘Poor arm,’ I said, although in a very matter-of-fact tone, because I was already embarrassed.

  Eddie stopped laughing and turned to look at me. He met my gaze, a question in his eyes.

  It was me who looked away first.

  Sometime later I was
comfortably drunk. Eddie was inside getting our third, or maybe fourth pint. I heard the beep-beep of the till as the landlord rang up his order, the crackle of something I hoped might be crisps and the lazy whine of a plane dragging across the sky.

  The lichened surface of our old picnic table had begun to feel like sandpaper on the soft backs of my thighs. I looked around for another, less abrasive table, but found none, so I flopped down in the grass like the ramblers’ dog from earlier on. I smiled, happy and intoxicated. Grass tickled my ear. I wanted never to leave. I wanted simply to be here; no phone, no responsibilities. Just Eddie David and me.

  As I gazed up at the sky, the earth warm underneath me, I caught an old ripple of memory. This , I thought lazily. The smell of warm grass, the soft patter and rustle of it, layered with buzzing insects and snatches of hummed songs. This had been me once. Before Tommy had moved to America and adolescence had exploded under my feet like a landmine, this had been enough .

  ‘Man down,’ Eddie said, coming down the steps with a beer, a cider and – worshipful praises! – crisps! ‘You claimed to be a hard drinker.’

  ‘I forgot about cider,’ I admitted. ‘But it should be noted that I haven’t passed out. I just got fed up with that prickly bench.’ I hauled myself up on my elbows. ‘Anyway, you must open those crisps straight away.’

  Eddie sat on the grass next to me, removing from his pocket what looked like an uncomfortable bunch of keys. They were held together by a little wooden key ring in the shape of a mouse.

  ‘Who’s that guy?’ I asked, as Eddie handed me a pint. ‘I like him.’

  Eddie turned to look at the key ring. After a little pause he smiled. ‘She’s called Mouse. I made her when I was nine.’

  ‘You made her? Out of wood?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Oh! Gosh, how lovely.’

  Eddie ran a finger along Mouse. ‘She’s been with me through a lot,’ he smiled. ‘She’s my taliswoman. Anyway. Cheers.’ He leaned back on his elbows, turning his face to the sun.