The Man Who Didn't Call: The Love Story of the Year – with a Fantastic Twist

by Walsh, Rosie

  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.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ Rudi’s antenna was up. ‘Mum? Why is your hand on Sarah’s leg? Why are there flowers tied to that tree? Why is everyone being—’

  ‘Rudi,’ Jo said. ‘Rudi, what about I spy? I spy with my little eye something beginning with “W”!’

  There was a pause. ‘I’m too old for that,’ Rudi said humpily. He didn’t like being kept out.

  My eyes were still pressed shut, even though I knew we’d passed the spot .

  ‘A whale,’ Rudi began reluctantly. ‘A watering can. A wobile phone.’

  ‘OK, Harrington?’ Tommy asked, after a respectful pause.

  ‘Yes.’ I opened my eyes. Wheat fields, tottering dry-stone walls, footpaths like lightning forks across horse-cropped grass. ‘Fine.’

  It never got any easier. Nineteen years had sanded down its edges, planed over the worst of the knots, but it was still there.

  ‘How’s about we discuss Eddie some more?’ Jo suggested. I tried to say yes, but my voice trailed off. ‘In your own time,’ she said, patting my leg.

  ‘Well, I do keep wondering if he’s had an accident,’ I said, when speech felt possible. ‘He was off to southern Spain to windsurf.’

  Tommy’s eyebrows considered this. ‘I suppose that’s a reasonable theory.’

  Jo pointed out that I was friends with Eddie on Facebook. ‘She’d have seen something on his page if he’d got hurt.’

  ‘We shouldn’t underestimate his phone having died, though,’ I said. My voice wilted as each avenue of hope shut down. ‘It was a mess. He—’

  ‘Babe,’ Jo cut in gently. ‘Babe, his phone isn’t dead. It rings when you call him.’

  I nodded miserably.

  Rudi, eating crisps, kicked the back of Jo’s seat. ‘Borrrrrrrrred.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘And remember what we agreed about speaking with your mouth full.’

  Rudi, unseen to Jo, turned towards me and offered me a view of his half-masticated crisps. Unfortunately, and for reasons unclear, he had decided that this was an in-joke between us .

  I slid my hand into the side pocket of my bag, closing my fingers around the last piece of hope I had. ‘But Mouse,’ I said pathetically. Tears were hot and close. ‘He gave me Mouse.’

  I cupped her in the palm of my hand; smooth, worn, smaller than a walnut. Eddie had carved her from a piece of wood when he was just nine years old. She’s been with me through a lot , he’d said. She’s my taliswoman.

  She reminded me of the brass penguin Dad had given me as a desk-mate during my GCSE exams. It was a stern-looking thing that had scowled ferociously at me from the moment I’d opened each paper. Even now, I loved that penguin. I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone with it.

  Mouse meant the same to Eddie; I knew it – and yet he had given her to me. Keep her safe until I get back , he’d said. She means a lot to me.

  Jo glanced back and sighed. She already knew about Mouse. ‘People change their minds,’ she said quietly. ‘It might just have been easier for him to lose the key ring than to get in touch.’

  ‘She’s not just a key ring. She …’ I gave up.

  When Jo resumed, her voice was gentler. ‘Look, Sarah. If you’re certain something bad has happened to him, how’s about you scrap all these private communications and write something on his Facebook wall? Where everyone can see it? Say that you’re worried. Ask if anyone’s heard from him.’

  I swallowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean exactly what I just said. Appeal to his friends for information. What’s stopping you?’

  I turned to look out of the window, unable to reply.

  Jo pressed on. ‘I think the only thing that would stop you is shame. And if you really, truly, honestly believed something terrible had happened to him, you wouldn’t give a rat’s about shame.’

  We were passing the old MOD airfield. A faded orange wind sock frilled over the empty runway and I suddenly remembered Hannah’s great hoots of laughter when Dad once observed that it was like a big orange willy. ‘Willy sock!’ she’d yelled, and Mum had been torn between helpless laughter and reproach.

  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, why hadn’t I 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: ‘Oh no, ’ 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. Staring at 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?’

  ‘You can’t legislate love,’ he replied cheerfully.

  An unexpected thought came to me: I miss England.

  ‘How did you two meet?’ I asked, stepping onto the green.

  He smiled at the sheep. ‘Well, I was sitting here, feeling a bit sorry for myself, when this young lady appeared as if from nowhere. We started talking. And before I knew it, we were discussing moving in together.’

  ‘This young man ,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about sheep, but even I can tell you he’s not a lady.’

  After a moment the man leaned backwards and checked the sheep’s undercarriage.

  ‘Oh.’

  The sheep stared at him. ‘Is your name not Lucy?’ he asked. The sheep remained silent. ‘He told me his name was Lucy.’

  ‘His name is not Lucy,’ I confirmed.

  The sheep baaed again and the man laughed. A delirious jackdaw flapped out of a tree on the lane behind us.

  Somehow I was standing right by them. The man, the sheep and me all together on the bleached village green. The man was looking up at me. He had eyes the colour of foreign oceans, I thought, full of warmth and good intentions.

  He was rather lovely.

  It will be many months before you can expect to develop authentic feelings towards another man , I’d been told this morning. The advice had come courtesy of a preposterous app called the BreakUp Coach, which my closest friend in LA, Jenni Carmichael, had downloaded (without permission) to my phone, the day after Reuben and I had announced our separation. Every morning it sent me dire push notifications about the state of emotional trauma I was in right now, and how that was totally OK.

  Only I wasn’t in any sort of emotional trauma. Even when Reuben told me he was sorry but he felt we should divorce, I’d had to force myself to cry so as not to hurt his feelings. When the app told me about my shattered heart and my broken spirit, I felt as if I were the recipient of someone else’s mail.

  But it made Jenni happy when she saw me reading the messages, so I kept the app. Jenni’s emotional well-being – increasingly delicate, as her thirties came to a close, taking with them her hopes of reproduction – was heavily dependent on her ability to look after the needy.

  The man turned back to the sheep. ‘Well, it’s a shame. I thought we had a future, Lucy and I.’ His phone started to ring.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be OK?’

  He pulled his phone a little way out of his pocket and cancelled the call. ‘Oh, I expect so. At least, I hope so.’

  I busied myself scanning around for another sheep, a farmer, a helpful sheepdog. ‘I feel like we should do something about him, don’t you?’

  ‘Probably.’ The man pulled himself up to standing. ‘I’ll call Frank. He owns most of the sheep around here.’ He dialled a number on his phone and I swallowed, suddenly uncertain. Once the sheep had been dealt with, we would have to stop joking and conduct an actual conversation.

  I stood on the green and waited. The sheep was picking unenthusiastically at the coarse spokes of grass around him, keeping tabs on us. He’d been shorn recently, but even his cropped coat looked suffocating.

  I wondered why I was here. I wondered why the man had been feeling sorry for himself earlier. I wondered why I was raking a hand through my hair. He was talking to Frank on the phone now, chuckling easily. ‘OK, mate. I’ll do my best. Right,’ he said, looking at me. He really did have lovely eyes.

  (Stop it!)

  ‘Frankie’s not going to get here for a good hour. He says Lucy’s broken out of a field down by the pub.’ He turned to the sheep. ‘You came a long way. I’m impressed.’

  The sheep carried on eating, so he looked at me instead. ‘I’m going to try and get him back down the lane. Fancy helping me?’

  ‘Sure. I was heading down there for lunch anyway.’

  I hadn’t been heading down there for lunch. I’d actually been waiting for the 54 to Cirencester, because there were people in Cirencester and there was no one at my parents’ house. Last night an A&E nurse from the Royal Infirmary in Leicester had called to say my grandfather had been admitted with a hip fracture. Granddad was ninety-three. He was also infamously offensive, but had nobody other than Mum and her sister, Lesley, who at the moment was in the Maldives with her third husband.

  ‘Go,’ I’d told Mum when she wavered. Mum didn’t like letting me down. Every June she would put on a towering production for my visit: seamless logistics, a house full of flowers, exquisite food. Anything to persuade me that life in England was far better than anything California could offer.

  ‘But …’ I watched her sag. ‘But you’ll be on your own.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Besides, Granddad will be thrown out of hospital if he doesn’t have you there to apologize for him.’

  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 s
well 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.’