Page 42 of The Man Who Didn't Call
I frowned. Tommy and Zoe had been remarkably generous with their spare room on this and every visit, giving me a key and telling me to use the flat as if it were my own. And apart from the odd time we’d made dinner for each other, I didn’t think Tommy had ever asked about my comings and goings.
I was going to come to your flat first, but can go straight to Richmond if you’d prefer?I wrote.
No, Tommy replied.It’s fine. See you then. And don’t you dare go hunting for Eddie while you’re down there, OK? Don’t look him up, don’t go running past his front door, don’t go and sit in that pub. Do you understand?
I understand. Have a nice weekend entertaining your secret lady. xx
Watch it, he wrote. Then:I mean it, Harrington. Don’t even look the man up, do you hear?
For a moment I wondered if Tommy was messaging me becausehewas meeting Eddie. I considered this possibilityfor a good few minutes before I realized how ridiculous it was.
Would I run as far as Sapperton, in the hope of seeing Eddie? The idea had been brewing for days. Although who knew if he was down here in Gloucestershire or up in London? Or in bloody outer space. And what would I do if I actually saw him?
But I knew that I would run to Sapperton, and I knew it would make me feel even worse, and I either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop myself.
The run was how I imagined a breakdown might feel. Eddie was everywhere I looked: watching me from tree branches, sitting on the old sluice, walking in the meadow that lay between the wandering branches of the river. And before long he was joined by Hannah, wearing the same clothes she’d worn that day, that awful day.
As I approached the tiny footbridge, I saw a woman walking towards me from the direction of Sapperton. She, at least, seemed real: a raincoat, hair tied back, walking shoes. Until she stopped suddenly and stared at me.
For reasons I couldn’t quite understand, I stopped jogging and stared at her, too. Something about her was familiar, only I knew I’d never seen her before. She was too far away for me to be sure about her age, but from here she looked a good deal older than me.
Eddie’s mother? Was that possible? I peered at her, but saw no obvious resemblance. Eddie was broad, round-faced, tall, whereas this woman was extremely thin and short, with a sharp chin. (And even if itwasEddie’s mother, why would she stand in the middle of a footpath, staring at me? Eddie had said she was depressed, not mad.) Besides, she didn’t know I even existed.
After another few seconds she turned round and started walking back in the direction she’d come. She walked fast, but her movements had the jerky irregularity of someone to whom movement does not come easily. I’d seen it enough times in children recovering from injury.
I stood there for a long time after she’d disappeared out of sight.
Had that been a face-off, or had the woman simply decided to finish her walk and go home? After all, there was no way of circling back from that section of the path: you either did a round trip of quite a few miles via Frampton Mansell or you turned round and went straight back to Sapperton.
I turned for home. Several times, I felt convinced that Eddie was walking along the footpath behind me. But the footpath was empty every time. Even the birds seemed silent.
I can’t stand this, I thought, as I arrived in my parents’ porch a few minutes later.I can’t stand it.How did I end up here again? Scrabbling around this valley after someone I’ve already lost?
Next to the coat pegs by the front door was a framed photograph of Hannah and me in the field behind our house. I was sitting in a cardboard box, Hannah next to it, a bunch of flowers in her small fist. Trails of mud and roots from the flowers dirtied her dungarees. She was scowling at the camera, scowling with a comic intensity that made my heart hurt. I stared at her, at my precious little Hannah, and loss thickened like glue in my chest.
‘I miss you,’ I whispered, touching the cold glass of the frame. ‘I miss you so much.’
I imagined her sticking her tongue out at me and was crying by the time I came face to face with my grandfather at the top of the stairs.
I froze. ‘Oh! Granddad!’
He said nothing.
‘I’ve just been for a run. I came to see you after lunch, but you were asleep, so I thought I’d . . .’
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t talk, not even to appease Granddad. I stood there in front of him, me in my running gear, he in a dressing gown that he’d been too weak to do up properly, beneath it the worn cotton of his old blue pyjamas. The edges were piped in navy. My heart was broken. Granddad smelled of deep tiredness. I wept silently, my face crumpled around the flattened shape of my crying mouth. I’d lost Hannah, and now Eddie: I knew it, I couldn’t pretend any longer, and here was my poor grandfather who’d been on his own for nearly fifty years, since Granny had had a heart attack and died in her chair with a ham sandwich in front of her, and now Granddad must be taking his daily exercise, because he had a Zimmer in front of him, and neither of us knew what to say to each other. Neither of us had a clue.
‘Come to my room,’ he said eventually.
It took Granddad a long time to get himself into the armchair Mum and Dad had installed for him. I used the time to try to clean up my face, then sat down on the edge of Hannah’s old bed.
For a short while I thought he was actually planning to talk to me, to ask me what was the matter. But, of course, he was Granddad, and he did not. He saw my pain, wanted to help, but couldn’t. So he sat there, looking out of the window, and occasionally at a spot on the wall near my face, until I started to talk.
I told him about the family at the pub at lunchtime, and the sense of dread I felt being in this valley, even after all these years. ‘There isn’t a day,’ I told him, ‘when I don’t thinkabout Hannah. When I don’t long to see her again, even just for five minutes. Hug her, you know?’
Granddad nodded curtly. I noticed that he had pulled his bedsheets straight and managed to pat down his pillow prior to his walk along the landing. I was moved. A need for order, even amid the densest chaos, was something I understood.
‘And then I thought something was changing, Granddad. I met a man, down here in Gloucestershire, while Mum and Dad were looking after you.’
