Page 38 of The Man Who Didn't Call
‘Right,’ Reuben said. ‘That way, the kids are in charge.’
Oh my God. Who was this tedious double act, and where was my message?
‘So he turned away and your clowns started doing all these improvisations together, and he couldn’t resist them. I mean, they hadmein stitches! By the time they left the ward, he was laughing non-stop.’
Grudgingly, I nodded. I’d seen it often enough.
Desperate for something – anything – to concentrate on that wasn’t Eddie, I launched into a tale about the first time I’d seen Reuben working with kids after he’d trained as a Clowndoctor. Kaia watched me as I rambled on, her littlebrown chin resting on her little brown hand, the other holding Reuben’s. I stopped eventually and looked at my phone, already picturing the physical shape of his reply, the length of the message, the grey oblong that held it.
But it was not there. It was not there, and Eddie was offline again.
‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ I asked, pulling my purse out of my bag. ‘Wine?’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’s a quarter past twelve. Perfectly respectable.’
I wrapped my hands around my torso as I waited at the bar, although whether it was to comfort myself or hold myself together I didn’t know.
Twenty minutes later, by which point my solo glass of wine had begun to offer a faint numb, Kaia excused herself and went off to the toilet. I watched her slender legs move under her skirt and tried to imagine Kaia coming to pick Reuben up after work so they could go for dinner, or maybe an evening hike in Griffith Park. Kaia coming to our Christmas party or our summer barbecue; having lunch with Reuben’s sweet, nervous parents at their house in Pasadena. Because all of that would be happening. (A much better choice, I imagined Roo’s mum saying. She had never quite trusted that I wouldn’t eventually return to England with her son.)
‘She’s lovely,’ I told Reuben.
‘Thank you.’ He turned gratefully towards me. ‘Thank you for being so friendly. It means a lot.’
‘We needed each other,’ I said, after a pause, surprising us both. ‘And now we don’t. You’ve met a nice girl and I’m happy for you, Roo. I mean it.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, and I could hear the joy deep in his heart. It was like Reuben had taken one of those long, slow breaths you had to do at the beginning of a yoga class, but he’d never gone back to his normal rhythm.
‘Hey,’ Reuben began. He looked uncomfortable. ‘Hey, look, Sarah, I . . . I have to say, your emails yesterday were kind of out of character. You sounded . . . not very businesslike. And you sent those documents to our trustees without talking to any of us. Not to mention agreeing with a child that you’d send some of our clowns to her sister without even calling the hospital in question. I was at a loss.’
Kaia was weaving her way back to our table. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had a bad day. It won’t happen again.’
He watched me. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine. Just tired.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Well, shout if you need me. We make mistakes when we don’t follow protocol.’
‘I know. Hey, look, we need to talk about the hospice pitch.’
‘Sure,’ Reuben said. ‘Now?’
‘We can’t talk about it with Kaia here.’
Reuben frowned. ‘Oh, she won’t mind.’
‘I do. This is business, Roo.’
‘No,’ Reuben said gently. ‘No, it’s charity. Not business. And Kaia gets it. She’s a friend, not a foe, Sarah.’
I made myself smile. He was right. Everyone except me was right these days.
Reuben and Kaia left forty minutes later. Reuben insisted on making a plan for our hospice pitch, in spite of what I’d said. And I’d gone along with it, because how could I not? Kaia had at least offered to go and sit outside while we talked. (‘No, no!’ Reuben said. ‘There’s nothing secret about this.’)
Kaia kissed me and then gave me a hug. ‘So great to meet you,’ she said. ‘Sogreat.’
And I said ditto, because there really was nothing about this woman that wasn’t nice.
After they’d left, I turned my phone off and my laptop on and I worked. People came and went; tuna salads and chips with wobbling pyramids of mayonnaise; wine glasses smudged with workday lipstick and pints of hoppy ale. Outside, the sun was covered with grey sheets. Rain fell, wind blew, the sun returned. The South Bank steamed; umbrellas were shaken.
It was on day five of our affair that I’d looked at Eddie David and thought,I would spend the rest of my life with you. I would commit to it, right now, and know I wouldn’t regret it.
