Page 6 of The Man Who Didn't Call
His mother turned her attention to the other child on the back seat. ‘Now look,’ she said, putting a plump hand on my leg. Her nails had been painted in a colour called Rubble for today. ‘I think you have to face facts. You met a bloke; you spent a week with him; then he went on holiday and never called you again.’
The facts were too painful at the moment; I preferred theories.
‘Fifteen days he’s had to get in touch, Sarah. You’ve been sending him messages, calling him, all sorts of other things that quite frankly I’d never expect of someone like you . . . and yet – no response. I’ve been there, love, and it hurts. Butit doesn’t stop hurting until you accept the truth and move on.’
‘I’d move on if I actually knew that he simply wasn’t interested. But I don’t.’
Jo sighed. ‘Tommy. Please help me out here.’
There was a long pause. Was there any humiliation greater than this? I wondered. A conversation like this, at the age of nearly bloodyforty? This time three weeks ago I’d been a functional adult. I’d chaired a board meeting. I’d written a report for a children’s hospital with which my charity was soon to start working. I’d fed and groomed myself that day, made jokes, fielded calls, responded to emails. And now here I was with less command of my emotions than the seven-year-old sitting next to me.
I checked Tommy’s eyebrows in the rear-view mirror to see if he was likely to throw anything in. His eyebrows, which had taken on a life of their own when he’d lost his hair in his early twenties, were nowadays more reliable barometers of his thoughts than his mouth.
They were creased together. ‘The thing is,’ he said. He paused again, and I sensed the effort it was taking to extract himself from his own problems. ‘The thing is, Jo, you’ve assumed I agree with you about Sarah. But I’m not sure I do.’ His voice was soft and careful, like a cat skirting danger.
‘What?’
‘I predict a riot,’ Rudi whispered.
Tommy’s eyebrows worked up his next sentence. ‘I’m sure the reason most men don’t call is that they’re just not interested, but it sounds to me like there might be more to this. I mean, they ended up spending a week together. All that time, can you imagine? If Eddie was just after you-know-what, he’d have disappeared after one night.’
Jo snorted. ‘Why leave after one night if you can pack in seven days’ you-know-what?’
‘Jo, come on! That’s what twenty-year-old boys do, not men of nearly forty!’
‘Are you talking about sex?’ Rudi asked.
‘Er, no?’ Jo was thrown. ‘What do you know about sex?’
Rudi, terrified, returned to his fraudulent iPad activity.
Jo watched him for a while, but he was bent studiously over the screen, muttering in his Russian voice.
I took a long breath. ‘The one thing I keep thinking about is that he offered to cancel his holiday. Why would he—’
‘I need to wee,’ Rudi announced suddenly. ‘I think I’ve got less than a minute,’ he added, before Jo had time to ask.
We pulled up outside the agricultural college, right across the road from the comprehensive Eddie had gone to. A grey mist of pain hovered as I stared at its sign, trying to imagine a twelve-year-old Eddie bouncing through the gates. A round little face; the smile that would crease his skin into laughter lines as the years passed.
Just passing your school, I texted him, before I had time to stop myself.I wish I knew what happened to you.
Jo was suspiciously upbeat when she and Rudi got back in the car. She said it was turning into a lovely day and that she was very happy to be out in the countryside with us all.
‘I told her she was being mean to you,’ Rudi whispered to me. ‘Do you want a piece of cheese?’ He patted a Tupperware of rejected cheese slices from the sandwiches Jo had given him earlier.
I ruffled his hair. ‘No,’ I whispered back. ‘But I love you. Thank you.’
Jo pretended not to have heard the exchange. ‘You were saying that Eddie offered to cancel his holiday,’ she said brightly.
And I felt the fissures of my heart open wider, because, of course, I knew why she was finding it so hard to be patient. I knew that of the many men to whom Jo had given her heart and soul (and, often, her body) in the years before Rudi, almost none had called her. And the ones who had called always turned out to have a collection of other women on the go. And each and every time she had let them string her along, because she could never quite give up the hope of being loved. Then Shawn O’Keefe had arrived on the scene, and Jo had got pregnant, and Shawn had moved in, knowing Jo would feed and house him. He hadn’t had one single job in all that time. He’d disappear for whole nights without telling her where he was. His ‘job interview’ today was pure fiction.
But Jo had been allowing this for seven years, because she somehow convinced herself that love would blossom if she and Shawn worked just a little harder, if she waited just a little longer for him to grow up. She’d convinced herself they could become the family she’d never had.
Yes, Jo knew all about denial.
But my own situation seemed to be too much for her. She’d tried to humour me since Eddie had disappeared off the face of the earth, forced herself to listen to my theories, told me he might just call tomorrow. But she hadn’t believed a word of it, and now she’d cracked.Don’t allow yourself to be used the way I have, she was saying.Walk away now, Sarah, while you still can.
The problem was, I couldn’t.
