by Rosie Walsh
Reuben was the only man I’d gone to bed with before this. Our first time was confused, brief, and hopeful; the bonding of two lost little souls in someone’s spare room with the thunder of an air conditioner and a carefully planned sound track on the CD player. And it had meant everything to us at the time, but in the years that followed we’d smiled ruefully at how bad it had been. There had been no such awkwardness last night. No misplaced fumblings or self-conscious questions. I bit my lip, smiling shyly at Eddie’s sleeping face.
He made a snuffling sound, stretched out, and rolled in closer toward me. He didn’t wake up. Just reached out an arm and hooked it round me. I closed my eyes, committing to memory the feeling of his skin on mine, the gentle weight of his hand.
The world and its unsolvable problems seemed a very long way away.
I went back to sleep.
* * *
• • •
When I woke up again, it was gone midday and the air smelled richly of baking bread.
I put on a sweatshirt of Eddie’s and crept out of his bedroom into the big space he lived in. Light streamed in through skylights and dusty windows, spliced and jigged by a network of old beams, full of rivets and pits and rusty hooks.
Eddie was moving around the kitchen at the other side of the room, talking to someone on the phone. Fine particles of flour lifted off the work surface he was wiping down with his spare hand, shifting in a sunny cloud under the roof lights.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Derek, thank you. Yeah, you too. Speak soon, okay? Bye.”
After a brief moment of stillness he turned on a radio hiding behind glass bottles on a windowsill. Dusty Springfield was coming to the end of “Son of a Preacher Man.”
His phone rang again.
“Hi, Mum.” He rinsed a cloth and ran it over the surface. “Oh, she’s there already? Brilliant. Good. Yes, I . . .” He paused, leaning against the worktop. “That sounds nice. Well, have a great time, okay? I’ll pop over on my way to the airport if I don’t hear from you before then.” A pause. “Of course, Mum. Okay. Bye.”
He put the phone down and wandered over to the oven to peer through the window.
“Hello,” I said eventually.
“Oh! Hello!” He spun round. “I’m making bread!” He beamed at me and I wondered if this was all just some sort of psychedelic dream, a desperate escape from the quotidian trudge of divorce papers and accommodation searches. This ebullient, handsome man, sweeping into a part of the world I’d come to dread and painting everything in bright colors.
But it wasn’t a dream; it couldn’t be, because the commotion in my chest was too great. Somehow, it was real. (Would we kiss on the mouth? Would we hug, as if we’d known each other for years?)
There was a breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the room, a wide, polished plank of something beautiful. I took a seat at it and Eddie smiled, throwing his tea towel over his shoulder and walking toward me. He leaned across the bar and answered my question by kissing me decisively on the mouth. “I like you in my sweatshirt,” he said.
I looked down at it. It was gray, worn ragged at the wrists. It smelled of him.
Dusty Springfield gave way to Roy Orbison.
“I’m very impressed that you made bread,” I said. “It smells incredible.” Then I frowned. “Oh, hang on a minute. Are you one of those terrifying people with hundreds of skills?”
“I’m a person who can do a lot of things badly but with great enthusiasm,” he said. “You can call that skilled, if you like. My friends have other names.” He pulled up a stool on the other side and sat opposite me, pushing some orange juice in my direction.
I felt his knees press against mine. “Tell me some of your nonskills,” I said.
He laughed. “Um . . . I play the banjo? And the ukulele. I’m teaching myself the mandolin, which is trickier than I thought. Oh, and I learned to throw an ax recently. That was brilliant.” He mimed it, making a thwacking noise.
I grinned.
“And . . . well, sometimes I challenge myself to try to make things out of bits of limestone I find in the woods, only I’m especially bad at that. And I bake bread quite often, although again without any great skill.”
I started to laugh. “Anything else?”
He ran a finger round one of my knuckles. “Don’t invent some fiction in your head about me being a high achiever, Sarah, because I’m really not.”
An alarm went off and he got up to check the bread. Eddie’s sense of place was so strong, I thought, imagining him combing the local woods for things to carve. It was almost as if he were a part of this valley, like an oak. Pieces of him would be flung into the wider world during season change or wild weather, but his core stayed in the earth. This earth, in this valley.
The thought came to me suddenly that I didn’t feel like that about LA. I loved it: it was my home. I loved the heat, the scale, the ambition, the sense of anonymity it gave me. But I wasn’t the dust of its deserts or the waves of its ocean.
“Bread needs a little more time,” Eddie said, sitting back down. “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about you as a tree and me as a desert.”
He smiled. “That doesn’t make us very compatible.”
“It wasn’t like that. It was . . . Oh, ignore me. I was being weird.”
“What sort of tree was I?” he asked.
“I went for an oak. An old one.”
“Can’t go wrong with oak. And I’m forty in September, so old’s reasonable.”
“And I was just thinking how rooted you seem to be. Even though you say you still work in London quite often, it’s like . . . I don’t know. Like you’re a part of the landscape.”
Eddie looked out of the window. Below us, clumped lavender leaned on the breeze.
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” he said. “But you’re right. No matter how many times I go up to London to fit a kitchen, play football, see friends—and find myself thinking, I love this city—I come back to this valley. I can’t not. Do you get that same wrench when you leave LA?”
“Well, no. Not entirely. But it’s where I’ve chosen to be.”
“Right.” There was a slight pinch of disappointment in his voice.
“But it’s funny,” I went on. “Listening to you talking about all these things you do, these hobbies you have, I realized how much I miss all of that. You can get anything and everything in LA, at any time of night, have it delivered, downloaded . . . I mean, they’re talking about deliveries by drone at the moment. There’re no limits to what’s possible. But for all that, I can’t remember the last time I made anything, other than my bed. I rarely exercise, I don’t play an instrument, I don’t go to evening classes.”
How flat I sound. How two-dimensional.
Eddie just looked thoughtful.
“But who cares about hobbies, if you’re spending all your time doing a job you love?” He twirled a strand of my hair into his fingers.
“Mmmm,” I said. “I do love it, but it’s . . . challenging. Nonstop. Even when I come back to the UK for my holiday, I work.”
Eddie smiled.
“Choice,” I said, eventually. “You’re going to remind me I have a choice.”
He shrugged. “Look, not many people set up a children’s charity from scratch. But everyone needs downtime. Nonthinking time. It keeps us human.”
He was right, of course. I seldom delegated. I held my work close, cloaked myself in it: I always had; it was the only approach I knew. But for all that activity, all that industry, was I there? Was I really there, in my life, the way Eddie seemed to be in his?
This is not the conversation to be having with a man you’ve barely known twenty-four hours, I told myself, but I seemed unable to stop. I’d never had this conversation with anyone, including myself. It was like I’
d turned on a tap and the bloody thing had come off in my hands.
“Maybe it’s not a city-living thing, or even a job thing,” I said. “Maybe it’s just me. I do sometimes look at other people and wonder why I can’t find time to do all the things they seem to do outside of work.” I poked at a cuticle. “Whereas you . . . Oh, ignore me. I’m rambling. It’s just that it all feels very natural, being here . . . Which is confusing, because normally when I come home, I can’t wait to leave.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you another time.”
“Sure. And I’ll teach you the banjo. I’m terrible, so you’ll be in great company.” He turned over his hand and put mine in it. “I don’t care what hobbies you do. I don’t care how hard you work. I could talk to you all day. That’s all I know.”
I stared at him with wonder.
“You’re great,” I said quietly. “Just so you know.”
We looked straight at each other, and Eddie leaned over again and kissed me. Long, slow, warm, like a memory brought back by music.
* * *
• • •
“Do you want to hang around for a while?” he asked, afterward. “If you don’t have anything to do, that is? I’ll show you my workshop downstairs and you can make a mouse of your own. Or we can sit around kissing. Or maybe we can take potshots at Steve, a little bastard of a squirrel who lives on my lawn.” He rested his hands on my legs. “I just . . . Sod it. I just don’t want you to go.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. I smiled. “That sounds lovely. But your mother . . . ? I thought you were worried about her?”
“I am,” he said. “But she—well, she doesn’t have explosive breakdowns, more just gradual declines. My aunt’s come to stay because I’m off on holiday on Thursday. She’ll be keeping a close eye on her.”
“You’re sure?” I asked. “I don’t mind if you need to go and see her.”
“Quite sure. She called earlier, said they’re off to the garden center. She sounded well.” Then: “Trust me,” he added, when I looked doubtful. “If things were even approaching serious, I’d be there. I know what to look for.”
I imagined Eddie watching his mother, week in, week out, like a fisherman watching the sky.
“Okay,” I said. “Well then, I think you should start by telling me about Steve.”
He chuckled, flicked a crumb, or maybe an insect, out of my hair. “Steve terrorizes me and just about every species of wildlife that tries to live here. I don’t know what’s wrong with him; he seems to spend almost all of his time in the grass, spying on me, rather than up a tree where he belongs. The only time he gets off his backside is when I buy a bird feeder. No matter where I hang the bloody things, he manages to bust in and eat everything.”
I started laughing. “He sounds great.”
“He is. I love him, but I also dislike him very intensely. I have a machine-gun-grade water pistol—we can have a go at him later if you like.”
I smiled. A whole day with this man and his squirrel, in this hidden corner of the Cotswolds that reminded me of all the best parts—and none of the worst—of my childhood. It was a treat.
I looked around me at the vestments of this man’s life. Books, maps, handmade stools. A glass bowl full of coins and keys, an old Rolleiflex camera. At the top of a bookshelf, a collection of garish football trophies.
I wandered over toward them. The Elms, Battersea Monday, said the closest one. Old Robsonians—Champions, Division 1. “Are these yours?”
Eddie came over. “They are.” He picked up the recent one; ran a brown finger along the top. A little ruler of dust slid off the edge. “I play for a team in London. Which might sound a bit odd, given that I live here, but I’m up there quite a lot doing kitchens and . . . well, they’ve proved very difficult to leave.”
“Why?”
“I joined years ago. When I thought I was going to give London a proper go. They’re . . .” He chuckled. “They’re just a very funny group. When I moved back to Gloucestershire, I couldn’t quite bring myself to retire. Nobody can. We all love it too much.”
I smiled, looking again at the jumble of trophies. One went back more than twenty years. I liked that he’d held friendships so long.
Then: “No!” I breathed. I plucked out a book from farther down his shelves: the Collins Gem Birds, the exact same edition that I’d had as a child. I’d spent hours poring over this little tome. Sitting in the fork of the pear tree in our garden, hoping that if I stayed there long enough, the birds would come and roost with me.
“I had this, too!” I told Eddie. “I knew every single bird off by heart!”
“Really?” He came over. “I loved this book.” He turned to a page near the middle and covered the name of the bird with his hand. “What’s this?”
The bird had a golden chest and a burglar’s mask across his eyes. “Oh, God . . . No, hang on. Nuthatch! Eurasian nuthatch!”
He showed me another.
“Stonechat!”
“Oh, my God,” Eddie said. “You are my perfect woman.”
“I had the wildflowers one, too. And the butterflies and moths. I was a precocious little naturalist.”
He put the book to one side. “Can I ask you something, Sarah?”
“Of course.” I loved hearing him say my name.
“Why do you live in a city? If you feel like this about nature?”
I paused. “I just can’t live in the country,” I said eventually. Something about my face must have told him not to pry further, because, after watching me for a few seconds, he ambled off to get out the bread.
“I had the trees book.” He looked around for an oven glove, settling eventually for the tea towel on his shoulder. “Dad got it for me. It was he who got me into woodwork, in fact, although he certainly never imagined I’d make a career of it. He used to take me to help him collect firewood from the log man in autumn. He let me smash up some of the logs to make kindling.”
He paused, smiling. “It was the smell. I fell in love with the smell at first, but I was fascinated by how quickly you could turn a tough-looking log into something completely different. One winter I started pinching bits of the kindling to make stick men. Then there came the toilet-roll holder, and the worst mallet in history.”
He chuckled. “And then there was Mouse.” He opened the oven; pulled out the baking tray. “My pride and joy. Dad wasn’t particularly impressed, but Mum said it was the most perfect little mouse she’d ever seen.”
He put a round, fragrant loaf onto a wire rack and closed the oven.
“He left when I was nine. Dad. He has a family on the Scottish border, somewhere north of Carlisle.”
“Oh.” I sat back down. “That must have been rough.”
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
An easy silence fell while he retrieved butter, honey, a jar of what looked like homemade marmalade from the fridge. He passed me a plate with a deep crack running through it (“Sorry!”) and a knife.
“Does your mum know I’m here?” I asked, as he started slicing the bread.
“Ow!” He wrenched his hand away from the loaf. “Why am I so greedy? It’s far too hot to eat.”
I laughed. If he hadn’t gone straight in, I would have.
“No,” he said, protecting his hand this time with the tea towel. “Mum doesn’t know you’re here. I can’t have her think her only child is a dirty old mating goat.”
“I suppose not.”
“Maybe if I’m really good, we can do some more mating,” he said, throwing a red-hot slice of bread in the direction of my plate.
“Certainly,” I said, sticking my knife into the butter. It was full of crumbs. Reuben, who liked to serve butter hipster style, smeared onto a piece of slate or some ridiculous rock or other, would have hated it.
“You’re great a
t mating,” I added, and I didn’t blush.
Eddie did. “Really?”
And, because I didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, I got up, marched round the planky island thing and closed my arms around him, kissing him hard on the mouth. “Yes,” I said. “This bread is too hot even for me. Let’s go back to bed.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dear Alan,
Please forgive this message from out of the blue.
You replied to my post on Eddie David’s Facebook wall earlier today. I’m a bit worried, and wanted to share what limited information I have.
Prior to your holiday with Eddie, I spent a week with him in Sapperton. I left on Thursday, June 9, so that he could pack, and he said he’d call me from the airport.
I never heard from him again. After trying several times to contact him, I gave up, assuming that he had changed his mind. I never fully believed it, however, and when I saw your reply to my post I knew I hadn’t been deceiving myself. Below is my phone number. I would really appreciate you sharing any thoughts or info that you might have. I am not a stalker! I just want to know he’s okay.
Best wishes,
Sarah Mackey
Eleven P.M. leached silently into midnight. My phone buzzed and I hurled myself at it, but it was just Jo saying she’d got home safely. No reply from Alan. I lay back in bed and felt my heart straining in my chest. It hurt. It actually hurt. Why did nobody tell you that a broken heart wasn’t just a metaphor?
Midnight turned into one, then two, then three. I imagined Tommy and Zoe in their giant bed along the hallway, and wondered if they held each other while they slept. I remembered Eddie’s body, wrapped around mine, and felt a longing so fierce it seemed to bore through my skin. Then I spent a while intensely disliking myself, because in Istanbul there were bodies in bags, whereas Eddie was—quite probably—a man who simply hadn’t called.
At four, having caught myself in the act of searching online for death notices in Eddie’s area, I let myself quietly out of Tommy’s flat. Dawn was pressing gray smudges into the sky, and a lone street sweeper was already at work, shuffling slowly past Zoe’s smart Georgian terrace. It would be another couple of hours until the city reached full throttle, but I couldn’t take another moment of the suffocating silence and the buzz of dark theories, each more terrible than the last.