by Rosie Walsh
“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 pajamas. 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 walker 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 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 think about 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.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, there was the faintest elevation of an eyebrow.
“Go on, please,” he said, after what felt like an age.
I paused. “I take it you know about my husband and me splitting up.”
Again, a slow nod. “Although I had to drag it out of your mother,” he said. “There’s something about being above the age of eighty that convinces people you will die of shock if you are party to bad news.” He paused. “I mean, who in your generation doesn’t get a divorce these days? I’m surprised you people even bother marrying.”
A blue tit whirled onto the feeder hanging outside the spare-room window, pecked at the nut hole and whirled away again. Kaleidoscopic disks of evening sun played on the window seat, where Hannah used to keep her toy hedgehog collection. The room was warm and silent.
“You were saying.”
I was saying nothing, I nearly retorted, but there was something about his posture, his eyes, that told me he wanted to know. That he might actually care. And if I’d chosen to talk to him, I had to expect the odd grenade.
So I told him everything. From the moment I heard Eddie’s laughter on the village green to my run along the canal just now, and all the desperate, shameful things I’d done since he disappeared.
“Luckily you were spared the indignities of online stalking, growing up when you did,” I told him. “But it’s not a nice experience. It never delivers what you’re hoping for.” It was too therapeutic, this business of talking to a silent person; I couldn’t stop. “It never gives you control of the situation.”
Granddad didn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t condone your actions,” he said. “They sound asinine and entirely self-defeating.”
“Agreed.”
“But I do understand, Sarah.”
I glanced up; for once he was looking straight at me.
“I fell in love with a woman for whom I would have torn down buildings, if I could. I loved her until the day she died. I still love her, years later. Even now it is painful.”
“Granny.”
He looked away. “No.”
A big cupboard of silence opened up between us. Downstairs, Mum and Dad were laughing; muffled noises gave way to the sound of Patsy Cline spilling out of Dad’s speakers.
“Ruby Merryfield,” Granddad said eventually. “She was the love of my life. Everyone told me I couldn’t marry her, and so I didn’t. She’d had a lover when she was younger, had had a child. It was placed in an adoptive family. It broke her heart. Nobody knew, other than my parents, because, of course, my father was her doctor. He forbade me from marrying her. I fought a spirited battle, Sarah, but in the end I had to give in because I was at medical school and I needed his support.”
He made a quivering spire with his hands. “And so I stopped calling for her, and I married your grandmother a year later, and we had a nice life together, Diana and I. But I thought about Ruby every day. I missed her. I wrote her letters I didn’t dare send. And when I heard she’d died of influenza, I took myself off on a fishing trip for several days because I was ill with the grief. Over near Cannock. It was far too beautiful. I wished I’d gone somewhere ugly.”
Granddad’s eyes swam. “She had this laugh, like a little bird at first, only then it would broaden to something so unladylike. She saw the joy in life, wherever she went.”
Granddad pressed the back of his hand, where the skin was pouchy and liver-spotted, into his eyes. Light was fading fast from the room.
“I should never have given up on her,” he said.
The blue tit came back and we sat in silence, watching it.
“I don’t entirely regret my decision,” he went on. “As I said, I cared for Diana very much, and I mourned her when she died. And without her I could not have had your mother and her sister, although, God knows, your aunt has been a handful.”
My aunt’s latest husband was called Jazz.
“But if I had my time again, I would not have given up,” Granddad said. “I don’t believe that love is meant to be like an explosion. It is not meant to be dramatic, or ravenous, or any of the silly words ascribed it by writers and musicians. But I do believe that when you know, you know. And I knew, and I let it go without any real sort of a fight, and I will never forgive myself that.”
He closed his eyes. “I need to go to bed now. And no, I do not need your help. Please could you shut the door on your way out? Thank you, Sarah.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dear Eddie,
In the absence of a request to stop writing, I’m going to continue.
It had been agreed that I would stay in LA for another few months, even though this would mean missing out on my final A-level year. I didn’t care: I couldn’t go back.
I had a total of two friends, and I lived in the “guest suite” of a house in Beverly Hills that had a pool and a full-time housekeeper. The only thing that reminded me even vaguely of home was the flank of plane trees on either side of South Bedford Drive. Only they weren’t really like home, because it had been a brutal summer and they were charred like crispy bacon by the time September was under way.
Tommy’s mum arranged for me to clean some of her friends’ houses so I’d have a little cash: it was my only option, without a visa. I cleaned for the Steins, the Tysons, and the Garwins, and on Wednesday afternoons I did a weekly grocery shop for Mrs. Garcia, who used to beg me to become her kids’ au pair. It bothered her a great deal that I said no. She couldn’t fathom how I coul
d get on so well with her kids and yet refuse to look after them, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her why.
I thought I’d reached my full height but started growing again, upward and outward. I had boobs and a waist and a bottom. I was turning into the shape I am now, I guess, and I was working out what sort of a woman I wanted to be. Strong, I’d decided. Strong, driven, and successful. I’d spent years being a wimp, a wallflower, a limp nobody.
One day in November Mrs. Garcia’s daughter, Casey, broke her arm at preschool. The au pair Mrs. Garcia had eventually hired stayed with Casey’s brother and I was asked to accompany the little girl to the hospital in a taxi. Mrs. Garcia was racing back from a conference in Orange County. She insisted I take her daughter to CHLA, even though it was miles away—she knew people there, she said; she wanted Casey to see a familiar face while she waited for her mom.
Poor Casey. She was so frightened by the pain; by the time we’d driven across town from Beverly Hills her teeth were chattering and she wouldn’t talk to the doctors. I couldn’t stand it.
As soon as Mrs. Garcia arrived, I left the hospital and went to find a joke shop someone had mentioned, near the intersection of Vermont and Hollywood. I wanted to find something that would make Casey laugh. Before I got there, though, I was assaulted by a great explosion of kids coming out of a Mexican restaurant right on the corner. They had balloons and face paint and they looked to be a million miles from where Casey was right now.
Shortly after they were chased back inside by a harassed-looking mother, a clown came out of the restaurant and slumped against the wall. He looked shattered. He got out a packet of fags and took a Mexican beer wrapped in a paper bag out of one of his pockets. I laughed as he opened it up and took a long, grateful drink. He was a very funny sort of a clown, no face paint or wig, just a boy with a red nose and odd clothes. And an illegal beer.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said, when he saw me. “I’m not really drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party.” I told him not to worry and asked for directions to the joke shop. He pointed down Hollywood at a store covered in graffiti and murals. “Can I come with you?” the clown asked. “I’m traumatized. I trained with Philippe Gaulier in France. I’m meant to be a theater practitioner, not a kids’ entertainer.”
I asked what the difference was. Turned out it was quite considerable.
“I tell you what,” I said to him, pausing on the steps of the joke shop. “If I promise not to tell on you for drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party, will you do me a favor? A fairly big favor?”
So this poor bloke, who probably smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, followed me into the Children’s Hospital and paid Casey a visit.
As we approached Casey’s ER cubicle, I felt his energy change. “From this moment on I will be Franc Fromage. Don’t use my regular name,” he instructed, even though I didn’t know what his “regular name” was.
Franc Fromage arrived at Casey’s bedside and produced a ukulele. He sang a song to her arm, about it being broken, and even though Casey was still frightened and upset, she couldn’t help but laugh. And then he asked her to help him make up the next verse, and she was concentrating so hard on that that she forgot where she was and how frightened she was. Soon after, she agreed to let the doctors set her arm.
Monsieur Fromage told me he’d enjoyed the visit very much. He got very overexcited and started using all sorts of theatrical and psychological terms I didn’t understand. I was rescued by a nurse asking if Franc Fromage would come back, please, because all the other kids wanted to meet the ukulele man with the red nose.
When we finally left, he gave me his phone number and—visibly terrified—told me I owed him a drink. “My name is Reuben,” he said gravely. “Reuben Mackey.”
So I called him and we went for a drink. Reuben said he’d been reading about hospital clowning since he’d met me and apparently it was a real thing with a method and studies. Some guy in New York had set up the first charity in the eighties. I want to train with him, he said. Use my skills to actually help people, not just make them laugh.
Nothing happened that night. I think we were both too shy. Besides, Tommy and Jo were watching us from a table across the street “in case he turns out to be one of them clowns that murders people,” as Jo put it.
Then Mrs. Garcia asked if I could get Franc Fromage to come to the hospital again because Casey was having her plaster cast removed. He said okay, but only if I bought him another drink.
He not only helped Casey get her plaster off but he spent hours with the other kids in orthopedics, too. He only stopped when he realized his hands were trembling with hunger. “Please come back!” one of the nurses implored.
The problem was, he couldn’t afford to work for nothing. He was living in a tiny shared apartment in Koreatown, he told me, couldn’t afford to earn a cent less.
That’s when I said, “How about I raise the money for you to do one day per month?” I told him I worked for all these wealthy people and how news of his time in the hospital had spread fast.
And that’s how it began. My relationship with a clown and the birth of our company. He went to New York to train with psychotherapists, child psychologists, and theater practitioners. Then he came back and we got going. He visited the sick children and I stayed in the background raising money and organizing, which suited me perfectly. I wanted to be involved—I wanted it more than he knew—I just didn’t want to be on the front line.
I was good at it. Reuben was good at it. People saw and heard about what we did and they wanted us to visit their sick kids. We hired three more people; Reuben trained them. Before long we founded our first little training academy. We got married, rented a flat in Los Feliz, near the Children’s Hospital. Years later the hipsters moved in and Reuben was in his element.
As for me, I had a purpose, and a direction, and I had no time to think about the life I’d left. I had a man who needed me to be strong when he was weak, and vice versa. Our love was based on reciprocal need and strength, and it worked perfectly.
For a long time that kind of love was all I thought I needed. When I promised to love and honor him forever, I meant it. But, of course, I changed. As the years passed, I no longer needed him, and so our balance was fatally disrupted. We cared so much about each other, Eddie, but without that balance of need, the scales couldn’t settle. My inability to give him a baby was the final straw. After the car accident I couldn’t stand being near kids; couldn’t bear the thought of a child suffering. The very idea of bringing a child into the world—a defenseless baby like my little sister had once been—created a storm of blind panic.
So I stuck to helping sick children from behind the scenes. It was bearable, and it was safe. It was the best I could manage, but it just wasn’t enough for Reuben. He wanted to hold his own baby in his arms, he told me. He couldn’t imagine a future in which that wasn’t possible.
By the time he had the courage to end things, I realized I had no idea what love should feel like. But when I met you, I finally knew what it should be. Our few days together weren’t a fling for me, and I don’t believe they were for you, either.
Please write to me.
Sarah
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DRAFTS FOLDER
You’re right, Sarah. It wasn’t just a fling. And it wasn’t just a week, either; it was a lifetime.
Everything you felt about you and me, I felt, too. But you should stop messaging me. I’m not who you think I am. Or perhaps I’m who you think I’m not.
God, what a mess. What a terrible mess.
Eddie
✓ DELETED, 00:12 A.M.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After a mere four days with my parents in Gloucestershire, I returned to London. I was to lunch in Richmond with Charles, our trustee; then I would speak at the palliative care conference he had helped organize. I would stay th
e night with Tommy, and begin my five-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey back to Los Angeles early the next morning.
I sat on the train up to London in quiet stillness, unable to tell if I was numb or simply resigned. I said the right things to Charles over lunch, and at the conference I spoke with precision but no passion. Charles, as I left, asked if I was all right. His concern brought me to the edge of tears, so I told him about my separation from Reuben.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” I begged. “We want to announce it properly at our next board meeting . . .”
“Of course,” Charles had said quietly. “I’m so very sorry, Sarah.”
I felt a terrible fraud.
* * *
• • •
Tomorrow, I promised myself, as I headed back to Central London on the train. Tomorrow I would regain control. Tomorrow I would get on a plane and I would fly back to LA, where I’d rediscover the numb of the sunshine, confidence, and my best self. Tomorrow.
My train pulled into Battersea Park Station and I rested my head against the greasy window, watching the scrum on the opposite platform. People were squeezing themselves onto a train before those on board had had a chance to get out. Shoulders were braced, mouths compressed, eyes were down. All of them looked angry.
I watched a man in a red-and-white football kit fight his way off the train, a suit folded over his arm. He walked toward the empty benches outside my own train, and I stared blankly as he folded his suit carefully into a satchel. After a while he straightened out and checked his watch, glanced briefly at me and then away, then hauled the satchel over his shoulder.
And then, as my own train began to pull away from the platform, I turned my head to follow his back as it walked off toward the exit steps, because I suddenly registered what it said on his football strip. Old Robsonians. Est. 1996.