Page 10 of The Man Who Didn't Call
‘You can’t legislate love,’ he replied cheerfully.
An unexpected thought came to me:I miss England.
‘How did you two meet?’ I asked, stepping onto the green.
He smiled at the sheep. ‘Well, I was sitting here, feeling a bit sorry for myself, when this young lady appeared as if from nowhere. We started talking. And before I knew it, we were discussing moving in together.’
‘This youngman,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about sheep, but even I can tell you he’s not a lady.’
After a moment the man leaned backwards and checked the sheep’s undercarriage.
‘Oh.’
The sheep stared at him. ‘Is your name not Lucy?’ he asked. The sheep remained silent. ‘He told me his name was Lucy.’
‘His name is not Lucy,’ I confirmed.
The sheep baaed again and the man laughed. A delirious jackdaw flapped out of a tree on the lane behind us.
Somehow I was standing right by them. The man, the sheep and me all together on the bleached village green. The man was looking up at me. He had eyes the colour of foreign oceans, I thought, full of warmth and good intentions.
He was rather lovely.
It will be many months before you can expect to develop authentic feelings towards another man, I’d been told this morning. The advice had come courtesy of a preposterousapp called the BreakUp Coach, which my closest friend in LA, Jenni Carmichael, had downloaded (without permission) to my phone, the day after Reuben and I had announced our separation. Every morning it sent me dire push notifications about the state of emotional trauma I was in right now, and how that was totally OK.
Only I wasn’t in any sort of emotional trauma. Even when Reuben told me he was sorry but he felt we should divorce, I’d had to force myself to cry so as not to hurt his feelings. When the app told me about my shattered heart and my broken spirit, I felt as if I were the recipient of someone else’s mail.
But it made Jenni happy when she saw me reading the messages, so I kept the app. Jenni’s emotional well-being – increasingly delicate, as her thirties came to a close, taking with them her hopes of reproduction – was heavily dependent on her ability to look after the needy.
The man turned back to the sheep. ‘Well, it’s a shame. I thought we had a future, Lucy and I.’ His phone started to ring.
‘Do you think you’ll be OK?’
He pulled his phone a little way out of his pocket and cancelled the call. ‘Oh, I expect so. At least, I hope so.’
I busied myself scanning around for another sheep, a farmer, a helpful sheepdog. ‘I feel like we should do something about him, don’t you?’
‘Probably.’ The man pulled himself up to standing. ‘I’ll call Frank. He owns most of the sheep around here.’ He dialled a number on his phone and I swallowed, suddenly uncertain. Once the sheep had been dealt with, we would have to stop joking and conduct an actual conversation.
I stood on the green and waited. The sheep was picking unenthusiastically at the coarse spokes of grass around him,keeping tabs on us. He’d been shorn recently, but even his cropped coat looked suffocating.
I wondered why I was here. I wondered why the man had been feeling sorry for himself earlier. I wondered why I was raking a hand through my hair. He was talking to Frank on the phone now, chuckling easily. ‘OK, mate. I’ll do my best. Right,’ he said, looking at me. He really did have lovely eyes.
(Stop it!)
‘Frankie’s not going to get here for a good hour. He says Lucy’s broken out of a field down by the pub.’ He turned to the sheep. ‘You came a long way. I’m impressed.’
The sheep carried on eating, so he looked at me instead. ‘I’m going to try and get him back down the lane. Fancy helping me?’
‘Sure. I was heading down there for lunch anyway.’
I hadn’t been heading down there for lunch. I’d actually been waiting for the 54 to Cirencester, because there were people in Cirencester and there was no one at my parents’ house. Last night an A&E nurse from the Royal Infirmary in Leicester had called to say my grandfather had been admitted with a hip fracture. Granddad was ninety-three. He was also infamously offensive, but had nobody other than Mum and her sister, Lesley, who at the moment was in the Maldives with her third husband.
‘Go,’ I’d told Mum when she wavered. Mum didn’t like letting me down. Every June she would put on a towering production for my visit: seamless logistics, a house full of flowers, exquisite food. Anything to persuade me that life in England was far better than anything California could offer.
‘But . . .’ I watched her sag. ‘But you’ll be on your own.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Besides, Granddad will be thrown out of hospital if he doesn’t have you there to apologize for him.’
