Ghosted: A Novel

Sarah!” Dad, who looked exhausted, hugged me tightly. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God you’re here. Our still, small voice of calm.”

He offered me some wine, which I refused. After my meeting on the South Bank yesterday with Kaia and Reuben, and the text message warning me off Eddie, I’d gone to Jo’s and drunk far too much. My body had told me this morning that it would not tolerate an alcoholic drink for some time.

“Oh, Sarah.” Mum hugged me. “I feel awful about the last few weeks. I really am so sorry.” My mother spent a lot of time apologizing for her failings, in spite of having done nothing but love and look after me from the day I was born.

“Stop saying that. I had a lovely time. You saw me in Leicester. Was I not happy?”

“Happy enough, I suppose.”

I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told them about Eddie. Perhaps because I was supposed to be home for the anniversary of the accident, not having sex with a handsome stranger. Or perhaps because, by the time I had arrived in Leicester, I was beginning to worry.

Or perhaps, I thought now, handing some flowers to Mum, it was because a part of me already knew it wouldn’t work out. The same part of me that had stood facing Reuben on our wedding day and thought, He’ll be taken away from me eventually. Just like Hannah.

Mum put my flowers in one vase and then swapped it for a different one. And then a different one still. “Mind your own business,” she said, when she caught me watching her. “I’m a retiree now, Sarah. I’ve earned the right to opinions on flower arranging.”

I smiled, quietly relieved. Last time I’d seen Mum, she had seemed diminished somehow, squashed, like a carton flattened for recycling. Which didn’t feel at all right, because, save for the odd lapse, she had seemed so splendidly robust in the years following the accident. In fact, her fortitude was the only thing that assuaged my guilt at having just cleared off and left them in all that pain and chaos.

Today she—and Dad, for that matter—were how I’d always held them in my mind’s eye: kind, solid, assured. And mildly alcoholic, I reminded myself, as Mum poured herself some wine, even though we were soon to leave for the pub. Don’t put them on a pedestal. They’ve just dealt with things in a different way.

I glanced up at the ceiling and lowered my voice. “How’s it been? How is he?”

“He’s a rotten old bastard,” Mum said squarely. “And I’m allowed to say that because he’s my father and I love him and I know what a rough time he’s had. But there’s no denying it—he’s a rotten old bastard.”

“He is,” Dad admitted. “We’ve been keeping tally of the number of complaints he’s made today. So far we’re at thirty-three, and it’s only quarter to one. Why aren’t you drinking?”

“I’ve a hangover.”

Mum slumped. “Oh, I feel terrible when I’m mean about him,” she said. “He’s impossible to be with, Sarah, drives us mad. But underneath it all I feel very bad for him. He’s been on his own so long now. His quality of life is awful, cooped up in that house on his own, nobody to talk to.” My grandmother, a woman so round she had seemed almost spherical in the photographs, had died of a heart attack when she was forty-four. I had never met her.

“Well, at least he’s got you two. I’m sure he appreciates the company, even if it might seem otherwise.”

“He behaves as if he’s been kidnapped by terrorists,” Mum sighed. “He actually said this morning, when I gave him his pills, ‘I can’t believe you dragged me down to this godforsaken place.’ I was very close to putting an end to his suffering.”

Dad laughed. “You’re an angel with him,” he said, and gave her a tender kiss. I looked away, mildly disgusted, very touched, and, actually, a little bit jealous. They were still so happy together, my parents. Dad had taken Mum out every day until she’d agreed to marry him; he’d telephoned her, written to her, sent her gifts. He’d taken her to concerts and let her sit at the sound desk with him. He had never left her hanging. He had never not called.

I asked if I should go up and say hello before we left for lunch at the pub.

“Luckily for you, he’s asleep,” Mum said. “But he’ll definitely want to see you.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Inasmuch as he ever wants to see anyone.”

•   •   •

We sat outside the Crown, even though it wasn’t really warm enough. Gusts of wind riled my mother’s hair into red flames, and Dad looked stunted, or perhaps drunk, because his side of the table was sloping down the hill. In the field rising steeply above the lane, a sheep had sunk down onto its knees to graze amid the pungent nettles. I laughed and then stopped laughing. I wondered if I would ever find sheep funny again.

“Tell me about this cello business,” I prompted Dad. On the way up, Mum had reported that he’d been taking lessons.

“Aha! Well, I was having a few jars with Paul Wise last autumn, and he was saying he’d just read in the newspaper about how you can keep your brain sharp in old age by playing an instrument—”

“So he just drove to Bristol and bought a cello,” Mum interrupted. “He was awful at first, Sarah. Terrible. Paul came and listened to him—”

“And the bastard just stood there and laughed,” Dad finished off. “So I practiced like mad, and then found a teacher in Bisley, and I’m soon to take Grade Two. Paul will eat his words.”

I raised my glass to propose a toast to Dad, just as a woodpecker drummed its rocky beak into the side of a tree. My hand sank back down to the table. The sound reminded me so strongly of Eddie, of our time together, that I found myself unable to speak.

The oily rolling returned to my stomach.

•   •   •

My parents talked about Granddad while I watched another family, sitting by a blaze of delphiniums further down the garden. The parents looked like mine: just beginning their transition into old age; grayer, more crumpled, but still firmly in their lives, not looking back on them. Their daughters were how I imagined Hannah and I would look if we could sit here today. The younger daughter seemed to be holding forth with some vehemence on some topic or other and I was mesmerized, imagining my own little sister as an adult. Adult Hannah would be full of opinions, I thought. She’d love a good polemic, never shy away from fights—the sort of woman who leads committees and is secretly feared by the other parents at school.

“Sarah?” Mum was looking at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

Then: “That family over there.”

Mum and Dad looked. “Oh, I think the husband is one of our neighbor’s friends,” he said. “Patrick? Peter? Something with a ‘P.’”

Mum didn’t say anything. She knew what I was thinking.

“I just want that,” I said quietly. “To be able to sit at this table with you two and Hannah. I would give everything I had if it meant we could all sit here. Talking, eating.”

Mum’s head dipped, and I sensed Dad had gone very still, as he always did when I talked about Hannah. “Well, we’d like that, too,” my mother said. “More than we can say. But I think we’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to focus on what we do have rather than what we don’t.”

A plate of cloud rolled over the sun and I shivered. It was typical of me to do this. To make my parents feel uncomfortable, remind them of how things could have been.

•   •   •

By six o’clock my heart was pounding and my thoughts had scattered like filaments from a dandelion clock. I told my parents, who were politely dismayed, that I was going for a run.

“New exercise regime,” I smiled, hoping they would allow me this fiction.

Sickened by myself, I went upstairs to change. I couldn’t decide what was worse: that this adrenalized state had become so familiar or that I couldn’t find a solution beyond wearing myself out and lying to those who cared about me.

Remind me when you’re back off to LA? Tommy texted just before I left.

Leaving for Heathrow 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.

OK. So you’re staying with us on Monday night, right?

If that’s OK. I’ve got a conference in Richmond on the Monday; I should get to yours by about 7:30 p.m. But if not convenient, I can easily stay on Jo’s sofa? I imagine you and Zoe have had it with me!

No, it’s fine. Zoe’s in Manchester again. So you’re not here Sunday night?

Negative. Why? Are you entertaining another woman?

Er, no.

Jolly good. See you Monday night, then, Tommy. Everything OK?

Everything’s fine. So, Monday morning: will you go straight to the conference, or will you come here first?

I frowned. Tommy and Zoe had been remarkably generous with their spare room on this and every visit, giving me a key and telling me to use the flat as if it were my own. And apart from the odd time we’d made dinner for each other, I didn’t think Tommy had ever asked about my comings and goings.

I was going to come to your flat first, but can go straight to Richmond if you’d prefer? I wrote.

No, Tommy replied. It’s fine. See you then. And don’t you dare go hunting for Eddie while you’re down there, OK? Don’t look him up, don’t go running past his front door, don’t go and sit in that pub. Do you understand?

I understand. Have a nice weekend entertaining your secret lady. xx

Watch it, he wrote. Then: I mean it, Harrington. Don’t even look the man up, do you hear?

For a moment I wondered if Tommy was messaging me because he was meeting Eddie. I considered this possibility for a good few minutes before I realized how ridiculous it was.

Would I run as far as Sapperton, in the hope of seeing Eddie? The idea had been brewing for days. Although who knew if he was down here in Gloucestershire or up in London. Or in bloody outer space. And what would I do if I actually saw him?

But I knew that I would run to Sapperton, and I knew it would make me feel even worse, and I either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop myself.

•   •   •

The run was how I imagined a breakdown might feel. Eddie was everywhere I looked: watching me from tree branches, sitting on the old sluice, walking in the meadow that lay between the wandering branches of the river. And before long he was joined by Hannah, wearing the same clothes she’d worn that day, that awful day.

As I approached the tiny footbridge, I saw a woman walking toward me from the direction of Sapperton. She, at least, seemed real: a raincoat, hair tied back, walking shoes. Until she stopped suddenly and stared at me.

For reasons I couldn’t quite understand, I stopped jogging and stared at her, too. Something about her was familiar, only I knew I’d never seen her before. She was too far away for me to be sure about her age, but from here she looked a good deal older than me.

Eddie’s mother? Was that possible? I peered at her, but saw no obvious resemblance. Eddie was broad, round-faced, tall, whereas this woman was extremely thin and short, with a sharp chin. (And even if it was Eddie’s mother, why would she stand in the middle of a footpath, staring at me? Eddie had said she was depressed, not mad.) Besides, she didn’t know I even existed.

After another few seconds she turned round and started walking back in the direction she’d come. She walked fast, but her movements had the jerky irregularity of someone to whom movement does not come easily. I’d seen it enough times in children recovering from injury.

I stood there for a long time after she’d disappeared out of sight.

Had that been a face-off, or had the woman simply decided to finish her walk and go home? After all, there was no way of circling back from that section of the path: you either did a round trip of quite a few miles via Frampton Mansell or you turned round and went straight back to Sapperton.

I turned for home. Several times, I felt convinced that Eddie was walking along the footpath behind me. But the footpath was empty every time. Even the birds seemed silent.

I can’t stand this, I thought, as I arrived at my parents’ porch a few minutes later. I can’t stand it. How did I end up here again? Scrabbling around this valley after someone I’ve already lost?

Next to the coat pegs by the front door was a framed photograph of Hannah and me in the field behind our house. I was sitting in a cardboard box, Hannah next to it, a bunch of flowers in her small fist. Trails of mud and roots from the flowers dirtied her dungarees. She was scowling at the camera, scowling with a comic intensity that made my heart hurt. I stared at her, at my precious little Hannah, and loss thickened like glue in my chest.

“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.”