Page 11 of Broken Country

I feel him watching me carefully. Frank picked up the pieces when Gabriel and I broke up. He knows, better than anyone, how long it took me to recover, how great the cost.

“He was nice,” I say, smiling at the blandness of the word. “Grown up, different. A dad, you know?”

“Once a posh nob, always a posh nob,” Jimmy says.

As far as I know, Jimmy has never met Gabriel before today, but he dislikes him regardless, out of loyalty to Frank. The bond between the brothers is fierce. When I readOf Mice and Men, I felt almost dizzy with recognition, as if Steinbeck had peered into my life. It’s insulting of me to compare them to George and Lennie. I’d never say it out loud. There’s nothing simple about Jimmy, yet he has an unerring, childlike devotion to Frank which sometimes feels too much. But mostly there’s a real sweetness to him. He can charm anyone from the church ladies to the local bobby; he’s a cap doffer and a door opener and usually the first to buy a round, even when he can’t afford it.

Helen is in the pub tonight; she has been my closest friend since school. When Bobby died, the whole village mourned for a week or two. Then they seemed to forget. Or perhaps, they didn’t want to remind Frank and me of our loss, aiming instead for breezy conversational chat that contained what was left unsaid like a layer of silt beneath. You could see the anxiety ticking across their faces.What can we talk about? I know, the weather!Helen was different. She came to our house every week, without fail, for the first year. She let herself in and washed up anything that needed to be washed up, cleaned the kitchen, changed the beds. She didn’t speak much; she just let us be while she worked in the background, cooking, tidying, making tea, quietly helping our lives to work better. I have never forgotten it.

Helen waits until Frank and Jimmy are talking. Then she says, in a low whisper: “Gabriel’s back? What the hell?”

“And we managed to kill his dog on his first afternoon.”

We burst out into the kind of laughter reserved only for the most inappropriate of moments, just as we did at school.

“Share the joke?” Frank says, turning around.

“Nothing interesting,” Helen says, smoothly. “Did I tellyou our spaniel got herself knocked up? One-night stand with a Lab by the looks of things, the minx. Six puppies in all. We’ve one left to find a home for. A boy, very handsome.”

“I’ll take him,” I say, and Frank laughs in surprise, kisses the side of my face.

“Consultation is not something my wife chooses to engage in,” he says. “Why not? Be nice to have a pup on the farm.”

But already an idea is forming. I know full well the healing charms of a puppy. And there is someone who needs that even more than me.

Before

It follows that an order of nuns who named their school the Immaculate Conception Convent should be violently opposed to sex outside marriage, and quite possibly within it. Sister Ignatius, our current headmistress, has demonized it enough over the years that we are predestined either to develop lifelong sexual hang-ups or—as in the case of my sister—set upon a trail of wild promiscuity the moment we are set free. Rumor has it a sixth former did fall pregnant not so long ago—she was hustled out of the school before the pregnancy had even begun to show.

The head takes us for religious studies every Monday, last lesson of the day.

“Elizabeth.” Sister Ignatius snaps out my name but, at first, I am too lost in thought to react.

My body has been aflame since the last time Gabriel and I were together, there is no other word for it. I have kissed a few boys but never one who connected me to this sharp and insistent desire. I long now for things never imagined before, I think of him undressing me, of his fingers trailing across my skin, of our bodies pressed together, of more. There is an ache I have that was not there before, as if I have been catapulted into a foreign universe; where previously lust did not exist, now it’s all there is.

“Elizabeth Kennedy!”

“Yes, Sister?”

“Would you stay behind after class, please? I’d like a word.”

When the rest of class has filed out, I stand beside Sister Ignatius’s desk, waiting.

“I hear you’re thinking of applying to Oxford?”

When I told my English teacher I was hoping to read English literature at Oxford, she cautioned me against it. Oxford was not meant for “girls like me,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, but I caught her drift.

“That’s right.”

“The school would be very proud, I’m sure, to have one of our girls there. You’re bright enough, so long as you apply yourself.”

This is unexpected, I can’t help beaming back at her.

“The school will help you however we can.” The nun nods to signal the end of our chat. “Hurry now, Elizabeth, or you’ll miss your bus.”

My head is full of Gabriel on the bus journey home. On Saturday I am spending the whole night with him and it’s hard to think of anything else. I have told my parents I am staying at Helen’s. I don’t like lying to them but I know my mother would worry if she knew the truth. She’d tell me it was too soon.

When we arranged it, Gabriel said: “Please don’t think I’m planning on taking advantage of you.”

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