Page 27 of Broken Country

“She could leave him behind.”

“Easier said than done with a baby. They take a lot of looking after.”

“I thought you were meant to be on my side.”

He doesn’t sound like him; there are brittle, hard edges to his voice, and something else, a thickness that makes me think Leo is holding back tears.

“I am on your side. One hundred percent. And so is she. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

“You’d never have left your son behind in a different country. I’ve seen your face when you look at the photo of him in your bag.”

His words knock the breath out of me. I keep a photo of Bobby with me and I look at it so many times during the dayI’m almost unaware I’m doing it. But to think of Leo, a boy who always tries to hide the missing of his mother, watching me, a woman who always tries to hide the missing of her son, shocks me. It is all the more obvious to me why Leo and I clicked straightaway, but it also feels increasingly dangerous. It’s not the real thing. I need to keep a grip on that.

“Look, here’s your dad,” I say, and we watch Gabriel hurrying across the grass toward us.

He sits down on the other side of Leo, puts an arm around his shoulder. “I’m really sorry,” he says.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough.”

Gabriel doesn’t say anything else and I think how sensible that is, his not trying to make things better, just accepting the disappointment and sadness which cannot be fixed for now.

After a moment, Leo drops his head onto Gabriel’s shoulder.

A hawk swoops from the sky in a dramatic curve, skimming the surface of the lake before settling on the grass.

“Look, a buzzard,” Gabriel says. “Beautiful creatures, aren’t they?”

“It’s a sparrow hawk, Dad. Buzzards are bigger, and their feathers are brown not gray.”

“Get you.” Gabriel punches him on the shoulder. “What else have you been learning behind my back, country boy?”

The lake is surrounded by woodland; it’s a haven for birds, particularly in early summer. Leo and I have been identifying them using a pair of binoculars that used to belong to Bobby.

“Bobby knew the names of hundreds of birds,” Leo says. “I only know a few so far.”

“Bobby?” Gabriel asks, then catches himself. “Beth’s son. Of course.”

Is it strange I talk to Leo about Bobby sometimes? He’s curious about him, probably because he is ten, just a year older than Bobby when he died. I like telling him about the things we used to do together. I like the fact Leo is getting to know Bobby, even a little bit, and talking about him helps me to keep his memory alive.

I listen as Leo tells Gabriel about the things Bobby could do. Milk cows, trill like a blackbird. He sounds almost proud of Bobby, a boy he will never meet. I feel touched by how much he has taken in.

But then Gabriel turns his gaze upon me and I see the question in his eyes.Why are you doing this? Why are you telling Leo about your dead child?

Before

Summer fades and Hemston is transformed by the changing season—trees showing off in coppery gold and beetroot red and banana yellow, and Gabriel is not here.

To begin with he writes constantly, letters that burn with longing and read like poetry. As the term progresses and he becomes more immersed in university life his letters change, the heat goes out of them, they feel rushed, or worse, written out of duty. One thing nags at me—how often he mentions Louisa Scott, for they are the best of friends, apparently. Gabriel has been absorbed into her circle, an arty, literary crowd whom I picture smoking and drinking Campari while they dissect the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

I spend my time studying for my interview at St Anne’s in November, forgoing invitations to parties and reading day and night until my eyes hurt and at last I am forced to close my books.

“It’s too much,” my father says, cajoling me to come for a walk with him for fresh air, a change of scene.

“Let her be,” my mother says. “Only a few more weeks to go.”

She is almost as ambitious for me as I am myself. When my mother left school in the 1930s hardly any women went to Oxford, it simply wasn’t an option for her. I know, because my father teases her about it: She intends to vicariously live the life she wasn’t able to have through me.

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