Page 31 of Broken Country

We begin to reminisce about the good times with Bobby. The toy tractor he had for his fourth birthday, which we had wrapped so carefully in many sheets of paper. Bobby took one look at it and burst into tears. “Why can’t I have a real tractor? This one doesn’t even go.” The day we took his stabilizers off, soon after that birthday, and he cycled around the yard for an hour without stopping. We called him the Lone Biker for a bit. The way Bobby always insisted on going milking on Christmas morning before he would open a single present from his stocking. He’d stuff his pockets full of apples for the cows and biscuits for the sheep. “It’s their Christmas too.”

Tonight, I can hear his voice exactly, and it’s not often I can. My eyes are full of tears, Frank’s too. It’s a knife-edge we are on, we both know that, but it feels significant, this thing which binds us so closely together and yet we neverdiscuss it. Something about being away from the farm with all its memories has made it possible.

“I wish—” Frank says and then he stops himself, but I see pain rushing into his face.

There are so many things both of us wish about the day Bobby died. So many things that could have made all the difference if we’d done them. But we didn’t.

Suddenly, I understand how it is our togetherness that bars us from healing. It’s like an exterior vision, as if I’m looking from the outside in, the two of us vacillating back and forth on our shared black rock of grief.

“I do, too,” I say. “Everything you wish, I wish. But it won’t bring him back. We have to try and let him go.”

We reach for each other’s hand at the same time.

“Are we going to be all right?” Frank says, and I see how much it costs him to ask it. Frank, who never talks about feelings or failings or anything that comes too close to the bone, and certainly not a question like this, one which might result in the wrong answer.

I’m not sure what to say. Are we going to be all right? Is there a time when we won’t both ache for our missing child? When the guilt which lurks in corners, waiting for the right moment to attack us, might diminish into something that is easier to bear?

“I hope so,” is the best I can come up with and Frank nods, as if this is what he expected.

“Time,” he says, and we laugh a little ruefully because we have a private joke about the people who bandy this cliché about, as if it might actually be insightful.

We are still smiling when the grim-faced waiter comes over to ask if we’d like coffee and perhaps a digestif to go with it; he can particularly recommend the cognac. When we both say “yes” with alacrity, he cracks his first smile of the night.

Before

In the morning, I watch Gabriel dressing for his lecture, throwing on the clothes he discarded yesterday: corduroy trousers, a black jumper with several of my long dark hairs clinging to it, a tweed jacket on top.

“See?” he says, holding out a hair between his thumb and forefinger. “I miss these.”

At the door he turns back for one more kiss, runs his hands over my body beneath the sheets. “It’s torture leaving you. I will not be thinking about Sir Gawain for the next sixty minutes, that’s for sure.”

“Can’t you skip it? Just this once?”

He holds out several pages of lined paper, covered in his handwriting. “It’s my paper this week, unfortunately. Don’t move, I won’t be long.”

After he’s gone, I put on one of his shirts and boil the kettle on the little camping stove Gabriel brought with him from Meadowlands. All those mornings by the lake when he brewed coffee and cooked scrambled eggs and bacon, it seems a lifetime ago.

I take a cup of tea to Gabriel’s desk with its view of the gardens below. I watch a boy cutting across the lawn, disheveled, harried, late for his nine o’clock lecture, perhaps. Next year, so long as I don’t mess up my A levels, it will be me. I revel in the fantasy for a few minutes while I drink my tea. I’ll be in my college room at St Anne’s, but Gabriel will have his own lodgings by then. I picture us cooking exotic feasts of beef Stroganoff or coq au vin in the evenings for our friends, whom I imagine as a broader mix than the peopleI met last night. Poets and scientists and art historians and musicians. Boys and girls from grammar and comprehensive schools who have worked so hard to get here.

His mother was right. I am more comfortable with my own kind. In my own way I can be just as elitist.

A green notebook catches my eye and I reach for it almost without thinking. I’m about to open it when I realize what I’m doing: This is probably Gabriel’s novel, the novel Louisa has been allowed to read.

I understand, utterly, the horror of letting someone read your work before it’s ready. And also, how it will never be ready unless you put it out there, risking humiliation and failure. Reading someone else’s writing is like having direct access to his innermost thoughts. And he chose to reveal that to Louisa, not me.

As soon as I open it I realize this is not Gabriel’s novel. It’s his diary.

September 25

Missing Beth like an illness, I feel sick with it. There’s no one like her here.

September 30

How is it possible to be with someone every day for a whole summer and then never see them? I feel like a part of me is missing. We used to say we shared a brain. Well, half my brain is gone.

I slam the notebook shut. Reading another person’s diary is the worst kind of deceit, the lowest, the ugliest. I will not allow myself to do it. Minutes pass, and the temptation to look again burns in my throat. It’s no good: I cannot resist. This is how Adam must have felt biting into his apple. One minute there’s purity and innocence, the next I am fully immersed in a world I wish I had never entered.

The mentions of me start to dwindle as the weeks pass and are replaced more and more by Louisa, or rather, “L.” There are other names too: Richard, Claudia, Nigel, Imogen. Talk of good lectures and indifferent ones, parties and concerts and nights in the pub. Weekend house parties staying, no doubt, at the grand country houses belonging to his friends. I begin to flip the pages, searching only for the name that sears and, sure enough, in the last two weeks, I find what I am looking for.

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