Page 54 of Broken Country

“And quite soon after it ended, she started a relationship with Frank Johnson?”

“Yes.”

“They married young, didn’t they?”

“They did, yes.”

I feel it, a new alertness in the room. We are all of us—the judge, the jury, the journalists on the press bench, the members of the public who queue up day after day to ensure their place in the gallery—attuned to the changing nuances of Donald Glossop’s tone. A softening in his timbre does not signal empathy, quite often the reverse.

“One might think your daughter, Beth, had not fully recovered from this first, most passionate love affair.”

My father says nothing. His hands are not visible but I know he will be clasping them together—Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people.How many times did he chant the rhyme with Bobby? A hundred? Five hundred?

The prosecutor’s voice grows forceful. “It is my belief Frank Johnson harbored a ferocious jealousy of Gabriel Wolfe from the very beginning of his marriage.”

“No.”

“No? He wasn’t jealous of the man your daughter was in love with as a girl? And he wasn’t jealous many years later when the affair started up again, right under his nose?”

“Frank is not jealous. That isn’t his temperament.”

“Are you an honest man, Mr. Kennedy?”

My mother frowns and Eleanor sucks in a long, jagged breath as she tries not to cry. My father is the most honest man you could ever meet.

“I am.”

“Then allow me to ask one final question. Do you genuinely believe your son-in-law felt no jealousy whatsoever while the woman he loved was spending her daylight hours in bed with another man?”

So heartless to draw that picture for my father in the witness stand, my mother beside me in the gallery. You’d think I’d be macerating in shame, but the truth is, I’ve been ashamed for so long now it is my background noise, myeveryday wallpaper, the emotion so familiar I feel little else. Our love triangle—the farmer, his wife, and the famous author—has been prodded and picked over and sensationalized out of all proportion in Fleet Street. A blizzard of headlines pointing the finger of blame—and shame—at me. You grow inured to it after a while. None of it matters, anyway.

“Frank understood my daughter’s reasons for the affair,” my father says. “If he felt jealous, then he was extremely good at hiding it.”

Donald Glossop allows himself a tiny smile of satisfaction. “Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. No further questions, my lord.”

Sunday

“Are you and Frank all right?” asks yesterday’s bride, as we stand shoulder to shoulder at the sink facing a landslide of washing-up.

I wonder what Nina means. It could be anything. When we finally got to bed around three this morning, Frank fell asleep straightaway. Several hours later, when he rose to milk the cows, I was so exhausted I didn’t hear him leave. We have not had a chance to speak since the wedding, but last night I caught him watching me across the tent from time to time. He looked so sad. And it eats away at me, that sadness. It’s rare for a person to be purely good. I’m not. Gabriel isn’t. Nor Jimmy or probably even Nina, not all the time. But Frank has kindness running through him. Injuring him feels doubly cruel, like torture.

And all the while, my mind is a rash of conflicting thoughts.I love Gabriel, I won’t leave Frank. I love Frank, what am I going to do about Gabriel?No, Nina, we are not all right.

“I said to Jimmy last night, it was selfish of us to choose Elvis for our wedding dance. You were crying, weren’t you? I saw you.”

“Oh,” I say, although the “oh” is more a gasp of pain as Bobby swims into the room.

Bobby. In some ways so present, but mostly, just horribly absent. The ache of missing him never really goes. Not for long.

“Shit,” Nina says, curving a soapy hand around my neck, pulling me close. “And now I’ve made you sad.”

I can feel the cool strip of her new wedding ring on the back of my neck.

“Just the hangover,” I say.

“God, this hangover. Why did we drink so much?” When Nina laughs a beam of light catches her eyes, turning them from green to gold.

The day fills with villagers coming to collect their things, then staying to help. Cups of tea and slices of wedding cake. Stories from the night before. Helen’s husband woke up fully clad in his suit and tie, even his boots. Someone else reversed their back wheels into a ditch and abandoned the car. The violinist who played “Ave Maria” during the ceremony hitched a ride home in a Land Rover and stood, head and shoulders through the open sunroof, serenading the lanes with “Hey Jude.” I wish I had seen that.

---