Page 62 of Broken Country

I sit there, face upturned to the sun, opening my eyes from time to time to check on father and son as they listen intently to the cries of wildlife, dark heads bent toward each other. “I love it when you’re not working, Dad,” Leo says, and Gabriel wraps an arm around his shoulder.

“So do I. We should do this more often.”

“It’s the best,” Leo says, swiveling his head from Gabriel to me. “Isn’t it?”

“It is,” Gabriel says, with more feeling than should really be allowed.

“It is,” I say, quietly.

Friday Morning

Nina turns up just as I am about to leave for Meadowlands.

“Time for a cup of tea?” she says.

We take it outside to the little table in the back garden. Autumn is coming, our hedge is burgeoning with blackberries, rose hips, elderberries, and sloes. Time was, Bobby would have been out here, lips stained purple, standing on tiptoe to grasp the fattest cluster of fruit.

As soon as we sit down, Nina says: “Gabriel had a journalist at his place the other day, didn’t he?”

“Did he? I wouldn’t know.”

Nina looks at me, irritation in her pretty face. “Well, you would know, because you were there. And I want to know why.”

“Why what?” I say, stalling.

“Why you were at Meadowlands in the middle of the day when Leo was at school. Why some hack is snooping around in the pub asking questions about you.”

Oh, I want to tell her. I do. Unleash a stream of angst and joy and confusion, a snapshot of the myriad emotions switching through me from moment to moment. Nina and I are close, but she is also married to my husband’s brother. She is the last person on earth I can tell.

“Tell me what the journalist wanted with me. And I’ll explain what I was doing at Meadowlands.”

“All right.” Nina picks up her mug, takes a sip. “She was very young, very confident—well, you met her. She came in at lunchtime, the first time. Ordered a lemonade. Stuck outlike a sore thumb. I was curious about her, so I asked her where she’d got her white boots from. A ‘little boutique in Carnaby Street,’ she said.” Nina carries off Flora’s clipped London accent perfectly. “We got chatting and she told me she’d been interviewing ‘the famous author’ Gabriel Wolfe. Said she was hoping for some background from the villagers who’d known him, what he was like as a boy, blah-blah. I told her the Wolfe family never came in the pub, preferring to drink their own champagne at home, no doubt. As far as I know they didn’t go to church either, so no one really saw much of them. Then she said an old friend of his was at the house. Beth. They seemed pretty close. She asked me where she could find you.”

I do not flush beneath my sister-in-law’s hard gaze. Even as the panic rises in my chest, I am thinking of a story, a half-truth which might work. This is who I have become, a practiced, efficient liar.

“Nosy cow,” I say, but Nina doesn’t even smile.

“So? Why were you there?”

“If I tell you, you’ll have to promise not to say anything to Jimmy. Or Frank. Not until I’ve had time to tell them myself.”

She nods, impatient.

“Gabriel’s new novel is a revamp of an old idea, a love story he was working on when we first knew each other as teenagers.”

“Don’t tell me he’s writing about yourlove affair?”

The expression in her voice is almost comical. A vocal recoil. Nina knows very little about the time Gabriel and I were first together—it was long before we knew her and is not exactly a topic anyone likes to discuss at Blakely Farm.

“No, nothing like that. But getting to know me again reminded him of the conversations we used to have. Wetalked about writing a lot back then, it was something we had in common. And, because he was stuck with this draft, he started talking to me about it. We’ve been brainstorming the plot, what might happen next, and I think he has found it helpful. That’s all.”

“I see.”

I don’t like the way Nina is looking at me. Or how her voice sounds: odd, suspicious.

“Well, you should know the journalist came back in the evening. Probably been snooping around the village all afternoon. She sat at the bar and had a Campari and lemonade. Frank and Jimmy were there.”

“What? No.”

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