Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)
1. 1968 Hemston, North Dorset
1968 Hemston, North Dorset
“Gabriel Wolfe is back living in Meadowlands,” Frank says, the name exploding at me over breakfast. “Divorced now. Just him and his boy rattling around in that huge place.”
“Oh.”
It seems to be the only word I have.
“That’s what I thought,” Frank says. He gets up from his side of the table and walks around to mine, takes my face in his hands, kisses me. “We won’t let that pillock cause us any grief. We’ll have nothing to do with him.”
“Who told you?”
“It was the talk of the pub last night. Took two huge great lorries to bring all their stuff from London, apparently.”
“Gabriel hated it here. Why would he come back?”
His name feels strange on my tongue, the first time I’ve spoken it aloud in years.
“There’s no one else to look after the place. His father long gone, his mother on the other side of the world. Up to her neck in dingo shit, with any luck.”
Frank always manages to make me laugh.
“What’s here for him, anyway?” Frank says, casually, but I see it, the unsaid thought that flits across his mind. Aside from you. “He’s bound to sell up and move to Las Vegas or Monte Carlo or wherever it is these…”—he grapples for the word, looks pleased with himself when he finds it—“ celebrities hang out.”
Frank spends all the daylight hours and a fair few at nighttime out on the farm, caring for our animals and tending the land. He works harder than anyone I know but always takes time to notice the beauty of a spring sunset or the sudden, dizzying soar of a skylark, his attunement to weather and wildlife set deep in his bones. One of many things I love about him. Frank doesn’t have time to read novels or go to the theater. He wouldn’t know a dry martini if someone chucked one in his face. He’s the very antithesis of Gabriel Wolfe, or at least, the one we read about in the papers.
I watch my husband leaning against the door to pull on his boots. In twenty minutes’ time his skin will be permeated three layers deep with the stench of cow dung.
The door, rapped hard from the other side, makes Frank start. “Bloody hell,” he says, yanking it open so quickly his brother falls into the room.
Our mornings invariably start this way.
Jimmy, still ruddy from last night’s beer, eyes screwed half shut, one strand of hair sticking straight up as if it’s gelled, says: “Aspirin, Beth? Got a banger.”
I take down the medicine box from the dresser where it lives primarily in use for Jimmy’s hangovers. Once upon a time it was full of infant paracetamol and emergency plasters.
There are five years between them but Frank and Jimmy look so similar that, from a distance, even I struggle to tell them apart. They are well over six foot with dark, almost black hair and eyes so blue people often do a double take. Their mother’s eyes, I’m told, though I never had the chance to meet her. They are both wearing shabby corduroys and thick shirts, soon to be covered in the navy overalls that are their daily uniform. In the village they are sometimes called “the twins,” but only in jest; Frank is very much the older brother.
“What happened to ‘just going to finish this pint and call it a night’?” Frank says, grinning at Jimmy.
“Beer is God’s reward for an honest day’s toil.”
“That from the Bible?”
“If it isn’t, it should be.”
“We’ll be with the lambs at midday. See you then?” Frank calls to me as the brothers go out of the door, still laughing as they cross the yard.
With the men out milking and the kitchen cleared there are plenty of jobs to get on with. Washing—so much of it—both brothers’ overalls rinsed and waiting for me on the scrubbing board. The breakfast washing-up. A floor that always needs sweeping, no matter how often I take the broom to it.
Instead, I make a fresh pot of coffee and put on an old waxed jacket of Frank’s and sit at the little wrought iron table looking out across our fields until my gaze meets its target: three red chimneys of differing heights peering above the fuzz of green oak on the horizon.
Meadowlands.