5. Before
Before
If I were to paint a picture of a classic English lake it would look just like the one at Meadowlands.
The surface is covered with clusters of water lilies, the flowers a fist of white and pink with bold yellow hearts. At the far end a pair of willow trees stretch out across the water, and three white swans are gliding toward us in a uniform line, as if the gaps between them have been measured with a ruler.
Gabriel has set himself up with a rug, a picnic hamper, and a folding canvas chair, a pair of fishing rods propped up against it. He gestures to the chair—“Be my guest”—but I choose to sit next to him on the rug instead. From the hamper he produces a tartan thermos of tea and a packet of Garibaldi biscuits.
I raise my eyebrows and he grins.
“I thought you might not come if I told you it was squashed-fly biscuits.”
I watch him pour tea into a white tin mug with a navy rim. He has beautiful hands, with long elegant fingers. He adds milk and sugar without asking and hands it to me.
On the far side of the lake, near to the willows, there’s an ancient-looking khaki tent, the kind you see in safari films. I can imagine Grace Kelly sitting outside it, sipping a gin and tonic, a neat shirt tucked into her fawn-colored breeches.
“What’s the tent for?”
“I camp here in summer. Wake up and swim every morning. Fry bacon and eggs on a little stove.”
It seems odd to me, a boy who lives in a house the size of Meadowlands, choosing to rough it instead under canvas.
Like everyone else in the village I’ve been to Meadowlands for the annual summer fete. I’ve eaten wedges of Victoria sandwich in the tea tent, hooked myself up to my sister for the three-legged race, come last but one in the egg and spoon. I’ve seen Gabriel’s mother, Tessa, dressed like a fashion model in head-to-toe black: her neatly tailored suit more fitting for Paris than Hemston; a wide-brimmed hat, huge sunglasses; scarlet lips her only hint of color. Compared to all the other mothers in their plain print dresses and sandals, she always seemed exotic and untouchable. I can picture his father, Edward, besuited, bespectacled, and much older, gamely lobbing balls at the coconut shy.
What I can’t remember is Gabriel.
“Why have I never seen you at the village fete?”
“I’ve always been away at school. Not anymore, though. I sat my last exam two weeks ago. Three months at home before I go to university, not sure how I’ll stand it.”
I gesture to our view. The glittering water and overhanging trees, their fronds reflected in a mirror image of feathery gold. The irregular stipple of white and pink. “How hard can it be?”
He glances at me, then shrugs. “It’s not a sob story, if that’s what you mean. I know how lucky I am. But I’ve been at boarding school most of my life. I don’t know anyone my age here. I suppose what I’m saying is, I don’t much like being at home.”
“What about your parents? Don’t you get on with them?”
He swivels his hand in a so-so gesture. “My father is quiet, scholarly, spends most of his time shut up in his study, reading; I don’t quite know how he ended up with my mother—a moment of madness, I think. They could not be more different. He doesn’t ask me anything, she never leaves me alone. She wants to know every detail of my life, who my friends are, which parties I’ve been invited to, whether or not I have a girlfriend. Especially that. She has a weird fascination with my love life. And she can be difficult. Especially when she drinks, which is most of the time.”
I met Gabriel fifteen minutes ago, perhaps less, but already I can tune into the words he doesn’t say. I can picture him aged ten or twelve, sitting beside a tall, exquisitely dressed Christmas tree, surrounded by presents but craving something else: teasing and chaos and banter.
When I begin to talk about my own family, I catch the wistfulness on Gabriel’s face. I tell him about my sister, who is about to finish her first year as a secretary for a solicitors’ firm in London. Her days may be spent taking minutes for short-tempered men, but at night she explores London in all its postwar glory. She writes to me of jazz clubs in Soho and after-hours drinking dens, wandering at dawn through the flower market at Covent Garden, waking hours later to a bedroom strewn with red roses.
To a country girl, the life my sister is leading seems one of unparalleled color and richness; I cannot wait to join her.
I tell Gabriel we have spent most of our adolescence leaning out of Eleanor’s bedroom window, sharing cigarettes filched from our father’s packet of Benson & Hedges, spinning daydreams for one another.
“What do teenage girls dream about? James Dean? Marlon Brando?”
“Bit more highbrow than that,” I say, immediately defensive.
But Gabriel is right, we spoke of boys and love mostly.
“And”—he looks up as if he’s examining the thin trail of cloud above us—“were there any ordinary mortals in these dreams of yours? I suppose I’m asking if there’s someone in particular you care about?”
Actually, there is, though I’m not about to tell Gabriel that. There’s very little to tell. A boy who takes the same bus to school and always smiles at me. A boy who is tall and broad and handsome, who looks too big for his uniform, as if one day he might burst out of it. His skin is always sunburned from weekends working on the family farm. He has let it be known in time-honored fashion, from his friends to mine, he would like to take me out one day. I have filtered back that if he asked me, I would be likely to say yes.
It seems simplest to evade the question. “Mostly we’d make up futures for each other. The dreams I spun for Eleanor were always more elaborate than the ones she made up for me. Eleanor gets bored easily. And I could get so lost in the detail, hours of conversations, wrong turns leading to right ones, I’d always make her wait for her happy ending.”
“You’re a storyteller, then. You’ll become a writer, I bet.”
“I write poetry.”
I never tell anyone about the poems I write, probably because I suspect they are bad. I can’t stop writing them, though, filling notebooks with lines of verse, half phrases, and pleasing word pairings when I should be crafting an essay on the Russian Revolution.
He taps the Emily Dickinson on the rug between us. “A poet,” he says. “I had a feeling you might be.”
“A bad poet. Maybe even a terrible one.”
“Don’t say that. You have to fool yourself into thinking you already are the thing you want to become. That’s what my father says. You write, therefore you’re a writer.”
There’s a moment’s silence, and then he says, “I write too,” and I recognize the sheepishness with which he says it.
We smile, perhaps both thinking the same thing: two would-be writers, two dreamers, two lonely teenagers waiting for their lives to begin. Who would have thought we’d have so much in common?
“What kind of things?”
“A novel I’ve started over and over. It always collapses at the same point, about seventy pages in.”
“What’s it about?”
“I’m embarrassed to tell you.”
“Does it, by any chance, feature a boy from a big house with questionable taste in clothes?”
Gabriel looks crestfallen and I am filled with sudden self-loathing. Why am I behaving like this? I don’t know him well enough, and my humor is clearly misjudged. “I’m sorry. I’m teasing you but I shouldn’t. I know better than anyone how painful this whole thing is.”
“You’re right about the autobiography aspect. The main character is a drunk. A beautiful woman, unhappily married to a much older man. The only thing I want in life is to write novels. I used to want to be Graham Greene. But then I read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and it changed everything for me. It’s such a funny book, but daring too. And that’s the kind of novelist I’d like to be. Taking risks. Surprising people. A bestseller before I am thirty, if I’m lucky. There. I’ve told you my innermost secret. You can laugh at me now.”
“I don’t want to laugh at you,” I burst out. “I want to take back every mean thing I’ve said. Can we start again?”
This time it’s me who holds out a hand for him to shake.
“You’re a strange girl, Beth Kennedy,” he says, taking my hand.
“Good strange or bad strange?”
“Good strange, definitely. My kind of strange. I have a sixth sense for these things.”
The light is beginning to drift from the sky by the time I get up to leave. We have been talking for several hours.
“I’ll walk you to the road,” Gabriel says.
“Escorting me off your land?”
“More eking out the last minutes with you.”
I feel a rush of pleasure at this, not that I show it.
“When will you come again?”
I like that for him it’s a foregone conclusion we will see each other again.
“At the weekend?”
“Come on Friday evening. The lake is magical at night.”
There’s a frisson of awkwardness when we say goodbye, as if we should shake hands or kiss or something, but we do neither.
“Goodbye, then,” I say.
“The tweed is going straight in the dustbin,” he calls after me.
“Good,” I shout back.
At the bend in the road, I turn around to wave and I can sense his eyes following me until I disappear from view.