Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

7. Before

Before

Gabriel is waiting at the end of his drive but looking the wrong way, as if he has forgotten the direction I am coming from. It gives me a second to regard him. He is dressed in dark clothes tonight—a navy sweater, gray trousers—and from twenty yards away his silhouette is long and lean. I cannot see his face but I absorb everything else, his tallness, his slightness; the way he keeps running one hand through his hair, the other stuffed into his trouser pocket.

“I’m missing the tweed already,” I call, and he spins around.

Instantly we are grinning at each other. Wide, foolish grins. Does this mean he feels the same? The past week has been almost unbearable, my head filled only with Gabriel, replaying every conversation I could remember, wondering if I’d imagined the feeling of connection.

“You look quite different in your own clothes.” By which I mean he is beautiful. Almost shockingly so.

We are standing a few inches apart and I have an irrepressible urge to kiss him. Just for a second. To see how it would feel, see what he would do. Instead, I turn away. I have the sense Gabriel can read every thought that flits through my mind.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he says.

“There was no danger of that.”

I’m rewarded with his slow smile as he takes in what I’ve said.

Gabriel has made a pathway down to the lake with a dozen candles burning in jam jars. In front of the lake is a little card table draped in white linen and laid with wineglasses, silver knives and forks, a jug of pale pink roses at its center. There are two folding wooden chairs with cushions on them and blankets draped across their backs in case it gets cold, which is unlikely because, a few yards away, a fire has been lit in a low cast-iron bowl. The moon has begun its slow rise, turning everything around us silver white: the willow trees, the surface of the lake, even the grass glimmers as if it’s made of crystal. It is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen: a stage set made for two.

“This is wonderful. You’ve taken so much trouble.”

“Told you, way too much time on my hands. Unfortunately, my mother caught me at it, so now she’s all agog wanting information. Don’t worry, I made her promise she wouldn’t come down here.”

“I wouldn’t mind meeting your mother,” I say, and Gabriel laughs.

“I’ll remind you of that when you’ve actually met her.”

He pours us each a glass of wine. There is a cooked chicken and potato salad, tomatoes and lettuce from the greenhouse. A little jam jar with ready-mix vinaigrette. And there is Gabriel, untying the paisley scarf looped around his neck before he smiles at me and raises his glass.

“To trespassers,” he says, and we clink.

It’s strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing us, as if such a thing were possible.

I tell Gabriel my family are Irish, or at least my father is, even though he was born in London and his family moved to Shaftesbury when he was eight. He has never lived in Ireland, and has no trace of an accent, but he pines for it all the same.

“He once told me he felt all wrong in England. As if he’d been displaced from his natural habitat. I asked him how that could be when he’s scarcely set foot on Irish soil. He said it was just a feeling he had. That it must be his genetic inheritance and it was driven into his bones, whether he liked it or not. All he knew was that in Ireland the pieces would suddenly fall into place.”

My mother is a Dorset girl, born and bred, just like me. She met my father at sixteen and has been with him ever since. They went to the same teacher-training college and married straight after graduation, both their daughters born before they were twenty-five. They adore each other with simple, unfaltering devotion and I sometimes think it has left Eleanor and me with unattainable romantic expectations. How can we ever hope to follow that?

We touch on religion. Catholicism for me, another inheritance from my father, schooling via nuns from the age of five.

“What are they like, your nuns?”

“A few of them are all right. Some of them can be pretty unpleasant, particularly the headmistress. She has her favorites and, unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Thank God I have only one more year to endure before freedom.”

Gabriel is going up to Oxford to study at Balliol College, where his father and grandfather went before him. He thinks he will have the same rooms his father had, overlooking the quad.

“Would they have taken you even if you were thick?”

“Probably. The Master is a contemporary of my father’s, they are still good friends.”

Gabriel laughs, perhaps expecting I will.

I look down at my plate, willing myself to say nothing, while my indignation burns. It’s so easy for someone like Gabriel, with his future mapped out from birth.

“I know you’re thinking it’s unfair. But you could go to Oxford if you wanted to, Beth. There are quite a few colleges that admit women these days. You could apply to St Anne’s. It only became a college recently and it’s pretty radical, by Oxford standards.”

No one at my school has ever gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Very few make it to university at all. The ones who do stay on for sixth form often seem to view it as a waste of time, just waiting for the starting pistol to release them into a life of child-rearing and domesticity, as if these things are the holy grail.

“You love literature,” Gabriel persists, when I say nothing. “At Oxford you’ll get the best teaching in the world. You can’t imagine what the libraries are like. Beautiful buildings filled with first editions. They have handwritten manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Shelley. Think of all the writers that went there before you. You’d be walking the same streets as Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot.”

“Any women?”

“If it matters to you, I will find some.”

We move our chairs beside the fire as the evening begins to cool. Gabriel feeds it with more logs, stirring up the embers with a poker and blowing on the flames until they shoot into the air. The stars seem to blaze more brightly here than they do in our back garden; same stars, set like jewels into a navy sky.

“It’s getting late,” I say. “I’ll have to go home soon.”

“Stay five more minutes. Ten. This evening has gone too fast.”

Something changes in the atmosphere. The look on Gabriel’s face makes my heart begin to race. He leans forward in his chair and presses his mouth to mine. A kiss that is tentative and gentle.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you all evening.”

“What took you so long?”

Gabriel laughs and I love the way it animates him. Most of the time I get the feeling he’s observing, but when he laughs his guard comes down.

“I was nervous, I suppose. Wasn’t sure if you felt the same.” Gabriel takes hold of my hand and pulls me onto his lap.

We kiss again and this time it is everything, his tongue searching mine, hesitantly, then more confidently. We clamp ourselves together, kiss deeply, our fingers entwining.

I didn’t know a kiss could be like this, that you could lose yourself in it, no thoughts in your head, your whole body alight to the touch and taste of another.

Gabriel walks me home from Meadowlands on the outskirts of the village to our cottage right in its heart. Outside our gate we kiss again, a chaste goodbye on the cheek in case my parents are watching from the upstairs window.

“Is it too soon to say I already like you more than anyone I’ve ever met?” Gabriel says.

I can’t stop smiling as I walk up the path.

At the sound of my key in the front door, my father comes bustling out of the kitchen. He’s clearly been waiting up for me.

“Look at that face,” he says, when he sees me. “Goodness me, I think my baby might be in love.”

“Dad,” I protest, laughing. “Stop.”

But I float up the stairs to bed, holding the thrill of his words to me. Perhaps that’s what it is, this feeling never experienced before, elation, excitement, a furious kind of happiness. Perhaps this is love.