Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

14. Before

Before

For one glorious week in August, Gabriel’s parents go on holiday to the Highlands.

“Grouse shooting,” Gabriel says. “And yes, it’s cruel. But look what we get. The run of the place for seven whole days.”

Gabriel often decries his inheritance, but I sense his pride as he shows me around. The entrance hall alone feels as grand as a ballroom with its dark wooden paneling and an enormous crystal chandelier, which hangs from the ceiling like a statement of decadence. It smells of wax polish and fresh flowers and something less distinct: a rich, dry scent as if even the air has been filtered for refinement.

Hard not to be intimidated by the beauty of this house, not just its size and grandeur, but also the way it is furnished—the gilt-framed pictures, the tapestries and dark polished wood, silver everywhere, all of it with a fierce, mirrorlike shine. I count four flower displays as I wander through the rooms, not daffodils plonked in a jug, but artful arrangements in porcelain. Gabriel’s mother is a woman with a passion for flower arranging; mine sits by the fire late into the night marking essays and planning lessons for the next day.

In the drawing room I examine the family photographs on top of the piano. Tessa Wolfe, as a bride in the 1930s, is more beautiful than any Hollywood star, and it’s easy to see where Gabriel gets his good looks from. Her dress is a column of ivory silk, worn with a feather headdress and long white gloves. There is something cold and intimidating about her, even on her wedding day. Her half smile seems scornful, as if she despises the photographer, the guests, perhaps even her husband.

The photo I love best is Gabriel, aged around nine, in shorts and a white shirt, sitting cross-legged with his arms around the neck of a fat black Labrador. I can’t stop looking at this picture, his smile, his frank, dark-eyed stare. Something about it unravels me.

In a week of unbroken sunshine, we spend our days playing tennis and swimming in the lake. We become more daring, knowing we have the place to ourselves. Aside from their “daily,” Mrs. W, who comes in to clean first thing, we are entirely alone. In the afternoons we sunbathe naked, we make love in the open air and almost every room of the house, imprinting our passion on the antique furniture—a dimpled leather sofa, a gilt-tooled desk.

As I was leaving, my mother surprised me with a diaphragm she had requested from the doctor. We hadn’t discussed my sleeping with Gabriel, but I’d spent so many nights with him at the lake, she must have guessed.

“You don’t mind?” I asked her.

“You seem serious enough about each other. Men have lovers before they marry, why shouldn’t women?”

“You’re not like other mothers,” I said, and she laughed and kissed me.

“Thank God for that.”

Something changes in this week of liberation, which feels twice as long as its actual hours. Time no longer matters, it stretches before us like elastic. We scarcely sleep, for one thing. There is the novelty of being naked together in a proper bed, one we can return to at any time of day. I tell Gabriel we have become like one of those old-fashioned weather clocks where the man and woman pop out at different times; when one of us is asleep, the other is invariably awake, pulsing with longing.

We live in this week like one person. We take baths together, head to toe and up to our necks in delicious-smelling bubble bath he steals from his mother’s bathroom. This, for me, is the epitome of luxury. At home we restrict ourselves to a twice weekly “bath night,” heating up water to fill the tin bath, Eleanor and I taking strict turns as to who goes in first.

Gabriel and I cook increasingly bizarre meals as the fresh ingredients run out and we are forced to rely on the larder. Consommé soup studded with tinned ham, rice we overboil to the consistency of glue, roast potatoes with marrowfat peas. We abandon our own books so we can read the same one, matching our pace as we scan each page, sometimes stopping to talk about what we have read, so in tune we often say the same thing at the same time.

“It’s starting to feel like we share a brain,” Gabriel says. “How will we integrate ourselves back into the real world?”

My favorite times are the evenings, when we help ourselves to wine from his father’s cellar and play records on the gramophone. We listen to Dickie Valentine and Chuck Berry and Bill Haley & His Comets. Over and over we play “Rock Around the Clock,” the hit of the summer, while Gabriel attempts to teach me the jitterbug, snapping out instructions like a ballroom dance teacher: “Under the arm now, two steps back and swing!” It invariably ends with us collapsing onto the sofa, laughing.

It is on these nights, tongues loosened by wine, we begin to talk in a way we have never spoken before. I confess to Gabriel that there was someone who loved me before he did and I fear I might have broken his heart.

Rumor has it Frank Johnson has dropped out of school, choosing to work full-time on the farm instead of finishing his A levels.

“You can’t help who you fall in love with,” Gabriel says, kissing me. “But poor fellow, whoever he is. I wouldn’t want a life without you in it.”

“You don’t think I’m a heartless monster?”

“I think you’re utterly and completely wonderful.”

One night, Gabriel trades a secret of his own.

A few years ago, his mother told him she was having an affair. The man was young, around her age, and handsome, but virtually penniless. She didn’t care. Over the course of a few weeks they had fallen in love and she decided to leave Gabriel’s father. But only if Gabriel would come with her.

“She looked so happy when she told me about him. Like a lovestruck young girl. She was euphoric. A side of her I’d never seen. Just like us.” He pauses, as if the next words are too hard. “I told her if she left, she wouldn’t see me again. A stupid, idle threat, I didn’t mean it. I was just worried about my father. She stayed because of me and I think the heartbreak destroyed something in her. She changed almost overnight. The daytime drinking started. The bitterness. The pointless cruelty to my father and, occasionally, me. Sometimes I think I ruined her life.”

For a moment I pause, trying to find the right words. I am shocked by what he has told me, not just his mother’s affair, but also the way she resented Gabriel and his father once it had ended. She sounds selfish and unkind.

“You mustn’t think like that. You weren’t responsible for your mother’s happiness.”

Gabriel pulls me against his chest. “It wasn’t enough for her to be unhappy herself, she had to make my father and me miserable too. I hated being here, until you came along.”

“You won’t leave me?” Gabriel says, on our last night together.

It’s late or very early, a ghostly light beginning to edge around the velvet curtains in his bedroom.

I am half-asleep, lost in that pleasurable haze where dreams and reality bleed into one another.

“Beth?”

“Mmm?”

“Promise you won’t leave me.”

“As if.”

“Then promise.”

“Are you actually serious?” I open my eyes.

He nods. “Very.”

“You first,” I say, and he laughs.

“So competitive. Even when you’re asleep.”

He promises, then I do, and it doesn’t mean anything, not really, it’s just silly talk, the kind of thing lovers say, but it feels, for a moment, before I drift back to sleep, as if our future is written.