Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

20. Before

Before

Summer fades and Hemston is transformed by the changing season—trees showing off in coppery gold and beetroot red and banana yellow, and Gabriel is not here.

To begin with he writes constantly, letters that burn with longing and read like poetry. As the term progresses and he becomes more immersed in university life his letters change, the heat goes out of them, they feel rushed, or worse, written out of duty. One thing nags at me—how often he mentions Louisa Scott, for they are the best of friends, apparently. Gabriel has been absorbed into her circle, an arty, literary crowd whom I picture smoking and drinking Campari while they dissect the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

I spend my time studying for my interview at St Anne’s in November, forgoing invitations to parties and reading day and night until my eyes hurt and at last I am forced to close my books.

“It’s too much,” my father says, cajoling me to come for a walk with him for fresh air, a change of scene.

“Let her be,” my mother says. “Only a few more weeks to go.”

She is almost as ambitious for me as I am myself. When my mother left school in the 1930s hardly any women went to Oxford, it simply wasn’t an option for her. I know, because my father teases her about it: She intends to vicariously live the life she wasn’t able to have through me.

“We’ll visit so often you’ll be sick of the sight of us,” she says, laughing.

“Never,” I say. “We’ll punt on the river and eat cream teas and spend a whole day in the Ashmolean looking at broken bits of pottery.”

It is almost two months before Gabriel and I finally meet. He is waiting for me to finish my interview, sitting on a low wall outside the college, reading. When he sees me, he leaps to his feet, flings his arms wide, his book clattering to the ground. “It’s you,” he says, enveloping me in his huge woolen overcoat. “And you are not wearing enough clothes.”

“I’m planning on wearing even less,” I say, and then we are laughing and running through the streets, faster and faster until we reach his college rooms.

As soon as the door closes behind us, we start tearing off our clothes. We are naked, on his bed, the feeling of his skin against mine, after all this time, my fingers tracing a pathway across his chest, his stomach, hip bones, the places I love and miss the most. Gabriel’s lips press to my neck over and over, him telling me he has missed me, how much he wants me, and everything is the same. There’s the desperate craving I remember so well, not wanting to wait even though Gabriel always says it will be better if we do, then the feeling of him inside me again, the intensity of it, pleasure that is almost unbearable, the way he cries my name, Beth, Beth, and then lying together afterward so tightly wrapped around each other we can barely breathe.

“How many times do you think we can make love in twenty-four hours?” Gabriel says. “Shall we see?”

I feel so happy knowing what we had, what we still have, was real, wondering why I doubted it, why I pored over his letters looking for proof he had stopped loving me.

“I need to show you Oxford,” he says, when we are still in bed, hours later.

The light has gone. Outside his window, Oxford looks spectral against the blue-black sky.

“There’s a birthday party we could go to,” he says. “But I’d rather keep you to myself.”

“Whose party?”

“Thomas Nicholls, Tom. He’s in the second year.”

I pick up on something, a slight hesitation, which makes me question his reluctance to go to the party. Does he feel awkward introducing me, still a schoolgirl, to his writerly crowd? Or is there something—or someone—he wishes to keep from me? In my head, I’m sifting the spare details for specks of hidden truth.

“Where does Tom live?”

“He has rooms on Magdalen Street. He lives with Louisa.”

Louisa . Just her name invokes a chill, as if my body has stored the weeks of suspicion and jealousy and is ready, in a moment, to be reactivated. As if the hours of lovemaking, the endless passionate declarations—I love you, I missed you—now vanish into air.

“I’d rather stay in bed. But what will I tell my parents? They’ll be wanting a blow-by-blow account of my twenty-four hours in Oxford.”

“You’re right,” Gabriel says, throwing back the blankets and leaping from bed. “We can go for half an hour and then we’ll sneak off and find somewhere for dinner.”

At first, the party thrills me. Tom and Louisa share a house that feels surprisingly large for a pair of students and there are people everywhere, crowded into the drawing room with its shiny black piano, smoking on the staircase, shouting to be heard in the kitchen, where we go to find our hosts. This is what it’s going to be like , I think, drinking it all in: a boy in a purple velvet suit; a couple necking openly, and inconveniently, against the fridge door.

Tom, blond and goofy looking in tweed and spectacles, is pouring out a bottle of champagne. “Here,” he says, passing us two glasses, filled almost to the brim. “Impeccable timing. This is the good stuff. And who have we here? Have you been fraternizing with freshers again, Gabe?”

Gabriel has been absorbed into Louisa’s second-year crowd of friends; I doubt he spends much time with his year at all. And he clearly hasn’t told Tom about me. Or hasn’t told anyone? Paranoia fizzes and splutters in my gut.

“This is Beth. She had an interview at St Anne’s today.”

“Welcome, Beth. I like your dress.”

We fight our way through a hallway three-deep in bodies to the relative calm of the drawing room, where Gabriel seems to know everyone. He is greeted, kissed on both cheeks, embraced, and backslapped as he introduces me: “This is Beth,” he says. “She’s down for her interview. We grew up in the same village.”

I smile at the Glorias and Claudias and Imogens in their rich-girl twinsets, their ropes of pearls, all the time wondering why he hasn’t introduced me as his girlfriend.

“Gabe, you came!”

I’m involved in a conversation with Claudia or Imogen and I can’t turn away, although the voice I hear behind me is instantly familiar. Affectionate, American. But I listen, even as I reply to questions about my interview—“mostly we talked about the Romantics”—and my attentive ear picks out the lowered voices.

“You said you couldn’t come.”

“I think Beth wanted to.”

“I hope it’s not awkward.”

“It’s fine, we won’t stay long.”

“Gabe, about that night—”

“Say that again, Beth, I didn’t quite catch it—?” says Claudia-or-Imogen, and I miss the rest of their conversation.

Suddenly I’m being embraced by Louisa, and everything about her—the way she is dressed, the cigarette she smokes in its black-and-gold holder, her round, black-framed glasses— glasses —which manage to make her look even more beautiful than I remember—destroys me.

Helen, my talented friend, surprised me with a polka-dot dress she’d made for me before I left—a Christian Dior rip-off from his New Look days, copied from a Vogue pattern. Low neck, fitted at the bust, a flouncy circular skirt. I loved this dress, I felt like a different person in it. Looking at Louisa now, I’d like to rip it to shreds.

Her black top is off the shoulder, revealing satiny golden skin and a glimpse of cleavage, and she’s wearing it with black-and-white checked pedal pushers which she has cinched at her waist with a wide gold belt. Perched on the back of her head is a white-and-gold naval cap. She looks incredible.

“How was your interview. Did it go well?” Louisa asks, smiling at me with her pretty blue-green eyes.

I’m so bored of the question, so bored of myself.

Actually, it couldn’t have gone better. Out of two dons interviewing, one was a woman and we seemed to click instantly. Within minutes we’d segued from the Wife of Bath and Shakespearean tragedy to trading poems from our favorite female poets. Professor Gilbert told me to look out for the modern Americans Anne Sexton and Mary Oliver, and a young Cambridge scholar she’d just come across named Sylvia Plath. Escorting me from the room, she’d said: “We have an active creative writing community. I believe you’ll do very well here.”

I manage to tell Louisa some of this and she touches my wrist and says: “Oh, you write too?” She puts one hand to her bosom, closes her eyes. “The novel Gabe is writing, it’s beautiful. Funny, devastating, brave. What you’d expect from him, I suppose. You must have read it?”

I manage to smile. “He’s quite cagey about his writing. We both are.”

“Talking about me, by any chance?”

Gabriel is smiling as he comes to stand between us.

Louisa’s face lights up the moment she sees him. She places a palm against his chest, the gesture jarring in its familiarity.

“I was telling Beth about your wonderful novel,” she says, turning back to me.

But I am not looking at Louisa. I’m looking at Gabriel, at the deep flush in his cheeks. He looks uncomfortable. Or guilty. Even after Louisa has removed her hand.

A battle is raging in my head when Gabriel and I leave the party a short while later. I want to rail at him: Why didn’t you tell people I was your girlfriend? And why did you blush when Louisa touched you? Is there something between you? Something I should know about?

“Most of the restaurants will be closing,” Gabriel says, looking at his watch, “but there’s an Indian that stays open.”

“Do you think I’m a country bumpkin?”

Gabriel frowns. “Of course not. Where’s this coming from?”

Oh, I don’t know, being in a room full of clipped, upper-class voices, girls in cashmere, boys opening bottles of champagne as if they were lemonade. Money and acceptance and me having neither, the fish out of water with a Dorset intonation.

“Your friend Claudia, or whatever her name was, kept asking me to repeat myself. She seemed to find me hard to understand.”

“How bloody absurd.” Gabriel pulls me to a stop. Leans forward to kiss my forehead, then my eyes, my nose, my mouth. “I love the way you talk. It’s one of the things I miss the most.”

I breathe in the Oxford night air, the sight of him, the most beautiful boy on earth.

“What do you say we skip the restaurant and go back to my rooms?” he asks.

“I say, thank God.”

We stand there in the cool night air, watching each other. Gabriel has this look on his face, one I know from before, where everything shrinks, until it’s just him and me. A look that tells me I am enough; more than that, I am everything. All I have to do is keep the faith.

“I wish you could see what I see, Beth. You’re worth a thousand of the girls in that room.”