Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

21. 1968

1968

“You think you know someone,” I say, as we turn onto a long, tree-lined drive and the hotel comes into view. It is a large, redbrick house on the borders of Devon, and Frank has planned our stay as a surprise for my birthday.

“Not every day you turn thirty,” he says, pulling up in front of the house.

Everything about the hotel thrills us. The way our shattered blue suitcase is carried up ahead of us into our room. The decanters of whisky and gin waiting for us on a silver tray. The biggest bed either of us have ever seen. When the bellboy has gone, Frank lies across it to demonstrate how its width is the same height as him.

“Come here.” He pats the space next to him.

We lie in silence, fingers interlaced, staring up at the ceiling’s intricate plasterwork.

“I’m worried this is costing too much, Frank,” I blurt out, and my husband frowns.

“I told you you weren’t allowed to worry about money. I sold that old trailer we never use, so we’ve got a bit of extra cash. Not another word now, you promised.”

“All right,” I say, kissing him. “What are we going to do with ourselves with all this free time?”

Frank smiles. “I can think of a few things.”

“Oh yes?” He starts to unbutton my shirt with his strong, efficient fingers. “We won’t be needing clothes as such,” he says.

Frank takes off my shirt, my skirt, my underwear, and props himself on one elbow so he can look down at me. “Did I tell you how lovely you are?”

“Not for a while.”

“Then I’m an idiot. Because you are. Very.”

Frank knows exactly how to touch me. I close my eyes as his fingers begin their expert trail across my flesh. I know how this goes, how Frank likes to take his time, but a sudden yearning takes hold of me. I don’t want to wait. I’m unbuckling his belt, yanking at his trousers, and Frank is laughing.

“Slow down. What’s the hurry?”

“I need you.”

That’s all it takes. He pulls off his clothes and leans above me, a palm on either side of my face, easing into me, slow and deep. It is all I want.

“Thank God,” he says. “Thank God for you.”

Afterward, we don’t bother to get dressed but stay in bed for the whole afternoon. Frank rings down for tea and it is delivered by the same bellboy, politely averting his eyes from me in the bed and Frank naked beneath his hotel dressing gown.

“He thinks we’re on a dirty weekend,” I say, when he’s left.

“We are,” Frank says, untying his dressing gown and hopping in beside me. “Didn’t I tell you?”

We fill the old Victorian bath to its brim and climb in either end, refilling it from the hot tap until our skin is flushed and crinkled. Sometimes we talk but mostly we don’t, we just smile at each through the steam. There has been so much tension between us lately, this afternoon I feel it drifting away. For this fragment of time, we are us again.

At dinner, we hold hands across the table drinking an expensive bottle of wine our solemn waiter recommended, both of us too intimidated to ask for something cheaper.

“Who cares?” Frank says, chinking his glass to mine. “It’s your birthday.”

He orders a steak, and it is cooked just the way he likes it, crisp on the outside and bloody within. I have sole fillets which are soft, buttery, lemony mouthfuls of deliciousness. They come with sautéed potatoes and green beans: simple, beautifully cooked food.

“What does this remind you of?” Frank says.

“Our honeymoon?”

I can see us now, two teenagers with their whole lives ahead, who knew nothing of what the next decade would throw at them. It was the first time either of us had spent the night in a hotel; this is the second.

The expensive wine slips down quickly and when the waiter asks us if we would like another bottle, Frank says yes.

“When do we ever get to do this? I like getting drunk with my wife.”

It’s probably a mistake, the second bottle.

We begin to reminisce about the good times with Bobby. The toy tractor he had for his fourth birthday, which we had wrapped so carefully in many sheets of paper. Bobby took one look at it and burst into tears. “Why can’t I have a real tractor? This one doesn’t even go.” The day we took his stabilizers off, soon after that birthday, and he cycled around the yard for an hour without stopping. We called him the Lone Biker for a bit. The way Bobby always insisted on going milking on Christmas morning before he would open a single present from his stocking. He’d stuff his pockets full of apples for the cows and biscuits for the sheep. “It’s their Christmas too.”

Tonight, I can hear his voice exactly, and it’s not often I can. My eyes are full of tears, Frank’s too. It’s a knife-edge we are on, we both know that, but it feels significant, this thing which binds us so closely together and yet we never discuss it. Something about being away from the farm with all its memories has made it possible.

“I wish—” Frank says and then he stops himself, but I see pain rushing into his face.

There are so many things both of us wish about the day Bobby died. So many things that could have made all the difference if we’d done them. But we didn’t.

Suddenly, I understand how it is our togetherness that bars us from healing. It’s like an exterior vision, as if I’m looking from the outside in, the two of us vacillating back and forth on our shared black rock of grief.

“I do, too,” I say. “Everything you wish, I wish. But it won’t bring him back. We have to try and let him go.”

We reach for each other’s hand at the same time.

“Are we going to be all right?” Frank says, and I see how much it costs him to ask it. Frank, who never talks about feelings or failings or anything that comes too close to the bone, and certainly not a question like this, one which might result in the wrong answer.

I’m not sure what to say. Are we going to be all right? Is there a time when we won’t both ache for our missing child? When the guilt which lurks in corners, waiting for the right moment to attack us, might diminish into something that is easier to bear?

“I hope so,” is the best I can come up with and Frank nods, as if this is what he expected.

“Time,” he says, and we laugh a little ruefully because we have a private joke about the people who bandy this cliché about, as if it might actually be insightful.

We are still smiling when the grim-faced waiter comes over to ask if we’d like coffee and perhaps a digestif to go with it; he can particularly recommend the cognac. When we both say “yes” with alacrity, he cracks his first smile of the night.