Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

22. Before

Before

In the morning, I watch Gabriel dressing for his lecture, throwing on the clothes he discarded yesterday: corduroy trousers, a black jumper with several of my long dark hairs clinging to it, a tweed jacket on top.

“See?” he says, holding out a hair between his thumb and forefinger. “I miss these.”

At the door he turns back for one more kiss, runs his hands over my body beneath the sheets. “It’s torture leaving you. I will not be thinking about Sir Gawain for the next sixty minutes, that’s for sure.”

“Can’t you skip it? Just this once?”

He holds out several pages of lined paper, covered in his handwriting. “It’s my paper this week, unfortunately. Don’t move, I won’t be long.”

After he’s gone, I put on one of his shirts and boil the kettle on the little camping stove Gabriel brought with him from Meadowlands. All those mornings by the lake when he brewed coffee and cooked scrambled eggs and bacon, it seems a lifetime ago.

I take a cup of tea to Gabriel’s desk with its view of the gardens below. I watch a boy cutting across the lawn, disheveled, harried, late for his nine o’clock lecture, perhaps. Next year, so long as I don’t mess up my A levels, it will be me. I revel in the fantasy for a few minutes while I drink my tea. I’ll be in my college room at St Anne’s, but Gabriel will have his own lodgings by then. I picture us cooking exotic feasts of beef Stroganoff or coq au vin in the evenings for our friends, whom I imagine as a broader mix than the people I met last night. Poets and scientists and art historians and musicians. Boys and girls from grammar and comprehensive schools who have worked so hard to get here.

His mother was right. I am more comfortable with my own kind. In my own way I can be just as elitist.

A green notebook catches my eye and I reach for it almost without thinking. I’m about to open it when I realize what I’m doing: This is probably Gabriel’s novel, the novel Louisa has been allowed to read.

I understand, utterly, the horror of letting someone read your work before it’s ready. And also, how it will never be ready unless you put it out there, risking humiliation and failure. Reading someone else’s writing is like having direct access to his innermost thoughts. And he chose to reveal that to Louisa, not me.

As soon as I open it I realize this is not Gabriel’s novel. It’s his diary.

September 25

Missing Beth like an illness, I feel sick with it. There’s no one like her here.

September 30

How is it possible to be with someone every day for a whole summer and then never see them? I feel like a part of me is missing. We used to say we shared a brain. Well, half my brain is gone.

I slam the notebook shut. Reading another person’s diary is the worst kind of deceit, the lowest, the ugliest. I will not allow myself to do it. Minutes pass, and the temptation to look again burns in my throat. It’s no good: I cannot resist. This is how Adam must have felt biting into his apple. One minute there’s purity and innocence, the next I am fully immersed in a world I wish I had never entered.

The mentions of me start to dwindle as the weeks pass and are replaced more and more by Louisa, or rather, “L.” There are other names too: Richard, Claudia, Nigel, Imogen. Talk of good lectures and indifferent ones, parties and concerts and nights in the pub. Weekend house parties staying, no doubt, at the grand country houses belonging to his friends. I begin to flip the pages, searching only for the name that sears and, sure enough, in the last two weeks, I find what I am looking for.

In late October, Gabriel writes:

Stayed up late talking to L. I told her everything, all the doubts I’ve been having, how guilty I feel. She was wonderful, as always, don’t know what I’d do without her. God, I feel so terrible about this, she ended up spending the night with me. I had to smuggle her out through the back door this morning, I can only pray no one saw her and Beth won’t find out.

Then, fatally, an entry four days ago.

Louisa is in love with me. What am I going to do? Beth arrives in three days for her interview. My life is a mess.

How could he have made love to me in the way he did when he had these feelings for her? And these doubts about me? I picture Louisa at the party, the joy in her face when Gabriel came to join us. The way she put her hand to his chest. Unconscious. Intimate. Knowing. As if she had touched him before. And I see Gabriel, reddening as I watched him, the guilty flush of a betrayer.

I read the entries again. The words seem like incontrovertible evidence now.

The magnitude of this, it’s too big to comprehend. Gabriel and Louisa. Louisa and Gabriel. She loves him. He slept with her. How could I have been so blind, so foolish? And why did I open his diary? Even now, with my world crashing around me, I wish I could turn back the clock to the ignorance of a moment ago.

I walk around his room, unsure what to do with myself. To Gabriel and Louisa I’m just some stupid schoolgirl he once had feelings for and they are counting down the time until I go away again.

I spy a pale pink scarf balled up in the corner. I pick it up, inhale its overpowering flowery scent and throw it to the ground.

It takes no time at all to dress in my own clothes, hurling the offensive spotty dress in my bag. I pause at Gabriel’s desk before I leave, heart racing while I consider what to write.

It’s over, Gabriel.

I can’t see you anymore.

You know why.

Beth

My bus has not yet arrived at the station. There’s a cluster of people waiting and I stand amid them, arms wrapped around myself, in shock. My breathing is too loud, too gaspy, and I feel as though I am fighting for air. Gabriel and Louisa. A perfect coupling. They will look so good together. Everything I dreaded has come true, as if I wished it into existence.

And then, Gabriel is here, running into the station, frantic.

“What’s happened?” he says, when he reaches me. He pulls me into his arms and, for a moment, a blissful, forgotten moment where everything is still as it was, I weep against him, my face pressed to the hard muscles of his chest, his smell—lemons and cedar and cigarette smoke—so intensely familiar and no longer mine.

I jerk myself away. “I know about Louisa,” I say.

His face betrays nothing. “What about her?”

“She loves you. You slept with her. I read your diary, Gabriel. Don’t bother denying it.”

“You read my diary? How could you—?” Gabriel is shouting so loudly people turn around. Fury in his eyes I’ve never seen before.

“I’m glad I did. Because you would never have had the guts to tell me. What were you going to do, string us both along? Your mother warned me about you. She said you use people, and move on when you get bored of them. She warned me you would tire of me as soon as you got to Oxford. I should have listened to her.”

It’s the worst thing I could have said.

His anger switches into something else: coldness, a look of such intense dislike—of me, of her?

“Gabriel,” I say, pleading, knowing I’ve gone too far but he turns his face away. He can’t bear to look at me.

My bus arrives, people get on, the engine starts up. The conductor leans out of the door. “Are you coming, love?”

I look at Gabriel, hoping he’ll say something to stop me, hoping there’s a way of this not being our end.

“You should go,” he says, and still he doesn’t look at me. “You’re right. This is finished.”

Heartbreak is commonplace—a young girl in a tempest of crying surprises no one—but there is concern on every single face as I get on the bus.

“Let’s get you safely home, darling,” the conductor says.

I do look at Gabriel as the bus leaves the station. His face is expressionless, but I know from the hard set of his mouth, from the fingers that creep beneath his eyes, he is crying too.

It is the last time I will see him for a very long time.