Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

36. 1968

1968

Weddings are joyful by nature: the public celebration of love and togetherness, the carefully curated festivity, the music, the dancing, the indulgent eating and jubilant drinking. Today at Blakely Farm that joy feels heightened, and it’s not only the collective pleasure at seeing Jimmy and Nina finally tie the knot. Our family has seen too many storms and today, all resentments and disagreements have been cast aside, the village out in force to witness this change in our fortunes.

Nina and Jimmy opted for a quick registry office wedding with only Frank and me in attendance, followed by a proper ceremony at the farm. It’s being held in a barn we have scrubbed and polished and painted until it looks as good as any church. Chairs borrowed from various houses in the village are lined up in rows, homespun and mismatched and all the better for it, a wedding forged by a whole community. The church ladies have excelled themselves with six-foot-tall flower displays, and we even have a roll of red carpet for Nina and her father to walk down.

Every face turns as they come into the barn, “You Can’t Hurry Love” playing from speakers in the corner. I could look at Nina forever, so slender and lovely in her pale gold dress, and scarcely changed from the girl we first met five years ago.

When Jimmy and Nina exchange their vows, Frank reaches for my hand. This wedding means more to him than it does to anyone else.

After the ceremony there is nothing left for us, the family, to do except enjoy ourselves, our friends from the village have taken care of everything. Trestle tables are covered with food, far too much of it, a gift from each family. Dishes of coronation chicken, cold joints of beef and ham, great bowls of coleslaw and potato salad, and two pigs roasting on spits outside. There is a bar serving cider and ale, wine, gin, brandy, whisky, more booze than we can possibly drink, almost all of it donated.

For the first hour I am busy talking to guests, the same conversation, over and over. How beautiful the bride is, how lucky the bridegroom, they took their time, didn’t they? I can respond on autopilot, which is just as well, for beneath everything, is one pervasive thought. When will I have a chance to talk to Gabriel?

The decision to invite Gabriel and Leo was last minute. Jimmy has never tried to hide his dislike of Gabriel, plenty of villagers can bear witness to that. Frank said—and I agreed, for reasons of my own—it might be awkward having them at the wedding. Then Leo came out to the farm in the summer holidays and struck up a friendship with Nina. Together they whitewashed the barn, radio blaring, Nina teaching him dance steps as she once taught Bobby. Leo was lovestruck just like my son—Nina tends to have that effect on people.

“What shall I wear to your wedding?” Leo asked, out of the blue, one day.

After a pause, Nina said, “Something fun. Surprise me,” and shrugged at me in apology.

They come up to greet me the first moment I am alone; Gabriel must have been watching me too. There are two hundred people crowded into this tent and I have not turned in Gabriel’s direction once, but I’ve always known exactly where to find him.

Leo has taken Nina at her word, dressed in a fringed cowboy shirt and a Stetson sent over from the States by his mother.

“Has Nina seen you yet?” I say, hugging him. “You’ll be walking off with Best Dressed Male, no competition, and that includes the bridegroom in his fancy new suit.”

“Is there a prize?”

“If there isn’t, there should be.”

“I like your dress,” Gabriel says, and I turn to look at him.

It is a mistake. For I know this look, this gaze, I remember it from before, from the days when we were free to show all that we felt in our faces.

“My friend Helen made it for me,” I say, the rush of color staining my cheeks.

It is a fabulous dress, the boldest thing I have ever worn: a sleeveless A-line shape which stops short of the knee. It is white with bright pink-and-yellow flowers splashed across it. I feel nothing like a farmer’s wife tonight.

I’m startled by the sight of Gabriel, clean-shaven in a dark suit. Even as a teenager, I loved how he looked in a suit. Perhaps because he wears one so often, he looks as relaxed in it as he does a pair of jeans, or because Gabriel’s suits, with their fine wool and elegant, narrow fit, are clearly handmade.

I force myself to turn away and find Frank standing a yard or so away, watching. He is holding two glasses of wine in his hands.

“You could have said hello to them,” I say, walking over and taking a glass from him.

Frank looks at me, expressionless, and says only: “Speeches are about to start, are you ready?”

I’ve heard most of Frank’s best man’s speech already but it’s a different thing seeing him stand up in front of a whole village. These people are his friends, his extended family, he has known them all his life. Frank hits all the right notes, the funny stories from boyhood, the challenging teenage years, the sudden transformation when an exquisite blonde flagged down Jimmy in his tractor. Overnight, he shaved off his beard and requested money for aftershave.

“That was five years ago and since then, as you all know, this family has been through difficult times. Nina has walked every step of the way with Jimmy. She is his rock, his soulmate. He would be lost without her and so would we.”

Jimmy and Nina have chosen “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for their first dance. Nina asked if we’d rather they didn’t play Elvis, but Frank and I felt the same: It was what Bobby would have wanted. They dance the first bars of the song alone, then Nina stretches out an arm toward me and Frank, beckoning with one finger. Frank takes me into his arms and we turn a slow circle, the two brothers and their wives on the dance floor with the village watching.

“You’re crying,” Frank says.

“The song. You. Me. Him.”

The him I mean is Bobby. But that’s not how Frank takes it, his mind is somewhere else. “I suppose it was a mistake having him here.”

For a second, I don’t understand what he means. And then I do. “I wasn’t talking about Gabriel.”

“Beth—” Frank says, then he stops himself. “Let’s not do this now. It’s their day. I won’t ruin it.”

Instead, I bury my face in Frank’s chest for the remainder of the song. To everyone else we must look like the thing we used to be, a couple who were devoted to one another, who once had everything and lost it, foolishly, devastatingly, but still managed to cling together.

The dance floor floods with other couples and for the next hour or so Frank and I are in demand. I dance with Helen’s husband, Martin; with David’s best friend, Brian; with Jimmy; with a whole sequence of village men whom I have known since they were little boys beginning primary school. People I have known my entire life. We dance to the Beatles, the Byrds, the Supremes. When Frankie Valli starts crooning “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” Nina and Jimmy happen to be dancing together and the crowd forms a spontaneous circle around them. Nina dances with her train swept up over one arm, hips keeping perfect time with the beat, shimmying her shoulders back and forth at Jimmy while he mimes the words of the song to her. I think, looking at Nina, she’s always been a performer, she knows what people want and how to give it to them, it’s why she is so good at her job. There could be no better bride.

Nina and I dance with Leo after that. We teach him how to twist, and he spirals up and down like a corkscrew, his cheeks flushed, eyes glowing. For a second or two, it’s like being with Bobby, my son who loved to dance, particularly with Nina. I can’t allow myself to go there. He’d be twelve now, a different proposition altogether. Who knows if he would have even liked dancing anymore?

Across the marquee Gabriel is watching. I’ve known where he’s been, of course, but this time when I catch his gaze, our eyes linger on each other for a beat too long. He tilts his head, almost imperceptibly, and walks out of the tent. My heart begins to thump painfully in my chest. I glance at Frank and see him talking to Helen and Martin in a corner; I have a moment, but that is all.

Gabriel is waiting for me outside.

“We can’t talk here,” I say, and he follows me to the elm trees at the edge of the field.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Gabriel says.

But for a moment or two he says nothing, we just watch each other in the shadows.

“You were wrong all those years ago about me and Louisa.”

“Let’s not do this. It was all such a long time ago.”

“I need you to know the truth. I didn’t sleep with Louisa while you and I were together. She stayed in my room, it’s true, and I felt guilty because I knew it would hurt you if you found out. But nothing happened between us.”

“Gabriel.” My voice is a wail, too loud, a little demented. The alcohol I have drunk is rushing through my veins. I’m drunk on wine, cider, on him, on the terrifying possibility of truth. “Why are you doing this?”

“You must know why. Tell me you know. Tell me you feel it too.”

I can’t look at him, to look will be fatal. Instead, I stare at the ground. “You told Louisa you had doubts about me. You can’t deny that.”

“Not you, Oxford. I was thinking of dropping out to become a full-time writer. Louisa talked me out of it.”

“It’s too late for this,” I say, desperately.

“Is it?” His voice is soft, tempting me to look at him.

“Why wouldn’t you have told me the truth? You knew I thought you’d been unfaithful to me.”

“I was so angry, Beth. You believed what my mother told you. You said I used people and threw them away afterwards. That hurt me so much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s me who should be sorry. I was a bloody fool. Too proud to beg you to come back.”

“Why would your mother tell me you were with Louisa if you weren’t?”

“Wishful thinking?”

“Or worse.”

I always knew Gabriel’s mother would find a way to stop our being together, even if I hadn’t managed to sabotage it myself first.

“How stupid and stubborn we were. Such a waste,” I say, and this time there’s no mistaking Gabriel’s tone when he says: “Is it?”

I look up at him and he looks back at me. A stare that feels dangerous, intimate, intoxicating. Every bit of resistance crashing down.

What I want, more than anything, is to reach out and touch him. I’d like to place my palm against his cheek. Or his heart, to see if it’s beating as wildly as my own.

There have been too many thresholds like this one, chances missed, turns not taken, and always the question burning between us, me and Gabriel, Gabriel and me, the life we might have had.

“What are we going to do?” Gabriel asks.

The music pouring from the tent is loud and yet, in this sudden stillness, I hear only us. Our breathing. The blood pounding through my head, my pulse or his?

“This,” I say, standing on tiptoe to kiss him.

Finally.

My mouth against his.

A kiss that feels like everything all at once. Unhinged. Tender. Too much, too much, nowhere near enough. Teeth snagging lips, hands caught in hair, every second of every year we’ve been apart in this kiss.

The record changes and the party continues, and it feels as if we are the only two people here, the only two people in the world.