Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

44. Wednesday

Wednesday

The front door at Meadowlands is always unlocked and I decide to creep in and surprise Gabriel. He will be at his desk, snatching a few minutes of writing time before I arrive. In my head I’m thinking I will discard a trail of clothes in the hall and be fully naked by the time I reach his study. I feel deranged, no other word to describe it, possessed by eroticism, by this fierce, rapid rekindling of love.

From the hall, I hear voices; Gabriel is talking to someone. A woman. My mind reels in shock. What if it’s someone I know? Someone who might mention to Frank they happened to run into me at Meadowlands during the day, no Leo in tow. I’ve thought about this scenario, we both have, deciding if anyone asked, we’d say I was doing some cooking for Gabriel. What am I doing coming here day after day with no thought to the consequences? It is as if I’m in free fall, waiting to crash-land, or to be caught.

I retrace my steps, hoping I can get in the car and drive away before anyone sees me, when Gabriel comes into the hall.

“Hey,” he says, in a voice that denotes the presence of a stranger. “Please don’t go. I won’t be long. I’d forgotten a journalist from The Times was coming today.”

“I can come back.”

“No, don’t. Come through, we’re almost done. I’ve made coffee.”

A young woman is sitting at the kitchen table, a spiral notebook open in front of her. She smiles when I walk in.

“Beth, this is Flora Hughes, she’s writing a feature for the color supplement. Beth is an old friend of mine.”

I feel a confusing stab of envy looking at Flora, a fledgling journalist with her whole career ahead and already writing for a national newspaper. She is wearing a navy minidress with white, knee-length platform boots, her hair cut into a fashionable low fringe that hovers just above her eyes. She seems intimidatingly “London.”

Gabriel passes me a mug of coffee, smiling fractionally when his fingers touch mine. Not long , his look says.

“You’ve got a few more questions?” he says to Flora. And to me: “Flora tells me she’s writing a piece about a new wave of young authors tearing up British publishing, alongside her interview with me, the has-been. I’m officially the old guard at thirty-one.”

Gabriel laughs. Flora doesn’t.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” she says. “Please don’t think—”

“Flora. I’m joking.”

When Gabriel smiles at her, she blushes.

It’s an odd sensation, witnessing this. I’ve always known Gabriel was widely regarded as a pinup, particularly when his first couple of books came out. Various breathy articles were written by female magazine journalists who seemed to spend almost as long on what he was wearing and the fragrance of his aftershave as the content of his novels. It wasn’t just his good looks. The sex scenes he wrote, which were more explicit than anything encountered in publishing before, had brought him readers in their thousands. He left D. H. Lawrence, with his daring carnal references, in the dust.

I sit at the other end of the table with my coffee and Gabriel’s copy of The Daily Telegraph open at the crossword, where he has begun filling out answers in his elegant loopy handwriting. I find myself gazing at his writing, remembering letters he sent me from Oxford, so passionate in the beginning. After we broke up, I burned them, but I read those letters so often I can still recall the things he wrote. How can it be right for two people who lived inside each other the way we did, almost as if we became the same person, to be separated like this?

It seems unfathomable now, knowing what I do, that we allowed ourselves to fall into disillusionment without at least trying to understand what had happened. Was it youth and naivete that made us behave like that? If I’d called him, if he’d sent one of those letters he has told me he wrote and ripped up, if his mother hadn’t been so obstructive… what then? This life I might have had, the one I’m half living right now, in some strange, inverted fantasy where nothing is quite as it should be.

Flora is asking Gabriel about his latest novel and, it strikes me as I listen, I have never asked him what it is about. I might say, “How’s the writing going?” or “Where are you up to in this draft?” but not once has he talked about the subject matter. I feel myself stiffen as I take in the words.

“This novel is a return to an idea I had many years before I was even published. It centers around a young woman who is sexually adventurous at a time when double standards were even worse than they are now. We are living through a sexual revolution, according to the newspapers. And yet, some of the reporting I read about women, even in more respectable papers like your own, makes me uneasy. For me, writing is a way to make sense of the anxiety I feel in my subconscious. I don’t always know why I’m writing a novel at the beginning, it only becomes clear to me after a while.”

“And is the idea of gender equality something you’ve found easy to embrace as a man?” Flora asks.

Ah , I think. This is why Flora has won her place on a national.

She’s unafraid, she asks the right questions. She’s happy to show her claws.

Gabriel laughs but I can hear his irritation. “I’d hardly be writing the novel if I hadn’t.” He pauses and, fatally, looks at me. “Beth and I used to talk about this when we were young. Do you remember, Beth?”

“What was that?” I say, looking up as nonchalantly as I can.

“Those conversations we used to have about inequality. You used to point out all the things I took for granted that women couldn’t do. Like opening a bank account. Or sitting in a pub on their own.”

It is an innocent reference—after all, Gabriel introduced me to Flora as an old friend. But I find myself blushing. There is a tense moment of silence when I say nothing and Gabriel, registering my discomfort, looks away.

Flora is watching with naked curiosity. “How did you say you two knew each other?”

“I didn’t. We both grew up here in Hemston.”

“I’m sensing some sort of history between you…?”

Flora’s voice is light and teasing but Gabriel slaps her down. “You’re wrong. And it’s hardly relevant to the piece. I trust you have everything you need now?”

When the journalist has gone, Gabriel and I go upstairs to bed, curtains drawn to the outside world. We have sex, then we talk, and the afternoon unfolds as the others before it, but I cannot truly relax. My fear of being discovered by someone I know does not leave me. I can’t shake it off. The intrusion of Flora Hughes into our lives, a young writer looking for sensationalism, has unnerved me and this temporary universe we have created no longer feels sacred. No longer feels safe.