Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

60. 1975

1975

Grace is weaving down Top Field with two ewes and a cluster of newborn lambs. She knows how to tack back and forth across our field in a slow zigzag, making sure her babies walk in the right direction. She knows when to stop and wait so the lambs stay close to their mothers. She chats to them incessantly, just like her uncle used to, and her brother, Bobby. She is five years old.

One of these lambs is more special to Grace than the others because yesterday she birthed it by herself. When its legs began to appear she knelt beside the ewe, grabbed the ankles in her small hands, and tugged, waiting for each contraction to ease it out a little farther each time.

“Pull hard now, Gracie. Give it everything you’ve got,” my father said, when the lamb’s little black nose first appeared.

I knew he was fighting the urge to help her. I was too.

Grace yanked hard, grunting like a heavyweight wrestler, and at last the lamb slithered free. I wish I’d had a camera on me. Her face. I wish Frank could have seen it, the mixture of pride and awe when she turned to grin at me and made a thumbs-up sign.

She was born, not on the kitchen floor like her brother, but at Dorchester Hospital, eight months after the trial finished. I waited until the risks of early miscarriage had passed before I told Frank I was expecting his baby. I knew how much it would mean to him, another child, his own flesh and blood this time.

“Guess what?” I said, the next time he phoned. “I’m pregnant. Thirteen weeks yesterday. We’re having a baby, Frank.”

In the short silence before he spoke, I pictured him in the prison telephone box, fighting his emotion. I heard his rapid breaths, the croakiness of his voice when he spoke.

“How?”

“I threw my diaphragm away, a few months before the trial. I didn’t want to tell you in case it didn’t happen.”

“We’re having a baby? You’re pregnant? We are going to have another child?”

Frank was shouting now. Shouting and laughing. Repeating my news until it had sunk in.

Remembering the joy in his voice when I told him consoles me on the loneliest nights.

When I first saw our daughter, I felt such a rush of elation. She had been born at exactly the right time to be a woman.

“For you,” I whispered to the tiny baby at my breast, “the world is changing.”

You have a daughter , I wrote to Frank that same afternoon. She’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Will you choose her name?

His reply came by return of post. Let’s call her Grace.

I thought, Yes, Frank gets it. She is our second grace. She is our new beginning.

I hoped Frank would let me visit him in prison once our daughter had been born. But, every time I asked him, he said no.

“Please, Beth, let me get this done in my own way.”

I railed at him sometimes. “Why is it all about what you need? What about me? What about me needing to see you?” I shouted, flaring up on one of our weekly Sunday-night phone calls. “You’re ashamed for me to see you in there? You’d rather go years without seeing your wife or being able to hold your child in your arms because you’re ashamed of what I might think? Then I’m ashamed you think so little of me.”

I hung up on Frank before he could answer and was filled with remorse for the rest of the night. I’d wasted our phone call. And, worse, I’d upset him. And now I had to wait a whole week before I could talk to him again.

Two days later, his letter arrived.

Dear Beth,

I have this picture in my head and it’s the thing that sustains me, every single day. I imagine myself coming back to the farm one bright, spring afternoon. A cold, crisp, sunny day, the kind of weather that has always been our favorite. There are new lambs in the field and all Bobby’s favorite birds are back for the summer chittering away, making a racket.

I step onto our land and breathe it all in. I’m home, I say to myself. I’m home. That’s when I see you with Grace, for the very first time… and it feels so pure, Beth. I don’t want this place in your head or hers. I know I’m being selfish. Please try to understand—?

Frank

My father visits Frank every month to keep him updated on the farm.

When Frank was sentenced to eight years in Wandsworth Prison, both my parents resigned instantly from their teaching posts in Ireland. Within three months they were back in Dorset helping me manage the farm.

It has been joyous seeing the way the farm has changed them. And how they have changed the farm. My mother, whom I couldn’t have imagined without her books and her marking, is out with us in the fields all day. She lives in an old pair of my father’s cords and has a permanent outdoor tan. She looks years younger.

My mother found an old handwritten recipe for cheddar muddled in among the farm accounts. She spent months perfecting her version of Blakely Cheddar and then she began selling it at the local Saturday market. The cheese is sharp and salty but creamy, and distinctive in its purple wax coating; every week it sold out within an hour. Now we’ve converted a shed into a cheese dairy, invested in new machinery, and the cheese sells throughout the country. This tiny experiment has become our staple income.

My father likes to save up problems for his visit to Frank. When something baffles us—usually a piece of equipment breaking down—he always says: “No matter, Frank will know how to fix it. I’ll pop up and see him, shall I?” In this way, he tries to keep Frank engaged with our life at the farm.

Aside from my dad, the people who have visited Frank in prison most often are Gabriel and Leo.

It took a long time before Gabriel was able to talk to me again, and I understood it.

He turned up at the farm, out of the blue, one afternoon.

My father answered the door and came back into the kitchen, his face full of meaning. “It’s Gabriel,” he said.

I went out into the yard to talk to him, shutting the front door behind me. At first, we just stood there, watching one another. It was the first time I’d seen him in months.

“I need to ask you something,” he said, eventually. “But you won’t like it.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I’d like to tell Leo that Bobby was his brother. I think it might help him process what happened if he understood why Frank did what he did. The worst thing for Leo is knowing Frank is in prison when he feels it should be him.”

Ours was a complicated tale with many pieces to fit together. All of us were to blame in some way—Gabriel and me, Frank, Leo, and Jimmy too. Everyone played a part in the tragedy.

And everything was about Bobby, really, when you dug deep enough.

Gabriel and Leo visited Frank every week and for a whole hour they would talk about Bobby. It hurt Frank to begin with, spending time with the man who had briefly stolen his wife. Recounting memories of days on the farm with Bobby. Telling Leo exactly what had happened on the day of the accident. And why he felt responsible. But slowly, he began to look forward to it. Slowly, he began to heal. And Leo finally understood what had driven Frank to make his noble, foolish gesture. Saving Leo was really a way of saving himself.

One Sunday on our phone call, Frank said: “I’m ready to let him go.”

He could have been talking about Jimmy, but I knew he wasn’t.

“Aah,” I said, though it was more an outlet of emotion than an actual word. Sadness or gladness, both probably.

That night, I began to write a poem for Frank, the first time since Bobby died I’d felt the urge to put pen to paper. I thought it was going to be about Grace and our new beginning, but it wasn’t, in the end.

Gabriel’s novel came out a year after the trial; I thought it a rather sad book. There was nothing of him and me in it, the girl and boy we had been when he first had the idea, but it was tinged right the way through with yearning and regret, a quest for second chances. That did belong to us. I worried the adverse publicity around our affair would affect his career, but it didn’t turn out like that at all. Scandal and notoriety are good for book sales, it seems.

Gabriel and Leo are living in California now. Leo is at an American high school. He writes me postcards about baseball and burgers, and he sent Grace an LA Dodgers T-shirt for Christmas. She refuses to take it off. Leo is seventeen now and from the occasional photos Gabriel remembers to send, every bit as handsome as his father was when I first met him.

Sometimes, when I’m out walking with Grace, we pass by Meadowlands on our way to the woods. There’s a spot in the road where you can see through the trees and have an almost perfect view of the lake. I stand there for a moment remembering the girl and boy who once fell so passionately in love. They don’t feel like Gabriel and me anymore. Their innocence as they swam among the water lilies and brewed coffee on a camping stove believing themselves creatures of great fortune is too poignant, and I cannot contemplate them for long.

Not so long ago, Leo made a noble gesture of his own: He went to visit Nina. He didn’t ask our permission for the tale he told her, although he did swear her to secrecy before he began. No one needs Frank facing a new sentence for perjury.

I was in the yard hosing down my wellies when Nina turned up. I watched in amazement as she got out of her car, even more astonished when she stood up and I saw her swollen belly. She was seven months pregnant. I’d heard tell of the new man Nina had met in the Compasses one night—an accountant of all things, with an office in Salisbury.

“I know,” Nina said.

I didn’t need to ask her what she knew: Her face said it all.

“Frank’s story never made any sense. I’m sorry I hated you.”

“You were right to.”

We embraced for a long time, both of us crying.

Nina had a little girl. And although her daughter belongs to another man, not Jimmy, I can’t help but feel there’s a symmetry to that. Too much has happened for Nina and I to ever recover a friendship but, who knows, perhaps our daughters will become friends one day. Jimmy would like that, wherever he is. Bobby too. He always did adore Nina.

Grace is halfway down the field now, murmuring to her ewes just as Bobby did and her uncle, Jimmy. I once told Grace her brother used to have names for all the sheep, so she does the same thing. Bugs Bunny. Madame Butterfly. Mavis. I hear her gently chastising Mavis for taking too long. “Would you have us wait all day, Mavis?”

Beyond Grace I catch a flash of navy blue. A man has arrived at the bottom of our field. I watch him place a hand onto the fence and hoist himself over in one go, swift and effortless. Frank looks tall and strong in the wedding suit, walking in his own land, home to me, to Grace, to the start of another day. I knew he was coming out soon, but not this soon. He always did say he wanted to surprise us.

“Do you see that man walking up the field?” I call to Grace, and she stops to look.

Shields her eyes like Little Bo-Peep. “Who is it?”

“Can’t you tell?”

She has a photograph of Frank on her bedroom wall. She always wishes him good night, the last thing she does before she falls asleep.

She pauses for a second or two, assessing the man walking up the field toward us. Then she screams, “Daddy!” and she begins to run, her sheep abandoned.

I watch her racing down the field, elbows pumping. She is wearing pink shorts and red wellies and her hair trails behind her in a dark cloud. I watch Frank as he opens his arms, as she flies into them. As he swoops her up and spins her around. I can hear them laughing. I watch as Frank throws his head back and yells at the gray clouds passing overhead. “I am home. I AM HOME.” As Grace tries it, resting her neck against her father’s shoulder, face upturned to the sky. “I AM HOME. I AM HOME.” As they laugh and yell and laugh some more, this father and daughter who are meeting for the first time. Then they turn to me. Frank stretches out his right arm and Grace, cottoning on instantly, holds out her left. A giant man and girl scarecrow.

I glance at my father, who is standing by the tap, pretending to fill a bucket of water for the sheep, but really, openly gazing. He is crying as he watches them, but he’s always been like that, my dad. These are joyful tears.

“Run, my darling,” he says to me. “Run.”

Frank stays rooted to the spot, arms wide open, waiting. Thinner than I’m used to, and older, but still Frank.

“Run, Mama,” my girl shouts, still laughing.

So, I do.