6. 1968
1968
In all the fantasies over the years of meeting Gabriel Wolfe again, driving his child and his dead dog home was never one of them. Leo is sitting in the back of the Land Rover, the dog wrapped in an old coat of Frank’s. His weeping cuts me to the bone.
Gabriel occasionally tries to bridge the impossible task of placating us both, and excusing the dog. “It was instinct,” he tells his son. “Lurchers were bred to hunt and kill. The farmer did the only thing he could. He had to stop him.”
“He murdered Rocket,” Leo says.
“Oh, honey,” Gabriel says, with a slight twang that makes me think of his American wife. “He had to protect his lambs.”
Gabriel says this without much conviction, and I understand. How can a lay person appreciate the true cost to a farmer in losing his sheep? It’s not the money, although we rely on the sale of each lamb to keep us going through the winter months. It’s the heartbreak of seeing your animals destroyed. The absolute terror of the flock as they watch their own being slaughtered. Five months of nurturing the pregnant ewe, the joy of its lamb being born, which doesn’t diminish no matter how many times you see it, only for the lamb to be lost to a savage, bloody death.
Even so, the boy’s pain is hard to bear.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Beth?”
I glance at Gabriel. He has not lost any of his handsomeness with age.
“This is not your fault.”
It’s surreal seeing him like this, a normal person, a father dealing with a bereft son, instead of the alter ego I have become used to seeing in newspapers and magazines. Gabriel Wolfe, enfant terrible of the literary world. In the years since I knew him, Gabriel has become the thing he desired more than anything else, a respected author. His first novel, published when he was just twenty-four, was a bestseller; his dream had come true in the space of six years. A combination of his edgy writing and indisputable good looks kept the press attention rolling in. If publishing had rock stars, then Gabriel was Mick Jagger and his pretty, blond wife was Marianne Faithfull. And our lives, his and mine, became polar opposites. I was now a farmer’s wife, my days filled with bitterly cold mornings, the magic of a lamb being born at sunrise.
I wouldn’t have changed a second of it.
We turn into the gates of Meadowlands. Gabriel’s childhood home is still one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen. It has the feeling of a chateau on a small scale with that lovely yellowy stone; steps ascending to a huge oak door; arched windows, their frames painted pale blue. I always loved the blue windows. I’m glad they haven’t changed them.
Gabriel gets out of the Land Rover and carries his bundle of dog toward the house, his boy following.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I call after them.
Gabriel turns, looking perplexed. “I don’t know what to do with the dog.”
“You should bury him.”
I am thinking of Bobby, my sensitive boy, how we buried every bird, every rabbit, a hundred little funerals.
“Where?”
“Not exactly a shortage of space, is there?” I say, and he gives me that sideways glance of old.
How quickly we have slipped into our personas from the past, he the landowner’s son, me the acerbic dissident.
But we are not who we once were. He is a father, and I was a mother, our identities as merged as they once were separated. You can never change back once you’ve had a child, even if that child no longer exists.
Leo says: “I have an idea where. Would you come with us, Beth?”
He asks so politely—considering we have just murdered his dog—and looks straight at me with his wide brown eyes. Bobby’s eyes were brown too; I used to say they were the color of freshly churned mud. He always laughed at that.
“Come on, then. Let’s find a nice spot.”
We cross the perfect green lawn, past a tree house that is new since my day—Gabriel must have installed it for Leo. I think how much my son would have loved it, a boy who was happy enough sliding down a stack of hay bales or riding on a tractor with his dad, who was never spoiled with toys but understood every single day, the way Frank does, the glory of our farm.
“Where are we going?” I ask and Leo replies.
“The lake.”
Gabriel looks over at me and smiles but it’s a regretful sort of smile, as if the ache of memories are the same for him. I cannot allow myself to think of it. When my relationship ended with Gabriel all those years ago, I was devastated for a while, and then I did what every self-respecting woman would do: I shut the door on it, on him. I taught myself to think of Gabriel as someone who belonged to my teenage years, a first crush, little more to me than my brief fixation with the singer Johnnie Ray. Seeing Gabriel again, like this, in the place where we once meant so much to each other, could shake me to my core if I let it.
Father and son choose a spot beneath one of the willow trees.
“If you fetch some spades, I’ll help you dig,” I say.
While Gabriel is gone Leo and I stand together, looking out at the lake.
Leo is no longer crying, but he stares out at the water morosely. I wonder if he feels awkward being left alone with me, a stranger.
“Do you think you’re going to like living here?”
“I doubt it. I miss my friends. And I don’t like the kids in my class. They’re mean.”
“Who is your teacher? Mrs. Adams? She’s nice, isn’t she?”
“I guess,” he says, sounding American. His accent is in and out, certain words sound American but mostly he’s more English. “How do you know her?”
“My son used to go to your school.”
I’ve had two years to practice but it never gets any easier, waiting for the next question.
“How old is he?”
“He died two years ago. He was nine.”
“Almost the same age as me.”
Leo takes my words at face value, the way only a child can. But then, in a gesture so kind and unexpected it takes my breath away, he reaches for my hand. “You miss him, don’t you?” he says.
“I do,” I say, and Leo must hear the fervency in my voice for he gives my hand a quick squeeze.
When Gabriel comes back with three spades, one for each of us, Leo and I are still standing in the same spot. We don’t talk, but there’s a peculiar sense of peace between us. Perhaps it is the proximity to this boy, not my boy, but there’s an energy and sweetness that brings Bobby back to me.
It’s laborious and physical, the digging. The ground is too hard for us to make much progress and Leo soon gives up and sits a yard or so away, watching.
Gabriel and I dig in silence for a while. Then, I say: “I hear your mother is living in Australia now.”
He glances up at me. “A mere ten thousand miles between us. Turns out there is a god, after all.”
“Of course there’s a god, Dad,” Leo says. “Why would you think there wasn’t?”
“Just a figure of speech. I’m joking.”
“Dad doesn’t like my granny much,” Leo says, in a confiding tone.
“I can’t think why.”
I had forgotten Gabriel’s laugh, how he gives himself over to it until it becomes infectious, and I can’t help laughing too, in spite of myself; or rather, in spite of the way I feel about his mother.
“Beth had a son, Dad,” Leo says. “But he died. She’s still so sad.”
The laughter dies on both of us, instantly.
“Oh, I know,” Gabriel says, looking everywhere but at me. “I wanted to write and then I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know if you—”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Really.”
I find myself in this situation often: managing other people’s awkwardness around my grief, my loss. But talking to Gabriel about Bobby, a child he never knew, will hurt me in a very specific way.
“It isn’t fine. I should have written, I thought about you so much but—”
“Gabriel?”
“Yes?”
“Stop. Please.”
“All right. But can I say something?”
“So long as it’s not an apology. I hate that.”
My voice is harsher than I’d intended. But the endless sorrys get you down. The soft, sad eyes, the reverent tones: It makes me want to scream.
“Is there any way you and I could be friends?” He sticks his hand out in a gesture that reminds me of our beginning.
I think, looking at Gabriel’s anxious face, how much I like him. I always did. In spite of everything.
I reach across the grave for his hand. “Friends,” I say.