Page 12 of Broken Country

I thought, but did not say,Oh, I hope you do.

I am so lost in thought I don’t notice someone sitting down next to me until a voice says: “Hi, Beth.”

It’s Frank Johnson. For once, not sitting in his usual place at the back of the bus with his friends. I do like Frank. He always seems more grown-up than the other boys my age. We see each other at the parties of school friends or the annual village hop, and he always asks me to dance or offers to fetch me a drink. For a while, I’d hoped our easy friendship might develop into something else.

When Frank was thirteen his mother died from a bleed on the brain.

She’d been helping with the afternoon milking when a cow kicked out and caught her full thwack in the temple. Accidents happen frequently on farms, everyone knows that. What shocked me was how Frank was back on the school bus the following day.

We’d had art that afternoon, two hours of sticking pressed flowers onto porous blue paper. Most of the girls had brought in daffodils from their gardens but I’d taken the trouble to plunder bluebells from the woods. When I got up for my stop, I passed by Frank, white-faced and silent in his seat. I took my picture out of my satchel and handed it to him, no words needed. I remember his look of surprise, then the merest hint of a smile. We have been friends ever since.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Frank says, and my heart dips with dread.

This thing I wanted, daydreamed about, in fact, for weeks and months, has come too late.

“I think you know what it is.”

I do, oh, I do, and I want, more than anything, to stop it from happening.

“Beth.” My name again, the beginning of a speech I fear Frank has rehearsed.

“I have waited far too long to tell you this. I think about you all the time. Seeing you on the bus is the highlight of my day. It would make me so happy if you would let me take you out this weekend.”

Frank has delivered his speech without looking at me, his eyes held just out of reach of my own. But now he does look, and he sees instantly my expression of regret.

“Oh,” he says. “It isn’t what you want? I don’t know why I thought it was.”

I put my hand onto Frank’s arm, my fingers splayed on the cheap black material of his school blazer. His hand isclenched into a fist, a scattering of black hairs between his wrist and his knuckles.

“It’s just—I’m sorry—I’ve met someone.”

Frank looks heartbroken. “I left it too late.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

I want to make it better between us, to find a way of bringing back some light into his handsome, healthy face.

But Frank gets up and heads to the front of the bus. And when the driver stops, he gets out, miles from home, as if he cannot bear to be near me for a moment longer.

For the rest of the journey, it’s Frank who is the headline in my thoughts, my heart churning at the thought of his long walk home and the burning humiliation he must have felt to get off the bus. And beneath this, a gnawing sense of regret or remorse or confusion that I might have thrown away the chance of something great.

1968

Leo is in his tree house, peering out at whoever it is coming up the drive, and when he sees it’s me, he waves and clambers down his rope ladder. It’s electrifying looking at him, the shape of him, the size of him, a reminder of the boy we lost; part of me wishes Frank were here to see it too. Since Bobby died, we’ve spent very little time in the company of children, and never one the same age. That was our choice and I know why we made it, but I hadn’t realized how lonely it would feel living a life that had no children in it.

Leo shrieks when I bring the puppy out from the car. “Is he yours?”

“He doesn’t really belong to anyone yet. He’s in between homes, let’s say. Would you like to hold him?”

Leo makes a cradle of his arms and the dog settles instantly.

“Look how relaxed he is with you.”

“Let’s show Dad. He’s in his study.”

I’m curious to catch Gabriel at work. There have been countless features over the years, Gabriel looking thoughtful in a black polo-neck. “Pretending he’s Hemingway again,” Helen said once, flashing a copy ofVogueshe’d stolen from the hairdresser’s in which Gabriel appeared at his typewriter, tumbler of whisky beside him. I read his books in secret, looking for traces of familiarity, for the boy I once knew. I always found them. Sharp-tongued women with a fondness for drink, and lurid, provocative sex scenes which forged his reputation as a brave writer, and sometimes made me weep.

Into the house with its head rush of memories. The hallsmells the same, wax polish and old wood, so much of it, everywhere. Oak panels on the walls, parquet on the floor, the worn circular staircase I always loved, slippery to a socked foot.

---