Page 28 of Broken Country

“We’ll visit so often you’ll be sick of the sight of us,” she says, laughing.

“Never,” I say. “We’ll punt on the river and eat cream teasand spend a whole day in the Ashmolean looking at broken bits of pottery.”

It is almost two months before Gabriel and I finally meet. He is waiting for me to finish my interview, sitting on a low wall outside the college, reading. When he sees me, he leaps to his feet, flings his arms wide, his book clattering to the ground. “It’s you,” he says, enveloping me in his huge woolen overcoat. “And you are not wearing enough clothes.”

“I’m planning on wearing even less,” I say, and then we are laughing and running through the streets, faster and faster until we reach his college rooms.

As soon as the door closes behind us, we start tearing off our clothes. We are naked, on his bed, the feeling of his skin against mine, after all this time, my fingers tracing a pathway across his chest, his stomach, hip bones, the places I love and miss the most. Gabriel’s lips press to my neck over and over, him telling me he has missed me, how much he wants me, and everything is the same. There’s the desperate craving I remember so well, not wanting to wait even though Gabriel always says it will be better if we do, then the feeling of him inside me again, the intensity of it, pleasure that is almost unbearable, the way he cries my name, Beth, Beth, and then lying together afterward so tightly wrapped around each other we can barely breathe.

“How many times do you think we can make love in twenty-four hours?” Gabriel says. “Shall we see?”

I feel so happy knowing what we had, what we still have, was real, wondering why I doubted it, why I pored over his letters looking for proof he had stopped loving me.

“I need to show you Oxford,” he says, when we are still in bed, hours later.

The light has gone. Outside his window, Oxford looks spectral against the blue-black sky.

“There’s a birthday party we could go to,” he says. “But I’d rather keep you to myself.”

“Whose party?”

“Thomas Nicholls, Tom. He’s in the second year.”

I pick up on something, a slight hesitation, which makes me question his reluctance to go to the party. Does he feel awkward introducing me, still a schoolgirl, to his writerly crowd? Or is there something—or someone—he wishes to keep from me? In my head, I’m sifting the spare details for specks of hidden truth.

“Where does Tom live?”

“He has rooms on Magdalen Street. He lives with Louisa.”

Louisa. Just her name invokes a chill, as if my body has stored the weeks of suspicion and jealousy and is ready, in a moment, to be reactivated. As if the hours of lovemaking, the endless passionate declarations—I love you, I missed you—now vanish into air.

“I’d rather stay in bed. But what will I tell my parents? They’ll be wanting a blow-by-blow account of my twenty-four hours in Oxford.”

“You’re right,” Gabriel says, throwing back the blankets and leaping from bed. “We can go for half an hour and then we’ll sneak off and find somewhere for dinner.”

At first, the party thrills me. Tom and Louisa share a house that feels surprisingly large for a pair of students and there are people everywhere, crowded into the drawing room with its shiny black piano, smoking on the staircase, shouting to be heard in the kitchen, where we go to find our hosts.This is what it’s going to be like, I think, drinking it all in: a boy in a purple velvet suit; a couple necking openly, and inconveniently, against the fridge door.

Tom, blond and goofy looking in tweed and spectacles, is pouring out a bottle of champagne. “Here,” he says,passing us two glasses, filled almost to the brim. “Impeccable timing. This is the good stuff. And who have we here? Have you been fraternizing with freshers again, Gabe?”

Gabriel has been absorbed into Louisa’s second-year crowd of friends; I doubt he spends much time with his year at all. And he clearly hasn’t told Tom about me.Or hasn’t told anyone?Paranoia fizzes and splutters in my gut.

“This is Beth. She had an interview at St Anne’s today.”

“Welcome, Beth. I like your dress.”

We fight our way through a hallway three-deep in bodies to the relative calm of the drawing room, where Gabriel seems to know everyone. He is greeted, kissed on both cheeks, embraced, and backslapped as he introduces me: “This is Beth,” he says. “She’s down for her interview. We grew up in the same village.”

I smile at the Glorias and Claudias and Imogens in their rich-girl twinsets, their ropes of pearls, all the time wondering why he hasn’t introduced me as his girlfriend.

“Gabe, you came!”

I’m involved in a conversation with Claudia or Imogen and I can’t turn away, although the voice I hear behind me is instantly familiar. Affectionate, American. But I listen, even as I reply to questions about my interview—“mostly we talked about the Romantics”—and my attentive ear picks out the lowered voices.

“You said you couldn’t come.”

“I think Beth wanted to.”

“I hope it’s not awkward.”

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