Page 32 of Broken Country

In late October, Gabriel writes:

Stayed up late talking to L. I told her everything, all the doubts I’ve been having, how guilty I feel. She was wonderful, as always, don’t know what I’d do without her. God, I feel so terrible about this, she ended up spending the night with me. I had to smuggle her out through the back door this morning, I can only pray no one saw her and Beth won’t find out.

Then, fatally, an entry four days ago.

Louisa is in love with me. What am I going to do? Beth arrives in three days for her interview. My life is a mess.

How could he have made love to me in the way he did when he had these feelings for her? And these doubts about me? I picture Louisa at the party, the joy in her face when Gabriel came to join us. The way she put her hand to his chest. Unconscious. Intimate. Knowing. As if she had touched him before. And I see Gabriel, reddening as I watched him, the guilty flush of a betrayer.

I read the entries again. The words seem like incontrovertible evidence now.

The magnitude of this, it’s too big to comprehend. Gabriel and Louisa. Louisa and Gabriel. Sheloveshim. Heslept with her. How could I have been so blind, so foolish? And why did I open his diary? Even now, with my world crashing around me, I wish I could turn back the clock to the ignorance of a moment ago.

I walk around his room, unsure what to do with myself. To Gabriel and Louisa I’m just some stupid schoolgirl he once had feelings for and they are counting down the time until I go away again.

I spy a pale pink scarf balled up in the corner. I pick it up, inhale its overpowering flowery scent and throw it to the ground.

It takes no time at all to dress in my own clothes, hurling the offensive spotty dress in my bag. I pause at Gabriel’s desk before I leave, heart racing while I consider what to write.

It’s over, Gabriel.

I can’t see you anymore.

You know why.

Beth

My bus has not yet arrived at the station. There’s a cluster of people waiting and I stand amid them, arms wrapped around myself, in shock. My breathing is too loud, too gaspy, and I feel as though I am fighting for air.Gabriel and Louisa. A perfect coupling. They will look so good together.Everything I dreaded has come true, as if I wished it into existence.

And then, Gabriel is here, running into the station, frantic.

“What’s happened?” he says, when he reaches me. He pulls me into his arms and, for a moment, a blissful, forgotten moment where everything is still as it was, I weep against him, my face pressed to the hard muscles of his chest, his smell—lemons and cedar and cigarette smoke—so intensely familiar and no longer mine.

I jerk myself away. “I know about Louisa,” I say.

His face betrays nothing. “What about her?”

“Shelovesyou. You slept with her. I read your diary, Gabriel. Don’t bother denying it.”

“You read my diary? How could you—?” Gabriel is shouting so loudly people turn around. Fury in his eyes I’ve never seen before.

“I’m glad I did. Because you would never have had the guts to tell me. What were you going to do, string us both along? Your mother warned me about you. She said you use people, and move on when you get bored of them. She warned me you would tire of me as soon as you got to Oxford. I should have listened to her.”

It’s the worst thing I could have said.

His anger switches into something else: coldness, a look of such intense dislike—of me, of her?

“Gabriel,” I say, pleading, knowing I’ve gone too far but he turns his face away. He can’t bear to look at me.

My bus arrives, people get on, the engine starts up. The conductor leans out of the door. “Are you coming, love?”

I look at Gabriel, hoping he’ll say something to stop me, hoping there’s a way of this not being our end.

“You should go,” he says, and still he doesn’t look at me. “You’re right. This is finished.”

Heartbreak is commonplace—a young girl in a tempest of crying surprises no one—but there is concern on every single face as I get on the bus.

“Let’s get you safely home, darling,” the conductor says.

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