Page 46 of Broken Country

“What is this, twenty questions?” Nina laughs. “We’ve only known each other a few weeks.”

“My mum and dad got married when they were young. They hardly knew each other.”

“Not true,” Frank says. “I’d been ogling your mum on the school bus for years.”

A look of satisfaction passes over my father’s face. He couldn’t bear my heartbreak over Gabriel, seemed almost as devastated as me. At the time, my sister and mother were quick to denigrate him. Understandable, but not what I wanted to hear.

“He was completely wrong for you,” Eleanor said.

My mother told me it was a lucky escape. “Now you know what he is capable of, you’re better off without him.”

But my dad, who’d watched me crash full pelt into my first love affair, without care or caution, the way I always was back then, didn’t criticize Gabriel once.

“People make mistakes, particularly when they are young,” he said. “I believe Gabriel will come to regret it.”

It wasn’t long before Frank began calling for me at the cottage. Our love affair was sweetly old-fashioned incomparison and my parents adored Frank from the outset. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was worried my parents would think it was too much, too soon. Frank and I hadn’t been together very long. But they were elated we were providing them with a grandchild years before they expected one and, as soon as he was born, Bobby became their new favorite person.

Bobby has changed us all.

“Is it normal to love one person your whole life like you and Daddy?” Bobby asks me, out of the blue. “Or can you love other people first?”

As his sweet, innocent voice carries across the table, the other conversations fade away. I feel it, a shimmer of awkwardness in the room, see Nina’s look of perplexity as she picks up on something she doesn’t understand. No one moves to speak, and it is left to me to answer him.

“It’s simplest when you do,” I say. “But the only thing that matters is finding the right person to spend the rest of your life with. However you get there.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Frank says, holding my gaze until I smile and look away.

1968

Jimmy’s stag night, such as it is, takes place exactly one week before the wedding. He and Frank disappear off to the Compasses in high spirits: Every male in the village, young and old, has gathered to celebrate his last days as a bachelor.

“Watch out for him, won’t you?” I whisper to Frank as they leave, and he rolls his eyes.

“Obviously,” he says, kissing me to make up for his impatient tone. “When do I ever not?”

An evening alone. So many jobs I should be getting on with, sauces and puddings to make for the wedding, a house that always needs cleaning, a laundry basket in need of emptying.

Instead, I build a fire in the grate, even though it’s a warm night, and I sit in front of it staring into the flames. Thinking.

Over and over I replay the conversation I had with Louisa in the pub. Her suggestion Gabriel had always loved me and perhaps still does. “It’s not too late,” she said. Although, of course, it is.

Nothing has happened with Gabriel and nor will it. I love Frank, we belong to each other. But there’s no denying Gabriel and I have drawn closer in the past weeks.

It’s that glass of wine we have most evenings—often the highlight of my day—when he encourages me to talk about Bobby. Gabriel is curious, he asks questions that make me pause and consider. I find myself searching my memory for Bobby’s favorite food—honey-roasted sausages—orthe name of his best friend: He didn’t have one, as he was friends with everyone. Each time, a new piece of Bobby comes back. It feels like a small miracle, this remembering.

What I feel in this hour with Gabriel at the end of the day, an hour when Leo is watching television in another room, and we sit side by side on the sofa, talking and quite often just being, is something close to happiness.

I am asleep when Frank comes back from the pub, waking as the front door closes behind him. I hear his quiet tread on the stairs, then the sound of him undressing in the dark. He gets in beside me but leaves a gap between us.

“Are you awake?” he says, eventually.

He must know from my breathing, my stillness that I am.

“How was it?”

For a moment he says nothing. Then: “As you’d expect, I suppose.”

His voice is bleak, sober.

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