Thursdays in the Park (22 page)

‘Jeanie.’ His gaze met her own puzzled one. ‘I can find no easy way to say this, no way of making it more palatable . . .’ he made a short, harsh sound, ‘more palatable to you or to me.’ She watched him take a deep breath and found her own heart beating loud in her ears, as if she too shared the as-yet unnamed dread. ‘I was abused as a boy. It was my father’s friend, Stephen Acland, the one who took me for the school holidays when I didn’t fly home to wherever my father was being a diplomat.’ The words, clearly rehearsed, came in a rush.

Jeanie stared at him. ‘Sexually abused?’

George nodded.

‘But . . . you went there for years.’

‘And he abused me for years. From ten to fourteen.’ His face twisted in what looked like long-suppressed rage.

‘God! Why didn’t you tell me, George? All these years you’ve kept this horrible secret and felt you couldn’t tell
me?’ She thought for a moment. ‘But you said how wonderful he was to you . . . you said he was so clever, so cultured, so funny . . .’

George nodded again. ‘Oh, he was. He taught me so much. Jeanie, it was my fault. I let him. I went to his study after supper when he asked me to – he was teaching me chess.’

Jeanie snorted angrily; her head was spinning. ‘Ha! is that what he called it? The bastard, the sick, sick bastard.’ She glared at her husband. ‘Abuse is abuse, George, and it is never anyone’s fault but the perpetrator’s. Christ, this is terrible! Terrible that it happened at all and even worse that you felt you couldn’t tell me. What did you think I’d say?’

George shrugged, ‘I was just so ashamed. I didn’t want you to think I was gay. I’m not gay.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘And I thought you’d be disgusted. I’ve always thought it was my fault and I assumed you’d think the same. But there was no way I could tell my parents. My father would never have believed me in a million years anyway. Stephen was a fellow officer in the Gunners. They served together in Burma and were in the siege of Malta. Stephen was a war hero; he got the DSO for rescuing three men from a blazing tank in North Africa. My father thought he’d be an inspiring role model for me.’

‘And his wife?’

‘Caroline had no idea, I’m a hundred per cent certain of that. It was a different age, Jeanie. Nowadays it’s talked about all the time; you’ve only got to speak to a child these days
to be accused of abuse, but the fifties were more innocent. Someone like Caroline would probably hardly have known what it was, let alone suspected her adored husband was buggering me in the study after dinner. It was a large house, and she never disturbed him in his study. I’m sure she was tucked up in bed with cold cream on her face and a good novel from Boots Lending Library.’

Jeanie smiled. ‘Boots Lending Library, I’d forgotten that.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry . . . All this time . . . what, fifty years? And you never said a thing. God, George, I don’t know what to say, except I wish you’d told me.’

They were both silent for a minute.

‘So what happened? When did it end? Have you seen him since?’

George stretched his legs out in front of him, blinked a couple of times.

‘It ended when Pa died. I was fourteen and at Sherborne by then, and my mother came home to the house we’d always had in Dorset.’

‘But didn’t you still see him? If he was so close to your father?’

‘They went to live in South Africa. I suppose Ma might have met up with them when they made trips over, but people didn’t fly about so much in those days. Anyway Ma, as you know, was the most antisocial woman on the planet. Always a joke that she’d been an ambassador’s wife.’

Jeanie had liked Imogen. She was charming in a quiet way, gentle, very vague and never happier than when left alone to
tend her beautiful garden. She’d died nearly fifteen years ago from complications after a fall. George had been devastated.

‘Did you ever tell her?’

George laughed sadly. ‘Can you imagine it? Anyway, even if she had believed me, what would have been the point? It’d just have upset her.’

‘I suppose . . . but you could have told me. Didn’t you trust me?’

George reached over and took her hand. ‘It wasn’t to do with trust. I thought I’d lose you.’

‘Lose me? You thought I’d stop loving you because you were the victim of child abuse? That’s ridiculous.’

‘It may seem so to you . . . and maybe now it seems stupid to me too. But at the time it was still so much a part of me. I thought about it all the time, every day of my life, and I thought you’d hate that, being made to think of it too, of me and him . . . but mainly I was ashamed. I still am.’

Jeanie was suddenly overwhelmed by such fury that she wanted to hit something. She got up and stamped around the bedroom, not knowing what to do with her emotions.

‘You were so young. Ten years old. How did you cope with it alone? You can hardly have known what was happening.’

‘He made it into a game.’

‘Sick, sick . . . vile bastard.’ She couldn’t deal with the image, with the young boy in the study, vulnerable and without the necessary know-how or support to reject this man’s manipulation, his casual pleasure.

‘You see?’ George was watching her. ‘Don’t you wish you didn’t know?’

Jeanie went over to the bed and hugged him fiercely. ‘That’s not the point.’

She lay in the bath and watched the warm water lap to and fro across her breasts. Over and over in her head ran the same image – she’d seen a photograph of him in his school uniform at around that age: a gangly, shy boy swamped by a blazer that ‘would last’. And George had lived with this every day, alone. She wanted to cry for him, his childhood stolen, and also for herself, because the tentacles of Stephen Acland’s vile crime had ended up corroding their marriage. George had finally explained what had happened that day, over ten years ago, when he’d rejected her for the isolation of the spare room.

‘I was having lunch with Simon in Primrose Hill,’ George had told her. Even telling the story, Jeanie could see, was wearing for him, but she could also see that he was desperate to get it off his chest. ‘And suddenly I heard a voice at one of the other tables. I instantly knew it was him; he had a very distinctive way of talking, very fast, very fluent, always loud
as if he knew he had something interesting to say, and the remnants of his South African childhood in some of the vowels – it was unmistakable. I must have gone pale, because Simon asked if I was feeling all right. I pretended I was a little queasy and went to the loo. Acland followed me. He must have been in his seventies by then, but to me he looked no different. I really thought I was going to be sick. He caught me outside the Gents and acted as if nothing had ever happened. He asked me how I was, said how lovely it was to see me after all this time. Told me Caroline had died the year before and how much he missed her. I didn’t say a thing, I couldn’t. Then Simon, worried about me, pitched up too, and Acland, brazen as ever, started telling him what a wonderful time we’d had together when I was a boy, and how much my visits to his house meant to him. He said, he actually said, “You and I were such special friends, weren’t we, George?” He used those words, Jeanie, “special friends” . . . can you believe the man’s nerve, his sheer affrontery? But he looked at me . . . cowering there, white as a sheet . . . and of course he knew I hadn’t told and I never would.’

Jeanie had put her arms round him, still in his navy pyjamas after what seemed like the longest night of her life, and knew there was nothing on God’s earth she could do to erase these memories.

‘Did you think of him . . . what he did to you . . . when we were making love? Was that the problem?’ she’d had to ask.

George’s look was tormented.

‘Yes and no. I wish I could say not at all, but I can’t. I know it’s so horrible to even think that would be the case. I did manage over the years to put it away in another part of my brain, I learnt to contain the thing . . . sort of. Sometimes it would ambush me and I’d be back there as if I was still ten, eleven, but mostly I lived with it. But seeing him that day finished me off. I suppose avoiding it couldn’t work forever, and that night, when you and I were in bed . . . he was right there between us, smiling that smug smile. I panicked and ran. I should have told you then and there, Jeanie, it would have been so much better for us both, but I just couldn’t do it.’

‘You should talk to a lawyer, take the bastard to court . . . at least see a therapist.’

George had shaken his head. ‘No, please don’t say that. I can’t tell anyone else, ever. Please don’t tell Chanty, Jeanie, I couldn’t bear it,’ he had pleaded. ‘It’s all so vile, what would she think of me?’

Jeanie had winced at the thought. She knew Chanty would feel only horrified sympathy for him, but surely no daughter should have to deal with such a revelation about their own father.

‘Of course it’s up to you who you tell. But please, you have to go to a therapist. Telling me won’t change a thing, you need to sort this out with someone who knows about these things, or it,
he
, will haunt you for the rest of your life. Please, George . . . no more secrets.’

‘Are you sure he’s not invented all this to stop you leaving him?’ Rita packed her tennis racket into its cover and zipped it up. Jeanie had played like a demon today, driving the ball to the line-edge with killer force, each shot discharging another bout of rage at what Acland had done to her husband.

Jeanie stared at her. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Well . . .’ Her friend shrugged, ‘it wouldn’t be the first time someone suddenly remembers something expediently.’

‘He didn’t “suddenly remember”, he never forgot, Rita; he told me he’s thought about it every day of his life.’

‘OK, just checking, sweetheart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying what happened, if it happened, isn’t dire – no torture is bad enough for a paedophile. But George isn’t stupid, you know. Even though he pretended otherwise, he must know you were contemplating leaving when you told him about Ray.’

‘I can’t leave him now.’

‘So it worked, then.’

‘Rita . . . please, stop being so cynical. You weren’t there. He was in a terrible state. I absolutely know he didn’t make it up.’

‘You can’t stay with him out of pity, Jeanie.’

She didn’t know how to answer. Suddenly her friend grabbed her by both arms and looked her full in her face.

‘Jean Lawson, this . . . is . . . your . . . life.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you know exactly.’ She let go her grip, shaking her head as if baffled. ‘Are you saying it’s Goodnight Charlie for Park Man, then?’

‘Maybe what I feel for Ray is just foolishness. Chanty said I’d be left alone and unloved . . . and old, if I broke up my marriage.’

Rita snorted, gathered up her things and began to drive Jeanie away from the court.

‘Well, obviously she’s going to say that. She’s your daughter. She doesn’t want either of you hurt. But that doesn’t mean she’s right, darling.’

‘I know, but you didn’t see George. He was so pathetic, so vulnerable. If I said I was leaving now I don’t know if he’d survive.’ She remembered his curled, shaking figure.

‘He would,’ Rita said firmly. ‘People do . . . George does.’

Jeanie looked at her friend. ‘Why are you so keen for me to leave him?’

‘I’m not so keen for you to do anything specific. I just saw how you were when you met Ray. You came alive. I hate waste, and I feel you’re wasted on George. He’s not a bad man, but he lives beneath the surface. You’re always dragging him through life, Jeanie. It must be tiring.’

She did feel tired, overwhelmingly so. And letting her guard down, she suddenly knew that she did want to leave George. The thought no longer spelt loss, but rather opened such a vista of freedom, such a scent of life, like breathing the fresh early morning air from an open window. Something had changed. Perhaps the burden of his secret had chained her to him, and now, ironically, when he needed her most, she was finally free. Yet the thought was transient. Responsibility tethered her obstinately to the present.

‘I know what you’re saying, Rita, I do.’

‘But you’re not going to take a chance?’

‘How can I? I can’t leave him immediately after he’s revealed such a horrifying secret. It would confirm his worst fear, that I’m disgusted by him. I can’t even think about Ray right now.’

Rita dropped her badgering tone; now she just looked sad. ‘When will you tell Ray?’

Jeanie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him since before I told George. He’ll know something’s up.’

‘Poor man, he’s been trumped.’

Jeanie looked sharply at her friend. ‘You still think George is playing me, don’t you?’

‘He’s no slouch at it, Jeanie. Don’t forget he was quite happy to modify your marriage ten years ago without ‘fessing up – he must have seen how unhappy that made you. He could have told you then, but he waited till he thought you were about to leg it. That smacks of self-interest, no?’

‘I don’t think these things are controllable. He told me when he could.’

Rita raised her eyebrows. ‘Whatever. Listen, darling, you have to do what you have to do, and in the end I’m fully behind you . . . all the way, whatever it is. But please,
please
think twice before you pack your life back into last year’s suitcase.’