Thursdays in the Park (27 page)

‘But how stupid was I, to think that he could really want me when there are so many young, beautiful girls out there? She was lovely, Rita, mixed race, tall and slim with the most stunning smile. I only saw her for a moment but she’s gorgeous. Much younger than him, of course, but then his last girlfriend was. He likes them young.’ She was thinking
out loud, voicing at last the thoughts that had twisted and spun about her head since lunchtime.

‘How do you know it was his girlfriend?’

‘They were under the same umbrella. He had his arm round her; they were laughing together,’ she listed in a dreary monotone.

‘Yeah, but they could have been friends who bumped into each other and took shelter from the rain, enjoying a joke together. Were they actually canoodling?’

Jeanie looked at her friend pityingly. ‘No, but they looked as if they were just about to.’

‘Listen, Jeanie, I’ve been around long enough to know that assumptions are highly dangerous.’ Rita got up. ‘Got any wine? You definitely need a drink.’

Jeanie shook her head.

‘Well, we’re going out then. Come on, you can’t just sit here feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘But what have I got left now, Rita?’

Rita sighed and sat down again. ‘Remember how you weren’t actually seeing Ray any more? Remember, in fact, how you were determined not to see him again? Remember how you were hell-bent on dying in Dorset . . . OK, Somerset? I don’t quite understand how today changes anything, except to confirm that you’re plumb on course.’ She paused. ‘Unless, of course, you had secret longings you weren’t telling me about?’ She raised her eyebrows and waited.

‘I suppose I thought, selfishly, that he’d be there if I changed my mind,’ Jeanie admitted sadly. ‘He said, the last time I
saw him, “If you change your mind you know where I am.” ’ She looked up at her friend. ‘I mean, obviously he couldn’t wait for ever.’

‘So you’re telling me now that if he was available you’d run off with him?’ Rita threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘I can’t make you out, darling. One breath you can’t leave George; the next you’re in a lather because Ray, quite reasonably considering you dumped him, has found someone else.’

‘I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t understand either,’ Jeanie replied with a rueful smile. ‘I told you, I’m a fool.’

‘George, it’s Alex’s exhibition tonight. Do you want to come? We can stay at the flat and come back tomorrow. You haven’t seen the flat yet.’

George looked at her.

‘Of course I’ll come. Can’t miss Alex’s day.’

‘It’ll mean getting a three o’clock train.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, today might be awkward.’ He cast a glance outside, where the drizzle dulled the landscape to a grey blur. ‘You see, I need to clear the ground for the vegetable patch before we get a frost and it’s too hard to dig. I should really . . .’

‘Well, it has to be today, George, it’s the opening night.’

George pondered this information.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ he repeated uncertainly.

‘You don’t have to. I can get Sally to pop in. I’m sure Alex will understand if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘No, I’ll come.’

Part of Jeanie desperately wanted him to come, or at least to be in a fit state to come. She so wanted the old George back, the ‘solid’, ‘unflappable’ husband and father. The other part dreaded taking him so far from the safety of the house. Supposing he got drunk and behaved as he had at Chanty’s that night?

The train was delayed by more than an hour – a signalling failure at Axminster. George had been silent at first, staring morosely out of the train window. But gradually she sensed a curiosity, then an excitement in her husband. His eyes, recently so lifeless, sparked up; he began to talk to her quietly, chatting about things that she’d assumed in his current state of mind he hadn’t taken in, as if months of stored-up information had suddenly been let loose. He talked about Lorna and Sally, the house, the family and the garden, of course. By the time they left the train he was, if not animated, at least brighter, as if a cloud had lifted. Jeanie watched in amazement. She didn’t question it, but it crossed her mind that his self-imposed solitude in the Old Rectory had done him more harm than good, the lack of stimuli imprisoning him further in his depression. If he could be a husband to her again, she thought, perhaps there would be something to look forward to, something to make her forget.

The gallery was brilliantly lit, the paintings vivid with colour against the stark white walls. Jeanie was delighted
by the improvement in her son-in-law’s work and sensed a buzz amongst the small number of people self-consciously clutching wine glasses and eyeing the paintings as they socialized.

‘Dad, Mum.’ Chanty looked relieved to see them, her pregnancy cleverly dressed with an elegant black smock and leggings. Jeanie saw her gaze rest on her father. ‘How was the trip up?’ she asked, although she seemed not to listen to the answer.

Jeanie could see her daughter was distracted, watching the door, the guests, her husband, gauging each glance directed at his work. Alex looked as he had predicted: terrified, and stood slightly aloof from the group round him, smiling automatically every few seconds, his blue eyes wide with fear like a rabbit pinned in the headlights.

Gradually the glamorous Spanish girl with a high, swinging ponytail and crimson lips, brandishing her clipboard with details of the paintings, began to place red stickers beside some of the frames.

‘I think it’s a success! Fingers crossed, they seem to like them,’ Chanty hissed into her mother’s ear.

‘They’re good,’ Jeanie agreed. ‘Particularly that one.’ She pointed to one on the wall by the door. ‘The colours are amazing.’

‘Dad seems to be getting into it.’ They both looked at George, who was listening intently to a thin, earnest-looking man dressed entirely in black and sporting a large satchel across his skinny chest.

‘If that man’s not careful, George will start telling him about the best conditions for bare-root hedging or the wide variety of agapanthus hybrids currently available.’

Chanty looked impressed.

‘I saw a catalogue,’ Jeanie admitted, laughing. ‘He’s obsessed.’

‘Is that good?’

‘Probably not, but that’s your father for you. His poor clocks have been entirely thrown over for the agapanthus hybrids. It was odd today, though; he seemed to have some sort of epiphany on the train – he just suddenly opened up and talked almost normally. And look at him now. This is the first time I’ve seen him really engaging with someone for months.’

‘Perhaps he’s turned a corner, Mum. I do hope so.’ Chanty put her hand on Jeanie’s arm. ‘Sorry I haven’t been there for you these past months; it must have been hell. I hate you being so far away.’

‘I miss you too, darling. I think I’ll take George off soon; I don’t want him to revert. Will you tell the girl I’d like to buy that painting, please?’

‘Oh, Mum, you don’t need to buy one. Alex will give it to you.’

‘Nonsense. Of course I’ll buy it. We can afford it, and I want it for the flat.’

‘I’m dog-tired, but I enjoyed that,’ George declared in the taxi up to North London.

‘Me too. I bought one for the flat.’

‘Good. Not sure about the paintings myself. As you know, I’m more of a landscape man,’ he muttered. ‘We should do this more often, old girl,’ he added, settling comfortably against her. It was the first time in months he’d called her by the loathsome nickname, but tonight, for some reason, it no longer offended her.

‘Drink?’ she asked when they got upstairs to the flat, feeling oddly like a host to her own husband.

Later, as they settled to the unfamiliar routine of sharing a bed, she felt a strange tension in George as he lay beside her.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Jeanie?’ George turned to her and suddenly she felt his hand on her breast, tentative, almost apologetic. ‘Would you mind if we . . . you know . . .’

She tried not to stiffen, but her whole body rebelled at the thought. This man had become almost a stranger to her. She made an effort to calm her breath and told herself she ought to encourage him. He was her husband; wasn’t this what she wanted, for things to get back to normal? He moved closer to her and began to kiss her face, her lips. He smelt old, tasted musty and stale from the wine, and it was all she could do not to push him off. Instead she just lay there, wooden and unresponsive, trying to feel something other than revulsion. He seemed not to notice, but it was over quickly, almost before it had begun. She heard him groan in the darkness and breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Thank you . . . that felt so good,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Sorry it wasn’t much of a performance, it’s been so long.’ He lay back with a sigh. ‘Did you enjoy it, though?’

‘It was nice.’ She spoke lamely into the lengthening silence, almost choking on her lie.

‘I think things are going to be OK, Jeanie.’

‘What happened on the train, George?’

‘I don’t know . . . I was looking at the countryside flashing past and I thought how beautiful it was, what an amazing world we live in. I began to see things in colour again; I felt I was seeing them for the first time. Don’t know how to explain it, not my forte, but, well, it’s been pretty grim recently . . . life . . .’

She listened to his breathing still, then the onset of a gentle snore. George got up, as usual, at five-thirty, and it was only then that Jeanie drifted off to sleep.

As autumn wore on, it became clear to Jeanie that she’d preferred the distance George’s illness had placed between them. Because as George recovered, he began to demand more of his wife: things that even a year ago she would have been happy to comply with, and nothing more than the normal interchange between a married couple. But Jeanie did not want sex with George, nor to sleep in the same bed as him. She didn’t want to give up the shop (which he was now demanding almost daily), she didn’t want to socialize with the locals, or accompany him to garden centres far and wide to choose ground-cover plants and stone statuary. She knew she was being unreasonable – was this such a bad life? – and kept hoping her feelings would change. Meanwhile she gritted her teeth, trying to persuade herself that her life could continue without any hope of Ray. But the persistent image of him with the young girl tormented her still, as if it were lodged in a large frame on the wall of her brain.

‘Do you want me to get the bedroom at the front ready for your guests?’ Sally wanted to know.

‘I think they’d like the back one; it’s bigger,’ George chimed in.

‘But it hasn’t got the view,’ Jeanie argued, although she couldn’t have cared less where Rita and Bill slept. Everything asked of her seemed an imposition; she plodded dully from day to day, living for Wednesday morning and her escape to the shop, despite the fact that her sojourn in London had now been whittled down to one night, not two. George had insisted, and Jeanie, wanting to stave off the pressure to sell for as long as possible, had given in.

‘But it’s a much nicer room.’ He nodded to Sally as if the argument were closed, and Sally accepted his decision without further reference to Jeanie.

They arrived very late on Friday night in the middle of a downpour.

‘Bloody hell, darling, this really is the back of beyond,’ Rita whispered to her friend as they embraced.

Jeanie had cooked a fish pie, but the Aga was on a go-slow, and it was almost ten before they sat down to eat round the kitchen table, by which time copious amounts of Rioja had been consumed.

‘Of course Jeanie loathes it here.’ George’s tone seemed mild, almost humorous, but Jeanie could detect a sharp underlying anger.

‘I don’t loathe it,’ she countered.

‘Of course she loathes it,’ Rita, loudly drunk, piped up. ‘Who wouldn’t. It’s the country.’ She giggled as Bill shook his head at her.

‘It’s not the country she loathes, unfortunately.’ George ground a generous amount of pepper on to his pie, keeping the mild, informational tone. ‘It’s me.’ He dropped it into the sentence as if he half expected everyone to go, ‘Ha, ha, George, good one.’ But they took him at his word and there was a deadly silence, everyone shocked out of their drunkenness.

‘What do you mean?’ Jeanie asked, her heart pounding. Rita shot her a glance, Bill found something fascinating on his plate next to his peas.

‘I mean, old girl, that you’ve well and truly gorn off me.’ He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘I can’t blame you; I haven’t been myself for a while now.’

The silence stretched out, only George still calmly eating as if he’d been talking about the weather.

‘You’re drunk,’ Jeanie muttered.

‘I may be drunk, miss, but I’ll be sober in the morning and you’ll still hate me,’ he retorted, parodying Churchill’s famous line. No one round the kitchen table laughed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I don’t hate you.’

‘Stop it, George. Jeanie’s right. This is the drink talking.’ Bill was always the voice of reason.

George turned to him, seated on his left. ‘I can’t say these things to her . . . it’s too hard.’ He’d begun to slur his words.