Thursdays in the Park (13 page)

‘Will I see you again, though?’

Jeanie shook her head. ‘I say I can’t with one breath, and with the next I can’t resist you . . .’

He smiled at that, but it was a nervous smile. ‘But . . .’ he offered.

‘But what will happen next? We meet for a drink, we want more. In the end we have more. What then?’

Ray smiled. ‘I can’t answer that, Jeanie.’

‘It isn’t funny.’

‘It may not be, but it doesn’t feel like a disaster either . . . does it?’

Jeanie shook her head, unable to think about it any more. She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back in a minute. Can we talk about something else? Something normal, like . . .’

They looked at each other and began to laugh.

‘Politics or the weather isn’t doing it for me. All I want to do is kiss you.’ Ray raised his eyebrows in question.

She looked around, panicky. ‘Not here.’

‘Where, then?’

‘We’re too old to kiss in public.’

Ray chuckled. ‘I reckon most people are. That certainly limits the options in the middle of Chinatown, though.’ He waved at the girl to bring the bill.

‘So in theory,’ he whispered, ‘would you like to kiss me?’

Holding his gaze, Jeanie felt a wave of desire which, against her will, produced a small gasp. Ray’s face told her he didn’t need more of an answer.

‘We could put the piano in here, for Ellie.’

It was as if George had bought the house already. As they entered each empty room, her husband started dragging virtual furniture from their Highgate house and installing it in the Old Rectory, Woodmanstead (pronounced Woomsted). The washed and brushed estate agent, James, was standing patiently by, toying with his cufflinks and agreeing with everything George said in an overly hearty manner. He had a glint in his eye, Jeanie thought, that must surely be the reflection of pound signs.

‘This is the first house we’ve seen,’ she hissed at George.

‘But that doesn’t mean we can’t buy it, does it?’ he answered mildly.

‘Of course not, but we should at least look at others. This is very expensive.’

She knew it was a waste of time. George would either
buy it or not, regardless of the price, regardless almost of what she thought.

‘It’s so perfect,’ he kept muttering, as the glint in the agent’s eye got brighter and brighter.

‘Stop saying how much you like it, will you? It’ll only up the price. He’s not on our side, remember.’

Jeanie was tired. She had forgotten what it was like to have a good night’s sleep. After lunch Ray had taken her to St James’s Park. The hot weather had vanished as if it never was, and in its place was a sharp breeze and intermittent rain. The park had the usual trail of tourists, but not even many of them, and Jeanie and Ray had sat on his coat under a may tree, him cross-legged with an effortlessly straight back, her clutching her legs to her body, her suit skirt demurely pulled taut over her knees.

‘You look strange in that suit,’ he commented.

She felt a bubble of laughter burst up through the layers of worry.

‘How rude! I’ll have you know this is my venerated Accountant Suit. I never wear it for anything else. Is it that bad?’

‘I didn’t say it was bad, just . . . not you. No, maybe it is bad. Wouldn’t he do your accounts just as well if you wore jeans?’

‘I’ve always thought not. It’s an old-fashioned respect thing, I suppose.’

They watched as a large trail of teenage tourists shambled past, entirely unaware of the world outside their exclusive bubble.

Ray pointed at them, ‘I blame central heating.’

‘For what?’

‘We’re tougher than them by a mile. But we’ve mollycoddled them out of existence and as a result they have no backbone.’ He began to get into his stride and Jeanie could tell this was not a new rant. ‘I was brought up in Portsmouth, my father was in the Merchant Navy, and we had a draughty bungalow with a “turn-the-coals-up-Norman” fire . . .’

‘The ones with the orange plastic coals on top of the bars?’ she interrupted him. ‘I remember them. They were better than the one we had, one of those grisly honeycomb gas jobs. It was either freezing or like a tropical rainforest.’

Ray chuckled. ‘Exactly. None of this namby-pamby heating. I used to hold my clothes up in front of the fire before I put them on in the morning, they were so bloody perishing. What do this lot . . .’ he threw his arm dismissively in the wake of the foreign school children, ‘know about that? It’s our fault.’

‘Ooh aye, and we had nought to eat but the neighbour’s rubbish and one pair of shoes between twelve of us.’ She pushed him playfully. ‘It’s just a changing world, isn’t it?’

‘No, but seriously, take people like your son-in-law.’ Ray was on a roll. ‘He obviously thinks he’s God, and I reckon that arrogance comes not from self-belief but from mollycoddling and indulgence.’

Jeanie frowned. ‘Please, let’s not talk about him again.’

He grabbed her arm and pulled her close. ‘OK, I’ll shut up if you kiss me.’

The kiss, which she willingly gave, was long and very tender. For a moment she forgot she was in a public space. She just wanted it to last forever, to erase the painful decision she had made.

As they drew apart, Jeanie sighed.

‘Ray . . . this can never work.’

She made to get up.

He rose with her, shaking his jacket free of grass. ‘It’s your call,’ he said, reaching over and cupping his hand to her cheek as he looked down at her. For a moment she let it lie, her whole body luxuriating in his gentle touch, the pain of loss hovering beyond it like a predator. She bent to pick up her bag and her briefcase.

‘I’d better go.’

‘Can we potter about on our own for a bit?’ George was asking James, and James obliged by going and leaning languidly on the open door of his Peugeot, his silver mobile pressed to his ear.

George took her hand and walked her upstairs to the stunning first-floor bedroom, the ‘master bedroom’, in agent-speak.

‘Look at that view.’ The house was situated at the head of a valley, and the window looked out towards the rolling Blackdown Hills. Sunlight dappled the hillside and the pink-white apple blossoms in the orchard. Sheep wandered in the fields. It was almost a caricature of the pastoral idyll. ‘Imagine us waking up to that.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she agreed, but inside she was dead.

‘Not too big, but lots of room for the family,’ George was intoning. ‘If we get going on the contracts James says we could be in by the end of the summer. There’s no chain, the owner died over a year ago apparently, and his rels are anxious to get the estate sorted.’ He put his arm round Jeanie in a totally uncharacteristic gesture. ‘Can’t you just see Ellie running about that garden?’ He peered over Jeanie’s shoulder and pointed. ‘Look, there’s even a swing on the old oak.’ His delight was both touching and ominous. Jeanie knew she was already trapped. If she didn’t say something, or do something, this would be her home for the rest of her life. What had Ray said? There was no plan that could make it all OK?

‘Where’s the nearest town?’

‘James says Honiton and Chard. It’s quite isolated, I grant you, but the village looks nice. And the sea’s not far.’

Jeanie tried to imagine herself here. She’d left home for London at eighteen to train as a nurse, her first home being the nurses’ home by Russell Square, a stark, dreary building, but situated in what seemed to her to be the centre of the universe. That was forty-two years ago. She watched her husband as he chatted seriously with the smooth young man. His certainty made it seem as if he’d been planning this for years.

George was bubbling with excitement as they drove home along the A303. He kept looking over at Jeanie and smiling encouragingly, until she felt so pressured she wanted to scream.

‘We can put the house on the market immediately, but it doesn’t matter if it takes a while to sell, we can bridge. Once we’ve got the Rectory we can do it up the way we want it over time; it’s perfectly liveable in, don’t you think?’

Then when she didn’t answer, ‘You seem a bit silent, old girl. I know you weren’t keen on the idea at first, but seeing the house must’ve changed your mind, no?’

And when she still said nothing, ‘Come on, Jeanie, spit it out. What’s the problem? Is it the location? Or the size? Tell me.’ He laughed. ‘Turning sixty has put you in a very odd mood, I must say.’

She was almost too irritated to reply. But she knew her husband. He would go on nagging her till she answered.

‘I’ve told you what I think, George. I don’t have anything else to say right now.’

Jeanie waited every night, as if for a lover, for the moment when George went upstairs and she had the safety of her own bedroom. Then she cried – huge, almost silent sobs, muffled hot under the duvet, which left her gasping for breath. The tears weren’t just for Ray. They began for that reason, but then they seemed to morph into a much larger sadness that encompassed her constrained childhood, her brother’s illness and death, the lie she had lived with her husband since he left her bed, the man that George had become. Tears should be cleansing, she thought, but these were not. These just seemed to intensify into something cruel, almost violent, until she felt she would crack apart.
Yet every night was the same, every night she found herself crying – even looked forward to it – and couldn’t stop until eventually she would sink into an exhausted sleep.

‘Mum, you look terrible.’ Her daughter peered into her face from the driving seat as Jeanie got into Chanty’s car. Ellie was stretching out her hand from the back, trying to reach her grandmother.

‘Gin . . . come too . . . look, I got my bag, an’ my underbrella.’ She waved a lurid pink bag towards Jeanie, into which was stuck the green dinosaur umbrella. Jeanie kissed the proffered hand.

Chanty was waiting, hands on the steering wheel, for her mother to fasten her seat belt.

‘Shall I go in the back with Ellie? Keep her quiet?’

Chanty shook her head, her tight, blonde ponytail swinging behind her head. ‘She’ll be fine. I want her to sleep if poss. She’ll be a nightmare if she doesn’t.’

It was Sunday and they were going to visit Aunt Norma for tea. She always prepared a proper tea: fingers of white bread and butter with the crusts cut off and a magnificent wooden cake stand with biscuits on the top, fancies in the middle and a big, round fruit cake on the bottom, to be eaten in your fingers, of course. Oh dear, yes, Aunt Norma had a horror of cake forks, said they were a ‘nasty Continental invention’. They drank lapsang souchong, leaves not bags, naturally, out of fine bone-china cups and saucers, and Aunt Norma always trusted Ellie with her own china mug and a tiny amount of tea. A trust which, much to both Chanty
and Jeanie’s surprise, the child never betrayed by spilling a single drop on the cream carpet.

‘Mum?’ Chanty kept glancing over as they drove round beside Wimbledon Common. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? You look so tired.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Are you still upset by the business with that man in the park?’

‘I . . . probably best not to go into that again.’

Chanty’s profile was tense. ‘I had to ask, Mum, about Ellie. You’d have done the same if it’d been me.’

‘It’s not that. I’m fine, honestly, darling.’

‘Tell me, Mum . . . please. I’m sorry I doubted you. It wasn’t you, really, it was just when Alex told me what Ellie had said.’

Jeanie laid a hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘I’ve told you, it’s not that.’

‘Well, what is it, then? Dad says you’ve been totally not-yourself, he’s worried you’re ill. Please tell me . . . is it the move? Dad said you loved the house.’

‘It was a beautiful house, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in it. I’d rather not have this conversation now, if that’s OK. I’ll be fine. I will.’

But her daughter was not a quitter. She pulled over to the side of the road in one of the streets behind Wimbledon Village and stopped the car.

‘Sorry, Mum, we aren’t going to Auntie Norma’s until you’ve told me what’s wrong.’ She glanced over to check that Ellie was still asleep, then folded her arms and waited.

Jeanie was too exhausted to argue. ‘OK . . . well, I suppose it is the move. I don’t want to go, to give up my shop. I don’t want to . . . well, give up on life.’ She saw Chanty begin to line up her objections and held her hand up. ‘Don’t tell me the advantages of Somerset. I’m not a fool, I can see them for myself, but . . . well, I’ve felt recently that everyone has stopped listening to me. You, Dad, you don’t seem to trust me to know my own mind any more. Take the park incident . . . or lack of incident, you could say. You implied I was dotty enough not to have remembered my own actions. And then not to believe me when I told you the truth. And Dad, well, Dad has just bulldozed me over this move. I said right at the start that I didn’t want to live in the country full-time. I suggested we get a cottage if he wanted to spend more time out of London. God knows we can afford it. But he just hasn’t listened. He’s just gone ahead and offered for somewhere, and he doesn’t seem to hear me when I say I don’t want to move. In fact, over the last few years, since he retired, he’s become more and more dictatorial. He never used to be like this, he was pretty easy-going before. Perhaps it’s him you should be worrying about, not me. My problem is simple. I don’t want to sell my shop. And I don’t want to rot in the country with him.’ Her voice was harsh and strident as she sat pressing her hands together in her lap, not looking at her daughter. ‘I’m sixty, not a hundred and sixty, and I’ve done nothing to warrant this lack of respect from either of you.’

There was silence. ‘Oh, Mum . . .’

‘Please . . . please, don’t . . .’ She knew that Chanty’s sympathy would be the last straw. She was only holding on to herself by sheer force of will. ‘I’ll be fine, I said. I’ll get over it.’ Despite her best efforts, the tears were close to the surface now. ‘It’s just been a difficult time.’

‘I feel this is partly my fault.’ Chanty paused, looking stricken. ‘But you and Dad are OK, aren’t you? I mean, you’re getting on all right generally?’

It was the first time Chanty had ever asked her that, and she had a sudden powerful urge to tell her daughter the truth.
No, it’s not OK, it hasn’t been for years: your father’s hiding something; I’ve met a man I want to run off with . . . the man in the park
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