Thursdays in the Park

by Hilary Boyd

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

When Jeanie's husband leaves her without an explanation, she is furious and hurt. Taking her granddaughter to the park on Thursdays helps console her, and there, one day, she meets Ray and his grandson. Ray is kind, easy to talk to, and gorgeous. Jeanie starts to live for Thursdays. But does she have the courage, with opposition from all sides, to turn her life upside down for another shot at love?

Release date: August 4, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

‘You shouldn’t drink so much.’ George’s whisper hissed into the heat of the summer night as they walked home along the silent pavement.

‘I didn’t have more than three glasses,’ Jeanie protested. ‘I’m certainly not drunk.’

She unlocked the door and made her way through to the kitchen. It was hot, so hot, even at ten-thirty at night. She threw the keys and her bag on the table and went to open the French windows on to the terrace.

‘It’s bloody embarrassing, you get so strident and loud,’ George went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘As if anyone’s interested in vitamin trials. If you hadn’t been so drunk you would’ve seen the man was bored out of his brain.’

Jeanie looked at her husband, stung by the venom in his voice. He’d been uncharacteristically tense all evening, snappish even before they’d left for Maria and Tony’s. Then, when they’d hardly finished coffee, George had jumped up and said they had to go, some feeble excuse of an early meeting she knew he didn’t have.

‘I wasn’t drunk, George. I’m not drunk. He was the one who kept asking questions,’ she told him quietly.

George picked up the keys she’d flung on the table and went to hang them on the rack of hooks by the doorway. Above each hook was a label in George’s careful, even script: George–H, Jeanie–H, George–C, Jeanie–C, Spare H, Spare C, to denote house and car keys for them both.

‘Let’s have a nightcap outside. It’s too hot to sleep.’ She checked her husband’s face to see if she were yet forgiven, but his eyes were tense behind the heavy tortoiseshell glasses.

‘I’m sure he thought you were flirting,’ George persisted, staring pointedly at his wife.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Jeanie felt the breath short in her chest and looked away from him, a blush flooding her cheeks. Not a blush of guilt – the man had been weedy and dried up with discoloured teeth: nice enough, but hardly a sex object – but of anxiety. She hated confrontation. Brought up in a dank Norfolk vicarage, she had watched her mother swallow the brusque, domineering dictats issued by her father, never questioning his right to abuse her in this way. Jeanie had lived in fear of him, but she remembered willing her mother on, hoping that just for once she would finally explode, make a stand against his bullying, and vowing that she would never let herself be treated in that way. Mild-mannered George, she believed, was nothing like her father.

George raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re blushing.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Come on, pour us an Armagnac and let’s sit outside and cool off.’ She heard the wheedling tone in her voice and hated herself for it. ‘You saw him,’ she added weakly, and moved towards the terrace. She felt the adrenaline twitching in her body, and was suddenly just tired.

‘I think I’ll go up,’ he said, but he made no move to go; just stood, his tall, gangly frame sagging and rooted, in the middle of the kitchen. He seemed miles away, the stupid tension about the dinner party obviously forgotten.

‘George . . . what is it . . . what’s wrong?’ She went over to him and looked up into his face. Shocked, she saw a heavy, blank desperation in his brown eyes that she’d never seen before. ‘George?’

For a second he held her gaze, frozen. He seemed about to speak, but instead turned abruptly away.

‘Did something happen today?’

‘I’m fine . . . fine.’ He cut across her question. ‘Nothing happened. What could happen?’ She watched his face twitch and pull distractedly, as if he were trying to change his expression, then he headed for the stairs. ‘Are you coming?’ he muttered as he left.

The bedroom was airless and stuffy from the day’s heat, despite the sash window thrown wide. George turned to her as she sank into bed, and drew his long finger across her cheek, her mouth, then brought his hand down slowly over her body in a determined gesture of desire. She didn’t want him, but there was something single-minded about his caress that was hard to refuse. This was not lovemaking, however, nor did it seem to be anything to do with her; she could have been anyone. In fact she had the odd feeling that neither of them was there, naked on that hot, damp sheet. It felt like a remote access engagement, mechanical, an anonymous exercise in sex.

Then without warning George suddenly pulled away, throwing himself up and back against the wooden head-board, for all the world as if a scorpion had just crawled across the sheet.

Jeanie blinked up at him in the darkness. ‘What’s the matter, what is it?’

Without a word her husband leapt out of bed and snapped on the bedside light. He stood there naked, his arms clasped round his chest, staring down at his wife. It was all she could do not to recoil, his brown eyes were so cold, empty.

‘I . . . can’t . . . do this.’ He spoke slowly, carefully, as if he were feeling his way around the words.

She reached towards him, but he held out his arm, palm angled towards her, fending her off, although she hadn’t moved from her side of the bed. With the other hand he reached down to pick up his navy pyjama trousers, which he clutched to his body like a shield.

‘I don’t understand, George. Tell me. Say what you mean.’ Jeanie felt her breath catch uncomfortably in her throat as she sat up to face him.

George did not reply, just stood there. ‘I mean . . .’ He spoke like a drowning man refusing rescue. ‘I can’t do it any more.’

‘Can’t do what? George?’

He turned away from her, picking his glasses up from the bedside table as he made for the door.

Jeanie jumped up and raced after him. ‘Where are you going? George? You can’t just leave me like that. Is it something I’ve done? Please . . . tell me.’

But George shook her off, barely glancing at her. ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room.’

I can’t do it any more. His words haunted her as she lay alone in the crumpled bed, shocked and above all, bewildered. Their life together, twenty-two years of it now, was orderly, you might even say a little dull. They never argued, as long as Jeanie accepted George’s apparently benign need to control her. Then tonight it felt as if she had been unwittingly perched on top of a volcano that had suddenly decided to erupt. What had got into her husband?

In the morning, George behaved as if nothing had happened. She came down to the sunny kitchen in her nightdress to find him laying out the breakfast cups and plates, the marmalade pot, the butter dish with its lid in the shape of a cow, just as he always did.

‘What happened last night?’ She slumped, exhausted, at the kitchen table.

He looked up from his task of filling the stainless-steel kettle as if her question was puzzling to him.

‘Nothing happened. I was tired.’

‘And that’s it?’ she demanded, dazed. ‘That’s all you have to say?’

Still clutching the kettle, he raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Don’t make your usual drama out of this, Jeanie. I’ve got a lot on at work. I said, I’m tired.’

He set the kettle on its stand and carefully flicked the button, smoothing his burgundy tie over his immaculate white shirt and into the band of his grey pinstriped trousers, held up with scarlet braces.

Jeanie waited, wondering for a moment if she had imagined it all. ‘George, you ran away from me last night as if I’d suddenly developed ten heads. I don’t need to invent a drama.’

George strolled nonchalantly round the table behind her, and she caught the mild scent of the shaving soap she had bought him for Christmas as he dropped a brief kiss on her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He opened the fridge. ‘Juice? I’m doing you a boiled egg.’

George had never come back to her bed. Now, nearly ten years later, Jeanie lay and listened to her husband’s firm tread on the floorboards above her head. It was hardly five-thirty, but this was late for George. She traced his usual path to the bathroom, heard the cistern flushing, the water running down the pipes, then the criss-crossing of the bedroom in search of his clothes. His routine had never varied for the thirty-two years of their marriage, but she had not been allowed to share it with him since that strange night. And to this day she was no closer to understanding why he had done it than she had been then. She had badgered him almost daily at first for an explanation. If he had performance anxiety, that could be dealt with. If it was something she’d done, just say. Come back to our bed, please, George, please – she had pleaded, cajoled, abased herself in her desire for things to return to normal.

The incident sat huge and painful between their every exchange back then, but through it all George said not a word, just point-blank refused to engage with her on the subject – there wasn’t a reason, it wasn’t her fault, and he would not, perhaps could not, talk about it. Jeanie got so tired of the constant tension that in the end she had simply given up, telling nobody, not even her best friend Rita, because in an odd way she felt ashamed. Surely, despite George’s assurance to the contrary, it must be a poor reflection on her sexuality.

Her confidence crushed, Jeanie made no move to seduce him after that night. Only once, about a year later, when both had had too much to drink, did he follow Jeanie to what was now her bedroom, and they began a drunken fumbling, fully clothed, on the covers. But almost immediately, even through the haze of alcohol, she sensed a tortured indecision in her husband’s caress. His hand fluttered, hardly committed, over her skin, his body held back from hers, even as he kissed her mouth. And then, as before, the shutters suddenly came down and he pushed her firmly away as if she were some corrupting temptress, quickly and silently dragging himself off the bed and out of her room.

Their marriage had adapted. Not all at once, of course: more a slow, painful fade of emotion, as Jeanie’s anger at her husband’s silence – which was much more tormenting even than the event itself – became contained, rationalized as an inevitable sacrifice to her marriage. Her childhood had been defined by sacrifice – Jesus died that we might live. Remember this and be thankful. Amen – had been her father’s favourite grace. Fervidly pious, Reverend Dickenson based his life on harsh and joyless duty, and he expected the same of his family, the vicarage silent with anticipation of his rigidly imposed will.

George had bought her the shop premises soon after, perhaps with some cockeyed notion of compensation, and she had thrown herself into her business with energy and enthusiasm. And she was successful. The health-food shop, Pomegranate, sat halfway up Highgate Hill. It sold the usual vitamins, herbal remedies and dry goods, but also organic vegetables, cheeses, fresh juices and smoothies, delicious wholegrain breads and deli products. Jeanie had gradually built up a reliable set of regulars, some of whom came from quite a distance to shop with her, but also, especially in the summer, her deli sandwiches drew in passing trade en route to Hampstead Heath for picnics.

She must have dropped back to sleep, because the next thing she heard was, ‘Morning.’ She watched George carefully placing the hot mug of tea on the bedside table. ‘It’s a spectacular day.’ He pulled back the heavy curtains enthusiastically, letting the early spring sunshine flood the room, then stood smiling down at Jeanie, hands on his hips. His grey hair was neatly combed, tortoiseshell glasses crooked as always – one ear was higher than the other they’d decided years ago, although it didn’t appear so to look at him – giving him an intensely vulnerable air.

‘What’ve you got on today?’

She yawned. ‘Interview with a new girl for the shop. Jola doesn’t trust herself after she chose the last one. Meeting with a new supplier of vegan packed lunches; checking out a second-hand chill cabinet – the one by the window’s knackered. Then Ellie.’ They both smiled at the thought of their granddaughter. ‘You?’

George moved off towards the door with his customary gangling lope. ‘Not as much as you, old girl. Golf this afternoon. Give that adorable little girl a huge hug from her grandad.’

His tone was deliberately cheerful, but she detected – as always since the insurance company he’d worked for, man and boy, had ‘offered’ him early retirement five years ago – a desire to seem busier than he was. He had only once alluded to it, a few months after leaving his job: the feeling that he was now ‘a bit of a spare part’, as he put it. But it had changed things between them. She had felt almost guilty at first, getting off to work with her customary enthusiasm every day and leaving him to hover idle and lonely between golf games. He had rallied, however, taking up his boyhood hobby of buying old clocks, pulling them apart and mending them, and now the house was thick with them: every available surface tick-tocking, mostly out of synch, as if the shelves and bureau tops themselves were alive. Only in Jeanie’s bedroom was there quiet. But she felt her husband’s obsessive nature, contained in the face of a useful career, was slowly burgeoning. And with it an uncomfortably familiar need to control her. This had always been there between them, but recently it seemed to have lost its sense of humour.

As Jeanie turned the corner to her daughter Chanty’s street that afternoon, she felt herself tensing. If Chanty had been there, it would have been fine: Jeanie and her son-in-law, Alex, knew how to comport themselves in company. But Chanty would be at work, at her documentary editor’s position at Channel 4 – she seemed to work more hours than there were in the day. When it was just her and Alex it was more in the nature of a Mexican stand-off.

She walked up the steps of the Victorian terraced house, first moving the empty green recycling bin the collectors had casually slung on the path.

‘Jean. Come in.’ Her son-in-law managed a half-hearted smile as he stood back to let her pass.

Is it a sine qua non that artists smell? Jeanie asked herself, holding her breath against the whiff of stale sweat from his paint-spattered tee shirt. And for the millionth time: What, exactly, does Chanty see in this man? She could see he had once been a ‘pretty boy’: large blue eyes and jet-black curls, and he could certainly be charming when he chose. But she found his expression self-regarding and a little petulant, as if the world had not delivered on its promise. Now he was approaching forty, the looks he must have traded on had not kept up with him, though he still behaved as if they had.

Jeanie forgot her son-in-law as her two-year-old granddaughter came running towards her, a grin a mile wide lighting up her huge brown eyes, her arms outstretched: ‘Gin, Gin . . .’

Jeanie bent down and lifted the child in her arms, wrapping her in a close embrace, burying her nose in the pure, sweet softness of Ellie’s skin. ‘How’s it going, Alex?’

Alex shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘Childcare was never going to be my muse of choice.’

Jeanie didn’t rise; she couldn’t afford to, not in front of Ellie. ‘So when’s the exhibition? Isn’t it quite soon?’ she said brightly. She hadn’t meant this as a needle; she was merely making conversation, but his sardonic smile told her that he took it as one.

‘I’ve postponed it.’

Jeanie turned away and began gathering Ellie’s coat and shoes. ‘Oh . . . that’s a shame,’ she said mildly. ‘Come on,’ she addressed Ellie, ‘let’s get your coat on and we’ll go to the park and feed the ducks.’

‘There’s no point in churning stuff out under pressure. It’ll happen when it happens. I need space.’ He stood propped against the mantelpiece in the sitting room, holding forth as if he were entertaining guests at a soirée. The room was sparsely furnished, the stripped floor covered with a pale sisal rug, bare of anything but the large brown leather sofa, a stylish dull-orange Conran armchair with wooden arms, a padded stool and a giant flat-screen television. Jeanie knew this was partly a style decision, the decoration being paintings, colourful and mostly abstract, and a modern rectangular mirror covering the area above the fireplace. They had obviously come to the conclusion that while Ellie was small it was pointless to deploy anything that might be knocked over, damaged or damaging to their child.

Jeanie felt her heart begin to race with indignation. ‘Space’? He needs ‘space’? This arrogant, weasel-faced layabout, who takes advantage of Chanty’s misplaced love on a daily basis to feed, clothe and house him, never contributing a single, solitary penny, and resenting his own beautiful daughter, has the nerve to whine about ‘space’! And to crown it all his paintings to date were, in her opinion, derivative, abstract, sub-Hodgkin crap.

‘I’ll bring her back around five.’ She tried to smile but felt the anger sticking to her face like a neon sign.

‘Sure . . . whenever . . . see you later, sweetie.’ Alex bent to kiss his daughter on the top of her head, avoiding his mother-in-law’s eye.

‘Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.’ Jeanie took a deep breath and sang to her granddaughter as they walked up the hill to the park. She berated herself for her inability to be more grown-up. But she had been there when Chanty, eight months pregnant, had collapsed on her parents’ kitchen floor, clutching the monstrous note Alex had left:

This isn’t working for me,I’m not ready to be a father, I have so much to achieve.Please forgive me.I love you, but this has all been a terrible mistake.Alex x

The note wasn’t scribbled in an agony of flight, which vastly added to the offence in Jeanie’s mind. No, it was carefully penned with black, heavy flourishes on a thick cream card, set out in column format, for all the world like an invitation to a party.

Chanty had literally been unable to breathe, and by the time George had called an ambulance and they’d sirened her off to A & E, it was clear Chanty was in labour. So this man she was now supposed to like and accept – love, even – had put the very life of his daughter, and indeed Jeanie’s daughter, in jeopardy through his selfishness.

Ellie took it all in her small stride, however. She’d spent forty-eight hours in an incubator to stabilize her breathing, but she’d never looked remotely frail. No thanks to Alex.

‘Again . . . again, Gin,’ Ellie was insisting. So Jeanie sang again, watching with delight as Ellie’s blonde curls swung to and fro to the tune.

But if Chanty had chosen to forgive him, and George – not being the sort to dwell on these things much – had managed to get past it, Jeanie had not. Every time she saw him she was reminded of her daughter’s face, permanently ravaged by tears, as she struggled to cope with her baby alone in the months before Alex had condescended to return.

The playground was empty except for one boy of about four and his father, who were racing round on either side of the roundabout, spinning it at high speed and shouting with laughter.

‘Swin . . . swin . . . come on.’ Ellie, released from her buggy, made straight for the swings. This, experience told Jeanie, could go on for hours, her granddaughter falling into an almost trance-like state as she swung, urging her grandmother, ‘Higher, higher!’ if Jeanie threatened to slack.

Today Ellie was spellbound not by the swing, but by the boy and his father. Her face lit up with laughter as she watched their antics. Then suddenly the boy let go of the blue-painted handhold and raced across the spongy playground tarmac towards his ball, cutting directly across the trajectory of Ellie’s swing. Jeanie heard the shout, ‘Dylan!’ at the same time as she lunged for the swing basket, jerking her granddaughter to a halt as the boy sailed blithely past, quite unconscious of the inch of daylight that had spared him a nasty injury.

‘Dylan!’ Jeanie turned and saw the man’s face, white and shocked as he ran over to his son and, instead of berating him, just held him tight until the boy squirmed free and went back to his ball.

He rose to his feet, and although he was a thickset man, his movement was surprisingly graceful and fluid. Jeanie watched him brush his hand backwards and forwards across his greying, corn-stubble hair in a gesture that reminded her of a child with a comfort blanket.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks a million.’

Jeanie shrugged, smiled. ‘It happens all the time.’

‘Well, it can’t happen to Dylan, not even once.’ His tone sounded almost desperate.

‘Your son’s OK, a miss is as good as a mile,’ she said soothingly, thinking he must be a playground novice to take on so.

The man looked blank for a second. ‘Oh . . . God no, this isn’t my son, it’s my grandson. Dylan’s my daughter’s boy. You’ve probably guessed I don’t come out with him much. In fact, this is only the fourth time she’s let me.’ He breathed deeply. ‘And it’d have been well and truly the last if that swing’d hit him.’

‘Down . . . down, Gin,’ Ellie was insisting. She had her eye on Dylan’s ball. Jeanie lifted her out and she ran off to stand staring shyly beside the older boy.

‘Let the little girl play too,’ his grandfather called out, to which Dylan paid absolutely no attention.

‘So how old’s your daughter?’

Jeanie laughed. ‘Touché . . . Ellie’s my granddaughter . . . she’s two and a bit.’

He laughed too, holding his hands up in protest. ‘It wasn’t flattery, honest. I just assumed.’ He looked away, embarrassed.

There was an awkward silence and Jeanie glanced around for her granddaughter, who was now totally involved in chasing Dylan and his ball, shrieking with laughter whenever he allowed her to get close.

‘Odd thing, grandchildren,’ the man said, gazing after the boy. ‘I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.’ It was almost as if he were talking to himself. ‘But I find he means everything to me.’

His words surprised Jeanie, not because she didn’t believe in their sincerity – or the sentiment, for that matter – but because it seemed such a personal remark to make to a complete stranger.

‘I know . . . I know what you mean,’ she found herself replying, because she too had been overwhelmed by her feelings for her granddaughter since the first moment she’d held Ellie in her arms, waiting as they prepared the incubator at the hospital for the little body. It had literally been love at first sight. ‘Perhaps it’s because we don’t feel old enough,’ she said, smiling.

The man laughed. ‘That’s certainly true.’

‘It’s a bit like a drug,’ she went on. ‘If I don’t see her for a couple of days I get withdrawal symptoms.’ She laughed, shy suddenly, in a very British way, about the strength of her feelings. Because she hadn’t been one of those mothers who pester their offspring to make them a grandmother. In fact when Chanty had told her she was pregnant, Jeanie had been a bit daunted, selfishly fearing the interference in her busy life.

. . .