by Hilary Boyd
‘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.
21
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.
Jeanie cringed. He seemed so pathetic in that moment, so vulnerable.
‘Well, we can either talk about the farmer’s market we’ll no doubt visit tomorrow, or slope off to bed and hope things improve after a good night’s sleep.’ It was clear which option Rita favoured. She got up as she spoke and began briskly to clear the plates from the table.
George just sat there at the head of the table and said nothing. It wasn’t till Rita and Bill had gone upstairs that he spoke again.
‘Sorry I ruined it.’
Jeanie turned from the solid butler’s sink, resting her back against it as she removed her yellow rubber gloves.
‘Do you really think I hate you?’ she asked gently.
He raised his owl-eyes to her. ‘Hate’s perhaps too strong a word, Jeanie. But you don’t seem to take any pleasure in our marriage any more.’
She said nothing.
‘It’s true, isn’t it? You don’t want to make love to me. You cling to the shop as if it’s your lifeline. I’ve seen your face on a Wednesday morning; it’s like the Great Escape. We hardly talk any more. I just get the feeling you don’t want to be here with me.’ There was nothing slurred about his speech now.
‘I haven’t found it easy, no,’ she replied slowly, choosing her words carefully. ‘I didn’t want to move, as you know, and I don’t want to give up the shop. You thought I’d come round. Well, I haven’t yet.’
Her husband got up and came over to her, putting his hands on her arms.
‘But the sex? You lie there as if you’re dead. Don’t you fancy me any more?’
Jeanie stood tense in his embrace.
‘George, it’s been a big adjustment. I don’t know what I feel, what with all that’s gone on. If anything I feel exhausted, just worn out with it all.’
‘So you need time? Is that what you’re saying?’
Jeanie nodded dumbly, wishing the bloody, bloody tears would hold off, just for once.
‘It’s not to do with this other fellow, is it? You’re not seeing him when you go up to London?’
‘Is that what you think? No, of course not. I haven’t seen him for months.’
‘So it’s totally over.’
‘Totally and completely over.’
‘OK . . . OK.’ George stepped back as she angrily brushed him off. ‘You seem so keen to go up, that’s all, and I thought perhaps it was something more than just the shop.’
‘It isn’t “just” the shop, George. It’s my business, my passion.’
‘But couldn’t you find a shop to
be passionate about down here? It seems so daft, you going all that way each week when you could be doing the same thing in Axminster or Honiton. I could help you look.’
Jeanie held her head in her hands. ‘Please, please stop nagging me about the shop. I’ll sort something out soon, but right now can you just leave it.’
George nodded. ‘Just one more thing. The sex . . . you . . .’
Jeanie waited, holding her breath.
‘If that man isn’t the problem . . . it isn’t because of what I told you, is it? The Acland business?’
‘Don’t call it that, George. Call it by its proper name: abuse,’ she snapped, not intending to be mean but hating his ongoing refusal to deal with it. ‘Of course it’s not. How can you think that?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s such a filthy thing to know about someone. I thought perhaps it’d turned you off me.’
It was Jeanie’s turn to offer her embrace. George came into her arms and she felt him relax against her.
‘It’s nothing whatever to do with that. I’m sorry. I haven’t been myself recently, but to be fair, neither of us has.’
‘You do still love me though, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she reassured him like a child. ‘Yes, I do still love you, George.’
Every night was the same now: Jeanie dreaded going to bed because George was there too. She’d allowed him to share her bed when they’d first moved because she was worried about him, he was ill. But since then he’d made it quite clear that he liked it.
‘It’s cosier,’ he told her. ‘I hated sleeping alone.’
‘But you did it for ten years. You can’t have hated it that much,’ she’d retorted.
‘We’re husband and wife, Jeanie. That’s what married people do; they sleep together.’
‘Telling me it’s the norm is a lousy argument.’
‘It is because I snore?’
‘Partly,’ she’d lied. The snoring was annoying, but it wasn’t the reason she wanted her own bed. George was famously stubborn, however, and refused to move to another room. Tonight she lay tense, knowing that the embrace she’d given him in the kitchen might prove a green light. George got into bed and she turned away from him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she heard him say, his voice suddenly cold. ‘I’m not going to touch you.’
She didn’t answer, but that night was a turning point for Jeanie.
‘I can’t do it any more,’ she told Rita as they drove away from the Rectory, en route to buy papers and bread the following morning. Jeanie felt surprisingly clear-headed, despite not having slept a wink.
‘What are you talking about, darling? Do drive slower; these roads are terrifying.’
‘I can’t stay with George. I’m leaving.’
For once her friend was speechless.
‘I love him, of course I do. Love him in the way you love someone you’ve been close to for most of your adult life. But I don’t love him. Not in the way I should as his wife. And I just can’t do this . . . this phoney marriage crap any more.’
‘What phoney marriage crap? What are you talking about? Pull over; we can’t have this conversation on these roads – we’ll die.’
Jeanie laughed, hearing the note of hysteria in her voice. It was such a relief to know at last. She pulled over by a gate to a field, the churned mud frozen solid overnight and crunching beneath the tyres. Winter sun poured through the windscreen. She turned the engine off and just sat there, hands resting on the steering wheel.
‘Jeanie, what’s happened? This can’t be about that stupid conversation last night. He was drunk, darling. We all say stupid things when we’re drunk.’
‘What he said was true; I have gone off him.’ She glanced sideways at her friend. ‘I just don’t want to be with him.’
‘But doesn’t everyone go through times like that in a long marriage? I get totally fed up with Billy on a regular basis.’
‘I’m not fed up with him, I just don’t want to make love to him. In fact, I dread it, don’t find him interesting, get sick and tired of him trying to control me. These days I’m only happy when I go up to London.’
Rita’s eyes narrowed. ‘This isn’t about Ray again, is it?’
Jeanie sighed. ‘You know that’s over. Rita, this is about me – I know I sound like a self-obsessed Oprah Winfrey guest, but I have to leave. If I don’t I shall surely stab him one day, and he doesn’t deserve that.’
‘But why so suddenly? I thought you were making a go of it down here?’
‘I’ve tried, believe me I have. But when I realized last night from what George said when you’d gone to bed that he knew exactly how unhappy I was, that I wasn’t succeeding in pulling the wool over our eyes, I knew the game was up.’
‘Hmm. So what about getting old and lonely and insecure? What about George, left all alone in Somerset?’
‘George is a survivor, we’ve seen that. You’ve said it: he always gets what he wants.’
Rita shook her head. ‘All he wants is you, darling. You know he does.’
‘Not as I am now. He’s not a masochist.’
‘But . . . but so you’re really going to do it?’
Jeanie nodded, taking a deep, calm breath in the cold air.
‘You’ve stunned me.’ Rita continued to stare at her. ‘You seem so sure suddenly.’
‘I am,’ she said, smiling. A weight had been lifted from her shoulders; a weight, she now understood, which had sat there, dragging her down, for many, many years.
‘Poor George. When will you tell him?’
‘I suppose when you and Bill have gone.’ She did not feel anxious at the prospect, just very sad.
‘Woah . . . some weekend this turned out to be. And here’s me thinking the country was dull. Darling, I can’t sit between you playing happy families . . . that’s so not going to happen. I better call Bill and get him to invent a drug overdose for his CEO.’
‘Coward,’ Jeanie smiled sadly.
On the way back from the village shop there was silence in the car.
‘Shouldn’t you wait till Chanty’s had the baby?’ Rita asked suddenly.
The euphoria was beginning to wear off. Jeanie had begun to think through what had to be done, what needed to be said, before she could be free. She hadn’t forgotten Chanty, the new baby due in a few weeks’ time, or how Alex’s defection had brought on a dangerously early labour last time. But although she quailed at inflicting pain on her family, the details of how and when did not deter her from her goal.
‘You’re right, I should . . . I will, of course.’
‘Darling, please, think this through really carefully.’
Jeanie shook her head. ‘I know it sounds sudden to you, Rita, but it isn’t. It’s been brewing for months, years perhaps.’
‘But you didn’t seem unhappy till Ray came along.’
‘If he hadn’t come along, perhaps I’d have plodded on. But it’s a long time since I could say I was really happy with George.’
‘Who’s happy? Long marriages can’t be thrilling all the time . . . or even any of the time.’
‘I know all the arguments, but the fact is that you and Bill, for instance, have a real relationship. I can see it. You’re stimulated by his company, you’re friends as well as lovers, even though you drive each other mad sometimes.’
Rita nodded, ‘No, you’re right, I suppose we are lucky.’
Jeanie pulled into her drive and stopped the car. For a moment neither of them moved.
‘How can I stay with a man I dread making love to?’ she asked, almost to herself.
‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft awry’ had always been one of George’s favourite quotes, usually delivered with a knowing sigh and a terrible Scottish accent, and one night, two weeks after Rita and Bill had spent the weekend, Jeanie forgot her duty to her daughter and blurted out the truth to her husband.
She had returned from London just after eight on the Thursday night. George wa
s waiting for her in the kitchen, an unmarked crossword in front of him, a glass of whisky by his side, the only light the dim glow above the cooker. He searched her face as she walked in as if in it he would find the secret of the universe. This monitoring was par for the course on her return home each week, the looks always accompanied by endless tiresome questions about exactly what she had done with every minute of time that she’d been away. Jeanie dreaded it.
‘Don’t stare at me,’ she’d snapped that night.
‘I’m not staring.’
‘Yes, you are. You do it all the time.’
George had shrugged, but continued to stare. ‘Have a good trip, did you?’ His tone was heavy with sarcasm.
‘Busy, but yes, it was good.’ She found she could no longer be honest with him about her work, because if she showed the slightest sign of being tired, or complained about a problem at the shop, he would jump in with yet another needle about giving it all up.
‘I spoke to Alan today.’ He’d continued to sit there while she began to get supper together. ‘He said it was unlikely that you’d sell the business as a going concern in this economic climate, that the money was only in the real estate.’
‘Did he?’ Alan was George’s accountant, a dapper, obsequious man whom Jeanie had never liked.
‘He said the best plan for us was just to close the shop down and sell the premises on. The flat above is a big asset, he said, because it can be a separate income or part of the whole.’ George doodled on the edge of the crossword with his pencil, big loopy spirals diminishing to a heavy-scored, angry dot.
Jeanie hadn’t answered, she’d just poured the watercress soup into a pan and put it on the Aga, unwrapped the Cheddar and set it beside the wholemeal loaf on the breadboard. George had got to his feet slowly and taken the bowls and plates from the dresser.
‘Do you want a drink?’ He’d waved the remains of a bottle of claret towards his wife. She’d nodded.
‘He says he’ll deal with it for us.’
Jeanie had been listening to him, her blood pressure gradually rising. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Unlike the Highgate house, which had always remained solely George’s, the shop was in her name. It had been a gift from her husband when he thought it time she had ‘an interest’. At first he had subsidized it heavily, but for the last five years she had begun to make a small profit.
