by Hilary Boyd
‘It isn’t yours to sell.’ She’d poured the soup into each bowl and slammed the pan in the sink.
George had gone very still, his mouth twisting, the index finger of his left hand tapping threateningly on the wooden table. He had nothing to hold over her, and she could see the lack of control was eating away at him.
‘If you persist in playing this game with me, pretending you’re going to sell when you’re not, then I shall take it as a very hostile act.’
Jeanie almost laughed at his pomposity.
‘Hostile act? What on earth do you mean?’
George’s face, normally so mild, had coloured a deep pink.
‘Don’t make fun of me, Jeanie. I’m not the fool you take me for.’
‘I have never thought you were a fool, George,’ she replied quietly.
‘We came down here to retire. You were going to sell the shop, we were going to make a life down here.’
‘You were. You were, George. Why do you insist on pretending this was a joint decision? You completely railroaded me. I . . . never . . . ever . . . wanted to come to the country. Get it? And I am not going to retire. I’m not old.’ She was almost shouting with frustration.
Her husband looked at her pityingly. ‘You’re being ridiculous. Stop yelling at me.’
‘Well, why don’t you listen to me?’
‘So what are you saying? That you’re going to keep the stupid shop and wear yourself out travelling the length and breadth of the country every week to prove a point? You’re so bloody stubborn.’
‘Pot and kettle spring to mind.’
‘So are you? Are you going to keep up this ludicrous double life? I’ve offered to buy you another shop down here. What’s so bloody special about that place in Highgate . . . unless you’ve got another agenda up there, of course?’ He was breathing heavily, his eyes boring into her as he delivered this coup de grâce.
Jeanie finally understood.
‘If you don’t trust me – and why should you, of course – there isn’t a lot I can do about it.’
‘So you’re still seeing that man, then.’
She shook her head. ‘Did I say that?’
‘You didn’t have to. I can tell from the way you are with me,’ he said sullenly.
‘The way I am with you has nothing to do with anyone except ourselves.’
‘Yeah, right. That’s what they always say,’ he sneered.
‘Who’s “they”? Who are you talking about?’
‘Stop playing with me, Jeanie.’ Her husband’s tone had suddenly changed. Now he was pleading with her. ‘Please, this is horrible. I’m jealous, I’ll admit it. You always seem so happy on Wednesday morning, and so miserable when you come home.’ He’d reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘It’s twisting me up. I can’t sleep when you’re away for thinking about what you’re doing. It’s hell.’ She’d seen the tears in his eyes. ‘I love you so much, Jeanie. Tell me you’re not . . . you’re not seeing him again.’
‘I’m sorry, George,’ she’d finally told him, the hammering of her heart stilled by the truth. ‘I can’t do this any more.’
George had gone pale.
‘Don’t, Jeanie, don’t be silly.’ His voice was feeble and she worried he would have another collapse.
‘I promise I am not cheating on you. But I don’t . . . I don’t want this life. I don’t want . . .’ She didn’t know how to say it, but there was no need.
‘You can’t leave me,’ he said piteously. ‘You can’t, not after all this time. It’s madness.’
She said no more.
‘You’ve been happy with me, I know you have – until that bloody man came and seduced you. We had fun, didn’t we? I’ve always thought we had a better marriage than most of the people we know.’ He was talking mostly to himself, trying to make sense of what was happening. He looked up at her. ‘If it’s the sex, we can stop, I can move to another bedroom. I know you haven’t enjoyed all that and I can’t blame you. It was me who messed up there.’
Jeanie began to cry. She felt a terrible sadness as, for the first time, she really confronted the prospect of leaving him. Maybe, she thought, she was being stupid, throwing all this away. Maybe she just wasn’t over Ray yet. Did it matter that she didn’t love George enough, or in the right way? Was she ready to be alone? For a moment she havered.
‘You can’t do this to me.’ George took his glasses off before lowering his head on to his hands and crying with soft, tearing sobs.
That night Jeanie slept alone; he did not come to her bed. But she lay rigid nonetheless, her stomach churning with nausea.
George wanted answers. And when Jeanie’s were unsatisfactory, he began to allocate blame: ‘That bastard’s ruined our marriage’; ‘You can’t accept you’re old’; ‘The abuse thing disgusts you and you can’t admit it’; ‘Rita’s been encouraging you to leave me, she never liked me’; ‘You’re punishing me for wanting to move to the country’; ‘My illness wore you out’.
‘Blame is pointless,’ she told him. ‘We’re both responsible for our marriage.’
‘Oh, please . . . you sound like some smug marriage guidance counsellor. So it’s my fault now, is it?’ he shot back. Despair had given way to anger, and as the weekend wore on and the wearying battles continued, George became more aggressive.
‘I’m not blaming you. I just said, blame is pointless.’
‘Well, I feel I’m “responsible” – if that’s the word you want to use – for giving you a bloody good marriage. I don’t see what I’ve done wrong to be treated like this. I’ve always given you everything you wanted. It was you . . . you, Jeanie . . .’ he stabbed his finger at her, ‘who cheated, who let me down. Not the other way round. No wonder you don’t want to talk about blame.’
Trying to keep calm, Jeanie waited a moment to answer. She realized there was little point in attempting to make George understand – whatever she said only added fuel to the flames – but her frustration was such that she was on the verge of delineating in minute detail his part in their joint unhappiness.
‘Well? You don’t have anything to say to that, do you?’
Jeanie got up to leave the kitchen, which had become their battleground. As she got to the door, she felt George’s hand clutching her arm and dragging her round. He pinioned her in front of him, his eyes flashing with rage.
‘Don’t walk away from me, damn it. I won’t let you go till you give me a satisfactory explanation. You owe it to me, Jeanie; after all this time you bloody owe it to me.’ His grip tightened. ‘It’s that bastard, I know it is. You’re still seeing him. All this bullshit about joint responsibility is just a ruse to pull the wool over my eyes. Admit it, damn you! Admit it, will you!’ He began to shake her.
‘Let go of me!’
‘Say it.’ His voice was no more than a desperate whisper as he let her go and sank on to the nearest chair.
On Tuesday night she packed the bulk of her clothes.
‘I’m going to stay at the flat for a while,’ she told him.
‘For a while?’ he asked.
They were both emotionally exhausted and had resorted to stalking around each other in a charged silence. When George did speak, he nagged her again and again to explain. She couldn’t, because she didn’t have the stomach to be cruel.
But perhaps she should have told the bald truth: ‘I found in Ray what I have never found in you, and although he’s no longer available to me, I know the difference now.’ Because George must have sensed her deceit and it only made things worse as he became increasingly entrenched in his own innocence. Nothing, he kept repeating, that he’d ever, ever done, had contributed to this horrible impasse.
‘We’re just destroying each other, George.’
‘What am I supposed to do without you?’ She saw the panic in his eyes. ‘I can’t live here on my own. I’ll get depressed again, you know I will. And what about Chanty? What are you going to tell her? Jeanie, please,’ George pleaded. ‘You know this’ll
destroy the family.’
But despite the powerful strings that tied her to this man, she knew she could not give in to his manipulation one more time.
She packed her car with two large suitcases and left the Old Rectory a little after six the following morning. George would normally have been up at that time, pottering around the kitchen making tea. But he stayed in his room and they didn’t even say goodbye to each other.
22
From the moment Jeanie drove away from the Somerset house, she felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Her heart was lighter, even her breath came more easily. The guilt sat like a stone in her gut, but she knew she’d have to learn to live with that – it wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Chanty was her primary concern when she reached London. She knew that the mood he was in, George was quite capable of ringing Chanty and sobbing down the phone. She wanted to tell her daughter herself.
‘Hi, Mum, this is early; are you on the train?’
‘No, the car, I’m at Archway. Can you meet me on your way to work, darling? Say nine at the shop?’
Chanty sounded puzzled, but Ellie was shouting in the background and she didn’t query the request.
‘I gave up work yesterday, so any time,’ she told her mother.
‘Left him? Left Dad? For good?’ was Chanty’s bemused response.
Jeanie nodded and began her tale with trepidation. But at the end Chanty just sighed, perhaps too wearied by the vicissitudes of late pregnancy to mind as much as she once might have done.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised, Mum. I thought perhaps it’d be OK, when I saw Dad was more himself again, but Alex and I have both noticed the tension between you for ages now. He warned me this might happen, but I didn’t believe him.’
‘I don’t expect you to like it.’
‘I can’t really take it in, to be honest . . . you and Dad apart. What will he do?’
‘I don’t know. He says he won’t cope, but he’s much better than we give him credit for at finding the help he needs.’
‘But that’s always been you. He’s a damaged man, Mum.’
Jeanie saw the tears and cursed herself for causing them.
‘I know, but I can’t help him any more – I’m not sure I ever did. I’m so sorry, darling. I don’t know what to say.’
‘Will you be with that man?’ Her daughter refused to call Ray by his name.
‘No.’ She saw Chanty scrutinizing her face to find out if this were the truth. ‘I promise, I’m not seeing him. I haven’t seen him for months. George says this is about him too, and I suppose he’s right to a degree, but not in the way he thinks.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that an affair tests a marriage, and ours wasn’t strong enough to survive.’ She wasn’t going to go into details.
‘Was it so bad with Dad?’
‘Of course not. But we want different things out of life now.’
‘Like Somerset?’ Chanty shook her head. ‘I’d never have supported him if I’d thought it would end like this.’
‘I did say,’ Jeanie replied gently, regretting that she couldn’t tell her daughter the whole truth, but knowing it would not be something she would want to hear.
Chanty sat in silence, holding her huge belly between her hands. She looked so tired.
‘I didn’t want to tell you till after the baby was born.’
Her daughter shrugged. ‘I shan’t be in any better a state to hear bad news with a newborn and a fractious two-year-old.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Still, every cloud . . . at least you’ll be round the corner again. Maybe we can persuade Dad to sell that stupid house and come back to town too.’
‘Maybe . . . although he seems to love it there.’
‘You never know what will happen, Mum.’
Jeanie knew the only reason she had got off so lightly with her daughter was because Chanty and Alex had discussed it and decided this was just another phase, a ‘pensioner panic’, that Jeanie was going through. They were waiting for her to see sense.
And it was clear that Chanty and her father were of one mind, because George began behaving as if nothing much had happened between him and Jeanie. The only sign of aberrant behaviour was his incessant phone calls. George never normally called her, but now he was phoning sometimes two or three times a day. Not to talk about their separation, however, but just to shoot the breeze, update her on his daily life, even ask about the goings-on at the shop – something in which he’d previously shown absolutely zero interest. She heard he had gone back to his clocks, and had begun to mend clocks for his neighbours. Lorna had started the trend when she found out about his hobby, by asking him to fix her seventeenth-century carriage clock. But at the end of every phone call he would say, ‘I miss you,’ or ‘See you very soon,’ as if she were away on a business trip and expected home shortly.
Jeanie had not been home for nearly a month now, and Christmas was looming, hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles.
‘So I thought I’d come up a bit before Christmas and stay over till about the twenty-eighth,’ George declared in the first of that day’s phone calls.
Jeanie had been caught off guard.
‘Stay? Where?’
George couldn’t have helped hearing the panic in her voice and his tone changed.
‘Well, at yours, obviously. Chanty will hardly want guests so close to the birth.’
She took a deep breath, trying hard to control the sense of suffocation at the prospect of George in her space. She had to think of Chanty, she told herself firmly. She couldn’t rock the boat right now.
Jeanie cursed Christmas, a festival she had dreaded all her life. Even when she was a small child, her father had become unbearably tense in the run-up, driven as he was to make use of this once-a-year chance to garner new souls to his church. They tiptoed round the house from mid-November, and by the time the Reverend Dickenson stepped up to the pulpit on Christmas morning, the family was in a torpor, caring not a fig for the final version of his sermon – previous attempts read out for their comments almost daily over supper – only that it was over for another year.
‘If you stay, one of us will be on the sofa,’ she blurted out, immediately hating herself for being so mean-spirited.
There was a hurt silence on the other end of the phone.
‘I’m so unacceptable that you can’t even share a bed with me for a few nights?’ His statement was leaden with shock, but perhaps then he remembered his own behaviour, because his tone became deliberately cheerful.
‘OK, fine, we’ll toss for it,’ he said, attempting a laugh. ‘So Christmas is on Friday; I could come up on Thursday and leave the following Monday.’
Four nights, Jeanie calculated. How would she cope?
‘Aren’t you lonely, holed up in this place on your own all the time?’ Rita paced about, her coat still on, as Jeanie got ready to go with her to the Swiss Cottage Odeon.
‘Not lonely as such,’ Jeanie replied after a moment’s thought. ‘I get sad, I cry sometimes, but I don’t think it’s loneliness. I’m not dying for company.’
She cried not sometimes, but most evenings, not only for what might have been with Ray, but also for what might have been with George. She thought a lot about her own family too, and cried for her brother Will as she never had before, sad that then, as now, the family had been unable to stand together in the face of their trauma.
After Will died, she and her parents slid off into their separate pain. Jeanie tried to talk to them at first, to cry with them, but she never saw either her mother or her father cry, not once. Her mother shrank before her eyes, seemed actually to become smaller, her neurosis vanishing, frightened off in the face of real disaster, and this previously nagging, frenetic woman barely spoke, not even to worry about her daughter. So Jeanie turned to her father. But he seemed to have acquired a permanent and alarmingly beatific smile, certain, he said, that he had been martyred by the Lord, that the Lord had honoured him b
y handing him Will’s precious life to guard. ‘Will hasn’t been taken untimely, you mustn’t think that, Jean,’ he insisted, eyes glittering with holy fervour. ‘Fifteen years was his allotted lifespan, perfect in itself. God couldn’t do without him for any longer. We mustn’t grieve, he is with God. Better a life taken in a state of grace than lived without it. We are lucky, we should kneel down and thank the Lord every minute of every day that we were lucky enough to have had Will in the first place.’
Jeanie, days off her fourteenth birthday, stamped and cried with rage at this pious edict.
‘You’re wrong, God’s wrong. You’re both stupid, stupid, stupid liars. He shouldn’t have died and you know it. Why don’t you cry, Dad? Don’t you care that he’s gone and we’ll never, ever, ever see him again? I loved him with all my heart, even if you didn’t. Why, why can’t you even cry? What’s wrong with you?’
She had been brought up to believe in a benign God, a God who cared for children, who blessed the righteous. And Will, even though a teenage boy, was, by her standards, righteous. He was kind and funny and clever and wise. He never hurt anyone. How could God so deliberately inflict such cruel suffering on a mere child? But more than this, the agony of his death left no room for philosophizing. She just wanted to howl with the pain of it, and with the ongoing disbelief that this was it, that he was never coming back, that she would never see him again. Just the smallest comfort of recognition from either of her parents would have been enough, she thought. But with her brother’s passing, her parents seemed to forget she existed, forget each other existed. Three satellites separately orbiting the memory of her beloved Will, never mentioning the fact that with his death, they had died also. Now, as she cried for them all, no longer able to blame them for reacting in the only way they were able, she cried too for the repetition of the silent, unspoken pain in her own marriage.
