Free Thursdays in the Park by Hilary Boyd Page A

one else she’d felt might care.
    ‘How horrible,’ Ray was saying.
    In her head she still heard Will’s screams. At the end he’d been nursed at home by her mother and a woman from the village, but every time they moved him, day or night, she would listen to his exhausted howl of agony and feel her heart torn from her chest. ‘He’s on the mend,’ her mother would reassure her brightly, and Jeanie went along with it, even as she saw the truth in her mother’s tortured gaze. Because although she knew it was impossible that the yellow, emaciated figure that had once been her brother could ever be well again, she was unable to contemplate the alternative.
    ‘You must have been devastated,’ he said, and his face told her that he knew what she had gone through.
    ‘It was a long time ago,’
    ‘That doesn’t make much difference.’
    Jeanie nodded. ‘It does and it doesn’t.’ She felt her throat tighten with decades of unshed tears. Ray’s hand reached for her own, then the waiter arrived to lay the food on the table and they sprang apart like two teenagers caught in the front porch.
    ‘Sorry, it still catches me unawares sometimes.’ She helped herself to a hot pitta bread automatically, without really wanting it. ‘Your turn now,’ she insisted, swallowing hard.‘Tell me what happened to your girlfriend, the one you left your wife for.’
    Ray looked away. ‘We were together for eleven years . . . and then she died. A massive tumour on the adrenal gland. She said she felt tired, nothing more than tired, and a bit of what she thought was indigestion. By the time she saw someone they said it was the size of a grapefruit. Anyway, there was nothing they could do, and she died six weeks later.’ He paused, looked at Jeanie with an echo of the original shock still burning in his eyes. ‘It was the tenth anniversary of her death in January.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘She smoked a lot,’ he added, as if he were still trying to find an explanation.
    Neither of them spoke for a while as they allowed the ghosts of the past to settle. The food lay almost untouched on the table.
    ‘So where does your husband think you are?’
    ‘Girls’ night with my friend Rita and her friend Lily.’
    ‘Will he ask about it?’
    Jeanie shrugged. ‘Depends. If he’s on one of his compulsive benders, we could be discussing the whys and where-fores for ever.’ She shuddered at the prospect, wondering how she had ever dared agree to this meeting with Ray.
    There was an awkward silence at the mention of George.
    ‘Sorry . . . bad subject,’ Ray muttered, offering Jeanie the saucer of hummus.
    Jeanie scraped a small amount up with the pitta bread asshe spoke. ‘I could make the excuse that I have a dreadful marriage, that my husband is a shit or a bore, or both, that I don’t love him, but . . .’ she looked Ray straight in the eye, ‘but that wouldn’t be true.’
    Ray waited.
    ‘We’ve been happy.’ She paused at the mention of the word, which suddenly seemed inappropriate. Thinking about it, she hadn’t felt really ‘happy’ with her husband for a long time now. Whatever had happened to him all those years ago seemed to have changed his outlook on life. He no longer wanted to socialize, eat out, or go to the theatre or cinema, even when she offered to organize it – that’s why she had taken to going with Rita. ‘It hasn’t been a bad marriage.’
    ‘You don’t have to convince me. Thirty-odd years of living with anyone is impressive.’
    Jeanie sighed, ‘Of course it’s not you I’m trying to convince, is it?’
    She saw his eyebrows raised in question.
    This time Ray took her hand firmly in his. ‘Jeanie, I don’t want to be the cause of your distress. I can’t say I’m not attracted to you, but it’s early days: we can still walk away before we do any damage.’
    Damage, she thought. Such a powerful word. But her mind refused to face what ‘damage’ might imply. Nothing had happened yet,