Thursdays in the Park Read Online Free PDF

crossed the park. ‘Full-on passive aggressive . . . compulsive controllers. To meet George you’d think butter wouldn’t melt. He’s charming, polite, amusing in a quiet sort of way.’
    Jeanie thought this summed up George perfectly.
    ‘But Jeanie, he’s . . . well, to put it politely, he’s got issues. He’s too smart to do it in front of me, but sometimes his guard slips. Remember the other week, when he tried to stop you having a drink, then dragged you off almost before we’d had pudding?’
    Jeanie nodded.
    ‘You didn’t want to go, Bill and I could see that, but you let him bully you.’ The frustration in Rita’s voice was clear. ‘Why?’
    ‘Because . . . because he gets so anxious.’
    ‘Anxious?’ Rita spluttered. ‘You kowtow to him because he’s
anxious
? That’s ridiculous. What’s he anxious about?’
    Jeanie shook her head. They had reached the top of Highgate Hill. This was where their ways parted, Rita heading to her house on one of the leafy lanes opposite Kenwood,Jeanie to hers on the far side of Pond Square. They both paused on the corner by the bus stand.
    ‘I don’t know. It’s just George. He wasn’t always like this.’ She felt a strong desire finally to tell her friend about that night when George had rejected her, when things had changed irrevocably for them both. But she didn’t want to add to Rita’s disdain for her husband. Nor did she really know how to explain the enormity of the event after all this time. Over the years she’d begun to wonder if she’d exaggerated it. She knew couples often stopped having sex and slept in separate bedrooms; theirs was a long marriage. But another part of her knew that something significant had happened to George that day. Something that he was unable, even with all the pressure she had put him under, to tell her about. And she couldn’t even imagine what that might be.
    ‘Well,’ said Rita brightly, ‘if he wasn’t always like it, then he doesn’t have to be like it now, no?’
    Jeanie shrugged. ‘I suppose. But I don’t know why . . .’
    Rita waited, but Jeanie didn’t say any more.
    ‘Look, darling, the bottom line is that you are not old, you work, and you most certainly don’t want to move to the country. So things are getting serious. If you get dragged away from a dinner party, that’s tiresome but not fatal. But to be dragged to Dorset? The country’s vile, don’t forget: full of mud, the sartorially challenged and farm shops where a cabbage that’s been sitting there for eighteen months costs twice the National Debt.’
    They both laughed.
    ‘So I tell him I’m not old, I’m not giving up my shop, and I’m definitely not moving to the country.’
    ‘Hurray!’ Rita held up her hand inviting Jeanie to a high five. ‘Seriously though, Jeanie, it really is time to take a stand.’
    ‘He’s not a bad man, Rita . . . I really don’t think he can help himself,’ Jeanie finished weakly. Her friend just rolled her eyes and strode off towards the roundabout with a farewell wave, her tennis bag slapping rhythmically against her back.
    Later that evening, as she stood alone in the kitchen preparing the salad for supper, George still closeted with his clocks, she remembered what her Aunt Norma had said about being sixty.
    Her aunt was her father’s only sister, recently turned ninety and still living, happily independent, in her house in Wimbledon. A quick-witted bird of a woman with the sharp blue eyes that Jeanie had inherited, she had been in MI5 in the war and then looked after her ageing parents single-handed. But by the time she was sixty they were both dead, and Aunt Norma, previously a stalwart gloved and hatted spinster of the parish, took on a distinctly bohemian air as she turned the dining room into her studio and began to paint. ‘Sixty is heaven,’ she had told Jeanie as they sat having tea. ‘The world is done with you, you become to all intents and purposes invisible, particularly if