A Spot Of Bother

136

Jean gripped the edge of the table.

If she’d been any nearer she could have reached across to grab George’s sleeve and force him back into his seat, but Katie and Ray were in the way and everyone was watching them and she could see no way of intervening without making matters worse.

“As some of you may know, I have not been well recently…”

God in heaven, he was going to talk about harming himself and going to hospital and seeing a psychiatrist, wasn’t he. And he was going to do it in front of pretty much every person they knew. It was going to make Jamie kissing Tony seem like very small beer indeed.

“We all look forward to retiring. Doing the garden properly. Reading those birthday and Christmas books we never got round to reading.” A couple of people laughed. Jean had no idea why. “Shortly after I retired I discovered a small tumor on my hip.”

Wendy Carpenter was in the middle of chemotherapy right now. And Kenneth had that lump taken out of his throat last August. Lord alone knows what they were thinking.

“I realized that I was going to die.”

Jean focused on the sugar bowl and tried to pretend she was in that nice hotel in Paris.