The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

  ‘Won’t you have some more coffee, Lindy?’ she urged warmly. ‘It’s nice and strong, this time, the way you like it.’

  Lindy passed her cup with a murmur of thanks and a smile. For a second the two smiles met in mid air, like warring aircraft; and then both fled, as if for cover, to Geoffrey. Both women spoke to him at once:

  ‘Do you think we should phone your mother about what time we’re coming?’ said Rosamund: and: ‘Do tell me more about that funny couple last night,’ said Lindy. ‘The Pursers’; and there could be no doubt that her remark was much the most interesting as well as her smile the most brilliant. So it was only natural—as well as polite—that Geoffrey should answer her rather than his wife.

  ‘Well, Purser is a metallurgist,’ he began, obligingly but naïvely. ‘A Manchester man …’ as if those were the sort of things that anyone could possibly want to know when they asked to hear ‘more’ about a person.

  ‘—And he hasn’t always been so gloomy,’ supplemented Rosamund, smiling affectionately at her husband’s inability to get quickly to grips with this sort of conversation. ‘They really do worry terribly about that boy of theirs. Though from everything you read in the papers, he doesn’t seem so specially much worse than the others.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any harm in any of them,’ said Lindy vehemently. ‘I think it’s all the fault of——’

  Was she really going to say ‘society’? Was she actually going to voice such a platitude, and in Geoffrey’s hearing? Rosamund hugged herself. Surely no man, however infatuated, would go on thinking highly of a woman’s wit and intelligence if she could produce as her own idea so monstrous a cliché?

  ‘The mothers,’ finished Lindy suavely. ‘I don’t think the fathers come into it any more—not now. Their wives don’t let them.’

  ‘How so?’ Geoffrey seemed intrigued. Disputation, of a gentle kind, usually pleased him, particularly at weekends. It made him feel young and leisured, back in his student days.

  ‘Well—look at the Pursers, for instance,’ said Lindy—Rosamund, but not Geoffrey, had seen from the start that the sociological generalisation about mothers was simply a highbrow introduction to saying something nasty about Nor ah Purser—‘Look at the way she was all the time identifying with the boy at the expense of her husband. That was what was hurting him so. Not the fact that his son was. delinquent, but that the delinquency was being used by his own wife to set up a barrier between the three of them. Her and the boy on one side: Father on the other. Don’t you see?’

  There was wisdom in Lindy’s words; and injustice, too. Rosamund leaped on the injustice; consciously she magnified it, made it seem the main subject of the debate. Even as she did so, she was shocked at her own skill.

  ‘I think the boot was quite on the other foot,’ she declared hotly. ‘I thought William was being really horrid to Norah. He was deliberately showing her up, in public, as having brought the boy up badly. As if he had had nothing to do with it at all!’

  ‘As he probably hadn’t!’ retorted Lindy. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Just think what it must be like from the man’s point of view (she carefully did not look at Geoffrey as she said this; she seemed to be talking to Rosamund alone). Just think: he pays, and pays, and pays for eighteen—twenty—years; and what does he get in return? Can you wonder that he sometimes looks at his sullen, unresponsive son, and thinks to himself: There goes ten thousand pounds of my money; seven thousand evenings which I might have enjoyed with my friends; a thousand peaceful, pleasant weekends….’

  Geoffrey was laughing, as if Lindy had made a delicious joke. So Rosamund tried to make her protest sound like a delicious joke, too.

  ‘But, hang it all, Lindy, anybody could calculate like that about anything! I could look at my son and think: There goes fifty thousand hours of washing-up, and——’

  ‘Implying that you wash up for eight hours a day!’ interrupted Lindy lightly. ‘It sounds more like running a hotel than bringing up a son!’

  Everybody laughed again. It was Lindy who had been witty enough to make them laugh; Lindy who had won the argument, too, simply by getting her beastly sums right. If she had got them right? Rosamund was still trying to multiply one and half three hundred and sixty fives by sixteen in her head when she heard Lindy proclaiming, still lightly: ‘And of course, when it’s an only son, the situation is even worse…. Ned is their only one, isn’t he?’ She added the question quickly, and with great innocence, as if to show, a second too late, that she had quite forgotten that Geoffrey and Rosamund had an only son.

  ‘No, he isn’t!’ said Rosamund triumphantly, and as if somehow scoring a point. ‘They’ve got a girl, too, she’s about fifteen. But we don’t hear so much about Sarah because she isn’t any trouble. Except for having a crush on T. S. Eliot and keeping writing herself imaginary letters from him. But that’s what I’d call not being any trouble. So quiet.’

  Geoffrey began to laugh; but stopped almost at once; for though Lindy was smiling, her smile held the faintest trace of embarrassment, as if Rosamund had said something not in the best of taste.

  ‘It does seem amusing, I know,’ she said, with an air of much more unruffled tolerance than seemed to Rosamund at all necessary. ‘From the point of view of an outsider, that is. But, you know, this schoolgirl crush business—it’s not quite so amusing at close range. I should know, after bringing up a younger sister. And it gets less amusing still if it goes on too long.’

  Nothing more. No explanation. No opening for anyone to ask further questions. With sudden fury, Rosamund realised that Lindy’s sister was to be left for evermore just faintly shadowed by this nebulous hint of some intangible degree of abnormality. But before her anger could show in her face, before it could twist her pleasant, un-jealous smile into something quite strange, there was an interruption. For at that moment the slam of the front door crashed through the house, shaking the crockery on the shelves, jerking a new expression onto everyone’s face. Then came the sound of two bicycles thumping down the steps; the creaking clash of the front gate; and then quietness, like a wind, swept back into the house.

  ‘There goes our ten thousand pounds’ worth,’ commented Geoffrey good-humouredly. ‘Our thousand quiet weekends. Our——’

  ‘And the Walker boy with them, I trust!’ said Rosamund, recovering her temper. ‘Oh, it was so ghastly this morning, Lindy, you can’t imagine …!’ and she began to relate—quite amusingly, she flattered herself—the story of her encounter with Walker in the kitchen.

  At the end of the recital Lindy as well as Geoffrey laughed.

  ‘You do make it sound so funny, Rosie!’ she declared. ‘Doesn’t she, Geoff?’

  Rosamund should have been disarmed by the compliment; but it happened that in that very moment she noticed why it was that she so hated Lindy’s habit of using these abbreviations of both their names. It was because it seemed to imply that she, Lindy, was on more intimate terms with each of them than either were with each other. How stilted and distant ‘Geoffrey’ was going to sound if Rosamund were to bring his name into her next remark—which of course she wasn’t. Indeed, she wasn’t going to have a chance, because Lindy was continuing:

  ‘It makes a good story, Rosie, I grant you; but when you come to think of it, what dreadful manners the boy must have! I suppose his mother is an ardent believer in child psychology—not frustrating them, and all that?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Rosamund, rather tartly. ‘That sort of thing hasn’t got nearly so much to do with how you bring up your children as outsiders think it has. People who’ve never had children always talk as if merely not believing in child psychology automatically made you into a good disciplinarian. It’s much more complicated than that. And anyway, most of these frightful fifteen and sixteen year olds, they were well brought up in the sense you mean. I’ve watched them with my own eyes evolving out of the most charming, well-behaved little boys. Peter was a little marvel at seven, you know. Passing round
cakes at tea parties. Standing up for old ladies in buses. The lot.’

  Lindy looked incredulous. So, to her dismay, did Geoffrey. Was she really remembering it all wrong, as mothers were said to do? Or——?

  ‘Oh, I daresay discipline is more difficult as they get older,’ Lindy was saying. ‘I’m not denying it. But it just goes to prove what I was saying before: At just the point when the father could and should be the major influence, disciplinary and otherwise—at just that point the mother begins to cut him off from his son. To put up the barriers. So he can no longer get discipline, or anything else, across to the boy.’

  Geoffrey was looking horribly thoughtful. Rosamund frantically tried to think of some come-back that would be kind, polite, good-humoured, and would knock Lindy sideways.

  But all she could think of was a rather dull change in the conversation, but one that at least would put Lindy and her carefully aimed insights out of the picture for the moment.

  ‘Don’t you think we ought to phone your mother?’ she asked Geoffrey, once again. ‘And let her know that we’re coming this afternoon?’

  ‘Oh. Ah. Of course.’ Geoffrey looked uneasy, and turned to Lindy. ‘You won’t mind, will you, Lindy? I shan’t be able to start on the crazy paving this afternoon after all. I’d forgotten this was the Sunday for Mother’s.’

  ‘Oh, but it needn’t be!’ Rosamund fell over herself to release her husband for Lindy’s exclusive use this sunny afternoon. ‘Next Sunday will do just as well. She’s not specially expecting us….’

  ‘Oh, but Geoff, you mustn’t upset your plans because of me! …’ For a moment the battle of self-effacement ricocheted between the two women, both of them talking together, and the sound was like the whirring of wings in the small sunny kitchen. And Lindy won.

  ‘Well, actually,’ she admitted. ‘If you did decide to put off going till next weekend, I could drive you there. I’ll have the poor old car in running order at last—at least I trust so. How’d that be?’

  She looked brightly, generously, from one to the other of them; and even Rosamund couldn’t see undercurrents of malice in the suggestion. For Lindy, of course, couldn’t possibly know of hers and Geoffrey’s little prejudice against cars; couldn’t know how much they enjoyed the walk from the station, right through the little sunlit town where Geoffrey’s mother lived, past the churchyard, and up the long, tree-lined road that was very nearly country, and where the hawthorns still bloomed in the spring: where every step, every gateway, reminded Geoffrey of his boyhood; might, at any moment, inspire him to some anecdote, some memory, which even now, after all these years, could still show him to his wife in a new, an excitingly different, light. Half the point of going to Mother’s was this walk. They wouldn’t give it up for anything.

  ‘Well, that is an idea!’ said Geoffrey enthusiastically. ‘Save our old bones for once, eh, Rosamund? Ashdene can’t be much more than an hour away by car, do you think Lindy …?’ He and Lindy fell to animated discussion about routes, and Rosamund was left smiling. ‘I wish she was dead!’ she said to herself, clearly and distinctly, as she smiled. And it was only long afterwards, when the time had come for her to subject every tiny shred of memory to a panic-stricken scrutiny, that she noticed that this was the very first time that the thought of Lindy’s death had come to her in so many words.

  CHAPTER VII

  ‘You really should learn to drive, Geoff! You’d be good.’

  Lindy had been explaining, with the greatest of good-humour, exactly why it was that she had changed gear on this hill but not on the previous one. Why couldn’t she lose her temper, like other drivers, thought Rosamund crossly. Why must she remain bright and serene in the midst of this chaos of Sunday traffic inching its way out of London, and at the same time answer fully and sympathetically all Geoffrey’s eager, amateurish questions?

  For after all these years of anti-car prejudice, Geoffrey had overnight become as excited as a schoolboy over the idea of learning to drive. Excited as schoolboys were supposed to be, that is to say, thought Rosamund wryly, from her corner of the back seat. Not like the two schoolboys she had left sitting side by side on the kitchen table, slowly finishing an entire tin of rock cakes while they discussed the gloomy future of the world: just like a pair of vultures, Rosamund thought, hovering arrogantly over the entire decaying universe as if it were their rightful prey. Still, they’d probably be better once they got out on their bicycles; and with any luck they wouldn’t be back for hours and hours. Why, it might even happen that Peter stayed the night with the other boy for once, instead of the other way round.

  Rosamund realised that her spirits were rising, though goodness knew why, with her husband and Lindy talking cars non-stop in the front seat, and the whole Sunday trip to Mother’s spoilt, perhaps for ever. Perhaps Geoffrey would always want to come like this, in Lindy’s car? Perhaps he would want to buy a car of their own? And this afternoon would have been so specially lovely for walking. Already, within a week, the sad, tattered, end-of-summer look was gone from the countryside, and the still, blue September skies were back. But you could not feel the stillness from the car, nor smell the stubble fields. The golden, gentle sunshine became a mere metallic beating of hotness through the car roof, and you couldn’t even talk. That is to say, Rosamund couldn’t talk, not from this solitary corner.

  She had chosen it, of course. Of her own accord she had urged Geoffrey to sit in front with Lindy, to help her with the map-reading, she’d said. As always, her status of odd one out in their trio was of her own deliberate choosing, and thus could not be felt as a humiliation. But it looked like a humiliation. Rosamund had been shocked, as they set out, to find how much she was hoping that the neighbours weren’t peering out from the Sunday somnolence behind their curtains; weren’t noticing how Lindy and Geoffrey were paired off in the front of the car, for all the world like a married couple, with the spinster sister of one of them lurking at the back.

  But probably the neighbours were already talking, anyway. Every time Geoffrey went over to help Lindy in her garden, a dozen upstairs windows must be taking note, setting one Saturday afternoon beside another, drawing gleeful conclusions. If only there was some way of telling them that she, Rosamund, wasn’t the neglected wife at all; that, on the contrary, it was all just a beautiful family friendship, with Rosamund herself freely encouraging all these visits and exchanges. She would have liked to label her husband, when he went over to Lindy’s, with a huge gaudy card saying: ‘A Present From Rosamund’, because that’s what it amounted to, and it would be so nice if the neighbours could know.

  Nice, too, if her mother-in-law could know, she now realised, as they turned in to the short gravel entrance of Geoffrey’s old home; welcoming as always with its warm brick, its square, unpretentious windows, and the jasmine round the front door.

  Wondering briefly at her own disproportionate anxiety not to be seen on the back seat, Rosamund scrambled ungracefully to the ground almost before the car had stopped, went round to the front, and stood smiling in at the window while Geoffrey and Lindy discussed arrangements for the return journey. Lindy was being admirably tactful about not expecting to be invited in to meet the elder Mrs Fielding. She wanted to explore the town, she declared, and the neighbouring countryside; to examine the old tombs in the churchyard…. This and that…. She would call back for them at about seven—and brushing aside their protests and expressions of gratitude, she drove quickly away, leaving them to walk up to the front door together, just as always.

  Except that it wasn’t as always, and perhaps would never be again.

  Jessie, Mrs Fielding’s old servant, answered the door to them, neat and invulnerable in her cap and apron, her kind old face lighting up with discreet pleasure at the sight of them. Jessie knew how to ‘keep her place’ with such exquisite skill and dignity that you quite forgot that her ‘place’ no longer really existed in the world today: the niche which she had occupied for fifty years had to all intents and purposes been swamp
ed and obliterated long ago by the swirling tide of the twentieth century. And yet she occupied it still, like an old, smooth stone, impervious to battering waves, immobile among the shifting sands.

  Her mistress seemed much more modern, although several years older. Mrs Fielding looked up briskly from the Journal of Hellenic Studies as they entered her book-lined drawing-room, gathered her papers together, and at once entered into eager conversation, mainly with Rosamund.

  ‘You’ve just come at the right time!’ she declared. ‘I’ve just finished the draft of a letter I’m going to send them about this Henriksen man’s findings. “Findings” indeed! It’s “Guessings”, as always in this Linear B racket …! Wait a moment…. I know I had it…. Just here somewhere….’ She perched her gold-rimmed glasses precariously back onto her nose as she shuffled through the tangle of documents. ‘Ah, here we are——’ She drew out a sheet of closely-written, tissue-thin typing paper, and handed it to Rosamund. ‘I’d like you to look through it, dear, if you will, and give me your opinion. Have I expressed myself too strongly do you think?’

  She had, of course. She always did. But all the same, the curt, uncompromising phrases, the fire of genuine indignation, gave a special flavour of her effusions, which perhaps explained why the editors of these so learned journals did occasionally print them. It was odd, really, that she should choose Rosamund as her confidante on these highly specialised matters—Rosamund, who knew not one word of Greek, and whose initial knowledge of Knossos and all appertaining thereto did not extend beyond a sketchy recollection of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. But after all these years of regular visits to her mother-in-law she knew a great deal more about it all now; and what she lacked in scholarship she made up for by an affectionate sensitivity towards the way the old lady was likely to feel towards a given incomprehensible inscription or scholarly statement or whatever it might be. And, dominating all else, was the enormous admiration she felt for a woman who had been able, after the age of sixty, to set herself to re-learn a language she had not set eyes on since she was in the fifth form at school, and within the next fifteen years to reach such a standard of proficiency in the whole subject as to be able to squabble, however wrong-headedly, with the recognised experts in the field.