The Jealous One (11 page)

‘Of course,’ Carlotta explained. ‘I’m particularly pleased
that he’s not done too badly (Oh, the dreadful
mock-modesty
of the mothers of successful sons!) because
everyone
has always told me that they were bound to suffer from my going out to work. They’d grow up deprived, people said: delinquent; and that I’d wear myself out, doing two jobs all the time. But they don’t seem to be turning out so badly; and I don’t think that I seem so
terribly
worn out, do I, compared with other women of my age?’

She must know very well that she looked at least ten years younger than any of them, far too young to be the mother of a sixth-former; but nevertheless everyone played up and assured her all over again that she
did
look as young as all this. You had to play the game according to the rules, no matter what flamboyant cards people laid down, or else what about when it came to
your
turn?

Rosamund glanced over at Lindy, who had not spoken all this time. Was she, for once, feeling left out? After all, she was the only one of them who had come unequipped with any problem whatsoever—not even an outdated one like a toddler not eating spinach, which used to be such a winner years ago.

But Lindy was looking as contented, as pleased with
herself
as ever: not in the least bored or at a loss. On the contrary, she wore a rather tiresome air of being the
outsider
who sees most of the game, thus turning her initial disadvantage into a potentially winning card.

But she didn’t even bother to use it. Even as Rosamund watched, she bent down and began to collect her bag and gloves together.

‘I’m awfully afraid I’ve got to go now,’ she said to Norah, standing up. ‘Don’t let me break up the party, though; I’ll just slip out.’

Norah broke into little anxious protests, getting to her feet at the same time. Must Lindy really go? It was barely half past twelve…?

‘Yes, Lindy, do stay,’ urged Carlotta. ‘After all,
you
can arrange your work when you like! You don’t have to
clock-in
like us poor wage-slaves!’

‘No, I know,’ said Lindy smiling. ‘It’s not
work,
exactly, that I have to go for. It’s some typing I’ve promised to do for an old lady in the country. Such a dear old thing, and so full of go! Well over seventy, and she’s started writing a book on archaeology—proving that Evans was absolutely right about Knossos—if all this means anything to you—’ she amended apologetically to the company at large. ‘
I
didn’t know anything about it either until I got to know her; but she makes it so terribly interesting…. Anyway, I
must
go now, because I said I’d have this instalment all ready to take down to her this afternoon…so cheerio, everybody…’ Smiling, calling friendly goodbyes, she disappeared into the hall with Nor ah; and a minute later the front door closed.

Rosamund felt her limbs shaking. Heat and cold chased each other, like laughing children, up and down her spine. She could feel her face going white.

So Lindy, not herself, was to help her mother-in-law with the new book! Rosamund had never even been told that there was to
be
a book. After all her years of helping,
sympathising
, sharing in the old lady’s hobby, this fascinating project had been kept a secret from her! Or—perhaps even worse—perhaps Mrs Fielding just hadn’t
bothered
to tell her—had been so absorbed in discussing it with her new helper that she hadn’t thought about Rosamund at all. Admittedly, Rosamund had missed the last Sunday visit—Geoffrey and Lindy had gone on their own, for almost the only time—but even so, there were letters, weren’t there? Telephones? And anyway, a project like this doesn’t leap into life in five minutes—Mrs Fielding must have been thinking about it for weeks.

Somehow this lesser blow seemed to strike with a violence that Rosamund had never yet experienced, in all these months. Perhaps because it was so utterly unexpected—a blow from the side instead of the front, so that all her guards were down. Whatever the reason, she experienced now waves of such bare, uncontrollable jealousy that she felt she was going to faint. Her mother-in-law—Jessie—the
old, welcoming house—they were all Lindy’s now. She wasn’t content with just Geoffrey.

And when she got home she found on the hall table a note from Geoffrey—he must have dashed in at lunch time, found her out, and left it there:

‘Late back tonight. Don’t wait supper

Love—Geoff.’

Not ‘Geoffrey’ any more, but ‘Geoff’.

Everything was Lindy’s now.

‘Lindy’s disappeared!’

Sitting giddily on the edge of the bed, just outside the circle of lamplight, Rosamund stared into her husband’s face almost uncomprehending. For one mad second it seemed the most natural thing in the world that Lindy should have disappeared, for in her dream Rosamund had killed her. How could she be expected to reappear after that?

‘Don’t look so blank, darling!’ Geoffrey urged her
impatiently
(over the last weeks, ‘darling’ had imperceptibly changed from an endearment to an expression of dutifully repressed irritation). ‘Just tell me—do you know where she is?’

Rosamund felt the unstable heat of fever leaping in her face: inside her skull was an aching and a roaring which made it difficult to make sense of Geoffrey’s words, simple though they were and desperately though she tried to do so as she felt his irritation and anxiety mounting. Strange that her muddled brain should be aware so clearly of his
feelings
, and yet be so confused about his words.

‘No—I haven’t seen her,’ she blurted out at last, and felt
her ears ring with weariness at the mental effort involved.

But it only let her in for more questions.

‘Not at all? Not all day? Didn’t she say anything to you about where she was going? Or ring up, or something?’

Rosamund was puzzled, not so much by his
disproportionate
anxiety as by the odd fact that it somehow didn’t strike her as disproportionate. Surely it should have? Lindy was a grown woman; why shouldn’t she be out and about at half past nine in the evening without giving an account of herself?

But her head was clearing now. She was becoming
capable
of examining the question rationally, of seeing how unreasonable was her husband’s perturbation.

‘No, she didn’t. Should she have? Surely she’s just out seeing friends, or something?’

‘But she said—she told me…. Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you’re right…. Perhaps I’m making too much of it—’ she could see that Geoffrey was trying to pull himself together—‘but it was such a shock, somehow, finding the house all dark … no heating on … the little dog yapping…. I’ve never seen it like that before.’

Geoffrey was quite shaken, she could see, and she could a little bit understand his feelings, irrational though of course they were. She, too, albeit unwillingly, associated Lindy’s house with warmth, bright lights, comfort. Even to her, who disliked and feared Lindy, it would have been a little bit of a shock to find the house as Geoffrey described it; how much more so for him! She tried to be consoling as well as reasonable.

‘Well, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. She’s sure to be back soon. And what about Eileen?’ she added, wondering why she hadn’t thought of this before. ‘Won’t she know something?’

‘She can’t. She’s not there—she’s been staying with that girl since the weekend—Wait a minute, though—I wonder? … I might ring her … see if she’s had some message….’

He ran down the stairs again, leaving the bedroom door
wide open, and soon Rosamund heard his voice in the hall:

‘Hullo? Yes. Yes, that’s right, Eileen Forbes. Yes, if you would: thanks.’ A long pause, and then: ‘Oh, Eileen, I’m glad I’ve caught you. I was wondering if you knew where Lindy is? She was going to call for me at the office (this was the first Rosamund had heard of it, but it seemed of no importance now) but she never turned up. And she’s not at home either … it’s dark and shut up … What? No, I don’t know. She just said there was something she wanted to tell me about. But she hasn’t even taken the car, it’s still outside the house…. Yes, I thought of that; but it’s not as foggy as all that; it seems to be clearing. Anyway, she could have rung me, or come by tube or something. It’s not like her.’

Here there was a long pause, during which Geoffrey said ‘Yes’ more times than Rosamund could count, each time, it seemed, sounding more anxious and mystified. At last he began to speak intelligibly again.

‘Yes. Yes, I know. That’s what’s worrying me, too. She’d never have left him shut up like that in the cold and dark all this time. He was yapping his head off when I went in.’

More silence at this end; then Geoffrey’s voice again: ‘Well, I know, Eileen, I wish it as much as you do; but I
didn’t
ask her, and there it is. Besides, she mightn’t have been able to tell me over the phone; it must have been something fairly confidential, for her to want to meet me specially away from home. And urgent, too. She sounded as if she was somehow scared…. That’s why I’m so worried….’

A few more brief, inconclusive sentences, and then
Rosamund
heard the telephone ring off. Geoffrey came slowly up the stairs.

‘I expect you heard all that,’ he said briefly. ‘It hasn’t made us much the wiser, has it?’

Rosamund was touchd by the ‘us’. Did he really suppose that she was worrying about Lindy, too?

‘I heard your end of it,’ she pointed out. ‘But not Eileen’s. Hasn’t she any ideas?’

‘Not really. She thinks it’s odd, though, just as I do: not
like
Lindy. But Eileen’ll be home tonight, she says—she was just setting out when I rang. She’ll be here in an hour or two. Perhaps she’ll have thought of something … or
perhaps
Lindy will be home by then….’

His voice softened, lightened, at this possibility.
Rosamund
felt strangely moved by his emotion, abhorrent though its cause was to her. Trying to ignore the dizziness, the fierce headache that assailed her whenever she moved, she stood up, hoping Geoffrey would not notice that she had no shoes on. She did not want him to realise that she had been lying down. To impose her own illness on him just when he was worrying about Lindy would be terrible, just the sort of thing that neurotic neglected wives are always doing.

‘Let’s go over to Lindy’s and look around, right now,’ she suggested, fighting back the throbbing inside her skull, the blackness that was threatening to blot out the room as she stood upright. For a moment it seemed that she must fall… but just in time the light returned…. Geoffrey’s face swung back into her view. With one foot, she began feeling
surreptitiously
for her shoes beside the bed, ready to
implement
her suggestion. ‘She might have left a note there for Eileen, or something,’ she hazarded.

‘I’ve looked. There’s nothing,’ said Geoffrey flatly: and then ‘Well, I don’t know, I was only looking round quickly, of course. I might have missed something.
You
go,
Rosamund
, would you? You’ll have more idea what to look for. I don’t want both of us to be gone at once, she might ring up here.’

Again Rosamund was touched, in spite of herself, by the way Geoffrey was treating her as a partner in anxiety; and a respected partner, too, to judge by that ‘You’ll have more idea what to look for.’ It made her feel stronger, less dizzy, the sort of person who could easily walk across a room and down some stairs. Her questing toes encountered the shoes at last, and she slipped her feet into them unobtrusively, without looking down, for fear of drawing Geoffrey’s
attention
to her actions. Not that there seemed to be much risk of this, he was still frowning, deeply preoccupied.

‘How do I get in—have you the key?’ she asked, ready, now, for the little expedition. ‘Or did you leave the door unlocked?’

‘
She
left the door unlocked,’ said Geoffrey, the anxiety wiped momentarily from his face by a look of amused, reminiscent affection. ‘You know what she is—so trusting and happy-go-lucky!’

He talks as if she’s still alive! flashed through
Rosamund
’s mind for one absurd, inexplicable moment. Then reason and common sense returned, and she thrust away the fantastic implications of the thought. She prepared, instead, to control the familiar surge of anger she was bound to feel at that ‘trusting and happy-go-lucky’.

But it didn’t come. Was she too weak with fever to be capable of any strong emotion? But it didn’t feel like
weakness
at all—quite the reverse. What
was
the feeling … this queer new awareness of power? As if she could afford, now, to be generous about Lindy because she had up her sleeve some strange and terrible trump card …?

What absurd tricks her mind was playing her tonight! I must be nearly delirious, she reflected, not without a touch of pride. Perhaps her temperature was even higher now—104°, perhaps, or even 105°? She wished she could take it again, just to satisfy her curiosity, but of course she couldn’t possibly, not with Geoffrey standing there, waiting for her to set off to Lindy’s on her errand. Cautiously, but trying hard to seem just as usual, she began to negotiate the steep incline of the stairs.

The french windows at the back of Lindy’s house opened at a push, as Geoffrey had said they would; and for a full minute Rosamund stood quite still on the threshold of the pitch dark room, smelling the Lindy smell. Newly-watered plants in their good earth; polish; and the faint exotic smell that might be almost anything from expensive chocolates to fresh flowers, and yet was always the same.

The darkness hung round her, chilling and yet somehow
protective, and she felt a curious unwillingness to move. It seemed easier just to stand here, and concentrate on
planning
, in an absurdly laboured and painstaking fashion, the perfectly simple actions that she needed to perform. Feel her way across to the door. Find the light switch. Turn on the light. Look around by the telephone—on the
mantelpiece
—on the hall table—anywhere where Lindy might have propped a note for her sister to find when she came in.

And those are the only sort of places we’re entitled to look in for tonight, Rosamund found herself thinking. By
tomorrow
, of course, or the next day, when she still isn’t back, we’ll be searching through her desk, reading her letters, sorting out her papers for clues…. Suddenly the
implications
of her thoughts hit her. Why was she assuming, with such unquestioning certainty, that Lindy had really
vanished
? Absolutely all that had happened so far was that Lindy had for some reason failed to keep an appointment: was this a sufficient reason for supposing that they had some tragic mystery on their hands?

I must be half dreaming still, Rosamund told herself, forcing herself into movement, action; forcing herself to discipline her racing thoughts. Slowly, cautiously, balancing herself by one hand or the other against such shadowed, anonymous bits of furniture as loomed close, Rosamund began to move across the room towards the door, her
footsteps
almost silent on the carpet, her breath shallow as she picked her slow way through the blackness.

A sudden burst of movement, a rush of hurtling,
indescribable
sound brought her to a standstill with a gasp of terror; and then her terror disintegrated into shaky laughter and a thumping heart as volley after volley of ferocious yapping filled the darkness, echoing back and forth off the walls seeming to come from all directions at once, so that it was hard to know where to step not to fall over her
vociferous
little opponent.

But it was all right. Shang Low—whose talents were in some directions not so very different from his mistress’s—must
have managed to combine this display of reckless ferocity with a certain number of very sensible precautions against being trodden on, for Rosamund managed to cross the last half of the room and turn on the light without touching him at all. As she turned to face him in the
reassuring
blaze of light, the infuriated little creature seemed to calm down a little. He was still barking, but some of the shrillness of outrage had subsided. As Rosamund moved towards him, holding out her hand in specious
friendship
, he backed away, the barks subsiding to a sort of high-pitched scolding, and then to a peevish, intermittent growl, such as he had often favoured her with in the past.

He was still suspicious, of course, and rightly so. He
followed
her, not a foot behind, from door to telephone, from telephone to mantelpiece, from mantelpiece to hall table. A blank having been drawn in all these places, the two with one accord turned to look at each other, as if to say: What next?

The kitchen, of course, was a possibility. One might very reasonably leave a note on the kitchen table with a fair certainty of it being seen; so Rosamund, followed by her baleful little bodyguard, proceeded thither. But to no
purpose
; there was no note in sight. Nor had anything been left cooking, or soaking, or drying up, to suggest some
unforeseen
delay in the cook’s return. Everything was tidy as always, but not with that deathly tidiness which means that the owner has really left home. After a long, thoughtful survey, Rosamund and Shang Low moved away, to stand and think once more in the hall.

Upstairs, perhaps? Rosamund remembered that
occasionally
, when Peter was very late, she would pin to his pillow the note reminding him about his clean shirt, or his dentist appointment, or whatever. Perhaps Lindy and her sister
followed
the same custom?

She turned towards the stairs.

She had thought that she must already have witnessed the ultimate of Shang Low’s potential as a guard dog; but
nothing
she had ever experienced or imagined could compare with the paroxysms of outrage and fury into which this small movement of hers threw him. He flung himself to the foot of the stairs, and with eyes popping, teeth bared,
prepared
to bar her path with every ounce of the strength and fury so tightly packed in his small, trembling body.

It was this pathetic smallness of his body, in contrast to the hugeness of his outrage, that made Rosamund pause. She hadn’t the heart to break down his miniature but so gallant defence—a tiny Horatius guarding his great bridge all alone. Indeed, she really hadn’t quite the courage, either: his fury was quite frightening, when you stood face to face with it like this. What was it all about, anyway? What was there upstairs that he must preserve from her with his very life?