The Jealous One (3 page)

Rosamund was not usually an ungracious guest. Usually she loved meeting new people, seeing their homes, learning about their lives, adding them to her rich collection of acquaintances or even friends.

But this evening, somehow, she was feeling mean. From the very moment of stepping out of the summer twilight into next-door’s echoing, uncarpeted hall, she felt her whole soul bristling up, on the alert for faults and failings of any kind. So that when the door at the side of the hall opened onto a scene of sparkling prettiness, her immediate instinct was to reject it in some way—to belittle it. She found herself trying to see through and past the dancing welcome of the candle flames; beyond, above, and round the massed glory of flowers and leaves; to discern behind it all the ordinary, dull, badly-proportioned little sitting room, exactly like their own next door.

But it was impossible. The place had been turned into a magic cave, and all you could do was to forget your mean censoriousness, and surrender yourself to enchantment. Poppies, nasturtiums and great trailing sprays of leaves had made a fairyland jungle of what must really have been a hideous shambles of lumpy furniture, dumped anyhow, just as the removal men had left it. A great dusty roll of carpet loomed out of the shadows, but how cunningly those loops of ivy cast speckled lights and patterns down its length! With what a blaze of gold and scarlet did that bowl of nasturtiums surmount the scratched surface of some
undistinguished
table, or it might be a chest of drawers, you couldn’t tell, it didn’t matter. The flowers and the candles had swamped and submerged everything in one vast victory of light and colour.

‘Lindy! It’s superb! It’s a knockout, it really is!’
exclaimed
Geoffrey. ‘Isn’t it, Rosamund? Oh, but I must
introduce
you, mustn’t I? This is my wife Rosamund, Lindy.
Rosamund
, meet our new neighbour—Lindy—er…’ Evidently he had forgotten her surname already—or had he never heard it? Had it been ‘Lindy’ right from the very first moment? Rosamund found herself shaking hands with a sturdy-looking young woman in orange slacks and some kind of black sleeveless garment—you couldn’t see properly in the uncertain candle-light.

‘Isn’t this fun!’ Lindy exclaimed, seizing Rosamund’s hand with eager welcome. ‘I’m so glad you could come! I was feeling so depressed, you know, and so tired, and
everything
was looking so hideous and moving-day-ish, I felt I
must
have a party! Have
you
ever felt so tired that all you could do was give a real slap-up party, straight away?’

Rosamund hadn’t. She couldn’t conceive of any other woman ever being in such a paradoxical state of mind, either; it was all the most outrageous affectation from
beginning
to end. Impossible to say any of this, of course; so she smiled, and said how lovely it all looked, and how clever Lindy was to have arranged it all.

Lindy laughed, in sheer, simple pleasure at hearing words of praise; and then suddenly her voice changed, became low and confidential:

‘Well, actually, I had another reason as well,’ she
explained
. ‘You see, I wanted to make things a little cheerful for my sister, for her first evening. That’s why I was so glad you could come. She’s a bit depressed, you see, about
coming
here. Moving house
is
depressing, isn’t it, even at the. best of times?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure it must be,’ agreed Rosamund, trying to remember herself back into her own just-moved state of several years ago. Had it been depressing? Or exciting? Or just a period of minute to minute activity so continuous as to make any sort of feelings at all seem a ridiculous and superfluous luxury? Anyway, what was all this about the sister?

‘Your sister?’ she prompted tentatively. ‘So she’s going to be living with you?’

‘Yes. Actually, the whole thing is because of her, really. You see, her husband’s left her, poor soul, and as I’m the free agent in the family, I felt it was my job to give her a home for a bit. I mean, it seemed a bit silly, each of us in our separate little flats, and her so lonely and everything; so I thought perhaps this would work out better. I think it will. I hope it will.’

‘It sounds a good idea,’ said Rosamund cautiously, trying to suppress her vulgar curiosity sufficiently for good manners, and at the same time to find out lots more about the sister. ‘When is she coming?’

‘She’s here now. She’s upstairs,’ said Lindy. ‘She insisted on “getting straight”, as she calls it, before she comes down. She’s different from me.
I
believe in having fun first, and getting straight afterwards.’ She turned to Geoffrey. ‘Don’t you agree, Geoff? If you take care of the pleasures, the pains will take care of themselves!’

She keeps a notebook of things like that, and twists them into the conversation by main force, thought Rosamund spitefully; and knew in that second that she would have to keep her spite to herself, even after the evening was over. For Geoffrey was laughing appreciatively; and so
Rosamund
laughed too, determined to be amused if it killed her.

And after all, it didn’t kill her. On the contrary, her spirits rose, and her simulated gaiety became genuine as she helped Lindy to slice up salami and cucumbers and hard boiled eggs, and Geoffrey plied them both with tastes of the white wine which Lindy had asked him to open—with a pair of scissors instead of a corkscrew, which of course added to the fun.

‘It’ll all be finished before we ever start eating,’ she
remarked
with satisfaction, peering into her empty glass. ‘But never mind. We’ll put the empty bottle on the table
surrounded
by a wreath of poppies as a memento. Poor Eileen—missing it all. But she won’t mind. She never drinks
anyway
. Where
has
she got to, I wonder?’

‘Well, I suppose, if she’s unpacking, it’s bound to take a
good while,’ said Rosamund, and was suddenly terrified lest the remark sounded prim. As if she was the sort of person who was on the side of people who unpacked before they started drinking white wine and scattering flowers around. ‘Should we help her, or something?’ she added—realised that this sounded primmer still, so laughed hastily, and looked round for something gay to do, quickly; like fixing a poppy behind her ear or tossing back the last of the wine.

But as it happened she didn’t need to do either, for at that moment a kind of irritable, tentative thumping interrupted them from the direction of the door. Lindy stared for a second, then clapped her hand to her mouth in mock horror.

‘There! Look what I’ve done! Locked out my own sister—Geoff, why didn’t you
tell
me that the door wouldn’t open if I put the record-player behind there?—I thought men were supposed to understand that sort of thing.
Eileen
!’—she raised her voice—‘Stop battering your way in like that—you’ll smash everything. Here’s a kind gentleman will clear a path for you——’

Geoffrey was already on his feet and over by the door, shifting impediments, upsetting candles, and eventually creating an aperture wide enough for the entry of a neat, slim girl with high-piled hair and wide, anxious eyes.

For a moment Rosamund was taken aback. She had somehow been led to imagine an
older
sister for Lindy. The broken marriage—the ‘getting straight’—the non-drinking—all had combined to give an impression of down-trodden middle age. But this girl was not only younger than Lindy, she was also—at first sight, at least—a good deal prettier, with her fair complexion and masses of soft, pale hair.

‘Come on, you silly girl!’ cried Lindy, as her sister picked her way with perhaps unnecessary caution through the medley of deceptively-lit objects that separated them. ‘Come and have a drink. You must be worn out. Exhausted. You look like a ghost already. Why do you
do
it?’

Oddly, even as her sister spoke, the girl
did
begin to look
rather like a ghost, Rosamund thought. You could see now that her pretty, fair skin was a little too pale, her large eyes lacking in sparkle. She seemed out of place, too—a creature out of its element, drowning, unable to breathe properly in Lindy’s colourful, buoyant environment.

‘Have a drink,’ Lindy repeated, sloshing the remains of the wine into a tumbler and handing it to her sister.

Rosamund was surprised. Hadn’t Lindy just said that her sister didn’t drink? Had she forgotten? Or was she just hoping to tempt her, for this once?

‘No—no thanks, Lindy. You know I don’t.’ The girl pushed the tumbler away and glanced enquiringly at the visitors. ‘I suppose …?’

‘Yes, yes, I should have introduced you, I know,’ said Lindy impatiently. ‘But it seems so silly, when you all know exactly who each other are. I’ve told you
all
about them, you know I have, Eileen, and I’ve told them all about you. Well, nearly all, anyway. Oh, well…. Eileen—this is
Rosamund
Fielding. Rosamund—this is Eileen Forbes…. O.K.? I needn’t go through it with you, too, need I, Geoff?’

She laughed up at him in the candle-light, and he smiled down at her. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll just guess. This must be—let me see—either your sister Eileen, or else your sister Eileen?’

‘Wrong both times! This is my sister
Eileen
!’
Lindy laughed, a high, excited sound. ‘But you’re on the right track, you know, Geoff, there
are
several of her. Only one of them is here in this room with us. One is still upstairs, grimly sorting things, and will go on doing so all night long. Another is—ah, that’s another story, isn’t it, Eileen?’

She threw a merry, challenging glance sideways to her sister; but the girl did not respond. It was like throwing something to bounce off a cushion, you’d
know
it wasn’t going to bounce, suddenly thought Rosamund. Just as Lindy must have known that Eileen was going to refuse the glass of wine and fail to respond to her banter. I think she’s rather unkind, Rosamund’s thoughts raced gleefully on,
fastening with inexplicable zest onto this possible flaw in Lindy’s character; she
likes
showing up her sister as much less vivacious than herself.

‘Well, let’s eat, anyway,’ cried Lindy gaily, settling herself cross-legged in front of the improvised table—an upturned drawer covered with a red-and-white checked cloth. ‘Who’d like Eileen’s glass of wine? Who’d like to drink her health for her? Since she won’t drink it herself?’ She waved the glass perilously this way and that for a moment, then set it in the middle of the table. Carefully she arranged four candles round it, in a solemn square.

‘There. It can be for the prize. The prize for the cleverest, the wittiest, the best at finishing the potato salad——’

She was laughing. Everyone was laughing. It was only a joke, after all. Why should Rosamund fancy she saw cruelty in the clear golden liquid thus floodlit in front of them: cruelty flickering cold and sharp among the candle flames? Was it only a figment of a censorious imagination, or had the rejected drink been set up as a laughing-stock,
deliberately
to highlight Eileen’s lack of spirit, her wet-blanketing sobriety?

I mustn’t think such things! Rosamund scolded herself, quite shocked at the headlong injustice of her imaginings, for which there was really no foundation whatever. Lindy was only acting as a good hostess—trying to make the party go. You had to say silly things when people really hardly knew each other—Rosamund should be helping her—
backing
her up, not sitting here criticising. Anyway, now here was Geoffrey telling one of his funny stories, telling it very well, too; even Rosamund, who had heard it a dozen times before, found herself convulsed with laughter. The meal continued happily enough, everyone spearing up food
haphazard
with their forks. Eileen, too, seemed to be warming a little to the situation, smiling more and more often, and allowing herself to be drawn out a little by Geoffrey’s friendly questioning. She was just beginning, a little
tentatively
, to describe her job in the book department of a large store, when Lindy scrambled to a kneeling position, reached
for the much-publicised tumbler of wine, and raised it high above her head.

‘It is my great pleasure,’ she declaimed. ‘To announce the winner of our all-star wit and brilliance competition. Our panel of distinguished judges have been debating the
matter
most earnestly for the last twenty-five minutes, and have come to the unanimous decision that this year’s title of Miss Twenty-two Woodchurch Avenue shall be awarded to Mrs Eileen Forbes….’ Once again the glass was deposited with ceremony in front of the unfortunate girl, who seemed visibly to flinch. Rosamund caught her breath: once more Eileen was to be shown up as a spoil-sport; and ridiculous as well, for no one could have failed to notice that in wit and brilliance she had lagged far behind her sister.

Rosamund glanced sideways at Geoffrey to see if he, too, saw unkindness in Lindy’s gesture. But no. He was beaming kindly, unsuspiciously on both sisters, and he joined in warmly and good-humouredly when Lindy burst into frenetic clapping at the end of her speech.

Was
it all meant kindly, just a bit of fun? Rosamund could not tell. For Eileen’s sake, she tried to lead the
conversation
back to the subject of the book department.

‘It must be very interesting, helping people to choose books,’ she began, addressing herself to the discomfited girl; but Lindy interrupted:

‘Yes, it suits Eileen down to the ground!’ she declared. ‘A good, steady, respectable job, with a pension at the end of it—she’s the Careers Mistress’ Dream, our Eileen! I’m
not,
I’m afraid, I’m more like her Nightmare! Security has never appealed to me, somehow, and as for the idea of a
pension
…!’

Geoffrey laughed at the horror she put into the word.

‘So what
do
you do, then?’ he enquired. ‘Do you always extract an assurance from prospective employers that the job is not pensionable, and that they will sack you without warning almost at once?’