The Jealous One (4 page)

‘More or less! How well you understand me, Geoff!’ Lindy seemed delighted. ‘Actually, I’m doing something
even madder than that at the moment—I’m trying
freelance
fabric-printing. Terribly precarious, as you can imagine. It’s a good thing
one
of us is doing something sensible and steady, isn’t it?’

She shot an approving glance at Eileen, and try as she would, Rosamund could not be sure that she saw traces of scorn or pity in it. Was she misjudging Lindy after all?

She was filled by the same doubts all over again when, later on, Lindy unearthed a guitar from the clutter and sat by the open french window, gently plucking chords under the cloudy summer night. Her fingers wandered for a while, erratically, among her rich mental repertoire of assorted tunes, and finally settled for ‘Oh Careless Love’, which she began to sing softly as she played.

‘Come on, join in, folks!’ she urged, after the first verse; and first Geoffrey and then Rosamund did so. But not Eileen. Was she sulking, or disapproving, or was she just hopeless at singing? If she was, then Lindy would know it—once more Eileen was to appear at a disadvantage.

Lindy had a lovely voice. It rose into the summer
darkness
clear and true as a nightingale; or was it, rather, like a bird of prey?

That evening was the beginning; and at that stage
Rosamund
wasn’t being a jealous wife at all. Nothing had
happened
, yet, to make her think of Lindy as a rival, and the empty, frustrated feelings that assailed her as they returned home, long after midnight, had nothing to do with jealousy. It was just that she felt done out of the after-party gossip that she and Geoffrey usually enjoyed as they went to bed, laughing about this or that person or incident, comparing
notes about the pleasure or boredom they had derived from the evening.

But Rosamund learned tonight that comparing notes is only a pleasure if your notes have been pretty well identical with those of the other person. It wasn’t comparing at all, really; it was just a companionable gloating over sameness, and all the more enjoyable for that. What fun they could have been having tonight, for instance, talking over Lindy’s affectations—her flamboyance—her veiled spite towards her sister—if only Geoffrey had seen her behaviour in this light too. But his innocent delight in the whole evening’s
entertainment
was like a bright, blank wall—it offered no door, no chink, through which any sort of conversation could start. Or so it seemed to Rosamund. It wasn’t conversation to exchange remarks like: ‘Yes, wasn’t it marvellous?’ or ‘Yes, she must be a very vital sort of person’ or ‘Yes, it
will
be fun having people like that next door instead of the dreary old Sowerbys.’

It had been more fun, actually, having the Sowerbys, Rosamund thought rebelliously. The gloomy, disagreeable Sowerbys, with their eternal complaining and bickering, and their neat rows of moribund seedlings put in every spring by Mr Sowerby against the advice of Mrs Sowerby. Almost any evening it had been possible to start an amusing
conversation
with: ‘Do you know what the Sowerbys are
rowing
about
now
?’—and thus, amid laughter, to savour the success and happiness of their own marriage in contrast to this miserable pair.

As she lay wide awake that first night, staring through the window at the waning summer moon, Rosamund felt a
terrible
nostalgic longing for the Sowerbys. For Mr Sowerby’s boots, which he was for ever failing to wipe when he came in from the garden; for Mrs Sowerby’s relations, whom he was for ever failing to be polite to…. What fun it had all been! Like a long, catastrophic serial story, suddenly cut off in its prime to make way for one of those dreadful
happy
stories, where nobody has any proper troubles, and there is even a Pekinese with a red bow…. Rosamund could see the
creature as the centre-piece of a full-page illustration, clutched in the arms of a vapid, jolly girl….

‘The sister was nice, too,’ came Geoffrey’s voice suddenly—she had thought he was asleep. ‘Much quieter, of course, than Lindy. More reserved. But nice.’

‘Yes, they’re both very nice,’ agreed Rosamund, like a parrot, and was glad that Geoffrey couldn’t see her face. I
hate
nice people, she was thinking crossly. I like nasty people. Interesting, disagreeable, nasty people that you can really talk about—laugh about. People, she might have added who make me feel superior; but this was no time of night to be embarking on such a disturbing train of thought; so Rosamund closed her eyes against the waning radiance of the night, and fell asleep.

It was Monday morning when she saw Lindy again; a still, golden, heat-wave morning, perfect for the washing, or for writing letters in the garden, or mending, or indeed for just lying there, staring up through green branches at the hot, still sky. And this last was exactly what Lindy was doing. As soon as she saw Rosamund across the fence, adjusting her clothes line, she called out: ‘Rosie! You
can’t
work on a day like this! Nobody could! It shouldn’t be allowed. Come over and have an iced coffee at once!’

Her voice was friendly, genuinely welcoming. She really
does
like me! thought Rosamund, in some surprise—she had somehow assumed that her secret feelings of hostility the other night must be mutual. So she set down her basket of washing, forgot her momentary annoyance at being called ‘Rosie’, and stepped over the low fence into the next garden.

The iced coffee was delicious, in long thin glasses,
purplish
dark, with great fluffy balls of cream bobbing
tantalisingly
to the surface as you stirred.
I
would never go to all this trouble just for the woman next door, thought
Rosamund
remorsefully; so to make amends for this, as well as for all her unkind thoughts of the last forty-eight hours, she exerted herself to be appreciative.

Besides, she was curious. She wanted to know all about these two sisters—their lives, their troubles, their past, their future. Almost instinctively, she set herself to be just as charming and friendly as is necessary to have another soul lay its secrets at your feet—and was astonished at how quickly and easily it worked. Could it be that Lindy was doing exactly the same thing?

‘Poor Eileen’s a funny girl, in some ways,’ explained Lindy, slowly stirring her coffee, now cloudy with dissolving cream. ‘She’s very pretty and charming and all that. And clever, too. Eileen’s much cleverer than I am really, you know. Always did better at school—that sort of thing. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with all that she’d be all set for a really happy and successful life.’

‘And isn’t she?’ asked Rosamund, unashamedly
inquisitive
now that she had Lindy safely launched on her
confidences
.

‘No. It’s a funny thing, but whatever she embarks on, it somehow seems to—well—fizzle out. It’s as if she lacked the—what is it? The energy?—zest?—whatever it is that gets one’s life swinging along on its own momentum. Everything that happens to her, she seems to have to
make
it happen, laboriously. And then, to keep it going, she has to work at it all the time. Her marriage was like that, you know. It was dreadful to watch her toiling away at it!’

‘What happened, then?’ asked Rosamund comfortably, sure, now, that the story would go on whether she prompted or not. ‘I know you told me it broke up …?’

‘Yes. And he was a nice boy, too. It was a shame.’ Lindy stared into the dazzle of greens and golds in front of her, slowly twirling the glass in her fingers. ‘If
I
had a husband’—she suddenly went off at a tangent—‘If
I
had a husband, and had to go out to work as well, I’d do everything in my power to make him feel not guilty about it, wouldn’t you? For instance, I’d somehow manage to get home in time to have everything looking nice for him, and myself all ready to welcome him. Not fussing over the cooking and the housework, but relaxed—at leisure—the way a man likes to
find his wife. As if she’d been doing nothing all day but making herself beautiful for him!’

‘Well—it’s a pretty tall order!’ Rosamund couldn’t help protesting. ‘I mean—with a full time job! Especially for a girl as young as your sister must have been when she got married.’

‘Oh, Eileen’s not as young as all that!’ Lindy assured her, rather sharply. ‘That childlike manner of hers is deceptive. She was old enough, anyway—or so I should have thought—to have realised what it was she was doing to her
marriage
. Evening after evening Basil would come in to find his wife scuttling madly about, making beds, peeling potatoes, cleaning grates—for all the world as if she was doing it on purpose to make him feel guilty. That’s the one fatal thing for any woman—to make a man feel guilty. It kills
everything
. But Eileen just couldn’t see it.’

‘She may have
seen
it all right,’ objected Rosamund, rather hotly. ‘But what on earth could she do? I mean—I’ve never had to work full time myself since I’ve been married, but I’m quite sure it must be terribly hard work. You’d just be compelled to do housework all the evening—and if your husband wouldn’t help, then he’d just have to feel guilty,
I’
d
say—and serve him right! I think he
should
help, in a case like that.’

Lindy shook her head, smiling with an air of rather
irritating
—it seemed to Rosamund—incredulity.

‘I’m really rather intrigued by the way married women are always up in arms on this question of working wives,’ she mused, smiling as if to herself. ‘Whether they
themselves
work or whether they don’t, the first thing that most of them think of is how “hard” it is for the wife! As if they were determined to seize on the question as a stick to beat their husbands with—an outlet for their unconscious
hostility
. “It’s not
fair
!”
they say—like children in a nursery!
I
wouldn’t worry whether it was “fair” or not. I’d want the man I loved to come home to what every man really wants—absolute leisure, tranquillity and comfort; and the feeling that his wife has nothing to do but to attend to him. He
doesn’t
want
to know that his wife has been working all day, and she shouldn’t thrust the fact under his nose, the way most of them do.’

‘It’s all very well!’—began Rosamund indignantly on Eileen’s behalf—and indeed on the behalf of all married women—and then she stopped. How could you argue with someone so untried, so unaware of the practical problems involved; someone so adept, too, in the use of weapon-words like ‘guilt’ and ‘unconscious hostility’—the inflated armchair jargon with which it is possible to batter other people’s
practical
problems into silence?

‘Sometimes,’ Lindy went on reminiscing, ‘Eileen would try to do as I advised. She’d tear madly home, running all the way, to have time to put on a pretty dress and look relaxed by the time Basil got back. Relaxed! It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. You felt all the time that the strain of being relaxed was killing her! No wonder poor Basil packed it in. I tried once or twice to show her how it could really be done—how it was possible to give a man a pleasant, leisurely meal at the end of his day’s work: but she just turned sulky. She’s never liked being in the wrong.’

All Rosamund’s dislike of Lindy was flooding back. She set down her glass with the feeling that she could not
swallow
another mouthful of the black, evil fluid. She could see with lurid clarity the gay little parties that Lindy must have laid on for her sister’s discomfiture. The candles, the
laughter
, the informality; with Lindy tranquil and triumphant at the heart of it all, trusting to Basil’s masculine obtuseness to prevent him realising that this kind of meal
did
need a lot of preparation, that Lindy, a single woman, had been able to devote to it time which Eileen would have had to be devoting to sweeping floors and washing her husband’s shirts. And Eileen could have done nothing to enlighten him. Loyalty—timidity—pride—all these would have silenced any protest she might have felt inclined to make. And if, by any chance, she
had
protested, then Lindy would still have won, and even more triumphantly. For what more
unloveable and unlovely spectacle can there be than that of a wife whining that
she
could be kind and charming too, if only this that and the other. For whatever this that and the other may materially be, spiritually they are, of necessity, three vicious blows at the husband’s self-esteem. Lindy,
unmarried
and inexperienced, knew it all: used it all with practised skill, like an artist working in an alien medium that he has managed to make utterly his own.

A low snarl within a few inches of her made Rosamund almost leap out of her chair. It was as if some avenging spirit had been reading her uncharitable thoughts, and was about to strike. And even when her startled wits had taken in that her accuser was only a very small, very suspicious Pekinese, she still wasn’t quite sure that her first instinct had been unfounded. Those bulbous, inscrutable eyes mirrored who knew what ancient, forgotten wisdom in their uncanny depths? Did the dog somehow know—sense—smell—that here was an enemy to his mistress?

Hastily Rosamund smiled and held out her hand. ‘Good doggie!’ she pleaded sycophantically, and tried to pat the rigid, hostile little body. But her insincere and incompetent blandishments were of no avail. The dog retreated a couple of paces, and set up a shrill, impassioned yapping, his
flattened
, ugly face contorted with what looked like more than human rage.

‘Shang Low, you silly! Be quiet!’ admonished Lindy admiringly, and with no effect whatsoever. ‘It’s because he doesn’t know you, you see,’ she explained lazily above the din. ‘He’s a very good guard dog really, although he’s so tiny. Pekes are.’

The last two words, simple generalisation though they were, seemed to Rosamund to be spoken in an oddly
self-satisfied
way, as though Lindy felt that she, personally, had supervised the three thousand years of intensive breeding that had gone to produce Shang Low and his self-righteous fury. Rosamund felt her irritation overflowing, quite out of proportion to its trifling provocation.

‘I like cats better!’ she said, quite sharply, and was
shocked at the naked rudeness of her tone. But Lindy only smiled, wholly unruffled.

‘I’m sure you do,’ she said easily. ‘I could have guessed that as soon as I saw you.’

The words were spoken lightly, but Rosamund could feel in them a sting, sharp and deliberate, though as yet quite unacknowledged. But before she could think of any retort, or even decide whether retort was indeed appropriate, they were once again interrupted. This time it was Mr Dawson from the other next-door garden. He stood, secateurs in hand, beaming admiringly from among his great
cream-coloured
roses, his admiration seeming to embrace
indiscriminately
the little yapping dog, Lindy’s brown gleaming legs in their becoming striped shorts, and the tall, cool glasses on the tray. All the glories of a suburban summer morning thus spread before his kindly gaze, he seemed to feel the need to join in, to make himself a part of it all. So ‘Good morning!’ he called out, over the fence. ‘Lovely morning, isn’t it? Nice little dog you’ve got there.’