The Jealous One (6 page)

‘Well, take Walker with you, and find him something to eat,’ said Rosamund, struggling to let calm reasonableness predominate in her tone, while maintaining an
undercurrent
of sufficient savagery to ensure that they would actually go. ‘Go on. Look in the refrigerator. Go
on
!’

‘O.K. C’mon.’ Peter at last abandoned his stance by the door and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. For one terrible moment Rosamund thought that Walker hadn’t moved, wasn’t going to move. But it was all right; he too had vanished. Too much relieved at their disappearance to call them back to shut the door—
anything
rather than have either of them back, for any reason whatsoever—Rosamund surreptitiously shut the door herself under cover of fetching a dish from the sideboard. At last she was able to turn her attention back to her guests, who by now were happily
discussing
the flavour of octopus as served in Sicily. Lindy was happy, that is to say, and so were the two men. Norah seemed less happy, as Lindy had just that moment managed to elicit from her, in the most public manner possible, that in twenty-two years she had never once attempted to cook octopus for her husband in spite of knowing that it was his
very favourite dish. William was looking almost
aggressively
smug and understood.

Rosamund was half listening to the talk, half to the sounds through the wall from the kitchen. The expert, almost telepathic ear of motherhood—or is it just
housewife-hood
?—could ascertain through nine inches of brick and plaster that the boys were only having bread and jam and cornflakes, and that in a very few minutes they would be finished. Would Walker go then, or what? Please, God, prayed Rosamund, as she distributed stewed pears and cream, Don’t let Walker stay the night. Oh, dear God, don’t let him!

But Walker
did
stay the night. When Rosamund stumbled sleepily into the kitchen in her dressing-gown the next morning there he was, neatly and completely dressed, sitting at the kitchen table expectantly. On Sunday morning, too, she protested to herself in silent horror, closing her eyes for a second in the dim hope that perhaps when she opened them he would have disappeared. On Sunday morning, at barely half past eight! Just when she had been planning to make a pot of tea for herself and Geoffrey and to go back to bed with it for hours and hours. And if this wretched boy
must
stay for the night, why couldn’t he at least lounge about in bed till midday, wasting the whole morning, like other boys? She opened her eyes, without much hope, and sure enough, there he still was, looking at her. Sooner or later somebody must say something, and clearly it wasn’t going to be him.

‘Hullo,’ she said, as unchillingly as she could. ‘I’m just going to make some tea. Would you like some?’

‘Yes, please.’

He could say things like that all right. It was an
exaggeration
to claim that he didn’t talk at all, Rosamund reminded herself contritely. She filled the kettle, lit the gas, terribly conscious all the time of the ghastly unoccupied-ness of her unwanted guest. Did he
have
to just sit there like that, doing nothing?

‘Wouldn’t you like the paper?’ she suggested brightly. ‘I expect it’s arrived by now. It’ll be out on the step.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Walker, swivelling his polite,
expressionless
gaze from the corner of the ceiling to his hostess’ face. Then, as if this degree of activity was all that anyone could possibly demand of him, he proceeded to wait, politely expectant, for Rosamund to say something else.

‘The kettle won’t be long now,’ she remarked desperately; and then, when Walker made no reply, she went on: ‘Wouldn’t you like to make yourself some toast? We’re always disgracefully late on Sundays—we shan’t be having breakfast for ages.’

‘No, it’s all right, thank you,’ said Walker. ‘I’d rather wait.’

And wait you shall, thought Rosamund grimly, swilling out the teapot with boiling water. Convention forbade her venting her annoyance on the silent figure, whose total lack of occupation seemed to be positively boring into her back as she bent over the sink; and so, instead, her thoughts turned wrathfully towards her son, the irresponsible author of it all, sleeping peacefully upstairs. What did he mean by bringing in this dreadful silent friend and dumping him on Rosamund to entertain, like a cat bringing in a dead bird? Let
him
get up, make toast, have his Sunday morning spoilt. It was
his
visitor.

She went to the door.

‘Peter!’ she yelled up the stairs; and then, going up to the landing: ‘Peter! Wake up! Come on down!’

Silence, of course. She went into her son’s room and shook him violently by the shoulder.

‘Wake up, Peter! Your friend Walker is up, and waiting
for his breakfast. Do go down and look after him, for
goodness
’ sake!’

‘What a fuss!’ Peter sat up, and rubbed his eyes. Then the full unreasonableness of the demand broke over him.

‘But it’s
Sunday
!’
he protested. ‘I don’t have to get up at this hour on Sunday!’

‘You have to
this
Sunday,’ said Rosamund with relish. ‘Because you have a visitor. I keep telling you, he’s down there in the kitchen waiting for his breakfast. You can’t just leave him there.’

‘But why not?’ Peter’s greenish flecked eyes were round with mingled sleepiness and surprise. ‘Walker doesn’t mind.’

Rosamund realised with a shock that this was perfectly true. Walker
didn’t
mind. He probably had not experienced one moment’s embarrassment during that (to her) ghastly interlude in the kitchen.
She
was the one who minded. She was the one who was made uneasy by a guest who was doing nothing, saying nothing. But young people—or was it just boys?—simply did not feel these sort of emotions. They spoke if they had something to say; moved if they had something to do. If they hadn’t, they might be bored, but it wouldn’t occur to them to be embarrassed. This was an adult—or was it a feminine?—or even just an
old-fashioned
?—state of mind.

‘You have an obsession about visitors, Mummy,’ said Peter tolerantly, as if he had been following her train of thought exactly. ‘But it’s all right. Honestly. Walker’s a marvellous chap that way, he never expects anyone to fuss over him.’

This was putting it mildly, Rosamund thought, as the daunting picture of someone trying to fuss over Walker flashed for a moment through her mind. But anyway, there seemed no point in arguing any more; Peter’s head was firmly under the blankets again, and downstairs she could hear the kettle dancing and shrieking its protests at her
neglect
, boiling its heart out, no doubt, under the interested, untroubled gaze of Walker.

Lindy arrived just in time for their eleven o’clock
breakfast
. That is to say, she dropped in at eleven o’clock, and Rosamund—as had been her policy ever since she became aware of the attraction between her husband and Lindy—had begged—pressed—her to stay. The nicer, the more
hospitable
, she was to Lindy, the less anyone could possibly regard her as a jealous wife: that was her reasoning. And not being regarded as something was half way to not
being
it, thought Rosamund uneasily, as she smilingly set a plate of bacon and mushrooms before Lindy. Perhaps, if I go on smiling at her, inviting her in, laughing at her jokes,
pushing
her and Geoffrey together—perhaps all this un-jealous behaviour rolled all together into one great heavy ball may some day roll back and crush my actual jealousy to death? Or perhaps (more practical thought, this), perhaps Geoffrey will get sick and tired of her if I keep stuffing her down his throat? Which of these is my motive really? And to think it all looks like being tolerant and good-natured! Is this always the secret of the tolerant, broad-minded wife?

‘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.’