The Jealous One (8 page)

‘It’s Jessie’s calendar,’ she explained. ‘Her niece has just sent her a new one, but she’d rather go on just fitting the new set of dates into the dear old cottage one, wouldn’t you, Jessie?’

They all glanced up at the wall, where the painted
plywood
shape of a cottage hung, with painted curtains to its windows, painted hollyhocks along its base, and its front door designed as a gap in which date and month could be inserted. It had hung there, over the table, ever since
Rosamund
could remember, and the little verse, painted in ornate, faded letters under the eaves, was by now so familiar that she was hardly aware of it any more. But this evening, her attention freshly drawn to it, she read it consciously and attentively for the first time in years:

Jessie’s calendar. Jessie’s prayer. In the course of her quiet, ordered life, lived apparently in such unchanging calm, had even she felt at times the tumult, the longing for peace? Had there been times, over the long years, when unguessed at tempests had torn and battered at her secret soul; when turmoils and despairs unspoken had hammered behind her starched apron and her neat black dress? Had she at those moments read and re-read the lines on her little wooden cottage, and found the peace they promised?

With a rush of love, Rosamund was aware of Geoffrey reading the words too, carefully and attentively as she was herself, without mockery or condescension. A tender, happy smile played about his mouth: he, too, must be thinking
these same thoughts about the faithful old servant of his childhood.

He spoke softly:

‘It reminds one of Lindy doesn’t it?
She’s
peaceful in that way. No matter what’s going on around her—traffic—parties—noise—she still remains at peace, tranquil within herself.’

Rosamund could have torn the calendar from the wall and flung it at him. She could have thrown herself on the floor in a passion of rage and weeping. She could, after recovering the power of speech, have bombarded him with furious argument. Lindy
isn’t
tranquil, she could have screamed: she’s a bundle of nerves: she’s all tensed up, all the time, with the strain of pretending to be calm and gay. I know it…. I sense it….

But instead she smiled, keeping her eyes fixed on the aging, multicoloured letters, which now seemed to her to be written in fresh, bright blood.

‘Yes, there aren’t many people like that, are there,’ she replied evenly: and a moment later they heard Lindy’s car crunching on the gravel. It was time for her to drive them home.

Even as a surgeon, trained over the long years to almost superhuman skill and sensitivity, may examine the patient beneath his hands for the almost imperceptible symptoms of a deadly disease, so did Rosamund, all her faculties sharpened by fury, examine Lindy’s face, her posture, the whole of her demeanour, for tiny, miniscule symptoms of some huge, corroding tension; or at least of common or garden impatience.

For Lindy had explained, in arranging to call for them at seven, that she wanted to be home by eight; and yet here she was, at twenty past seven, still smilingly and charmingly listening to Mrs Fielding’s impassioned defence of Evans and all his works in the Palace of Minos. As kindly and cleverly as ever Rosamund herself could have done, she was encouraging the old lady with tactful interventions, of a sort which indicated her interest without betraying her
ignorance
. Never once did Lindy’s eyes flicker towards the clock; never for one second did she let her interest seem to flag, as a preliminary to ending the conversation. How relaxed she looked, damn her, one arm resting lightly along the arm of the chair, the other lying loosely in her lap. Rosamund watched, sharp-eyed as a weasel, for those white,
well-manicured
fingers to start fiddling with something; picking at the braid on the armchair, perhaps; pleating up a bus ticket; anything at all to indicate some tiny degree of inner tension.

But it was no use. And in the end it was Geoffrey who had to remind them that time was getting on.

‘Oh, what a shame! Yes—I suppose we
should
be going really…. It’s been so interesting, Mrs Fielding, I really don’t know how to tear myself away….’

So it was on the cordial farewells between his mother and Lindy that Geoffrey beamed this time, as he usually did on his mother and Rosamund.

‘You must come again, my dear, I would be so pleased if you would!’ exclaimed Mrs Fielding to Lindy, as she showed them all to the door. ‘Do bring her again, Geoffrey, won’t you?’

‘It’s a case of
her
bringing
us
at the moment,’ laughed Geoffrey. ‘She’s introduced a car into our lives, you know, Mother, and we’re really quite bitten! Next thing you’ll know, we’ll be driving up to your door in our own Rolls and taking you for drives. How would you like that?’

‘It would depend how you drove,’ said his mother
cautiously
. ‘I’ve never felt you were one of Nature’s mechanical geniuses, Geoffrey. Particularly since the time you told me I
was only imagining that noise in the geyser, and it blew up the same night!’

‘Oh, Mother, I didn’t say you were
imagining
it! I said——’

‘Well, never mind, dear,’ interrupted Mrs Fielding
annoyingly
. ‘You haven’t even got a car yet, have you, so there’s no need to argue. Goodbye, dears. See you all again soon, I hope. When you can next spare the time.’

She stood waving in the lighted doorway while Lindy edged and backed them into position, and then swept the car slowly, gracefully, out into the dusky road. Down under the great trees, under the gathering hosts of stars, and out into the streams of cars in the main road.

The traffic was even worse now than it had been this afternoon. People must have seized on this last warm
basking
sunshine of the season to swarm in thousands to the coast; and now here they all were swarming back, tired, irritable, scowling narrow-eyed at the bumper just ahead. As the slow crawl came at last to a total stop some of them began hooting, with sharp, poignant hopelessness, to
somebody
or something; perhaps to unhearing Hermes, god of travellers, long vanished from the earth, and who can blame him?

And what god can
I
pray to, wondered Rosamund,
running
her mind over such classical deities as she could
remember
. Which was the goddess whose special task it was to watch over bad-tempered wives cooped up in a five-foot box with Another Woman of angelic good-humour, of unruffled calm? Oh, dear goddess, whoever you are, prayed
Rosamund
, show me how to make her annoyed and upset
without
it being in the least bit my fault. If you would just do that for me, I think I really would sacrifice a sheep to you, or whatever it was you wanted. At least, I would if I thought it would fit into my oven, but I’m sure it wouldn’t, it’s bad enough with the turkey at Christmas. Besides, the butcher would think I was mad, asking for a whole sheep…. It’s no wonder the Olympians have deserted the earth, with
everything
so complicated….

‘Get a move on, sister!’ yelled the man in the car behind them, sticking his head through his window. He sounded very cross and unreasonable, and pinched his hooter
spitefully
as he spoke. Lindy leaned out and threw him an enchanting smile:

‘So sorry, Pal,’ she called. ‘But I can’t do a thing. We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?’

The scowl left the man’s face. He grinned apologetically. Geoffrey looked at Lindy with delight.

‘There can’t be another driver on the whole road who could have achieved that!’ he declared admiringly. ‘This is the most rotten luck for you, I must say,’ he went on,
gesturing
at the glittering shambles of standing cars in every direction. ‘I’m terribly sorry we’ve let you in for this. There isn’t a hope of being back by eight, I’m afraid, it’s practically that now. Was it something very
important
?’

‘Oh, only our party,’ said Lindy lightly. ‘I was going to do the food and things, but it doesn’t matter. I daresay
everyone
’ll be late, anyway.
You
will for one, that’s quite certain! And so will Rosie!’

‘I didn’t know we’d been asked.’ Rosamund could hear that Geoffrey was smiling in the darkness. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘Oh, well, you know me!’ said Lindy. ‘I only thought of it this morning, and I just rang everyone up straight away. I meant to ask you when we started out this afternoon, but it went right out of my head. So I’m asking you now. Will you come to my party, on Sunday the 13th of September, at 8.0 p.m. or as soon after as the hostess happens to turn up? No. On second thoughts, let’s start it on the dot! Eight p.m.
prompt
is on the invitation card now!’

She took her hands off the wheel, reached into the glove compartment and drew out a small square bottle and three plastic mugs.

‘Vodka,’ she explained. ‘To get the party going! Will you divide it out, Geoff? There’s only a teeny drop, but still, we might as well enjoy ourselves while we sit here. Nothing’s
going to move for hours yet. So here goes, boys and girls! The party’s begun!’

You could, if you didn’t mind how nagging and
mean-spirited
you sounded, have pointed out to Lindy that she shouldn’t drink while she was driving. But by the time it had been divided into three, the vodka filled less than half an inch at the bottom of each mug; that amount couldn’t possibly affect anyone, least of all a driver as confident as Lindy. And anyway, Rosamund knew very well that rather than make such a wet-blanketing sort of protest in her husband’s hearing, she would willingly have sat by and watched Lindy drinking a pint of the stuff: yes, and would have accepted her fate in the ensuing pile-up without so much as an ‘I told you so!’

I’m just a criminal; a plain criminal! thought Rosamund, shocked at herself as she realised that, just to save her own selfish pride, she would without a qualm have condemned half a dozen people to death or disablement.

But it was silly to agonise like this: Lindy
wasn’t
drinking a pint of vodka. And all that giggling with Geoffrey didn’t mean she was drunk at all; it was simply that she had thrown out the daring proposal that they should invite the irascible driver of the car behind to join them in this little celebration.

‘Poor man, I feel so sorry for him, all alone in his car, eaten up with impatience, and no one to swear at! I’m sure he’d love it—and it
is
a party, isn’t it?’

‘But, my dear Lindy, suppose it all starts moving
suddenly
, then where will he be? I’m sure we could all be arrested, or something!’ Geoffrey sounded as if he was half laughing, half shocked, and wholly intrigued.

‘Oh, nonsense! I tell you, nothing’s going to move for hours yet. I always think that these real, outsize jams could be made a wonderful social occasion, if only people would be a bit more enterprising. You could have debates, lectures, parties….’

In the end, of course, they didn’t invite the man in the car behind: but they went on giggling about the possibility of
it, like school-children, till Rosamund could have screamed. And her distress was not only for the here-and-now
situation
. She also knew, with that deadly stir of intuition that clutches at the spirit, that this, for Lindy and Geoffrey, was going to be one of those memories. One of those times that they could look back on even after forty years, and still say: ‘You remember that man in the car …?’ Every time Vodka might be mentioned from now on, Geoffrey’s glance would meet Lindy’s in swift, mutual recollection. The memories he shared with Rosamund were already, perhaps, becoming shadowy, tiresome; something to remember with an effort, like a cousin’s birthday….

It was well after nine when they reached home, and as the car drew up, Rosamund saw lights streaming from every one of the windows of Lindy’s house. There was the sound of music, voices; the party had evidently begun without her.

‘See?’ the errant hostess exclaimed happily. ‘There was no need to fuss! There never is. Parties just run themselves, if the hostess will only relax!’

The remark could hardly have been aimed at Rosamund, who had not given any sort of a party, relaxed or otherwise, since Lindy had come to live here. Nevertheless, the words seemed somehow to have the quality of missiles, flung at random into the darkness at the back of the car: carelessly, as much as to say: With any luck some bit of this will hit and hurt her; but if not, why, there’s nothing lost, it was no bother. No trouble at all, dear; a pleasure….

‘Come on in—I’m longing to go to my own party!’ cried Lindy excitedly, as they left the car. ‘Both of you come along, at once.’

‘Well, just give us a few minutes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I want to get changed….’

‘Yes. And I must see if Peter’s in, too,’ added Rosamund, though she couldn’t think why she must. It was a breathing space she wanted: a little bit of time in her own home, away from Lindy, away from the sight of her and Geoffrey together.

‘O.K. Don’t be long,’ Lindy called. She had reached her
own front door by now, and across the two gardens Rosamund saw her feeling for her key in her handbag.

But before she could find it the front door was flung open with a great blaze of light, and Rosamund could see Eileen framed in the brilliance; could hear her voice, low and frantic:

‘Lindy! How
could
you! Why have you been so long? How
could
you leave me to cope with everything on my own? And
this
time, of all times! You
knew
that Basil might be coming!’

So
that
was the secret of all this relaxed hostess business! Lindy was simply leaving her sister to do everything, while claiming credit herself for superhuman light-heartedness and calm. If only Geoffrey was listening … was taking it in!

But no. As ill luck would have it, he had hurried straight indoors, and hadn’t heard a word of the significant exchange on the other side of the fence. Rosamund followed him into the house slowly, trying to think of a way of reporting the incident without sounding catty. How it did cramp one’s style, this not being a jealous wife! How much less
interesting
it made one, too; for the anecdote, catty or not, would at least have been amusing and stimulating—could have
triggered
off the kind of conversation that Geoffrey and she had once enjoyed nearly all the time. As it was, there seemed nothing to talk about while they got ready for the party except whether to lock the back door; as to which
Rosamund
found herself disagreeing with Geoffrey simply for the sake of something to say. Never, ever had it been like this with them before….

The party was in full swing when they arrived, and
looking
swiftly round Rosamund calculated that every single one of their neighbours must have been invited. How well Lindy had managed to get to know everyone in the three months she had lived here! Better than Rosamund had done in all the past ten years, to judge by all these familiar faces gathered together. Familiar in a sense, that is: in another sense quite unfamiliar, for faces that you are
accustomed
to meeting under hats or over garden walls look queer indoors, like the postman without his uniform. In a way, it was easier to talk to the total strangers; the bearded artistic men and the un-housewife-looking women who must have come out of Lindy’s former life. Letting herself be pushed unresisting by the surging movements of the crowd, Rosamund presently found herself wedged tête a tête in a corner with a wiry, pale young man who looked like a poet, but who said that he was a Shell Shelder, or something that sounded like that: indeed, for all Rosamund knew, there might really
be
such a job; anyway, you couldn’t go
on
asking him to repeat it, any more than you could ask him to go on repeating his name, also lost in the
surrounding
din.

Gradually, as her ears became accustomed to the noise, she gathered that he was talking to her about modern marriage. Before much longer, she found that she could actually hear everything he was saying, and no longer had to reply with such smiles and platitudes as would be equally appropriate whether he was describing the faithlessness of his wife or the Darby and Joan happiness of his aged parents.

It was neither, and the platitudes couldn’t have been in the least appropriate, but perhaps he hadn’t heard them:

‘The wonderful thing about just
living
with a girl,’ he was saying, ‘is the privacy and the dignity of it. People aren’t watching you all the time, the way they are when you’re married, to see how you’re making out. I mean, an affair is expected to break up, so people don’t get any kick out of
watching for it to happen. And they don’t think it’s against the rules for you to go out separately sometimes, or for you to have different tastes, different friends. Stepping out of an affair into marriage is like stepping out of a civilised state into a goldfish bowl. Wherever you look, whichever way you turn, there are great eyes staring at you, hugely magnified, watching to see how you match up to the Perfect Husband. Or Perfect Wife, of course: it’s just as frightful for her, too I’m not saying it isn’t.’

Rosamund laughed. ‘It sounds as if you have a heavy concentration of in-laws,’ she said. ‘And your wife, too. Are you both members of big, devoted families?’

‘On the contrary, we are both orphans. Were, I should say. My wife and I are separated.’

‘Oh! I’m sorry!’ Rosamund felt some embarrassment, but the young man hastened to dispel it, in his rather
disconcerting
way.

‘Don’t be silly! You don’t have to apologise. Hang it all,
I
brought up the subject. I wouldn’t have, would I, if I’d wanted it tactfully avoided?’

‘No, that’s true,’ said Rosamund. ‘It’s just that one is rather brought up to …’

‘There you are! That’s another thing!’ interrupted her engagingly indignant companion. ‘The way everyone feels they’ve got to be so bloody
tactful
about marriage, as if it was a fatal disease, or a deformity, or something. They stare, and they point, and they whisper, but they won’t
talk
to you about it. Nobody asks you how it’s going, whether you’re enjoying it, that sort of thing, the way they would if it was a new job, or a trip abroad, or any other exciting new venture in life. Your friends all get so remote and evasive, it’s like being stranded on a desert island; just you and this young woman. Not being a character in a film, I just couldn’t take it.’

‘Well, you’ve said you don’t like people to be tactful, so I won’t be,’ said Rosamund. ‘I must say, it does sound to me as if you must have given up rather soon. All that kind of thing—what you’ve been describing—subsides pretty soon,
you know. People soon get tired of watching and
speculating
, and then you get forty or fifty years of peace and quiet. If that’s what you want.’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you? People never get tired of watching and speculating. Not ever. All you really mean is that you find compensation in all the chances
you
get to watch and criticise in
your
turn. I don’t mean you in particular,’ he added hastily, suddenly looking very young. ‘I mean “one”.’

‘
Now
who’s being tactful?’ smiled Rosamund. ‘You might very well mean “me in particular”, because I’m sure I’m terribly like that. No, what I mean is, people are curious at first, naturally, because they don’t know what this new
personality
, the-pair-of-you, is going to be like. As soon as they
do
know, they stop being inquisitive. It’s like getting to know any new person.’

‘Well, in the first place, I resent suddenly being counted as half of a new personality when I’ve spent twenty-six years being the whole of an old one, and enjoying it thoroughly, thank you very much! And in any case, none of this answers my second objection: the way people boycott the subject of your married state as a topic of conversation. And
that
doesn’t change. I daresay
you’ve
been married quite a few years, but if I were to ask you, quite simply and
conversationally
, how you’d enjoyed it, you’d evade the
question
in horror, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, I would,’ said Rosamund; and began to consider why she would. Loyalty? Cowardice?—Or simply that it was none of this young man’s business?

The last thought must have shown in her face, for he laughed a little defensively:

‘There you are, you see? Whereas if I’d asked you how you’d enjoyed living in this neighbourhood all these years—and
that’s
none of my business, either—then you’d tell me quite happily, and we could have an interesting discussion about it. And then I’d tell you where
I
lived, and you could ask how I felt about it, and it would all be quite interesting, probably….’

‘Well, where
do
you live?’ Rosamund was beginning obligingly, when Lindy suddenly appeared through the line of shoulders and backs cutting off their corner from the rest of the room.

‘Oh,
there
you are, Basil!’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘Come along, there’s a good boy, I’ve got someone over here dying to meet you—’ She seized his hand and dragged him, half laughing, half protesting, into the heart of the crowd,
leaving
Rosamund to assimilate this new bit of
information
.

So this was Basil, Eileen’s one-time husband: the young man who, according to Lindy’s account, had left Eileen
because
she was always in a fluster of overwork, always
making
him feel guilty. Did this interpretation dovetail in any degree with the opinions that Basil himself had just been expressing to Rosamund about marriage—presumably
based
on his own experience? In all this noise and confusion it was difficult to think coherently, or at any length, but so far as she could collate her memories, it did not seem that there was much connection between the two versions—though she supposed they weren’t actually incompatible. You could, of course, object to the state of marriage as such
and
find your wife irritating…. Realising that by standing here
speculating
she was in danger of looking neglected—an
unforgiveable
sin at a party—Rosamund decided to worm her way through the crowd until she caught sight of someone she knew. The room, which at first had seemed full of neighbours, now seemed full of total strangers, more and more pouring in every moment, like refugees from some unimaginable disaster outside: the lucky ones, the
survivors
, gathering themselves into the shelter of Lindy’s charm….

And now here was Lindy herself again, only a yard or two away. Over the intervening shoulders, Rosamund was able to witness the introduction of Basil to this person who was ‘dying to meet him’. It was Eileen. Rosamund could not hear what was being said; she could see only the expression of baffled dismay on Eileen’s face, of utter astonishment on
Basil’s. And the smile, the warm, charming hostess smile on Lindy’s, and her mouth opening and shutting, pouring forth animated, inaudible words.

What was she saying? Why was Eileen looking so appalled? And Basil so surprised? Had he not known that Eileen would be here? Did he perhaps not even know that Eileen lived here at all? Was Lindy trying to ‘bring them together’ by the childish ruse of a surprise meeting? No. Lindy would never be so silly—nor so simple. Whatever she was up to, it would be something complicated, and carefully planned. It would be like a card trick—all those simple, natural smiles and gestures would culminate—surprise!
surprise
!—in Lindy’s suddenly appearing to advantage in relation to someone else—presumably, in this case, Eileen.

But there was no chance of filling in the details from this distance, so Rosamund continued on her difficult way until she reached the french windows which had been flung open to the September night, still almost as warm as summer. The lantern so carefully wired up by Geoffrey hung from the laburnum tree, and on the shadowy space of grass sat or stood little clusters of guests, in comparative quietness and freedom of movement.

Among the groups Rosamund caught sight of the
Dawsons
, Mrs Dawson’s plump bare arms and careless frizz of grey-blonde hair shining palely through the darkness; and she could hear Mr Dawson’s elderly yet boyish voice
holding
forth about sparrow-hawks. Rosamund could not quite see who he was addressing, but at least he and his wife were well-known to her, so she unobtrusively sidled into the group, exchanging with Mrs Dawson the conspiratorial smiles of women tolerating good-naturedly the
incomprehensible
male passion for talking about facts, when there is so much else in the world so immeasurably more
interesting
.

‘And I
know
it wasn’t a pigeon!’ Mr Dawson was
asserting
forcefully, defending the opinion against some
imaginary
opponent. It must be imaginary, for surely he couldn’t
have magnified into an opponent either his wife or the blonde, beautifully lacquered lady who was regarding him amiably but with a certain restlessness across her gin and lemon. ‘Sparrow-hawks don’t necessarily hover, you know. Everybody thinks they do, but they don’t. They dart about under the trees. It’s ridiculous to say that just because it wasn’t hovering it must have been a pigeon!’

The lacquered lady hadn’t said so, and was beginning to look a little resentful as well as restless. But she was wrong to take it personally: she should have realised that she was only the stand-in for a dream-audience of attentive,
admiring
professional naturalists. ‘
Some
people think you don’t ever see them in towns—’ he was moving triumphantly to his peroration—‘but that’s quite untrue. And anyway, you can’t call this exactly “town”, can you? … All those great elms….’ He gestured vaguely, and stared out across the rooftops with the wistful intensity of imagination cultivated by so many suburbanites—they can at will raze to the ground acres of red brick and wooden fencing, and see in primeval splendour the rural remnants of their
environment
. ‘It’s practically woodland, you know, over there
behind
the tennis-club buildings. You could easily have a pair nesting there. Several pairs.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you could,’ said the blonde lady, rather helplessly. Rosamund could see that she was trying to make up for the blankness of her mind on the subject by a sudden look of bright attentiveness, and by sipping her drink
continuously
. Rosamund felt sorry for Mr Dawson, and tried to think of something encouraging to say about
sparrow-hawks
herself. It was nice to know they were there, and she wished them well, but that seemed rather a feeble thing to say.

But Mr Dawson mercifully did not seem sensitive to the inadequacy of his audience. He was happily continuing: ‘But of course, people don’t
look.
They never see anything of the wild life here because they never look for it. They think that because they live in a street of houses and people, nothing else can exist there. Did you realise—’ he turned
once more in fruitless challenge to the blonde lady—‘that there are more worms in London than there are people? Did you know that?’

How had he found out? Or, rather, how had the writer of whatever article he had been reading found out? Did the L.C.C. pay somebody to count worms? Or did universities provide grants for it? What odd ways there were of
spending
your life, if you were so minded. But poor Mr Dawson was evidently waiting for a proper response to his dramatic announcement. ‘Really? You don’t say’ wasn’t enough.