The Jealous One (20 page)

‘Asked you?’ Mrs Fielding looked vague for a moment. ‘There’s no need for you to wait to be
asked,
Rosamund, I’m sure you know that, dear; I’m always delighted to see you.
I’m certainly very glad you’ve come,
particularly
glad this time, because it’ll set Jessie’s mind at rest; at least I hope so. She’s been worrying about you the last few days, I’m sure I don’t know why. She’s got some idea that you’re in some sort of trouble or something—
I
don’t know. I sometimes think Jessie is getting rather fanciful, but of course I don’t like to upset her, telling her so. Anyway, she seems to be worrying about you, wondering if you are all right, all kinds of nonsense. There
isn’t
anything wrong, is there, dear?’ She glanced up sharply for a second, then began busying herself with her papers once more. ‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was anything wrong? Not that I’d be much help, I’m too selfish, and I get more selfish as I get older, I know it very well. But I’d always be on your side.’

From such an undemonstrative woman the words were extraordinarily moving, and Rosamund was filled with
comfort
.

‘I know you would, Mother,’ she said gratefully. ‘But it’s all right. There isn’t any trouble … exactly. It’s just that we’re worried about Lindy disappearing….’

‘Oh, is
that
all!’ Mrs Fielding seemed greatly relieved.

‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it; she’s sure to be back soon.
Such
a nice girl, and with a little home of her own to come back to, though it’s a pity, in a way, that she’s never married. Still, I’m sure she knows her own mind best, and marriage does mean a woman’s giving up her freedom, even nowadays, there’s no getting away from it. As you know, Rosamund, I loved Geoffrey’s dear father very dearly, and no one could have been more deeply grieved than I was when he passed away, but all the same, I wouldn’t go back to it, not for anything in the whole wide world. Well,
anyway
, dear, if you’d just have a look at this page—from
here
onwards. And then I’ve just got a couple of paragraphs of the introduction I could get into shape while you’re here….’

Under the stimulus of Rosamund’s presence and
typewriting
skill, the couple of paragraphs expanded into a number of forceful quarto pages. They worked steadily
until one o’clock, when the soft peal of the gong summoned them ceremoniously to veal cutlets, mashed potatoes and sprouts, followed by treacle sponge. Like many women of her generation, Mrs Fielding had retained an immense gusto for nursery puddings of all kinds; and in this
particular
setting Rosamund found that she enjoyed them too.

After lunch they went back to the typing, and so
absorbing
did the task become that it seemed hardly any time before the early winter dusk began to fall, and Jessie came in with her gently clinking trolley, made up the fire with fresh, sparkling logs, and drew the curtains cosily against the encroaching night.

For a second Rosamund remembered that, for her, this secure and cherished cosiness was but a temporary thing. Soon—very soon—she would have to go forth into the gathering damp and fog that was being so deftly obliterated by this soft, heavy swish of curtains. Then she relaxed, resolved to enjoy to the full her last hour or two in this enclosed paradise of safety and comfort.

After tea, as was her settled custom, she went out to Jessie in the kitchen, and settled herself at the kitchen table in readiness for the usual talk about Jessie’s nieces. Everything seemed exactly as usual; the Aga murmuring; the kitchen warm and neat and shining; Jessie enjoying her hour of leisure.

Yet there was something that was not the same. The first inkling Rosamund had of this was when she found that Jessie seemed, for the first time ever, to have nothing to say about the Australian nieces. Rosamund tried one lead after another, asking about this one and that one … the one whose husband was on night work … the one whose little boy was ever so smart, top of his class in everything … the one who was to be X-rayed to see if she was having twins: but even this met with no awakening of interest. What was the matter? Was Jessie ill?

‘Are you ill, Miss Rosamund?’ Jessie blurted out,
suddenly
and bewilderingly; then, evidently overcome by the temerity of such a direct question, she began to apologise.
‘… If you’ll excuse the liberty, but you aren’t looking the thing at all, not at all. You look real poorly.’

Why must Jessie say all this, all over again? Even if it was true, did she have to harp on it? Rosamund’s irritation at the old servant’s concern was out of all proportion … and quite suddenly she knew that it was not irritation at all, but fear. What, exactly, did Jessie mean by all these befogging circumlocutions—‘not the thing’ and ‘poorly’? Did she really mean that Rosamund looked ill, or did she mean … did she sense …?

‘Oh, I’m all right, Jessie…. Is that a new picture of Queenie’s wedding…?’ On pretence of wanting to examine the photograph in question, Rosamund got up and studied herself surreptitiously in the mirror that stood on the same shelf as the photographs.

Did she look ill—pale—as one might after ’flu? Or was it something else that Jessie had noticed? A look in her eyes of guilt … of fear …? The hunted look, the haunted look of newly committed murder? Did Jessie perhaps even know something of what had happened on that vanished Tuesday afternoon … the afternoon when it was alleged that
Rosamund
had arranged to come here, and then had failed to come …? When instead she had lain in bed at home dreaming savage dreams … or had she, savage dreams and all, sallied out into the fog?

How much did Jessie know—or guess—or wonder? And how much of what she knew would she ever venture to put into the restrained, respectful language that was the only speech she knew?

Rosamund stared deep into the shadowed mirror, trying to see in her face what Jessie saw, to guess what Jessie guessed: and the longer she stared into her own eyes, the queerer they seemed, the more meaningless, like a word that one reads over and over too many times. Round, and blank, and empty of all human feeling, like a doll’s eyes … and now, with such intensity of looking, they had fallen out of focus … the headache was coming back. Rosamund drew away from the mirror, rubbed her eyes.

‘She’s very pretty, isn’t she?’ she remarked of Queenie’s photograph, without a single glance at it; and came back to her place.

She was aware of Jessie’s eyes still fixed on her, with an expression of indefinable unease.

‘I don’t think you should be stopping too late, Miss Rosamund,’ advised Jessie uncomfortably. ‘It’s … not a nice night. Not a nice night at all.’ She opened the kitchen curtain a crack, and peered out. ‘The fog’s coming up again something cruel….’ She went on staring into the blanketing greyness for nearly a minute, and when she turned back, Rosamund fancied she saw in the old disciplined features a look she had never seen before; a look of fear.

‘I think you should go
now,
Miss Rosamund!’ the old servant repeated, with veiled and respectful urgency. ‘I really think you should, indeed I do! Perhaps it’s not my place to be saying it, but there’s something I don’t like about this fog tonight….’

‘Ah, Rosamund,
there
you are!’ Mrs Fielding put her head round the door. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, dear, there’s a little bit I want to alter in that paragraph about the shields. Just a difference of emphasis, that’s all, it won’t take us a minute. You see, I don’t want to give the impression that it’s
only
the new dating I’m questioning….’

It took them a number of minutes: two and a half hours, in fact, counting the brief interval for the poached egg and milky coffee that always constituted Mrs Fielding’s supper. By the time they had finished, Rosamund saw to her dismay that it was nearly half past eight.

‘I
must
go!’ she exclaimed. ‘If I miss that nine o’clock train, there’ll be nothing for ages. I’d love to stay a bit longer, but I really mustn’t——’

‘I’ll phone for a taxi for you: don’t fuss, dear,’
remonstrated
Mrs Fielding with the confident unflappability of the one who doesn’t actually have to make the journey; and it was only after four or five minutes of fruitless dialling that she allowed herself to admit that there were no taxis
available
this foggy night.

‘You
would
have thought that they’d run a better service in a place this size!’ she fumed righteously, in an attempt to blur her own share in delaying Rosamund’s departure. ‘But never mind, dear, the evening trains are always late. I’m sure you’ll manage if you walk briskly.’

It was the walking briskly that caused Rosamund her first twinges of apprehension. At least, that was what she told herself as she hurried along the deserted road, listening to the beat of her own footsteps, the only sound unmuffled by the fog. If only those beats could have been slow, and steady, and confident, it would never have occurred to her to imagine that anything could be wrong. It was this quick, hurried tap-tapping, the patter-patter of her own high heels that gave her this sense of being pursued.

It was all nonsense, of course; no one was pursuing her. Twice she had stopped dead in the middle of the empty road, but of course there had been no sound, nothing to be seen: only the fog, palely swirling, softly and unobtrusively obliterating sight and sound, enclosing her ever more deeply in its soft, sinister caress.

Why sinister, for goodness’ sake? It was Jessie’s odd, uncharacteristic forebodings that were making her feel like this, of course. Mother had been quite right; Jessie
was
getting
fanciful: though it was a pity, all the same, that the conversation had been interrupted at just that moment,
before
Jessie had had a chance to explain exactly what it was that was in her mind.

Rosamund hurried on, trying not to notice how relieved she felt at the thought that she would soon be safely in the High Street. There the lights would be shining, albeit
hazily, from the closed shop fronts. People would be moving up and down, fumbling, laughing, suddenly friendly as they encountered one another in this unfamiliar element.

But even the High Street seemed almost deserted by now. The few footsteps that approached and passed seemed as nervous, as hurried as her own. ‘Good evening!’ the anonymous voices called through the greyness, in search of mutual reassurance; and presently the far-off whistle of a train reminded Rosamund that she had nearly reached the corner of Station Road.

But why was her heart beating like this, with the deep, heavy throbs of sudden shock? Why did she feel this
overwhelming
impulse to run, and run, and run … faster, faster … away, away, as one runs in dreams? Away from what? Was it from herself—from her own guilt? Is it true that most fear is, basically, a fear of oneself, of one’s own impulses? This fear, the like of which she had never felt before, was it a very ancient and familiar fear really—mankind’s primitive fear of blood-guilt? Was it the Furies of ancient Greece, the Avengers, who were pursuing her now through this foggy twentieth-century town? And was it for the murder of Lindy that they were pursuing her? Surely nothing but guilt, black and inescapable, could account for such
sickening
, overwhelming terror without material cause?

If she had indeed killed Lindy, she must expect to feel like this, perhaps for all her life long. As the years went by, there would be periods of forgetfulness, but they would never last for long. An hour?—two hours? Even a day? … and then on she would have to run again, on, on, through the nights and days, her guilty conscience pursuing her for ever.

Or could the pursuer be something even more strange, more incomprehensible, even than conscience? Could it be Lindy’s ghost itself hunting her along the foggy roads;
invisible
, implacable, sure, in the end, of victory, as Lindy had been sure in life? Was it Lindy’s ghost that had hovered this evening outside the window of Jessie’s kitchen,
radiating
unease out of the fog; and fear, and deadly
premonition
?

How easy it would be to begin to believe such nonsense, if one once let down the guards! Rosamund forced herself to move forward at a slow, even pace, for she knew now that this was the only way in which she could trust herself not to break into crazy flight. She listened to the steady steps,
telling
herself: Listen, it’s all right, hear how steadily she’s walking, a woman perfectly calm and unafraid. The beat beat beat of her feet feet feet, on and on and on, it can’t go on for ever, soon she will be at the station, boarding the train for home….

But when she got to the station, the nine o’clock train had gone. There was something almost consoling about the sleepy triumph with which the booking clerk informed her that there wouldn’t be another train for an hour and a half, and that even then it would be a very slow one, not reaching London till after midnight. At least this was a form of human contact. Her idiotic, baseless panic began to subside. When the clerk had disappeared into the bit of booking office round the corner that the passenger can never see, she longed for him to come back, even if it were only to tell her that after all there wouldn’t be a train till five in the
morning
, and that all the waiting rooms had to be locked up at ten sharp, it was the regulations, and she would have to sit out on the platform all night.

But he didn’t; and she was able to creep into the empty,
ill-lit
waiting room and sit crouched over the burnt-out stove, as if to absorb from it memories of past warmth. But it wasn’t the cold that she minded most, nor yet the slow, yellowish fingers of fog that drifted and coiled through the doorway, as though they, too, were seeking hopelessly for warmth. It was the smell.

Odd that it should affect her like this, for it was only the perfectly ordinary smell of railway stations—clammy—sooty—oily; not pleasant, admittedly, but surely not frightening either? Frightening in a strange way, too. The senseless panic of a few minutes ago was gone now that she was
safely at the station, but it was replaced by a heavy,
shapeless
dread, of which this smell seemed to be the very heart and core. Fear and the smell together drifted round her, lazily intertwined, like smoke, filling her lungs, her senses … and then she began slowly to know that she had felt like this before.

When? Where? Waves of memory, like sickness, heaved against her consciousness, but she could not quite grasp them; and presently, as her nostrils grew accustomed to the smell, its power of evocation faded; the half-glimpsed memories submerged once more and were gone.

She must have fallen into a doze, for the next thing she knew, she was waking from a brief dream of confused and fearful tumult, to find that her train had just come to a standstill outside. In panic haste, heart still thumping from the shock of sudden waking, she snatched up her
possessions
, dashed out onto the platform and onto the waiting train.

But after all she need not have hurried. Nothing
happened
at all. It was the
slow
train, of course, as the
booking-clerk
had so gleefully predicted, and for what seemed a long, long time it stood there motionless. Once or twice a compartment door slammed somewhere further up: a porter called out ‘O.K., Mate!’: then silence again.

Rosamund must be almost the only passenger on this train. It was an eerie feeling. After a while she got up from her seat and strolled along the corridor and back to see if there was anyone in any of the other compartments, but they were all empty—in her coach, at least, and it seemed really too silly to walk the whole length of the train just for the sake of seeing if anyone else was there. So she came back to her original seat, and sat there staring out through the mist at the empty, dimly-lit platform, waiting for
something
to happen. Probably the delay was something to do with the fog, but it was somehow unnerving, expecially with everything so quiet. Why couldn’t they at least throw bags in and out of the guard’s van and shout at each other, the way they usually do on standing trains?

Her relief when she saw that there was, after all, another passenger, was absurd. He came panting along the platform, suitcase swinging, at something as near to a run as his short, elderly legs could manage; and it was all Rosamund could do not to call out a joyful welcome to him from her carriage window. Desperately he wrestled with the door two away from hers—evidently he was imagining, as she had once done, that the train might be actually going to move—dragged it open, and bundled himself pell-mell inside.

Here he must have faced anti-climax as the train
remained
silent, immobile. He must have experienced, too, the same feeling of uneasy solitude as had oppressed Rosamund, for a minute later he appeared from along the
corridor
, peering rather sheepishly into her compartment
before
he came in and settled himself behind his newspaper in the furthest possible corner from her.

Rosamund felt immense fellow-feeling for her silent,
well-barricaded
companion. He had deliberately chosen the only compartment on the train with someone in it, and had then, equally deliberately, proceeded to fence himself off from all possible contact. Evidently he wanted exactly what she wanted—the solace of knowing that someone else existed, but not the bother of talking to them. Dear, nice, elderly gentleman! thought Rosamund, although all she could see of him was a pair of dark, well-creased trousers and black polished shoes.

As though it had been waiting politely all this time for him to settle down, the train now wheezed and groaned into movement, and as it slowly gathered speed, Rosamund felt a rush of even greater thankfulness for her silent companion.

For the fear had come upon her again. With the
throbbing
of the wheels it had come back … it grew, and throbbed, and mounted until she nearly screamed aloud. What it would have been like to be alone with it on this empty train was something she could not dare to imagine. She fastened her eyes on those prosperous neat legs, those reassuring shiny shoes, and waited for the spasm of terror to pass, as if it was a physical pain.

And pass it did. The train settled to an even pace, nosing its way leisurely through the fog, and Rosamund relaxed sufficiently to think of getting out her book. Not to read, exactly, she knew her mind was too preoccupied for that, but the mere sight of print on her lap would be reassuring, Also, it would set her companion’s mind at rest should he venture to peer round his newspaper and look at her. It would be dreadful if he saw her looking unoccupied, and was frightened out of the compartment by the fear that she might say something.

Presently the train began slowing down again; it was wandering into yet another little country station; and now, to her horror, Rosamund saw that her dear elderly
gentleman
was folding his paper. Yes, he was picking up his hat … his gloves … he was reaching for his suitcase…. Ye gods, he was
going
!

She could hardly believe the horror of it. She could have fallen on her knees on the dusty, cigarette-strewn floor,
begging
him, praying him, to stay on the train. But no; all that her upbringing would permit her to do was to sit prim and reserved in her corner, smile politely when he murmured ‘Excuse me’ as he pushed past her. And now he was
opening
the door … shutting it again behind him … fading, vanishing, with short, ungainly steps, into the fog.

Now she was alone. As the train lurched forward once more, she could feel the fear inside her mounting, gathering strength, rising from her stomach to her heart to her
throbbing
, shuddering mind…. And now the train was moving faster, crashing, thundering along the rails … it gave a great roaring whistle, like the howling of all the fiends in hell; and in that moment Rosamund remembered
everything
.

Yes, everything: right up to the stunning blow on the head that had blacked out her memory of that Tuesday afternoon.