The Jealous One (22 page)

Whichever it was, it must have taken quite a long time; and by the time she got there Rosamund must have
recovered
consciousness and gone, still clutching the bag mechanically…. Rosamund could vaguely remember now, wandering, staggering over rough ground …darkness … confusion … lights … a telephone box. A blurred,
dreamlike
attempt to phone Geoffrey, to summon his comfort and support. Rosamund felt strangely moved to know that it must have been from her, and from no one else, that he had received that sense of telepathic communion down the wires. And after that she must, somehow, have made the familiar journey home—so familiar after all these years that she could indeed have made it almost in her sleep.

So Lindy, after a long and anxious search along the
railway
bank must have found that her victim, and the tell-tale bag, had both vanished. She would have known, then, that Rosamund must be still alive—or else that her body had already been found. Whichever it was, all hope of
benefitting
from her crime must in that moment have left her.

No, not
all
hope. Everything would depend now on how much Rosamund, if still alive, remembered about the
accident
. Lindy would no doubt realise that she might have been so shocked and stunned as not to remember anything at all—as indeed was the case, for a few days at least. Or Lindy might calculate that Rosamund would remember the fact of falling from the train, but might have been too
confused
to have noticed or remembered that Lindy had
deliberately
caused it. In which case, it could all still pass as an accident.

But Lindy must
know.
How would she set about finding out? She would keep telephoning the house anonymously until she heard Rosamund’s voice answering … and then again she would telephone to find a time when no one was there so that she could slip in and retrieve her much-needed handbag. And all the time she would be trying to devise some way of finding out how much Rosamund remembered
—how much she had divulged. Every day that there was nothing about it in the papers must have brought her a fraction more of reassurance. Sooner or later, as the risks of disclosure seemed to grow less, she might even venture to come back—watchful, cautious, armed with some clever and infinitely adaptable story to fit onto what ever turned out to be the known facts. Oh, she was clever enough; no doubt she would get away with it—especially with someone anxious to believe the best as Geoffrey would be.

And then everything would go on as before? Could it, with what Lindy knew … with what she must wonder, in the depths of the dark nights, whether Rosamund knew, too, even if nothing was ever said again? Always, on top of her hatred of Rosamund there would now be fear added as well. You don’t need actually to be a blackmailer to inspire this kind of fear … you only need to be in a position where you
could
be a blackmailer.

But of course, as things were, it was much simpler than this. Now that Rosamund really did remember the whole thing, she would go straight home and tell Geoffrey, and they could then decide together what to do—if anything. That seemed hardly to matter. The real death-blow to Lindy’s hopes was that Geoffrey should know. All she could do now was to stay invisible—go abroad—something like that. Perhaps she had already done so….

Some sound, some uneasy sense of movement, made Rosamund open her eyes. Someone was standing out there in the corridor … a face was pressed against the window of the compartment. Lindy’s face.

For as much as half a minute after their eyes had met, Lindy still did not move. She’s trying to guess from my expression how much I know, how much I remember, Rosamund thought calmly, and without any sense of danger. The immensity of her relief at discovering that
she
was not the guilty one was still flooding her spirit, leaving no room for any other emotion. She even smiled at the white, watching face, in foolish gratitude that it, and not her own, must for ever carry the marks of murder.

Slowly, Lindy slid open the compartment door and came inside, closed it carefully and deliberately behind her; and now Rosamund saw that her face, far from carrying marks of guilt, had a look of wary triumph. It was not so pale, either, as it had looked at first, pressed so intently against the glass; it was the hard, yellow electric light and the shreds of yellow fog that had found their way in out of the night, that created an illusion of pallor. Rosamund’s own face must be looking the same….

‘So we meet again!’ Lindy spoke carefully, never taking her eyes off Rosamund’s face as she sat down opposite her. ‘How are you now?’

After being pushed out of the train? After my attack of ’flu? Lindy must be deliberately keeping it ambiguous, probing to find out how much Rosamund remembered. And I won’t tell her! resolved Rosamund—not because it had yet dawned on her that there was any danger in her situation, but simply from a childish satisfaction at finding herself for once in a position to make Lindy feel
uncomfortable
, instead of the other way round.

‘I’m very well, thank you,’ she replied distantly. ‘And how about you? Where’ve you been all this time?’

Lindy ignored the question.

‘You don’t
look
well,’ she insisted. ‘And Jessie doesn’t
think you look well, either. You really should begin to take more care of yourself, Rosie, at your age….’

The nerve of it! All Rosamund’s resolution to keep Lindy in the dark were swamped by the familiar sense of baffled outrage.

‘Well, I like that! After
you
…!’

She stopped; but it was too late. The end of the sentence, unspoken, rang plain enough between them. Rosamund realised that she had given herself away completely. Lindy knew, now, that she knew; that she remembered. But what was all this about Jessie? Had Lindy been eavesdropping out there in the fog, outside the kitchen window? Of course she had—and outside the drawing room window, too; she would have been a fool not to have seized—indeed to have sought out—such an opportunity. She would have learned, from the mere fact of its non-inclusion in the conversation, that Mrs Fielding and Jessie had not heard of anything so dramatic as Rosamund’s having fallen out of a train,
accidentally
or otherwise. Would Lindy have deduced from this that Geoffrey hadn’t heard of it either? Well, let her wonder!

‘You’re a funny, secretive creature, Rosie,’ said Lindy, with an air of compassionate wonder. ‘Anyone else who’d had an accident like that would have rushed home and told everyone all about it.
Certainly
they’d have told their own husband! Geoffrey’s going to think it very odd, isn’t he, when he hears about it first from
me,
after all this time! Or perhaps he’s used to it? Perhaps you’re always like that? To me, it seems a very queer sort of relationship, for a husband and wife….’

‘Of course I’d have told Geoffrey at once—if I’d
remembered
it!’ cried Rosamund. ‘But when I first recovered
consciousness
I’d completely forgotten—it’s like that, after you’ve been stunned. It takes several days before you
remember
….’

And only now, as she watched the triumph glittering yellow in Lindy’s face under the bare electric bulb, did she realise how completely she had fallen into the trap, and how
incautious were these revelations that Lindy had surprised out of her by playing on her childish pride.

For Lindy had now been told, almost in so many words, not only that Rosamund had so far not incriminated her at all, but that she was proposing to do so as soon as they reached their journeys end. Now at last Rosamund saw quite clearly how very important it was to Lindy that she, Rosamund, should never reach that end of the journey. Once already Lindy had attempted her murder; the second time, perhaps, was even easier….

Yet what could Lindy do? Certainly Rosamund wasn’t going to lean a second time out of the window into the fog and the darkness. There was no way, now, in which Lindy could take her by surprise. All she had to do was to sit here firmly, on her seat … not to be trapped into going near the window, or even into standing up at all… and then nothing could happen. After all, the journey couldn’t go on for ever. In half an hour or so they would be in London. Just sit here then, immoveable, and let Lindy do her worst.

But Lindy just sat there, too. She had stopped speaking, and there was a tiny smile about her mouth. Rosamund watched it, uneasily, as if it was a small, bright weapon. What was Lindy thinking, planning?

‘You think I’m planning to kill you, don’t you?’ said Lindy suddenly, and with curious scorn in her voice. ‘But I’m not, you know. I don’t plan things. I act on impulse, always. You made me so furious….’

Was it true? Rosamund remembered several little
incidents
, from the days and hours before that fatal afternoon, that suggested to her, now, that Lindy might have been planning it all, or at least have been waiting and watching for just such an opportunity. Her odd, half-guilty
cross-questioning
of Rosamund at Norah’s coffee party: the carefully-chosen jibes which (perhaps predictably) stung Rosamund into travelling impetuously down to Ashdene in the fog … and with a temperature, too, which perhaps would make the ‘accident’ seem less extraordinary, more explicable, than it would otherwise have been.

Not that it mattered now. Why was Lindy trying so emphatically to refute the imputation of forethought in all this, when it could make no possible difference one way or the other? Whether the attempted murder had been planned or unplanned was now of no importance or
relevance
.

Except to Lindy’s pride. Even now, under the shadow of total disclosure, it was more important to Lindy to maintain her image of herself as a passionate, impulsive sort of
person
than it was to think of a way of getting herself out of the present impasse.

It would be to me, too, flashed through Rosamund’s mind; and this small stab of fellow-feeling put her a tiny bit off her guard.

Off her guard against what? For Lindy was still sitting there, making no move, and the minutes were passing. Yet still the smile flickered round her mouth; she wore a look of curiously inappropriate confidence. Was this, too, merely part of an act?

‘Besides,’ said Lindy suddenly, as if there had been no pause since her last words. ‘There are some things you will mind more than being killed——’

In a single swift movement (impulsive to the last?) she stood up and flung open the carriage door, and the foggy darkness, like a hurricane, poured in.

Was it a trap—an unwontedly clumsy trap? Was she expecting Rosamund to leap to her feet and try to close the door? Rosamund, as she had resolved, clung to her seat. Here, sitting down, she was surely safe … and then, as she sat there, she realised that Lindy was pulling the
communication
cord.

‘It’ll be your word against mine!’ cried Lindy, her whole face aglitter with triumph; and then, quite calmly, she stood there waiting for the train to slow down.

Only then did Rosamund understand the import of it all. As soon as the train was going slowly enough for her to do it safely, Lindy was going to jump out, be found lying by the side of the line, saying that Rosamund had pushed her
—and
then
what a feeble, implausible, cooked-up imitation would Rosamund’s story of last Tuesday sound—coming, as it now would,
after
Lindy’s?

Or was all this what Rosamund was meant to suppose … was it really just another trap … a cunning way to get her to leave her seat and come to the doorway? No … her first guess had been right … Lindy was indeed preparing to spring as the train slowed down … slower … slower….

And then suddenly the expression on Lindy’s face was like nothing Rosamund had ever seen before. The train was slowing down indeed, just as she had planned, but only
because
it was coming into a station.

*

As a
femme
fatale
Lindy had been very nearly
convincing
. As a murderess she had been superb; but she had no ready-made image of herself appropriate to this. As the guard, bored and irritable, came to ask her why she had pulled the cord, she looked once more exactly as Rosamund had first seen her, peering into the back of that furniture van: a rather fussy, dumpy little woman.

The glittering façade was shattered; and Rosamund, as she watched its disintegration, felt herself, too, to be
diminished
: with the grief of a fellow-craftsman, she witnessed the smashing of so mighty a work of art.

*

After Lindy had gone abroad, which she did almost at once, there seemed no point in making the affair public—Geoffrey and Rosamund were entirely agreed on this, from the very first. There was no point even in letting Eileen know the whole truth—they both felt that Eileen had enough on her mind already, in piecing together her
marriage
once again. One couldn’t even expect her, in her still delicate domestic situation, to take over Shang Low. So for a while, before the new people came, Rosamund still had to go in and out to feed him; until, gradually, it began to seem easier to bring him into her house rather than take the food into his; and even after that, it was still a good many weeks before she fully realised that they now owned a Pekinese. As
the months went by, Shang Low came to adore Geoffrey more and more, but he still continued to display a measure of guarded contempt towards Rosamund.

But it didn’t matter; for Geoffrey and Rosamund soon decided that the best kind of Pekinese
always
adore their masters and despise their mistresses. It became one of their things.