The Jealous One (5 page)

‘A dreadful, noisy little dog, if you ask me,’ laughed Lindy, turning towards the newcomer, confident of being contradicted. ‘I do hope you don’t mind him?’

‘Oh no, not a bit. Not a bit.’ Mr Dawson leaned further over the fence. ‘I like dogs. Used to have a dog ourselves——Oh, for years. He was nearly sixteen when he died, poor old chap. But the wife thought we’d better not start all over again with a puppy. Not with the kiddies both grown up by that time, and left home.
You
know.’

‘What a shame!’ said Lindy, with rather more sympathy than it seemed to Rosamund that the subject called for. It was not clear if her condolence referred to the death of the old dog, or to the misfortune of having a wife who didn’t want a new puppy, or to the sadness of having all your children grown up and away. ‘Do come over and join us,’ Lindy continued hospitably. ‘We’re having iced coffee—I’m sure that’s just what you need after all that
gardening
.’

Mr Dawson seemed enchanted by this prospect. He
abandoned
his secateurs and climbed with clumsy alacrity over the intervening fence; and in practically no time at all, it seemed to Rosamund, Lindy had managed to welcome him charmingly, to produce a third comfortable chair without seeming to go and fetch it, and to set before them three fresh sparkling glasses of iced coffee, topped with yet more cream. What a larder the girl must keep! thought
Rosamund
, with unwilling admiration. Fancy being able
casually
to produce mounds of whipped cream for anyone who happened to drop in unexpectedly in the middle of Monday morning!

Mr Dawson was looking cherished, happy. He leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee, his bronzed, balding head and amiable features gleaming with warmth and
contentment
as the sun mounted towards its zenith, and Lindy, wide-eyed with interest and sympathy, steered him with consummate skill through the story of his life; encouraging him to linger on such episodes as redounded to his own modest credit, and to pass over those which did not. Once again Rosamund found herself forced reluctantly into
admiration
. She had always flattered herself that
she
was a good listener, a sympathetic confidante. But now, listening to Lindy, she had to own herself utterly worsted in this field. In ten years of living nearly next door to the Dawsons, of meeting and chatting with them, she had never learned a fraction of what Lindy was learning now, in less than an hour’s conversation. Had never known that Mr Dawson had always longed for a daughter as well as his two sons; that he had wished, as a boy, to go in for farming, or
market-gardening
, or something like that, but had given in to his parents’ importunate passion for security and gone into
insurance
; how sometimes, to this day, he regretted his cowardice. ‘Particularly on a day like this,’ he confided,
closing
his eyes luxuriously against the glory of the noonday. ‘When I think of the hay just cut in the meadows, and the larks far up in the still blue sky, and the hedges white with—er—well, with that white stuff….’

‘I suppose you
could
move to the country now, if you
wanted to?’ interposed Rosamund sympathetically. ‘Now that you’ve retired, I mean——’

Lindy was showing more sense. Lindy was keeping quiet. Rosamund realised in the very instant of speaking that she was saying absolutely the wrong thing; was shattering poor Mr Dawson’s precarious little dream.

‘Oh. Ah. Well——’ Mr Dawson heaved himself into a less comfortable position in his chair as he sought a way to extricate himself from this disconcerting proposition; to bolster up his nostalgic vision against this onslaught of real possibilities. ‘Oh, well, you know, at my time of life…. And then our friends, it would mean leaving all our friends, you know; the wife wouldn’t like that. And there’s the Women’s Guild, too, remember. The wife’s a great one for the Women’s Guild. Very keen. Very keen indeed. Did you know, they’re going to do a play in the autumn? Lady Windermere’s Fan. And the wife’s to be Lady Windermere herself! That’s the main part, you know. The most
important
part in the play!’

The pride in his voice was unmistakable. Lindy looked up quickly.

‘How funny,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought that that was a part for a younger woman. Though I’m sure Mrs Dawson will do it very nicely,’ she amended smoothly. ‘Won’t you have a little more coffee?’

Mr Dawson was about to reply when a faint stir of
movement
from next door, scarcely audible to other ears, alerted him, brought him bolt upright in his chair.

‘The wife’s back!’ he announced, getting hastily to his feet. ‘Think I ought to be popping back. Give her a hand, you know—duty calls. Thank you for a most delightful interlude, Miss—er——?’

‘Lindy.
Please
call me Lindy,’ protested his hostess,
getting
up also. ‘And do call over again, whenever you can—and bring Mrs Dawson too, of course. I do so want to get to know my neighbours.’

She smiled delightfully. Nothing could have been more charming, more unaffectedly friendly, than her manner.
You felt that she really did want to meet Mrs Dawson, was really looking forward to it.

And yet, the very moment Mr Dawson’s back door banged shut behind him—as if it were a cue for which she had been waiting—Lindy’s expression changed completely. She resumed her seat, edging closer to Rosamund as she did so, and burst into low, impassioned speech:

‘What a shame!’ she ejaculated softly. ‘What a wicked shame! Poor fellow! Has it always been like that?’

‘Has what always been like what?’ asked Rosamund blankly. ‘Do you mean the Dawsons?’ She was quite baffled by this outburst following so incongruously on Lindy’s pleasant farewell speeches to Mr Dawson a few seconds ago.

‘Of course I mean the Dawsons.
Mrs
Dawson, that is. She must be an absolute bitch. You know her?’

‘Yes, of course I know her,’ said Rosamund, bristling a little. ‘And she’s not a bitch at all. She——’

‘But she must be! Surely you can see it? Didn’t you see how scared he was? The moment he knew she was in—and he must have been absolutely on tenterhooks listening,
because
I didn’t hear a thing—the moment he heard her, he leapt up as if he had been stung! Didn’t you notice?’

‘But it wasn’t like that at all—you don’t understand,’
protested
Rosamund. ‘They’re a very happy couple. He came over here because he was at a loose end while she was out shopping, and as soon as she came back he went home again. It was as simple as that. Besides, I expect he wanted to see what she’d brought for lunch. He does most of the cooking for the two of them, you know, now that he’s
retired
.’

‘Well—I think that’s dreadful, too,’ insisted Lindy. ‘After a lifetime of hard work, you’d think a man might be allowed to have a bit of a rest when he retires. These women who seem to regard retirement as an excuse to turn a man into a domestic servant——’

‘But she doesn’t! It isn’t like that at all. He loves cooking—it’s his hobby. He hunts up all sorts of exotic recipes to try out, and is terribly proud of himself when they turn out
well. And so is she—she goes round boasting about how clever he is.
I
think it’s sweet. And very wise of her to
encourage
him. Some women would be complaining about having a man messing about in their kitchen.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But the trouble with you, Rosie, is that you see it all from the woman’s point of view,’ said Lindy, with maddening condescension. ‘From the
married
woman’s point of view, that is to say. But I sometimes think that we single women are more in touch with the way a man really feels. We aren’t blinded by the way we
want
him to feel, the way so many married women are. It affects their whole
outlook
, on everything. You see, the average wife not only wants her own husband to have the feelings she has chosen for him; she wants husbands in general to have those
feelings
, too. It makes her feel safe. Look how anxious
you
are, for instance, to prove that Mr Dawson just loves having to cook lunch; and that it is sheer devotion to his wife that makes him jump like a scalded cat when he hears her come in. And how
quietly
she comes in, too,—didn’t you notice—no slamming the front door or anything? As if she was hoping to catch him out at something…. Oh, I’m sorry, Rosie. She must be a friend of yours—I mustn’t go on like this about her. Let’s talk about something else.’ She smiled at Rosamund, charmingly: ‘What shall I do with this garden? What do you advise? I want to put in something that will really brighten it up next summer. Do you think tulips?’

‘
Yes
!’ said Rosamund, between her teeth, unappeased by the change of subject. ‘Lots and lots of tulips. You couldn’t do better.’

Lindy glanced at her quickly, a little puzzled by her vehemence. She couldn’t know, of course, that tulips were Geoffrey’s and Rosamund’s pet hates. Nasty, stiff, artificial looking monstrosities, Geoffrey had always said; might as well be made of plastic. And they’d agreed, with gloriously abandoned prejudice, that only stiff, disagreeable sorts of people went in for tulips; people with no real heart.

‘Tulips would be perfect,’ Rosamund repeated
encouragingly
.
‘Have rows and rows of tulips in every bed. And in the front as well.’

‘Have you seen the fork, Rosamund?’ asked Geoffrey one Saturday afternoon in late August. ‘I want to help Lindy with a bit of digging.’

Rosamund did not reply for a second: she was thinking. Not about where the fork might be for she knew very well that it was in its usual place in the toolshed. And Geoffrey must know this too—he wasn’t asking for information at all, she realised. Rather he was asking for some sort of backing—a reassurance from Rosamund that she didn’t mind his spending so much of his weekends over at Lindy’s. It was as if by getting Rosamund to tell him where the fork was, he was in some way bringing her into this plan for re-
designing
Lindy’s garden: making the whole project into a
threesome
, not just him and Lindy.

‘It’s in the toolshed,’ said Rosamund, following his train of feeling exactly. ‘I’ll get it for you.’ As she carried it across the tired, yellowing August grass, she wondered whether to feel touched or uneasy at the look of relief on his face. It was nice of him to want to feel assured that she wasn’t
feeling
jealous or left out: but how insulting that he should think she might be!

As if I would! Rosamund handed him the fork with a bright smile, and then turned savagely on that tiny
cowering
corner of her soul which might perhaps be tempted to feel bitter at the sight of her husband’s arms and shoulders bronzed and rippling with muscles in the service of another woman.

She—Rosamund—jealous? Never would she so degrade
herself as to feel—let alone show—such an emotion. So she went smiling back to her solitary tasks of tying and staking overblown plants, of clipping the ragged edges of the lawn. Between the blades of the shears she could feel that summer was already gone; the grass was long and quiescent; the surge and spring of growth was over. The shadows
lengthened
as she worked, and the enfeebled sun, already touched with autumn, slanted weakly down, scarcely warming her shoulders as she worked. Across the fence she could hear the rhythmic plunging of the fork into rich earth; could hear Lindy’s voice rising and falling; laughter, and Geoffrey’s voice, happy and amused. Did he sound as happy as that at home? Presently she went indoors, and could hear it no more.

Geoffrey came back soon after six, sunburnt, glowing, with his boots covered in mud. At the sight of his happy face Rosamund realised in one spiteful unheralded flash of insight that, in his mind, Lindy must be getting the credit for a sense of well-being that in fact came merely from hard physical exercise.

So, as an unjealous wife should, she smiled, and made no comment on the traces of mud spreading through the kitchen … through the hall … up the stairs … into the bathroom … down the stairs … into the sitting room.
She’d
expect me to nag him about it, Rosamund reflected
truculently
, but I just won’t, that’ll show her!

So she made no complaints, and showed herself full of interest in Geoffrey’s afternoon’s activities as they sat talking afterwards.

‘… about five hundred weight of clay, I should think! Really, I’m not exaggerating! And we hadn’t a barrow, so I had to carry every scrap of it in buckets. Gosh, what my back will be like tomorrow…!’

But he wasn’t complaining, Rosamund well knew. He was boasting; glorying in the hard physical work of which men are most of the time deprived. Why don’t
I
want the garden dug up? thought Rosamund crossly; it seemed so unfair that Lindy should have this advantage, on top of so
many others, simply because Rosamund liked their garden the way it already was: a lawn, a tangle of hardy, colourful perrenials, and single glorious blossom tree.

‘What’s she going to do with it, anyway?’ she asked
hopefully
, remembering the tulips. Perhaps Lindy had in mind something absolutely frightful; something that Rosamund and Geoffrey would be able to lean out of the landing
window
and criticise every summer for years and years.

‘Well—she was suggesting a little paved area in the centre, to catch the sun, surrounded by masses and masses of tulips. Rather a striking idea, don’t you think?’

‘Striking, perhaps. But—
Tulips
!’
Rosamund laughed, and put into the word all the happy, united prejudices they had shared over the years. She waited for Geoffrey’s answering laugh, which should have been immediate, and rich with shared memories.

‘Well—I don’t see why not,’ he said uneasily. ‘I mean, the way she’s planning it—she’s thinking of having all different sorts all massed together—all sorts of colours. Scarlets, and yellows, and flame colour, and those huge, very dark
blackberry
coloured ones.’

This was not Geoffrey speaking, Rosamund knew. He was not naturally very imaginative, or given to vivid description. These were Lindy’s words. It was Lindy who had poured all these colours into his head in glorious headlong profusion—Lindy who had led him to this betrayal of his and
Rosamund
’s joint hatred of tulips.

With half her mind, Rosamund knew how petty and ridiculous it all was.
Tulips
! What a thing to be bothering about! With the other half, she was aware of black treachery.

‘It sounds gorgeous,’ she heard herself saying brightly. ‘Lindy’s always full of marvellous ideas. Let’s ask her to supper this evening, shall we?’

Even as she spoke, Rosamund knew exactly what her motive was: she was terrified that Geoffrey had been going to make exactly this suggestion himself. By thus forestalling him, her pride was saved. She need never know now that he
had
been going to suggest it. For all she need ever know, he might have been feeling that he’d already seen quite enough of Lindy for one weekend.

He looked pleased and touched. ‘Lovely idea. What a good girl you are, Rosamund.’ He kissed her gratefully, and she felt the kiss like the imprint of a message in code. A message thanking her for not making a jealous scene; for being nice about the Other Woman; for not being as other wives are. A flattering message, in its way, but one which bound her to a course of action from which there was no returning.

But I’ll invite someone else as well, she decided
defensively
: a married couple perhaps would be the best idea. The mere presence of another wife would give her a feeling of moral support, and—delicious thought, this—the other wife
might,
if provoked, behave towards Lindy in all the ways in which Rosamund would have loved to behave. Sooner or later
someone
will have to be uncivilised, she
reflected
, but if I play my cards carefully it won’t have to be me.

Horrified to discover the depths of scheming to which she could sink, Rosamund hurried to the telephone, and rang up the first likely pair she could think of.

Even at such short notice, the Pursers turned out to be able and delighted to come, and they arrived only a few minutes after Lindy herself, both wearing that air of escaped prisoners which some parents develop over the years and never lose—an air of guilty, precarious enjoyment of a brief spell outside. William Purser was a serious,
balding
, young-old person, who was devoting himself, rather early in life, to being disappointed in his son. His wife Norah was serious, too, but her seriousness was masked by the almost permanent smile which lit up her little anxious, ravaged face. She was disappointed in their son too, but, unlike her husband, she made it her job to make the best of it; a wearing occupation, which left her tense and nervy, whereas her husband was at least able to relax in his depths of settled gloom.

‘And how’s Peter?’ was the first thing Norah asked, when they were all settled round the table in front of bowls of Rosamund’s onion soup. ‘Still doing nicely at school?’

‘Not bad,’ said Rosamund, wishing that there was a little more to boast about in Peter’s unruffled but sadly mediocre performance in the educational rat-race—if race it could be called which seemed to leave the whole lot of them free to lean on their bicycles arguing outside the front gate for the whole of every weekend. ‘We think he’s getting pretty lazy, actually,’ she added kindly, knowing that Norah’s ‘How’s Peter?’ was really asked in the hope of hearing that Peter was already showing signs of being as tiresome as her Ned. Norah would then be able to assure herself—and her despondent husband—that
all
boys were like that at
sometime
or another, it was just a phase….

Sure enough, Norah’s fixed smile widened into a spark of real hope. ‘Is he? Is he really? They do get like that, you know, at about that age’ (she flashed an almost
imperceptible
glance at her unresponsive partner). ‘That’s just when Ned began to be so difficult, at about sixteen. He’d done brilliantly till then, really brilliantly…. I sometimes think that perhaps this is something they
need,
you know, these bright boys. To knock around a bit…. Find their feet.’

Her husband glanced up from his soup balefully.

‘I don’t call it “finding his feet” to hang about the house, out of a job, lying in bed till midday….’

‘Oh, William, but that’s not fair! It’s only the last couple of weeks that Ned’s been unemployed. He——’

‘The last
five
weeks,’ contradicted Ned’s father
remorselessly
. ‘And before that in April. And that packing thing over Christmas was only part time. If that boy’s done as much as ten weeks’ solid work since he left school, I’ll …’

The uneasy wrangle over facts and dates went on, and Rosamund watched Lindy drinking it in, silently, with relish, like a second, extra nourishing, bowl of soup. She was thinking, you could see, some more of her favourite sort of thoughts about wives and their inadequacies. Devastating reflections about the way they messed up the relationships
of their husbands and their sons were probably maturing inside that sleek black head, and Rosamund determined to interrupt them.

‘Half the battle is to get them out of the house,’ she broke in cheerfully. ‘Peter’s gone off cycling with a friend this weekend, and it’s such a relief! All the way to Canterbury and back, with practically no money and nothing to eat! But they don’t seem to mind.’

With some annoyance she heard the pride in her own voice. She had never meant to be one of those mothers who are for ever boasting about the physical achievements of their sons, the hardships endured by them. But somehow it was irresistible, far more so than boasting about their
academic
successes. And evidently Norah found it so too, for she instantly leaped into the competition.

‘Oh
yes
!’
she exclaimed. ‘Ned had six weeks in France last year with literally no money at all! He slept under bridges—got himself washing up jobs in return for meals——’

‘And was back in a fortnight,’ interposed William. ‘Owing about seven pounds to an American family who took pity on him, and the whole of his fare home. And he didn’t go penniless. Norah, you’re talking absolute rubbish. He had ten pounds in travellers’ cheques, and——’

‘Well, after all, he was barely nineteen,’ began Norah
defensively
. ‘Lots of boys——’

‘And their Peter is only sixteen!’ interrupted William, with an exaggeratedly approving glance towards Rosamund. ‘Now, there’s a lad with guts for you! Setting off to cycle a hundred miles just for the joy of it! If Ned had ever done such a thing, ever, in his whole life …’

Rosamund murmured some sort of deprecating protest, but she couldn’t help being pleased. She knew, of course, that Peter’s virtues were only being used as a stick with which to beat the nefarious Ned: she knew, too, that the approving glance had fallen on her rather than on Geoffrey, who was surely equally entitled to it, because William wanted to highlight, by contrast, Norah’s lack of maternal
skills. A congratulatory glance at Geoffrey might have set people thinking that fathers have something to do with their sons’ shortcomings, too.

‘When a boy is lucky enough to have a really sensible mother,’ he hammered on, in case anyone had somehow succeeded in missing the point. ‘A mother who doesn’t spoil and cosset him, why, then he naturally grows up courageous and enterprising, full of zest for this sort of venture….’

A thumping and a clattering in the hall … the slam of the front door … the dining room door thudding open, and there in front of them stood Peter, his straw coloured hair falling even further than usual into his eyes, and his mouth open in unmannerly horror at the sight of his parents’ guests.

‘Oh, we got fed up,’ he explained, in answer to his mother’s dismayed queries. ‘We got tired, before we even got to Gravesend. It seemed a bit pointless.’

Rosamund tried to hide her total dismay. Not only was her recent ill-gotten prestige as the mother of an
enterprising
son laid in ruins, but her whole weekend—her lovely Peter-less weekend—lay shattered about her like a trayful of smashed china—you couldn’t even begin to count up the losses, to sort out what was still intact, in that first moment of shock. And Peter just kept standing there, eyeing the table (covered with appetising food but surrounded by
horrifying
guests) with just the sort of fixed, apprehensive look with which a dog regards a dinner that has been given to him too hot.

‘Well, go and find yourself something to eat in the kitchen,’ urged Rosamund inhospitably, and with the grim brightness appropriate to an embattled mother who is also trying to be a gracious hostess. ‘Go on,’ she repeated, the grimness fast overwhelming the graciousness as Peter went on standing in the doorway.

‘Walker’s here,’ he observed. He seemed to expect his mother to understand that it was this fact which was
keeping
him rooted to this irritating and inconvenient spot, and to expect her to do something about it. Rosamund leaned
back a little in her chair to peer round the door. There, sure enough, was Walker, the dreadful speechless companion of Peter’s cycle rides. Speechless, that is to say, in Rosamund’s presence: she supposed that he must speak sometimes, or how could all these outings be arranged, let alone cancelled. Whether the boy’s silence was due to shyness or to deep thought it was hard to tell, and even harder to care.
Rosamund
stared at the two of them with growing irritation. Why did Peter have to look so
short,
she thought crossly, on top of everything else? Rather small for his age in the first place, he was now standing, as if deliberately, with his head slumped into his shoulders and his shoulders slumped into his spine as he leaned against the edge of the half open door. His left hand fiddled uneasily with the doorknob
behind
him as he waited limply for his mother to make some decision which would somehow heave the two of them into some other room.