The Jealous One (9 page)

‘Well, I think that’s perfectly splendid!’ contributed
Rosamund
. ‘I mean, when you look at all the crowds of people in Oxford Street, and read about the population explosion and everything, there’s something awfully consoling in thinking that worms are doing it too. You feel it’s all part of Nature after all.’

Mr Dawson seemed a little non-plussed. Evidently, in spite of her good intentions, she had failed to strike quite the right note. At this point, Mrs Dawson intervened, in her comfortable voice: ‘Harold’s always been interested in the Country,’ she observed, as if in vague excuse for the whole conversation, including Rosamund’s contribution. ‘When he was younger, he used to toy with the idea of living there, didn’t you, dear?’

‘Toy with it! It was always my ambition. Alwavs. You know that. I wanted to be a farmer. But Life brought me other duties: I’ve had to face the fact that the buttercup fields are not for me.’ He sighed.

‘If you’d really been a farmer, you’d have learnt to hate buttercups long ago,’ remarked his wife comfortably. ‘Farmers always do.’ She seemed not at all put out by his little speech, though the ‘other duties’ which had frustrated his ambition could be none other than herself and the two sons with which she had presented him. ‘It’s beginning to be a little chilly, dear, don’t you think?’ she continued,
shrugging
up her bare shoulders expressively. ‘Don’t you think we should be getting indoors?’

‘Of course, dear!’ At once Mr Dawson was all solicitude,
helping his wife from her chair, escorting her across the grass towards the bright indoors: and it was only then that Rosamund noticed that Lindy, from just by the open french window, seemed to be watching them. She might, of course, have just been looking out, with hospitable concern, to make sure that her guests in the garden were all enjoying themselves, and were well supplied with food and drink. But Rosamund chose to interpret it otherwise. There she is again, she told herself, watching like Big Brother to see if she can’t catch some wife nagging her husband, or being possessive about him, or something like that. She probably thinks that Mrs Dawson isn’t feeling cold at all, but is
dragging
her husband indoors to get him away from that dull blonde who can’t even talk intelligently about
sparrow-hawks
! She’s going to come over and tell us so tomorrow morning, I know she is: and I shall have to feed her coffee and biscuits while she goes on and on about it. And then she’s going to say how awful it is of her to have prevented him becoming a farmer: and when I say that he’s only too thankful to have been prevented, he much prefers a
comfortable
life really, then Lindy will say … she’ll say…

Rosamund could not think of the smiling, subtly deflating remark with which Lindy would silence her in this
imaginary
conversation. Indeed, by this time Rosamund was quite losing sight of the fact that the foregoing conversation
was
imaginary. And she certainly wasn’t allowing herself to reflect that it was most unlikely that Lindy could have heard anything at all that the Dawsons were saying to each other out on the lawn.

For since the drive to Mother’s this afternoon, Lindy had swollen in Rosamund’s imagination into a figure of
superhuman
power and cunning: nothing, nobody, could escape her net. Why, even now she must be noticing, storing up, the fact that Rosamund and Geoffrey had not spoken to each other at all since arriving at the party. And yet, if Rosamund sought him out and spoke to him, then that, too, would be noted: as possessiveness. And if Rosamund were to leave the party early, as she now longed to do, that would
count as a gesture of jealous resentment; if, on the other hand, she stayed to the bitter end, then it would be to keep watch on her husband…to make sure he wasn’t enjoying the company of other women too much….

Suddenly, her conversation earlier in the evening with Eileen’s husband swept back into Rosamund’s memory with a new significance. When Basil complained about people continually watching his marriage for symptoms of
breakdown
, had ‘people’ been a euphemism for ‘Lindy’? Or had his sister-in-law’s evil watchfulness so poisoned his whole environment that he really did feel that ‘everybody’ was
doing
it? Rosamund could picture Lindy sitting attentive in the newly-weds little flat, noticing whether Basil kissed his wife the moment he came in at the front door, or whether he looked at his letters on the hall table first…. Whether Eileen ran out of the kitchen to greet him….

She’s a sort of vampire! thought Rosamund in sudden, uncontrollable loathing. She lives on the flaws in other people’s marriages…she sucks the blood from them,
leaving
a dried-up, bloodless ruin where once was a
relationship
…. And then doesn’t even want the husband for
herself
!

Or does she? Does she? Does she want Basil…? Does she want Geoffrey…?

Rosamund’s one idea now was to get away from this horrible party unnoticed. She pushed her way blindly through the sitting room, through the hall; and as she passed the foot of the stairs she felt quite sure that she could hear Eileen upstairs, crying.

But it was absurd, really. She couldn’t have. Even if Eileen
was
crying, she couldn’t possibly have heard it, there was far too much noise everywhere. Nevertheless, she carried the imagined sound out of the house with her, like an armful of extra fuel, all ready to fling upon the flames of her hatred once she was blessedly alone, within her own four quiet walls.

That first expedition in Lindy’s car proved, as Rosamund had feared, to be the prelude to an entirely new pattern for their weekends. At first Lindy backed up her continued
insistence
on driving them to Geoffrey’s mother’s by alleging various reasons of her own for wanting to go to that
particular
neighbourhood on that particular Sunday: but gradually this pretence—if pretence it was—was abandoned, and it became simply the accepted thing that she should take them. Soon it also became the accepted thing that she should spend the whole afternoon there with them; for Mrs Fielding had taken a great fancy to Lindy and was always urging her to stay.

And so it came about that every fortnight or so the three of them would go off together in the car, spend the
afternoon
together with Mrs Fielding, and come back together in the evening, for all the world as if Lindy were one of the family, a daughter, or a sister, or something. Or Geoffrey’s wife, of course.

As the autumn advanced, slow and golden, with its bright shortening days, the habit of going out with Lindy began to spread to the intervening Sundays as well—the Sundays they had been accustomed to spend getting up late,
pottering
about the house, and reading out to each other
astonishing
or ridiculous items from the vast unmanageable Sunday papers which gradually spread so cosily all over everything as the leisurely day wore on. But not any more. Rosamund was learning to dread this endless, cloudless St Martin’s summer, or whatever it was called: this waking, Sunday after Sunday, to the still, misty mornings, with a golden promise behind the mist that grew and grew until about ten o’clock it burst into the full glory of the sun.

And always with the sun came Lindy, her head sticking over the wall—or through the kitchen window—or round the front door—and her gay voice calling: ‘Isn’t it a
gorgeous
day? Shall we go out somewhere?’ And after a while, it ceased to be ‘Shall we go out?’ and became ‘Where shall we go?’ so fixed and regular had these Sunday
expeditions
become. And then there was the little excited huddle over the map … where to go … how long it would take … whether to take a picnic lunch or stop at a pub….
Rosamund
forced herself to join in these debates good-
humouredly
—indeed, the other two always consulted her opinions most punctiliously—but she never managed to make any suggestions half as enterprising and imaginative as Lindy’s. Her imagination was elsewhere, far from the sunny promise of the morning; in dark, cloud-hung, shadowy places, where it rained, and rained, and rained.

But it never did rain, not all that autumn long, or so it seemed to Rosamund. Week after week they drove along narrow sunlit lanes; they picnicked among warm tussocks of dry autumn grass; they picked late blackberries in the mellow afternoons; and never did the rain come.

Eileen never came with them. Lindy had brushed this idea aside, right at the beginning, with the casual verdict: ‘She doesn’t care for this sort of thing.’ Shang Low came however, although he didn’t seem to care for this sort of thing either. He was always put on the back seat with
Rosamund
and urged to be a good dog, which, according to the letter of the law, she supposed he was. That is to say, he no longer ventured to snarl at her, or set up his former
ferocious
yapping at the sight of her. Instead, he sat as far away as he could on the warm leather seat and watched her, his eyes bulging with dislike and suspicion. Her occasional
reluctant
advances of friendship he met by withdrawing his dignified little body even further into its chosen niche, and very slightly increasing the tempo of his sterterous
breathing
. Not a threat, exactly; just an indication. If, rashly, she went further, and offered him some titbit of cold chicken or beef from the picnic, he would take it into his mouth, hold it there motionless for about thirty seconds, and then, slowly and deliberately, watching her face all the time, would spit it carefully out onto the seat of the car.

So Rosamund soon gave up all attempt to get on terms with him on these expeditions, and they sat silently, as far away from each other as the seat allowed, in a state of mutual dislike so intense that it almost became a sort of bond between them. Companions in enmity, they listened to the chatter and laughter on the front seat, occasionally
exchanging
a suspicious, hostile glance when one or the other of them, in their restless boredom, made some unwonted movement.

But Shang Low was charming with Geoffrey. As soon as they settled down on the grass for the picnic, he would come bundling out of the car and hurry to Geoffrey’s side. He would put his front paws on Geoffrey’s knee and stare
unblinkingly
and with adoring greed at his adopted master’s every mouthful. From Geoffrey’s hand he would even eat plain bread with mustard on it. Lindy and Geoffrey would laugh at him when he did this; tease each other about Shang Low’s growing devotion, and play idiotic games with him. They would kneel on the grass a few feet apart, with Shang Low in the middle, and both call him at once and see who he went to first: and whichever it was, it seemed to be equally uproariously funny, Rosamund noted sourly.
Sometimes
she tried to join in, exploiting humourously her role as Shang Low’s enemy, only to find that she wasn’t being humourous at all, just rather dull and interrupting.

Not that either of them said, or even hinted this. They were both very kind, and did their best to treat her as one of them. But Rosamund knew for herself that all the spark, the wit, had gone out of her. The thing that used to flash
unbidden
and scarcely noticed between her and Geoffrey was gone. Rosamund was learning the first sharp lesson that hits the tolerant, broad-minded wife; the wife who determines to avoid nagging and scenes, and determines to win her
husband
back simply by being as good humoured and nice to him as ever. She learns that being good humoured and nice isn’t a one-way process, and never was; it is a response to something and when that something isn’t there, then the good humour and niceness begin to look peculiar, almost
crazy, like playing tennis with no one on the other side of the net; it just makes people stare. So you just have to stop playing, and stand dull and incapable, while on the next court the Other Woman returns all the balls—or even misses them; at least she is playing. And your man may well be thinking: Why, my wife used to play like this once: why is she no good at it any more, just standing there like that, so stiff and dull?

Was Geoffrey noticing that she had grown stiff and dull? Sometimes she fancied that he was looking at her, a little puzzled. Was he wondering what was the matter with her, why she had ceased to be an amusing companion? Or was he even beginning to believe that she had always been like this—that his memories of her as a lively, entertaining
personality
were an illusion?

Lindy has destroyed us, Rosamund reflected, with a sort of dispassionate wonder, one cloudless October afternoon. Without seducing him, without so much as exchanging a kiss, she has succeeded in laying my marriage in ruins.
She
knows it already, of course; but does Geoffrey?

Through eyes half closed against the low sun, she
examined
her husband’s face, bronzed, sunburnt, content.
Probably
he was only aware, so far, that time passed somehow much more pleasantly and amusingly when Lindy was there than when she wasn’t; he might even suppose that Rosamund found this too—she had been at enough pains, after all, to pretend that this was the case. He loooked so happy as he sat there, in the mellow autumn light, so
unsuspecting
. He didn’t know yet that they were walking in a ruined city with all its lovely buildings fallen, with gaping chasms in the once solid streets. She almost found herself crying out to him aloud: Look out…! Look out…!

And then the going home—not to their own home, oh no: it had become established custom that after these expeditions they should go back to Lindy’s for a drink
before
dinner; to sit in her delightful sitting room (which so maddeningly just caught the last of the evening sun, and so looked at its very best at just this time) and talk about the
pleasures of the day. Rosamund always joined in the
conversation
adequately enough, but all the time her mind was inclined to wander round this charming room hoping to find some dreadful flaw; some hideous streak of vulgarity or tastelessness. But it was no good. Sometimes the room was untidy, but always charmingly so: a swathe of Lindy’s newly designed material flung across a chair: a pile of coloured wools awaiting sorting; a tangle of indoor plants gathered onto a tray for watering. Everywhere there seemed to be pictures, brilliant fabrics, flowers. Shamelessly,
Rosamund
looked at each bit of furniture in turn, picturing it, with nostalgic yearning, as it had appeared on the afternoon of the move; drab, shabby, and uninviting. Why couldn’t it look like that again? And why couldn’t Lindy look again like that dumpy, uninteresting little woman they had seen leaning into the van? Rosamund dreamed of that long-ago afternoon as a traveller in the desert dreams of clear water.

And so the autumn wore on, turned at last to winter. With the darkness, and the coming of the fogs, the
character
of their Sunday expeditions changed, but they did not cease. They went to museums now, and to art galleries, and to look at old buildings; and it slowly dawned on Rosamund that this way of life had come to stay.

It was on an evening in early December when this thought finally crystallised in her mind; an evening of thin, chilling fog creeping up from the pavements, drifting down from the low blanket of a starless London sky. The sort of evening to send workers and wayfarers hurrying home, head down, their minds full of some bright cosy room full of warmth and welcome. A room like Lindy’s. Why should any man ever tire of the thought that a room like this was waiting for him? Why should so innocent, and yet so rewarding, a relationship ever come to an end? Rosamund realised that all this time she had been waiting, at the back of her mind, for things to come to a head; for some sort of a showdown. She saw now, quite clearly, that there would quite likely never be one; she would have to endure this threesome for always.

It was strange that it should have been on this evening, of all evenings, that Rosamund should have come to this
fatalistic
conclusion. For already, although she could not know it, the showdown was at hand.