The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

  Lindy shook her head, smiling with an air of rather irritating—it seemed to Rosamund—incredulity.

  ‘I’m really rather intrigued by the way married women are always up in arms on this question of working wives,’ she mused, smiling as if to herself. ‘Whether they themselves work or whether they don’t, the first thing that most of them think of is how “hard” it is for the wife! As if they were determined to seize on the question as a stick to beat their husbands with—an outlet for their unconscious hostility. “It’s not fair!” they say—like children in a nursery! I wouldn’t worry whether it was “fair” or not. I’d want the man I loved to come home to what every man really wants—absolute leisure, tranquillity and comfort; and the feeling that his wife has nothing to do but to attend to him. He doesn’t want to know that his wife has been working all day, and she shouldn’t thrust the fact under his nose, the way most of them do.’

  ‘It’s all very well!’—began Rosamund indignantly on Eileen’s behalf—and indeed on the behalf of all married women—and then she stopped. How could you argue with someone so untried, so unaware of the practical problems involved; someone so adept, too, in the use of weapon-words like ‘guilt’ and ‘unconscious hostility’—the inflated armchair jargon with which it is possible to batter other people’s practical problems into silence?

  ‘Sometimes,’ Lindy went on reminiscing, ‘Eileen would try to do as I advised. She’d tear madly home, running all the way, to have time to put on a pretty dress and look relaxed by the time Basil got back. Relaxed! It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. You felt all the time that the strain of being relaxed was killing her! No wonder poor Basil packed it in. I tried once or twice to show her how it could really be done—how it was possible to give a man a pleasant, leisurely meal at the end of his day’s work: but she just turned sulky. She’s never liked being in the wrong.’

  All Rosamund’s dislike of Lindy was flooding back. She set down her glass with the feeling that she could not swallow another mouthful of the black, evil fluid. She could see with lurid clarity the gay little parties that Lindy must have laid on for her sister’s discomfiture. The candles, the laughter, the informality; with Lindy tranquil and triumphant at the heart of it all, trusting to Basil’s masculine obtuseness to prevent him realising that this kind of meal did need a lot of preparation, that Lindy, a single woman, had been able to devote to it time which Eileen would have had to be devoting to sweeping floors and washing her husband’s shirts. And Eileen could have done nothing to enlighten him. Loyalty—timidity—pride—all these would have silenced any protest she might have felt inclined to make. And if, by any chance, she had protested, then Lindy would still have won, and even more triumphantly. For what more unloveable and unlovely spectacle can there be than that of a wife whining that she could be kind and charming too, if only this that and the other. For whatever this that and the other may materially be, spiritually they are, of necessity, three vicious blows at the husband’s self-esteem. Lindy, unmarried and inexperienced, knew it all: used it all with practised skill, like an artist working in an alien medium that he has managed to make utterly his own.

  A low snarl within a few inches of her made Rosamund almost leap out of her chair. It was as if some avenging spirit had been reading her uncharitable thoughts, and was about to strike. And even when her startled wits had taken in that her accuser was only a very small, very suspicious Pekinese, she still wasn’t quite sure that her first instinct had been unfounded. Those bulbous, inscrutable eyes mirrored who knew what ancient, forgotten wisdom in their uncanny depths? Did the dog somehow know—sense—smell—that here was an enemy to his mistress?

  Hastily Rosamund smiled and held out her hand. ‘Good doggie!’ she pleaded sycophantically, and tried to pat the rigid, hostile little body. But her insincere and incompetent blandishments were of no avail. The dog retreated a couple of paces, and set up a shrill, impassioned yapping, his flattened, ugly face contorted with what looked like more than human rage.

  ‘Shang Low, you silly! Be quiet!’ admonished Lindy admiringly, and with no effect whatsoever. ‘It’s because he doesn’t know you, you see,’ she explained lazily above the din. ‘He’s a very good guard dog really, although he’s so tiny. Pekes are.’

  The last two words, simple generalisation though they were, seemed to Rosamund to be spoken in an oddly self-satisfied way, as though Lindy felt that she, personally, had supervised the three thousand years of intensive breeding that had gone to produce Shang Low and his self-righteous fury. Rosamund felt her irritation overflowing, quite out of proportion to its trifling provocation.

  ‘I like cats better!’ she said, quite sharply, and was shocked at the naked rudeness of her tone. But Lindy only smiled, wholly unruffled.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ she said easily. ‘I could have guessed that as soon as I saw you.’

  The words were spoken lightly, but Rosamund could feel in them a sting, sharp and deliberate, though as yet quite unacknowledged. But before she could think of any retort, or even decide whether retort was indeed appropriate, they were once again interrupted. This time it was Mr Dawson from the other next-door garden. He stood, secateurs in hand, beaming admiringly from among his great cream-coloured roses, his admiration seeming to embrace indiscriminately the little yapping dog, Lindy’s brown gleaming legs in their becoming striped shorts, and the tall, cool glasses on the tray. All the glories of a suburban summer morning thus spread before his kindly gaze, he seemed to feel the need to join in, to make himself a part of it all. So ‘Good morning!’ he called out, over the fence. ‘Lovely morning, isn’t it? Nice little dog you’ve got there.’

  ‘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.’

  CHAPTER V

  ‘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.