The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

  ‘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.

  ‘Well, take Walker with you, and find him something to eat,’ said Rosamund, struggling to let calm reasonableness predominate in her tone, while maintaining an undercurrent of sufficient savagery to ensure that they would actually go. ‘Go on. Look in the refrigerator. Go on!’

  ‘O.K. C’mon.’ Peter at last abandoned his stance by the door and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. For one terrible moment Rosamund thought that Walker hadn’t moved, wasn’t going to move. But it was all right; he too had vanished. Too much relieved at their disappearance to call them back to shut the door—anything rather than have either of them back, for any reason whatsoever—Rosamund surreptitiously shut the door herself under cover of fetching a dish from the sideboard. At last she was able to turn her attention back to her guests, who by now were happily discussing the flavour of octopus as served in Sicily. Lindy was happy, that is to say, and so were the two men. Norah seemed less happy, as Lindy had just that moment managed to elicit from her, in the most public manner possible, that in twenty-two years she had never once attempted to cook octopus for her husband in spite of knowing that it was his very favourite dish. William was looking almost aggressively smug and understood.

  Rosamund was half listening to the talk, half to the sounds through the wall from the kitchen. The expert, almost telepathic ear of motherhood—or is it just housewife-hood?—could ascertain through nine inches of brick and plaster that the boys were only having bread and jam and cornflakes, and that in a very few minutes they would be finished. Would Walker go then, or what? Please, God, prayed Rosamund, as she distributed stewed pears and cream, Don’t let Walker stay the night. Oh, dear God, don’t let him!

  CHAPTER VI

  But Walker did stay the night. When Rosamund stumbled sleepily into the kitchen in her dressing-gown the next morning there he was, neatly and completely dressed, sitting at the kitchen table expectantly. On Sunday morning, too, she protested to herself in silent horror, closing her eyes for a second in the dim hope that perhaps when she opened them he would have disappeared. On Sunday morning, at barely half past eight! Just when she had been planning to make a pot of tea for herself and Geoffrey and to go back to bed with it for hours and hours. And if this wretched boy must stay for the night, why couldn’t he at least lounge about in bed till midday, wasting the whole morning, like other boys? She opened her eyes, without much hope, and sure enough, there he still was, looking at her. Sooner or later somebody must say something, and clearly it wasn’t going to be him.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, as unchillingly as she could. ‘I’m just going to make some tea. Would you like some?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He could say things like that all right. It was an exaggeration to claim that he didn’t talk at all, Rosamund reminded herself contritely. She filled the kettle, lit the gas, terribly conscious all the time of the ghastly unoccupied-ness of her unwanted guest. Did he have to just sit there like that, doing nothing?

  ‘Wouldn’t you like the paper?’ she suggested brightly. ‘I expect it’s arrived by now. It’ll be out on the step.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Walker, swivelling his polite, expressionless gaze from the corner of the ceiling to his hostess’ face. Then, as if this degree of activity was all that anyone could possibly demand of him, he proceeded to wait, politely expectant, for Rosamund to say something else.

  ‘The kettle won’t be long now,’ she remarked desperately; and then, when Walker made no reply, she went on: ‘Wouldn’t you like to make yourself some toast? We’re always disgracefully late on Sundays—we shan’t be having breakfast for ages.’

  ‘No, it’s all right, thank you,’ said Walker. ‘I’d rather wait.’

  And wait you shall, thought Rosamund grimly, swilling out the teapot with boiling water. Convention forbade her venting her annoyance on the silent figure, whose total lack of occupation seemed to be positively boring into her back as she bent over the sink; and so, instead, her thoughts turned wrathfully towards her son, the irresponsible author of it all, sleeping peacefully upstairs. What did he mean by bringing in this dreadful silent friend and dumping him on Rosamund to entertain, like a cat bringing in a dead bird? Let him get up, make toast, have his Sunday morning spoilt. It was his visitor.

  She went to the door.

  ‘Peter!’ she yelled up the stairs; and then, going up to the landing: ‘Peter! Wake up! Come on down!’

  Silence, of course. She went into her son’s room and shook him violently by the shoulder.

  ‘Wake up, Peter! Your friend Walker is up, and waiting for his breakfast. Do go down and look after him, for goodness’ sake!’

  ‘What a fuss!’ Peter sat up, and rubbed his eyes. Then the full unreasonableness of the demand broke over him.

  ‘But it’s Sunday!’ he protested. ‘I don’t have to get up at this hour on Sunday!’

  ‘You have to this Sunday,’ said Rosamund with relish. ‘Because you have a visitor. I keep telling you, he’s down there in the kitchen waiting for his breakfast. You can’t just leave him there.’

  ‘But why not?’ Peter’s greenish flecked eyes were round with mingled sleepiness and surprise. ‘Walker doesn’t mind.’

  Rosamund realised with a shock that this was perfectly true. Walker didn’t mind. He probably had not experienced one moment’s embarrassment during that (to her) ghastly interlude in the kitchen. She was the one who minded. She was the one who was made uneasy by a guest
who was doing nothing, saying nothing. But young people—or was it just boys?—simply did not feel these sort of emotions. They spoke if they had something to say; moved if they had something to do. If they hadn’t, they might be bored, but it wouldn’t occur to them to be embarrassed. This was an adult—or was it a feminine?—or even just an old-fashioned?—state of mind.

  ‘You have an obsession about visitors, Mummy,’ said Peter tolerantly, as if he had been following her train of thought exactly. ‘But it’s all right. Honestly. Walker’s a marvellous chap that way, he never expects anyone to fuss over him.’

  This was putting it mildly, Rosamund thought, as the daunting picture of someone trying to fuss over Walker flashed for a moment through her mind. But anyway, there seemed no point in arguing any more; Peter’s head was firmly under the blankets again, and downstairs she could hear the kettle dancing and shrieking its protests at her neglect, boiling its heart out, no doubt, under the interested, untroubled gaze of Walker.

  Lindy arrived just in time for their eleven o’clock breakfast. That is to say, she dropped in at eleven o’clock, and Rosamund—as had been her policy ever since she became aware of the attraction between her husband and Lindy—had begged—pressed—her to stay. The nicer, the more hospitable, she was to Lindy, the less anyone could possibly regard her as a jealous wife: that was her reasoning. And not being regarded as something was half way to not being it, thought Rosamund uneasily, as she smilingly set a plate of bacon and mushrooms before Lindy. Perhaps, if I go on smiling at her, inviting her in, laughing at her jokes, pushing her and Geoffrey together—perhaps all this un-jealous behaviour rolled all together into one great heavy ball may some day roll back and crush my actual jealousy to death? Or perhaps (more practical thought, this), perhaps Geoffrey will get sick and tired of her if I keep stuffing her down his throat? Which of these is my motive really? And to think it all looks like being tolerant and good-natured! Is this always the secret of the tolerant, broad-minded wife?