The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

  She realised, of course, with the intellectual part of her mind, that what this amounted to was a criminal tampering with the evidence; a bare-faced suppressing of clues; but that wasn’t what it felt like at all. It felt like simply putting everything right again. Suddenly she understood exactly how it is that liars and cheats so often manage to retain their self-respect—genuinely to retain it. They are not trying to take advantage of anybody or to escape anything; they are simply trying to make their original misfortune of misdemeanour not have happened.

  But before she had time to act on her ostrich-like impulse—or to reject it either—a ring on the front door bell threw her into total panic. Without any thought at all she thrust the handbag out of sight into the wardrobe and rushed downstairs.

  She could not have said what it was that she was afraid of seeing when she opened the front door. A policeman with a warrant for her arrest? Lindy’s avenging spirit, transparent, in clanking chains? It was no wonder that Carlotta took a small step backwards and stared at her.

  ‘I say! Goodness! Are you ill, or something?’

  ‘No. Oh no! That is, I think I’ve had a touch of ’flu, but it’s getting better…. I’m all right now. Do come in. We’re in a bit of a mess, I’m afraid….’ Rosamund talked on, at random, trying to recover herself; and by the time she had Carlotta settled in the sitting room she could feel that her face was looking ordinary again, or fairly so.

  ‘Well, thanks a lot,’ said Carlotta, relaxing pleasurably into the easy chair that Rosamund had pulled forward for her. ‘I haven’t come to stay, really, you know: got to get back to the brood.’ In referring to her family Carlotta always chose phrases, half-humourously, which made her four children sound both more numerous and a good deal younger than they really were, a crowd of faceless tots milling round the skirts of the Mother Figure. ‘I just popped in with a message from your husband, actually … he seemed worried. He’s been trying to ring you all the afternoon, it seems, and couldn’t get any answer, so in the end he rang us.’

  ‘But why? What’s happened?’

  It would be about Lindy, of course. The possibility that she had been found now seemed just as terrifying as the possibility that she hadn’t.

  Carlotta looked surprised.

  ‘Happened? Nothing, that I know of. He only wanted to let you know that he’d be late home tonight. That’s all. He must be a very considerate man, your Geoffrey. Lots of husbands wouldn’t ring at all, let alone go to all this trouble about it. My goodness, though, you do look washed out. Is it the ’flu? Did you have it very badly?’

  The sudden sympathy quite broke down Rosamund’s determination not to let anyone know how ill she had been feeling these last two days. Not to let Geoffrey know, really—that was the main thing; what was the harm in telling Carlotta? Besides, what other explanation could she give for her evidently strange appearance?

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she admitted. ‘It’s this one-day ’flu that everyone’s been having, though its lasted two days with me. My temperature was a hundred and two last night,’ she added, warming to the recital.

  Carlotta leaned forward, frowning anxiously. You might have supposed that the anxiety was for her neighbour’s state of health, but even Rosamund could tell that this wasn’t so. Carlotta was in fact being agonisingly torn between two treasured, but sadly contradictory, images of herself: one, as the woman who is never ill: the second, as the woman who has had a higher temperature than anybody else, ever, and much higher than Rosamund’s paltry 102°. The second image won, by a short head, and Rosamund was soon listening to a colourful account of the measles epidemic that had struck Carlotta’s household five years ago. With a temperature of a hundred and five herself, she had yet managed to nurse her ‘whole nursery full of kids’ day and night, without any assistance from anyone. You didn’t get the impression that her husband had helped at all—or even that he had selfishly left it all to her; he simply didn’t come into the story at all, though of course he must have been there at the time, in some corner of the house or other.

  As the story proceeded, it occurred to Rosamund that here was her chance to get some first-hand information.

  ‘But weren’t you delirious some of the time, with a temperature as high as that?’ she asked disingenuously. ‘Did you find yourself doing silly things—forgetting what you were doing—anything like that?’

  You could see that Carlotta loved being asked this question; she was rolling it round her mind, savouring it, like a connoisseur of wines, before answering:

  ‘Well … you know, I’ve sometimes thought since that I must have been. It was very strange, the night when Jeremy was at his worst—his temperature was about a hundred and two, I remember, and mine was touching a hundred and six, and he kept calling for drinks, poor little kid. And every time I went down to the kitchen I had a queer feeling that I was floating there: not walking at all, but just floating down the stairs and across the hall….’ She made faint little flapping movements with her arms to illustrate this remarkable sensation, and her big dark eyes were wide with self-admiration.

  ‘And did you ever find that you’d just been dreaming—that you hadn’t fetched him the drink at all, when you thought you had?’ persisted Rosamund, bent on making the most of her captive informant.

  ‘Oh no!’ Carlotta seemed a little huffy. ‘No, I never let the child down once, no matter how ill I felt. Somehow I managed to keep going, see to everything, the whole crowd of them all needing attention all the time. I never let up all that night … the doctor said it was a wonder I hadn’t died, working all day and all night with a temperature like that! He said he’d never heard of anything like it…!’

  Neither had Rosamund. And so the conversation continued—necessarily rather at cross-purposes, with Rosamund’s determination to extract technical information for ever tangling with Carlotta’s determination to present her own heroism as the main point of the discourse. All that Rosamund could gather in the end was that while a very high temperature might no doubt make some people go to pieces and do silly things, it could never possibly have that effect on Carlotta; and the following prolonged exposition of all the remarkable qualities in Carlotta that made this the case precluded all hope of getting any further information out of her. And eventually the call of the Brood (combined, perhaps, with the fast-accumulating evidence that Rosamund had no intention at all of asking her to stay to supper) induced Carlotta to take her leave.

  CHAPTER XV

  After she had closed the door on Carlotta, Rosamund came slowly back into the sitting room, and it dawned on her that she was probably going to spend the rest of the evening in solitude. Geoffrey had said he would be late—and no doubt he meant very late, or he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to make sure she got the message. And Peter still wasn’t back, which probably meant he had gone off somewhere with a crowd of his friends straight after orchestra practice. Quite soon, he either would or wouldn’t ring up to say he either was or wasn’t coming home for supper, which he then either would or wouldn’t do. It was no good trying to plan anything round Peter’s activities.

  Rosamund was rather glad on the whole of the prospect of being on her own. For one thing, she now wouldn’t have to set her wits to work on all that rice and stuff. She could simply go back to bed, if she chose, for all the rest of the evening.

  But, rather to her surprise, she no longer felt like lying down. On the contrary, she felt restless, full of uneasy energy; and above all, she wanted to get out of this house. Out—right away from the wearying mystery of the shoes, and Lindy’s wretched handbag; from the endless telephone calls (although she hadn’t answered them); and from her own profitless brooding. She would go out for a walk, that’s what she would do, and when she came back perhaps she would find everything settled and ordinary again.

  But where to walk to? What for? It seemed silly to go for a walk all by oneself—quite different from those evening strolls that she and Geoffrey had once enjoyed. She sto
od on the front step, hesitating, and feeling quite absurdly conspicuous. Going for a walk? All by herself? Where’s her husband? … She felt the idle, imaginary comments flitting like bats up and down the dark road—winter bats, imaginary bats, for real bats are summer creatures, deep in hibernation in this season of the long nights and the deep, damp cold.

  She shivered, nearly turned back indoors again, and then had an inspiration.

  Shang Low. That would be an excuse for a walk, would give it a purpose. Since Eileen didn’t seem to be back yet, to judge from the darkened windows, it was positively Rosamund’s duty to take him for a walk—if he’d come with her, that is: she was never quite sure how deep the enmity between them might go.

  But Shang Low was not one to let his enmities interfere with his pleasures. After his long day of solitude, broken only by two short strolls with Mr Dawson, and a tin of Doggo-loaf or some such substance (of which, Rosamund observed, he had not touched one mouthful), he allowed her, with enormous condescension, to fix his lead on to his collar and escort him out into the December night.

  Slowly they moved together through the deserted roads. Now that she was on her feet, Rosamund realised that her feeling of restless returning energy had been something of an illusion. Her head was aching again, quite badly now, and she was already tired. She decided to go no farther than the railway bridge beyond the cricket ground. From there, she could go down the steps to the fenced footpath that ran alongside the line, and come home that way. There it would be safe to let Shang Low go free for a bit, with no risk from cars.

  ‘Hullo. Good evening!’

  The unknown male voice out of the darkness made Rosamund jump; she hadn’t noticed anyone approaching.

  ‘Good evening,’ she responded warily, tugging at Shang Low’s lead, trying to get him to co-operate in passing the stranger at a dignified and unhesitating pace. But Shang Low had found a particularly luscious bit of jutting out brickwork, and wasn’t going to be parted from it till he had sniffed his fill, so Rosamund could only stand still and wait for him.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ the voice enquired, rather unhelpfully; and for a second the two stood peering into each other’s faces in the darkness. Rosamund was racking her brains trying to place this vaguely familiar voice, this pale, rather pointed young face.

  ‘Basil!’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognise you for a moment. How are you? Are you on your way to Li——?’

  But Lindy wasn’t there. Lindy might at this very moment be dead. She was at a loss how to finish her ill-conceived sentence.

  ‘Well, to see about Lindy, you might say,’ he amended. ‘I hear there’s a spot of bother going on. Eileen rang and told me—she’s a plucky kid, you know,’ he digressed wonderingly. ‘I never thought she’d have the guts to ring me up after the flaming row we had; not about anything. She always used to be so scared, it was always I who had to make the first move after a bust-up…. She seems more mature, somehow, without being …’

  It was clear that Basil would go on with these irrelevant and surely not very momentous speculations for as long as Rosamund cared to stand there listening to him; so she hard-heartedly brought him back to the point.

  ‘Yes, we’re all awfully worried about Lindy,’ she said. ‘No one can imagine what’s happened. I suppose nothing new has turned up? Eileen hasn’t heard anything?’

  ‘Nope. I just thought I’d drop round, see if a strong right arm was needed, or any of that lark. In case I could do anything to help——’ he finished, rather weakly. Rosamund found Basil’s unpredictable swings from jauntiness to a sort of little-boy uncertainty rather appealing. She could see how Eileen could have fallen in love with him, and also how she could have found him impossible to live with.

  ‘I should think there might be a lot you could do,’ she agreed. ‘Giving Eileen moral support, for a start. And then, if Lindy still doesn’t turn up, I suppose, sooner or later, someone’ll have to notify the police.’

  As she said it, the word gave her an unexpected little stab of fear; and it must have had the same effect on Basil, for he started.

  ‘The police? Why—you don’t think——?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ Rosamund wished very much that she had not raised the question. ‘I just meant, that if she goes on not turning up—well—I mean, we’ll have to do something.’

  Basil was frowning down at the faintly glistening pavement. He seemed as if many and complicated thoughts were surging through his head, and he was selecting, ordering, arranging them before trusting himself to speak again.

  ‘Mrs Fielding,’ he said at last, ‘I think you and I should have a talk about all this before I go and see Eileen. May I walk along with you for a bit? Tell me what you know, from your vantage point just across the fence.’

  Rosamund began to comply; but by the time she had carefully left out all her own secret anxieties, there didn’t seem much left to tell. She began asking him questions instead.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘You’ve known Lindy for much longer than we have—— Is she the sort of person who might do something like this quite casually and irresponsibly? Just disappear for fun—for a whim—just because she felt like it? I’m asking, because my husband was suggesting something of the sort. He says that perhaps, since she’s such a happy-go-lucky, unworrying sort of person herself, she might expect everyone else to be the same. It might not occur to her, he says, that we’d all be anxious.’

  ‘Is that what your husband says? He’s really fallen for all that? Really and truly?’

  What did he mean? It sounded so much as if he shared Rosamund’s own private assessment of Lindy’s character that she longed for him to elaborate.

  ‘Is she the worrying type then, really? All this carefree light-heartedness—do you mean it’s just an act? I’m sorry—I make her sound an absolute hypocrite!’ she apologised hastily.

  ‘Of course you do. Because that’s what you think she is,’ observed Basil. ‘But never mind. After all, what is a hypocrite, when all’s said and done? It’s a person who pretends to have all sorts of kind and good feelings that he hasn’t got. But what should such a person do—I’m asking you? Through no fault of his own, he just hasn’t got these feelings—what ought he to do about it? Go on, tell me!’

  Rosamund didn’t tell him, of course, because it was so overwhelmingly clear that he intended to tell her. So she said nothing, and sure enough he proceeded:

  ‘Hypocrites, as you call them, are simply people who are honestly trying to make good their emotional deficiencies. They are cultivating the best substitutes for actual feeling that they can possibly contrive. Is this wicked? Is a blind man wicked when he trains himself to behave normally by cultivating as best he can all sorts of substitutes for sight? Is a cripple wicked if …’

  Basil’s eloquence was once again carrying them far from the real point of their conversation. Rosamund interrupted him.

  ‘But do tell me—from what you know of her—would Lindy just disappear like this? Might she? Is it in character?’

  ‘Well.’ Basil was walking slower and slower as he pondered. ‘I don’t think you know what a difficult question you’re asking me. The fact that I’ve known her quite a long time makes it harder, not easier——’ He came almost to a standstill, and Rosamund paused with him. Shang Low gave a censorious little sigh and waited.

  ‘What would you say,’ suddenly burst out Basil. ‘If I told you that a few years ago, Lindy was quite, quite different from what she is now? Plain. Frumpish. Shy. Never went anywhere or did anything?’

  ‘Well, I’d be very surprised. Naturally. Because she’s so very attractive now, isn’t she.’

  ‘You’d say so?’ Basil was being so ostentatiously noncommittal that Rosamund glanced at him enquiringly.

  ‘In the faces of some very old ladies,’ Basil continued, apparently at a tangent. ‘You can still see traces of great beauty. In Lindy’s face, if you look carefully, you can still see traces of great plainness.’
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br />   Rosamund did not know what to say. Basil’s revelations—if revelations they were, and not merely the unfounded guesses of one rather opinionated young man—were startling to her in the extreme. Forty eight hours ago they would have seemed wholly delightful—a welcome confirmation of her own secret opinion that Lindy’s charm and sociability were all part of an act. Under the present shadow of Lindy’s disappearance they naturally could not be delightful in the same way—but even so, why should they make Rosamund feel so uneasy, so strange? They had reached the railway bridge now, and as Rosamund stared over the parapet towards the station lights, haloed in mist, she began to feel herself trembling. Basil was still speaking, describing the occasion when, as an undergraduate, he had first met Lindy—how withdrawn she had seemed, how shy—and with every sentence, Rosamund felt her fear growing. But why? Why should the story of Lindy’s changing personality seem so sinister, so fraught with nightmare, unreasoning terror? It was as if some terrible memory had been awakened, deep inside her; with every word that Basil spoke, with every passing second, some fearful knowledge seemed to be ploughing its way up through thick layers of forgetfulness … up, up, relentlessly, towards her consciousness. How her limbs were shuddering now, her whole soul was shuddering … the very ground beneath her feet seemed to have caught the vibration, to be trembling, quivering, in exact rhythm with her fear.

  ‘The bridge is shaking!’ she cried out, the words forced from her involuntarily by the mounting sense of approaching revelation, the thunder of approaching fear….

  ‘Well, of course it is; there’s a train coming.’ Basil glanced at her, puzzled by the tone of her voice.

  ‘Of course; how silly!’ She forced herself to answer, even to laugh a little as the roar of the coming train half swamped her consciousness, the thunder of sound, the blaze of sparks … and then it had passed … and with it passed that fearful sense of impending revelation. Her whole consciousness seemed to throb with relief as the memory, whatever it was, withdrew, and sank away, down, down, back into the depths from which it came.