The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

  ‘Don’t you worry, old girl,’ Rosamund heard him say awkwardly, as the two passed through the little iron gate into the darkness. ‘The lad’ll come out of it all right in the end. He’ll work through it, you wait and see!’

  And in his voice, even from this distance, Rosamund could hear the note of incredulous joy as William discovered that at last, for once, he was having a chance to be the optimistic one, the comforter.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Scarcely were the Pursers out of sight beyond the first street lamp when the front gate clanged once more and Peter bounded up the steps, coatless as usual in the winter cold, and radiating unaccustomed energy.

  ‘Hullo, Mummy,’ he greeted Rosamund cheerfully. ‘I just met the two old crows going down the road. Been croaking around here again?’

  ‘If you mean did Mr and Mrs Purser call,’ Rosamund corrected him haughtily, ‘Then the answer is yes. They did.’ Really she would have liked to follow this up straight away with the news of Ned’s escapade, but she felt that for decency’s sake she should radiate dignified reproof for another minute or two. ‘Old crows’ indeed! My mother would have killed me if I’d referred to her friends like that’, she mused rightously.

  But Peter was always so amiable about everything, that was the trouble. It disarmed you completely. He seemed to have no idea, even now, that he was being snubbed.

  ‘Well, thank God they’re not staying to supper, anyway,’ he observed, flinging himself into an armchair. ‘They just make you feel you want to turn on the gas oven and put them out of their misery, don’t they?’

  Even this was disarming in a way: this serene and confident allying of himself and Rosamund together in this inhospitable ambition. ‘What’s the latest news, anyway, from Misery Mansions?’

  He threw out the question in the most offhand manner, as if it was all far beneath his attention really; but Rosamund knew very well that he thoroughly enjoyed any gossip about the neighbourhood that she saw fit to repeat to him. This, too, was endearing, and there was nothing she could do but relent.

  ‘Oh, just the usual,’ she said lightly. ‘Take your feet off the rug, Peter, there’s a good boy; you’re absolutely grinding the mud into it—— It’s the usual story. Ned’s left home again.’

  ‘Good for him!’ said Peter vaguely, and almost meaninglessly. He didn’t particularly like Ned—hardly knew him really—and certainly did not know enough about his affairs or state of mind to have been able to form any real opinion as to the rights and wrongs of his leaving home. ‘Good for him’ was simply a piece of automatic conformity to the convention that all the young should side together against all the old—or should talk as if they did, anyway: actual life is quite another matter, as any sensible young person knows.

  ‘William and Norah are very worried about it, naturally,’ continued Rosamund—a little primly, in answer to that ‘good for him!’ ‘They’re scared he may have gone to Brighton, and got mixed up with gangs of delinquents and drug addicts and things.’

  ‘Good for him!’ repeated Peter, parrot-like; and then, focussing his attention: ‘Gone to Brighton, has he? Then I daresay he’s mixed up with that murder on the line. That’ll be something to liven up the old crows, won’t it?’

  Peter spoke with a cheerful relish which would have been moderately inoffensive if his remark had been the irrelevant nonsense which he naturally imagined it to be. But something—she had not yet collected her wits enough to say what—flicked at Rosamund’s ever-present uneasiness, and she pulled him up sharply.

  ‘What murder?’

  Peter looked a little surprised.

  ‘What? Oh, I don’t know. Not really. Just there’s supposed to have been a murder—well, a body found, anyway—near a bit of the Southern railway. Not Brighton particularly, I only said that to make it more interesting, since Ned’s gone there. No, it was on the Ashdene line actually, somewhere on the way to Granny’s. Though now I come to think of it, you can get to Brighton that way. If you change about twenty times….’

  ‘Who told you? How do you know?’

  Rosamund tried to keep the tension out of her voice. Somehow, she had to fit this jig-saw puzzle together without letting her anxiety show. Thank goodness for the self-absorption of the young—well, of everybody, really….

  ‘Well, look it up in the timetable for yourself——Oh, you mean about the murder? I heard about it at school.’

  ‘But who? Who actually told you——?’

  ‘Some chaps at school,’ repeated Peter amiably, apparently not bothering to wonder why his mother was suddenly displaying such an uncharacteristic interest in this isolated bit of news. ‘There was a lot of talk about it yesterday, because two of the chaps said they’d actually seen the body. A woman. Lying on the bank beside the line.’

  ‘But how could they know she was dead?’ Rosamund wished she could stop asking questions, but she couldn’t. Peter looked at her pityingly.

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t be sunbathing, would she, in the pitch dark, on a December evening? Anyway, they just did know. They’d gone right up to her, so ’tis said. Tried to wake her. She’d popped it all right. When’s supper?’

  ‘Quite soon. Who did you say found her? Two of your friends?’

  ‘Nope. Fourth-formers. But why ever do you want to know all this, Mummy?’—Peter was at last stirred to mild protest—‘You don’t really think I meant all that about Ned Purser, do you? I was only fooling——!’

  ‘Of course! I know you were, dear!’ Rosamund assured him hastily. ‘It’s just—well, I’m just interested, that’s all. Anybody might be—and since it was on the way to Granny’s naturally it makes it that bit more interesting. Is it in the papers yet, do you know? Murders usually are.’

  ‘Don’t think so. Haven’t seen anything. Anyway, it only happened two or three days ago. It might be in the local paper, I suppose, at the weekend. Perhaps in Granny’s, you’d better ask her. Or Jessie. I expect she keeps up with the murders better than Granny does.’

  Impossible to go on with the inquisition any longer. Peter was already mildly puzzled by her insistence, and would become disastrously so if she kept hammering on any longer. Anyway, she knew in her heart that there was nothing left to ask. All the pieces of the puzzle were now in her hands; all she needed was a few minutes of quiet and solitude to fit them together. Quiet so that she wouldn’t become confused; solitude so that no one would be there to watch her face changing, as the picture took shape, from the face of a pleasant, ordinary housewife to the face of someone looking at a monstrosity.

  Or had the change already come? What sort of face was it, even now, that smiled at Peter across the hearth; what sort of voice was it that was telling him to go up to his room and try to get some of his homework done before supper? It was strange, almost eerie, the way Peter didn’t seem to notice any difference in her. Here he was, obeying with exactly the usual amount of grumbling and delay, for all the world as if it was his own mother speaking, not a murderess at all.

  How had she let this word slip past her guard? As if it was a physical assailant, she fought it back, forced it from her mind, and then turned, like an animal at bay, to face the mighty weight of evidence massing against her from every side.

  For it was no longer just the coincidence of her dream and Lindy’s disappearance; no longer the puzzle of the handbag and the muddy shoes. Everything now was conspiring to show that she really had travelled down to Ashdene that Tuesday afternoon. As well as her alleged telephone call to her mother-in-law, there was now Norah’s word for it that Rosamund and ‘your friend’ had been seen on the station platform. Rosamund’s annoyance at being unable to extract from Norah any further details, such as who her companion was, which platform they were on, and at exactly what time, was really a contrived annoyance. She had no doubt what the answers would be. The companion was Lindy: the platform, the one for Ashdene: the time: Tuesday afternoon.

  And now the body by the line…. She recalled this morning’s brief,
false assurance that, because of the fog, her dream of wind and stars couldn’t possibly fit the facts. She had taken comfort from the thought that on such a night there could be no wind blowing even on a cliff top, no stars to be seen. But there need be no cliffs in the picture now, nor any stars. That thunder of crashing seas could have been the thunder of a speeding train, the noise magnified to terror as the compartment door swung open, letting in the wild wind of speed to roar about her face, the myriad lights and sparks of the railway world to spin before her eyes as she gave that light push that was all that was needed … you would not need to use violence if you took your victim by surprise….

  Some dim and terrible memory thrust for one fraction of a second against the walls of her consciousness, then died away; it left her trembling, her head aching all over again, as if from a savage blow.

  She felt numbed, stupefied. She scarcely noticed when Geoffrey came in; when Peter came down from doing his homework; when she dished up stew, and mashed potatoes, and apple pie for them both. Nor could she have said what they all talked about during the meal; yet it must have been something fairly ordinary, and she must have taken her usual part, for neither of them were asking her what was the matter, or looking at her in a puzzled way.

  What were they both thinking? What did they think she was thinking, as she moved quietly about the kitchen, changing plates, setting food before them? Never had she felt so completely alone, as if during the past few hours she had travelled without noticing it to somewhere indescribably remote; had crossed some frontier into a land where no one else could follow.

  But you couldn’t go on feeling like that, not right through the washing up and everything. After she had put away the last of the glasses, and hung the towel back on its hook, Rosamund suddenly and surprisingly found herself in contact with Geoffrey again, in a manner strained and sad, but oddly close. As they moved out of the kitchen and towards the sitting room, Geoffrey turned towards her and began to say: ‘Well, I think I’ll…’ and stopped. ‘Have a look at the paper,’ he finished in a mumble; but they both knew what, from long habit, he had been going to say. ‘Pop over to Lindy’s for a bit’ were the words he had swallowed; and the desolation of it swept them both, simultaneously and without a word. The cheerless silence of the house next door seemed in that moment to spread into this house; the silence, the enigma, the sudden emptiness in both their lives.

  Yes, in Rosamund’s too; for as she looked into her husband’s eyes she knew that the destroying of the Other Woman can bring no surcease of jealousy; rather the reverse, for where there is no longer any battle ground, there is no longer any hope of victory. The cobwebs gather in the arena now, and the dust thickens, and the dead wind blows out of the past bringing no hope nor glory; only the emptiness of a spirit that can fight no more.

  Something of her sense of desolation Geoffrey must have seen in her face, for he gripped her hand in a quick gesture.

  ‘Oh, Rosamund, you were so fond of her, too!’ he exclaimed; and for a moment they stood in the kitchen doorway exchanging wordless comfort. ‘Were so fond of her’—for the first time, Geoffrey was speaking as if he felt in his heart that Lindy was dead.

  Rosamund should have felt sick with guilt: she should have felt appalled at herself for accepting from her husband comfort so misdirected, so undeserved. Yet somehow she did not. The comfort seemed utterly appropriate; that moment of shared grief was something self-contained, like a crystal, invulnerable. It seemed to have nothing to do with what either of them had done or not done, felt or not felt; nothing to do with crimes or virtues, not even with truth or lies. And even after it was all over, and Geoffrey was hidden unhappily behind the newspaper in the big armchair, it was still not guilt that swept through Rosamund’s soul; rather it was a sense of futility so huge as to defy rational appraisal. How could I have done this thing, she asked herself, to no purpose and with no outcome? I must have seen then, just as I can see now, that the only possible result of Lindy’s death, even from my own selfish point of view, must be this sense of emptiness and loss. Lindy’s death doesn’t restore Geoffrey to me; it simply leaves him emptier, poorer; from now on he will have less to give me, not more. Even if he never learns of my share in it, it will nevertheless remain as a great wall between us, shutting out the sun, preventing any further growth in our marriage. If Lindy had stayed alive, then his love—his fondness—for her might have died a thousand natural deaths; she might, as the months and years went by, have disillusioned him in a thousand different ways; I myself might have learned much from my own jealousy; we could all have emerged from it richer, wiser. But now his feeling for her will be preserved as in amber, for ever at its peak, for ever proof against the inroads of time, of boredom, of human changeability….

  No! I could never have been such a fool! Rosamund was almost startled at this conclusion to her musings. Not: I could never have been so wicked! or: I could never have been so cruel! Just I could never have been such a fool.

  I couldn’t; no. But who is this ‘I’ that is to be considered? If, during that strange, lost afternoon, I was delirious—mad—what you will—then was the ‘I’ of those hours anything I could hope to recognise as myself? They say, don’t they, that when the unconscious mind takes charge, then primitive instinct and passions come to the fore which the ordinary conscious, rational person would utterly repudiate?

  And what are the conditions most likely to bring the unconscious mind to the fore like this? Surely ‘They’ would all agree that months of suppression of jealousy; months of smiling to cover the black hatred in one’s heart; months of biting back the bitter, censorious words, and forcing friendly speeches onto one’s tongue…. Why, it is practically a case-history as it stands …!

  For long, black minutes Rosamund’s rising horror struggled with what she still tried to call common-sense. Out of the past months, one episode after another arose, bright, black, and clear, like silhouettes against the uncomprehended blur of her conscience. The moments when she had hated Lindy most—and had forced herself to speak brightly and kindly. The moments when hopes of Lindy’s death had been clear and vivid in her mind—and she had forced herself to smile…. All these repressions and deceptions, could they have risen in revolt at last … and then could her horrified consciousness, in its guilt and terror, have blacked out the memory of that culmination of her hatred?

  ‘They’ would say it could, undoubtedly. ‘They’ would say that amnesia is invariably the mind’s final refuge from intolerable guilt.

  Suddenly Rosamund longed for some really silly person, like Carlotta perhaps, or Norah, to ring on the doorbell at this very moment, and come in and chatter to her about inhibitions and guilt-complexes and such: the kind of person who, in a few brief, earnest sentences, can make you know that psychology is all nonsense.

  CHAPTER XX

  But the person who did ring the doorbell, at about nine o’clock, was no amateur psychologist to chatter reassuring claptrap about hidden drives. On the contrary, it was Walker.

  ‘He’s upstairs doing his homework,’ said Rosamund at once, obligingly saving Walker the weariness of opening his mouth and asking for Peter: and silently, evasively, as if outwitting an enemy sentry, he darted past her and up the stairs to Peter’s room. Peter’s voice sounded for a moment; he seemed pleased and surprised; and then the door closed and the sound of voices was quenched.

  It was too quiet, too deathlike, and Rosamund could not feel at ease anywhere in the whole house. Not in the sitting room, where her husband’s unhappy quietness hovered round her like an accusation; nor in the bedroom where it was too early to go to bed; nor in the kitchen where the washing up was all finished and there was nothing left to do.

  Driven by the stillness, Rosamund began to contemplate going in next door, to the darkened house where Lindy was no more. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t darkened now? Perhaps Eileen was home already? She’d said she intended going straight after work this evening to visit some elderly relative who just
might have some knowledge of Lindy’s whereabouts, but she might have changed her plans; the relative might have been out, or away, or something. And at least, at the very worst, there would be Shang Low there, barking disagreeably, breaking the doom-laden silence, demanding to be taken for a walk. Even that would be better than nothing.

  Yes, very much better. Decidely reassuring, in fact, because you couldn’t imagine a murderess taking a dog for a walk … wandering slowly, peaceably along the winter roads, bidding ‘good evening’ to the neighbours … pausing for a chat with this one … enquiries after the health of that one … sharing a good-natured smile over Shang Low’s obstinacy as he dragged her towards this lamppost or that. Besides, the neighbours wouldn’t be like that if she were a murderess. They would see it in her face, even if they were not consciously aware of what they saw … they would hurry on, with a single uneasy word, if she stopped to greet them … they would glide past on the other side of the road … they would whisper uneasily together…. Yes, her walk with Shang Low would be a test, it would prove that everything was all right.

  In picturing this imaginary walk which was so smoothly and effortlessly to prove her innocence, Rosamund was beginning to forget that her original plan had been to call on Eileen if she was in; so it was with quite a shock that she saw, as she emerged from her own front gate, that there was a light shining in Eileen’s upstairs room.

  Well, that was all right. That was what she had hoped for in the first place. All she had to do now was to go up the path and ring the bell.

  Yet for some reason she was trembling, assailed by an extraordinary sense of embarrassment, almost as if she was wearing some sort of fancy dress. She felt, as she stood hesitating in the dark garden, as if she didn’t belong here at all—had no right to go and ring that bell: just as you might feel if you were returning to the neighbourhood after long years away, wondering if people would still recognise you….