The Jealous One

by Celia Fremlin

Off her guard against what? For Lindy was still sitting there, making no move, and the minutes were passing. Yet still the smile flickered round her mouth; she wore a look of curiously inappropriate confidence. Was this, too, merely part of an act?

  ‘Besides,’ said Lindy suddenly, as if there had been no pause since her last words. ‘There are some things you will mind more than being killed——’

  In a single swift movement (impulsive to the last?) she stood up and flung open the carriage door, and the foggy darkness, like a hurricane, poured in.

  Was it a trap—an unwontedly clumsy trap? Was she expecting Rosamund to leap to her feet and try to close the door? Rosamund, as she had resolved, clung to her seat. Here, sitting down, she was surely safe … and then, as she sat there, she realised that Lindy was pulling the communication cord.

  ‘It’ll be your word against mine!’ cried Lindy, her whole face aglitter with triumph; and then, quite calmly, she stood there waiting for the train to slow down.

  Only then did Rosamund understand the import of it all. As soon as the train was going slowly enough for her to do it safely, Lindy was going to jump out, be found lying by the side of the line, saying that Rosamund had pushed her—and then what a feeble, implausible, cooked-up imitation would Rosamund’s story of last Tuesday sound—coming, as it now would, after Lindy’s?

  Or was all this what Rosamund was meant to suppose … was it really just another trap … a cunning way to get her to leave her seat and come to the doorway? No … her first guess had been right … Lindy was indeed preparing to spring as the train slowed down … slower … slower….

  And then suddenly the expression on Lindy’s face was like nothing Rosamund had ever seen before. The train was slowing down indeed, just as she had planned, but only because it was coming into a station.

  *

  As a femme fatale Lindy had been very nearly convincing. As a murderess she had been superb; but she had no ready-made image of herself appropriate to this. As the guard, bored and irritable, came to ask her why she had pulled the cord, she looked once more exactly as Rosamund had first seen her, peering into the back of that furniture van: a rather fussy, dumpy little woman.

  The glittering façade was shattered; and Rosamund, as she watched its disintegration, felt herself, too, to be diminished: with the grief of a fellow-craftsman, she witnessed the smashing of so mighty a work of art.

  *

  After Lindy had gone abroad, which she did almost at once, there seemed no point in making the affair public—Geoffrey and Rosamund were entirely agreed on this, from the very first. There was no point even in letting Eileen know the whole truth—they both felt that Eileen had enough on her mind already, in piecing together her marriage once again. One couldn’t even expect her, in her still delicate domestic situation, to take over Shang Low. So for a while, before the new people came, Rosamund still had to go in and out to feed him; until, gradually, it began to seem easier to bring him into her house rather than take the food into his; and even after that, it was still a good many weeks before she fully realised that they now owned a Pekinese. As the months went by, Shang Low came to adore Geoffrey more and more, but he still continued to display a measure of guarded contempt towards Rosamund.

  But it didn’t matter; for Geoffrey and Rosamund soon decided that the best kind of Pekinese always adore their masters and despise their mistresses. It became one of their things.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Celia Fremlin, 1965

  Biographical Sketch © Chris Simmons, 2014

  The right of Celia Fremlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–31276–4