Free The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin

proclaiming, still lightly: ‘And of course, when it’s an only son, the situation is even worse…. Ned is their only one, isn’t he?’ She added the question quickly, and with great innocence, as if to show, a second too late, that she had quite forgotten that Geoffrey and Rosamund had an only son.
    ‘No, he isn’t!’ said Rosamund triumphantly, and as if somehow scoring a point. ‘They’ve got a girl, too, she’s about fifteen. But we don’t hear so much about Sarah because she isn’t any trouble. Except for having a crush on T. S. Eliot and keeping writing herself imaginary letters fromhim. But that’s what I’d call not being any trouble. So quiet.’
    Geoffrey began to laugh; but stopped almost at once; for though Lindy was smiling, her smile held the faintest trace of embarrassment, as if Rosamund had said something not in the best of taste.
    ‘It does seem amusing, I know,’ she said, with an air of much more unruffled tolerance than seemed to Rosamund at all necessary. ‘From the point of view of an outsider, that is. But, you know, this schoolgirl crush business—it’s not quite so amusing at close range. I should know, after bringing up a younger sister. And it gets less amusing still if it goes on too long.’
    Nothing more. No explanation. No opening for anyone to ask further questions. With sudden fury, Rosamund realised that Lindy’s sister was to be left for evermore just faintly shadowed by this nebulous hint of some intangible degree of abnormality. But before her anger could show in her face, before it could twist her pleasant, un-jealous smile into something quite strange, there was an interruption. For at that moment the slam of the front door crashed through the house, shaking the crockery on the shelves, jerking a new expression onto everyone’s face. Then came the sound of two bicycles thumping down the steps; the creaking clash of the front gate; and then quietness, like a wind, swept back into the house.
    ‘There goes our ten thousand pounds’ worth,’ commented Geoffrey good-humouredly. ‘Our thousand quiet weekends. Our——’
    ‘And the Walker boy with them, I trust!’ said Rosamund, recovering her temper. ‘Oh, it was so ghastly this morning, Lindy, you can’t imagine …!’ and she began to relate—quite amusingly, she flattered herself—the story of her encounter with Walker in the kitchen.
    At the end of the recital Lindy as well as Geoffrey laughed.
    ‘You do make it sound so funny, Rosie!’ she declared. ‘Doesn’t she, Geoff?’
    Rosamund should have been disarmed by the compliment ;but it happened that in that very moment she noticed why it was that she so hated Lindy’s habit of using these abbreviations of both their names. It was because it seemed to imply that she, Lindy, was on more intimate terms with each of them than either were with each other. How stilted and distant ‘Geoffrey’ was going to sound if Rosamund were to bring his name into her next remark—which of course she wasn’t. Indeed, she wasn’t going to have a chance, because Lindy was continuing:
    ‘It makes a good story, Rosie, I grant you; but when you come to think of it, what dreadful manners the boy must have! I suppose his mother is an ardent believer in child psychology—not frustrating them, and all that?’
    ‘Not that I know of,’ said Rosamund, rather tartly. ‘That sort of thing hasn’t got nearly so much to do with how you bring up your children as outsiders think it has. People who’ve never had children always talk as if merely not believing in child psychology automatically made you into a good disciplinarian. It’s much more complicated than that. And anyway, most of these frightful fifteen and sixteen year olds, they were well brought up in the sense you mean. I’ve watched them with my own eyes evolving out of the most charming, well-behaved little boys. Peter was a little marvel at seven, you know. Passing round cakes at tea parties. Standing up for