Free The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin Page A

old ladies in buses. The lot.’
    Lindy looked incredulous. So, to her dismay, did Geoffrey. Was she really remembering it all wrong, as mothers were said to do? Or——?
    ‘Oh, I daresay discipline is more difficult as they get older,’ Lindy was saying. ‘I’m not denying it. But it just goes to prove what I was saying before: At just the point when the father could and should be the major influence, disciplinary and otherwise—at just that point the mother begins to cut him off from his son. To put up the barriers. So he can no longer get discipline, or anything else, across to the boy.’
    Geoffrey was looking horribly thoughtful. Rosamund frantically tried to think of some come-back that would bekind, polite, good-humoured, and would knock Lindy sideways .
    But all she could think of was a rather dull change in the conversation, but one that at least would put Lindy and her carefully aimed insights out of the picture for the moment.
    ‘Don’t you think we ought to phone your mother?’ she asked Geoffrey, once again. ‘And let her know that we’re coming this afternoon?’
    ‘Oh. Ah. Of course.’ Geoffrey looked uneasy, and turned to Lindy. ‘You won’t mind, will you, Lindy? I shan’t be able to start on the crazy paving this afternoon after all. I’d forgotten this was the Sunday for Mother’s.’
    ‘Oh, but it needn’t be!’ Rosamund fell over herself to release her husband for Lindy’s exclusive use this sunny afternoon. ‘Next Sunday will do just as well. She’s not specially expecting us….’
    ‘Oh, but Geoff, you mustn’t upset your plans because of me! …’ For a moment the battle of self-effacement ricocheted between the two women, both of them talking together , and the sound was like the whirring of wings in the small sunny kitchen. And Lindy won.
    ‘Well, actually,’ she admitted. ‘If you did decide to put off going till next weekend, I could drive you there. I’ll have the poor old car in running order at last—at least I trust so. How’d that be?’
    She looked brightly, generously, from one to the other of them; and even Rosamund couldn’t see undercurrents of malice in the suggestion. For Lindy, of course, couldn’t possibly know of hers and Geoffrey’s little prejudice against cars; couldn’t know how much they enjoyed the walk from the station, right through the little sunlit town where Geoffrey’s mother lived, past the churchyard, and up the long, tree-lined road that was very nearly country, and where the hawthorns still bloomed in the spring: where every step, every gateway, reminded Geoffrey of his boyhood ; might, at any moment, inspire him to some anecdote, some memory, which even now, after all these years, could still show him to his wife in a new, an excitingly different,light. Half the point of going to Mother’s was this walk. They wouldn’t give it up for anything.
    ‘Well, that is an idea!’ said Geoffrey enthusiastically. ‘Save our old bones for once, eh, Rosamund? Ashdene can’t be much more than an hour away by car, do you think Lindy …?’ He and Lindy fell to animated discussion about routes, and Rosamund was left smiling. ‘I wish she was dead!’ she said to herself, clearly and distinctly, as she smiled. And it was only long afterwards, when the time had come for her to subject every tiny shred of memory to a panic-stricken scrutiny, that she noticed that this was the very first time that the thought of Lindy’s death had come to her in so many words.

CHAPTER VII
    ‘You really should learn to drive, Geoff! You’d be good.’
    Lindy had been explaining, with the greatest of good-humour , exactly why it was that she had changed gear on this hill but not on the previous one. Why couldn’t she lose her temper, like other drivers, thought Rosamund crossly. Why must she remain bright and serene in the midst of this chaos of Sunday traffic inching its way out of London, and at the same time answer fully and sympathetically all