Free The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin Page B

Geoffrey’s eager, amateurish questions?
    For after all these years of anti-car prejudice, Geoffrey had overnight become as excited as a schoolboy over the idea of learning to drive. Excited as schoolboys were supposed to be, that is to say, thought Rosamund wryly, from her corner of the back seat. Not like the two schoolboys she had left sitting side by side on the kitchen table, slowly finishing an entire tin of rock cakes while they discussed the gloomy future of the world: just like a pair of vultures,Rosamund thought, hovering arrogantly over the entire decaying universe as if it were their rightful prey. Still, they’d probably be better once they got out on their bicycles; and with any luck they wouldn’t be back for hours and hours. Why, it might even happen that Peter stayed the night with the other boy for once, instead of the other way round.
    Rosamund realised that her spirits were rising, though goodness knew why, with her husband and Lindy talking cars non-stop in the front seat, and the whole Sunday trip to Mother’s spoilt, perhaps for ever. Perhaps Geoffrey would always want to come like this, in Lindy’s car? Perhaps he would want to buy a car of their own? And this afternoon would have been so specially lovely for walking. Already, within a week, the sad, tattered, end-of-summer look was gone from the countryside, and the still, blue September skies were back. But you could not feel the stillness from the car, nor smell the stubble fields. The golden, gentle sunshine became a mere metallic beating of hotness through the car roof, and you couldn’t even talk. That is to say, Rosamund couldn’t talk, not from this solitary corner.
    She had chosen it, of course. Of her own accord she had urged Geoffrey to sit in front with Lindy, to help her with the map-reading, she’d said. As always, her status of odd one out in their trio was of her own deliberate choosing, and thus could not be felt as a humiliation. But it looked like a humiliation. Rosamund had been shocked, as they set out, to find how much she was hoping that the neighbours weren’t peering out from the Sunday somnolence behind their curtains; weren’t noticing how Lindy and Geoffrey were paired off in the front of the car, for all the world like a married couple, with the spinster sister of one of them lurking at the back.
    But probably the neighbours were already talking, anyway . Every time Geoffrey went over to help Lindy in her garden, a dozen upstairs windows must be taking note, setting one Saturday afternoon beside another, drawing gleeful conclusions. If only there was some way of telling them that she, Rosamund, wasn’t the neglected wife at all; that, on thecontrary, it was all just a beautiful family friendship, with Rosamund herself freely encouraging all these visits and exchanges. She would have liked to label her husband, when he went over to Lindy’s, with a huge gaudy card saying : ‘A Present From Rosamund’, because that’s what it amounted to, and it would be so nice if the neighbours could know.
    Nice, too, if her mother-in-law could know, she now realised, as they turned in to the short gravel entrance of Geoffrey’s old home; welcoming as always with its warm brick, its square, unpretentious windows, and the jasmine round the front door.
    Wondering briefly at her own disproportionate anxiety not to be seen on the back seat, Rosamund scrambled ungracefully to the ground almost before the car had stopped, went round to the front, and stood smiling in at the window while Geoffrey and Lindy discussed arrangements for the return journey. Lindy was being admirably tactful about not expecting to be invited in to meet the elder Mrs Fielding . She wanted to explore the town, she declared, and the neighbouring countryside; to examine the old tombs in the churchyard…. This and that…. She would call back for them at about seven—and brushing aside their protests and expressions of gratitude, she drove quickly away,