The Jealous One (12 page)

Suddenly she felt too tired to bother. Her head ached too much. What was the point, anyway? Eileen would soon be home and could go and look; why, Lindy herself might be back any moment now. One way or another, everything would be explained in due course. What
were
they all making such a fuss about? Every minute she was finding it harder and harder to remember.

When she got home, Geoffrey was pacing about the sitting room. He looked up eagerly.

‘Any luck?’

‘No. Nothing. Well, there might have been something upstairs, but I couldn’t go and look—Shang Low wouldn’t let me. He just went mad, barking and snarling, when I tried to go up the stairs, so I gave up.’

Geoffrey smiled briefly, not really listening.

‘Oh, well.’ He paused in his pacing, frowned, and slowly lowered himself on to the sofa, as though to think better in a sitting position.

‘I’m just wondering,’ he said, ‘whether, possibly, there’s been some sort of muddle about the time? That would
explain
everything. Though I did tell her, most clearly, that it was my late evening, and I wouldn’t be able to meet her till after eight…. I wonder if she rang from home …? Did you say you didn’t see her
at
all
today, Rosamund? Not this morning, or any time? Or hear her going out?’

Again the throbbing, the aching in her head when she tried to concentrate her thoughts.
Had
she seen Lindy? Well, of course she had, at that meeting at Norah’s…. But that was
yesterday,
wasn’t it, not today…? Again confusion swept her thoughts, whirling them this way and that like a high wind. Sleeping all the afternoon got you so
confused
….

‘It
is
Tuesday, isn’t it?’ she asked Geoffrey. Then, seeing his expression, she hastily added: ‘I’m sorry—I’m being stupid. It’s just that I’m so sleepy….’

It was not exactly impatience that she saw clouding his face now; more a sort of withdrawal. She knew that he was hurt that she could just simply feel sleepy while he was still so anxious. By her ill-judged excuse she had destroyed for them that tentative sense of comradeship in anxiety that had so moved her a little while ago.

‘Yes, it’s Tuesday,’ he said, chilly and patient again. ‘
Do
try to be a help, darling. You can’t really be as sleepy as all that. It’s only half past ten.’

‘Yes. Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Just let me think a minute. I’ve been doing so many things today, I have to try and remember….’

What things? Had she done anything at all? Well, of course she had. She’d washed up breakfast, tidied the house, got ready for Norah’s coffee morning…. No, that was
yesterday
, Monday: she
must
try to keep it clear. Well, then, it must have been something else today … what did she usually do on Tuesdays?

Shopping? No, she hadn’t gone shopping today, she felt sure…. No, of course she hadn’t; she began to remember now, the fog had looked so thick, and her throat had been hurting…. Yes, that’s right! That’s how she’d spent the day—she’d been ill.

But what to tell Geoffrey? She couldn’t—wouldn’t—plead illness at a time like this, particularly with him looking so aloof and peremptory, simply wanting facts out of her. Brief, relevant facts, to help him to find Lindy. But he
won’t
find her, gloated the evil little voice inside her: and
somehow
the fighting down of this little voice restored courage and clarity.

‘Well, I didn’t go out at all, anyway,’ she said confidently, feeling that this, at least, was the truth. ‘I was doing things about the house all day—you know. Tidying, washing—things like that.’ She moved over the fireplace and sank into a chair facing her husband. It was an effort not to close her eyes, so great was the relief of sitting down.

She became aware of his eyes moving down her
out-sretched
legs.

‘Were you looking round the garden as well as the house, when you went over to Lindy’s just now?’ he asked
curiously
; and Rosamund, startled, followed the line of his gaze. Her nearly new black court shoes were coated with mud—thick, heavy, half-dried mud, with bits of grass blades — bedded in it. A sharp, agonised sense of—something—passed through her head like a sudden pain, vanished
before
she could grasp it, and left her as puzzled as Geoffrey. They both stared at the shoes in equal bewilderment.

‘No. No, of course I didn’t,’ said Rosamund, utterly baffled. ‘I just went along the side path and across the bit of concrete by the french window. I can’t think how they got like that.’ She stared at the two muddy feet in a
concentrated
yet unfocussed way until they seemed no longer to be her own. They seemed to swell, to shrink, to glide away to an immense distance and then come scudding back to fit on to her legs again.
Her
legs, yes, she mustn’t lose track of whose legs they were that had been tramping through
unknown
mud to some unknown destination. But what on earth was Geoffrey thinking of this long silence …?

But it could only have been going on for a second or two, after all. As she glanced at him, she saw that he had stopped looking at her feet, had given up the problem.

‘Oh, well…’ he glanced at his watch, his mind moving restlessly forward. ‘Eileen should be here soon now, I should think … she said an hour or so….’ He got up, moved over to the window, and gazed for a long minute past the heavy curtain, carelessly thrust aside, into the street.

‘The fog’s definitely lifting,’ he announced, muffled, over his shoulder. ‘If she was held up anywhere by fog, she should be clear now….’ Rosamund, from the other side of the room, was aware of his eyes piercing and probing through the lessening obscurity, trying to force out of it the familiar, long-awaited figure. She could feel, locked inside him, waiting to leap forth, the smile, the wave, the rushing to the front door….

I ought to tell him, she thought. It’s not fair to let him go on waiting and hoping like this … and in the same instant realised that this thought was nonsensical. For she had nothing to tell. She knew no more than he did—less, in fact, for he, not she, had been the last one to have seen Lindy, the last one to have spoken to her.

‘I suppose it
was
she who rang you up?’ she heard herself asking; and wondered whatever could have put so idiotic an idea in her mind.

His head jerked back from behind the curtain. He stared at her.

‘What on earth do you mean? Who else could it have been?’

He might well ask. Rosamund herself was wondering what she could possibly have meant. But she must go through with it now, think of something vaguely sensible, or else simply admit that she was light-headed with fever and be done with it. She thought of the dutifully-repressed annoyance with which he would greet such news at just this juncture: the clumsy, agonising attempts at a display of
sympathy and concern at this addition—or rather
interruption
—to his worries. No, she couldn’t face it.

‘Who else
could
it have been?’ he repeated.

‘Well——’ Rosamund thought quickly—‘It only just crossed my mind, but supposing Eileen—after all, they
are
sisters, their voices may sound quite alike on the telephone. If
she
wanted to ask your advice about something, and took for granted you recognised her voice and so didn’t bother to say who she was—could it have been that? After all, she might easily be wanting advice about her problems. You know—Basil and everything.’

You could see that for one second Geoffrey was
considering
this bizarre possibility. But the flaws were glaring and obvious.

‘Then why wouldn’t she have said so, when I rang her up just now? Of course it wasn’t her! Apart from the fact that
she
didn’t turn up either…. It wouldn’t explain anything whatever!’

No, it wouldn’t. The snub—if snub you could call it from so anxious a man—was well deserved. Rosamund lapsed into silence, slumped deeper into her chair, and sensed rather than saw Geoffrey resuming his vigil behind the curtain.

She must have dozed off a little, for the next thing she knew Eileen was standing in the middle of the room, her pale hair glistening with damp and her face pinched with cold. She must have only just arrived, for she was still
wearing
a white belted mackintosh, and her whole presence still radiated that disruptive sense of outdoors suddenly brought in. But already she and Geoffrey were talking hard, both at once, as it seemed to Rosamund’s half-awakened senses.

‘No, Geoffrey, really, I don’t know a thing!’ Eileen was assuring him. ‘She didn’t tell me she was going to ring you up, or meet you, or anything. I’ve just
no
idea what it could be about.’

‘And she hadn’t told you anything about being worried? I mean—quite apart from whether she meant to consult me
or not—was there anything you know of that she
could
have been worrying about?’

There was a tiny pause. Then Eileen laughed, a slightly forced sound.

‘Can one ever say, of anyone, that there is
nothing
they could be worrying about? All I can say is, I don’t know of anything
in
particular,
just now.’

She had the defensive look that she so often wore when Lindy was talking at her, teasing her about her orderliness or her sobriety. She looked uncomfortable, too, standing there in her mackintosh, as if about to go at any moment. Rosamund roused herself.

‘Do sit down, Eileen,’ she urged. ‘Geoffrey, take her coat, will you?’—and after the little disturbance was over, and they were all seated, she told Eileen, a little apologetically, how she had been trespassing around hers and Lindy’s house that evening.

‘Though I must say Shang Low did heroic service in stopping me taking any liberties. I wouldn’t like to be a burglar in your place, Eileen! Do you know, he just wouldn’t let me set foot on the stairs. Anybody’d think you kept the Crown Jewels up there, or something!’

Eileen looked startled for a moment.

‘Oh. Yes, well, he’s like that,’ she explained. ‘He doesn’t mind people in the places where he’s accustomed to see them; it’s only if they suddenly do something that they don’t usually do, like you going upstairs. I expect you’ve never been upstairs in our house before, and that’s why——Incidentally, why
did
you go up? What did you think you’d find?’

Eileen’s voice had changed, become quite sharp.
Rosamund
, in some confusion, explained her idea about the note on the bed.

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ Eileen seemed mollified. ‘No, Lindy would never have left a note there. She wouldn’t have left a note at all, actually. She wouldn’t expect me to be anxious, just not finding her in. We both go in and out as we please.’

‘But
aren’t
you anxious, then?’ put in Geoffrey eagerly.
‘You seemed as if you were, when I rang you up. But of course, if Lindy quite often does this sort of thing….’

It’s not that. It’s …’ Eileen clasped her cold hands tightly together in her lap, as if to give herself courage. Then she looked Geoffrey full in the face.

‘You’ve just asked me if I know of any reason why Lindy should be worried, and I’ve told you that I don’t. But when you rang me up just now at Molly’s, you didn’t just say Lindy sounded
worried.
You said she sounded
scared.
You haven’t said that again, since I got here. Is it true?’

She looked both shy and aggressive. Geoffrey observed her in some surprise.

‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘Certainly it’s true. I suppose I didn’t repeat it again in exactly the same words because—well, I assumed, naturally …’ His sentence petered out under Eileen’s accusing gaze, and he started again. ‘Well, anyway, let’s not quarrel about words. Let’s begin again at the beginning. Do you know any reason why she should be
scared
?’

Eileen’s gaze stayed on his face for a very long time
before
she answered, or so it seemed to Rosamund. It seemed to her, too, that for some reason Eileen was having to bring to this interview every scrap of courage she possessed,
summoning
it up from every corner of her soul, in the desperate fear that even so it might not be quite enough for what she had to do.

‘No,’ she answered Geoffrey steadily. ‘I don’t know any reason. Do you?’

Now it was Geoffrey’s turn to stare, but she did not flinch.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ she persisted. ‘
Something
you haven’t told me?’

‘The girl has second sight!’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with a not very successful attempt at lightening the tension. ‘Yes. There is, actually. I didn’t tell you before—either of you—(this with a glance at Rosamund) because really it’s so irrelevant. I’m sure it is, though I admit it shook me a little
at the time. A little while after Lindy’s call, while I was still at the office—more or less on my own, by then, you
understand
, I’m the only one who stays late on Tuesdays—the telephone went again. The switchboard girl had gone by then, of course, so I took it myself, and——’

‘And it was Lindy again?’ prompted Eileen eagerly. She was leaning forward in her chair.

‘No. It was no one. No one at all.’

‘You mean no one answered—said anything?’

‘Not a word. I kept saying Hullo and Press Button A, and things like that, but nothing happened … just a muddled sort of sound—you know—as if someone was messing about who didn’t know how to work it … and then the receiver seemed to bang down at the other end, and that was the end of that.’

‘Well, I suppose it
was
someone not knowing how to work it,’ said Eileen, seizing on the idea. ‘It’s always happening, especially since this new kind with all those pips and putting threepenny pieces in instead of pennies. Lots of people lose their nerve over them. Not Lindy, though. It couldn’t have been
her
.’

‘No. I’m sure you’re right, Eileen. Now that I’m looking back on it, I’m sure it must have been something quite commonplace like that. But at the time—I don’t know how to describe it—but I had the feeling that the person messing about at the other end was in some sort of terrible trouble … trying desperately to get through to me. If I was a
fanciful
sort of fellow I’d have said there was something almost telepathic about it—a sort of wordless s.o.s. from one soul to another—but of course I don’t believe in that sort of
nonsense
. But then, as time went on, and she still didn’t turn up … and then coming back and finding the house all dark and shut-up looking … it all seemed to hit me at once, if you can understand….’