Read Online The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin - Free Book Online Page B

could be no doubt that her remark was much the most interesting as well as her smile the most brilliant. So it was only natural—as well as polite—that Geoffrey should answer her rather than his wife.
    ‘Well, Purser is a metallurgist,’ he began, obligingly but naïvely. ‘A Manchester man …’ as if those were the sort of things that anyone could possibly want to know when they asked to hear ‘more’ about a person.
    ‘—And he hasn’t always been so gloomy,’ supplementedRosamund, smiling affectionately at her husband’s inability to get quickly to grips with this sort of conversation. ‘They really do worry terribly about that boy of theirs. Though from everything you read in the papers, he doesn’t seem so specially much worse than the others.’
    ‘I don’t think there’s any harm in any of them,’ said Lindy vehemently. ‘I think it’s all the fault of——’
    Was she really going to say ‘society’? Was she actually going to voice such a platitude, and in Geoffrey’s hearing? Rosamund hugged herself. Surely no man, however infatuated , would go on thinking highly of a woman’s wit and intelligence if she could produce as her own idea so monstrous a cliché?
    ‘The mothers,’ finished Lindy suavely. ‘I don’t think the fathers come into it any more—not now. Their wives don’t let them.’
    ‘How so?’ Geoffrey seemed intrigued. Disputation, of a gentle kind, usually pleased him, particularly at weekends. It made him feel young and leisured, back in his student days.
    ‘Well—look at the Pursers, for instance,’ said Lindy—Rosamund, but not Geoffrey, had seen from the start that the sociological generalisation about mothers was simply a highbrow introduction to saying something nasty about Nor ah Purser—‘Look at the way she was all the time identifying with the boy at the expense of her husband. That was what was hurting him so. Not the fact that his son was. delinquent, but that the delinquency was being used by his own wife to set up a barrier between the three of them. Her and the boy on one side: Father on the other. Don’t you see?’
    There was wisdom in Lindy’s words; and injustice, too. Rosamund leaped on the injustice; consciously she magnified it, made it seem the main subject of the debate. Even as she did so, she was shocked at her own skill.
    ‘ I think the boot was quite on the other foot,’ she declared hotly. ‘I thought William was being really horrid to Norah. He was deliberately showing her up, in public, as havingbrought the boy up badly. As if he had had nothing to do with it at all!’
    ‘As he probably hadn’t!’ retorted Lindy. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Just think what it must be like from the man’s point of view (she carefully did not look at Geoffrey as she said this; she seemed to be talking to Rosamund alone). Just think: he pays, and pays, and pays for eighteen—twenty—years; and what does he get in return? Can you wonder that he sometimes looks at his sullen, unresponsive son, and thinks to himself: There goes ten thousand pounds of my money; seven thousand evenings which I might have enjoyed with my friends; a thousand peaceful, pleasant weekends….’
    Geoffrey was laughing, as if Lindy had made a delicious joke. So Rosamund tried to make her protest sound like a delicious joke, too.
    ‘But, hang it all, Lindy, anybody could calculate like that about anything! I could look at my son and think: There goes fifty thousand hours of washing-up, and——’
    ‘Implying that you wash up for eight hours a day!’ interrupted Lindy lightly. ‘It sounds more like running a hotel than bringing up a son!’
    Everybody laughed again. It was Lindy who had been witty enough to make them laugh; Lindy who had won the argument, too, simply by getting her beastly sums right. If she had got them right? Rosamund was still trying to multiply one and half three hundred and sixty fives by sixteen in her head when she heard Lindy