The Jealous One Read Online Free PDF Page A

!’—she raised her voice—‘Stop battering your way in like that—you’ll smash everything. Here’s a kind gentleman will clear a path for you——’
    Geoffrey was already on his feet and over by the door, shifting impediments, upsetting candles, and eventually creating an aperture wide enough for the entry of a neat, slim girl with high-piled hair and wide, anxious eyes.
    For a moment Rosamund was taken aback. She had somehow been led to imagine an older sister for Lindy. The broken marriage—the ‘getting straight’—the non-drinking—all had combined to give an impression of down-trodden middle age. But this girl was not only younger than Lindy, she was also—at first sight, at least—a good deal prettier, with her fair complexion and masses of soft, pale hair.
    ‘Come on, you silly girl!’ cried Lindy, as her sister picked her way with perhaps unnecessary caution through the medley of deceptively-lit objects that separated them. ‘Come and have a drink. You must be worn out. Exhausted. You look like a ghost already. Why do you do it?’
    Oddly, even as her sister spoke, the girl did begin to lookrather like a ghost, Rosamund thought. You could see now that her pretty, fair skin was a little too pale, her large eyes lacking in sparkle. She seemed out of place, too—a creature out of its element, drowning, unable to breathe properly in Lindy’s colourful, buoyant environment.
    ‘Have a drink,’ Lindy repeated, sloshing the remains of the wine into a tumbler and handing it to her sister.
    Rosamund was surprised. Hadn’t Lindy just said that her sister didn’t drink? Had she forgotten? Or was she just hoping to tempt her, for this once?
    ‘No—no thanks, Lindy. You know I don’t.’ The girl pushed the tumbler away and glanced enquiringly at the visitors. ‘I suppose …?’
    ‘Yes, yes, I should have introduced you, I know,’ said Lindy impatiently. ‘But it seems so silly, when you all know exactly who each other are. I’ve told you all about them, you know I have, Eileen, and I’ve told them all about you. Well, nearly all, anyway. Oh, well…. Eileen—this is Rosamund Fielding. Rosamund—this is Eileen Forbes…. O.K.? I needn’t go through it with you, too, need I, Geoff?’
    She laughed up at him in the candle-light, and he smiled down at her. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll just guess. This must be—let me see—either your sister Eileen, or else your sister Eileen?’
    ‘Wrong both times! This is my sister Eileen !’Lindy laughed, a high, excited sound. ‘But you’re on the right track, you know, Geoff, there are several of her. Only one of them is here in this room with us. One is still upstairs, grimly sorting things, and will go on doing so all night long. Another is—ah, that’s another story, isn’t it, Eileen?’
    She threw a merry, challenging glance sideways to her sister; but the girl did not respond. It was like throwing something to bounce off a cushion, you’d know it wasn’t going to bounce, suddenly thought Rosamund. Just as Lindy must have known that Eileen was going to refuse the glass of wine and fail to respond to her banter. I think she’s rather unkind, Rosamund’s thoughts raced gleefully on,fastening with inexplicable zest onto this possible flaw in Lindy’s character; she likes showing up her sister as much less vivacious than herself.
    ‘Well, let’s eat, anyway,’ cried Lindy gaily, settling herself cross-legged in front of the improvised table—an upturned drawer covered with a red-and-white checked cloth. ‘Who’d like Eileen’s glass of wine? Who’d like to drink her health for her? Since she won’t drink it herself?’ She waved the glass perilously this way and that for a moment, then set it in the middle of the table. Carefully she arranged four candles round it, in a solemn square.
    ‘There. It can be for the prize. The prize for the cleverest, the wittiest, the best at finishing the potato salad——’
    She was