LITMIR.BIZ

       The Other Woman

      Rose’s mother was killed one morning crossing the street to do her shopping. Rose was fetched from work, and a young policeman, awkward with sympathy, asked questions and finally said: ‘You ought to tell your Dad, miss, he ought to know.’ It had struck him as strange that she had not suggested it, but behaved as if the responsibility for everything must of course be hers. He thought Rose was too composed to be natural. Her mouth was set and there was a strained look in her eyes. He insisted; Rose sent a message to her father; but when he came she put him straight into bed with a cup of tea. Mr Johnson was a plump, fair little man, with wisps of light hair lying over a rosy scalp, and blue, candid, trustful eyes. Then she came back to the kitchen and her manner told the policeman that she expected him to leave. From the door he said diffidently: ‘Well, I’m sorry, miss, I’m really sorry. A terrible thing – you can’t rightly blame the lorry-driver, and your mum – it wasn’t her fault, either.’ Rose turned her white, shaken face, her cold and glittering eyes towards him and said tartly: ‘Being sorry doesn’t mend broken bones.’ That last phrase seemed to take her by surprise, for she winced, her face worked in a rush of tears, and then she clenched her jaw again. ‘Them lorries,’ she said heavily, ‘them machines, they ought to be stopped, that’s what I think.’ This irrational remark encouraged the policeman: it was nearer to the tears, the emotion that he thought would be good for her. He remarked encouragingly: ‘I daresay, miss, but we couldn’t do without them, could we now?’ Rose’s face did not change. She said politely: ‘Yes?’ It was sceptical and dismissing; that monosyllable said finally: ‘You keep your opinions, I’ll keep mine.’ It examined and dismissed the whole machine age. The young policeman, still lingering over his duty, suggested: ‘Isn’t there anybody to come and sit with you? You don’t look too good, miss, and that’s a fact.’

      ‘There isn’t anybody,’ said Rose briefly, and added: ‘I’m all right.’ She sounded irritated, and so he left. She sat down at the table and was shocked at herself for what she had said. She thought: I ought to tell George … But she did not move. She stared vaguely around the kitchen, her mind dimly churning around several ideas. One was that her father had taken it hard, she would have her hands full with him. Another, that policemen, officials – they were all nosy parkers, knowing what was best for everybody. She found herself staring at a certain picture on the wall, and thinking: ‘Now I can take that picture down. Now she’s gone I can do what I like.’ She felt a little guilty, but almost at once she briskly rose and took the picture down. It was of a battleship in a stormy sea, and she hated it. She put it away in a cupboard. Then the white empty square on the wall troubled her, and she replaced it by a calendar with yellow roses on it. Then she made herself a cup of tea and began cooking her father’s supper, thinking: I’ll wake him up and make him eat, do him good to have a bite of something hot.

      At supper her father asked: ‘Where’s George?’ Her face closed against him in irritation and she said: ‘I don’t know.’ He was surprised and shocked, and he protested: ‘But Rosie, you ought to tell him, it’s only right.’ Now, it was against this knowledge that she had been arming herself all day; but she knew that sooner or later she must tell George, and when she had finished the washing-up she took a sheet of writing-paper from the drawer of the dresser and sat down to write. She was as surprised as her father was: Why didn’t she want to tell George? Her father said, with the characteristic gentle protest: ‘But, Rosie, why don’t you give him a ring at the factory? They’d give him the message.’ Rosie made as if she had not heard. She finished the letter, found some coppers in her bag for a stamp and went out to post it. Afterwards she found herself thinking of George’s arrival with the reluctance that deserved the name of fear. She could not understand herself, and soon went to bed in order to lose herself in sleep. She dreamed of the lorry that had killed her mother; she dreamed, too, of an enormous black machine, relentlessly moving its great arms back and forth, back and forth, in a way that was menacing to Rose.

      George found the letter when he returned from work the following evening. His first thought was: ‘Why couldn’t she have got killed next week, after we were married, instead of now?’ He was shocked at the cruel and selfish idea. But he and Rose had been going together now for three years, and he could not help feeling that it was cruel of fate to cloud their wedding with this terrible, senseless death. He had not liked Rose’s mother: he thought her a fussy and domineering woman; but to be killed like that, all of a sudden, in her vigorous fifties –

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