Waking from a dream in which she was strangling her attractive new neighbour Lindy, Rosamund Fielding is suddenly confronted by her husband Geoffrey bearing the breathless news that Lindy has disappeared. Is there, then, anything in the all-too-vivid nightmare Rosamund was just having? And exactly how, given their long devotion and many shared perspectives, could someone like Lindy come between the Fieldings in so short a time and thus inspire such jealousy and hatred in the normally placid Rosamund? It is to the book’s credit that Celia Fremlin chooses to devote the first half of The Jealous One (1965) to that second question.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Fremlin’s debut novel The Hours Before Dawn (1958), I was intrigued to return to this seam of not-my-usual Suspense fiction and see how she had applied herself elsewhere. And, just as in that debut, it absolutely cannot be denied that Fremlin has an almost genius-level skill for putting marriage under the microscope and watching the tiny fissures inexorably work their way through so that small irritations multiply believably and grow to ruinous suspicion, doubt, fear, and murderous urges. As a catalogue of the death by a million cuts to a previously stable relationship, I honestly wonder if there’s ever been anything better.

Which is not to say that the second half is a let-down, but the acuity of Fremlin’s observations as Geoffrey falls more under Lindy’s spell — Rosamund’s reflection on the vodka incident, or laughing “determined to be amused if it killed her” — pierced the chest in a way I rarely encounter.

Lindy has destroyed us, Rosamund reflected, with a sort of dispassionate wonder, one cloudless October afternoon. Without seducing him, without so much as exchanging a kiss, she has succeeded in laying my marriage in ruins. She knows it already, of course; but does Geoffrey?

That the supposedly carefree Lindy gets to exist outside the anxieties of wifedom and parenthood is also ingenious, with Rosamund and other wives and mothers vying for position where their progeny are concerned, albeit only for appearances’ sake (“…it seemed better…to boast of [her son’s] existence from as great a distance as could be contrived.”) and thus feeding into the dual disquietudes at the novel’s care.

Sooner or later someone will have to be uncivilised, she reflected, but if I play my cards carefully it won’t have to be me.

The second half then builds on this magnificently, with Lindy’s disappearance far from solving the problems raised (“…where there is no longer any battle ground, there is no longer any hope of victory.”). Of course, this being the 1960s, Psychology is never far away, both in Lindy’s confident dismissal of how mothers fail their children and wives their husbands and the warring mentalities of the Young People against the Old, but Fremlin plays it with a mostly light touch. Instead of bludgeoning the reader, or author allows Rosamund’s sense of self-doubt and her spiralling panic and uncertainty to build and build with an inevitability that never quite crests, hinting at limitless potential, and that, in the rare moments of release, is uncorked in her protagonist’s ignorance (the final line of chapter XVI is astonishing).

Tellingly, too, Fremlin isn’t really on anyone’s side in this, poking both the complacency of the women Lindy so rallies against (“…and of course that had led to a lovely discussion about the evils of affluence — always a delightful topic to discuss in affluent surroundings.”) and the notion of the Stepfordish perfection that the society they inhabit has forced upon them:

Carlotta’s recital came next. No problems here, but the same unbroken success story as had been deflating all her friends for years, ever since the days of her unnaturally natural pregnancies when she had felt so much less sick than anyone else and had produced bigger babies with shorter labours and fewer stitches than anyone could imagine. The way she’d talked about it, you’d think that the babies were mere by-products of the process; no more than incidental trophies designed to commemorate Carlotta’s capacity for Radiant Motherhood. You kept waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing ever did: and now here was the first of these products getting nine O-levels and a prize for physics — a tribute this time to his mother’s qualities as a Whole Woman.

I can fault this only in that, as things build to that glorious conclusion, there’s a moment where Fremlin, at pains to catalogue every moment of casual agony so perfectly until now, suddenly goes ‘Er, so somehow this happened…’ and robs us of what should have been the wonderful moment where the defences fail and the barbarians previously held back by determination and iron will storm the citadel. Once again, it’s as if the complexities of actual plotting don’t quite marry up to the skill Fremlin clearly possesses elsewhere and, as with The Hours Before Dawn, it dents the fully-rounded perfection of this. Arguably that scene is the entire point of the book, and the dawning understanding that you’re being hand-waved past it is a deflating realisation.

However, who would imagine that I could take such delight from a book as this? Don’t pick it up because you want the “Britain’s Patricia Highsmith” that the cover promises — a nonsense comparison, pure advertising pithiness without any accuracy — but rather for the astute and painful examination of characters placed under an all-too-relatable quotidian strain that really does feel like it could roll up to your front door at any moment. It’s the familiarity of Fremlin’s suspense that makes it so terrifying, and I eagerly anticipate bathing in it afresh before too long.

~

See also

The Idle Woman: This is a tale of men and women, and women and women – of men’s eagerness to be flattered and women’s need for admiration; of power-plays and jealousy; of how love can decay not by any great betrayal but simply the gradual drip-drip of indifference, perhaps without one of the participants even noticing. It isn’t particularly flattering to anyone, but it shows a piercing understanding of character that rather impressed me. And Fremlin is so gifted at showing the way that great emotions pulse beneath the carefully-schooled smile.