My Friends George and Tom (My Friends...) by Duncan Jane

Author:Duncan, Jane [Duncan, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

When on my return, George and Tom met the train, all thought of Monica was swept out of my mind for almost the first words George spoke were: ‘Jean has been seen here in Inverness.’

‘She will have heard about you and the books,’ Tom said, ‘and is on her way back to see what is in it for herself, the old devil, as well as having nowhere else to go by this time likely.’

To an onlooker, the degree of my shock at this news would have been incomprehensible for no one other than myself had any intimate knowledge of my relationship with Jean. Even as a child, I had seen in her everything that I most disliked. She was stupid and at the same time cunning, she was physically coarse and fat as she grew older but at the same time vain, she was avaricious but at the same time ostentatious and she was capable of acute mental cruelty yet endowed with the ability to forget that she had ever been cruel. Jean did not deny, merely, things that she had said. She could forget literally and at will, it seemed, that she had ever said them. This intimate knowledge of her was peculiar to myself, this was Jean through my eyes only, but Tom, George and Jock had a similar though less intimate knowledge and in Achcraggan at large her malicious tongue and her vicious temper were a by-word.

I knew Jean better than did anyone else because I had first met her when I was ten years old and had lived in her shadow for six impressionable and, I think, observant years, but more important than this by way of gaining knowledge of her was the fact that she hated me. Jean had little capacity for liking and loving. Indeed I think that the only person she ever had any liking for was my father, who had given her the things that she most valued in life, which were the marriage title and a home that was financially secure. Hatred can be as potent as love in the revelation of a personality and Jean’s hatred for me was great enough to expose her fairly fully to my observation.

Down the years, I had not gone to the trouble of hating Jean in return. I simply avoided all contact with her, forgot her for most of the time and laughed about her when she came to my mental notice. But deep in my mind my knowledge of her had hardened into an almost physical thing, I discovered now, a thing from which I recoiled in horror as I would from a rodent or a reptile.

‘Now then,’ George said in the lounge of the hotel when I let my teaspoon clatter into my saucer, ‘you are not going to worry about this, Janet.’

‘But do you think she will come to the cottage?’

‘Quite likely but there is no need for you to lose the skin off your hands over her.’

‘She will be grudging every penny she has to pay in boarding-houses and places,’ Tom said.

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