The Blackmailer by Isabel Colegate

Author:Isabel Colegate
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526615558
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

7

To a certain extent, of course, Judith was a prig. To a certain, quite small, extent, she was still the scrubbed sixteen-year-old who had commanded the school of which she had been head girl with such devoted efficiency.

Even in her ‘intellectual’ days, that is to say in the years between her leaving school and her marriage, she had never quite lost that way of looking at things. For instance, though the code she then adopted involved tolerance and even admiration for any sort of unconventional behaviour among her friends, she herself had never really lost her head girl’s healthy opinion that ‘sex was silly’. This had lasted even beyond her marriage, the principle being only slightly modified—that is to say, sex became silly except with one’s husband.

Indeed, it was only in the realm of ideas that she was the free spirit she thought herself. Where behaviour was concerned, where life was to be led, her inclination was towards the safe, the conventional, the duty-guided. Her intelligence, which was not as exceptional as she thought it but was perhaps unusual in a woman, and her eagerness to find a duty whose path to follow, had led her into some strange friendships, into, even, a rather strange marriage; but in spite of everything she had had few moral doubts. Right was right and wrong was wrong. She would not have liked to have heard it expressed by that cliché, but though it perhaps debased her attitude, it more or less summed it up.

With it, she was a fatalist. It was perhaps this last, together with an altogether feminine desire for self-immolation, which made her need to devote herself to a duty, for duty breathed life into the inevitability of events, gave them, if not a meaning, at least something to be suffered for.

Her liking for responsibility was one reason for her liking for Jean-Claude. She wanted dependents. She had enjoyed the days when her widowed father had relied on her; she would have liked to have had a lot of children; in long daydreams she gave herself a kingdom and ruled it with scrupulous fairness and devotion. Jean-Claude was solitary and helpless. He needed to be fed, kept warm, and allowed to cook and clean; that was all he wanted, and Judith, in providing it, gladly assumed him as one of her duties.

When, therefore, Baldwin Reeves after four days of brooding arrived at her house in a self-made rage and ordered her to dismiss Jean-Claude, she was deeply upset. She would rather have paid any money in the world, and said so.

During the last few days, the midget had assumed a disproportionate importance in Baldwin’s eyes. The latter’s reasoning, being now influenced by various emotions not clear even to himself, was not particularly valid, but it ran, roughly, along these lines. He had found out that to get money from Judith was not hard, but his success had not had what now seemed to be the desired effect on her, for instead

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