What jealousy reveals
Text 1: The Prompt Corner, by Imogen Strachey
An original short story extract.
From the prompt corner Margaret could see three things: the lit stage, the back of the prompter’s head, and, for eleven minutes before her first entrance every night, Celia Vane.
Celia waited in the wings in the green silk gown that Margaret had been fitted for twice, in case. She stood very straight, with her eyes closed, while the dressers fussed round her hem. Everyone said she was the best Rosalind the company had seen in years. The notices in the Post had used the word luminous. Margaret had cut it out and kept it in her purse, though she could not have said why, except that it hurt in a useful way, like pressing a bruise.
Margaret knew every line. She knew Celia’s lines better than Celia did; she had learned them on the bus, in the bath, in the queue at the butcher’s, mouthing them so that people stared. Six weeks of understudy calls, every afternoon, playing to an empty house and a stage manager eating an apple. Six weeks of waiting for a cold, a sprained ankle, a telegram. She was not proud of it.
Tonight, a minute before her cue, Celia opened her eyes and looked straight at Margaret. Then she held out her hand.
It was shaking. Not a little. It was trembling so hard that the rings on her fingers clicked together.
“Every night,” Celia whispered. “Every single night. Don’t tell them.”
Margaret took the hand without thinking. It was cold and damp, and she held it until the cue light flicked green, and then Celia drew it away, lifted her chin, and walked out into the light, and the whole theatre seemed to lean towards her.
Margaret stood in the dark with her own hand still held out, empty, and for the first time in six weeks she did not know what she wanted.
Text 2: Cheers, Mike, by Tom Ashdown
An original short story extract.
Ethan could do everything. That was the first thing Jack noticed about him, and the second, and the tenth. He could turn burgers on the barbecue without them falling through the grill. He could play guitar, properly, with chords. He could make Jack’s dad laugh, a big helpless laugh that Jack had not heard since before the divorce, by doing an impression of a man at the garden centre.
It was Jack’s first time at the new house. He sat on the edge of the patio with a can of lemonade and watched his father in a stripy apron that someone else had bought him, standing next to a boy who was not his son, flipping sausages and talking about football as if they had known each other for years.
Jack hated the apron. He hated the guitar. He hated the way Ethan said “Cheers, Mike” instead of “Thanks,” and the way his dad said “Cheers, mate” back.
Later, looking for the toilet, he went round the side of the house and found Ethan sitting on an upturned bucket by the shed, alone, looking at his phone. He was not playing anything. He was just looking at a message, over and over, scrolling up and down.
Ethan put the phone away fast when he saw him. “My dad,” he said, though Jack had not asked. “Said he’d come today. He does that.” He shrugged, the same easy shrug as before, but his face did not match it.
Jack did not know what to say. He stood there with his can of lemonade going warm.
“Your dad’s all right,” Ethan said, after a while. “He talks about you all the time. It’s actually quite annoying.”
From the garden came the smell of burning sausages and the sound of Jack’s father calling both their names.
‘In both texts, jealousy reveals more about the jealous character than about the person they envy.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
120 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3 Section A: Reading meaning and effects – skills, covering 3.3.2 Analyse and compare use of language, 3.3.3 Draw inferences and justify with evidence, 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts, and 3.3.7 Evaluate form and structure. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.