The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  Her own reflection in a mirror caught and stopped her. Pale pointed face, emptied of its assurance, filled with inner questions. No color at all in her cheeks, her lips, just the startlingly dark arch of brows and etching of lashes around frightened eyes.

  It wouldn’t do under Oliver’s new clinical gaze. She ran upstairs. The children were splashing in the tub, and there was a line of light under Constance’s bedroom door. In their own bathroom Elizabeth washed her face in icy water, put a flick of powder over the resultant pink, used her lipstick. She looked better now—still not like a seasoned mother of two, not like the Elizabeth March looking tiltedly out of her book jackets—but better.

  There was the doorbell; was Oliver locked out, or was it the telephone? Elizabeth opened the bedroom door and listened, and heard the rustle of bath water and a shouted “That’s MY duck.” And something else. Oliver’s voice.

  His car must have driven in just as she had gone up the stairs. Elizabeth went along the hall and stopped with her foot on the top step of the stairs and her call frozen in her throat. Below her, beyond the curve of the banister railing, Oliver said softly and concentratedly,

  “Friday noon. Same place . . . ? Right. And look, for God’s sake, I told you—don’t call me here again.”

  He said “Right” again, but Elizabeth only half-heard that and didn’t hear the click of the receiver at all.

  Seven

  “WINDY OUT,” said Oliver, “and getting cold as the devil. Shall we have a fire? Yes, we shall.”

  His topcoat and the evening paper went haphazardly into a chair. He knelt at the fireplace, saying casually over his shoulder, “Where is everybody? Kids in bed?”

  Elizabeth clasped her cold hands tightly together behind her back. “About to be . . . did the phone ring just now, or was I hearing things?”

  Oliver balanced logs and struck a match. He said cheerfully, standing again, “It did. Wrong number.” The kindling and newspaper blazed high, and waves of light washed concealingly over his face. “Drink? . . .”

  That was what bothered Elizabeth most of all—the easy good humor he hadn’t shown for weeks. As though the telephone call and his Friday appointment had transformed him; as though lying to her, idly, expertly, gave the thing an extra fillip. She was glad the firelight masked her own face; she could feel her cheeks burning with shock. That was odd, because her hands and her feet and the very center of herself felt so deadly, bitterly cold.

  They had cocktails, and Constance came downstairs wearing a soft green suit Elizabeth hadn’t seen before. The lines of it took the heaviness away from her body; the color made her skin and hair years younger. Constance, fidgeting, examining the seams of her gloves minutely, seemed vaguely embarrassed over her own changed appearance.

  Presently headlights glimmered through the gap in the hedge. Elizabeth and Oliver, realizing simultaneously that the driver was not going to emerge, broke politely into small talk while Constance put on her coat and went to the door. There she said breathlessly, “I’ve got my key. . . . Good-night,” and let herself out into the windy dark.

  “Don’t wait up, Ma,” murmured Oliver, catching Elizabeth’s eyes. “Isn’t this something new?”

  Elizabeth answered that with a shrug. She set the table and lighted candles; in the kitchen she tasted Constance’s salad dressing and added salt and a few drops of vinegar. She moved about automatically, and went on listening to the memory of Oliver’s voice.

  ‘I told you—don’t call me here again.’ She had been discussed, warned against; she was, intolerably, the female in the oldest, shabbiest tag-line of all: If a woman answers, hang up. And at the other end of the wire, whose voice? Friday noon, same place. It sounded like the essence of all clandestine meetings; it sounded as alien to Oliver as the heavy exotic perfume had seemed in Noreen’s bedroom. And it sounded like a warning bell that this was a part of what she feared.

  In the living-room again, she remembered all at once what had been driven out of her mind by the telephone call. Friday was the date of her morning appointment with Hathaway. It was a long-established hour that she always took when possible, because it meant she could meet Oliver for lunch before driving home. She said casually, “Oh, by the way, can we lunch Friday? Hathaway’s seeing me at eleven, and I’ll be through in plenty of time.”

  “Good,” said Oliver promptly. “Dinty Moore’s?” She met his gaze squarely, and it looked pleased and inquiring. “Yes, let’s,” she said, turning away. Friday would tell her a great deal, Friday was the fork in the road. . . .

  They had dinner in comparative silence until Oliver reached for a cigarette and said mildly, “Constance made any New Year’s resolutions that you know of?”

  Elizabeth took fire instantly. “Such as what?”

  “Such as plans,” Oliver said, still mild. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate what she’s done, because I do. But if we’re to be a permanent unit of five instead of four I think we ought to know about it and arrange things accordingly.”

  Five instead of four; it wasn’t a felicitous phrase. Oliver, knowing it, said almost without pausing, “What I mean is that if she’s staying we’d better make it known that where we’re asked, she is, and so forth. What we’ve got here is, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a very half-assed arrangement, indeed.”

  “And what would you suggest?” inquired Elizabeth, unreasonably angry. “That I tell her we don’t need her any more, and to go and buy a one-way ticket to someplace?”

  “Damn it, no,” said Oliver. “You know perfectly well what I mean.” But I don’t, thought Elizabeth; that’s just the trouble. I don’t know whether you want us to be alone again or whether you’re afraid of Constance, because she’s my cousin, watching and recording with those eyes of hers. She said stiffly, “I’ll get coffee, shall I?” and escaped.

  It was after coffee, it was nearly nine o’clock when Maire’s scream rang through the quiet house.

  To Elizabeth it was the sudden black eruption of everything hidden and malign in the house. She felt one burning wave of panic from head to foot and then she was on the stairs and running before Oliver had had time to do more than start to his feet and say, “Take it easy—!”

  Maire screamed again as Elizabeth reached the upper hall and brushed blindly past Noreen, bathrobed and blinking. She flung open the door of the children’s room, her breath shaking, and saw them both there and safe. Jeep humped like a camel in his crib, Maire sitting up in a tumble of bedclothes.

  She was only half awake. Elizabeth went to her and put a reassuring arm around the small pajamaed shoulders. She couldn’t have controlled her voice a moment ago; now it came out softly, just above a whisper. “It’s all right, honey—back under the blankets. . . .”

  Maire murmured something and crawled under the covers, and Elizabeth, smoothing them, looked around the room. Closet door closed, curtains stirring in the faint draught of cold air from the window—the child had waked and seen that, probably, like a dream brought to frightening life. . . .

  Branches scraped against the porch roof. Elizabeth, looking up from the watchfully open eye above the level of the blankets, saw the huge soft shadow on the far wall and turned her head sharply. It was Noreen, who had kept a silent vigil in the doorway, who must have seen Elizabeth’s nervous, roving inspection of the room.

  Maire’s visible eye had closed, lashes firmly down on the round cheek. Elizabeth stood up and moved away from the bed, and Noreen whispered practically, “Perhaps that draught—?”

  There was no direct draught on either of the children, they were both aware of that, and equally aware that the window that was open led onto the low porch roof, against which the apple tree, jostling in the night wind, made a perfect natural ladder. Elizabeth knew that in the odd little silence during which they stood facing each other in the cool stirring half-dark, had it borne in on her even more strongly when Noreen tiptoed past her, closed the window over the porch and opened the other, the one at the foot of Ma
ire’s bed, fractionally, from the top.

  Noreen must feel it too, then—the gentle, intentional warping in the house. She wasn’t a fool, and she had seen the roses, the bon-bons, Mrs. Bennett’s purse—most important of all, she was an outsider, looking in. And knowing, or suspecting, so that she grew daily more shadowy-eyed and apprehensive.

  Talk to her, thought Elizabeth, suddenly alert; pin down, if possible, small facts of timing and opportunity that might have escaped her in her own fog of dread. . . .

  Downstairs, Oliver was turning out all but the living-room lights, to be left on for Constance. He glanced at her briefly. “Early to bed, whether you like it or not—you’re shot, in case you didn’t know.”

  Elizabeth said nothing; she picked up her book and cigarettes and went silently upstairs. She was in bed when Oliver sauntered out of the bathroom, toothbrush suspended, and said, “What was all the shouting about—bad dream?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Oliver disappeared again; after an interval of splashing next-to-drowning sounds he was back again. “You know, some day,” he said without inflection, “you’re going to shoot up the stairs like that and trip and break your neck while Maire goes peacefully back to sleep.”

  Trip. And break her neck. While Maire . . . Elizabeth said tightly, “I can’t help running when I—when anything, anything might happen in this house,” and to her intense horror burst into tears.

  Oliver was there instantly, much as she had been there for Maire, with close-holding arms and the safe steady shelter that everyone, child or adult, sought at times to grow quiet against. It took Elizabeth some time to grow quiet, because the accumulated terrors of six weeks came spilling and hiccuping out into Oliver’s chest. Even then, remembering the short hostile exchange over Constance, she held back the forged checks, as though the unadmitted fear in her own mind put them in a place apart. She told Oliver, frantically, between sobs, about the roses: “I didn’t, no matter what you think,” about the bon-bons: “Can’t you see how horribly deliberate that was?”, about the face at Noreen’s window: “I don’t know who—and then the empty house. I’m so afraid,” said Elizabeth unsteadily, lifting her head and staring blindly across the room. “I’m so terribly afraid.”

  Oliver’s arms loosened. He was shaking his head, gently, as though he were afraid to trust himself with any more violent gesture. When she stopped speaking he tilted her face and said, “Elizabeth . . .” and groaned and gave his head a quick clearing shake and started again, gazing intently down at her, “You mean you’ve been living with this—this business ever since that mess over the roses? When you said yourself that—”

  Elizabeth was queerly, instantly conscious of the importance of this. “When I said what?”

  But Oliver shook his head, listening. Footsteps went discreetly down the hall, a light switch clicked, a door closed.

  Constance.

  “Oh, God,” Elizabeth said bleakly. ‘That does it up nicely.”

  “That,” said Oliver, grim, “is what I meant. Here, let’s have a cigarette and go at this a little at a time. . . .”

  Elizabeth stopped listening after the first few quiet words, realizing what seemed just then the ultimate horror. She had told it all to Oliver, gasping and crying and shaking like a child—and Oliver was treating her like a child, to whom he might explain kindly that the shadow under her bed was her slipper.

  No way out there, no one to help her after all. . . .

  She pulled stiffly away from Oliver as he concluded, “—ten to one I’m right. And things always look different in the morning —worse, maybe, but different. What you need at the moment is about twelve hours’ sleep.”

  Elizabeth lifted her bent head and caught an astonishing glimpse of herself in her dressing-table mirror. Wild eyes, wet cheeks, recklessly ruffled hair . . . no wonder Oliver thought she was hysterical.

  Or did he merely pretend to think so?

  Oliver was in the mirror, too, his gaze thoughtful and faraway. As though her eyes on his reflection had burned him he stood up and crossed to the bureau. “Think you could swallow a pill?”

  “All of them.”

  “Come now,” said Oliver, his back to her, “I wouldn’t—” His voice stopped, and Elizabeth glanced up at the sharp-edged silence. “Aren’t they there?”

  “Got them,” said Oliver, and brought her the capsule and a glass of water.

  Elizabeth settled herself under die covers and caught Oliver at the edge of his bed. “Do you suppose Constance locked the front door?”

  “Probably.”

  “I wish you’d look.”

  As soon as he had left the room resignedly, Elizabeth slid out of bed and crossed to the bureau. When Oliver came back she was in bed again, composed, still, with nothing to show the violent pounding at her temples.

  Two capsules left in the little gray pasteboard box that, last night, had held nine. Oliver knew it, because he had got the capsule the night before.

  Six missing.

  You’ll trip and break your neck, said the shocked hammering of her blood.

  And: What are we going to do about Elizabeth?

  Eight

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN two o’clock or four when Elizabeth found herself awake, nudged out of sleep by a change in the texture of the icy, deep-night silence.

  A bar of moonlight hung like a knife across the front of the bureau; she could almost have screamed at that. When the orientation of pulse and brain and senses was complete, she knew it was nothing in the room that had waked her.

  The curtains hung straight and still, the moonlight might have been a painted thing, across from her Oliver slept undisturbed, a long scissoring shape under blankets. She had dropped her head uneasily to the pillow again when she heard the soft, the indescribably secret sound.

  She knew later that a louder sound must have preceded it, jarring her out of the depths of exhaustion. Because this would never have waked her, this gentle and almost snuffling sound from somewhere below her in the house. As though—she listened again and found it in the immense library of connected sounds stored by the mind for random use. It was the faint shudder of wood being pushed, the delicate answer of metal.

  Someone was trying the front door.

  But Oliver had gone down and made very sure of the lock. Hadn’t he?

  The back door, the cellar door with its other entrance into the kitchen; the porch door—open to a seeking hand at this unconscious hour? Her shoulders and throat ached from the steady stubborn lift of her head as she listened. Elizabeth realized all at once that the sound had stopped and wouldn’t come again.

  The floor was cold under her bare feet as she stepped off the rugs in her progress to the window. It was a stageset lawn: bare arching trees, lawn drifted with shadows, stone path glimmering faintly with frost. Only the hedge moved at the inner edges of its opening, as though it had been disturbed a bare second ago—or had she imagined that?

  “Can’t you sleep?” said Oliver’s voice, shooting unexpectedly out of the dark.

  How long had he been awake, how long had he watched her? Elizabeth answered at random and went back to bed, still listening acutely. She was almost asleep when she heard the small, infinitely careful closing of Noreen Delaney’s door.

  Morning. Maire running a slight fever. Constance preoccupied over her generous, post-Oliver breakfast, going away behind her pale folded eyelids so that Elizabeth, fidgeting nervously with her coffee, felt as though she were excusing herself needlessly when she rose and went out to the kitchen.

  Maire was making a bubbling hum in her orange juice. Jeep wore a cereal beard. Elizabeth smiled at them both and said, “Noreen, if you have a minute I’d like to talk to you.”

  Noreen had just poured the children’s milk into cups in the pantry. Elizabeth watched with mild astonishment the narrow shoulders, the small deft hands, go rigid. After a second the hands went down automatically to the apron, twisting there, and the girl turned. She said on a caught b
reath, “Mrs. March, that’s what I’ve been wanting to ask you. If there’s something I should be doing that I’m not doing . . . it’s hard to know in a new place, and I’ve been wondering—I know you had someone so satisfactory before me—”

  “It’s not that at all,” Elizabeth interrupted hastily. “We’re more than satisfied, Noreen, it’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

  How pale the girl was, how braced . . . was it apprehension over her job, or a deeper fear? Elizabeth met the grave green-brown eyes, shadowed in mauve down to the ridge of cheekbone. The shadows were new; Noreen hadn’t had those when she first came, nor the faltering look to the young, down-curving mouth.

  She knew something—or she was afraid of something. Elizabeth was startled into changing her tack; she said gently, “Are you quite sure you like it here, Noreen? Don’t be embarrassed to say so if you don’t—children this age are quite an undertaking.”

  “Oh, please, Mrs. March, I love the children!” It was soft; it had an underlying violence, and Elizabeth was startled again. Noreen gave her a small anxious smile, and Maire said curiously, “Who loves the children?” and that, temporarily, was the end of it.

  In the middle of Friday morning Elizabeth dressed with foolish, superstitious haste. Her plum-blue suit, the fitted stiff-skirted rosy tweed coat that wasn’t really warm enough for a bitter day like this but might deceive Hathaway’s bright and nonchalant eye. She felt like a mad reversal of Lot’s wife, as though the danger lay in looking forward to the ring of the telephone and Oliver’s voice saying regretfully that he couldn’t meet her for lunch.

  She had been braced all through breakfast, but all Oliver said was, “Call me from the office there when you’re through, and I’ll give you a head start and meet you in the bar at Dinty Moore’s.”

  “Where you will take a head start.” She had felt gay with relief because Oliver was breaking his soft, hurried telephone appointment in order to meet her. There had been an obscure choice to make, and he had made it in her favor. Why look anxiously at the clock, then, why want so urgently to be out of the house and on her way to Boston before anything could happen . . . ?