Book Read Free

The Iron Cobweb

Page 11

by Ursula Curtiss


  Lucy Brent said airily, the next day, “Not a word about the last moments at the sickbed? Heavens, I misjudged the girl.”

  It was the airiness, and something under it, that took Elizabeth out that afternoon to see Lucy.

  The Brents lived in a house that Elizabeth had always coveted, a shapely old house set under maples with a deliberately prim picket-fenced lawn. The harbor lay below it; behind rose a tumble of gray mossy rocks that ended the park above. At some point in its lifetime the house had been painted a serene smoke-blue that looked like a reflection from the water; Lucy and Steven had added the snowy shutters and the white brick chimney.

  Elizabeth, arriving, glanced around her at the charming yellow and white and russet living-room Lucy had contrived out of auctions and cunning. “Where’s the puppy?”

  “Oh, the shepherd?” said Lucy, casual. “As a matter of fact I— we gave him to the people down the lane. He was a dear little thing, but you know me about the house . . .

  Elizabeth did know, which startled her all the more: Lucy was one of those rare and expert beings about whom order always seemed to appear without effort. She had a sudden flashing vision of Lucy driving off into the snow the afternoon Steven had dropped in without warning; of Lucy iced and angry, walking into the house, looking at the puppy, picking up the telephone . . .

  Lucy was looking at her, and saying, “It must be wonderful to have Noreen back and be able to get out again. She still hasn’t said—?”

  Elizabeth shook her head, and told her. She made it short and matter-of-fact: her own visit to the house on Sycamore Street, Noreen’s stricken silence. And she watched, and went completely unrewarded. Lucy said reflectively, “She must have gone of her own free will—people don’t abduct grown girls in full daylight. Did you get to see the aunt?”

  Elizabeth said she hadn’t, and Lucy shrugged. “I supposed she’ll tell you some day—when she gets around to it.”

  There was, again, that odd intimation of something known and withheld. Elizabeth didn’t pursue it, she had tried that and failed. She sat through another cigarette, and thought that she reminded herself a little of a research chemist who had set cultures to grow, and went the rounds now and then to see what was happening.

  A number of people got killed that way, finding out too late which tube contained the deadly thing.

  Elizabeth had said she must go, and was fishing for a glove that had slipped down between the cushion and the arm of the loveseat, before she discovered that Lucy wasn’t quite the impeccable housekeeper she had thought. Something else came up with the white pigskin. A twist of metallic purple that had, surely, covered a bon-bon.

  She went upstairs early that night, leaving Oliver and Constance in possession of the living-room, because there seemed no further point in pretence. They knew she was in another world, their eyes discussed her. There were invisible head-shaking-s, soundless comments. Elizabeth wondered curiously and a little coldly if this was how you felt when you were getting—peculiar.

  Who could hate her enough for this, when she stood in nobody’s way? When her life boiled down to the facts that she was a perhaps-happier-than-average wife, the mother of two small children, a writer of very small renown? No fortunes at stake, no momentous secrets, no one she had wronged, or been wronged by. Nothing to single out her existence from any other woman’s, except to herself because she loved it.

  Unless—and this was openly terrifying—there were no reason at all. Any more than an avalanche had reason, or a lightning bolt. Someone near her slipping out of control, destroying blindly, purposelessly, for destruction’s sake. . . .

  Elizabeth brushed her hair ferociously, trying to deaden the sound of Noreen Delaney’s voice saying tonelessly, “There’s nothing you can do.”

  Because if someone were deriving pleasure from tearing flowers and ruining Jeep’s birthday, forging her checks and removing her sleeping pills, turning Christmas morning into a quiet horror, that form of domestic upset would very soon start to grow tame. There would have to be a stronger, sharper excitement. . . .

  Oliver came into the bedroom, startling her; she had planned on being in bed, feigning sleep, because that was easiest. He went past her into the bathroom; the shower rushed briefly. Elizabeth smoked a cigarette and waited, and at the appointed moment stepped casually past him. “Water still hot? If it is, I think I’ll have a bath.” It took her a long time, afterwards, to forget the moment when she came back into the bedroom, and Oliver looked at her and put down a cigarette, unlighted, and crossed the room to her without saying anything at all. She turned her back swiftly, pretending absorption in a bottle of cologne, but his hands came down on her shoulders, light, workless, demanding.

  “Oh, don’t, don’t —” Panic wrenched her away, turned her suddenly rigid, risking a glance, not daring to glance again at Oliver’s dark and angry face.

  The electric clock hummed audibly for a moment. Elizabeth stared at the floor and controlled her involuntary trembling; when she looked up at Oliver, still formidablv close, his face was expressionless. He said coolly, “Sorry if I frightened you—my error,” and walked violently past her to the closet. When he emerged he had a robe slung over his shoulder. He said politely, “I’ll be downstairs reading. You won’t, I’m sure, wait up,” and closed the door behind him.

  Elizabeth went to bed and eventually to sleep, her face wet and aching in the solitary dark.

  “Pigs can’t swim,” said Maire suddenly from the back seat.

  “Pigs go oink-oink-OINK!”

  “And little boys sit quietly on the seat,” said Noreen, interrupting Jeep’s mounting shout.

  Elizabeth put the car around a corner, glanced briefly into the rear-view mirror and smiled. It had been an inspiration to sweep all of them out of the house for a drive; it was like a blowing-away of cobwebs. The children, who had been threatening all morning to push each other down the stairs, were amicable again, reporting the view from their separate windows. Noreen sat between them, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright with pleasure. Every now and then, at something the children said, she would give a soft little spurt of laughter, as though it had been sealed inside her for too long and was beginning to bubble rebelliously out.

  Elizabeth thought she understood; she felt her own mood lift as she drove. She took a contrary pleasure in this aimless expedition, as though she had slipped away from some dark and clinging presence, almost as though she had outwitted it. No one had known they were going to do this, and it followed quite simply that nothing could spoil it.

  Over the last wooded hill and down to the harbor, where the water rustled greenly about the dock; Elizabeth stopped the car and took out her cigarettes. It was too cold for the children to get out and sit on the wooden benches. Noreen said, “I’ll just take them up the end and back, shall I, Mrs. March?” and Elizabeth nodded and watched them go.

  So small, really, when you looked at them as a stranger might. Elizabeth thought back to her conversation with Noreen Delaney that morning. The girl had been clearly mystified by her mention of the ‘oun’—and as clearly worried, putting into words what Elizabeth had felt all along. “I hate to see Maire afraid of anything, she’s got so much—I guess it’s trust. She gets very gossipy in her bath—perhaps if I asked her in a roundabout way tonight?”

  Elizabeth put it out of her mind firmly; that, and her own growing, helpless dread belonged to the house and the existence she had managed to shake off for an hour. Noreen and the children approached the car, and she smiled at the three of them coming back identically rosy, and turned the car reluctantly for home.

  It was on the way back that chance entered the quiet deadly battle for the first time. Elizabeth was threading through the streets of the town when a small rattling sound she had been vaguely aware of for some time turned suddenly into a clatter. It came from the rear of the car. It was something caught and dragging, or—

  A policeman solved it for her, motioning her to the curb. Elizabeth rolled
her window down and looked up at the stiff weather-reddened face. He was new, she hadn’t seen him before. He said with a kind of leisurely disaproval, “How long since you’ve looked at your rear license plate?”

  “About an hour,” Elizabeth said mildly. “I’m sorry, Officer, it seemed all right then.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem all right now.” He was sour and deliberate, bending to squint into the back of the car, returning his stare to Elizabeth. “If I hadn’t stopped you, lady, you’d have left that plate in the street.”

  There followed a brusque lecture on general maintenance. Elizabeth said again that she was sorry and would have it attended to at once, and was surreptitiously shifting gears when the policeman said abruptly, “Are you a resident here?”

  “Yes.” He was new, and ambitious. Elizabeth dipped into her bag for her wallet, unzipped the inner compartment where she kept her driver’s license and thrust her gloved fingers inside a little impatiently.

  She took everything out of her wallet, and explored every compartment of her bag, before she was sure that the driver’s license was gone.

  Fourteen

  A POLICE SERGEANT whom Elizabeth knew arrived, and sent her on her way with a wink and a warning. She drove home in a quiet numbness, listening to the children’s, “What did the man say. Mama?”; hearing only the confusion in her own mind.

  She had last used her driving license as identification two days before Christmas, when in a flurry of last-minute shopping she wrote a check for Constance’s doeskin gloves. She remembered very clearly putting the license, folded small, back into its compartment in her wallet, because the zipper had caught, running up, and the salesgirl had said sympathetically that workmanship wasn’t what it used to be. She had managed to get the zipper up at last—and she hadn’t had occasion to use the license since.

  So it had been removed deliberately from her wallet.

  She didn’t tell Oliver. She knew he would not believe in her own certainty, and it had become instinctive with her to avoid issues between them. She applied for a new license, and when it came, folded it inside the five-dollar bill she always carried in the cylinder attached to her car keys.

  New Year’s Eve came and went. Constance announced a little stiffly that she had made plans of her own; Elizabeth and Oliver went to a party at the Perrins’. The Brents were there, and approximately twenty other people. Elizabeth wore black that showed a thousand pleats when she stirred, and thought she was doing very well until Jane Perrin said with midnight frankness, “Elizabeth, it’s so good to see you, and so wonderful of you to come when anybody can see you’re not well.”

  Hollows about her throat, a restlessness in her hands, a new habit of starting at sudden sounds—all of it showing, in spite of a gaiety donned as carefully as the extravagant black gown.

  And Oliver watching her across the room: that, thought Elizabeth, was the worst of all. His eyes examining her as though she were someone else’s wife, interesting but not for him. And did she imagine it, or was there a new quality to his constant study that night—a watchfulness, like a man who has brought his hydrophobic wife to a swimming meet? Was Oliver afraid of what she might do, or say?

  He was—and she hadn’t known how bitter this could be—her escort, in the severest sense of the word. She had come with him and she would leave with him, and in between, even when he was at her side, there was nothing.

  It was on the third day of the new year that Jeep brought her the thing that, like a reagent, began to show her the first dim outlines of the pattern.

  She had just come down from the studio, having taken a perilous and on the whole pleasing plunge at a first chapter. Noreen had seen her descending the hill and was assembling the little tea-tray; Elizabeth thanked her, shivering, and carried it into the living-room. That was when Jeep came tiptoeing out of the small front hall, clearly enchanted with some project of his own.

  His left hand dangled ingenuously at his side, his right was hidden behind him. His little square face beamed as he said in the challenging tone Elizabeth used over different-colored lollipops, “Which hand. Mama?”

  Elizabeth appeared to meditate and soberly chose the hand behind his back. It would be a penny, or a rubber band, or a block . . . but, this time, it wasn’t. It was a strip of shiny, crinkly paper, perhaps an inch and a half wide and four inches long, with the edges of a chartreuse and silver design.

  She said, only half looking at it, “Thank you. Jeep, that’s what I call handsome. I’d better put it away before I lose it.”

  Jeep climbed into her chair. His momentous and all-knowing air was gone; he said plaintively, “What is it, Mama?”

  “What is it? Oh, a piece of paper, left over from Christmas, maybe . . .”

  She really looked at it then, and realized in a puzzled way that it was not gift wrapping, that she had seen it somewhere before very recently and that it had a definite echo in her memory. She knew it as certainly as she had known—why did she think of this? —that the twist of purple foil in Lucy’s loveseat was a bon-bon wrapper. She took it gently out of Jeep’s toying fingers and examined it more closely.

  It was one end of an envelope; she could see the fold and the beginning structure of comers. There was only enough black lettering on the chartreuse part to tantalize: “—ue” in flowing script; under that, in small block capitals, “—ney.”

  Elizabeth turned the strip of paper over in her fingers, unable to explain to herself her sudden sharp interest. She had seen this, or something very like it, before, and that was all. Or was it all? Why was she lifting it out of Jeep’s reach, why did she feel this remembering tingle?

  She said cautiously, “Pretty, isn’t it. Jeep? Where did you find it?” and Jeep, all pride again, said kindly, “I show you,” and caught her hand.

  He led her first to the dining-room and, palpably at a loss, pointed under the radiator. “No, not there,” Elizabeth said patiently, and Jeep, anxious not to lose the spotlight so gratifyingly focussed on him, repudiated the radiator and said with growing confidence, “I show you. Mama.”

  Elizabeth followed him up the stairs, and looked in a number of unlikely places before she realized that he was merely prolonging the game. Perversely, the silvery scrap gained importance. She was standing in the upper hall, still fingering it, saying, “Jeep dear, try and remember where you found it,” when Constance mounted the stairs, her coat over her arm. She said mildly, “I had no idea it was so cold outside . . . are you looking for something, Elizabeth?”

  For once, her cousin’s unceasing vigilance would probably have helped. Elizabeth knew that even as she closed her fingers over the fragment of paper and said lightly, “No, but we’re pretending to, aren’t we. Jeep?”

  Jeep gave her a betrayed stare. He said injuredly, “Where pretty paper, Mama?” and Elizabeth said firmly, “Maire’s calling you. Jeep, better run.”

  In her own room, she smoothed out the chartreuse and silver strip again and examined it, trying to recapture the casual identification her mind had made once before. Or no, twice, because someone—near her? with her? outside the house, at any rate—had commented on it, and she had looked again and been, it was coming closer now, amused.

  If she had seen it outside the house, chances were she had been Christmas shopping . . . but where, and with whom?

  In the days after that, Elizabeth found to her astonishment that she could actually work, that it was as though her studio lay outside the perimeter of danger. She bought a hot plate and some instant coffee and a supply of cigarettes, and spent her mornings there, banging at her typewriter with a concentration she’d never felt before, sprawling full-length on the couch to “read and try to assess what she’d written, lighting a cigarette with one already burning in the tray beside her, going back to the typewriter to take up again or to scrap what she’d done and rewrite.

  She was almost happy, in the studio. She could forget temporarily the shock of her new relationship to Oliver, Maire’s terrors,
the mystery of Noreen’s absence, the possible meaning of the bonbon wrapper in Lucy Brent’s loveseat. If her own life were crumbling around her, she built new ones for other people out of inked ribbon and yellow paper. She was half aware of the uselessness of that even as she took comfort from it, but at least she was doing something with the waiting period.

  Because it was just that, a waiting. While someone went on hating her for the everyday things she possessed, and inched closer. There would be a pounce, when the hatred overran itself.

  But meanwhile, if in the studio she lived in borrowed freedom, the cobweb waited quietly for her in the house—clinging, reminding, brushed away only to entangle her again. A glance from Oliver could set it quivering, or a word from Constance. A look from Noreen, as though she reflected Maire’s panic; a visit from thin, nervous, sharp-eyed Lucy.

  It was not a new year at all, it was a deterioration of the old. Nothing happened to punctuate the slow and terrifyingly domestic decay until Saturday of the second week-end in January.

  It was a day of curbed violence right from the start; wild drumming winds, thrashing branches, an echoing rain that changed to a sleet like silver pepper at the windows. Oliver awoke holding Elizabeth personally responsible for the weather, and Elizabeth, sharply nervous over the hollow, mocking, here-and-there sounds of the storm, flashed at him.

  After breakfast Noreen, measuring the temper of the house, spirited the children away upstairs. Constance announced unexpectedly that she had agreed to take a table at the library tea: “Such a shame, isn’t it, that we should have weather like this for it?” So that at a little before eleven o’clock that morning Elizabeth and Oliver had the downstairs part of the house to themselves.

  It was as awkward as though they were strangers waiting for a mutual hostess, not liking the look of the party.

 

‹ Prev