She mustn’t think about this, not here, not now.
The thoughts came anyway, random, dreadful. The knife rack in the kitchen. The medicine cabinet. The shelving of roof, with the apple tree leaning against it, under the children’s window— such an easy swing up for an adult body, such a crippling plunge for a half-asleep child.
Elizabeth brought her hands up to her temples and pressed fiercely against the bones. Constance sampled the mint sauce and said consideringly, “Perhaps just a thought more vinegar?”
There were precautions to take and Elizabeth took them, walking stubbornly over the bewilderment and disapproval and silent concern that met her on all sides. The children’s afternoon walks ceased; they played within the confines of the grounds. Elizabeth established a new regime under which, when the children had had their supper and bath, she heard their prayers and saw them into bed herself, inspecting their room and their windows in the process.
She went through the medicine cabinet and threw away paregoric, phenobarbital, the codeine left over from her attack of pleurisy: everything that might constitute danger to a child, or—at the very back of her mind—an adult.
Above all, she watched.
She watched Lucy Brent, who dropped in the day after the fire in the studio, full of horrified questions and headshakings; she watched Constance, whose long bland face might hide anything at all, and Noreen Delaney. She even watched Steven, whose wordless understanding had become a prop.
And, icily aware of the state to which she had come, she watched Oliver.
She thought, Which of them?
The children reacted instantly to the unaccustomed confinement and Elizabeth’s new sharpness. Maire grew quarrelsome and mulish, losing her clear piping voice in a maddeningly accented singsong with an expression to go with it; Jeep reverted to all-fours, said simply, “I baby,” and behaved accordingly. That was why, on a bitter dark day toward the end of January when Noreen was off, Elizabeth gave the children an early supper and herded them up for their bath an hour ahead of time.
Here, at least, they were both under her eye. The water ran, the mirror and the window grew blind and steamy, wind rustled coldly about the shutters. Elizabeth pushed her white silk sleeves high, tossed boats and soap and rubber ducks into the tub, and caught herself straining for another sound over the tumult and splash from the faucet. But even when she turned it off and undressed the children absently, all her concentration on the empty house about her, there was nothing.
There couldn’t be, of course, because Constance was out and the doors were locked. That distant click was the refrigerator, the muffled sound on the stairs was wood reacting to heat . . . and this was precisely what she was supposed to be feeling: that the bathroom, a refuge ten minutes ago, was in reality a trap.
The thought brought steadiness with it. Elizabeth said, “Stop that!” to Maire, who had placed a dripping washcloth on Jeep’s head, and knelt forward to intervene. She wasn’t in time. Jeep, emerging from the cloth with his eyes screwed shut, flung a double handful of bath water at Maire, who leaped up in a stung-pink slipperiness that evaded Elizabeth’s fingers, seized the towels from their rack and plunged them triumphantly at Jeep.
Elizabeth scooped them both promptly out of the tub and spanked them impartially; in an interval between howls she heard a door close somewhere on the same floor. Constance was back, and could bring her dry towels. She fixed the children with a bleak eye, said, “Don’t move, either of you,” and opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hall. She got as far as “Constance? Could you hand me—” before her voice died in her throat. “Did I frighten you?”
Oliver was smiling at her. He took his shoulders away from the wall, breaking the terrifying immobility with which he had been standing when Elizabeth glanced up the hall. His face was watchful behind the smile, but it had lost its look of—was it rage?
“It was just—you’re early, aren’t you?” Elizabeth said it before she thought, because the finding of any words at all just then was an accomplishment.
Oliver’s eyes changed. He said flatly, “Yes, a little,” and started past her. Elizabeth was saved from speech by a violent splash from the bathroom behind her.
“Bad boy,” said Maire with an undercurrent of admiration.
“Bad gel,” said Jeep, complacent.
“Hand me a towel, would you, Oliver?” said Elizabeth, and escaped.
She dried the children and put them, suddenly meek and full of virtue, into their pajamas. She tried to forget, because it was so disturbing, her first impression of a total stranger—waiting, menacing—who had spoken and smiled and turned into the man to whom she had been married for five years.
The children went thumping downstairs in search of Oliver. Elizabeth sat still on the edge of Maire’s bed, recapturing in spite of herself the sound that had made her step out into the hall. It had been the closing of a door, and involved in it was the protesting shiver of faintly warped wood. There was only one door in the house that closed that way, and it was the door of Constance’s room.
So that Oliver’s early return from Boston, at a time when she would normally have been busy in the kitchen with the children’s supper, was not as casual as he had tried to make it seem—was not, in view of his stormy face, casual at all.
What had he seen in her cousin’s room—or searched for, and failed to find?
Seventeen
AT TEN-THIRTY that evening, because the silk scarf she had tied over her hair was wet with melted snowflakes, Elizabeth went reluctantly back into the house.
Oliver, deep in a book, glanced up and said, “Still snowing?” and went to the window to look. At the desk, pen poised over a sheet of notepaper half-covered with her small decisive writing, Constance lifted her head to say dutifully, “Jeep cried out a few minutes ago, and I went up. His head seemed a little warm, I thought. Do you think he might be catching cold?”
“Probably,” said Elizabeth, and hung up her coat and scarf. “I’ll go have a look.”
Jeep was snuffling damply in his sleep. Elizabeth felt his forehead and the hand she could find; he was warm, but not alarmingly so. The morning would tell. She tucked in the covers and went downstairs again. Oliver had abandoned the window and was back with his book; Constance was sealing an envelope at the desk. Elizabeth paused a long moment in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and then found her voice.
“Isn’t there—don’t I smell something?”
Constance lifted her head, the light glimmering in her glasses, and sniffed thoughtfully. Oliver rose sharply to his feet. Elizabeth said hastily, “Not smoke.”
Perfume. A tiny teasing whiff of it, as surprisingly present as a strange hat and coat draped over the newel post. It was a heavy scent, sweet, musk-laden, with a tired edge. It was the kind of scent that would be thoroughly at home in, perhaps, the Hotel Savoia. . . .
It was the scent that had hovered in Noreen Delaney’s room, so palpably wrong in its surroundings, on the day an alien face had stared blindly up at Elizabeth’s studio.
It didn’t take her long to find the source. The hall closet door hadn’t quite caught when she closed it, and the perfume was bolder when she swung it wide. Under her scarf, which had slithered to the closet floor, was a handkerchief, damp from contact with the wet silk, and reeking.
Constance wrinkled her nose as Elizabeth lifted it. “That isn’t yours, is it, Elizabeth?”
The handkerchief bore no initials. Smoothed out, it was a small square of white linen, a woman’s, but other than that, anonymous. Whose fingers had dropped it, how long had it lain there before dampness had released the latent fumes?
To Elizabeth, it was suddenly the very smell and touch of hate. Aware of Oliver’s grimace, she walked steadily to the hearth and dropped the handkerchief onto the smouldering logs. Behind her, Oliver was silent; Constance said startledly, “Oh! Did you have to—?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, and turned to face them both, her hands behind her bac
k so that neither of them could see how desperately her fingers clutched each other. “I’ll be glad to make restitution, but I happen to loathe that particular perfume. I think I’ll go up now—is anyone else tired?”
Half an hour later, she gazed at Oliver’s back, bare above the waist, and said carefully, “Oliver, I think I’ll go away for a while.”
There was nothing in her voice to suggest panic; it sounded like an idea she had considered for days rather than a desperate measure, thirty minutes old. But, watching Oliver’s leanly muscled shoulders, Elizabeth thought that they tensed, as though his hands, exploring in his bureau drawer for a matching pajama top, had forgotten what they searched for. If it happened at all it took the barest part of a second, because Oliver turned almost instantly and said emphatically, “Good idea—it’s what you need. Get a complete rest from the house and the kids.”
“I’d take them with me.”
There was a brief silence, loud with the implications that brought Elizabeth’s chin up defensively. Then Oliver said slowly, “Oh, I see. Where will you go?”
She hesitated only fractionally, but it was too long.
“You don’t trust me, do you, Elizabeth?” Oliver was almost gentle. “My . . . God. While I—!” He moved with sudden controlled violence, shaking a cigarette from a package on the bureau.
tossing the burned match in the direction of an ashtray. He didn’t look at her.
Elizabeth sat up straight against her pillow, as stunned and tingling as though she had been struck. There could be no evasion now, even if she had wanted it. This time the small pause in the bedroom had the tight inevitability of the space between lightning and thunder. Into it she said steadily, “I think I’d better hear the rest of that.”
“Do you? All right—” Oliver turned abruptly. Because his voice was as careful as hers, his face bleak and unreadable, the astounding question came at Elizabeth with no warning at all. “Where did you spend the night of November 19th?”
Incredibly, it wasn’t a joke. Elizabeth stared at him. “The night of—here, of course, where I always do.”
“Not that night. I was in New York for the stockholders’ meeting. When I called home—late—you weren’t here.”
“Then I—” Elizabeth groped through bewilderment for a moment before she remembered. “I did sleep at the studio once when you were away. I suppose it was then. Constance must have told you when you phoned. . . .”
She looked at Oliver’s face in the instant before he turned his shoulder, and the last words trailed away. The bewilderment went with them. Shock took its place, and a butterflying anger in her midriff. “Of course Constance told you,” she said slowly, “and you don’t believe either of us—which must mean you have a theory of your own. All right, Oliver, where did I spend the night of November 19th?”
Oliver’s back had stayed grimly turned until then; the mockery stung him. “As a matter of fact, a number of people say you were at a hotel in Boston.”
Elizabeth was so astonished that the full meaning of that didn’t register at once. When it did it was like an answer in a crossword puzzle, radiating other answers in every direction. The Hotel Savoia and Oliver’s presence there, the mysterious telephone calls, the menacing voice on the wire . . . but she must make sure of it. She said in a voice as impersonal as Oliver’s, “The Hotel Savoia, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And not alone, needless to say.”
“No—not alone.”
In the silence after the short crossfire Elizabeth reached blindly for her robe, pulled it about her shoulders and slid out of bed. Oliver was standing furiously still across the room. She said incredulously, “You’re paying blackmail for that— blackmail. You don’t believe—”
“To hell with that.” The violence left Oliver suddenly; he looked white and tired. “The point is that you make it so damnably hard—”
There might have been more; Elizabeth didn’t hear it. She found her slippers and then the doorknob, and at last the refuge of the hall.
She woke at a little before six o’clock, stiff and cold, in the wing chair where she had finally fallen asleep. The lingering; winter dark at the living-room windows, the silent yellow lamplight, the brimming ashtray at her elbow had a dreamlike air. With an effort, Elizabeth forced herself to face the inevitable waking of the house.
She emptied the ashtray, started the coffee, turned up the thermostat. She washed her face at the sink and paper-toweled it dry, and thought remotely how nice it would be if the shadows could be wiped away too. Tip-toeing like a thief, she searched for and found a comb and a spare lipstick, and when she had poured herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen there was nothing left to do but start remembering again.
Ugly as her own errand at the Savoia had been, Oliver’s had been worse, because she had depended purely upon the evidence of her own senses and Oliver had not. He had gone there at the suggestion of someone else—not the person who hated her, that would be too dangerous, but a go-between—and he had found the evidence arranged for him. He had balanced that against all that he knew and had loved about her—and she had lost.
How?
Last night in their bedroom she had been wholly concerned with the repercussions between Oliver and herself; nothing had mattered at all beyond the fact that he could believe what he did. But there had been the solitary hours in the wing chair after that, and the realization that evidence of a sort would have been easy to supply after all.
There was her driver’s license, and there was the haircoloring, the kind you could wash in, and, just as simply, out. Given even that vague assistance, it shouldn’t, at the Savoia, be difficult to find a clerk, a bellboy, to absorb and repeat a description of Elizabeth’s coat, her bag, her rings—to cover a night when she hadn’t been in the house, and Oliver had phoned from New York.
A woman, of course, would know the telling power of personal detail. And there had to have been a man.
Had Oliver also been furnished with a description of her supposed companion, or had he stopped short of listening to that? Put together, Elizabeth was bitterly certain, it would have added up to Steven Brent.
Go away now, today—the place on the Cape, the small house her parents had left her, hadn’t been rented this year. She wouldn’t have to see Oliver at all; she could call him at his office just before she left with the children.
Out of nowhere, watching the ashy dawn, Elizabeth wondered dully what people meant by a clean break. It wasn’t clean, there were no neat edges at all, because you grew so far into someone else’s life and possessed so much of his that it could only be a savage, rending affair. . . .
Just as someone wanted it to be.
She found that, in making plans for departure, she had reckoned without Jeep. His eyes were drowsy that morning, his face flushed and hot. Elizabeth called the doctor and went stubbornly about the rest of her preparations, assembling blankets, warm clothes for herself and the children, a carton of emergency rations. She drove the car into Boston for a complete overhauling and a change to snow tires, and then she prepared to wait.
She closed her eyes to the reactions around her: to Oliver’s bitter, adamant silence and her cousin’s speculation, to Noreen’s troubled air and the shrewd curiosity Lucy Brent didn’t try to conceal.
Deliberately, she locked herself away from them, allowing herself to feel nothing at all, until the morning of the day before she was to leave for the Cape. They were at breakfast when Oliver said abruptly, “Oh, by the way, I won’t be home until late tonight. One of the vice-presidents and his wife are up from New York—Moulton was going to take them to dinner and the theatre, but he’s home in bed and I’m stuck with them. So expect me when you see me—” He was rising.
Always, before, she and Oliver together had entertained the visiting hierarchy; it was an established custom. In spite of the iced neutrality between them now, Elizabeth was stung, so instantly that words slid to her tongue before she had time to think.
>
“I’m so glad you reminded me—I’ve got to dine out too, as a matter of fact. Crale, one of the men at Homham’s, wants to talk to me about resurrecting my book in time for September.”
It wasn’t true. Crale had mentioned dinner, but they hadn’t gotten as far as dates. She had only to pick up her car at the garage in Boston and drive home again to dinner with Constance while Oliver, who had started thinking of her as an embarrassment to his work, did some deferential escorting of a vice-president and his wife. . . .
She caught a train to Boston at a little after three o’clock that afternoon.
She had regretted the childish subterfuge almost instantly that morning. Under Oliver’s eyes she had felt compelled to go through with it, although it meant a sudden welter of rearrangements. A telephone call to Lucy, explaining that they would not be able to come for cocktails at the Brents’ after all, apologies to Constance, who would have to curtail her activities as hostess at the charity bazaar in order to be back at the house by six o’clock, when Noreen Delaney had to leave.
But I’ll be back by then, Elizabeth thought, watching the bleak marshes flicker by. I’ll say Crale was called unexpectedly to New York, and Constance can go on being hostess and I can finish up the last of the packing.
At North Station, she took a taxi to the garage in Brookline. They were finishing up on her car, the foreman told her; they had had to install a new battery. If she could come back in about an hour . . .
Elizabeth found a small restaurant four blocks away and had a solitary cocktail and a chicken sandwich. It was nearly dark, at a few minutes after five, and a raw raging wind had come up. She almost ran the distance back to the garage, coat skirts whipping, gloved hand anchoring her feathered felt cap.
Her car was ready, unaccustomedly shining, smoothly obedient when she pressed the starter. By this time tomorrow night she’d be getting supper for the children in the house at Orleans. Knowing that they were hidden and safe, feeling none of the sudden prickling nervousness that brought her foot down now on the accelerator.
The Iron Cobweb Page 14
