“Yes, you would. You certainly would,” said Margaret with emphasis, because such a sane and sensible observation from Hilary must not be allowed to go unnoticed.
“You were scared of him, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” And he had known it, and enjoyed it; for all she knew, he might have accepted the click of the lock as a challenge.
And oh, Lord, the furnace.
Never, thought Margaret fiercely, will I take on anything like this again. Not for Cornelia, not for anybody.
Hilary had apparently covered her tracks in the library; the bookshelves she often prowled through, as though she was assessing Mrs. Foale’s taste in literature, were stiffly, staringly neat. The photograph of Philip had probably come from here, although there was no album. If it were a picture that Philip had given Cornelia—teasingly, because Cornelia had what almost amounted to a phobia about mustaches—she would never have left it lying around loose. She was tidy and very methodical, and the only impact she and Philip had made on the house at all was in the bureau drawers in their bedroom.
Hilary would hardly have explored there—not out of delicacy, but because her interest was not Philip or Cornelia but Mrs. Foale.
Margaret realized with surprise that her brain had figured all this out by itself; it had simply informed her, during the night, that Philip had known Mrs. Foale at some previous point.
Well, suppose he had? There was no law that required men to list all their previous acquaintances for their wives, and perhaps, so newly married, Philip had thought it the better part of valor to say nothing at all. Although no bride could very well object to the thin sixtyish woman of the framed photograph in the hall . . . Almost without volition, Margaret went to look at her again.
A good sixty, sweet but austere, mouth and nose thin and wavy, light eyes, blue or gray, with autocratic lids. A crisp edge of high frill showed about the throat. She looked the very image of a bird-fancier. The sharp, almost illegible inscription in the lower right-hand corner said, “To Hadley with deepest affection, Christina.”
Christina? Isabel, surely?
Beside this photograph, identically framed, hung one of—no, it was not an elderly gibbon because it was signed, “To Christina with love, Hadley.”
How odd and formal for husband and wife, or were they husband and wife? Margaret tried to imagine away Hadley Foale’s white Van Dyke and decorate him with Christina’s sedately rolled hair, but it was a complicated process and got her nowhere. There seemed to be some resemblance, but there often was between long-married couples, and in any case she might be imagining it. She had already begun to imagine that the photograph of the small dark-haired woman in the vase in Hilary’s closet was faintly familiar.
Certainly, because of the postcard, the current Mrs. Foale was Isabel, and just as certainly the foolish little shoes and slippers had never been worn by Christina. Margaret turned away with an odd feeling of oppression and came face to face with Hilary, emerging from the kitchen with a piece of over-jammed bread which, as Margaret opened her mouth in warning, relinquished a cluster of strawberries onto the floor.
“When is lunch?” said Hilary, treading resolutely into the jam.
Margaret closed her eyes, but when she opened them Hilary was still there. “When you’ve cleaned up what you’re standing in,” she said restrainedly. “Maybe we’ll go out.”
“Out to lunch?”
“Yes.” Although Margaret thought of it in reverse terms: out of this house—anywhere, into the light and the open.
Hilary was still suspicious of this benevolence. “Me, too?”
“Yes, if you can ever get yourself unstuck . . .”
They went to a small old adobe restaurant with a poplar-ringed courtyard for summer dining. Faint approving smiles followed Hilary’s silkily brushed hair, white-piped navy blazer, plaid pleated skirt, but then Margaret herself was constantly astonished at Hilary’s prim outer casing. She ordered chicken tacos for both of them and, while they waited, a whiskey sour and a glass of ginger ale, realizing with a kind of gloomy outrage that she was being regarded as Hilary’s mother.
The drinks came. Margaret lit a cigarette, gazing gratefully at part of a mountain peak, still snow-clad against a meltingly warm blue sky, and was recalled by Hilary’s voice. “Do you drink a lot?”
Well, she had only wanted temperance lectures to make her perfect. “No.”
“Mrs. Foale does.”
Margaret said “Sshh!” sharply and instinctively, but no one at the neighboring tables seemed to have noticed. It was a measure of Hilary’s effect on her that, after a thoughtful moment, she didn’t say “Nonsense,” or “That doesn’t concern us,” but simply, “How do you know?” Hilary dropped her yellow glance. “There’s a huge big box of empty bottles in the cellar, in that room. I got worried about the furnace once when you were taking a shower,” she added rapidly, “and I went to look at it and I heard this funny noise—”
“Like fire,” suggested Margaret pleasantly. “Or burglars.”
“Well, and I went and looked, and the box said blankets but there were all these bottles in it. Whiskey,” said Hilary in a low carrying hiss.
Savingly, the tacos arrived: thin crisp brown tortillas enclosing slivered chicken, lettuce, cheese, and a delicately hot sauce. It was Margaret who was saved, because in spite of a minor amount of discomfiture Hilary had obviously relied upon the startling quality of her latest discovery to carry her through.
And quite rightly; Margaret was much too taken aback to embark on the usual lecture. Of course, “all these” bottles might be two or three, or Mrs. Foale might have collected them painstakingly to flow wax over as candle-holders for her less fortunate acquaintance. Still, what a bacchanalian secret for the dimly elegant old house to conceal beneath its polished floors and fragile rugs.
Hilary, busy with her tacos, appeared to have forgotten all about Mrs. Foale for the time being, and perhaps she
