At nine, Lena arrived. Margaret had a second cup of coffee and walked into the town in the bemusingly springy, sunny, bird-chirpy morning. The mountains might have been laid with fresh damask above their vast blue-purple lower slopes, but color and softness were emerging everywhere. Bare patches of earth were gold rather than dun, the blueness of the sky, to an upward glance, seemed to stain the immediate air. For that matter, it was hard for an East-coast mind to conceive of a really bitter winter in a land where low adobe houses, white or blurred pink or clay-colored, sheltered so safely among so many walls.
In town, she bought magazines and sherbet and a card game for Hilary, and discovered herself lingering on the way back. She quickened her footsteps deliberately; she must not allow her dread of the house to grow any deeper. She was committed to it until Cornelia and Philip returned, and to give in to near-fear would be to surround herself with nightmare.
Gaze preoccupiedly bent, she turned in at the gate and came face to face with the woman who had been Jerome Kincaid’s companion at lunch the day before. She was also, upon her first greeting, the woman who had telephoned the house asking for Mrs. Foale.
Her name was Elizabeth Honeyman, and she pronounced it as though it hurt her tongue. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, although well-cut tweeds gave her a look of almost wasp-like agility. It was impossible to tell whether the pale banding of hair around a face like a chic wood-carving was the result of age or sun until, close up, her tanned skin showed its fine tight creping. Her small raspberry smile, when it appeared, was amazingly sardonic; tired, haughty gray-blue eyes gave the impression of being infinitely superior to and bored with Margaret after less than a minute’s interchange.
Would it, she wanted to know in her rather weary voice, be all right if she reclaimed a cookbook she had lent Isabel several months ago?
“Oh, certainly,” said Margaret, and opened the door. The morning flooded briefly in on the white walls, turning the dark vigas lustrous with reflected light until she closed the door again. A faint new astringency, not quite a fragrance, had entered with them. When Margaret turned, her visitor was gazing with fond approval at the beaded peacocks, the formal brocaded chairs and settees, the shadow-sunk Orientals. “Christina did love this house,” she murmured to Margaret. “The first Mrs. Foale, you know. She was a cousin.”
“Oh,” said Margaret, recognizing belatedly the autocratic lids over the middle-colored eyes. Christina had been austere but sweet, this woman was austere and embittered. Hastily, because her eye had fallen on some of Hilary’s drawings on the desk and Miss Honeyman looked like the kind of woman who would cable Mrs. Foale at once, she said, “I haven’t come across the cookbook, but you’d probably know where it’s kept?”
“In the pantry, I believe,” said Miss Honeyman, starting away. .
Her back, her every footstep, claimed the house as familiar, well-loved territory. There was no trace of Hilary in the pantry, but to get there they would have to pass the jigsaw puzzle on the dining-room table. Margaret paused, turned a piece, and fitted it into place under Miss Honeyman’s small saturnine smile. “You care for puzzles?”
“Now and then,” said Margaret nonchalantly, and proceeded into the kitchen. Beyond her, as she put the sherbet in the freezer and dropped the magazines and cards behind the breadbox, she heard the pantry drawers open and close. Miss Honeyman appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Now, I wonder where . . .” She was giving cabinets and surfaces an inventorying stare, pausing hard at the mobile with one bird missing. “Of course, Isabel left so suddenly . . . Might it be in a bookcase, I wonder?”
Margaret agreed that it might, realizing as the other woman set off for the library that Miss Honeyman was only bored and weary when other people were talking; she followed up her own utterances with a keenly attentive stare.
How hard it was, how almost impossible, to imagine either her or Mrs. Foale in serious possession of a cookbook.
Of course, Jerome Kincaid might have mentioned Hilary in the course of lunch, and Miss Honeyman might well be inspecting the house, on her friends behalf, for crayon on the walls, jam on the slipcovers, modelling clay on the floors. Certainly her glance at the bookshelves was cursory. Straightening, she proceeded to put Margaret through an interrogation whose full insolence did not register at the time.
No, she hadn’t taken the house herself; it had been rented by her sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Byrne. Her sister had been ill with flu, so they were off on a recuperating trip while she, Margaret, looked after the house.
Oh, didn’t they, Miss Honeyman inquired rather discontentedly, have help?
Margaret, beginning to bristle, explained about the housekeeper’s fall and broken hip and their feeling of responsibility in leaving a furnished house vacant. She could not have hit upon a happier theme; Miss Honey-man’s face grew almost benign. “Very wise, oh, very wise indeed. Isabel regards this house quite as a trust; she’s most particular about it. I must confess that I was surprised to hear that she had rented it at all.”
“A trust?” repeated Margaret. Two could play at this game, and she arched her own eyebrows at Miss Honeyman.
“Yes. You see, she and Mr. Foale were married in the East—he had gone there for diagnosis and surgery, which unfortunately he did not survive—and Isabel’s first trip out here was of course a very sad one. There was the house to be put in order, family things to be stored. . . Fortunately a relative came with her to help.” Miss Honeyman looked around for her purse and her gloves, found them, and donned both.
