She studied her gloved hands while Margaret murmured indistinguishably, and then, moving briskly toward the door, she said, “Still, I’m afraid it was all too much for Isabel, poor child. If she had only let me know, or waited until I came back from a short trip of my own —but perhaps Europe, a complete change of scene, is best. I do hope your sister will be the better for her vacation, Miss Russell.”
“Thank you, I’m sure she will.” Margaret held the door. “What’s the name of the cookbook, so that if I find it I can put it aside for you?”
The haughty gaze returned hers with fixity. “The Art of Spanish Cooking. A dark green book. Thank you so much, Miss Russell, and good day.”
Margaret closed the door slowly, and, with the sun pouring down and Lena moving distantly around the house, locked it. Hilary was either asleep or otherwise content, and she had time to look at a number of things.
“Poor child”—but to Elizabeth Honeyman, so painedly perfect, anyone who had not attained to her own age, wisdom and discrimination would be a child. Still, the frivolous shoes—and the elderly gibbon. Isabel Foale had obviously been far younger than the man she married, but odd and unexpected idylls did occur in that line from time to time.
Had it been an idyll, or did Miss Honeyman merely believe it to have been so, or was she only pretending to believe it? Certainly she had seemed to accept and even approve of Christina’s successor, in a patronizing way. On the other hand, a woman of such pride and bitterness might dissimulate for a number of reasons— because she was jealous of Hadley Foale’s name, or wanted continued access to a house she loved possessively, or wanted to shape the second Mrs. Hadley Foale in her own thin competent hands, or was, purely and simply, a meddler.
In spite of the woman’s ready description of it, Margaret did not believe in the cookbook. Jerome Kincaid had tried to enter the house, thinking it empty; he had lunched with Miss Honeyman; Miss Honeyman had turned up on what seemed more and more a transparent errand. She had inspected the bookshelves in the library, she had opened and closed the pantry drawers—
Lena’s soft voice in the hallway said hesitatingly, “Ma’am?” and Margaret answered, “Just a minute, Lena, I’ll be right there.”
She went rapidly into the pantry. She looked in both drawers, and even in the cabinets above and the cupboards below, but the letter Hilary had found on that first misbegotten day, the letter out of which she had spelled “pregnant,” wasn’t there.
Six
LENA had come to tell Margaret that Hilary wanted her, which was just as well, as Margaret wanted Hilary. In the cool apple-green and white room where Hilary lay with the covers pulled primly up to her chin, she said in an off-hand voice, “I got your magazines and your paste . . . feel better?”
“No.”
“What is it—your stomach? Your throat?”
“I get these attacks,” said Hilary morosely, and Margaret had an instant vision of the Greenwich Village apartment, Hilary tottering off to bed to recall her parents’ attention, Mrs. Reverton saying anxiously to friends and pediatricians, “She gets these attacks.”
“Hilary, do you remember the letter you found in the pantry drawer?”
“What letter?”
It was going to be one of those conversations. “The one you spelled a word out of, when you were looking for shoelaces, and I told you to put it back.”
“And I did,” said Hilary with suspicious promptness. “Are you sure? Because it’s important.”
“You never believe anything I say,” said Hilary, but she looked so flushed and injured that Margaret could not bring herself to pursue it. She got the thermometer instead, and found presently that Hilary’s temperature had gone up a degree and a half. Margaret glanced at the clock, gave her another aspirin, and went quietly off to find the doctor’s telephone number.
A curled piece of cellophane tape still clung to the pantry wall over the phone, but the slip of paper with telephone numbers it had held was gone.
Margaret knew dismally what had happened. The warmth of the pantry radiator had dried the tape, the paper had fluttered down, Lena, inured to the litter left everywhere from Hilary’s scrapbook work, had swept it up and thrown it away.
She went back to the bedroom and Hilary. “What doctor did Cornelia have, do you remember?”
Hilary stared up from her magazine. “She didn’t have a doctor.”
“She did, she must have. The number was here, but it’s lost.”
“Well, he never came,” said Hilary practically. “Am I going to have a doctor?”
“Yes, I think you’d better.”
Hilary’s flushed face went reverent. “Am I very sick?”
“No,” said Margaret dampeningly. “You have a cold that we might as well get rid of, that’s all. Would you like some soup now?”
Hilary said almost in a croak that she would not, and Margaret, leaving the room, controlled a smile that flickered out by itself. Hilary must be mistaken about Cornelia’s not having had a doctor, of course; he might have made late-evening visits, or come while the child was out. (Out where?) In any case, she had the telephone number she had found with the thermometer in the bedside drawer.
When she dialled it, the line drawled emptily back at her. Well, it was a little after noon on Saturday, but wouldn’t a doctor have an answering service? Frowning, she got the directory, leafed through the back to “Physicians,” and went examiningly through the names. She had only thrown a glance at the slip of paper when Cornelia taped it up; still, she ought to recognize the name when she came across it.
It began with M, she was fairly sure of that. And here were Martinez, Mendoza . . .
