Nor did Margaret. Beyond any reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt at all in her own thunderous head, it had been Philip.
Eight
EVEN if it had been Philip, that was no reason to stand here with her mid-section gone hollow, her hand as tight and still on the cradled receiver as though it had been fused there.
With an effort, Margaret got herself away from the telephone and into the empty shining black-windowed kitchen. Almost unaware of what she was doing, she made herself a second drink and sat blankly down at the table with it, gazing fixedly at nothing.
No, not nothing: dim montages of Philip’s face when she had first known him—bent toward hers at a cocktail party, waiting smilingly outside the apartment door, turned to her on the street, in restaurants, in countless places. Words went with the overlapping images, the things Philip had told her about himself in that first and often-regretted freedom with which people attracted to each other unroll their inner selves like maps for inspection.
He loved mountain climbing, strictly as an amateur, of course; he had done some on a trip abroad during college and still did, whenever he found a height to go up.
He was all alone in the world except for a divorced aunt who spent such time, effort and money in looking half her age that she shunned such a tall mature relative as though he had been a mass of extra calories. Margaret had met her once, slim, sable-caped, hair a delicate silver-gold, on the arm of a handsome dark man outside the Plaza. When she and Philip had moved away after introductions and the briefest of pleasantries, a fragment of the light voice had followed them: “. . . by marriage, of course. But isn’t he enormous? . .
In the course of tea at his apartment, Margaret had wormed a collection of photographs out of Philip, and in none of them had he worn a mustache.
So much for the prostrating effect of the altitude, the cousin whom he had gallantly accompanied out here in her distress, the mustache.
How long did it take to grow a mustache? Of course, if you were in any kind of hurry, you could buy one.
The thought of Philip going out to buy a mustache, pricing them solemnly, trying them on, was so ludicrous as to be cheering. Margaret clung to her amusement, and it carried her safely through dinner, the washing of the few dishes, the inevitable wandering back to the library.
There it deserted her. The caching of the liquor bottles was now explained; a sorrowing widow and her ailing cousin would have to be very careful indeed of every overt move, and great numbers of empty rum bottles would not do at all. The mustache had altered Philip’s appearance on arrival, and the tale of the blood-pressure condition had kept him out of sight, except for a random glimpse like Miss Honeyman’s, from then on. Obviously, anyone who went to that amount of trouble was anxious to avoid recognition—then, or at some future time.
It could be argued that if all this had taken place before his marriage to Cornelia, it was strictly his own concern. What had shaken Margaret so badly was not so much the fact that Philip had lied, but that he had lied so well, so smilingly, glancing around the living room on the night of her arrival and saying wryly, “Cosy, isn’t it? But a stroke of luck for us that Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is decided to rent it.”
And what about Isabel Foale, going abroad so precipitately? Had she thought Philip was going to marry her—was morally bound to marry her—and then, learning about Cornelia, cut herself off from a situation she couldn’t bear?
How angry Philip would be, Margaret thought irrelevantly, if he knew about the things Hilary had found: the snapshot of himself, the other one, and apparently the only one, of Mrs. Foale. But of course in bringing Cornelia to the house he had thought himself safe with those two elderly portraits in the hall. He had never envisioned the possibility of a quietly prowling Hilary, nor of Margaret’s being there.
Margaret found herself staring at her book without having comprehended a line. One of the library windows faced on the porch, and a slice of black glass showed; equally, a slice of lighted room, untenanted except for herself, showed to whoever might care to look. She got out of her chair, carefully unhurried, and twitched the heavy beige curtains to a complete close.
“Missa Foale give Julio money.” To wind the clock? Hardly, unless that were a sacred duty imposed on her by Elizabeth Honeyman. It seemed much more likely that he had been paid to keep away, that he hoped, with his mixture of servility and impudence, that Margaret might be interested in keeping him away, too.
He. She hardly thought of him as a man at all, only as a pair of eyes under a big hat, a sinuous, insinuating presence that might flatten itself like a snake and get into the house after all.
A chill touched her—but it was an actual, physical chill, a brush of cold air on her legs. One of the tall windows must have slipped its catch and be standing negligently open.
Don’t get excited. (Wasn’t that what the snakebite kits said so waggishly?) Walk briskly and loudly through the house, an indignant resident but not a terrified one, a woman who would calmly send for the police at the first threat of an intruder. Margaret’s shaking legs, so addressed, took her into the long living room with its islands of light, through it and into the hall beyond, where the draught was stronger.
Hilary’s room, the door open on blowing darkness. Margaret got the light on, sweeping the wall for the switch with a frantic hand. There across the room was the wide-open window, its unhooked screen swung out from the bottom, summoning in the night—and there
