How unbelievable it always looked in the newspapers, the chronicling of a fifth wife or a tenth husband exhumed on somebody’s at-long-last suspicions. How, you wondered, had the opposite partner gotten away with it all these years, why had no one ever questioned this rapid matrimonial turn-over before?
But no one had, and the record was there to prove it, although it was impossible to overpark without getting a ticket.
Hilary said with interest, “You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold.”
“I thought you said you were sick?”
“I’m sick and cold,” said Margaret out of her pounding throat, “and the doctor is coming and if you’re all right I think I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”
And Hilary did have feelings, well-buried but nevertheless there, because her still-flushed squirrel face went solemn, her yellowish gaze was genuinely alarmed. She had simply never been face to face with any demand on her feelings before.
“If you get sick,” said Hilary practically and offendedly, “who’s going to take care of me?”
Dr. Wimple arrived at shortly after twelve. He took Margaret’s temperature, looked down her throat and into her ears, listened to her lungs, counted her pulse twice. By persistent questioning, Margaret found that her temperature was almost 103, her right tonsil was badly infected, there was congestion in her lungs, her pulse was fast.
He asked if she had ever had quinsy and if she tolerated penicillin, and gave her a shot there and then which she could only liken, later, to a kick from a vindictive horse. He said that she would have to go to bed at once, wrote out a prescription that he would have delivered, and asked after her little girl.
“Oh, she’s not mine. She’s—her parents—oh,” said Margaret despairingly, “I can’t go into it.”
She went with Wimple, still shuddering uncontrollably now and then, while he examined Hilary, said something about secondary infections, and removed a long curl of red crayon delicately from the heel of his shoe. “Now, can you find someone to come in? Otherwise I’d advise the hospital.”
For the first time in her life, Margaret found the thought of a hospital appealing. To enter another world, high, white, sterile; its corridors lighted and travelled at night, however hushedly; its very routine, shutting out any other possible activity, soothing. Hilary could probably be wangled in, too, bringing the nursing profession to its highest, most haggard peak.
But she would be shut away from even indirect contact with Cornelia. “I have someone I can call,” said Margaret, folding her arms tightly around herself, “and she can take care of both of us.”
Wimple put things back in his bag. He had offered Hilary the used tongue depressor, and she had answered primly, “There might be germs on it.” As he straightened beside the bed a piece of paper floated to the floor, and he picked it up, glanced at it, and returned it to Hilary after a lightning glance at Margaret and a somewhat delayed smile. “You’re quite an artist, aren’t you?”
“That’s Mrs. Foale,” said Hilary, divided between pride and invalidism, and Margaret and the doctor, equally taken aback, gazed at a purple outline of face, one sharp-lashed blue eye lower than the other, a scribble of black bangs, a crude red smile.
“Very nice,” said Dr. Wimple, recovering first, and then to Margaret, as he eased himself into the living room, “An imaginative child, isn’t she?”
“Very.” Although she wasn’t, really. “Thank you, doctor.”
“Had any more trouble with your visitor of the other night?”
Why did he ask that just now, and was it only her nerves that thought he was examining her, watching for some betrayal by eyes or mouth or hands? “No. I’m sure he was quite harmless anyway,” said Margaret, meeting his gaze steadily. “I was coming down with this throat, I suppose.”
“I did the autopsy on a hit-and-run victim on this street that night,” said Dr. Wimple, equally off-hand, “and took a bullet out of him. Julio Garcia, his name was. But of course the man you saw would have told you if he’d been shot. He’d certainly have been looking for help.”
He could not have seen the bloodied flagstones in the dark; lie couldn’t know, even though her face must be flaming. This was the tiniest portion of what she could expect if she told the police about Julio Garcia’s last visit, because although she had neither gun nor car they would find it difficult to believe that she hadn’t known he was hurt, impossible to understand the panic that had driven her to wash the stones of the porch.
To explain that she would have to explain about Philip and Cornelia and herself and Mrs. Foale—without a scrap of proof. She would look like a classically jealous and bitter woman, determined to cave the roof in on the man who had humiliated her. More important, they would almost certainly detain her for questioning, or whatever it was they did, and she would be out of touch with Cornelia at this time that mattered most.
“I don’t think it could have been the same man,” said Margaret, allowing doubt to creep in. “At least, I certainly hope . . .”
She gave the doctor an imploring look, to which he rose. “It’s very unlikely. With that loss of blood, you’d have known. I’d like you to call me—let me see—on Wednesday, and I’d keep the child in bed, too . .
Margaret called Lena and then went fugitively to bed. For just a few minutes, she thought; just long enough to get warmed through, to put down her aching head and not think about anything at all.
She shivered for some time under the blankets, and all at once her body let go and was still. She had to fight a gradual cocoon-like drowsiness, because Hilary
