His accusation, and subsequent embarrassment and need for explanation, had established a peculiar intimacy between them that could never have come simply from their both, theoretically, being devoted to Mary Ellen. They were a little like adults discussing a marvelous child. It might have been considered a dubious bond, but for the moment Celia was content with it.
The theater seats were good ones, but after her first genuine shock of surprise at the close actuality of flesh-and-blood players and the odd resonance of voices and footsteps on the stage, she barely followed the play itself. The central character seemed to be a waspish man in a dressing gown, while other people came and went through an astonishing number of doors and windows—at amusing intervals, apparently, because little tides of laughter rippled through the theater. Celia heard it all from a distance; she was overridingly conscious of David’s profile beside her, his hand under her elbow as they navigated up the aisle at intermission.
At no point was it love, or even strong physical attraction. It was triumph, the headier because it was secret. It was all the Mrs. Stevensons in the world, with all their desirable and out-of-bounds sons, powerless now to dismiss Celia from the scene.
In the lobby, just before the third-act buzzer, David turned in response to a tap on his shoulder, said with obvious pleasure, “Spence . . . Helen. When did you get back?” and seconds later was introducing Celia to a darkly tanned, amazingly bald man and a pretty woman with polished black bangs and a beautiful figure. They had evidently just returned from Majorca.
After a desultory comment or two about the play (“Clifton Webb really did it for all time, but Langley is very good”) tentative arrangements were made to meet for a drink afterwards—and in the middle of them something made a small, computerlike click in Celia’s head. Turning a little aside, audible only to David, she murmured, “I’d love to, but I think I really ought to get back, you know.”
And for just a second, David looked blank before he said, “Oh. You’re right, of course.”
For another second, Mary Ellen hung in the air, a very slight nuisance with her headache. That was some reward, but Celia, for tactical reasons deprived of a visit to a fabled after-theater place and the company of this dazzlingly knowledgeable-looking couple, was determined not to let it rest at that. At the curb, in the midst of the struggle over cabs, she said with an air of impulsiveness, “Let’s walk a little way, shall we?”
David looked at her with pleased surprise, as well he might; Mary Ellen made wry little sagas of her walks with him. (“Only a few blocks, he said, but that must have been before they moved Central Park”) He could hardly fail to notice the freedom with which Celia moved, or the more companionable height of her shoulders. When a taxi did slow, and they took it as a matter of course, there was a faint unspoken suggestion of regret, as though someone had come along with an umbrella just when they were enjoying the rain.
Small, dimly lit elevators were intimate at that hour. Celia said, “Thank you very much, David. I shouldn’t have enjoyed myself so much, with poor Mary Ellen ill, but I’m afraid I did.”
“So did I,” said David. “You’re quite a walker,” and waited until Celia turned her key. “Better not come in, we don’t want to wake her,” she whispered over her shoulder, and although David had had no intention of going in, there was, again, the wraith of the untasted nightcap, the leisurely rehash of the play. Celia summoned a kind of decorous complicity with her soft “Good night” and gentle closing of the door.
Mary Ellen was very much awake, sitting up and reading. Out of some subconscious defensiveness she had brushed her hair and put on a tangerine bed-jacket that threw a faint glow up into her small face. A trace of her cool sharp cologne lingered on the air. Celia, who had found it politic to hurry home to the sufferer, knew an instant of pure, uncomplicated dislike. “Is your head better?”
“Much, thanks. Practically like new. How was the play?”
“Marvelous, although I felt guilty about taking over your seat like that.” Rapidly, before the other girl could begin to ask for details which she couldn’t supply, Celia said, “Anything I can do for you before I go to bed? It’s been a long day, what with tramping around on interviews.”
“Not a thing. What a stunning coat, is it new?”
It wasn’t mockery—Mary Ellen was probably myopic enough to believe that the coat was new—but somehow the friendly talkativeness was tearing the evening’s triumph to pieces. She said with a slight edge, “No, I just got it out of storage,” and yawned and stretched with exaggeration. In the doorway she said punishingly, “Funny, the way you can be physically tired and all wound up at the same time. I haven’t your scruples, so I think I’ll take a sleeping pill . . .”
Celia was asked to the Vestrys’ for Christmas weekend, partly, she suspected, because Mary Ellen didn’t know quite what else to do about her, and partly because she would help serve as a buffer against the formidable Mrs. Vestry.
In the meantime, Harry Bloom had taken shrewd stock of Celia and she had done a little modeling for Castle- tweed. It was not, she discovered, the kind of modeling associated with chic hatboxes and extravagant eye makeup and other glamorous trappings; it was a matter of parading new Castletweed designs on echoing bare boards before little groups of hard-eyed buyers, often while someone darted agilely
