Celia reminded herself coolly that she had not touched Mr. Tomlinson, but she was well aware that it could be made to look . . . that Susan could do her considerable harm. Particularly in the unlikely event that she matched notes with Mrs. Cannon.
But none of it was going to happen. As a result of the trip to Bridgeport and the talk with Lena, her family would disavow any knowledge of a Celia, out of simple— and simple-minded—fear.
And yet there was a tiny flaw somewhere in what should have been Celia’s total relief at having sealed off that threat. Something she had said, or not said, to her sister? Or some physical object in that dreary, cluttered room? She frowned unconsciously at the somewhat worn carpeting of Mrs. Pond’s room, where they were having a late highball, and Mrs. Pond studied her with the acuteness that lay behind her misty-looking green eyes. “You’ve got something more on your mind than an apartment painting,” she observed without archness; anything in that vein was husbanded for her labors in the Alexandra’s public rooms. “A man, possibly?”
“More or less.” It was a lie; Celia had not thought once about David Macintosh since walking into that horrible scene with the police and weeping Maude Egan and Susan and the door standing nakedly wide on the silence of Mary Ellen’s bedroom. Now she gave him a moment of fierce concentration. Was it possible that out of shock and remorse he would babble something that a newspaper might consider worth printing, something that would drag in Celia’s name? On the whole—a man who deferred to his parents’ sensibilities to the extent David had—no. Still, Celia was sharply alarmed that she had overlooked this potential menace; for a few seconds, the world seemed to contain nothing but enemies.
“Which usually means more,” Mrs. Pond was remarking thoughtfully. She tipped her dark head, to which she had recently added a swash of disarmingly false pink-gold; the part of Celia which was always clinically detached noted that this was the kind of thing women like Mrs. Pond could do with casual success. “You know, I did think when you arrived that you were looking a trifle edgy.”
Celia glanced at her with coolness.
“But then, March is a month you can have, for all of me. Wherever you are,” said Mrs. Pond, suddenly pensive over some problem of her own, “it’s the perfect time to be somewhere else.”
To be somewhere else . . . It was an almost uncanny reflection of Celia’s growingly restive frame of mind.
She would have been both angry and incredulous if someone had suggested that she was not unlike a forced laboratory growth which was able to seek out a host plant, feed to satiation, drop off and roam in search of another host for its supply of a different element. But she did recognize that she had absorbed all that the world of the Vestrys could give her.
It was a comfortable and decorative world, but there was no place in it for the kind of niche Celia planned for herself. She would have slipped away from the Vestrys soon even without the awkwardness of Mary Ellen’s suicide, because almost without conscious effort on her part a diagram was taking shape in her mind.
She lay awake for a long time that night, aware, as she had been months before upon first moving to the Alexandra, that whatever move she made now would be of extreme importance. In a way, this plan would be like going back to Square One in a child’s game—but from it she could take a giant step.
She presented herself the next morning in Mrs. Pond’s blond-wood-and-lime office and proposed that, in return for room and board, she be taken on as assistant to the social director.
Mrs. Pond had been in the hotel business too long to register surprise at anything. She gazed across her desk at Celia’s well-groomed energy and then nodded at the little cubbyhole that opened off one wall. “I do have Miriam, you know, for typing and errands and the phone.”
It was said as crisply and sensibly as though Mrs. Pond, after hours, had not complained irritably about Miriam’s dumpiness, prattling, and general inefficiency, and Celia responded in kind. “Yes, I know, but there are other things I could take off your hands, although I can type too if things get rushed. I could help with the fashion shows”— for some reason Mrs. Pond had an almost pathological hatred for the hotel’s occasional fashion shows—“and the children’s parties, and I’d consider the training as payment.”
Mrs. Pond’s phone burred then and she lifted the receiver, but she went on gazing at Celia reflectively as she talked; Celia, in turn, felt far more tense than she had under Charlotte Wise’s clever, protuberant dark eyes. Mrs. Pond hung up and made a note on a pad. She said, “Well, we can hardly have unsalaried employees—it’s against all kinds of laws, for one thing—but I suppose there is room in here for another desk, and I’ll speak to Mr. Tashman.”
Mr. Tashman was the personnel manager, a grim little tyrant who, according to Mrs. Pond’s unguarded statements, stalked about with his hands clasped behind his back seeing which of the staff was superfluous that day. Celia’s heart sank, and lifted again as Mrs. Pond said with a slight smile “—and Mr. Wilhelm.
Mr. Wilhelm was the assistant manager of the hotel, and the author of the flowers which were usually to be seen in Mrs. Pond’s room. Celia left the office in a hopeful frame of mind which was justified at ten thirty that night, when the social director tapped at her door
