Jules turned his face impassively to the maid. “Miss Brett will have a daiquiri, I’ll have Scotch on the rocks. Adelaide . . . ?”
“Having recommended the sherry, I shall have to have it, shan’t I?” inquired Mrs. Wain humorously. But she was unvanquished; wearing a hostess smile as implacably as a conventioneer’s lapel button, she proceeded to put Celia through her paces.
“Jules tells me you’re from Connecticut originally, so we’re both New Englanders. I was brought up in Boston. I have some very dear friends in Wilton, do you know that area at all?”
“Only vaguely, I’m afraid, but it’s very pretty as I re member it from drives. We lived outside Danbury,” said Celia, smiling back.
“The hat place, of course,” said Mrs. Wain with a musing air. “Such beautiful country around about, though— but so changed, as I imagine much of the East is nowadays. Have you been back recently?”
“Since my mother’s death three years ago, no.”
“Celia’s been in New York,” said Jules with undisguised sharpness. “I told you, that’s where she met Clara Hays-Faulkner.”
“Of course, I’d forgotten. How is Clara? Did you look her up while you were in New York this time, Jules?”
“I did think of it, but she isn’t in the book.” Jules glanced at his watch. “Didn’t David—my secretary,” he said offside to Celia, “say he’d be here by one fifteen?”
“He did, but he’s obviously been delayed. I’m sure Miss Brett would like another cocktail,” said Mrs. Wain, delicately venomous, “so we can put the time to good—Oh, there you are, David.”
A shadow had fallen over the beautiful rug. Celia, in the act of shaking her head and refusing another cocktail, glanced up at the man walking through the doorway and set her glass down blindly in the space an inch from the table’s edge.
Seventeen
THE tall fair man who had entered was not David Macintosh—could not have been, Celia realized later, outside of some computer-arranged nightmare—but the set of his head and shoulders against the light, his Christian name, the inimical Mrs. Wain’s air of satisfaction at his arrival, had all conspired to do the damage. The stemmed glass struck the rug soundlessly, letting out a tiny darkening gulp of liquid on the Persian flowers; Mrs. Wain’s astonished gaze traced a triangle from Celia to the secretary to Jules and back again. Celia put a hand to her forehead as though to press back dizziness. “I’m so sorry—”
Sorry didn’t begin to cover it: she had seen the look of faintly distasteful surprise, as if he were watching a clumsy stranger, that crossed Jules’s face before concern took over. While Mrs. Wain assured her smoothly that it didn’t matter in the least, that table was much too small, and insisted on providing a fresh cocktail, Celia’s mind began to race.
David Farrell joined them for lunch in the small formal dining room. Although it was evident from his manner that this was not the first time he had done so, he was still somewhat discomfited by the reaction to his entrance and glanced covertly at Celia from time to time. This was not lost on Mrs. Wain; Celia, now recovered, noted with cold amusement that as soup gave way to mushroom omelette and tiny fresh peas, to be replaced in turn by strawberries and coffee, the older woman grew almost benevolent. The triumphant shape of what she planned to say later to Jules —“Mark my words, there’s something between those two, or there has been”—hovered almost as tangibly as the white-coated manservant.
Let her dig herself deeper: although Farrell left immediately after coffee, Celia did not mention him until she and Jules had arrived back at Theodore Street. There, in the lemon-and-white foyer, she asked with an air of uncharacteristic hesitation, “You can stay a few minutes, can’t you, Jules? And would you get us a brandy? It’s silly of me, but I still feel a little shaken up . . . It was Mr. Farrell,” she said, taking the liqueur glass he handed her and giving a shiver which was only half-assumed. “I thought when he came in that he was the man who drove the girl I’ve told you about to suicide—there’s an uncanny resemblance, and his name was David too—and it brought the whole thing back so dreadfully . . .”
She knew as she talked, watching Jules, that an explanation had been essential and this particular explanation wise; a certain thoughtfulness in his regard was being replaced by solicitude and, if she wasn’t mistaken, a masculine pleasure at what he took to be her tenderer sensibilities. Moreover she was, in a sense, speaking with sincerity. The momentary assumption that she was looking at David Macintosh had been terrifying, like a loose thread, free for the seizing, which could unravel all her work and expose the discarded past.
And, like most things, it had two edges. Sharp reaction of any kind generated a counter-reaction, created a tiny unwilling bond. The secretary, saying good-bye to Celia, had given her an acutely personal look which she hadn’t liked at all.
“Poor darling, I can see how it would have upset you,” said Jules, tightening his arm protectively about her. “Farrell isn’t the villain, you know, he’s worked for me since— well, years, anyway, and I doubt that he has time to do much philandering here, let alone in New York. Still—” he was perturbed, only half-joking “we may have to have him grow a mustache. I don’t believe I could tolerate a beard.”
Celia’s heart leaped at the implication that she would be seeing a fair amount of any secretary of Jules’s as a matter of course; it was far more committing than any embrace. She released herself gently and, remembering Adelaide Wain’s anticipatory relish, smiled. “Would you explain to your sister-in-law? I don’t know what she can have thought of me.”
A week later, Jules asked Celia to marry him.
It was a considered proposal rather than an impetuous one, the orderly progress to a goal marked out beforehand, and
