She greeted Celia at the door with a cool and raking glance and went directly to her uncle, predictably on his balcony with his field glasses at this hour. She was downstairs again half an hour later with an unaccustomed flush under her yellow eyes and a voice clasped in ice. “Isn’t it fortunate for you, Celia, that my uncle is underwriting your secretarial education. I understand that Mrs. Meggs benefits, too. I hope Dr. Fowler is aware of all this excitement?”
Celia gave her a level glance, far removed from the demurely dropped lashes of six months ago. She said with no hint of triumph, because the triumph would come more absolutely from the doctor’s own lips, “Yes, he is, Mrs. Cannon.”
“Oh? I believe I’ll just have a talk with him,” said Mrs. Cannon. “It’s possible that Dr. Fowler is getting past his abilities . . . I believe I had an umbrella?”
When the door had closed behind her, Celia went about her work unperturbed. Mr. Tomlinson was probably one of the few people left in the country who still had an attendant physician, and Dr. Fowler, who came ceremoniously once every two weeks to check up on the friend whose ills he had diagnosed and treated for fifteen years, was warmly congratulatory toward Celia. Enthusiasm for a project, he told her, was a far more powerful drug than any yet invented by medical science, and he was delighted at the increase in his patient’s usually peckish appetite, lack of digestive complaints, and sound sleep without pills. Keep up the good work, Celia.
For the time being, no more was heard from Mrs. Cannon. Mr. Tomlinson did not mention his niece’s angry visit, but his unruffled resuming of work in the study the next morning—“Let me see, where were we?”—made a pact between him and Celia. The pact was further sealed on a night in late December.
Willis Lambert had been absent from the typing class, and Celia returned to Stedman Circle earlier than usual. When she let herself in with her key, shivering from a last attack of snowy wind, it was not two male voices that she heard from the living room, but one male and one female. Before she had quite absorbed this fact she was face to face in the doorway with a handsome gray-haired woman of about sixty, about whose shoulders Mr. Tomlinson was tenderly placing a black coat. Taken aback, but always punctilious, he said, “Eleanor, this is Miss Brett. I’ve told you what a help she’s being. Celia, this is Mrs. Ellwell, a very dear friend of mine.”
The two housekeepers, one current, one former, smiled and acknowledged each other. Celia proceeded to the kitchen, where she put away the cheese and crackers left out for the backgammon friend, washed two glasses that had surely contained port, put those away. Darkening the kitchen again, she met Mr. Tomlinson in the lower hall. A listener would have heard only, “Good night, Celia. Class go well?” and “Yes, thank you. Good night.” It would have taken a watcher, and a close one at that, to record the glance of complicity that passed between them.
Her employer’s choice of companions was a matter of indifference to Celia, but it was a positive pleasure to see Mrs. Cannon outwitted. More importantly, she felt that she need no longer observe her own curfew so carefully. Willis Lambert recovered from his flu, and he and Celia were gradually joined by another couple at their now well-established drink after class. Ted Vanney was an unassuming boy with an easy flush and a bad skin; Betty Schirm had prominent blue eyes, forbidding black brows, and cruelly red lipstick.
She was hostile to Celia from the first, perhaps because she had measured Ted against Willis and decided to make a change. She said when the waiter had trudged away with the drink order, “Funny I haven’t seen you around before this.”
“You probably have, and didn’t notice.”
“No, I’d remember,” said Betty Schirm, studying Celia with secret-police authority. “Do you have one of those new bachelor-girl apartments near the school?”
Celia had known this would come, sometime. “I don’t have an apartment, I live at home.”
“Really?” Betty Schirm managed to invest the single word with surprise and mild contempt. She also had the air of someone who was going to look up all the Bretts in the telephone book at the earliest opportunity. “Your house must be fairly nearby, then, as I notice you don’t take the subway.”
“It’s not too far,” said Celia with calm, but she took the image of that bright, bullying blue gaze back to Stedman Circle with her that night. She had no illusions about what would happen if Willis learned in what capacity she worked for Mr. Tomlinson. She would either have to drop out of the after-class gatherings, or . . .
Mr. Tomlinson solved the problem for her by catching a cold.
For the first time since she had known him, Celia brought his bourbon and water, and later his dinner, up to his room on a tray. When she went downstairs again the house seemed peculiarly her own: no dry little cough, no rustle of the evening newspaper, no possibility of immediate summons. Without actually planning it, she set the dining room table as she set it for her employer and had her dinner there; the thought crossed her mind that anyone entering might easily assume that she was dining alone because her old . . . uncle was sick.
Mr. Tomlinson was up and about the next day, but that did not alter Celia’s intentions. She had alarmed Mrs. Stevenson into finding her another job and she had changed her last name, but she had acted out of inadvertence in the first case and impulse in the second.
What she was to do now would be very deliberate indeed.
Four
CELIA usually did an hour’s work in the study with Mr. Tomlinson at ten A.M., when the kitchen had been set in order and the
