Constance’s gaze became suddenly inquiring; Elizabeth, searching vacantly for a pretext, seized on the housecoat. “I was right, that’s a marvelous color for you. Does it fit?”
“Oh yes. That is, I think—” Constance was nervous. She stood too suddenly and one balancing hand sent something crashing lightly to the surface of the dressing-table. Elizabeth glanced idly down; it was a photograph of herself, the one her publishers had used for the back of her first book jacket. She was looking slantingly down and across the camera. Her hair had been longer then, and a delicate angling of light emphasized the pale backward lift of it. The photograph hadn’t been in the guest room when Constance came, thought Elizabeth idly, it hadn’t been there—
Constance was waiting; she forced herself back to attentiveness and an admiring inspection of the housecoat. She wished, as she said goodnight and went along the hall, that she had never knocked at her cousin’s door, that she hadn’t seen her photograph there. That she hadn’t heard that hurrying rustle, as though taffeta arms had gone up hastily to rearrange lifted-back hair.
Five
DECEMBER WAS snowy, and made of elastic. Elizabeth got through the days with a determined briskness, plunging into her Christmas shopping, which she dreaded ordinarily, with a fervor that astonished everyone around her, Maire talked about sleds; Jeep, for reasons known only to himself, hoped ardently for a fly-swatter.
There were a number of things to remember the early part of December by, and Elizabeth remembered them all; while October 29th had dropped into a void and was just now sending up echoes, every day had become a new day of battle. And battle with what? Shadows, nerves, imagination . . . ?
No. Forged checks were made of paper and ink, and cunning.
Maire plummeted the full length of the stairs on her head and had to be rushed to the hospital for X-rays. Jeep stuffed his panda into the toilet, flushed it, and consulted nobody about the mounting level of water on the bathroom floor; when he had tired of watching it he simply went away. The kitchen ceiling dried eventually, and Oliver, looking like a man determined to hold his tongue at all costs, painted it laboriously.
Hathaway’s nurse called up and postponed Elizabeth’s appointment; she reported this stiffly and conscientiously to Oliver, who met her eyes and glanced quickly away. Gradually, and somewhere in herself terrified that it could happen at all, she accustomed herself to two existences that overlapped but never blended.
There was the one in which everything was what it seemed, and she was a dutiful mother to the children and the reasonable facsimile of a wife to Oliver, and went about with Lucy Brent and succumbed to Steven’s quiet encouragement sufficiently to spend grim, trying-to-work hours up in the studio.
There was the other one, in which she was alone and afraid, cut off from appeal by the dread of further damaging her marriage. In which, if she let her desperately fixed attention flicker, everything might topple, and anything might happen.
Like the roses, like the misty date of October 29th when a woman pretending to be Sarah Bennett had walked into Elizabeth’s bank, it was nothing you could put an accusing finger on. It was like a picture delicately out of drawing, or a phonograph record with a slightly warped center. It was all wrong only if you knew and loved the view or the melody.
But it was calculated; there was a brain behind it, wholly concerned with the quiet growth of fear.
It was, perhaps most of all, the affair of Jeep’s birthday on the thirteenth of December.
There was protocol on Jeep’s birthday. Ten minutes after Oliver had had his first glimpse of his son, while Elizabeth was still pleasantly giddy over a long-awaited cigarette, they had agreed never to lose Jeep in the Christmas rush. “Who knows, it might warp him for life,” Oliver had said, “so as long as the funds hold out, let’s keep him separate. Did you know you were burning a hole in your bedspread, Mrs. March?”
So there was as much panoply over Jeep’s birthday as though it had fallen in July. Presents, and something in the way of consolation for Maire, all to be opened when Oliver arrived with ice cream and candles for the cake. Everything was wrapped and waiting at five-thirty, and the children, who had been asking since morning, “Is it Jeep’s birthday yet?” had obligingly disappeared. For no reason at all Elizabeth was startled when the fall of the knocker turned out to be Steven Brent.
He was diffident, standing against the icy dark, sensing her surprise at once and half turning away. The porch lamp made his hair very fair, deepened the hues in the shy tired face. “Crale saw the synopsis today and likes it very much. There are just a couple of things . . . but you’re busy, so I’ll—”
“Not at all, come on in.”
Elizabeth took him out to the sunporch where they wouldn’t be disturbed, and switched on lamps. Light flowed softly over the rope rug, woven in golden parquet squares, over yellow and red armchairs, a fat black hassock, a wall of windows glimmeringly full of reflections. They sat on the couch at the end of the long narrow room; Steven put the typed synopsis and its manila envelope on the coffee table and frowned absently at a memo in his hand.
“As I say, Crale’s most enthusiastic. He does question, and I must admit that I do, too, the fact that the daughter who willfully vanishes doesn’t make more of an effort to communicate with the mother. Don’t you think . . .”
It was a plot Elizabeth had been playing with for two years; she knew every twist and turn and objection, and she could let her attention wander. She came in nicely at intervals with, “Oh, not necessarily, don’t forget
