And it might have worked if Elizabeth hadn’t seen the face in the window, the face that was not Noreen’s. It was a purely negative identification but none the less certain for that: if you saw something jarringly wrong, and were only allowed a fleeting instant, you couldn’t assign it to its proper background. You could only know that it was out of context.
What had it been in the case of the face in the window—height, contour, quality of movement?
Elizabeth took the pocketbook to her room and examined it. Mrs. Bennett had been accurate; there was a handkerchief, a horn hairpin, a two-cent stamp, a plumber’s bill. It told her nothing except the manner of its arrival in the house.
Sitting there on the edge of her bed, Elizabeth knew with a feeling that was half dread and half relief that the time had come to tell Oliver about the forged checks.
When you knew about the checks, Jeep’s spoiled birthday and the destruction of the roses fell into a different focus. It might have been argued, before, that the checks themselves were a simple, non-uncommon case of theft—but then there would have been no stranger in Noreen’s room, and Mrs. Bennett’s bag would have been disposed of.
It was nearly five o’clock. Elizabeth put the black purse in a drawer of her bureau and went downstairs.
Constance met her in the lower hall. “Oh, here you are. I was just coming up. There’s cold chicken in the icebox and I’ve fixed a salad and made some strawberry shortcake. I thought I’d tell you because,” said Constance, flushing like an elderly schoolgirl, “I won’t be in to dinner tonight.”
Elizabeth swallowed her surprise. Of course—H. W., who must be following up his gift of perfume. She smiled involuntarily at her cousin’s retreating back and went out to look at the kitchen clock. With her decision to tell Oliver about the checks, the time until he came home seemed suddenly endless and empty.
Noreen was heating consomme and cutting croutons; she turned to smile at Elizabeth and then at Maire. “Tell Mama what you saw this afternoon.”
“A buffalo,” said Maire, radiant.
“Maire!”
Maire turned her face away from Noreen’s reproachful gaze and addressed herself importantly to Elizabeth. The buffalo dwindled and then disappeared as she lost interest; they had, it turned out, seen ducks instead, and Jeep had cried all the way home.
Elizabeth said seriously, “He’s little, he gets tired,” and, “Come to think of it, where is Jeep?”
Jeep was in the small back L of the kitchen, peacefully oiling his tricycle with mustard, from which he was separated with great difficulty. Noreen set the table for their supper and pointed out the possibilities of the croutons. Elizabeth left them in an absorbed silence and went into the living-room to wait for Oliver.
He would believe her now, because he had to; the watchful impersonal look would go out of his eyes. If there were someone else who understood, someone else to watch the narrow line between normality and disaster, then she could stand it. She could stand anything as long as Oliver was with her, as he would be, as he couldn’t help being. . . .
It was five-thirty and then a quarter of six, and Elizabeth dropped all pretense of reading and walked nervously up and down the length of the room, cupping her hands against her eyes to stare out into the dark. The children finished their supper and followed Noreen upstairs for their bath, and Oliver still had not come. . . . Elizabeth went on pacing.
Her own reflection in a mirror caught and stopped her. Pale pointed face, emptied of its assurance, filled with inner questions. No color at all in her cheeks, her lips, just the startlingly dark arch of brows and etching of lashes around frightened eyes.
It wouldn’t do under Oliver’s new clinical gaze. She ran upstairs. The children were splashing in the tub, and there was a line of light under Constance’s bedroom door. In their own bathroom Elizabeth washed her face in icy water, put a flick of powder over the resultant pink, used her lipstick. She looked better now—still not like a seasoned mother of two, not like the Elizabeth March looking tiltedly out of her book jackets—but better.
There was the doorbell; was Oliver locked out, or was it the telephone? Elizabeth opened the bedroom door and listened, and heard the rustle of bath water and a shouted “That’s MY duck.” And something else. Oliver’s voice.
His car must have driven in just as she had gone up the stairs. Elizabeth went along the hall and stopped with her foot on the top step of the stairs and her call frozen in her throat. Below her, beyond the curve of the banister railing, Oliver said softly and concentratedly,
“Friday noon. Same place . . . ? Right. And look, for God’s sake, I told you—don’t call me here again.”
He said “Right” again, but Elizabeth only half-heard that and didn’t hear the click of the receiver at all.
Seven
“WINDY OUT,” said Oliver, “and getting cold as the devil. Shall we have a fire? Yes, we shall.”
His topcoat and the evening paper went haphazardly into a chair. He knelt at the fireplace, saying casually over his shoulder, “Where is everybody? Kids in bed?”
Elizabeth clasped her cold hands tightly together behind her back. “About to be . . . did the phone ring just now, or was I hearing things?”
Oliver balanced logs and struck a match. He said cheerfully, standing again, “It did. Wrong number.” The kindling and newspaper blazed high, and waves of light washed concealingly over his face. “Drink? . . .”
That was what bothered Elizabeth most of all—the easy good humor he hadn’t shown for weeks. As though the telephone call and his Friday
