Elizabeth said that it did, and stepped out on six. Her heart was pounding; for a wild instant she confused that with the faint rapid sound of footsteps in one of the near corridors. Oliver’s walk, quick, unerring . . .
She was up a short stem of corridor, and she was in luck; as she stood at the point of intersection, motion at the far end of the hall to her right caught her eye. She turned her head just in time to see Oliver disappearing behind a door that closed quietly after him.
Silence again, dimly busy with the echo of traffic. From somewhere close by sounded a heavy crash of glass, and a woman’s voice said stormily, “Ox!” All Elizabeth’s detachment dropped away, and she was acutely, incredulously aware of her errand in this furtive, pink-lit hotel. Not an automaton after all, not a woman she would have felt sorry and a little embarrassed about, but herself, Elizabeth March. In search of the shabbiest possible information about her husband, and finding it.
She forced herself up the corridor Oliver had taken, and looked at the room number. This was reality; it would be difficult, later, convincing herself of that. She wondered whether she would ever be able to forget the gray light from the window striking waterily across the numerals, or the little triangular chip in the paint just above them. Then she walked quickly away.
The room clerk watched her as she approached the desk; had he noticed her earlier across the lobby, seen her waiting, entering the elevator so urgently? The rose-red coat flared like a candle in the dusk; she was conscious of an automatic lift of eyes as she passed.
He listened attentively while, deliberately vague, she told him about a friend of a friend registered at the hotel. She believed the number of the room was 619, and the name—she had trouble finding one in the confusion of her mind—was Hunt.
The clerk gazed at her sardonically. “Sorry, Madam. There’s no one by that name registered here at the moment.”
“Oh, but there must be.” She was on firmer ground now that they both knew he didn’t believe her. “I’m quite sure she said the Savoia, Room 619. Would you,” she stared coolly back at him, “mind checking, please.”
The clerk sighed audibly and turned to ruffle through a slender stack of cards. He withdrew one and held it a little apart from the others; when he faced her again, Elizabeth, every nerve bared, saw instantly the subtle change in his manner.
A frond of the rubber plant quivered near her cheek. The clerk said with a kind of suave enjoyment, “Room 619 is occupied by a C. G. Massman. Sorry.”
He had dropped the “Madam” pointedly, he was dismissing her with his eyes, his tone, a careless turn of his shoulder. “Alfred. Did Mr. Casales speak to you . . .”
Elizabeth walked away, on fire with fury at herself, at Oliver, at the knowing impudence that seemed to saturate the air. She didn’t know what prompted her to look back. The room clerk had his elbows on the desk, confiding in an antique bellboy who was watching her retreat with a wrinkled, appreciative grin.
They all know a joke when they see one at the Savoia, Elizabeth thought, feeling the grin like a scald on her back. Damn you, Oliver, for every minute of this . . .
She clung to her anger as she would have clung to a spar, because under it waited the yawning and bottomless fear.
It was bitterly cold, driving home. She kept herself fiercely from thinking, because there wasn’t room in her mind for both traffic and shock. She reached the house at about two o’clock and found it empty and mockingly serene.
A match to the living-room fire, a cup of scalding tea—and then, inescapably, the facts. What, after all, did she know? That Oliver had made an obscure appointment by telephone and warned his caller to secrecy; that he had lied to her in order to keep the appointment, that it had had to be kept in a bedroom in a shady side-street hotel, under arrangements so blatant that even the hotel employees were amused.
That—because it came down to this—in the short space of not quite two months her life had gone casually to pieces.
Was it possible that all this was unconnected, that Oliver was so carried away by another woman that he had forgotten all his latent fastidiousness, his dislike of marital murk?
If that were true, then her marriage was as good as dissolved, because even if she could manage to go on living with Oliver, she could not possibly live with herself.
If it were not true—and it was that sliver of incredulity that had persuaded her to follow Oliver from his office—then he was caught in the same delicate mesh of malevolence that was spinning itself about everything she loved.
Why?
Constance, arriving in a little flurry of cold air, seemed mildly surprised to find her back. “I thought you might spend the afternoon in town, you go in so seldom. Have you been home long?”
“Only a few minutes.” Elizabeth watched her cousin removing her gloves, putting the finger tips and wrist edges meticulously in line, folding them away in her purse. Constance, she thought, was very like sand going through an hourglass, recording everything, affected by nothing. She said, “The children are out for a walk, I gather.”
“I believe,” Constance was vague, “that Noreen had promised them something about the pond. It’s too bad, isn’t it, that you couldn’t have made your trip into town with Mrs. Brent.”
Was there anything more than idleness in the thick-lidded eyes? No . . . no. Elizabeth flicked out a match with care. “I didn’t know Lucy was
