“Oh, she may not have been. I picked up a few last-minute things in town just after you left, and when I saw her at the station I just assumed, for some reason . . . tell me,” said Constance, “what did the doctor say?”
“What doctors usually say. Liver-and-iron and sleep.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, surprised, and turned her head, in time to see Constance flushing as unhappily as though she had been caught making a face at Elizabeth’s back. She said awkwardly, “I just . . . you’ve seemed so—” and Elizabeth, sorry for her and regretting her own crispness, said, “It was just the usual check-up. But I haven’t been sleeping as well as I ought.”
“Nerves,” said Constance briskly, herself again. “Although I must say that for the last night or two I’ve been unusually wakeful myself. It’s the wind, I think, it makes you hear things.”
“We’re quite exposed here,” Elizabeth said, and thought with sudden dreariness how little it took to remind her of fear, of the night when the sounds at the door had not been the wind.
“I hadn’t thought of it before,” said Constance reflectively, starting for the stairs, “but you are quite exposed, aren’t you, Elizabeth?”
Oliver asked her about the doctor too, with a casual “Everything all right this morning?” when he got home that evening, with a subtly different tone up in their bedroom.
“What did Hathaway really say?”
“That I’m a little underweight and could use a few vitamins, but then,” said Elizabeth, “doctors always like you round and rosy.”
She could feel Oliver’s waiting silence behind her; she could feel the mount of her own bitter surprise at the fact that he could make any reference at all to that morning. She took refuge in action, brushing her hair so vigorously that it hurt, seeing almost as clearly as her own reflection the uncrossable chasm that lay just under the surface between herself and Oliver.
Once he knew that she had followed him to the Savoia, once the knowledge of his deception was a shared and admitted thing, there could be no going back. An impulsive word from her would open the chasm—and no power on earth could close it again.
Part of the plan of whoever it was who hated her?
Oliver was leaning against his bureau, dark head bent, frowning down at the cuff-links he rattled like dice in his palm.“Hath-away didn’t suggest your taking a vacation, getting away for a while?”
No mistaking the eagerness there, or the faint surprise, as though —Elizabeth had a flashing memory of Oliver at the telephone, severing a Boston connection—he had asked Hathaway to put forth such a suggestion. He wouldn’t have to worry about surreptitious calls then, or awkwardly broken lunch dates—was that why he had inquired so restlessly about Constance’s plans the other night?
She caught back a tumble of words; she thought clearly. The children. You aren’t only yourself, you’re the children too. And if you confront Oliver and he admits what you’re afraid of and you make the only possible answer, you make it for Maire and Jeep too.
She said, “No, he didn’t say anything about it,” and, very casually, “Don’t forget to pick up Maire’s sled tomorrow, will you?”
Christmas Eve came with a dark and biting cold. Elizabeth hunted for the red candles and pinned up fragrant sprays of fir, dug through the attic for last year’s lights and the treetop angel and didn’t, in all the furious activity, escape the naked fear that walked with her all day long.
She had learned to dread the lulls, the pleasant normal times when everything she loved was safe and near her and anything else was built of shadows. It was as though Christmas were a talisman, to be snatched from her; as though she were especially vulnerable on this of all days, and violence might burst forth at any moment among the flowers and firelight.
Noreen Delaney left at three o’clock, flushed and smiling and protesting at the presents Elizabeth put into her arms. Oliver departed to pick up the tree; Constance, restrainedly festive in brown satin, put on an apron and began to make canapes. Lucy and Steven Brent were coming for cocktails, and Elizabeth, trying grimly to ignore the web that bound them all together, had asked the Stock-bridges and Bill and Ellie Seaver.
The children settled down to untangle an immense snarl of red satin ribbon, and Elizabeth joined Constance in the pantry and thought, Really, this is quite simple, and went back in the midst of the peaceful silence to find the white leather chair slipcovered in Christmas seals. Maire cried bitterly when they were removed; Jeep, philosophical, picked them up quietly as they were removed and transferred them to the wall.
Elizabeth sat them firmly down to listen to carols, and found that the small hushed faces and faraway eyes seemed like an invitation to malice, and frightened her more than ever.
By six o’clock she had them bathed and fed and in bed, with intense queries as to whether Santa Claus would come down the chimney when there was a fire burning in the fireplace. Elizabeth said gravely that they would put the fire out at once, and went into her own room to dress.
Not the satin-paneled black—she had worn it that other night when the Brents had come, and it still carried memories of shock. The copper faille, then, making a great deal of her white throat and very little of her waist, belling in crisp extravagant folds. She dressed; she went downstairs to find Oliver and Bill Seaver closeted in the pantry, making drinks, and Ellie Seaver, pink and gold and giddy, trapped bewilderedly in a conversation about tulips with Constance. At six-thirty the Stockbridges arrived, and the Brents.
Before they had all been there five minutes Elizabeth realized startledly that Lucy and Steven were at each other’s throats, that Steven was gently and forlornly drunk and Lucy silkily furious. It was in the living-room like vapor. The Stockbridges were alert and fascinated, only
