“Tuesday’s all right,” Elizabeth said.
She was still bewildered and a little angry; she didn’t like bearing the brunt of Lucy’s coolness, or the knowledge that Steven could have said all this over the phone without embarrassing everyone concerned. It made a situation that couldn’t have happened six months ago. It had happened now, and even though it was small and ridiculous it was another reminder of how wrong everything was.
Constance had marshalled the children into the kitchen and was preparing their supper. Snow slid softly against the black window-panes of the porch, and Elizabeth, watching it, wondered uneasily about Noreen. Lucy had dismissed the girl’s disappearance briskly, tolerantly—but it wasn’t as simple as that. In the two months of her stay at the house, Noreen had shown herself as reliable as bread and butter, and almost over-conscientious.
‘Oun,’ screamed Maire in memory, and Lucy’s echoed voice said, ‘Rather a handful to kidnap.’ And here was the night and the snow and the complete lack of communication. . . . Elizabeth stirred. She had the address where Noreen spent the night once a week with another girl. If she hadn’t heard by morning . . .
“Elizabeth,” said Steven with nervous explosiveness, and she came back with a jolt to the porch and the papers he had flung down with unaccustomed violence. “Do you think Lucy’s happy?”
It was the last thing she had expected him to say; it was, at the moment, the last thing she wanted to hear. She looked carefully at Steven, and he was serious, his face worried out of its usual shy calm, his fingers tapping unevenly at the table-top. Heaven only knew what it had taken to make him say this, even to someone he knew and trusted. She said cautiously, “I don’t know, Steven—I’ve always thought so,” and finished it out silently and unavoidably in her own mind: But then I am not an authority, as I always thought Oliver was happy too.
She looked at Steven again, and he looked confused and unanswered. She said, “Why? I mean, are you worried about her health, or—”
“No. It isn’t anything like that, it . . .” Steven paused, staring down at his linked fingers, before he glanced up again and said uneasily, “I realize it’s only a symptom, but—this obsession with bridge. Lucy’s gotten so that she lives for it. It isn’t natural, and furthermore—”
He stopped himself in time; he didn’t say, except by implication, “We can’t afford it.” Elizabeth, startled and newly aware, looked back at Lucy’s increased sharpness, Lucy borrowing fifty dollars, Lucy bitter about the puppy . . . and what else might Lucy have shown Steven? Elizabeth was suddenly and immensely weary; she thought, I can fight this for myself, but not for Steven.
Rebellion must have shown in her face, because Steven, pacing, turned and said half-apologetically, “It’s not a question people ask, I know. It’s just that . . . women tell other women things.”
“Some women,” Elizabeth amended, lightly and firmly.
The snow had increased its velvet swing; outside the porch windows, under the apple tree, the ground was alive with luminous sloping shadows. Steven said suddenly and surprisingly, “You’ve had enough to cope with, haven’t you, without this?”
Elizabeth looked wordlessly startled, and he said “Sorry—am I speaking out of turn? I thought, the other night when Maire cried out like that—”
She almost told him then. His face was sober and his eyes quietly curious, and she could have gotten it said without the tears and trembling with which she had told Oliver. And Steven, she knew instinctively, would believe her. But, distantly, a car went slushing by, and she remembered the lonely tail-light of the Brents’ old Ford dying into the dusk. She would have liked to pin down Steven’s impression that Maire had seen something to frighten her here, among them—but she was firmly determined not to discuss Lucy with him, or to be the cause of delaying him an instant longer.
She stood up, and said without answering anything directly, “Everybody hits a low point some time or other. As a matter of fact, it sounds as though Constance is hitting one right now in the kitchen—I’d better take over.”
At the door Steven said casually, “Tuesday for lunch, then—I’ll call you about the time. Christmas go off all right?”
“Beautifully, thanks. . . .” Closing the door behind him, standing for an instant at one of the flanking windows to watch the white and drowning snow, Elizabeth found that her mouth was still stiff from smiling. Steven turned at the hedge to wave, and she lifted a hand. All at once the glass and the distant figure and her own gesture sharpened and became the ingredients of another scene.
The face in Noreen’s window, the lazily upraised hand. The drench of perfume said that the intruder had been a woman, but the face itself, looked at abstractly, was not nearly so definite. At that distance, sharply wrong in its surroundings, it could have been a woman’s . . . or a man’s.
Elizabeth had the children on their way to bed when Maire’s terror returned.
She had been chattering about giving her baby a bath. At the foot of the stairs, without warning, she gave her dreadful clear cry and hurled herself wildly against Elizabeth.
Jeep, clutching his bedtime armful of trucks, stopped in bewilderment. In the living-room, Constance came startledly to her feet, saying, “Good heavens, what is it?” Elizabeth ignored both of them. She disentangled Maire very gently from her skirts and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs. She made her voice as businesslike as she could, because the commotion along her nerves told her that whatever had frightened Maire was the dark and secret core of her own pursuing evil.
She said, “Now look here, Maire, what’s this all about? Where is this—oun?”
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