Elizabeth went to bed and eventually to sleep, her face wet and aching in the solitary dark.
“Pigs can’t swim,” said Maire suddenly from the back seat.
“Pigs go oink-oink-OINK!”
“And little boys sit quietly on the seat,” said Noreen, interrupting Jeep’s mounting shout.
Elizabeth put the car around a corner, glanced briefly into the rear-view mirror and smiled. It had been an inspiration to sweep all of them out of the house for a drive; it was like a blowing-away of cobwebs. The children, who had been threatening all morning to push each other down the stairs, were amicable again, reporting the view from their separate windows. Noreen sat between them, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright with pleasure. Every now and then, at something the children said, she would give a soft little spurt of laughter, as though it had been sealed inside her for too long and was beginning to bubble rebelliously out.
Elizabeth thought she understood; she felt her own mood lift as she drove. She took a contrary pleasure in this aimless expedition, as though she had slipped away from some dark and clinging presence, almost as though she had outwitted it. No one had known they were going to do this, and it followed quite simply that nothing could spoil it.
Over the last wooded hill and down to the harbor, where the water rustled greenly about the dock; Elizabeth stopped the car and took out her cigarettes. It was too cold for the children to get out and sit on the wooden benches. Noreen said, “I’ll just take them up the end and back, shall I, Mrs. March?” and Elizabeth nodded and watched them go.
So small, really, when you looked at them as a stranger might. Elizabeth thought back to her conversation with Noreen Delaney that morning. The girl had been clearly mystified by her mention of the ‘oun’—and as clearly worried, putting into words what Elizabeth had felt all along. “I hate to see Maire afraid of anything, she’s got so much—I guess it’s trust. She gets very gossipy in her bath—perhaps if I asked her in a roundabout way tonight?”
Elizabeth put it out of her mind firmly; that, and her own growing, helpless dread belonged to the house and the existence she had managed to shake off for an hour. Noreen and the children approached the car, and she smiled at the three of them coming back identically rosy, and turned the car reluctantly for home.
It was on the way back that chance entered the quiet deadly battle for the first time. Elizabeth was threading through the streets of the town when a small rattling sound she had been vaguely aware of for some time turned suddenly into a clatter. It came from the rear of the car. It was something caught and dragging, or—
A policeman solved it for her, motioning her to the curb. Elizabeth rolled her window down and looked up at the stiff weather-reddened face. He was new, she hadn’t seen him before. He said with a kind of leisurely disaproval, “How long since you’ve looked at your rear license plate?”
“About an hour,” Elizabeth said mildly. “I’m sorry, Officer, it seemed all right then.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem all right now.” He was sour and deliberate, bending to squint into the back of the car, returning his stare to Elizabeth. “If I hadn’t stopped you, lady, you’d have left that plate in the street.”
There followed a brusque lecture on general maintenance. Elizabeth said again that she was sorry and would have it attended to at once, and was surreptitiously shifting gears when the policeman said abruptly, “Are you a resident here?”
“Yes.” He was new, and ambitious. Elizabeth dipped into her bag for her wallet, unzipped the inner compartment where she kept her driver’s license and thrust her gloved fingers inside a little impatiently.
She took everything out of her wallet, and explored every compartment of her bag, before she was sure that the driver’s license was gone.
Fourteen
A POLICE SERGEANT whom Elizabeth knew arrived, and sent her on her way with a wink and a warning. She drove home in a quiet numbness, listening to the children’s, “What did the man say. Mama?”; hearing only the confusion in her own mind.
She had last used her driving license as identification two days before Christmas, when in a flurry of last-minute shopping she wrote a check for Constance’s doeskin gloves. She remembered very clearly putting the license, folded small, back into its compartment in her wallet, because the zipper had caught, running up, and the salesgirl had said sympathetically that workmanship wasn’t what it used to be. She had managed to get the zipper up at last—and she hadn’t had occasion to use the license since.
So it had been removed deliberately from her wallet.
She didn’t tell Oliver. She knew he would not believe in her own certainty, and it had become instinctive with her to avoid issues between them. She applied for a new license, and when it came, folded it inside the five-dollar bill she always carried in the cylinder attached to her car keys.
New Year’s Eve came and went. Constance announced a little stiffly that she had made plans of her own; Elizabeth and Oliver went to a party at the Perrins’. The Brents were there, and approximately twenty other people. Elizabeth wore black that showed a thousand pleats when she stirred, and thought she was doing very well until Jane Perrin said with midnight frankness, “Elizabeth, it’s so good to see you, and so wonderful of
