Hollows about her throat, a restlessness in her hands, a new habit of starting at sudden sounds—all of it showing, in spite of a gaiety donned as carefully as the extravagant black gown.
And Oliver watching her across the room: that, thought Elizabeth, was the worst of all. His eyes examining her as though she were someone else’s wife, interesting but not for him. And did she imagine it, or was there a new quality to his constant study that night—a watchfulness, like a man who has brought his hydrophobic wife to a swimming meet? Was Oliver afraid of what she might do, or say?
He was—and she hadn’t known how bitter this could be—her escort, in the severest sense of the word. She had come with him and she would leave with him, and in between, even when he was at her side, there was nothing.
It was on the third day of the new year that Jeep brought her the thing that, like a reagent, began to show her the first dim outlines of the pattern.
She had just come down from the studio, having taken a perilous and on the whole pleasing plunge at a first chapter. Noreen had seen her descending the hill and was assembling the little tea-tray; Elizabeth thanked her, shivering, and carried it into the living-room. That was when Jeep came tiptoeing out of the small front hall, clearly enchanted with some project of his own.
His left hand dangled ingenuously at his side, his right was hidden behind him. His little square face beamed as he said in the challenging tone Elizabeth used over different-colored lollipops, “Which hand. Mama?”
Elizabeth appeared to meditate and soberly chose the hand behind his back. It would be a penny, or a rubber band, or a block . . . but, this time, it wasn’t. It was a strip of shiny, crinkly paper, perhaps an inch and a half wide and four inches long, with the edges of a chartreuse and silver design.
She said, only half looking at it, “Thank you. Jeep, that’s what I call handsome. I’d better put it away before I lose it.”
Jeep climbed into her chair. His momentous and all-knowing air was gone; he said plaintively, “What is it, Mama?”
“What is it? Oh, a piece of paper, left over from Christmas, maybe . . .”
She really looked at it then, and realized in a puzzled way that it was not gift wrapping, that she had seen it somewhere before very recently and that it had a definite echo in her memory. She knew it as certainly as she had known—why did she think of this? —that the twist of purple foil in Lucy’s loveseat was a bon-bon wrapper. She took it gently out of Jeep’s toying fingers and examined it more closely.
It was one end of an envelope; she could see the fold and the beginning structure of comers. There was only enough black lettering on the chartreuse part to tantalize: “—ue” in flowing script; under that, in small block capitals, “—ney.”
Elizabeth turned the strip of paper over in her fingers, unable to explain to herself her sudden sharp interest. She had seen this, or something very like it, before, and that was all. Or was it all? Why was she lifting it out of Jeep’s reach, why did she feel this remembering tingle?
She said cautiously, “Pretty, isn’t it. Jeep? Where did you find it?” and Jeep, all pride again, said kindly, “I show you,” and caught her hand.
He led her first to the dining-room and, palpably at a loss, pointed under the radiator. “No, not there,” Elizabeth said patiently, and Jeep, anxious not to lose the spotlight so gratifyingly focussed on him, repudiated the radiator and said with growing confidence, “I show you. Mama.”
Elizabeth followed him up the stairs, and looked in a number of unlikely places before she realized that he was merely prolonging the game. Perversely, the silvery scrap gained importance. She was standing in the upper hall, still fingering it, saying, “Jeep dear, try and remember where you found it,” when Constance mounted the stairs, her coat over her arm. She said mildly, “I had no idea it was so cold outside . . . are you looking for something, Elizabeth?”
For once, her cousin’s unceasing vigilance would probably have helped. Elizabeth knew that even as she closed her fingers over the fragment of paper and said lightly, “No, but we’re pretending to, aren’t we. Jeep?”
Jeep gave her a betrayed stare. He said injuredly, “Where pretty paper, Mama?” and Elizabeth said firmly, “Maire’s calling you. Jeep, better run.”
In her own room, she smoothed out the chartreuse and silver strip again and examined it, trying to recapture the casual identification her mind had made once before. Or no, twice, because someone—near her? with her? outside the house, at any rate—had commented on it, and she had looked again and been, it was coming closer now, amused.
If she had seen it outside the house, chances were she had been Christmas shopping . . . but where, and with whom?
In the days after that, Elizabeth found to her astonishment that she could actually work, that it was as though her studio lay outside the perimeter of danger. She bought a hot plate and some instant coffee and a supply of cigarettes, and spent her mornings there, banging at her typewriter with a concentration she’d never felt before, sprawling full-length on the couch to “read and try to assess what she’d written, lighting a cigarette with one already burning in the tray beside her, going back to the typewriter to take up again or to scrap what she’d done and rewrite.
She was almost happy, in the studio. She could forget temporarily the shock of her new relationship to Oliver, Maire’s terrors, the mystery of Noreen’s absence, the possible meaning of the bonbon wrapper in Lucy Brent’s loveseat. If her own life were crumbling around her, she built new ones for
