Because it was just that, a waiting. While someone went on hating her for the everyday things she possessed, and inched closer. There would be a pounce, when the hatred overran itself.
But meanwhile, if in the studio she lived in borrowed freedom, the cobweb waited quietly for her in the house—clinging, reminding, brushed away only to entangle her again. A glance from Oliver could set it quivering, or a word from Constance. A look from Noreen, as though she reflected Maire’s panic; a visit from thin, nervous, sharp-eyed Lucy.
It was not a new year at all, it was a deterioration of the old. Nothing happened to punctuate the slow and terrifyingly domestic decay until Saturday of the second week-end in January.
It was a day of curbed violence right from the start; wild drumming winds, thrashing branches, an echoing rain that changed to a sleet like silver pepper at the windows. Oliver awoke holding Elizabeth personally responsible for the weather, and Elizabeth, sharply nervous over the hollow, mocking, here-and-there sounds of the storm, flashed at him.
After breakfast Noreen, measuring the temper of the house, spirited the children away upstairs. Constance announced unexpectedly that she had agreed to take a table at the library tea: “Such a shame, isn’t it, that we should have weather like this for it?” So that at a little before eleven o’clock that morning Elizabeth and Oliver had the downstairs part of the house to themselves.
It was as awkward as though they were strangers waiting for a mutual hostess, not liking the look of the party.
Oliver was silent and restless, patrolling rather than walking, stopping abruptly to stare through the drenched panes. Would he like more coffee? No, thank you, he would not. A beer, then? She might have offered him hemlock.
Elizabeth said edgily at last, “If you’re so bent on walking, couldn’t you make more progress outside?”
“Thanks, but I feel rotten.”
“If you’re sick you ought to go to a doctor.”
Oliver wheeled; he said explosively, “I ought to go to a doctor?” and there was a flaming silence.
He went on walking, with a pattern of pauses that registered only dimly on Elizabeth’s mind, because she was saying in an off-hand voice she would never have thought she could achieve, “You know, we can’t go on like this, Oliver. Don’t look so astonished—it’s time we brought it into the open, don’t you think?” This was what was known as burning your bridges. It wasn’t planned, but there came a time when you could take no more. Elizabeth said, forcing herself to be quiet and even, “You think I’m a hysterical idiot, all swallowed up in morbid self-pity over the baby, taking too many sedatives, imagining things. And I think—” damn her voice for starting to shake “—that you’re the stair that wasn’t there, so that you let me trip and make a fool of myself. I know better now, and I won’t make the same mistake any more. No more confiding tears, and,” said Elizabeth, steady again, “no more trust. You’re interested elsewhere, you—”
The telephone rang, shockingly loud. Oliver was across the room before the second peal had stopped. He lifted the receiver and listened a moment. He said disinterestedly, “Afraid you have the wrong number,” and dropped it with a click.
And the pattern of his walk stood out suddenly clear for Elizabeth.
The turn, past the phone. The halt—beside the phone. The waiting for a call, with the inevitable, unwelcome fact of her being there because the storm had kept her from her usual Saturday morning shopping. Because she felt that the knowledge must show, and because she couldn’t bear to look at Oliver just then, Elizabeth turned her back abruptly and straightened folds of a striped linen curtain. Behind her, so close that she stiffened, Oliver’s voice said tautly, “Elizabeth, you’ve got to believe me—”
“Do I? Why, I wonder, when you don’t believe me?” She slipped past him, head bent, seeing in a blur.
“Elizabeth—where are you going?”
“Anywhere. For a walk.” That at least came out steadily enough. But she had to face him again to get her raincoat from the closet —and Oliver was suddenly looking at her as though she were a lamp, or a table; all his consciousness was somewhere else. His gaze, narrow and intent, was seeing someone else—at another telephone, furious at being cut off?
Elizabeth got her raincoat and put it on. Oliver said in a short absent voice, “Don’t get soaked,” and started up the stairs.
Of course—the extension in their bedroom, put in a week ago. Elizabeth had suddenly wanted it, pleading the possibility of fire, needing to know that there was more than one means of communication in the house. She pulled on her boots now, and listened.
Oliver had gone into their bedroom, but he hadn’t closed the door. There was a peculiar halted quiet, as though he were standing there, listening, charting the silence. But the bedroom windows looked over the front lawn. . . .
Rapidly, feeling the pound of her heart, Elizabeth went to the back door, opened it on a violence of wind and sleety rain, slammed it echoingly and waited an instant. Her boots were rubber, and noiseless; she was able to go back to the telephone without a sound, to lift the receiver gently and hear the faint airy wait along the line.
And then Oliver’s voice, not absent now, but urgent. A Boston number, and the drawl as it rang. Elizabeth did not apologize to herself; her visit to the Hotel Savoia had killed that kind of sensitivity. She listened, hardly breathing, hearing the sound of Oliver’s breath, until there was a rising click and a voice said sleepily, “Hello?”
Male or female? Elizabeth couldn’t be sure; it sounded muffled and husky. Whichever it was, Oliver identified it at once. He said,
