But payment could not be stopped at hotels, or stores.
Had she an understudy?
The bed that had seemed so blissful became all at once intolerable, in spite of the damp ache of grippe, the stab of pain just under her right shoulder blade. She must have waked a hundred times, out of thought or out of sleep, to a panicky listening for the children.
It didn’t help to realize that the logical tools of imposture bore no relation to the romping malice that had gone before: the wrenching apart of the roses, the sickening of the children on Jeep’s birthday, the sardonic transposing of her Christmas presents.
Because it was, it must be, the same concentrated brain at work; so honeycombed with hatred of her that it was hardly, by now, a functioning brain at all.
“. . . Perhaps tomorrow,” said Dr. Halloway, disapprovingly.
Tomorrow turned out to be a day of thaw, blue and windy, with the lawn as soaked and springy as it was in April and the lilacs black and moist and hopeful. Elizabeth put on a housecoat, out of deference to Oliver’s reluctance that she get up at all that morning, and a faint touch of rouge, out of deference to herself, because her face looked so starkly white in the bathroom mirror.
Oliver, worried and still angry at himself for having let her go out into the storm on that critical Saturday, said, “Don’t go feeling your oats.”
“I won’t.”
“What you’d better do,” said Oliver, looking at her earnestly, “is go back to bed and then get up for lunch and go back to bed and so forth.”
“I’ll see . . .” She felt stumblingly new in this relationship, not knowing how far to trust the warmth, the normalcy.
“Whatever you do,” Oliver downed his coffee, looked at his watch and stood, “don’t go up to the studio. That’s probably where you caught cold in the first place . . . is Constance ready, do you think?”
“Whenever you are,” said Constance from the doorway. Her arms were laden with rental library books; she over-rode Elizabeth’s protests. “Nonsense, it’s a beautiful day and the walk back will do me good. And these books really ought to be returned. Is there anything else you’d like me to get you while I’m there?”
Elizabeth said no and watched them drive away, wondering, as she had wondered every morning during the past week, if today were the day of Oliver’s appointment with the sleepily vicious voice on the telephone. Or perhaps he had already taken care of that—until the demand for more money should come again.
She was alone in the house. Noreen had taken the children for an after-breakfast walk, clearly doubtful about leaving Elizabeth. She had said in a low voice, for Elizabeth’s ears alone, “Are you sure you’ll be all right, Mrs. March?” and for an instant, meeting the shadowed eyes, Elizabeth sensed the same recognition she had felt in Maire’s room on the night the child cried out. It put them both on an oddly different basis. She said without smiling, “I don’t know why I shouldn’t be, Noreen—do you?”
The girl’s eyelids dropped; Elizabeth, watching, thought she saw a faint rise of color in the thin face. But when Noreen glanced up again the oddness, the other meanings might have been imagined. She said in a defensive tone, “Mr. March is very anxious that you shouldn’t get over-tired on your first day up, and I just thought . . .”
Well, that was all right, thought Elizabeth now, going back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. And if Oliver had also spoken to Constance, that was all right too, and only normal anxiety. It didn’t mean that she was being . . . watched in another sense, and it was foolish to connect it with Oliver’s warning her away from the studio.
The swish of her housecoat was loud in the silence. She finished her coffee and wandered idly into the living-room with a cigarette Gradually a small uneasiness grew, a deepening of the feeling she had had once before: that the walls and chairs and mirrors, hidden from her for a week, held a touch, an imprint, a reflection she would have given almost anything to identify.
Whose?
The cigarette turned suddenly bitter. Elizabeth rose in a rustle and went to the windows, not wanting to let the thought take possession. It was always there in her mind, of course; it was like a lens through which she saw everything else. But if she lingered over it, if she let it grow, it swelled until it occupied her entire brain and there was nothing in her but a black blind fear.
. . . It had almost happened now. Elizabeth, at the window, became slowly aware that she had been curling her fingers in and out of her palms in a quickening, tightening tempo, and that the palms themselves were damp. She flattened them hard against the cold glass; she thought wonderingly, Anyone seeing me now would think . . .
Far down at the end of the road, half-screened by intervening branches, the nose of a black car pulled into view and halted. A man got out of the car, and then a woman. Something about the man’s build, or posture, seemed half-familiar. . . and the woman was her cousin. The man was holding her outstretched hand; when he turned to enter the car again the sun caught a wink of light from his glasses. There was the distant race of a motor and the black nose withdrew. Constance began to walk briskly up the road toward the house.
“Elizabeth? Oh, there you are, I thought you might have gone upstairs to lie down.” Her cousin, coming in, wore a blown and almost young-girlish look that should have sat awkwardly on her big-boned efficient frame but was oddly attractive instead. Constance set about immediately to rectify it, tightening her rolled-back hair with severe fingers, removing the scarf that the wind had flung over
