She said, putting away her gloves, “It’s a pity you can’t get out today, Elizabeth, it’s more like April than January. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a walk more.”
Elizabeth glanced across the room. She said casually, “Oh, did you walk?”
“Yes. I believe Oliver said it was almost a mile from town— but so pleasant on a day like this. Now—” Constance settled her glasses with a thoughtful expression “—I thought, for lunch . . .”
Elizabeth listened and didn’t hear. She was jolted not so much by the gratuitous lie as by the briskly off-hand air with which Constance delivered it. It occurred to her for the first time that, out of appearance and manner and scraps of background, she had built a character for a woman she had never really known. . . .
Constance had evidently mentioned omelette and asparagus, because that was what appeared at lunch. Elizabeth ate obediently under her cousin’s admonitions. “You must get your strength back, Elizabeth, and you can’t do it on black coffee. It’s not only for your own sake, you owe it to Oliver and the children. After all,” said Constance, giving her keen attention to a roll, “you never know when you might need it.”
The house quieted for Jeep’s nap. Constance tiptoed upstairs for buttons to sew on a blouse; Noreen washed the dishes while Maire sat at the kitchen table and drew queer tripod-like creatures on yellow copy paper. Elizabeth took a shower and washed her hair. She was brushing it dry when she heard Maire’s long, mounting, infinitely chilling scream.
It caught her in a second’s paralysis, locking her muscles, stopping her heart, striking her as incapable of movement as though it had been a bullet finding its mark. It echoed again, and sense and motion returned to Elizabeth. She dropped the hairbrush with a clatter and flung her bedroom door open and ran down the stairs. Like lightning against the dark she thought disconnectedly of Oliver saying, “Someday you’ll trip, and break your neck . . .
She reached the foot of the stairs and a peculiarly empty silence. She thrust open the door to the kitchen and looked in, her breath still catching harshly in her throat—at a scene of perfect serenity.
Noreen was drying the dishes, just visible through the narrow entrance to the pantry. Maire stood at the door, her back solemn with attention, her hands flattened against the panes. She was watching something, but nothing about her suggested fear. And yet, that dreadful long-drawn sound—
Elizabeth went quietly up to Maire and looked out the back door. On the sodden lawn at the foot of the steps, not ten inches apart, two cats faced each other in immemorial attitudes of fury. The gray one with scarred jowls shifted a trifle; his yellow adversary flattened its ears and howled.
Maire’s cry, coming from a cat’s throat.
At Elizabeth’s side the child said absorbedly, “Those kitties in a rage. Mama?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact,” said Elizabeth conversationally, “they’re ouns, aren’t they?”
Maire’s gaze pivoted to hers. “Oim isn’t here.” It was half a statement, half a fearful question. The small hand reached confidently for Elizabeth’s. “Look, Mama . . .”
She led Elizabeth into the living-room, stopping directly before the front windows; from her air of reassured triumph, she had been here moments ago. She said pleasedly, “See, there’s no oun,” and waited, her face turned up.
And Elizabeth stood there, more baffled than she had been before. She was sure, because of its singular echo, that Maire had borrowed her cry from a tomcat’s howl. But she had showed no fear at the sight of the cats, so it was something else, some related memory. . . .
At a little after three o’clock, she went up to the studio. She found herself slipping out surreptitiously, which was ridiculous, because although Oliver had advised her pointedly not to, she hadn’t promised one way or the other. Nevertheless, she chose a time when Constance was upstairs to say hurriedly, “I’ll be at the studio if you need me, Noreen,” and make a rapid exit.
It was all wrong to feel this release in the little room on the top of the hill, but she did. When the light grew dull Elizabeth turned on the lamps, coming with a new freshness to her manuscript. The scene she’d ended on was all wrong. She hunted for cigarettes, found two aged ones in a package between the couch cushions and sat down at her typewriter to try another approach.
It worked, or partly; in the middle of it she discovered with dismay that she had used her last match. But if she could finish the chapter, she would have what amounted to a third of a book. She tried to concentrate, keeping her eyes away from the remaining cigarette, telling herself firmly that smoking couldn’t be that necessary to her work.
She found that it could.
Regretfully, she gathered the scattered sheets from the couch, collected them in a neat and gratifyingly weighty pile and put them on top of her typewriter, slipped the cover over them and turned off the lamps. With luck, Constance wouldn’t even know she had left the house—it hadn’t been much more than an hour— and there would be no remonstrations from anybody.
There was no sign of Constance when she returned; her cousin was apparently still upstairs. Noreen said that Lucy Brent had called. “She seemed surprised that you were out at all, Mrs. March. She asked if you’d call her when you came in.”
But Lucy didn’t answer her phone, although Elizabeth let it ring for moments on end.
That was at four-thirty.
Darkness came, and a damp thrusting wind. Elizabeth forced herself upstairs to assemble clothes for the cleaner’s weekly call; she would not have admitted to anyone her sudden and enormous fatigue. The radio beside Oliver’s bed might help keep her awake; she turned out pockets, drowsily, and listened to a weather report that said
