Noreen Delaney had been lingering uncertainly in the doorway while Oliver gave Constance a terse account of what the fireman had said. Now she took a decisive step forward, her young face worried. “Mrs. March, you’re not well—you’re shivering. Hadn’t you better let me—”
Oliver turned sharply, Constance half-rose in concern. Elizabeth said steadily, stopping them all, “No. I’m perfectly all right, thanks, except that I’d like to say this. I’ve no way of proving it at the moment, but the studio was set on fire deliberately, after I left it this afternoon. It couldn’t have happened otherwise.”
In spite of her tight cool voice, it sounded preposterous, a defensive child’s tale of masked men with guns who had broken their heirloom vase. Noreen lifted a startled hand to her cheek. Oliver, leaning against the mantel to light a cigarette, let the small flame die out between his fingers. Constance sat forward in her chair.
peering over the rims of her glasses with a surprised and faintly affronted expression. Can she possibly, wondered Elizabeth wildly, be going to write a letter to the laundry about this?
The flicker of reaction lasted for perhaps five ticks of the gilt clock. Then Oliver struck another match and said in a conversational tone, “It’s one of those things. Firemen are often guessing, have to be. The heater—”
“It wasn’t on.”
Elizabeth began to explain about finding herself in the studio with only two cigarettes, using her last match, searching without success for more. Unspoken, but louder in the room than her own desperately calm voice, were the things that all of them knew and none of them said: that Elizabeth without adequate cigarettes and matches was as unimaginable as a wingless bird, that when she was at her desk she would often, in her concentration, light a fresh cigarette while a forgotten one burned at a perilous tilt in her ashtray.
She looked at their faces. She said, “It isn’t only that. I left my manuscript on top of the typewriter and put the cover over the whole business. It isn’t there—it’s what the firemen found the remains of, on the couch. It didn’t get there by itself, unless,” said Elizabeth, suddenly tired and bitter, “the characters are more life-like than I thought.”
Constance breathed through her nose, a sign of distress and perplexity. Oliver propped an elbow on the mantel and looked into his glass. He said, “But are you certain—” and abandoned that as leading straight to trouble. “We’ll go up in the morning and make sure. There’s always the chance . . .”
Elizabeth met his eyes, or tried to; Oliver’s flickered away. She said, “I’ll go and do something about dinner, if you think I’m to be trusted around the stove,” and walked quickly out of the room, feeling the silence close behind her like a door.
The meat was overdone, the small green peas mushy, the potatoes past their delicate prime. Rebelliously, Elizabeth ate nothing at all. Oliver talked about a traffic accident in the Sumner Tunnel; Constance shook her head perfunctorily and began an anecdote of her own. Elizabeth nodded blankly at intervals and could not break out of the other world, the place of terror.
Fire. The hatred, bored and sated by the delicate vibrations it had set up in her life, could feed for a time on this new and more personal excitement—the destruction of her book, the charring of her studio, the more subtle issue of her irresponsibility when alone, her need to be watched.
But this too would pall, and what then?
The children.
There might be a step between, but unless the evil were caught and stopped, it must certainly come to that. To Maire and Jeep, fast asleep upstairs, Maire with her pig within reach of her small relaxed hand. Jeep with the head of his fly-swatter protruding neatly from under the blankets. . . .
She mustn’t think about this, not here, not now.
The thoughts came anyway, random, dreadful. The knife rack in the kitchen. The medicine cabinet. The shelving of roof, with the apple tree leaning against it, under the children’s window— such an easy swing up for an adult body, such a crippling plunge for a half-asleep child.
Elizabeth brought her hands up to her temples and pressed fiercely against the bones. Constance sampled the mint sauce and said consideringly, “Perhaps just a thought more vinegar?”
There were precautions to take and Elizabeth took them, walking stubbornly over the bewilderment and disapproval and silent concern that met her on all sides. The children’s afternoon walks ceased; they played within the confines of the grounds. Elizabeth established a new regime under which, when the children had had their supper and bath, she heard their prayers and saw them into bed herself, inspecting their room and their windows in the process.
She went through the medicine cabinet and threw away paregoric, phenobarbital, the codeine left over from her attack of pleurisy: everything that might constitute danger to a child, or—at the very back of her mind—an adult.
Above all, she watched.
She watched Lucy Brent, who dropped in the day after the fire in the studio, full of horrified questions and headshakings; she watched Constance, whose long bland face might hide anything at all, and Noreen Delaney. She even watched Steven, whose wordless understanding had become a prop.
And, icily aware of the state to which she had come, she watched Oliver.
She thought, Which of them?
The children reacted instantly to the unaccustomed confinement and Elizabeth’s new sharpness. Maire grew quarrelsome and mulish, losing her clear piping voice in a maddeningly accented singsong with an expression to go with it; Jeep reverted to all-fours, said simply, “I baby,” and behaved accordingly. That was why, on a bitter dark day toward the end of January when Noreen was off, Elizabeth gave the children an early supper and herded them up for their bath an hour ahead of time.
Here, at least, they were both under her eye. The water ran, the mirror and the window grew blind and steamy, wind rustled coldly about the
