Half an hour later, she gazed at Oliver’s back, bare above the waist, and said carefully, “Oliver, I think I’ll go away for a while.”
There was nothing in her voice to suggest panic; it sounded like an idea she had considered for days rather than a desperate measure, thirty minutes old. But, watching Oliver’s leanly muscled shoulders, Elizabeth thought that they tensed, as though his hands, exploring in his bureau drawer for a matching pajama top, had forgotten what they searched for. If it happened at all it took the barest part of a second, because Oliver turned almost instantly and said emphatically, “Good idea—it’s what you need. Get a complete rest from the house and the kids.”
“I’d take them with me.”
There was a brief silence, loud with the implications that brought Elizabeth’s chin up defensively. Then Oliver said slowly, “Oh, I see. Where will you go?”
She hesitated only fractionally, but it was too long.
“You don’t trust me, do you, Elizabeth?” Oliver was almost gentle. “My . . . God. While I—!” He moved with sudden controlled violence, shaking a cigarette from a package on the bureau.
tossing the burned match in the direction of an ashtray. He didn’t look at her.
Elizabeth sat up straight against her pillow, as stunned and tingling as though she had been struck. There could be no evasion now, even if she had wanted it. This time the small pause in the bedroom had the tight inevitability of the space between lightning and thunder. Into it she said steadily, “I think I’d better hear the rest of that.”
“Do you? All right—” Oliver turned abruptly. Because his voice was as careful as hers, his face bleak and unreadable, the astounding question came at Elizabeth with no warning at all. “Where did you spend the night of November 19th?”
Incredibly, it wasn’t a joke. Elizabeth stared at him. “The night of—here, of course, where I always do.”
“Not that night. I was in New York for the stockholders’ meeting. When I called home—late—you weren’t here.”
“Then I—” Elizabeth groped through bewilderment for a moment before she remembered. “I did sleep at the studio once when you were away. I suppose it was then. Constance must have told you when you phoned. . . .”
She looked at Oliver’s face in the instant before he turned his shoulder, and the last words trailed away. The bewilderment went with them. Shock took its place, and a butterflying anger in her midriff. “Of course Constance told you,” she said slowly, “and you don’t believe either of us—which must mean you have a theory of your own. All right, Oliver, where did I spend the night of November 19th?”
Oliver’s back had stayed grimly turned until then; the mockery stung him. “As a matter of fact, a number of people say you were at a hotel in Boston.”
Elizabeth was so astonished that the full meaning of that didn’t register at once. When it did it was like an answer in a crossword puzzle, radiating other answers in every direction. The Hotel Savoia and Oliver’s presence there, the mysterious telephone calls, the menacing voice on the wire . . . but she must make sure of it. She said in a voice as impersonal as Oliver’s, “The Hotel Savoia, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And not alone, needless to say.”
“No—not alone.”
In the silence after the short crossfire Elizabeth reached blindly for her robe, pulled it about her shoulders and slid out of bed. Oliver was standing furiously still across the room. She said incredulously, “You’re paying blackmail for that— blackmail. You don’t believe—”
“To hell with that.” The violence left Oliver suddenly; he looked white and tired. “The point is that you make it so damnably hard—”
There might have been more; Elizabeth didn’t hear it. She found her slippers and then the doorknob, and at last the refuge of the hall.
She woke at a little before six o’clock, stiff and cold, in the wing chair where she had finally fallen asleep. The lingering; winter dark at the living-room windows, the silent yellow lamplight, the brimming ashtray at her elbow had a dreamlike air. With an effort, Elizabeth forced herself to face the inevitable waking of the house.
She emptied the ashtray, started the coffee, turned up the thermostat. She washed her face at the sink and paper-toweled it dry, and thought remotely how nice it would be if the shadows could be wiped away too. Tip-toeing like a thief, she searched for and found a comb and a spare lipstick, and when she had poured herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen there was nothing left to do but start remembering again.
Ugly as her own errand at the Savoia had been, Oliver’s had been worse, because she had depended purely upon the evidence of her own senses and Oliver had not. He had gone there at the suggestion of someone else—not the person who hated her, that would be too dangerous, but a go-between—and he had found the evidence arranged for him. He had balanced that against all that he knew and had loved about her—and she had lost.
How?
Last night in their bedroom she had been wholly concerned with the repercussions between Oliver and herself; nothing had mattered at all beyond the fact that he could believe what he did. But there had been the solitary hours in the wing chair after that, and the realization that evidence of a sort would have been easy to supply after all.
There was her driver’s license, and there was the haircoloring, the kind you could wash in, and, just as simply, out. Given even that vague assistance, it shouldn’t, at the Savoia, be difficult to find a clerk, a bellboy, to absorb and repeat a description of Elizabeth’s coat,
