A woman, of course, would know the telling power of personal detail. And there had to have been a man.
Had Oliver also been furnished with a description of her supposed companion, or had he stopped short of listening to that? Put together, Elizabeth was bitterly certain, it would have added up to Steven Brent.
Go away now, today—the place on the Cape, the small house her parents had left her, hadn’t been rented this year. She wouldn’t have to see Oliver at all; she could call him at his office just before she left with the children.
Out of nowhere, watching the ashy dawn, Elizabeth wondered dully what people meant by a clean break. It wasn’t clean, there were no neat edges at all, because you grew so far into someone else’s life and possessed so much of his that it could only be a savage, rending affair. . . .
Just as someone wanted it to be.
She found that, in making plans for departure, she had reckoned without Jeep. His eyes were drowsy that morning, his face flushed and hot. Elizabeth called the doctor and went stubbornly about the rest of her preparations, assembling blankets, warm clothes for herself and the children, a carton of emergency rations. She drove the car into Boston for a complete overhauling and a change to snow tires, and then she prepared to wait.
She closed her eyes to the reactions around her: to Oliver’s bitter, adamant silence and her cousin’s speculation, to Noreen’s troubled air and the shrewd curiosity Lucy Brent didn’t try to conceal.
Deliberately, she locked herself away from them, allowing herself to feel nothing at all, until the morning of the day before she was to leave for the Cape. They were at breakfast when Oliver said abruptly, “Oh, by the way, I won’t be home until late tonight. One of the vice-presidents and his wife are up from New York—Moulton was going to take them to dinner and the theatre, but he’s home in bed and I’m stuck with them. So expect me when you see me—” He was rising.
Always, before, she and Oliver together had entertained the visiting hierarchy; it was an established custom. In spite of the iced neutrality between them now, Elizabeth was stung, so instantly that words slid to her tongue before she had time to think.
“I’m so glad you reminded me—I’ve got to dine out too, as a matter of fact. Crale, one of the men at Homham’s, wants to talk to me about resurrecting my book in time for September.”
It wasn’t true. Crale had mentioned dinner, but they hadn’t gotten as far as dates. She had only to pick up her car at the garage in Boston and drive home again to dinner with Constance while Oliver, who had started thinking of her as an embarrassment to his work, did some deferential escorting of a vice-president and his wife. . . .
She caught a train to Boston at a little after three o’clock that afternoon.
She had regretted the childish subterfuge almost instantly that morning. Under Oliver’s eyes she had felt compelled to go through with it, although it meant a sudden welter of rearrangements. A telephone call to Lucy, explaining that they would not be able to come for cocktails at the Brents’ after all, apologies to Constance, who would have to curtail her activities as hostess at the charity bazaar in order to be back at the house by six o’clock, when Noreen Delaney had to leave.
But I’ll be back by then, Elizabeth thought, watching the bleak marshes flicker by. I’ll say Crale was called unexpectedly to New York, and Constance can go on being hostess and I can finish up the last of the packing.
At North Station, she took a taxi to the garage in Brookline. They were finishing up on her car, the foreman told her; they had had to install a new battery. If she could come back in about an hour . . .
Elizabeth found a small restaurant four blocks away and had a solitary cocktail and a chicken sandwich. It was nearly dark, at a few minutes after five, and a raw raging wind had come up. She almost ran the distance back to the garage, coat skirts whipping, gloved hand anchoring her feathered felt cap.
Her car was ready, unaccustomedly shining, smoothly obedient when she pressed the starter. By this time tomorrow night she’d be getting supper for the children in the house at Orleans. Knowing that they were hidden and safe, feeling none of the sudden prickling nervousness that brought her foot down now on the accelerator.
She realized for the first time, with a sense of shock, how very close she had come to leaving the house unguarded for a dangerously long period of time.
It was night there, too, and the wind would be shaking the windows, driving the lilacs against the glass, meeting itself angrily around the house comer. And both Oliver and she were out of the way, for any purpose that might produce itself on a black and noisy night like this . . . the very eve of escape.
How could she have become so blinded by resentment at Oliver as to forget that?
The wind fought the small car, and twice Elizabeth had to swerve sharply in order to avoid toppled branches in the road. It was ten minutes after six when she went through the center of the little town. Constance, barely arrived, would hardly have had time to change her clothes; she could go back to her hostessing. Elizabeth drew to a stop in front of the house as inwardly breathless as though she had finished a race.
She ran up the lawn under the toss and swish of maples. She pushed the front door shut on a shudder of wind, and called, “Constance? I’m back, so why don’t you—”
But it was Lucy Brent on the stairs;
