Careful, thought Elizabeth. Careful.
Maire was delighted with the snow; Jeep eyed it with sophisticated calm. Elizabeth took a window-by-window tour of the house, showing astonishment because it was snowing outside the children’s room as well as outside the kitchen, while Jeep sat lethargically on the floor in the living-room, mumbling over his trucks.
The firm grip of Maire’s small hand in hers took on an utterly new meaning for Elizabeth. Is this, thought Elizabeth in wonder, looking down, is this in the balance?
She would have to see Lucy, of course. Casually, and in the course of friendship, but with the special perspective that knowledge gave. When she had done that, and when she had seen Oliver and Lucy together again, she would know better what to do.
Constance was having breakfast in the dining-room, consuming toast and damson jam with the detached and delicate greed that had always fascinated Elizabeth. She made a point of breakfasting after Oliver, as though to spare him the inflaming sight of food, his food, being put to use. Oliver had once said annoyedly, “Does she think I’m going to whip it out from under her nose, or what?” And Elizabeth had answered soberly, “Some people, you know, keep an eagle eye on the pantry. Aunt Kate was quite capable of it. Leave her alone, she likes it better that way.”
She said now, “More coffee, Constance, when I get mine?” and Constance tucked in a last buttery crumb with precision and put down her napkin and started to rise. “I’ll get it, Elizabeth, you sit down.” As though, thought Elizabeth with a new edge of irritation, the modest salary she had forced upon her cousin turned her into a servant, caught relaxing. She said, “Stay where you are, I’ll get it,” and went into the kitchen.
Noreen Delaney, assembling boots and mittens while the children waited expectantly, glanced up. “Good morning, Mrs. March. Isn’t it lovely? I thought I’d teach them fox-and-geese while the snow’s still fresh, if they don’t get too wet at it.”
“They will; that’s a game by itself,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “Don’t let them wear you out.”
The coffee was still hot; she gave it an extra minute over the gas and poured two cups. Maire, absorbed in the legs of her snowsuit, said in a sweet absent voice, “Don’t wear me out. Jeep, you know you mustn’t wear me out.”
“Parrot,” said Elizabeth, and to Noreen, “I’ll be out very shortly to take over myself.”
Why had she said that? Because of a natural impulse to share the first snow with her children? Or because, with danger hanging over all their heads, she wanted to scoop up all the love she could?
The kitchen door closed behind them, their voices began to flute excitedly on the air. In the dining-room Constance said, “You look rather pale, Elizabeth. I hope last night wasn’t too much for you —how did you sleep?”
How did I, indeed? But she had. The body would take only so much from the mind. “Very well,” said Elizabeth. “How about you?”
“Oh, quite well, as usual. I did think,” Constance wrinkled her brow, “that I heard a car go out after the Brents left. I started to wonder if something was wrong, and then I fell asleep.”
Her tone dropped the matter there, but the pale eyes under the heavy lids took it up again, speculatively. Elizabeth retreated behind her coffee cup and said over the rim, “Oh, that’s right—Steven had a manuscript to read. Lucy had hopes of winning an argument from Oliver, I gather, so she stayed a while.”
“And did she?” Constance was bland, folding her napkin. “Win, I mean?”
She knew.
She doesn’t, thought Elizabeth, angry at herself; she can’t possibly. She’s shrewd, but she isn’t radar. She put down her coffee cup and shook her head. “You’d have to ask Oliver—I was too drugged to bother. Is there anywhere you’d like to go this morning . . . ?”
At three o’clock the house was empty of everyone but herself, and too still.
The children, bundled and booted like miniature paratroopers, had trudged off for a walk with Noreen, who seemed to find a pleasure almost equal to theirs in the fresh white world. Constance had taken the car into the village to treat with Mr. Willet, the grocery manager, over the matter of a roast. There was no word from Lucy Brent, who had said something about an auction the night before.
Would a house, or at least your own pleasant familiar house, seem so empty if there weren’t a corresponding hollowness inside? At a quarter to four, because the walls seemed to be closing in, Elizabeth put on her boots and coat, left a brief note on the kitchen table and went out into the frozen stillness.
Fox-and-geese tracks in the snow, blurry imprints where the children had made angels—don’t get maudlin, she told herself crisply, and went on her way. The March property was large, by current real-estate standards: nearly three acres that in summer turned into lawn and borders, a wooded hillside, a raspberry patch, a grape arbor. And at the top of the hill, built with abandon when Elizabeth sold her first book, the studio.
She hadn’t been here since her return from the hospital. The key was still under the single wooden step. Elizabeth unlocked the door and didn’t close it behind her because the air was heavy with damp and disuse. Her eyes went at once to the typewriter beside a window; it was somehow weird that the same sheet of yellow copy paper should still be there, waiting timelessly for the end of a sentence.
Sprigged chintz at the three windows, a day-bed where she’d slept more than once, an overflowing bookcase, an armchair: it was a comradely room, remote enough to be in another world. Her glance stopped on a
