She was speaking now to Maria. “You remember—I don’t think you were too young—how all the family said Gerald was only marrying me for my money? They were wrong,” Louise said almost calmly. “Gerald was much worse than that.”
“But your letters,” Maria said in a small wondering voice. “Your postcards . . .”
Louise shrugged a little. “It isn’t easy to admit you’ve been the fool everybody said you were. I asked Gerald for a divorce before we’d been married six months—but of course there was the money, which he hadn’t quite gotten his hands on yet. And he was careful about his—affairs. He was an expert at that.”
Torrant studied an unlit cigarette; out of the comer of his eye he could see Maria, beside him on the loveseat, twining her fingers tightly together. Louise Mallow’s level voice went into details in spite of them both.
There had been affairs from the first, thinly cloaked as valuable contacts and business interests—not because Gerald wanted to spare Louise but because he was determined to give her no grounds for divorce. She was after all a housekeeper and hostess, an unimpeachable background, perhaps most of all a sea anchor when one of his affairs reached a stage that might become awkward.
Until he met Annabelle Blair.
“She was a little taller than I am,” Louise said slowly, “and she had a beautiful figure and a kind of—I don’t know— magnetism. Some quality that made you want to watch her, anyway. I remember the first time I met her, when Gerald brought her to the apartment for dinner. She told us she’d been widowed about six months before, that her husband, a test pilot, had been killed on an experimental flight.”
Torrant had been absorbed in answering to himself, for the first time, the mystery of what had drawn Martin Fennister to a woman who would deliberately destroy him. ‘Some quality that made you want to watch her’ . . . that would have fascinated Martin of all men; it was what he had always pursued with his cameras. He glanced up sharply now, listening to what Louise Mallow had just said, remembering her words when he had first broached the subject of Martin’s death. ‘It was always possible . . . with what Martin .was.’ He had taken that for the coolest kind of challenge, but Louise had still believed in Annabelle’s casual tale of a test pilot. He stared at the woman in the wing chair, and began to realize a part of what he had helped to put her through.
Three months after he met Annabelle, the steady voice went on, Gerald came to Louise and demanded a divorce. He hadn’t counted on the depth of the bitterness that had been growing through twelve years of humiliation, and he was dumbfounded and then furious when she refused.
“Pride didn’t come into it any more by that time,” Louise said; she seemed to be trying to explain it to herself. Gerald was so confident, so used to his own way. He wrung the use out of a thing or a person and then he was through—but I wasn’t, and in a way it was what I’d wanted for years, to see him wanting something he couldn’t have. I remember that he flung out of the apartment that night in the worst rage I’d ever seen him in. He turned up the next day as though nothing had happened, with,” her mouth moved wryly, “an olive branch, an alligator handbag. He said a trip would do us both good, and as it was to be business combined with vacation he would need Annabelle Blair along. So we came here, Gerald and Annabelle and I.”
The room was still, absorbing that slow trio of names. Louise stood up suddenly and walked to one of the windows facing the road; she might have been watching for a car or struggling to keep the calm that was almost detachment. Turning, she said, “I wonder if I can make it clear to you. I should have known instantly what it was all about, but although I knew Gerald through and through by that time, I didn’t know there were women like Annabelle.”
Torrant saw it at once, with a kind of bemused clarity; he had had almost all of it in his mind, except that he had applied it to the wrong woman. Beside him, Maria drew a single furious breath and then sat in a shocked quiet while Gerald and Annabelle, summoned by the controlled voice at the window, drifted from under their double blanket of myrtle and occupied these shadowy rooms again.
There was Annabelle, bored, restless, splashing the other sitting room with raw vivid color because, she said, it was such a delicious touch to paint anything in Chauncy red. Annabelle giving Mrs. Partridge her orders because, Gerald told Louise while Mrs. Partridge stood by, “You’re inclined to be much too lax with servants.” Gerald asking Louise to fix something for lunch as he and Annabelle had some letters to do, and from upstairs, instead of the tap of the typewriter, low voices and an occasional spurt of laughter.
There were the times when the three of them went out to dinner, Annabelle beautifully suited and furred, Louise in quiet black. Gerald ordered for himself and Annabelle with numerous instructions about what was or was not to be done with the salad or the sauce; Louise’s order was briskly disposed of. There was, with surprising sting even at this late telling, one evening after Mrs. Partridge had gone to Connecticut.
Louise had finally rebelled at bearing the entire weight of the housework alone; at half-past five she found that she couldn’t stand the disorderly, dish-piled kitchen. She changed into a tweed skirt and her oldest sweater, pushed up the sleeves and began to attack it. At six Annabelle came down to fix cocktails for Gerald and herself and left a tray of melting ice cubes and
