But Clare Kendry had begun to cry, audibly, with no effort at restraint, and for no reason that Irene could discover.
Part III
Finale
I
The year was getting on towards its end. October, November had gone. December had come and brought with it a little snow and then a freeze and after that a thaw and some soft pleasant days that had in them a feeling of spring.
It wasn’t, this mild weather, a bit Christmasy, Irene Redfield was thinking, as she turned out of Seventh Avenue into her own street. She didn’t like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudy as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all as soft, as like April, as possible. The kind of weather for Easter. Certainly not for Christmas.
Though, she admitted, reluctantly, she herself didn’t feel the proper Christmas spirit this year, either. But that couldn’t be helped, it seemed, any more than the weather. She was weary and depressed. And for all her trying, she couldn’t be free of that dull, indefinite misery which with increasing tenaciousness had laid hold of her. The morning’s aimless wandering through the teeming Harlem streets, long after she had ordered the flowers which had been her excuse for setting out, was but another effort to tear herself loose from it.
She went up the cream stone steps, into the house, and down to the kitchen. There were to be people in to tea. But that, she found, after a few words with Sadie and Zulena, need give her no concern. She was thankful. She didn’t want to be bothered. She went upstairs and took off her things and got into bed.
She thought: “Bother those people coming to tea!”
She thought: “If I could only be sure that at bottom it’s just Brazil.”
She thought: “Whatever it is, if I only knew what it was, I could manage it.”
Brian again. Unhappy, restless, withdrawn. And she, who had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies, had found it first unthinkable, and then intolerable, that this, so like and yet so unlike those other spasmodic restlessnesses of his, should be to her incomprehensible and elusive.
He was restless and he was not restless. He was discontented, yet there were times when she felt he was possessed of some intense secret satisfaction, like a cat who had stolen the cream. He was irritable with the boys, especially Junior, for Ted, who seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of his father’s periods of off moods, kept out of his way when possible. They got on his nerves, drove him to violent outbursts of temper, very different from his usual gently sarcastic remarks that constituted his idea of discipline for them. On the other hand, with her he was more than customarily considerate and abstemious. And it had been weeks since she had felt the keen edge of his irony.
He was like a man marking time, waiting. But what was he waiting for? It was extraordinary that, after all these years of accurate perception, she now lacked the talent to discover what that appearance of waiting meant. It was the knowledge that, for all her watching, all her patient study, the reason for his humour still eluded her which filled her with foreboding dread. That guarded reserve of his seemed to her unjust, inconsiderate, and alarming. It was as if he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him.
She closed her eyes, thinking what a blessing it would be if she could get a little sleep before the boys came in from school. She couldn’t, of course, though she was so tired, having had, of late, so many sleepless nights. Nights filled with questionings and premonitions.
But she did sleep—several hours.
She wakened to find Brian standing at her bedside looking down at her, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.
She said: “I must have dropped off to sleep,” and watched a slender ghost of his old amused smile pass over his face.
“It’s getting on to four,” he told her, meaning, she knew, that she was going to be late again.
She fought back the quick answer that rose to her lips and said instead: “I’m getting right up. It was good of you to think to call me.” She sat up.
He bowed. “Always the attentive husband, you see.”
“Yes indeed. Thank goodness, everything’s ready.”
“Except you. Oh, and Clare’s downstairs.”
“Clare! What a nuisance! I didn’t ask her. Purposely.”
“I see. Might a mere man ask why? Or is the reason so subtly feminine that it wouldn’t be understood by him?”
A little of his smile had come back. Irene, who was beginning to shake off some of her depression under his familiar banter, said, almost gaily: “Not at all. It just happens that this party happens to be for Hugh, and that Hugh happens not to care a great deal for Clare; therefore I, who happen to be giving the party, didn’t happen to ask her. Nothing could be simpler. Could it?”
“Nothing. It’s so simple that I can easily see beyond your simple explanation and surmise that Clare, probably, just never happened to pay Hugh the admiring attention that he happens to consider no more than his just due. Simplest thing in the world.”
Irene exclaimed in amazement: “Why, I thought you liked Hugh! You don’t, you can’t, believe anything so idiotic!”
“Well,
