A Fox Inside (14 page)

“Leave her alone,” she said. “If you’ve got any
decency
, leave her alone. At least for a while.” She glanced round the room irritably. “This house is so empty,” she said. “It always was.” She stood up and walked towards the door in her high heels that made such a hopefully young sound. She left him where he sat. He did not move. He could hear her moving through the house, making rapidly for the hall, and it seemed to him that from the sound she was going up the front stairs more quickly than she might have done.

He heard a door bang and he thought he heard it lock. And it occurred to him that that was what was wrong: that the house was empty and that it always had been. It did not make him like her any the more, or like Maggie any the less. It solved nothing. He remembered, unpleasantly, how close and warm and different Maggie had felt when she had kissed him, and he thought of Charles, with his cold, hard flesh. He became so aware of Lily that he got up and left the house.

“You’re not old,” he told himself. “Nobody is ever old. But you aren’t young any more either.”

Outside the ants were still trooping towards the apple, but Maggie was not there. If she was still waiting for him she was waiting somewhere else, and he took a walk to investigate. The garden was no longer kept up. It had gone to seed. And perhaps for that reason the farther he got from the house the happier he felt. He stopped and frowned, and found himself staring at a scarlet pepper bush, its long leafy antennae withered by the heat, even here, in the shade. He would have to tell Maggie he loved her some time. It might as well be now, if that would help to keep her calm. He would compel himself to love her, for that was the only way to save her.
Therefore
love her he would.

L
ILY STAYED LOCKED IN HER
room. There was no one in the house, but that didn’t prevent her from locking her door, chiefly against that corridor with its bedrooms that were no longer used. There were five bedrooms apart from her own. She went in them sometimes, when the house was empty, just to be sure that there was no one there.

Maggie’s was at the far end of the corridor, beyond the well of the hall, and looked over the front of the house. It had not been re-done for ten years and it was still a girl’s room. She remembered when she had had it done that way. It was before she met Charles and she had had the room done up as a surprise for Maggie. The three guest rooms were never used. They were redecorated when the house had been made Georgian, the first year she had known Charles. Ford had slept in one of them once. So had the Governor Ford and Jerome had selected for that term. But they usually stood empty. She had them cleaned once a week and always kept them made up. Then there was Jerome’s room, which faced the back of the house and which had never been remodelled. Sometimes when she was alone in the house and Ethel had gone to bed she would get up and lock the door to Jerome’s room. It was always kept shut. But she would
not have the blinds or curtains drawn. She liked the sterilizing light. It was furnished in heavy mahogany, simple yet massive, that had come round the Horn. It was a room whose contents she could see only too clearly. Beyond it was the room Charles had always used when he had stayed the night. The decoration of that he had supervised himself, but the effect was cold. It had a bathroom attached. Once, a year ago, Ethel had been cleaning up in there and left the hot-water tap running. Lily had heard it soon enough and turned it off, but Ethel could be careless at times. The doors of these rooms were always shut, except that belonging to
Maggie
, which was left open to let light into the hall. It was a cheerful room. It was a pity it was never used.

Lily lay on her bed listening to the clock. It was one of those brass clocks under a glass dome which have four balls that ceaselessly revolve, and though it made little noise, that little was oddly perceptible.

It was almost dark, but she did not bother to turn on the light. She knew these rooms well. She had had the wall knocked out and an arch put in, so that the
sitting-room
, with its efficient desk and sprigged chintz
furniture
flowed naturally into the bedroom, which
contained
nothing but a night table and the bed. No one ever came into her rooms but Ethel, to clean, and Charles, once. And a few people before Charles, though nobody since.

She had undressed and put on a négligée, but she had not really gone to bed. She kept jumping up to fuss with things, or trying to read a detective story, though she had given that up hours ago; and it seemed to her, in the empty silence of the house, that the downstairs rooms
were full of people who did not like her. She went into the bathroom and flicked on the overhead light.

“You were young once”, she said to her reflection, “and now you won’t be young ever again.” But she did not say so aloud. She did not want to hear it. Ageing was something she had never been able to understand, and she did not understand it any the better now. She stared at herself in the harsh, unflattering light and then went back to the bedroom and lay down and wondered if Charles had ever really liked her. It would have been nice to believe that he had.

*

Even when Maggie was away at a private school and not old enough for college, and chiefly because Jerome was too ill to bother with, she had given parties for people from the campus. And not only because she was lonely. Originally, she supposed, it had been Senator Ford’s idea. He liked other people to give his parties for him. When she first married him Jerome had helped to run the local political machine, and Ford had had great hopes for him. And later, when Jerome went odd, Ford had had the idea that they should cultivate young law students or anyone else who was likely, not so much to bring them over to their side, as because it didn’t do any harm to know people. Ford believed in catching them young.

She wasn’t much more than forty-five in those days and she had looked younger. She had forgotten, with Jerome, what it was like to be young and drink too much and have fun. Of course Jerome had always been a stuffed shirt and she knew why she had married him, yet sometimes she wished the stuffing would come out once
in a while. But as Jerome began to fail and she had to take over the reins herself, which meant fighting Ford all the way, and even giving in to him more than she wanted to, until the whole setup began to dwindle away from them both, leaving them with not much more than the county, she saw less and less of Ford. She also saw less of the law students and political science majors whom he had encouraged.

Stanford meant a lot to her, perhaps because she had never gone there, or because after all it was the one local college that mattered, and she began to make a thing of throwing parties for the football team after a big game. The team and the lawyers didn’t mix too well, but it was easier to laugh and forget things with the team. Some of them were nice; besides which, of course, Ford had become impossible, and as he began to draw the younger politicians away from her, though she knew what he was up to, it made it all the easier for her to keep what new acquaintances she made of her own.

She kept the house full in those days and it was
amazing
how cheerful it could be when it was full. She never got over that, for it had never been cheerful before, and she and Ethel, whom she had brought with her from the hotel as her personal maid, got a lot of fun out of
planning
the parties themselves, down to the last
canapé
, and for really big occasions a small band. Jerome had put his foot down about the band, but now the big Capehart did just as well. Once in a while it went crazy and threw records all over the room. If it did one of the boys always knew how to fix it.

On the 5th January 1940, when Maggie was fifteen, and away with friends anyhow, she gave a real party to
celebrate the Rose Bowl game, or anyway, to celebrate. Ethel and she had really knocked themselves out. She was late getting ready, and of course before she went to her room she had to go in and take a look at Jerome, to say good night.

There wasn’t anything wrong with Jerome actually. Not if she admitted the truth, anyway. But he liked to save himself, he didn’t like to talk, and he could be
difficult
. He was difficult that night. It took her a long time to get away from him. Outside in the hall she had looked at her watch and scampered into her room. She had a new faille dress, the colour of a young Siamese cat, or colours; and she dressed with great care, cheering up as she watched the evening taking shape in her mirror.

It was true she was getting somewhat plump, but not too plump, and she was not beautiful: she had a spaniel face. But it was a quizzical, engaging face; and she knew that everybody thought she was a good scout, except perhaps Jerome and Ford, neither of whom could be expected to know what a good scout was. Being a good scout was her speciality.

“All right?” she asked Ethel, and Ethel said yes, it was all right. Gathering up her skirts, she went down the main stairs, and that was how she met Charles. He was in an ill-assorted clump of people—she couldn’t
remember
who they were now, or ever afterwards—but he had come alone and he sort of stood out. Besides, she had not seen him before, and almost everybody else there she either knew only too well or did not want to know at all. She stopped half-way down the stairs for a moment, looking at him, and she knew that he had noticed her as well. He had to be nice, she thought, for
she was his hostess; yet all the same she felt suddenly timid and wondered if perhaps her dress was not a little too full around the hips.

For that matter Charles had been pretty full around the hips himself.

Hesitating for that minute on the stairs she hoped that she really did look her best, and that—she supposed—was the beginning of it. It was not falling in love or
anything
like that. Nobody falls in love. It was that,
catching
his eye, she saw instantly that, whoever he was, they understood one another. And since understanding
herself
was the last thing in the world she would ever admit to doing, not with these fresh-faced boys, anyway, that gave her a sudden, illicit thrill. For nobody ever caught her out. The only people who could do that were people just the same as she was.

She went on down the stairs with her special party smile, a neat mixture of the maternal and the acquiescent that she hoped looked well and that she knew worked well, at least when it was sufficiently backed up by the liquor cellar and the buffet. “Hello,” she said. “Hello.” And wished these whey-faced boys would not look at her with awed contempt, as though she were the house matron. The girls usually did not look at her at all.

There must have been a hundred people there and that was the sort of party she liked. It cut down on the effort she had to make if she had fewer people, and
tonight
there was an excitement in the air that usually she missed. At about midnight she found herself pushed into the library, which was half empty, by the crowd in the gallery and the living-room. She took a deep breath. Looking up she saw him. He was standing in front of the
sofa, examining the picture over the mantelpiece
speculatively
. She saw automatically that though his evening clothes were well made, they had not been made for him. And it surprised her that she made a note to do something about that even before she spoke to him. She had erupted into the room and she hoped she didn’t look too tired or too flushed. He looked at her with that sideways smile and twinkle that he could turn off or on. There was something pleasantly memorized about everything he did.

“You shouldn’t be here alone,” she said, pushing back her hair.

“Well, I’m not,” he said, “now am I?”

She liked his voice, too. It had a double emotional
vibrato
that she seemed to recognize. It was a little like her own when she was being sincere. She shrugged and went over to the liquor cabinet, the private one, and poured two highballs without even asking if he wanted one. She was a little nervous.

“I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “You’re not one of Senator Ford’s boys….”

“No, not really,” he said. “I don’t think he thinks much of me.” He hesitated. “It could be a point in my favour.”

She glanced at him over the top of her glass. He wasn’t trying to make an impression. They were talking as though they had already known each other for years. He was clever, she could see that. He knew he had
already
made his impression and she wondered if he had come to make it. She felt suddenly happy.

“You bet it could,” she said, and she felt excited, and watched him with bright brown eyes, like a chipmunk,
holding on half-way up a tree, who looks quickly to see where to jump next. And she let her eyes crinkle into a smile.

Maybe he hadn’t expected it to be so easy. He twirled his glass and looked towards the other room, the people jammed with their backs to the still open door. “Don’t you get tired of it?” he asked. “I should think you would.” He looked disdainful and she saw that for some reason she had lost a point.

“They all go home eventually,” she said. “Most of them. Or go somewhere.” She looked down at the
bottom
of her glass, knowing damned well what she was going to say. “If you don’t”, she said, “it might be better to wait upstairs.” She handed him her empty glass, went out of the room and had the feeling that when the others had gone he would be there.

She didn’t see him for the rest of the evening and
enjoyed
herself thoroughly, certain, for once, that somebody would be upstairs after the others had left. She had never found her guests so amusing, as now when she no longer needed them. She knew she must look her best.

When, at three-fifteen, she did get upstairs, he was there all right, sitting quietly in a chair, smoking cigarettes and looking satisfied with a bottle of bourbon from the library, she noticed with amusement,
thumbing
through a big blue and gold album of Jerome’s that was full of bad photographs of the Barnes that once were.

It was so very easy. She didn’t care whether it was
prearranged
or not. She thought she could manage him. She took him down to Del Monte when the spring term was out. He had not wanted to go and she had
thought it was because of clothes, so she sent him the money for a decent suit, knowing he’d go to the best local tailor; and then she went down to the tailor, scooped up his measurements, and had him sent a wardrobe. She got power of attorney from Jerome in May and that made things easier for them. It was her first adventure on a big scale and she loved all of it. It gave her something to do.

She put herself on a thirty-day protein diet and went up to town for a week to buy new clothes. And though she gave him things openly, on her own initiative, she was careful not to give him too much. As a Stanford trustee she had him granted a decent scholarship and watched him spend the money with considerable
satisfaction
. It was a fiction, but it was a fiction that made things easier all round; and she was proud that she had had the sense to work it out that way. The only person she worried about was Ford. He had sharp eyes. She wondered sometimes if he had arranged Charles to get her out of politics, and that gave her an idea about Charles, so she really settled down to train him. Del Monte was the test case.

*

It seemed silly to take the Cadillac. The Cadillac
belonged
to her matron side. She bought a convertible and spent a week banging it up, so it wouldn’t look new; had him move into town; put him up at the town house—the first time it had been used, except for her shopping expedition, in months—and then picked him up there the next morning, with the luggage already piled in the car. He had his own luggage by now, saddle-stitched cowhide, and she looked at it with approval. He caught
her doing that and smiled at her. His teeth were small and regular. It was the smile of a little boy who knows he has done the right thing, but wonders faintly why anyone should think him capable of doing anything else. In those days she didn’t in the least mind his making use of her: after all, she was making use of him. And it was good to have company again, not just some lout, but somebody she could really get to know.