The Man in the Net (3 page)

“Linda!” Because he’d once again let himself be fooled and because he’d been idiotic enough to minimize the fact that the drink had started to work in her, all the affection had gone. He looked down at her, wearily, almost hating her.

“You think you can paint!” Her voice came, husky with spite, through the covering hands. “There’s something I’ve never told you. I swore I’d never tell you. I shouldn’t be telling you now. You can’t paint. You’re no good at all. Everyone knows that—not just the critics —everyone. Ask anyone in Stoneville. Anyone at all. They all laugh at you. And they all laugh at me.
You
, they say, 
you
who are so charming, so bright …”

She got up jerkily like a puppet. Not looking at him, still pouring out the babble of words, she started across the room.

“You who’s so charming, so attractive. Why, in God’s name, have you saddled yourself with that crazy, untalented oaf who’s dragging you down as surely as you’re standing right there, who …”

The words—the stale, dead words which he’d heard innumerable times before—fell on his nerves like water drops.

“I could have married many other men. I could have married George Krasner, the president of the Krasner Model Agency. I could have married …”

She was at the bar now. Casually, almost as if she wasn’t conscious of what she was doing, she was stooping down for the gin bottle.

“Linda,” he called.

She went on fumbling.

“Linda,” he called again.

She straightened, bristling with outraged hauteur.

“Why are you shouting at me like that?”

“Don’t,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t.”

“Don’t? Don’t—what? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Linda, please. As a favor to me. You don’t have to start it. It won’t help.”

“What won’t help?” Her face was scrawled now with astonishment and shock. “My God, you’re not accusing me of going to take a drink, are you? I was only arranging the bottles.”

He didn’t say anything. He just stood with his arms dangling at his sides.

“Well, are you?” Her voice tilted higher. “Is that how you’re going to justify yourself? I suppose you’ll say I had a drink in Pittsfield, just because some stupid, ignorant girl said some stupid, ignorant thing about my hair. Oh, you’re so clever. You know how to do it, don’t you? I’m here to tell you I haven’t had a drink for months. For that matter, there’s hardly been any time in my life when I drank anything more than—well, a couple of cocktails at a party or …”

She gave a little whimper and ran across to him. She threw herself in his arms, pushing her face against his chest.

“Oh, help me. Help me, John. Darling, help me.”

It was a real cry from her heart. He knew it was. This wasn’t acting. But, as he put a hand on her waist, all he felt was the panic of an animal caught in a net.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said, stroking her hair. “Going back to New York wouldn’t change anything.” “I’m so afraid.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t want to say all those things, John. I didn’t want to.”

“I know.”

“They weren’t true. Really they weren’t. I didn’t want to say them. Oh, John, if you’d help …”

Hope, or an illusion of hope, stirred in him. He might as well try again anyway.

He said, “If you’d talk to Bill MacAllister.”

Her body, pressed against his, started to tremble. “No,” she said. “You can’t do that. You can’t do that to me. You can’t have them shut me up in a …”

“You know it wouldn’t be anything like that. Bill? He’s an old friend. He’d understand …”

“No. Don’t talk about it. No.” At least it had its secondary value of shocking her back. Her fingers, clinging to his shirt, relaxed. “I’m all right. Honestly, I’m all right. And, darling, I’m so sorry. How could I have said those things? Of course I see you’ve got to turn Charlie Raines down. We’re better here. We’re both better here. And I did have a drink. Only one. I swear it. But it’s all right. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She drew away from him, smiling up at him, her huge green eyes glistening with the suggestion of tears.

“It’s just that I needed time to get used to it. Don’t you see? Springing it on me like that. It wasn’t easy. Right away … having to take it. You know it isn’t easy for me. If you’d done it another way, if you’d been a little more tactful …”

Her hand moved up from his shirt collar and caressed his neck. Already she was rewriting the scene in her mind. Already she was seeing herself as the sensitive wife who’d been a little unreasonable because her husband had handled her clumsily.

Even now she was still capable of staggering him.

“Darling, you’ve got to hurry and change. You should be leaving for Vickie’s right now.”

“Me? You’re not going?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—not now.”

“Then I won’t go either.”

“But of course you’ve got to go. One of us must go. What would she think? It’s her birthday. We’ve got the present and everything. Give her my love and say I’ve got one of my migraines. I’ll lie down on the bed for a while. I’ll be all right.”

From where he stood, the bar-table was in his direct line of vision. Almost without his realizing it, his eyes settled on the bottle of gin.

Linda’s voice came quick and sharp. “Trust me, John. Trust me just for once. If you knew how important it is to trust me.”

There it was again—the cry from the heart, and the dilemma. If he called the Careys to say neither of them were coming, he’d be undermining her with an obvious lack of faith. But, then, if he did leave her here alone …

He turned back to her. Her face was imploring—a little girl’s face.

“She knows about my migraine. They all do. Tell her I didn’t call because I was hoping right up to the last minute that I’d feel well enough to go.”

Didn’t he have to trust her? If he didn’t, after a direct plea like that, wouldn’t it be admitting the total defeat of their marriage?

He said, “You really think it’s best for me to go? That’s really what you want?”

“Yes, yes. And I won’t—I swear I won’t …”

“Okay, then. Where’s the present?”

“It’s upstairs in the bedroom. It’s all beautifully wrapped. I wrapped it myself.”

She was smiling happily now. She slipped her arm around his waist. They started up the stairs together. John was remembering that they’d bought the tray for Vickie together three days before in an antique shop. It had been the woman in the store who had gift-wrapped it.

In the bedroom Linda lay down on the bed. John peeled off his work clothes and took a shower. When he came back from the bathroom, she was still lying there with her eyes closed. He put on a shirt and tie and a summer suit. As he was brushing his hair, she called softly: “John, John darling.”

He put down the brush and turned to her. Her eyes were open and she was stretching her arms up toward him. He crossed to the bed.

“Kiss me, John.”

He bent over. She put her arms around his neck, drawing his mouth down to hers. Her lips clung to his in a long, passionate kiss. Her breath smelt of peppermint life-savers with a faint metallic back-taste of liquor.

“I’m sorry, John.”

“It’s okay.”

“I want you to be happy. That’s all I care about in the world—that you should achieve what you want to achieve—that you should live the life you want to live. Nothing else matters but that.”

“Sure, Linda.”

Her arms were still around his neck. Her mouth slid to his cheek. “Darling, if it was twice as much as you were getting before, it would be about twenty-five thousand, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

She giggled. “My, we’re being poor in the grand manner, aren’t we?”

She patted his hair and released him.

“I’ll just lie here for a while and then I’ll make myself something to eat. Don’t hurry home. I don’t want you to spoil your evening worrying about me. And give Vickie my love. Give them all my love. Say how terribly sorry I am.”

“Sure.”

He started for the door.

“Darling,” she called, “you’ve forgotten the tray. My beautiful gift-wrapped tray.”

HE GOT into the old black sedan, put the tray, wrapped in gold paper with a large blue ribbon rosette, on the seat next to him and swung down the weed-matted drive to the road.

I mustn’t worry, he told himself. For a long time now anxiety had been his greatest enemy, eating into his reserve of strength, making him each time progressively less adequate to face trouble when it came. Getting through the party would be tough without the added burden of agonizing about what Linda might be up to at home.

And perhaps she wouldn’t be up to anything. It was perfectly possible that, when he got back, he would find her all right. She’d controlled herself before after she’d started to drink. This habit of always expecting the worst was bad.

Vickie and Brad Carey lived on the edge of Lake Sheldon which was the most attractive situation in Stoneville. It was just about a mile away from the Hamiltons’ old farmhouse down a plunging hill through the woods. Brad was the only son of old Mr. Carey who owned one of the longest-established family paper companies in New England. He worked at the factory as vice-president and heir-apparent, and five years ago had married Vickie, a wealthy girl from California.

Although Stoneville was in the heart of the Berkshires, that swarming ground for summering New Yorkers, it was still surprisingly undiscovered. Old Mr. Carey had lived there for years and established his family as a sort of self-elected “gentry”. But, apart from them and the Fishers who were currently visiting in California, the only other people with social pretensions were Gordon and Roz Moreland, Timmie’s parents, who collaborated on almost best-selling historical novels and wintered in Europe. With the Fishers away, a party at Brad and Vickie’s inevitably meant a party consisting of the old Careys and the Morelands and, since their discovery of Linda, the Hamiltons.

The very smallness of the group made it fanatically closely-knit. The Morelands took an intense interest in the Careys and the Careys in the Morelands, and the old Careys in both families. They were beginning to be the same with Linda.

It was this growing intimacy which worried John. Except for Vickie and Brad, who were simple and friendly, the Carey set were not his kind of people, nor was he theirs. To him, old Mr. Carey was a boring bully and the Morelands silly and affected. And yet for Linda the fact that they had accepted her was enormously important. It gave her that added security which she so desperately needed, and for almost six months she had been able to keep her public personality intact with them. But John knew that the whole relationship hung by a hair. If ever the Carey set, smugly insulated against the seamier side of life, suspected the truth, they would discard her in a minute. And once that happened …

As he drove past the empty Fisher house and down the hill through the vast stretches of maple trees, paradisically serene in the yellowing sunlight, John felt once again a spasm of anxiety in his stomach. Twice already he’d had to use Linda’s migraine as an excuse. Would it work for a third time? And for a birthday party too? The Carey set made a cult of birthdays, and Linda, always lightning quick to pick up other people’s affectations, had been gushing for almost a week about this one.

“Vickie darling, a real Carey birthday party; I can hardly wait. It’ll be such an event for me. Then I’ll feel I really do belong.”

He turned into the highway which skirted the lake and soon swung into the Careys’ drive and down it to the old gravel parking area at the back of the house. The old Careys’ Cadillac was already there, parked by the young Careys’ Buick and their old convertible, but the Morelands’ Mercedes, brought back from a recent foray into Germany, had not yet arrived. John climbed out of the car, carrying the tray, and rang the doorbell. As he did so, there was an insistent tinkling behind him. He turned to see Leroy Phillips, very neat in a white shirt and grey shorts, appearing through a stone archway on a bicycle. Leroy’s parents worked as cook-butler for the young Careys and, sticklers for etiquette, made a point of keeping Leroy out of their employers’ eye. John had scarcely ever seen him at the Careys’ before The little boy pedaled determinedly up and smiled his dazzling smile.

“Hi, Mr. Hamilton.”

“Hi, Leroy.”

Leroy looked down at his handlebars, overcome by bashfulness. “We went swimming. We all went swimming, Emily and Angel and Buck and—and Timmie.”

“You did?”

“Yes, we did. And”—Leroy glanced up from under long black lashes—“Emily and Angel have a secret.”

“What sort of a secret?”

“A great big terrific secret. Do you think they’d tell me, Mr. Hamilton?”

“They might.”

“But they said they wouldn’t. They said they wouldn’t tell anyone. Timmie … he’s getting a space-suit from his father, and Timmie said if he’d let Angel wear his space-suit would she tell him the secret. But Angel said no. She said …”

The door opened and Alonso Phillips, in his white butler’s coat and black pants, beamed at John.

“Evening, Mr. Hamilton.” He saw Leroy and bent down, scowling a ferocious mock scowl. “What’s the matter with you? You know better’n to bring that bicycle around here. Scat, you—disappear.” He beamed back at John. “It is you, Mr. Hamilton. He’s been hanging around waiting ever since he knew you was coming. That boy’s just crazy about you. I guess all the kids are—just nuts about you. Come in, sir. They’re out on the terrace taking their cocktails. Mrs. Hamilton not with you tonight?”

“No. I’m afraid she’s got a bad headache.”

“My! That’s a shame. And a birthday party too.”

John followed him through the living-room and then went out on to the paved fieldstone terrace.

It stretched the whole length of the house and looked across Lake Sheldon which, although its north shore belonged to the township, was considered by the Carey set as their own private lake. The Carey family was seated around a cluster of wrought-iron porch furniture and blue-and-white-striped umbrellas. Old Mr. Carey, bland, vigorous and formidable, sat holding a martini in his hand like a gavel, as if the party were a board meeting at which he had indulgently condescended to preside. His wife, faded and fluttery, was seated at his side in her perpetual role of handmaiden. Brad Carey, very much the respectful son and heir, was mixing drinks at a glass-and-iron bar. Vickie was ensconced at a central table which was loaded with birthday gifts.