Hours to Kill
the cup Hilary had dropped yesterday. Margaret picked up the knitting and the hats, shook them free of glass splinters, and retrieved a pair of crystal cocks, one now beakless and combless; a small inlaid box, and a white vase encrusted with purple violets. It wasn’t empty, as it looked; when she lifted it a photograph fell out.Was this Hilary’s treasure trove? No, that was the library. And here came Hilary, trailing the broom. Margaret dropped the photograph instantly back into the vase, only registering the impression of a small plumpish dark-haired woman, rather pretty, with bangs.
No rubber band appeared, and Hilary was so exaggeratedly aggrieved about it that Margaret knew it had never existed. What was to be done with her—prying by day, terrified by night? And it had been a genuine and disturbing terror; Margaret had felt an echo of it in herself. Damn Mrs. Foale, she thought with surprising vehemence, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Hilary, it’s time you and I had a talk.”
She realized at once that it was a mistake. If she admitted having examined Hilary’s scrapbook, Hilary would go underground like a mole and Margaret would have no clue at all as to what was going on. And if she hammered away at the necessity of not finding out anything more about Mrs. Foale, she would inevitably put the stress in the wrong place and Hilary would be lured to further efforts.
But it was too late to retreat, and she embarked on a long and effortful lecture which she might as well have delivered to the broom. She covered the value of privacy, the responsibilities of living in other people’s houses and the necessity for honesty, and when she had droned to a conclusion Hilary said, “Will you play a game of checkers?”
“No,” said Margaret.
At eleven o’clock Jerome Kincaid telephoned to ask her to dinner that night. He knew there was Hilary, but couldn’t Margaret get someone to stay with her—or weren’t there evening movies?
His voice sounded different over the phone, deeper, more purposeful. Margaret hesitated, tempted. She would simply be warned, she told herself, not admitting her own surprising pleasure; there was no need to have total rapport with every man who took you casually out. Lena could probably come, and it would be nice, more than nice, to get away from this dark house to lights, other people’s faces, a dinner she hadn’t cooked . . .
“Oh, I can’t,” she said suddenly. “Cornelia and Philip are going to call tonight.”
“Tomorrow night, then? Remember me to Cornelia, will you, and if they can give you an address I’d like to send a postcard. I might even be travelling out that way.”
Margaret said yes, tentatively, for dinner the next night. She didn’t examine until later his “out that way.” She wondered if he were trying by indirection to find out where Cornelia and Philip had gone. In any event she couldn’t have told him, because she didn’t know herself.
Had he even been at school with her or Cornelia? She hoped violently that he had, because otherwise—
She was getting as bad as Hilary.
The full measure of how bad she was getting, and the toll of the strangely upsetting night, came at a little before noon. The doorbell rang, and she answered it to a small, dark-skinned wrinkled man, eyes as bold as a boy’s, under an enormous hat. In spite of his worn work clothes he looked as elegant and untrustworthy as a snake. He greeted Margaret with a flood of Spanish at which she smiled apologetically, shook her head, and began to close the door.
He slid forward and past her and was in the house, saying in heavily accented English, “No understand, no? I wind clock.”
How had she failed to miss the quarter-hour chimes, the counting of the hours, the faint golden swing of the pendulum? The clock was dead and still in its rosewood and glass, but even so Margaret stood warily near the front door, grateful for Hilary’s interested presence at the entrance to the dining room, while the man opened the clock and wound up the weights.
His air of secret amusement might have been habitual with him, built-in; nevertheless, it stiffened her back while he set the pendulum in motion, asked her for the time, moved the elaborately-wrought hands. When he had closed the glass door and replaced the key, he said affably, “You give me money?”
He walked down the room toward her, at once wheedling and bold, measuring her openly. Margaret realized suddenly that he was very drunk indeed; his sinuous appearance came from an inability to stand erect and still. “Nice lady, no? Give money? Missa Foale give Julio money.”
“All right. Just a minute,” said Margaret steadily. Every nerve in her body was alarmed at his heavy breathing, his shiny gaze that appraised the room and everything in it and kept returning to her in an up-and-down stare. “Hilary, get my bag from the kitchen, will you please?”
Hilary obeyed instantly. Margaret got her nervous fingers inside her billfold and extended two dollars. She didn’t wait for his glance of contempt; she reached for the front door and opened it imperatively.
He didn’t move. He was studying Hilary.
Margaret said in a clear carrying voice, “I’m very busy just now. Goodbye,” and though it looked for a moment as though he might refuse to leave, he gave the room and Hilary a last survey, smiled to himself, and moved with insolent leisure through the open doorway and onto the porch. With the doorknob in her hand, Margaret said crisply, “You needn’t bother to wind the clock again. My husband—” she didn’t care if he noticed her ringless fingers “—will take care of it.”
He did look at her hand, deliberately. “Got husband? Nice, no?”
Margaret closed the door and locked it, knowing that the click was audible, worried a little about that. It would have been like Hilary to say he was the nicest man she had ever met, but Hilary looked