Hours to Kill
Margaret’s right. Margaret half-turned her head, and met the examining gaze of a small bathrobed girl in the hall doorway. She seemed to be seven or eight years old, although Margaret arrived at that only from her size; her face was startlingly knowledgeable. She studied Margaret as another woman might have, with an unhurried encompassing glance, and then looked at Cornelia. She said baldly, “Who’s that?”“Why, that’s—that’s your Aunt Margaret,” said Cornelia, falsely hearty. “Would you like to come in and be introduced, Hilary?”
“Hil,” corrected the child.
Cornelia closed her eyes, either out of fatigue or exasperation. “Hil.”
“Is she going to stay while you’re gone?”
Cornelia said yes, in the same submissive way. Neither she nor Philip told the child to go to bed; it entered Margaret’s mind that Hilary, crossed, was somebody to reckon with. A look at Cornelia’s wan face drove that and everything else out of her head; she said decisively, standing up, “I still feel as though I’m flying, so I think I’ll get to bed . . .”
The sound of running water, in the quiet immediately after Philip and Cornelia had left, proved to be the overflow from a bathroom basin in which Hilary had left the hot water running full tilt. Margaret mopped it up and wrung out towels with a consciously determined cheerfulness. She reminded herself that Hilary, at eight, was still very young, and that if children never did things like this nobody would be required to superintend them. She reminded Hilary that the house was a rented one; Mrs. Foale’s tile floor was not apt to be improved by lying under an inch of water, Mrs. Foale’s towels were now soaking wet.
Hilary listened docilely. At the end she said, “Do you dye your hair?”
“No. Don’t walk in the puddles, Hilary.”
“How come it isn’t the same color as Cornelia’s, if you had the same father?”
“Because it isn’t. If you’d move your foot, please—no, the one you’re standing on the towel with . . .” Wrists aching, Margaret glanced up with compunction, but Hilary wasn’t there.
Hilary was in the kitchen, mixing flour and water into paste for her scrapbook, the sink, the counter-tops, and two eggbeaters . . .
Never mind, thought Margaret. Lena comes tomorrow.
Lena—Margaret didn’t know and never found out her last name—was a small, slim, dark girl who came twice a week to do the cleaning. She did not know that Hilary was a student at progressive school in New York and the problem child of problem parents, and she treated her with a calm indifference which, to Margaret’s astonishment, Hilary appeared to love. She followed Lena everywhere, making important statements which Lena would interrupt with a “You want me to make laundry, ma’am?” to Margaret, or an off-hand, “Nice big girl picks up her clothes,” to Hilary.
Margaret, released, went into the town to make the acquaintance of the library. There was no need to shop when she had done that, as Cornelia had laid in provisions for at least a week, so she wandered through the plaza, examined books and jewelry and pottery in shop windows, watched blanketed Indians, dark and inscrutable over celery-tops tickling their chins, emerge bag-laden from grocery stores.
The town fell gradually behind her, but it was farther than she had thought to the narrow tilting street that led to Mrs. Foale’s house. Even though she walked slowly, as warned, the unaccustomed altitude caught her halfway and she had to pause, chest thumping, legs leaden, head very slightly swimming.
She realized, standing there among the sharp delicate branch patterns on an adobe wall, just why she had been so very anxious to get out today. It wasn’t so much Hilary, or the endless vigilance over Mrs. Foale’s lace-thin old Oriental rugs, Mrs. Foale’s books and cabinets, Mrs.
Foale’s birds of velvet or beads or crystal or porcelain. It was the actual darkness of the house—spawned, it almost seemed, by the tremendous vigas in living and dining rooms; further nurtured by the deepset windows. Light seemed an enemy there, something to be kept at bay. In late afternoon, when the snow on the mountains to the north was a radiant flushed pink, the house was sunk so deeply in shadow that lamps had to be lit.
Cornelia and Philip would be—where? At a motel in Arizona, beside a swimming pool? They hadn’t laid out any hard-and-fast plans; if they came to a place they liked they would stay there, if not they would simply wander, with no pressures, no deadlines, no more immediate worry than how to enjoy themselves. They were to phone Margaret the day after tomorrow and let her know where they were and where they expected to be, chiefly in case of contingencies over Hilary. But they had left Hilary’s parents’ Mexico City number and also the doctor’s—and Hilary was eight, after all, not a tumbling-down two or a try-anything five. Nothing was going to happen to Hilary.
On March twelfth, disturbing to Margaret even at the time, Hilary began a quiet, microscopic study of Mrs. Foale.
Two
IT began with a letter.
Margaret was washing the breakfast dishes, and wondering absently how Hilary had managed to distribute so much yolk out of one poached egg, when Hilary’s preoccupied voice said from somewhere, “What does p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t say?”
“Preg—” began Margaret, and dropped a fork as though it had burned her. “Hilary, come here, will you?” Hilary came with a promptness that betrayed her; she never, with her wits about her, obeyed any order on time. She carried what was obviously a letter, and Margaret seized it at once with a mixture of speed and severity.
“Where did you get this?”
“In a drawer.”
“What drawer?”
“In the pantry. I was looking for shoelaces,” said Hilary virtuously. “Mine are all in knots, and you said you’d get me some new ones yesterday and you didn’t.”
“You couldn’t expect to find shoelaces in a pantry drawer,” said Margaret sternly, “and even if you did they’d be Mrs. Foale’s shoelaces. Hilary, you must not pry.” She tried to pin