Hours to Kill
Hilary’s disconcerting yellowish eyes, but they were downcast in the squirrel face-plump cheeks, nubbin of chin. “Do you know what prying means?”Hilary’s lashes stayed down. “Looking where I shouldn’t.”
Margaret tried not to think that this glib definition indicated a long history of prying. “Well, then, you know better. Put it back right away,” her own gaze flickered tempted down to the lines of ink and then lifted again, “and if you need anything like shoelaces, remind me when I go out. Have you made your bed?”
In two days she had become well acquainted with Hilary. Teachers at the progressive school had probably discussed her in her hearing, as had friends of the Revertons’. Hilary was complacent about being a problem, as well she might be. Cornelia and Philip had knuckled under to it; Lena accepted it as philosophically as bad weather. Margaret was unable to do either, and as a result she and Hilary treated each other like hostile Indians.
Pregnant, thought Margaret vaguely, going back to the dishes. Well, Mrs. Foale, a thin, fadedly pretty woman in her sixties to judge by the photograph in the hall, undoubtedly corresponded with younger relatives and friends.
And if it was not Hilary’s concern, it was not hers either.
At eleven-thirty, Hilary brought in the mail.
Margaret sorted it because Cornelia had asked her to. Philip’s job as representative for a chemical concern on the Coast required so much travelling that he was, very discreetly, putting out other lines. If a letter came from Phalanx, Inc., she was to open it against their expected call.
There was no letter from Phalanx, Inc. Margaret riffled automatically through envelopes, handwritten and typed: two for Cornelia, one for Philip, bank statements for each of them, and a postcard to Mrs. Hadley Foale.
No one wrote intimacies on postcards, and Margaret read it almost without thinking. The tiny cramped writing said, “Dear Isabel, So thrilled and envious at your wire. Aren’t you the lucky one? Do wish you’d planned to embark from N.Y. so we could have seen you. Have a wonderful trip and keep us posted. Love, Grace.”
The card, mailed from New York almost a month ago, was inaccurately addressed and had been a number of places, to judge by the scribbled notations, before arriving here.
“Is that yours?” asked Hilary, craning upward, and Margaret said crisply. “No. You’re standing on my foot, Hilary.”
“I have very big feet for my age,” said Hilary complacently. “As big as Mrs. Foale’s.”
Perhaps because of the solemnity with which Margaret invoked the name, Hilary had come to say it with a kind of round owlishness, the “Mrs.” almost swallowed, the “oh” in Foale deepened and exaggerated. In this intonation, Mrs. Foale became a vengeful two-headed deity, dangerous to trespass on in any way. “What,” demanded Margaret astoundedly, “do you know about Mrs. Foale’s feet?”
“She left some shoes in the shoebag in my closet. I thought you didn’t want me to leave my shoes lying all over the room,” said Hilary righteously, “so I took hers out and put mine in.”
“Oh, you can’t do that,” Margaret said, starting instantly down the hall. This would, with Hilary, be the entering wedge; she had a horrified vision of the house being briskly rearranged, some objects broken, others irretrievably lost—and always with Hilary’s air of prim reproach. Besides, she had only one extra pair of shoes, red sneakers coming out at the sides, which could hardly be said to lie all over any room.
Hilary’s was really the prettiest room in the house, and the only one that was ever filled with light. Against the white walls, the furniture was painted a cool apple-green, and lacquered birds in blossomy branches glowed on the twin bureaus in a pattern that was only broken when a drawer was pulled open. There was a small rocker beside Hilary’s lumpily made bed, and a little curved comer fireplace with a raised hearth.
Margaret opened the closet door, and it was as she had feared: a pile of shoes had been tumbled rudely into a corner, while the ragged sneakers, side by side, reigned over the shoebag. Hilary would undoubtedly be seized by the urge to clean out the closet, presently, and hurl Mrs. Foale’s shoes somewhere else, and Cornelia would have everything to replace when she got back . . .
“Look,” said Margaret sternly, bending to pick up the shoes, “in a rented house you have to leave things just as you found them. Including shoes.”
But Hilary had been right, she thought absently; Mrs. Foale’s feet were small, and surprisingly, shabbily gay. A pair of worn brocade slippers turned up in an Oriental point, black velvet flats with broken gilt embroidery, scuffed red calf, faded yellow satin—all, for some reason, at variance with the personality otherwise stamped on the house.
Although was it her personality, really? The heavy old mission furniture, the oils framed in dimming gold, the stately clock, the preoccupation with birds, might all be the choice of the late Mr. Foale—at least Margaret assumed he was late. She slipped the last sandal back into its nest, and Hilary’s voice said rather truculently, “How come she didn’t wear any high heels?”
A very tall woman (hardly, though, from her shoe size) minimizing her height? A very small woman, capitalizing on it? “She took them all abroad,” said Margaret summarily, and closed the closet door. “Come on, let’s see about lunch.”
Lena was not due for another two days, and Hilary seemed in some mysterious manner to create dust as well as disorder; further, to reproduce it instantly. After lunch, Margaret dispatched her to a movie, not without some argument.
“I’m pasting in my scrapbook.”
Now you are, said Margaret silently. “You can do that when you come home.”
“Are you coming?”
“No, I’ve got the house to do.”
“I don’t like movies.”
“Yes you do,” said Margaret, marvelling at such flawless perversity. “I’ll walk down with you, and pick you up when it’s over. The air will do you good.”
Hilary got into her coat with a face like thunder. “I’m not allowed to go