The velvet hand

by Helen Reilly

  The three cars were in the garage, and Libby hadn’t called a cab. An accident; it was in all their minds. Moreover, with Philip coming home Libby wouldn’t have left the house for long, except for a very good reason. And there didn’t seem to be any. But she liked walking and the country to the north and west was lonely. She might be lying out in the woods with a broken leg. On the other hand she might have gone on some errand and been detained, some sort of emergency might have arisen, someone might have been taken ill. . . “Have you called people?” Kit asked Philip.

  Her uncle had. “Anita isn’t home.” Anita Stewart was their nearest neighbor and a close friend. “No one else knows anything.”

  More silence. Kit wished Hugo weren’t there. He was an exacerbation. Without looking at her directly he appeared to be keeping her in his field of vision. She stood. “I’m going up to Libby’s room.”

  The door around the jog at the far end of the upper hall was an unfamiliar panel of whiteness where there was usually a bright gap. Kit went in and switched on the lights. The pretty room was tranquil, undisturbed. The flowery chintz bedspread was slick and tight and unwrinkled, the dressing table immaculate; Libby was neat and always knew where everything was. “The pearl from your bracelet, Kit? Wait a minute, I’ve got it.” She had a button basket, too. You could get any kind of button from her. That pleased Philip. Careless and vague himself, he liked women to be busy about the house.

  Kit looked around for some signpost. Alligator pumps, three years old and pretty well done for, nudged each other in front of the armchair near the window where Libby had kicked them off. The sight of them hurt Kit, brought back all the days before Hugo, when there had been no division between herself and her cousin.

  The closed window had imprisoned the perfume left on the air, lily of the valley gone slightly stale. Kit’s heart sank. The smooth bed and the perfume—Libby hadn’t slept here last night. No . . . And their Aunt Miriam had been out, an insensate log under the influence of one of her sleeping pills. Why then was Miriam nervous, as if she thought she might be blamed for something?

  Kit turned. Hugo was in the doorway. His face was sober. As always he was terrifically alive, but there was no light in his eyes now, no smile, just the gaze, quick, and with an assaying and recording quality to it with which he surveyed the world at large, not letting you know his conclusions, putting you off with a light word. Was it the suggestion of hidden depths that had first snared her? Perhaps there were none.

  “You can come in,” she said with formal politeness.

  “Thanks.” Hugo settled his shoulder against the lintel, his gaze circling the room. His sharp masculinity was out of place in that feminine setting of ruffled curtains, fragile furniture, and thick white rugs.

  Down the hall Miriam was going into her own room.

  Her door opening and closing created a draft. The breeze, coming from behind Hugo, rattled something. Kit fished out a piece of paper caught between the little desk painted with butterflies and leaves, and the wall. It was a sheet of Libby’s heavy deckle-edged notepaper. There was writing on it. “Darlings—Don’t worry about me. You’ll be hearing from us in a few days.”

  Libby’s usual precise handwriting was slanted to toppling point and the pen strokes were strong on one side and wavering on the other. It might have been written with a glove on. It had certainly been written when Libby was not herself.

  “Us,” Kit said aloud, starkly.

  Hugo read the note over her shoulder, moved off. He lit a fresh cigarette, dropped the match into an ash tray shaped like a sea shell. “Us.” He gazed at Kit intently and absently.

  She said a little desperately, still bemused, “It might be Judith Newbury. Judith’s having trouble with her husband. Maybe she had to get away and Libby went with her—Harold Newbury’s a mess when he’s drinking—and Libby’s very fond of Judith.”

  She didn’t believe it. Neither did Hugo, or Philip, who joined them; he had talked to Judith Newbury on the phone. Philip read the note, and crumpled it in an angry hand. “She knew I was coming home. She knew it, and she didn’t even write the note to me. What’s been going on around here?”

  He was as bewildered as Kit. Hugo said to her practically, “Look in the closet. Maybe you can tell what clothes she took with her ”

  It was an acceptance of the fact that Libby was gone, and that she had gone deliberately. But why—and where? Kit went to the wardrobe lining the east wall. Rows of dresses, of suits, of blouses—Philip had opened charge accounts for Libby at half a dozen Fifth Avenue stores after the money had come. Kit said doubtfully—after all she hadn’t seen Libby except fleetingly in the last three months and Libby might have bought any number of new things— “Her blue tweed suit isn’t here—and that lace robe you gave her for Christmas, Philip, and that she never wore— she said it was going to be a help when she hard boiled her first soft-boiled egg after the honeymoon.”

  Her honeymoon with Hugo. Only it wasn’t. Hugo was here, and Libby wasn’t. . . . Alarm gathered in Kit, made a tight knot under her diaphragm. But alarm about what —except for that “us” in the note? And that didn’t mean anything, not really. Libby, on paper, was hopeless. “Kit, what on earth can I tell this ghastly man who wants me to meet his mother?” She would start a letter, tear it up, begin another, and throw that away.

  Kit bent and looked into the trash basket under the desk. There was a crumple of gray paper there that, smoothed out, showed the same sloping scrawl. “Darling Philip, Kit and Aunt Miriam . . .” That was all. It ended there.

  Hugo came over and looked at it. His elbow brushed Kit’s and she stepped back. They both saw the snapshot at the bottom of the basket at the same time. A miniature

  Hugo looked up at them, knee-deep in snow under the leafless beech beyond the tennis court. He was smiling in the direction of the invisible girl with the camera. Libby was an indefatigable and bad snapshot taker. More often than not she got blanks and blurs with one film superimposed on another. This was one of her more successful tries.

  The three-by-four oblong of shiny paper woke Kit like a pail of ice water flung over a somnambulist. She had begun to tell herself that she had been wrong all along the line, that Hugo might have been attracted to Libby as he would have been to a kitten, for a passing moment, that that was all there had been to it, and that she herself might have gone off the handle without sufficient cause, on the strength of that one glimpse of them in each other’s arms in the dark of a February night. In short, that she had made a thorough fool of herself.

  She wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t just a glimpse. She had broken with Hugo in February, and he had gone on seeing Libby, and loving her. The only real snow of the year had come in March, which was when the snapshot had been taken.

  She was keenly aware of Hugo beside her looking down as she was looking down. He knew, of course, that the little snapshot was a dead giveaway. The room was stifling. Kit crossed to the window and threw it up. The June night outside was soft and warm. The frogs in the pond beyond the orchard sang a deeper chorus. Kit stared into the darkness, her hands pressed hard on the sill. . . . She couldn’t stand there indefinitely. She started to turn —andsaw. . .

  Her exclamation brought her uncle and Hugo. She pointed to the square glass ash tray behind folds of the looped-back curtain. There was a single cigarette in the ash tray, king size. She said, pointing, “That’s not Libby’s. She doesn’t smoke much, and when she does it’s the ordinary short ones.”

  They all stared at the long cigarette from which no more than a few puffs had been taken. It wasn’t a woman’s. There was no lipstick on it.

  “Us”—Libby and a man.

  Philip said harshly, out of the silence, “You mean that there was a man up here with Libby, helping her to pack, that she left the house last night with a man . . He rubbed his hand over his face.

  Hugo didn’t say anything. He was as still as though he had been turned into a statue of himself, not a very good one. Ash from h
is own cigarette fell unheeded to the floor while he stared at the one in the glass ash tray.

  The odor of lily of the valley was strong. It filled the room that was Libby’s private and personal core, the books in the bookcase, the little alligator pumps, a yellow jersey swaying lightly on a hanger in the closet, the photographs and pictures, an immense velvety panda that she used as a pillow. Someone named Leo had sent it to her last New Year’s and it was flat and dejected from the pressure of her head.

  Who was the man? The question was there, clamorously. Libby spent most of her time with Philip. They worked together, went places together. She would have been in Mexico with him only for that ridiculous attack of whooping cough she had caught from the Trent children. Leaving Hugo out of it, who could it be? Libby was popular and had loads of friends but there had never been any particular man—that Kit was aware of.

  Hugo said suddenly and softly, “Let’s get out of here, shall we?” and tinned on his heel.

  Looking at his back, Kit thought, now you know what it means to be rejected and cast aside—and was suddenly horribly sorry for him.

  Philip led the way along the hall and into Miriam’s room. After the money had come Miriam had had it completely done over. She was in bed under a satin puff. She took a folded handkerchief away from her eyes and sat up.

  “A—man?” Her face was suddenly sallow in a white and mauve setting. “Libby left here last night with a manl”

  Her voice sharpened. “I don’t know anything. I tell you I was asleep. I didn’t hear a sound . . .” She couldn’t think of any man Libby was interested in particularly, anybody new. Although she had been going out a lot. . .

  Miriam was coldly and emphatically insistent about her lack of knowledge. Too insistent? It was hard to tell.

  They left her and went downstairs and into the living room. It looked strange to Kit, alien. Everything was new here too, chairs and sofas and tables, a great shimmering rug instead of the two smaller ones, the long fall of jade and silver draperies, the spinet Philip had bought Libby for Christmas, over her veto.

  Bright shadow, it was just that. It weighed on Kit’s spirit. Libby had also liked the old things better. She had said, dimpling helplessly, “Philip’s terrible, Kit, like a runaway horse. I can’t do anything with him.” But his recklessness with money had worried her. She said he ought to be saving it for later on when he wouldn’t be able to work so hard, or wouldn’t want to.

  Philip paced the floor, his face ravaged. Hugo sat in the red wing chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, staring at his shoes. Kit said to him, "You’ve been seeing Libby, haven’t you?”

  “Some. Not much, I’ve been busy. Why?”

  “Well, because—do you know anyone, did there seem to be anyone . . . ?” Asking a discarded lover whether he had seen signs of his oncoming successor was rather difficult.

  Philip found a focus for his bewilderment and anger in her question. “Haven’t you been seeing Libby, Kit? Haven’t you been here week-ends?”

  His pain-filled eyes were accusing. He was right, she thought miserably. She had neglected Libby, had deliberately separated herself from Denfield, unable to bear the aura of happiness that surrounded Libby, needing time to lick her own wounds and put herself back together again. She shrugged. “Since you went to Mexico, I’ve been busy, too, Philip, busier than I’ve ever been. When I did see Libby in New York, when she dropped into the apartment, I thought—sorry, Hugo—that you and she were about at the announcement stage. She’d come in wearing flowers and as happy as a lark...

  Hugo said with a complete lack of expression, “Well, you were wrong.” He was curt. He went on, “Can’t you think of anyone, Kit, not the men around here that Libby’s known all her life but—maybe someone in New York?”

  Kit sent her thoughts back over the months, sitting forward, elbows on her knees, chin propped on her linked fingers. Her narrow black skirt and black jersey, her white face and dark haloed head gave her the look of a figure out of ballet. She was unconscious of the intensity of her pose. Something was coming. . . . The room faded out and another room faded in. Daisy Ballentine’s room, Daisy Ballentine’s party. . .

  Daisy was merchandise editor of Parasol and it was one of her usual affairs, mixed-up and mad and amusing for a little while. Kit could see it all clearly. There was a man in bare feet who played the flute and a girl with long red hair in a horse’s tail and an immense harp. George had taken her and Libby. Getting the harp into the third floor walk-up had created a great deal of confusion not helped by the candles in wine bottles with which Daisy lighted her at-homes. The din was terrific. People talking the strange language of the fashion business, “I wouldn’t mind one dog or two dogs but a whole line of dogs—and supposed to be from Paris at that,” jostled people who painted, “If you can picture a concrete abstraction,” and people who wrote. She and George were sitting on the sidelines withdrawn as far as they could get from the sound and fury when Kit caught sight of a man’s head.

  It was an extraordinary head. Handsome was much too weak, too insufficient, a word. A nearby candle, streaming trickles of wax down its shortened length, had increased the illusion of an inhuman perfection, a portrait done in subtle tones against the smoky darkness and the haze. The man’s hair was a clear bronze and as bright as metal. His profile might have been carved in marble, carefully, by a master—human features would show some small reassuring flaw. He was laughing, and it came as a shock. Magnificent marble busts didn’t laugh aloud.

  “My God,” George had said in her ear, "this is quite a party. Daisy’s robbed a museum. I know who did that guy. Michelangelo. He’s on loan from the Metropolitan.”

  And then another head had appeared, and it was Libby’s. It was at Libby—with Libby—that the Adonis was laughing.

  Later on Libby had tried to introduce Kit to him. He was the center of a cluster of four or five women and Kit had found herself disliking his air of arrogant boredom. When Libby appeared he said, “Here’s my girl,” dismissing his cortege. One of the women was Daisy Ballentine, and Daisy was tight. She had thrown her arms around him. "Tony, you utter angel, you. I’m going to give you a kiss to see if you’re real.”

  He had removed her arms, not gently, and Daisy had almost fallen. She swore and then laughed. “Pardon me— and pray don’t apologize for spraining my wrist. Oh, Kit Haven. You’re next in line—got your admission charge?”

  Kit remembered that the man’s eyes had traveled over her with an odd effect of sightlessness in them, and his mouth had hardened. He knew she didn’t like him. She had said, “I won’t need any admission charge, Daisy,” and had walked away. Shortly after that she and George left. Libby was having fun and had stayed on. The Adonis had brought her home a couple of hours later. What was his name?—Tony Wilder. Could it be Wilder who had put the stars in Libby’s eyes? God help her if it was, and yet it would explain why she had gone away secretly like this. Philip would most emphatically not approve of Wilder. . . .

  Kit stared at the rug, the folds of the curtain. The curtain stirred. The dark night wind was soft, warm. Hugo and her uncle were both watching her.

  “You thought of someone.” Philip half started from the chair into which he had flung himself. “Who is he?”

  Kit told them.

  The effect of Wilder’s name on Hugo was astonishing.

  Ill

  Black blinding rage; she could feel rage seize Hugo, shake him. She thought tiredly that there was nothing odd about that. He was in love with Libby and Libby had chosen another man. The queer thing was that Hugo met her eyes and instantly all trace of his fury vanished. He covered it up, hid it away. And that was the beginning of it, the strangeness, the discrepancies, the faint distortion of the familiar, so that at times Kit thought she was the one who was off beat, out of step.

  Hugo denied unequivocally knowing anything about Tony Wilder. Philip shot questions at Kit. She suspected and surmised a lot about Wilder, actually she knew very litt
le, and that little she censored—no use making her uncle feel any worse than he did, and after all they weren’t sure. Libby had seemed to be attracted to Wilder, but it was a long while ago. On the other hand there had certainly been someone for the last three months and if it wasn’t Hugo . . . She said that Wilder was in his early thirties, very good-looking, and that he seemed anything but broke. “I’m going to call Daisy Ballentine and see what she can tell us about him.”

  She looked in the book and dialed long distance. Listening to the ringing at the other end of the wire she made herself relax. What difference did an hour or two make now? Libby had been gone for twenty-four hours. If the man she had gone away with was Wilder they were probably married by this time.

  Daisy was evidently out. She might be anywhere—in Bermuda taking color shots or in California at a fabric promotion; Kit dropped the phone into its cradle, started to get up, and didn’t. She kept her hand on the instrument, her pulse leaping. She hadn’t heard the front door open, but there was a man in the hall, behind her and a little to one side, a motionless dark shape, standing there as though he were listening . . . She tinned. It was only William Grant. He said, “Hello, Catherine,” and came on down the hall.

  William was Miriam VanKreef’s nephew and no blood relation of the Havens. He was an innocuous young old man of thirty with a mouth that hadn’t quite grown up, round staring brown eyes behind rimless glasses, and the bulbous brow of an offended elder statesman. “It’s not enough,” Philip had once remarked, “to have his aunt a thorn in our flesh, we have to have William as salt in the wounds.” He came indefatigably every week-end and on holidays to visit his aunt and her family by her first marriage, with his rolled-up umbrella under his arm and his aura of patient martyrdom, of waiting humbly for the crumbs that fell from the table of the Havens, whom he considered to be rich, gay people who did what they wanted when they wanted while he slaved his life away at an arduous job as a hotel clerk.