Edith brightened at once. In spite of the tug of her conscience she saw Mildred floating away out of her mind and the blood frothed into yards and yards of beautiful pink gauze trailing Mildred down the years.
“I adore sweetbreads,” she said.
She ate too heartily and had indigestion anyway, and by two-thirty she had begun to fidget because Andrew and the children hadn’t returned. Lucille tried to calm her and succeeded only in making herself nervous and impatient.
At four o’clock Lucille built a fire in the living-room grate to cheer them up. But the wood was damp and the flames crept feebly up along the log like dying fingers beckoning for help.
“They should be here,” Edith said. “They should be here. I can’t think what has happened.”
“Probably nothing at all,” Lucille said and poked the log again and turned it.
“I told you that wood wouldn’t burn.”
“My dear Edith,” Lucille said, “it is burning.”
“Not really burning. I’m surprised at Andrew worrying me like this, I’m surprised at him. He should know better.”
“How could Andrew know you were going to eat too much and make yourself nervous?”
“You’re going too far, Lucille.”
“I should have said that two hours ago.”
“It carries a nasty implication,” Edith said coldly. “As if I would not worry about Andrew if I hadn’t eaten too much, which I’m not admitting in the first place. I think you might...”
The telephone in the hall began to ring. The two women looked at each other but did not move.
“Aren’t you going to answer it, Edith? It’s probably a call for Andrew.”
Edith didn’t hear her.
“An accident,” she whispered. “I know — an accident...”
“Don’t be silly,” Lucille said and went out to answer the phone herself.
The operator’s nasal voice twanged along the wire.
“A collect call from Castleton for Mrs. Andrew Morrow. Will you accept the call?”
“This is Mrs. Morrow. Yes, I’ll take it.”
“Here is your party. Go ahead.”
“Hello,” Lucille said. “Hello?”
For a moment there was no reply but a confused background of sound. Then, “Hello, Lucille. This is Polly.”
“What’s happened?”
“There’s been an accident.”
“Polly...”
“No, not ours. We sort of happened into it and Father and I are staying to help. There’s a little hospital here, that’s where I’m phoning from.”
“Polly, you sound funny.”
“Maybe I do. I’ve never seen a train wreck before. Anyway, I’m in a hurry. There aren’t enough doctors and nurses. Tell Edith not to worry. Good-bye.”
“Wait — when will you be home?”
“When they can spare us. Martin and Giles are helping get the bodies out. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” Lucille echoed.
Edith was tugging at her sleeve. “What is it?”
“Nothing much,” Lucille said. “There was a train wreck and Andrew’s helping.”
“How awful!” Edith said, but the words meant nothing to Lucille. She was looking over Edith’s shoulder, smiling. Andrew was safe, her world was safe. All the trains on earth were of no importance if Andrew wasn’t on them.
She hurried back into the living room to stir up the fire... Andrew would be tired when he came home, he would like a fire and a hot toddy.
But no matter how hard she worked, the wood refused to burn. She rose to her feet, dusty and defeated. Slowly she moved her head and her eyes met Mildred’s, Mildred, whole and happy and done in oils, and changeless, Mildred, still a nuisance after sixteen years, having to be dusted once a day and sent away to be cleaned when her plump white shoulders showed scurf.
Lucille looked at her bitterly but Mildred’s soft sweet mouth did not alter, and her blue eyes undimmed by time or tears or hate stared forever at a piece of wall. “It’s all coming back to me,” Edith said.
“What?” Lucille said. “What?”
“The wreck I was trying to remember. It was when Andrew and I were practically children. I don’t remember how it happened exactly but the train was derailed in some way not a mile from the house. And of course we had to go over as soon as we heard about it.”
She went on and on, and Lucille heard only snatches. “Hundreds of bodies, yes, hundreds... very unpleasant for children... soldiers to help because the other war was on then...”
In the excitement Edith’s indigestion disappeared, and Lucille acquired a headache.
“You’re becoming more moderate with the years,” she said sharply. “The last time you told me, it was thousands of bodies.”
“Oh, it was not,” Edith said, offended. “I’m very accurate at numbers. You’re not yourself today, at all, Lucille. You’re quite critical.”
“I have a headache.”
“Go up and lie down then. You’re not yourself today,” she repeated.
“I don’t want to lie down,” Lucille said and was surprised to hear how childish she sounded.
Edith and I are not friends, she thought. We get along and laugh together and understand each other but with only a little less control we might rail at each other like fishwives.
“Very well, I’ll lie down,” she said. She walked abruptly to the door hoping that if she hurried she might defeat Edith by having the last word.
But she was not quick enough.
“Well, I should think so,” Edith said.
Breathing hard, Lucille went to the staircase and began to ascend. She wanted Edith to hear how briskly and youthfully she went upstairs, but the deep carpet and her own weariness betrayed her and the sounds she made were the soft treacherous sounds of a panther moving across the uncertain floor of a jungle.
She had intended to pass the hall mirror without looking at herself but now that she had reached it she couldn’t bear to turn her head away and slight an old friend.
“Hello,” she said, quirking an eyebrow to show herself how whimsical she was being saying hello to herself. “Hello, stranger.”
She passed down the hall into her own room.
As far as anything in the house could be free of Mildred, this room was. In Mildred’s day it had been the guest room because the windows looked out over the park. Mildred had draped the windows herself with yards of suffocating ruffles and net and visitors saw the park only through a pink fog.
Lucille’s first act had been to strip off the ruffles and replace them with crisp tailored drapes. There was a chair beside the windows and here Lucille often sat watching the people in the park, in the winter the skiers and the children with sleds and toboggans, in the summer the parade of prams and picnickers and cyclists.
There was one very steep hill that hardly any cyclist ever managed to get up, and Lucille found pleasure in estimating at just what point the bicycles would falter and the riders dismount and trudge up the rest of the hill.
She enjoyed the people who used the park. They were so tiny and harmless and always making things difficult for themselves by going up and down hills. But she especially loved the cyclists, the ones who never reached the top. Cruelly she enjoyed their endless and futile activity while the clock on her bureau ticked away the minutes and the years.
Outside it had stopped snowing. The park lay like a silent lolling woman softly draped in white with hints of darkness in its hollows.
Lucille turned from the window. She did not like the park at dusk. For a long time after Mildred died nobody had gone into the park after nightfall. There were rumors of a man who roamed the hills with an axe in his hand, there were tales of ghosts and half-human animals. But Mildred and the man were soon forgotten, and intrepid children and impatient lovers had driven away the ghosts.