Rosa forced herself to meet that hard blue gaze. No merriment there. Indeed, now she came to think of it, there had not been much humor in those raucous hoots in the first place. They had been run through with an almost … almost crowing aggression. Yes, that was it! There had been triumph in those sounds. As if Kitty, with the battle lines hardly sketched out, was already victorious. But why was she crowing? Probably, thought Rosa, with a stab of humiliation, about the fact that she had Esslyn’s first wife in a begging position. What a tale that would make to pass around the dressing rooms. Rosa could just hear it. “You’ll never guess. Poor old Mrs. Earn came round the other day wanting to bring up the baby. Talk about an absolute scream. Left it too late to have any of her own. Silly old fool.”
Ah, well, observed Rosa, she’d brought it on herself. Imagining Kitty’s phantom gibes made her now wonder how she had ever entertained the ridiculous, misbegotten idea of adoption for a minute, never mind letting herself get to the stage where she’d actually visited the house and put the question. What in the world, queried Rosa, now devil’s advocate, did she want with a child at her time of life? And dear Earnest, who had brought up three and, while doting on his grandchildren, found a half-hour-a-week romp and dandle with each a contact of ample sufficiency. How would he have coped? But there was no point in railing, she thought doughtily. What was done was done. Now, the only course open was to withdraw with as much dignity as she could muster. And she was about to do just that when Kitty closed the door.
The click sounded very loud. And rather final. Having shut the door, Kitty didn’t move away but leaned back against it in what seemed to Rosa a rather threatening maimer. And then she smiled. It was a terrible smile. Her narrow top lip with its exaggerated lascivious arch did not spread sideways. It lifted in the manner of an unfriendly animal, revealing pointed, sharp incisors. The light glinted on them. They looked dangerously sharp and bright. Then she stopped smiling, and that was worse. Because Rosa, distracted briefly by the sight of those alarming pale fangs, made the mistake of looking into Kitty’s eyes. Brilliant azure ice. Inhuman. Suddenly the air in the room was thick and fearful. And Rosa knew. She knew that all the joshings and suppositions and half-serious theories bandied about in the clubroom were no more than simple facts. And that Kitty had truly got rid of her husband for his money and her freedom. And that she, Rosa, was now alone with a murderess.
Rosa realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out now with great care, as if the gentle purling might snatch Kitty’s attention and activate some quiescent impulse to destroy. Rosa tried to think, but all her cerebral processes seemed to have ground to a halt. She tried to move as well, and found to her horror that far from simply standing on the floor as she had supposed, she seemed to be rooted in it like a tree. Her heart thudded, and the drop of water splashed and spread. And it seemed to Rosa that the long long space between one splash of water and the next and one thud of her heart and the next was alive with the pulsating obscene hum of evil.
What could she do? First look away. Look away from those guileless, cruel eyes. Then have a go at tautening up her sagging mental faculties. If only she had told someone—anyone—that she was going to White Wings. But then, thought Rosa sluggishly, ticking over again at last, Kitty didn’t know that. Bluff! That was the thing. She would bluff her way out. She would say that she had told Earnest where she was going, and that he was driving over to pick her up any minute now. Quaveringly she got the information across.
“But Rosa—how can he be? The car’s out there in the drive.”
Oh, but she was cunning! All that was in her voice was simple puzzlement. Rosa joined Barnaby in wondering how the hell they had all come to believe that Kitty couldn’t act. Well, that was water down the drain. What next? Kitty moved away from the door, and Rosa’s brain, now miraculously freed from its former coagulate state, leaped into protective action, feeding dozens of combative images across the screen of her mind.
She floored Kitty with a kung-fu kick or a straight uppercut. She pressed her to the ground and held a knife to her throat. With one immaculate Frisbee spin of a plate, she stunned her into insensibility. As the last of these comforting pictures faded, she realized that Kitty was slowly walking toward her.
“Oh, God,” prayed Rosa. “Help me … please. ”
She felt huge and stifled, hippo-sluggish in the heat. Runnels of sweat ran over her scalp and down between her breasts, yet her upper lip and forehead prickled with chill, and her blood felt thick and unmoving. She stared at Kitty, young, Amazonian, slim as a whip with strong, sinewy arms and legs and thought again, What chance will I have?
Kitty was smiling as she came on. Not her genuine weasely smile, but a false one, painted on her lips. A simulacrum of concern. So might she have smiled at Esslyn, thought Rosa, as she wished him well on the first night, before unsheathing the means of his destruction. And then, recalling her first husband, she had a sudden, vivid impression of Earnest arriving home as he would be just now and wanting his lunch. At the thought of never seeing his dear face again, Rosa felt her blood stir and start to flow. Anger chased out fear. She went up on the balls of her feet (now miraculously unstuck) and felt her calf muscles tense. She would not go down without a fight.
Kitty was barely a foot away. It was now or never. Rosa hooded her eyes in what she hoped was a menacing fashion. And sprang.
Colin Smy sat alone in his workshop. He was cold but could not be bothered to light the heater. He held a smooth blond piece of maple in his hands, but the beauty and grain of the wood, once a certain stimulus to feelings of the deepest contentment and an amulet against despair, this morning had lost the power to move. Next to him was a cedarwood cradle. Only two days ago he had been delicately chiseling a border of leaves and flowers around the name Ben. He pushed the cradle with his finger, and it rocked on its bed of fragrant rust-colored shavings. He got up then and moved a little stiffly around the room, touching and stroking various artifacts, pressing the outlines hungrily and devouring the detail of line and marking as a man might who was on the point of going blind.
Colin picked up his chisel. The varnish on the handle had long since worn away, and it fitted the palm of his hand to such perfection that the word “familiar” was totally inadequate to describe the sensation. Colin always felt vaguely ill at ease away from his workshop and the beloved tools of his trade. Now, believing that it might be months or even years before he saw or touched any of them again, he felt a great gaping, prescient sense of loss.
He stilled the cradle and stood looking round for a moment more. Although his emotions were chaotic, his thoughts were crystal clear. Paramount was the vow he had made to Glenda when she lay dying. “Promise me,” she had cried, over and over again, “that you will look after David.” And he had reassured her, over and over again. Almost her last words (before “such a short while” and “good-bye, my darling”) were, “You won’t let any harm come to him?”
Colin had kept his promise. Since her death, David had been his world. He had given up everything and gladly for the boy. His welding job had been the first to go. So that he could take David to and from school and be available at the weekends and holidays, Colin had taken up freelance woodwork and carpentry, at first with scant success. In material terms they’d had very little, but they had each other, and Colin had been overwhelmed with pride when his son had shown a talent far surpassing his own for carving. Two of David’s sculptures stood now on his workbench. A grave old man, a sower of seed, a shallow basket in the crook of his arm and a kneeling heifer, a present for Ben, most tenderly carved, its head bowed, the horns tipped at such an eloquent angle.