She dropped the carved gold case on the table top and reached down into the lowest drawer of the dressing table.
“Get me a glass,” she ordered, taking the top off the bottle. The contents, half gone, swam amber gold with the movement of her hands.
Anna hesitated, her eyes bulging as they focused on the bottle.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Linda asked gently. “Hurry up. You lazy little fool.”
Anna jumped, and then ran into the bathroom. Linda took the glass without looking at it or the girl who held it. She poured it half full. Her elbows on the table, she sipped, and watched Anna in the mirror; and Anna stared back with her big, bulging, watery-blue eyes.
Cocktails in the den before dinner. Very classy, Linda thought, for a cop’s daughter from Cleveland. She came down the stairs carefully, holding up her heavy skirts with one hand. The other hand, beringed and graceful, trailed nonchalantly along the curved mahogany rail. She didn’t need to hold on. A couple of drinks-or even three or four-didn’t affect her at all, physically, except to dull the sharpness of her hearing. With a couple of drinks-or maybe three or four-she could hardly hear the voice of the house.
There was no one in the marble-floored foyer to appreciate her entrance, so she turned to the right and went along the hall, past the drawing room, past the morning room, past the dining room; her skirts rustling stiffly, her head high. Why not the drawing room for cocktails? she wondered. Why the study? That was Gordon’s room, as the dainty-chintz morning room was supposed to be hers. Usually he didn’t allow casual visitors into his sanctum. Oh, but this man was not a casual visitor. He was…something about a biography. That explained the study. Michael What’s-’is-name was going to get the full effect-the rows on rows of learned volumes, the windows opening onto the beauty of the countryside. And in the midst of it all, Gordon himself, the sage, the scholar, who had abandoned the hollow sham of the world for a life of contemplation.
The door was open. She could hear their voices as she approached: Gordon’s mellow baritone, the softer, higher voice of Jack Briggs, Gordon’s secretary, and another voice…deeper even than Gordon’s, slower, drawling. For no reason at all, a shiver ran through her and she stopped, knees waxy-soft, and put one hand out blindly for support against the satiny surface of the paneled wall.
The spasm lasted only a second. She shook herself and went on, wondering. Something was going to happen. Good or bad? Were there such categories, or were things-happenings, people-amoral, to be judged only by their effects on others? “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…”
She came to the door and stood there, looking at them.
Amid the bustle of their rising, she caught two swift impressions. One was the barely perceptible relief in Gordon’s face as he took in her appearance: exquisitely gowned, coiffed, and made up, poised and calm. The other impression was simply that of a man, a stranger, and never, afterward, could she reduce it to details. He was there; his presence was enough.
Yet he was not, on second glance, a particularly good-looking man. A few inches taller even than Gordon’s respectable height, he seemed to be strung together with old elastic, so that his movements looked gawky and abrupt beside Gordon’s disciplined grace. His hair was mousy brown, combed carelessly back from a side parting; his mouth was too wide and his face had a lopsided look, as if one jaw were longer than the other. The only feature that might be called handsome were his eyes, and their beauty lay in their expression rather than their color, which was a brown slightly darker than his hair.
“How do you do,” she said, and gave him her hand. With the touch of his hard, square fingers, the flash of empathy faded. He was just another man, and this was just another normal social occasion.
She sat down in one of the big, soft leather chairs and watched with amusement as Collins tried to get his long arms and legs folded back into a sitting position. Gordon was hovering. He looked pathetically pleased, and it was significant, she knew, that he nodded at Briggs without making her ask for a drink.
Briggs bustled over to the bar and began fussing with ice cubes, bottles, and glasses. Linda’s nerves tightened as she watched him. She detested him even more than she did the other servants-although, as Gordon’s secretary, he was not to be regarded, or treated, as a servant. He was a pale, puffy man; the texture of his skin suggested clay or bread dough, some substance that would not rebound elastically from the prod of a finger, but would retain the impression. Gordon claimed that he was a very efficient secretary. She found that hard to believe. His movements, when away from the typewriter, were fussy, slow, and inept. Finally he came back with her drink, and she tried not to touch his hand as she took it. His fingers were always damp.
“We were just discussing Michael’s last book, Linda,” Gordon said. “I think you read it; I know I recommended it to you.”
So they were on first-name terms already.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I read it. It was very good.”
She saw Michael flush a little at the coldness of the compliment, and added smoothly, “I particularly liked the chapter on the relationship between Emily and Bramwell. You caught something there which no other biographer has understood.”
His wide mouth curved up, bringing out a line in one cheek, a line too long to be called a dimple.
“What was that?”
Linda looked at him in surprise. So Michael Collins wasn’t quite the gauche young fool he looked. A compliment was meaningless to him unless it was genuine.
“The fact that, though he loved her desperately, he resented her talent. Oh, I know the point’s been made; but you seemed to comprehend so fully the effect on the frustrated male ego, and the conflict between her feeling of feminine inferiority and the inevitable awareness of her own genius. Very few men can look at that problem dispassionately, with sympathy for both points of view.”
He settled back in his chair, nursing his glass between his hands and smiling. His eyes were remarkable, Linda thought; they mirrored his feelings candidly, without evasion or concealment.
“And,” she added, “you did it without resorting to the psychological jargon that’s so popular today.”
“It’s hard to avoid,” Michael said. “It has become part of our unconscious thinking.”
Gordon said interestedly, “A person untrained in psychology-which includes most of us, I suppose-doesn’t even use the jargon accurately. If a psychiatrist speaks of paranoia, he is trying to pinpoint a specific syndrome. Whereas a writer, and the majority of his readers, get a much more generalized, and probably wildly inaccurate, picture of behavior.”
“That’s true,” Michael agreed. “But I was thinking more in terms of the way vocabulary reflects changing cultural patterns. Words don’t convey a single specific image; they suggest a vast complex of ideas, emotions, and states of knowledge. When we speak of ‘guilt,’ for instance, we’re using the same word that occurs in-oh, St. Augustine, let’s say, and Sophocles. But for each of them the word had implications which a modern jurist no longer considers.”
“A better example might be the word ‘mad.’”
The voice was soft and gentle. There was no reason why it should have startled Linda so badly that the glass almost fell from her hand. She drained its contents. Briggs, rising to refill it, continued in the same mellifluous voice.
“The medieval world, assured of the reality of God and the devil, regarded madness as possession by an evil spirit. We have murdered God by reason; we try to deny the powers of evil by inventing new terms to explain the aberrant behavior that men of the Middle Ages attributed to demons.”