Vicky leaped up from it, feeling as though someone had squeezed her heart.
"Afterwards I could hardly embarrass the boy by betraying my presence. There is such a thing as decency, my dear."
This wasn't real, Vicky told herself.
She folded her arms, cradling them as though she were cold, and began to walk up and down the room.
It was the same pleasant room, with the overstuffed chairs covered in white cretonne, the polished hardwood floor, with rugs scattered on it, which was badly sprung in places and had a tendency to creak near the windows at the back. Vicky looked round the cream-painted walls; at the red-brick fireplace, swept and scrubbed; at the flowers on the grand piano. It was all the same, yet it was all changed.
Because Arthur, Arthur had strangled a girl here. Odd. That was her first thought: the oddness of it. Yet was it so odd? She thought of Arthur: the thick-set figure, the dark complexion, the rare laugh. Pleasant enough, unless you got him out of his intellectual depths. The soul of neatness, and not very liberal with money.
As a lover, she could not get on with him. He was both violent and unskilled. And this prompted dangerous thoughts. In two years of marriage, he had awakened Vicky Fane just enough so that she realized several things. In the proper hands, she realized, she might be…
Frank Sharpless's, for instance.
A word to the police—
Vicky shut the thought from her mind. She hated herself for the disloyalty of these thoughts. Arthur was her husband. You could not share the same life, the same house, the same room with a person for two years, twenty-four months, heaven knew how many hours, without conceiving some sort of tolerant liking for him. You had to protect him, whatever happened.