"Yes. I tried to do it reasonably, but I think all I did was blurt one hint after another until she—understood. She did, I know—that is, she understood what had been happening. As I think I told Mr. Lamson, I didn't get as far as telling her I was pregnant. I got the other facts said, somehow or other, and she—said something that showed she understood, and then I was suddenly sick to my stomach."
"She didn't appear angry?"
"No, Mr. Warner. I believe—I believe what I said could have been taken to mean that the thing was completely ended. Of course I've no way of knowing if that's what she thought. She wasn't angry. And then my sickness, coming like that, confused everything else. I ran for the bathroom. I know Ann was sorry for me, trying to help. I was—call it hysterical. I yelled at her, couldn't stand the idea of her touching me while I was sick, only wanted her to go away. But she wouldn't, so I ran from her again, into my bedroom, and I locked the door." (Help me now!) "Yes, I know I locked the door."
"That part is a perfectly clear memory, Callista? The physical act of turning the key or throwing the latch or whatever it was?"
"Yes. Old-fashioned key—why, I probably never had used it before, no occasion to. But I did then. I threw myself down on the bed. My throat was still raw and sour from vomiting, I remember that."
"Now you told Mr. Lamson that there's a stretch of a few minutes, in the bedroom, that won't quite come back. I take it for granted that since then you've been trying to fill in that gap in memory. Suppose I put it this way, Callista: is it possible now for you to add anything to what you told Mr. Lamson that day in his office?"
Not quite a direct lie required—thanks, friend. Not that it matters, direct or indirect. The letter killeth—inner Puritan, drop dead, drop dead! "No, Mr. Warner—as you say, I've tried ever since to clear up that part in my mind, but—I can't add anything now." I don't dare look toward a certain flinty intelligent face—the name is Francis Fielding—and yet I'll do it.
He was very quiet, Mr. Fielding, alert, interested; no change or wavering in his smart bird-like eyes as she met their probing and tried briefly, unavailingly, to win a glimpse of the self behind them. Once I watched a heron in my famous field glasses, motionless at the edge of a stream. Motionless, hunting motionless. That had been only the summer before last, a trip alone in the Volks to the hill country. More of the day came back, a good day and the summer hush. Eighteen. The heron had remained a somber painted image until the frog returned to the bank; then he got his meal: too large a frog to swallow whole, so he knocked it to pieces against a rock and resumed his stillness. But Cecil was speaking.
"I'll make a suggestion, Callista—a sort of hypothetical question, though I won't try to phrase it in precisely that form. Before you broke away and went into your bedroom you'd been, as you say, hysterical, sick, nauseated: too early for ordinary morning sickness I suppose, but the pregnancy must have had at least some influence on your condition. And you had undergone, were still undergoing, an intense emotional strain: the anticipation, the build-up to your interview with Mrs. Doherty, then sudden realization that it was wasted effort. Now I suggest that all those things coming together at once might have produced a plain old-fashioned fainting spell, a blackout from exhaustion. And I'll ask: is everything you remember about those moments consistent with that? It makes sense to you, that this could be what happened?"
Again the aid and comfort to the idiot Puritan: don't know why it should help to avoid the phrasing of a direct lie—superstition—somehow it does though and he knows it—my love is wiser than other men—"Yes, it could have been like that, Mr. Warner." A half-seen glimpse of something kind in black-haired Dolores Acevedo might mean feminine sympathy, fellow-feeling—or something else, or nothing at all. The experts say, Callista remembered, that a person with an obsessive notion never actually performs the fantastic act he imagines performing—like for instance leaning forward in this chair and saying: "Dolly, I bet you know how it feels to go nuts for a good lay."