The Simple Way of Poison Read Online Free PDF Page A

affairs—not yours… or our friends’ here.”
    He waved a hand toward the rest of us.
    “Really? It seems to me they’re also my father’s—or is that too old-fashioned for people who live on Massachusetts Avenue?”
    I looked at Iris. A cool smile played in her eyes under their dark curling lashes and deepened in one corner of her scarlet mouth.
    “I always say there’s nothing like a first-class family row to make guests feel at home on Christmas Eve,” she said. “Who’d like a cocktail? Mac, you and Steve go out and make one. Lowell will show you where the vermouth is.”
    Angie Nash came over to her, put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a rough brotherly sort of hug. “You’re swell, Iris!” he said. “I don’t see how the hell you stick her.”
    I saw the quick tears spring to her eyes. She tossed her cigarette into the fire, her fingers trembling.
    “I suppose I’ve got it coming to me,” she said.
    “Personally, I’d like to give her a good swift kick,” Angie said bitterly. “Incidentally, I guess now’s as good a time as any.”
    Iris laughed. “You just keep Mac busy,” she said. “Let’s try to hold the bloodshed in the family.”
    She took another cigarette and held the box out to me.
    “And how long,” I asked, “in heaven’s name has this been going on?”
    “Oh, it’s like hives. It breaks out any time,” she said wearily. “It’s worse now because her mother’s quite sick and she’s upset. Then she’s quarrelling with Mac about Steve.”
    “And who’s Steve?”
    “He’s terribly nice. He’s a lawyer. She met him at Gloria Mason’s coming-out tea Thanksgiving. She’s perfectly mad about him.”
    “And what about him?”
    She threw the cigarette she’d just lighted into the fire and sat down by me, her elbows on her knees, her body hunched forward, staring into the fire. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, in a dead hard voice, “I don’t know, really. I suppose that’s part of the trouble. I was a damned fool, probably. But with all her lacquer of sophistication she’s nothing but a kid, and I… well, I suggested—in the most tentative fashion, because she resents so bitterly anything she can possibly take as criticism—that she ought to give him a chance to do a little of the telephoning.”
    She leaned her head on the back of the damask sofa and closed her eyes. Her face looked tired—not pathetically, but with the kind of disillusioned weariness that comes from perfectly futile and useless effort.
    “I thought if she’d understand I was speaking from experience she’d see I wasn’t simply being stepmotherish. So I told her about the years I thought I was in love with Gilbert St. Martin, and how I did most of the bothersome things, like standing in line for tickets and all that. And all the thanks I got.”
    She got up abruptly and stood, looking down into the fire.
    “Well, you’d think at my age and with my experience I’d have better sense than to give another… another woman a fine hand-turned club to whack me with.”
    She moved away down the room—straightening things, anything to absorb the nervous tension from her hands—to the garden windows. The old gold taffeta curtains rustled softly as she held them back and stood there, staring out. I saw her slim green-brocaded shoulders with their old-fashioned puffed sleeves rise as she drew a long deep breath. Past her the lights from the other windows streamed on the snow-shrouded garden so that it looked like a scene in a play. The summer house with its little White-capped dome was there, and beyond it the high brick wall that separates my small garden from their large one.
    “The snow’s lovely,” she said. “It’s a shame to shut it out.”
    She looped the heavy silk into the elaborate gold leaf arrangement there.
    “What about Angie?” I asked. “I was dumbfounded seeing him. Has Randall quit being the heavy father?”
    She shook her head. “No,