Femmes Fatal (12 page)

“ ‘Some have children,

Some have none,

But here lies a woman

Who had twenty-one.’ ”

To each his own. Mr. Fisher continued to remind me of sushi. But, to be fair, I had been so furious with Ben for inviting the man to be the Hearthside Guild speaker, I had done nothing but carp … sorry about that … from the moment Mr. Fisher opened his briefcase and produced samples of coffin linings.

“Madam Vicar, ladies and gentlemen.” He had folded a swatch of white over his arm in the manner of a waiter about to pour the wine. “The ever popular virgin silk.”

“My favourite every time. So elegant and yet snuggly soft!” That comment had come from the vivacious Mrs. Bludgett, and it seemed to me that Mr. Fisher had looked coldly upon her.

“Not my first choice, if you will forgive the intrusion of personal taste.” Mr. Fisher’s mouth had stretched into a frayed smile. “I particularly like a rich look of paisley when we are catering to a gentleman who likes to make an understated … statement. And paisley works so well if you want to match the client’s tie. Superb with a mahogany cabinet. Then again, for the sportier gentlemen, a Harris tweed lining with matching traveling rug does seem the way to go.” Mr. Fisher continued to fold lengths of material over his arm. “We offer either knotted pine or bleached oak with the tweed.”

To my annoyance, Ben chose that moment to announce to the room at large and Mr. Fisher in particular that the program was of special interest to me.

“My wife is an interior designer. You find this fascinating, don’t you, Ellie?”

“Oh, yes.” Before I could stop myself I had blurted out, “What about Victorian tea caddies, Mr. Fisher? I would think they’d make charming cremation boxes.” My tongue got all tangled up when I met his cold fishy eyes. But instead of subsiding into wise silence, I blundered on to make matters worse. “Awfully embarrassing if you went to add one for the pot and realized you had spooned in Grandma …”

A suffocating silence ensued, during which lifetime I plotted what I would do to Ben when I got him home. This was all his fault. Agreed, it made sense to plan for the possibility … the
certainty
of death, but did he have to make a Tupperware party out of the event? Any minute now we’d be playing pencil games for prizes—black-edged notepaper and monogrammed arm bands.

Mr. Fisher gave me a look that dripped embalming fluid into my veins. Tut, tut! Bad for business. He adjusted his rimless glasses to bring me back into focus as a prospective customer. Stretching a smile, he cleared his throat and fetched forth another swatch of white silk, this one patterned with tiny blue flowers.

“Our forget-me-not
peau de soie
is ever the perfect compliment to our Vintage Champagne cabinet. Not for everyone, of course, but lovely for brides and virgins of any age. Our deluxe model has the added feature that when the lid is raised it plays ‘We’ll Meet Again.’ ”

A chill fingered my throat. Several heart-pounding moments passed before I realized the culprit was my own hand, not some ghost from the graveyard. Everything and everyone around me from the grandfather clock to the others in the room—the vicar and her husband, the Melroses, the Bludgetts, and Ben—had flattened to silhouettes upon the wall. Only Mr. Fisher was real … and yes, Mrs. Malloy standing in the doorway,
her face flushed the colour of her cranberry apron, her eyes shining with adoration!

“My Walter, what a dream!”

She brought us both back to the present moment, in the kitchen at Merlin’s Court, on the morning after. Unbuttoning her purple crushed-velvet coat, she pushed up the sleeves and shocked me by filling the kettle. Tradition had always dictated that I make her a cup of tea. Even Tam and Abbey were amazed. They stopped their rattle wrestle to stare at her with their little mouths open. Mornings generally find me slow on the uptake, but it finally dawned that there were a couple of other incongruities to Mrs. M’s arrival. The supply bag had not accompanied her and …

Plonking the kettle down on the cooker, she shot the gas flame under it as if trying to heat the house in a hurry. She turned to face me, hands on her purple hips. “Don’t fall all over yourself, Mrs. H, thanking me for coming on me day off. I’m a woman who likes to clear her debts and I do owe you for yesterday. You saved me life and that’s a fact.”

“Why, Roxie!” I was moved almost to tears.

“Yes, well, we don’t want to make a Gilbert and Sullivan production out of it, do we?” Switching off the kettle, she made the tea in a cloud of steam and came rattling across the room with cups and saucers. “Now then, Mrs. H”—she hooked a chair away from the table with her foot—“take a load off while I tell you about me night of sin.”

“You don’t mean …?”

“I bloody well do. Mr. Walter Fisher escorted me ’ome from the vicarage.”

“No!”

True to form in the shock process, Mrs. Malloy and I reversed roles. I was the one pouring the tea while she settled down in the chair and took off her coat to reveal an outfit stolen from the wardrobe of the lead biker of Hell’s Angels. “Now, before your blood pressure goes up, Mrs. H, I’ll confess that me sin were letting the man out of me clutches without so much as a good-night kiss.”

“But you did invite him in?” I squeezed around the washing machine to shift the playpen away from the glare of the sun striking through the greenhouse window above the sink and rejoined Mrs. M at the table.

“You bet your bloomers I asked him in for a drinky-poo, and you know what the angel man said?”

“What?”

“He’d take a cup of cocoa.”

“Enough to warm the cockles of your heart.”

Mrs. Malloy leaned back in her chair, folded her ring-encrusted hands on her black sateen middle, and exhaled a blissful sigh. “I tell you, Mrs. H, the sight of Walter sitting on me calf-skin sofa, why, it gave me palpitations—someplace other than me heart, if you get my meaning?”

“Quite.” I cast an anxious look at the twins. They appeared to be listening to every word, but perhaps that was because they hadn’t yet grown into their ears.

“I was that pleased, Mrs. H …”

“Yes?” I turned back to her, realizing I had missed something.

“I’d put an orange bulb in me Venus lamp. Such a lovely glow it cast over him. You should have seen his spectacles, Mrs. H, they was like rainbows. Believe you me, I had to remove meself from temptation’s way and sit in the easy chair.”

“It must have been torment.”

“True, Mrs. H, but if you can understand me, it
was a blessed pain—a religious experience, to put it bluntly, and I’ve never been one for bobbing up and down in church.” She raised a hand to her black hair with the two inches of white roots as if expecting to find a halo nestling there. “I felt like a virgin again, although truth be told, if I ever was one, I’ve forgot. Always before the blighter only had to say, ‘How about it, Roxie old girl?’ And I’d think ‘What the hell, if he brings in the coal, why not?’ But last night …”

“Yes?” I poured her a fresh cup of tea.

“Last night I wanted to do things by the book.”

“The Fully Female manual?”

“After I gave Walter his cocoa, I excused meself and nipped in the back room for a peek at Chapter Two. Here”—she produced the book from her coat pocket—“I’ve found the place:

“ ‘When a man comes home from the hustle and bustle of his job he doesn’t want to be romped over by his wife like she’s Rover the dog barking the bad news at him that the cooker doesn’t work and the washing line came down in the mud. Come on, Fellow Female, unbutton his coat for him, hang it up, and lead him gently by the hand into the sitting room, which you have turned into his private oasis. The Fully Female woman has arranged fresh flowers in vases, sprayed her best perfume on the cushions, decanted a bottle of wine, lit her prettiest candles, and replaced her hundred-watt bulbs with softly coloured ones …’

“Hear that, Mrs. H?”

“Your orange light was preordained.”

Mrs. Malloy flipped over a few more pages. “Here’s where we get to the meaty part:

“ ‘According to Dr. Tensel Reubenoff, a quiet woman is like still water. At the end of a long day she awaits her hot and dusty traveller from the workplace. She invites him to immerse in her calm, float in the comfort of her arms, and when the last candle dips below the horizon, she draws him down to those hidden depths …’ ”

“Lovely.” I began clattering up the teacups with one eye on the twins. Was my darling Abigail blushing?

“Mrs. H, you know me! I’m not the quiet sort. Not one to tiptoe through the tulips, so to speak. And where did all me feisty charm get me? Buggering nowhere with Walter, until last night when I took a leaf out of the Fully Female manual. There he sat on me sofa sipping his cocoa, and he says to me, ‘Mrs. Malloy, I
like
this room; it has a restful atmosphere that I rarely find away from the business premises.’ ”

“High praise.” Gathering both babies up in my arms, I brought them over to the table.

“Walter said I was very different from that Mrs. Bludgett.” A demure lowering of the neon lids put me forcibly in mind of Miss Gladys Thorn, former church organist.

“Really?”

“Seems Walter had some business dealings with Mrs. B; not to talk out of school, she and the mister bought a plot on the never-never. And between you, me, and the clothes horse, my Walter didn’t take to the woman, called her a jack in the box. A bloody good tip-off, wouldn’t you say, that what he has in mind is the blushing-violet type?”

With the twins ganging up to strangle me I could only signal assent with my eyes. But truth be told, I would have thought any woman alive too noisy for Mr. Fisher.

“Chapter one of my love story.” Mrs. Malloy rose majestically to her feet. “What about you, Mrs. H? Any progress to report? Did you and Father Bear”—she squinted at the twins—“set the sheets on fire when you got home from the Hearthside Guild meeting?”

“The mood wasn’t right.” I could feel my face setting in priggish lines. “For starters, we couldn’t get rid of Freddy. He was agog to hear all about Mrs. Vicar. And the moment Ben and I did get into bed, Abbey woke up.”

“And I don’t suppose,” she said with a self-righteous smirk, “you’ve drunk your Formula neither?”

“Not this morning.”

“A bloody drop-out, that’ll be you, Mrs. H, if I don’t put me foot down. You hand over them kiddies and go put your coat on. We’ll arrange things so as you do the morning sessions at Fully Female and I go afternoons.” A baby tucked under each arm, Mrs. Malloy hustled me toward the door. “Off with you now, and don’t disgrace me. I intend to get me cap and gown from Fully Female if it kills me.”

“Ever thought you’d sink this low, ladies?” Bunty Wiseman’s voice gurgled overhead as I went down into a deep knee bend … and decided to stay there. I liked being this short. But I found it wasn’t safe. Talk about lethal leotards. The rest of the Fully Female aerobics class had finished warming up and were stomping and bomping to piano music that I recognized as “Old MacDonald” with overtones of “Abide With Me.” I had fought my way back to daylight again, when Bunty called a halt.

“Relax those neck muscles, ladies! Loll your shoulders, let your arms go floppety flop at your sides.”

The class was being held in the large room on the lower level of Bunty’s house, the one from which I had heard gasps and rasps on my interview visit. At the front of the room across from the door was a small platform. There Bunty, a mike in her hand, was stationed, marshalling the troops. To her right, back to the window wall, sat the ubiquitous Miss Gladys Thorn at the piano. And hemming me on all sides were my fellow females. Damsels and dowagers. I counted three octogenarians—all sporting Roman noses and feather-duster hats along with their leotards. How unutterably depressing. I had always counted on old age being the great equalizer. At some point in the dim and distant future, the loveliest and the plainest of us all become much of a muchness. How many breathtakingly lovely eighty-year-old women enter rooms to masculine gasps and the clatter of dropped wineglasses? Trust me to be out of step with the times—as well as my aerobic steps. Kicking out a foot to the left when it should have been right, I got a woman in a cerise-and-silver ensemble in the rump.

“So sorry.”

“Don’t”—shake, shimmy, lunge—“worry!”

My leotard was too short in the leg and so tight in the top I felt as though I was wearing one of those breast depressors nuns used to wear. But beggars can’t be choosers. I had appropriated the togs from the lost-and-found box in the changing room, and the fear of some furious female opening the door and screaming “Who’s the thief?” finally got me moving in what I hoped was a blur of arms and legs.

Here a gasp, there a gasp, everywhere … Hairpins flew from Miss Thorn’s mousy head as she pounded away at her bopped-up version of “Old MacDonald.”

“Time, ladies!” Bunty’s cry rang out as if this were closing time at her Aunt Et’s pub, The Pig & Whistle.

The piano music sputtered away to nothing.

All of me had come to a stop except my heart, which went right on hopping and bopping. Eyes on our leader, the Fully Female ladies stood around like a bunch of ice lollies.

Above us, Bunty paced on her platform. Shoulders back, tummy in, she trailed that mike lead as if she were the Honourable Mrs. Snodgrass walking Peaches the pooch in Hyde Park.

“Bloomin’ hell, class, am I ever proud of you! When I was a kid growing up with the toughs and scruffs, all I ever wanted was to go on the stage; and so I did for a while, but I swear this stage right here is the best ever. Up here, I feel like a missionary of sorts. I know I can help you change your lives—if I don’t trip over this friggin’ mike wire or drop my ‘aitches’ and trip over them. Cripes! What a time to remember my Aunt Et’s warning the day I married Lionel Wiseman: ‘Hellocution lessons in’t the same as Heducation, so don’t you go sticking your nose too ’igh and getting it pecked off by a dicky bird, Bunty, me girl.’ ”

Laughter.

Scattered murmurs of “Isn’t she wonderful!”

A roomful of rapt faces. Talk about idolatry! Anyone would think our leader was a church statue that had suddenly come to life and begun pelting us with rose petals.