Femmes Fatal (23 page)

“Ellie, I had an ulterior motive in coming to see you.” Eudora passed me the milk.

“Tell me.”

“This isn’t easy.” She stirred her tea. “But you came clean with me, so I suppose the least I can do is return the favour. I …” She added two spoonfuls of sugar. “I want you to tell me if you think I might find the tenets of Fully Female beneficial in … restructuring my marriage.”

“Oh!”

“This afternoon I drove very slowly down to that place; I was right behind your car all the way. I saw you turn in at the gates and right then and there lost my nerve, or rather came to my senses. I couldn’t go before a group of people, some of them my parishioners, and pour out my
heart. The counsellor cannot seek counsel. She must have the answers, not be seeking them. But as I drove back home, Ellie, your face was in front of me.”

“Really?” I couldn’t lift my cup.

“When I met you on Monday, I was frankly surprised. I had expected the woman who had captured Reverend Foxworth’s heart to be, not to mince matters, a vamp. But what I saw was a fresh-faced country girl who seemed my kind of person. Someone who wouldn’t always get it right first time and, therefore, might know something about compassion. So, driving back to the vicarage this afternoon, I came up with a compromise. I could not join Fully Female, but I could pick the brains of one of its members and perhaps”—her eyes strayed toward the toaster—“perhaps even borrow the manual.”

“No!” I rattled my cup over onto its side so that it lay in a saucer of tea.

Slowly, she got to her feet. “I see.”

“No, you don’t! Eudora, I am speaking as your friend. Do not dabble in the workings of this heinous organization!”

Even more slowly she resumed her seat. “Why, Ellie! You make it sound like the haunt of the devil.”

“That was never the founder’s intention. Believe me, Bunty Wiseman is a bit of a flake, but a nice person. Yet somehow her little venture has gone horribly awry. My first tip-off was that Jonas, who does the garden here, ran away from home, terrorized by the advances of Mrs. Pickle. Now two people are dead, a friend of mine is reduced to a lovesick zombie, and Bunty herself, who tried to turn other women into doting dolts, now realizes she has been the biggest doting dolt of all. Her husband Lionel Wiseman has fallen prey to the machinations of … well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm to name names, seeing the engagement is about to be made official …”

“Yes?”

“The lady in question is Miss Gladys Thorn, your former church organist.”

“The woman from Gladstone’s past!” Eudora gripped the table with such force that the milk jug and sugar bowl jumped up and down on the tray. “This doesn’t make sense. I know there is still something between my husband and that woman. He has not been himself since we came upon her in the church. She was at the organ, thumping out some hymn or other, and the moment Gladstone’s eyes met hers and she uttered a squeal of joy, I knew my thirty-year marriage had hit a bump in the road. Then, when I was in the study, I heard them out in the hall. There was no doubt she wanted to pick up where they had left off, while he, poor lamb, was resisting with all his might. I
knew
I had to get rid of her, so I sacked them both—Miss Thorn and Mrs. Pickle—so it would look more like a new broom sweeping clean.”

“Miss Thorn said you accused her of frequenting the Methodist Church.”

“What I said was that someone, Mrs. Melrose, I believe, had mentioned seeing her going into Unity Methodist, and I wondered if she might not be happier serving that congregation.”

“And when the deed was done, you felt awful.” I righted my cup and poured us both a fresh cup of tea.

“That nice Mrs. Pickle!”

“If it’s any consolation, Rowland was dying to sack her, but he—”

“Don’t say it! He was too kind.” Eudora looked at me with the wounded eyes of an early martyr roasting on a spit on one of St. Anselm’s stained-glass windows. “Everything has changed. Last night Gladstone burned the treacle pudding, and breakfast this morning was a
disaster. Only one sausage, no bacon, and the merest dab of scrambled egg.”

“But surely,” I said, indulging in a teaspoon … and a half … of sugar, something I never do except in times of stress, “surely if Miss Thorn is marrying Lionel Wiseman, your problems are over.”

Eudora shook her head. “Ellie! That’s a smoke screen, it has to be. I tell you the woman is in love with my husband.”

“Possibly, but what you don’t understand is …”

I was hunting around for a nice way to say what Mrs. Malloy had phrased so pithily—“Gladys Thorn would throw her legs in the air and give the V sign to anything in trousers”—when a knock sounded at the garden door. And who should come gliding in, but Mrs. M herself.

She had my purple caftan strung over one arm, but otherwise she was all in black, from the supply bag in her hand to the turban on her head. Even her damson lipstick had a blackish cast, as if it had grown old and mouldy in her service. Her complexion, robbed of its rouge, was the colour of death, and her eyes still had that faraway haze.

“Good morning, Mrs. H.”

With a sideways glance at Eudora I started to stammer that it was six in the evening, but Mrs. Malloy had gone sleepwalking into the pantry, the way a character in a farce will walk into a cupboard thinking it is the exit. Several awkward seconds later, she reappeared and without looking left or right, coasted past Eudora and myself to vanish through the hall door.

“And that”—I smiled gently upon Eudora Spike—“is the work of Fully Female. Are you sure you still want to borrow the manual?”

When Ben, the evening shadow on his chin matching the darkness at the window, came home from a hard day at the restaurant, he found me seated in the drawing room which was beginning to seem more than ever like a museum documenting the lives of an unknown couple living sometime B.C.—Before Children. These cream silk walls and Queen Anne furnishings had as much to do with my present lifestyle as my Aunt Astrid had to do with modelling naughty undies at lingerie parties.

Loosening his tie, my husband crossed the rose-and-peacock Persian carpet to stand gazing, not at me, but at the portrait above the mantelpiece—Abigail of the auburn hair and periwinkle eyes, the Edwardian mistress of Merlin’s Court.

“Sweetheart?”

“Are you talking to me?” I roused myself off the sofa, shook the creases out of my washerwoman skirt, and braced myself for questions regarding my day’s productivity.

“Every time I look at this portrait”—his dark head was tilted so that the light from the wall lamps brushed his face like a watercolour paintbrush—“I become consumed with desire.”

“For Abigail?”

“No! For a portrait of you with the twins.”

“Ben, you know how I hate having my photo taken.”

“So you do.” A thoughtful gleam darkened his eyes to the peacock blue of the vase on the leaded-glass bookcase.

“I would rather be hanged in the good old-fashioned sense of the word than strung up for posterity on some wall of this house. I hate the thought of a complete stranger gawking up at me somewhere down the years and saying, ‘Don’t you think she looks like a bulldog?’ ”

“Ellie!”

“Don’t tell me I am depriving Abbey and Tam of
the opportunity for immortality and your mother and father of their rights as grandparents, because I have every intention of taking the twins down to Belamo’s Studio in the—”

He did not let me finish. His hands found me and in one swift jerk I was in his arms, his breath warm upon my lips, his voice raspy as the feel of his shadowed face beneath my fingers. “Are you crazy?”

“You don’t like Belamo’s?”

“I don’t give a hang about the place.” He held me away from him. “What I care about is having you take a good hard look at yourself.”

Uncertain what he was getting at, I escaped into banter. “Sorry, dear! I don’t have a hand mirror on me.”

“You don’t need one.” He cupped my chin in his hand and suddenly we were rubbing noses like a couple of passionate Eskimos. “Make my eyes your mirror, sweetheart. Look into them and see yourself as I see you.”

“I’d rather not.” I managed a laugh.

“Stop that!” He gently shook me until his face blurred. “I won’t let you sneer at the woman I love.”

“You blind fool!” My smile hovered on the verge of tears. “You’re the one who needs to face facts. I’m not the girl you married. I’m a frumpish hausfrau. Oh, let’s stop prettying up the truth—I am
fat
.”

“No.”

“You see what you want to see.”

“I see a lovely woman.”

“Then you’re looking with the heart, not the eyes.”

“So,” he said, then drew my braid over my shoulder, removed the rubber band, and began undressing my hair with slow, deliberate fingers. “Isn’t that how you look at me?”

“Don’t be silly.” For some unknown reason, I was having trouble breathing. “We are not talking about the
same thing at all. You, Bentley T. Haskell, are gorgeous.”

“My poor blind fool!” His mouth came down on mine and I was enclosed in an embrace that sent my senses reeling. Perhaps it was the spicy clean scent of his Mr. Right after-shave that made my head spin. All I knew was that the moment became eternity and nothing existed but his heavy breathing and the pounding of my heart. And no one existed but the two of us, fully clothed but moulded into one being made out of scalding wax.

At last he lifted his head. “Ellie, I have an idea.”

“Me, too.”

“What I had in mind was a little moonlight adventure.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“A picnic.”

“A
what
?”

Gently he disengaged my arms from around his neck and ignored my lips, aching to be reunited with his. “Sweetheart, remember how in the early days we used to enjoy dining al fresco under the beech tree?”

“Yes,” I said, rubbing my arms, already feeling the nipping spring wind, “but in the daytime.”

“Ah, my love.” He raised my hand an infuriating inch at a time to his lips. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Defunct.” Impossible to tell him it had died in the service of Fully Female, which reminded me—I hadn’t told Ben about Mrs. Malloy. And this wasn’t to be my chance. I was being hustled into the hall and told to go and slip into something comfortable, like a coat and a wooly hat, while the master of the manor retreated to the kitchen to rustle up our midnight feast.

“The babies!” I whined.

“Not to worry. I’ll give Freddy a ring.”

“Really, Ben. We can’t keep imposing.”

“Nonsense. The old chap dotes on those kiddies, almost as much as he dotes on the opportunity to raid our refrigerator.”

“He may be in bed.” Obviously I was now reduced to talking nonsense. My cousin boasted that he never slept more than three hours a night, rarely turning in before three or four in the morning.

So Ben went whistling off to the kitchen, and I reluctantly wended my way upstairs, crossing the landing on tiptoe to enter the bedroom. Never had that old four-poster looked more alluring, but I tore my eyes away from it and opened up the wardrobe, bent on hunting out my navy duffle coat with its windproof hood. But the garment staring me in the face was none other than the Purple Peril, the caftan which Mrs. Malloy had borrowed and, bless her heart, returned.

Standing at the wardrobe with my hands full of faux silk and gold braid, memories came flooding back of the night I first met Bentley T. Haskell. There I had been, about to slip into my Aladdin slippers, when he came through the door, his long scarf flapping with every stride, his hair made blacker by the wet night, a glitter to his fine eyes, eyes that boded ill for any woman who would keep him waiting while she made a last-minute hike to the bathroom, closed the door, swooned against it and informed the dazed woman staring at her from the mirror: “The man’s a devil, but God knows I never wanted to be a saint.”

“Ellie!” Back in the present the bedroom door opened and banged shut and I turned to find Ben swooning against it.

“What’s wrong?” I tugged so hard on the Purple Peril that the hanger snapped.

“I’ve just had the most damnable shock.”

“Tell me!”

“The babies are fine.” Ben found the strength to lift
his right hand and press it to his brow. “I came upstairs to get the travelling rug from the Blue Room so we wouldn’t have to sit on the damp grass and what do you think I found? Ellie, there is a strange woman in that bed snoring her head off.”

“Oh, her!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Darling, I’m sorry! I forgot to mention that I suggested that Mrs. Malloy stay the night.”

“I didn’t recognize her.”

“You’re just not used to seeing her in curlers and a chin strap. Then, too, she hasn’t been herself lately. She turned up late this afternoon and hinted that she was nervous about going back to her house. She’s involved with a man—Walter Fisher, your undertaker friend—and I think she’s frightened of him.”

“That Milquetoast?”

“Ben, she told me he has aroused passions she never knew she had … and to be honest, I can remember and empathize. There’s nothing to equal the delicious terror of going over the rapids into the whirlpool that first time.”

“Is that so?” Ben opened the door and held out his hand.

“Yes, but …”

“Sweetheart, I like to think there may be several first times in the lifetime of a love affair.”

“You took the words out of my mouth.” Tossing aside the hanger, I closed the door on the Purple Peril. “Ben, dear, after the fright you just received, I will understand completely if you wish to cancel the picnic.”

“Not a chance.”

“I hate men who play hard to get.”

“I’m thinking of you!” Taking my arm as if we were strolling down Lovers’ Lane, he walked me along to the nursery. “That was a fine salmon I found in the
fridge and it deserves the right ambience in which to be fully enjoyed.” He opened the door and we crept in to peek at our offspring. Sweet darlings, they were both magically asleep, watched over by Mother Goose, the Calico Cat, and Tommy and Topsy, the twin bears. Silly of me, but I half believed that as soon as we were gone from the room and the door closed, those toys would come alive and whisper the secret words: Norman the Doorman.