How to Murder Your Mother-In-Law (8 page)

Mum rounded on her. “But you haven’t taken two bites!”

“She’s right!” Dad scolded. “If that stew sits on your plate much longer, it’ll be ready for canonization.”

“Yes, well …” Tricks flashed me an apologetic grin. “The truth is, I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat for years. But don’t let that bother anyone. When I say live and let live, that goes for blood-thirsty people,” she said, laughing, “as well as the poor little baa lambs and moo cows.”

Splendid! My doleful little dinner party was forth-with elevated to an act of terrorism.

“So why didn’t you eat your salad?” Mum pounced
on her yet again. “And what about those carrots and the broccoli? Just what sort of vegetarian are you?”

“I guess you’d call me reformed rather than orthodox,” Tricks twinkled across at Dad. “I haven’t eaten veggies since I started growing them. You know how easy it is, Elijah, to get emotionally attached.”

“I can’t say as I do.” Jonas mopped up his gravy with a slice of bread. “But us old bachelors b’ain’t known for our sensitivity.”

His reward was a schoolgirl giggle. “Oh, go on with you! Anyone can see you’ve got a heart of gold. Why you wasn’t snapped up years ago by some lass in a tight skirt and a bunny wool sweater is a mystery to me.”

Did the lady have designs on my babe in the woods? I was wondering how I felt about this possibility, when Dad said, “If I thought the way you do, Tricks, I’d be out of business. Then again, I’ll admit there’ve been times when I’ve felt uneasy seeing a particularly fine cauliflower going out the door to be boiled to mush.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Dad.” Ben speared a piece of beef. “Perhaps you should arrange for the health care visitor to conduct a spot check after each sale to ensure that living standards within the refrigerator are up to snuff.”

Mum’s pinched face showed disapproval of all this talk of vegetables—to say nothing of the mound of broccoli on her plate. “What I’d like to know, Bea,” she said, “is what you
do
eat to keep body and soul together.”

“This and that.” A flutter of false eyelashes which were twice as long as the ones worn by Mrs. Malloy. “And never a day goes by when I don’t take my wonderful health tonic. You should try it, Mags! Trust me, it would make you feel
forty
years younger.”

“I wouldn’t poison myself.”

“Don’t be so negative,” Dad reproved. “Might do you some good with that problem of yours.”

“What problem?” I asked, ever unwise.

Mum prissed her lips. “I would rather not say, Ellie.
Not in mixed company. It was difficult enough to mention the subject in my letters. Not that I would expect you to remember. At my age, you learn to live with discomfort. There isn’t any choice, except to go under the knife, and my doctor admits there’s no promise of a cure.”

“She’s got bowel trouble!” Dad roared the bad news, causing the salt and pepper shakers to start up an Irish jig.

“I had no idea.” Ben looked at me—the one entrusted with reading and answering his mother’s letters. In excuse of my callousness I might have said that when Mum wrote anything of a highly personal nature, her handwriting became exceedingly small, as if she were lowering her voice on paper, meaning I couldn’t read a word. But as it happened, I didn’t get to say anything, because Mrs. Malloy came in at that moment to do the rounds with the wine bottle.

Convinced Tricks was hovering on the brink of asking if the grapes were humanely crushed, I suggested she might like to try some of Mrs. Pickle’s dandelion brew. A weed’s a weed for all that. The bane of the gardener’s existence.

“Just a nip, love.” Tricks held out her glass. “I’m forever hearing about how the lady always comes away with a ribbon for her wines at the fête.”

In the wake of these praises, Ben suggested we all follow Tricks’s lead. And with only one or two grumbles about being overworked and underpaid, Mrs. Malloy clacked around the table on her stilt heels, filling glasses, until she came to Mum, who flinched as if about to be struck.

“Thank you, I don’t drink.”

“What was that you said?” Mrs. Malloy filled the glass to the brim.

“I don’t—”

“What a crying shame! But waste not want not! There’s thousands dying of thirst in deserts all over the world.” Moved close to tears by her own rhetoric, my
trusty trench woman tossed off the wine with hardly a gulp, dried off the inside of the glass with her cranberry apron, and returned it to the table with a flourish.

“I don’t know why you keep that woman on,” Mum snipped as Mrs. M.’s insubordinate rump disappeared out the door.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, love!” Tricks beamed at her. “Be a devil—drown your sorrows in a glass of water.”

“If it’ll make you happy” came the sullen response. And from that moment on Mum drank steadily, in teensy-weensy sips, of the fruit of the kitchen tap. A couple of times I thought of refusing to refill her glass as I watched her sink further and further into sobriety; but where does a hostess draw the line? There was also the little matter of Tricks billing and cooing at my assorted menfolk. Every time she looked his way, Jonas sat with knife and fork upended and the silliest expression on his face. Even Ben was not immune to the seventy-year-old vamp. But Dad was the worst. When he wasn’t hanging on her every word, he was feasting his eyes on her superlative bosom.

“You haven’t touched your wine, Tricks,” he chided her in an uncharacteristically soft voice. Whereupon she did touch it by knocking the glass over with her elbow.

“Don’t worry,” she gurgled as the yellowish stain seeped into the damask cloth. “It’ll come out in the wash.”

“Without any problem,” I said.

“My daughter-in-law is into all that housewife stuff. It wouldn’t be for me; I’ve always wanted more from life. But don’t get me wrong”—Tricks flapped her hands—“Frizzy’s a great girl. We’ve not had a cross word in all the years I’ve lived with her and Tom, and that’s a marvel in such a small house with the kiddies always underfoot.”

“You could ask them to move out,” Dad joked.

“I’ve been tempted, let me tell you, what with young Dawn getting into my makeup and the three little ones bounding about when I’m trying to do my meditation.”

“That’s what you get for giving up your independence,” Mum chipped in. “By the way, what happened to your husband?”

“Killed in the war,” Tricks responded brightly.

“The Second World War?” Ben looked puzzled.

“That’s right.”

“But that doesn’t add up, whatever way I do my sums!” Mum stared at her. “You weren’t married when I last saw you, and that was in the fifties.”

“It was a stray bomb.”

“You’re joking!” Dad retired his fork to the side of his plate.

“Oh, all right!” Tricks threw up her hands and batted her false lashes. “So I was never married to Tom’s father. These days nobody gives a hoot, but way back when I landed in the family way, I had to make up the usual cock-and-bull story about being widowed before the baby was born. I picked the surname Taffer, because I thought it was pretty, out of the telephone directory.”

“Never married!” Mum shrank so low in her chair, I thought about fetching in one of the twins’ booster seats for her. But once more Mrs. Malloy shattered the moment by wheeling in the trolley.

“No rest for the wicked!” Smacking her butterfly lips, she proceeded to clear away the plates as if walking a slippery deck. But if she had been imbibing in the kitchen, at least I didn’t have to worry about her driving home. I had already decided to ask Tricks if she would share a taxi with her. My treat, of course.

“Anyone for pud?” Having loaded up the top of the trolley, Mrs. M. lifted the tray of chocolate mousse glasses from the bottom shelf and went around the table, plonking one down in front of each of us. “Don’t anyone ask me to sit down and join the party. I might
forget meself and say yes. Too late to beg, Mrs. H., I’m off to soak up to me elbows in Fairy Liquid.”

Duty calling, she tottered out, never knowing how dearly I would have liked her to drag up a chair and plant herself in our midst. Mrs. Malloy could always be counted on to complicate a situation sufficiently that whatever else was going on seemed insignificant. To my surprise, Mum did not return to the cliff-hanger disclosure of Tricks’s unmarried state. Instead of sticking in the knife, she dug her spoon into her chocolate mousse. I held my breath, naively hoping she would turn an awestruck face my way and say “Ellie, I’ve been wrong about you all these years. A woman who can make a chocolate mousse of this calibre is deserving of my one and only son.”

The sad truth is, she ate as if unaware what she was doing. Her spoon might move, but her eyes didn’t. They were fixed straight ahead, as if directed upon some distant shore. The men were so busy making sure Tricks wasn’t worrying her spiked red head over any misconception that her revelation had lowered her in their estimation that not one of them touched their mousse. Tricks in turn chose to stick to her dandelion wine, for which she would appear to have developed a taste—being now on her third glass. As for myself, I was (for once) not in the mood for chocolate.

“It b’aint easy being a woman with a lad to rear all on her lonesome.” Jonas exerted all his rustic charm on Tricks’s behalf. “Makes you a heroine in my book, it do.”

“I had my struggles,” chirped Florence Nightingale. “But I managed.”

“Magnificently, I’m sure!” Dad raised his glass to her.

“It’s hard enough bringing up children when you’re married.” That was Ben, who tended to think he had invented parenthood. Belatedly mindful of his responsibilities to his coworker in that endeavour, he flashed me a smile and finally tasted his chocolate
mousse. Eyes closed, he touched the spoon to his lips … and immediately dropped it with a hideous clang.

“Ellie, there is something dreadfully wrong!”

“You mean it didn’t set?”

“I’m talking about the
chocolate
! What kind did you use?”

“The regular baking …” The protest died on my lips and I clapped both hands to my burning cheeks.

“What is it?” demanded the Grand Inquisitor.

“I’ve just remembered, I hunted high and low for the box and finally found it on the shelf with the medicines.”

“That wasn’t no baking chocolate,” Jonas growled. “That was my Choco-Lax.”

“You mean”—Tricks giggled—“she made the pudding from a laxative?”

“Anyone can make a mistake.” In avoiding Ben’s eyes I looked towards Mum and was instantly stricken by a dose—horrible word—of remorse. “Oh, my goodness!” I snatched her spoon away. “You of all people, with your health problem, eating that stuff! Perhaps we should phone the doctor.”

“She’ll be all right,” Dad said with husbandly conviction. “I’m always telling her she should eat more figs.”

“But what if there are complications?”
Death
was the one that sprang to mind, Already I could see the headlines in the newspapers.
Woman Given Overdose of Laxative. Daughter-in-Law Accused of Murder
. There would be a photo of me hiding out behind dark glasses and a couple of paragraphs dwelling in lurid detail on
Mum’s Near Fatal Fall
down the stairs tonight. Stairs that had been polished, ladies and gentlemen, to a dangerous sheen in anticipation of the deceased’s visit.

“Mum, I don’t know when I’ve felt more awful,”

“That makes two of us.”

This indictment cut me to the quick, but I got the feeling, which was certainly a cowardly one, that she
wasn’t referring to a reaction to the chocolate mousse. She sat with her hand stuck up in the air as if still holding on to the spoon I had grabbed from her, and her eyes were fixed in a blank stare.

“Mum, are you all right?” Ben half rose from his chair.

“Of course I am.” She shook her wispy head, shedding her hair grips. “Where”—she glanced down at her hand—“is my spoon?”

“So tell me about your wedding, Mags love?” Tricks demanded.

“My what?” Mum jolted upright in her chair.

“What’s to tell?” Dad for once offered full spousal support. “Let’s talk about something more interesting. How’s the weather forecast for tomorrow?”

“Now, don’t be a pair of spoilsports!” Tricks beamed from one to the other of them. “If it hadn’t been for that silly quarrel, I would have been your bridesmaid. Surely I am entitled to know every frilly little detail.”

“All they ever told me”—Ben sat with his elbow on the table, his handsome chin resting on his cupped palm—“is that it was a private ceremony.”

“So it was,” Dad said with a crispness that implied “end of subject.”

“And it was as lovely as a dream, I’m sure!” Tricks was not about to be silenced. “But was it held in a church or a synagogue?”

“That’s none of your business.” Mum was trembling so violently, the floor shook. Jonas looked dumbfounded, I didn’t know how to look, and Ben looked as though he would have liked to smack both his parents for making such a mountain out of a molehill.

“Is it any of
my
business?” My spouse quirked a dark eyebrow and waited for enlightenment.

“Not from where I sit!” Dad heaved up in his chair and banged it down with awful finality.

Amazing! Tricks appeared to be the only person oblivious of the upset she had caused. Quite possibly,
she had not done it on purpose; she was, I believed, too self-absorbed to be actively malicious, but sensitivity was not her middle name. Then again, who was I to talk? At that moment I wished most desperately that I hadn’t invited her, or that I’d never decided upon this dinner party in the first place. Now was a fine time to realize that the words “I meant well” might well be among the most chilling in the English language. Ben had warned me that his parents did not like any fuss being made of their anniversary. The reason might be nonsensical—I suspected a registry office wedding; but what did that matter when his mother was sitting at my table with teensy tears trickling down her cheeks?

“Elijah,” she said, “we have been backed into a corner and I see nothing for it but to tell our boy the unsavoury truth.”

“Go on with you, Mum!” Ben’s voice held both exasperation and affection. “I’m not about to cut you out of my will if you tell me you were married at Caxton Hall.”