Femmes Fatal

by Dorothy Cannell

  “What?” She drew up her furry shoulders so that she resembled the king of the beasts in his royal ruff. “What the bleeding hell do you take me for—the Virgin Queen? I’m not made of stone, you know. I’m a Woman In Love.”

  “And he’s married …”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Horoscopes always leave out the juicy bits.”

  “The wretch left him years ago. Just upped and walked out one foggy winter’s night. My angel still can’t talk of it without turning white as a ghost. The old story. He found a note on the mantelpiece. And wasn’t one of them Hallmark cards, I can tell you that.”

  “Didn’t care enough to send the very best!” Awful of me to be so flippant, but for the first time since this nightmare started, I was beginning to think this was all a storm in a teacup. So long as no one got shot. Mrs. Malloy gave the gun a buff with her furry cuff and laid it on her lap. Savour the moment. Do not consider the possibility that it might be one of those trigger-happy models ready to go off if she crossed her legs.

  “If the wife is out of the picture …” I ventured.

  “Out of sight don’t mean out of mind.” Mrs. Malloy’s rouged cheeks quivered and her eyes grew misty under the neon lids. “For some reason he can’t forget her. I tell you, Mrs. H, I’ve done me bloody best to shut him out of me heart, but it’s no cop. From the moment—a fortnight Tuesday—when our eyes met across the crowded bingo hall, I’ve known me fate. In all England or out there in the great blue yonder, there’s none but Walter Fisher for Roxie Malloy. Life’s not worth a salt twist in a packet of crisps without him. When Walter is near, I feel forty again. Me whole body goes snap, crackle, pop.”

  Jealousy, mingled with a bitter-sweet sadness, flamed within me for a moment, only to be quenched by the name Walter Fisher. Why did it ring a bell? A doleful bell.

  “Mrs. H, he’s come over two or three nights …”

  “For dinner?”

  “On business. He’s been talking to me about …”

  “Yes?”

  “Prepaying me funeral.”

  “You don’t mean …?” But of course she did! Her Mr. Heartbreak was none other than Chitterton Fells’s one and only funeral director and embalmer. I’d met the gentleman a few years back when he came to offer his condolences, along with a bill for services rendered, on the occasion of Uncle Merlin’s interment. Extraordinary! The man was such a weedy chap. Mr. Walter Fisher seemed as unlikely a sex object as … Miss Gladys Thorn.

  Lost in thoughts of Walter, Mrs. Malloy ignored my dumbstruck amazement. “Always the perfect gentleman, Mrs. H.”

  “Darn!”

  “Never so much as a hand on my knee. And then last night when I’d unbuttoned me blouse—just the top ones, on the off chance—he started talking about her. Mrs. Fisher. To hear him you’d think the woman was a saint. Never a cross word. Always bright and bubbly. Always laughing. Isn’t it enough to make you spit?”

  “Absolutely. Makes a lot more sense than killing yourself.” Torn between sympathy and irritation, I closed in on her, hands locked in prayer. “Come on, Mrs. Malloy, put the gun away. I’ll make us a nice cup of tea and we’ll try and figure how to reel in Mr. Fisher.”

  Blast! So far this had been a hellish day. But enough is enough. Already the babies had been left so long they had probably outgrown the clothes they were wearing. Without a “Pardon me,” I stepped up to the mat and plucked the gun from Mrs. Malloy’s knees in the same way I would have taken a rattle from Abbey or Tam.

  If looks could kill, I’d be needing Mr. Fisher’s professional attentions myself. “No need to mince words.” She huffed onto her four-inch heels. “You don’t mind me doing meself in, so long as it’s not in your house on your time. A pity them tablets was only for indigestion. Any minute now it could all be over. Me eyes would roll back in me head and me knees would do the limbo bend. Well”—mighty sniff—“beggars can’t be choosers. I’m off to throw meself over the cliff.”

  “Not if I have to pump a few rounds of sense into you.”

  Shocked to the core, I looked down at my hand, the one pointing the gun at my faithful daily, as if itching to put another notch on my belt. I didn’t believe this. What would I say to Ben when he came home tonight and asked what I had done to keep busy? This had to be a bad dream, although it felt more like a bad western. Right on cue, the desk clock struck high noon. When the last note shivered into silence, Mrs. Malloy teetered on her high heels, then slumped back in the leather chair.

  “Oh, my God, I’ve shot her!”

  Impossible. There had been no sound, unless … could this be what is meant by a deafening blast? And to think how recently I had been sweating the small stuff. All that nonsense about whether or not to keep my one o’clock appointment with Fully Female. I was a murderess. I would spend my children’s formative years in Holloway. I put the gun in my apron pocket and approached the corpse. On the count of three, I darted a touch at her dangling arm. Oh, my God! Her feather hat slid sideways, falling on the floor like a bagged bird, and at the same moment … the eyes of the corpse opened.

  “Promise me,” she rasped.

  “Anything!” She was alive!

  “Make sure I’m buried in me plum taffeta with the sequins and me sealskin stole—you’ll have to get it back from the cleaner’s. And one more thing … Tell Mr. Walter Fisher to eat his heart out when he closes me coffin lid.”

  What a crazy world. What a crazy day. I hadn’t shot Mrs. Malloy, but it said a lot about my state of mind that I thought I had. Apparently Jock Bludgett had been right when he said I needed more than a new pump. Mrs. Malloy certainly needed more help than I could give and there was no time to lose with the clock ticking on like a bomb and the babies to be fed.

  “Mrs. Malloy, don’t move.”

  Racing out into the hall, I skated across the flagstones, took a peek into the kitchen, blew Abbey and Tam a kiss, got goo-goos in reply, dodged back past the gawking suits of armour, and without pausing to regulate my breathing or shuffle my thoughts into a neat pile, picked up the telephone and dialled one of the few numbers I know by heart.

  Answered at the third ring.

  “St. Anselm’s vicarage.” The wary voice belonged to Mrs. Pickle, Rowland’s daily.

  “Emergency!” I shouted. “I must speak with—”

  “Just a mo.”

  Silence, then a clunk as she laid the phone down. Mrs. Pickle takes her own sweet time about everything. She calls it being conscientious. Standing on the dais, treading water like a kiddy locked out of the loo, I pictured her dusting off the receiver and straightening the paper and pens on the table before setting off at a snail’s pace, looking back over her shoulder every third step because she didn’t like leaving even a telephone caller unattended in the vicarage hall. Might come back to find a couple of church bulletins missing.

  Chewing on the telephone cord, I counted out her imagined footsteps going down the hall. The muffled thump of a door closing. Then all was swallowed in deadening silence. Would Mrs. Pickle have quickened her pace had I given my name? Remembering Jonas’s idea that she was sweet on him, I could have kicked myself. The minutes dragged on and I began to long for the music that had been piped into my ear during my phone call to Fully Female. But Mantovani was not in my immediate future.

  Voices crackled in my ear. Naturally I assumed Mrs. Pickle had unearthed Rowland from his study, but disappointment was only a screech away.

  No clue as to the identity of the screecher. But a man—who wasn’t Rowland—spoke, not into the phone, but obviously close by, in one of those whispers that have more carrying power than a shout.

  He was answered in screeching accents by a woman who was not Mrs. Pickle. Would Mrs. P have left a divorcing couple cooling their heels, if not their tempers, in the hall? Never! Besides, that scenario didn’t work. What I had tapped into sounded more like an untoward meeting than the grand finale.

  “This has come as a nasty shock.” The man�
�s voice blew in my ear like a rush of chill air through a ventilator. “It won’t do at all, you know. For twenty years I’ve thought myself safe from your wanton ways.”

  “Does this mean you’re not thrilled to see me?” The female voice vibrated on the verge of hysteria.

  “Enough! In the name of what we once shared, I ask you to vacate these premises.”

  “Not until I have spoken to your wife.”

  “Never. You’re not worthy to enter the same room as that saintly woman. If you try, I’ll take whatever steps are necessary …”

  “Gladstone, how can you be such a cad?”

  Fade-out, leaving me trapped in the place where fact and fiction merge. I could only suppose I had been listening to a keyhole dramatization of the life and times of the great prime minister. A man carved in stone, before ever death saw his statue installed in Westminster Abbey, but whom modern muckrakers suspect of taking more than a political interest in ladies of the night. It didn’t surprise me that Mrs. Pickle toted the wireless around while polishing. Heaven forbid that someone abscond with it while her back was turned.

  Had the woman forgotten me? How long would she take to come back and tell me the vicar was nowhere to be found? Glaring at the receiver, ready to chew on it in frustration, I was clobbered by a chilling thought. What if Mrs. Malloy, encouraged by my absence, made a break from the house by way of the window? At this very moment she might be skittering on her four-inch heels down the gravel drive, bent on hurling herself off the cliff edge.…

  Dropping the phone—my heart as much a lead weight as the gun in my pocket—I was at the study door before I knew how I got there. Shoving it open, I beheld Mrs. Malloy’s fur coat slumped across the desk. No need for heart failure—she wasn’t in it. A rhinestone clip glinted in her two-tone hair as she stood stuffing the china poodle and other earthly treasures into the supply bag.

  “Won’t do to ply me with liquor.”

  “I wasn’t …”

  “Nor kind words neither.” She settled the feather hat on her hat, then took it off and handed it to me. “Here, give this to that bloody cat to remember me by once in a now and then. Well, that’s it then, except for this.”

  Numbly, I took the envelope she handed me.

  “Give that to Mr. Fisher. I wrote him a poem.”

  Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be anything like the rhymes of Norman the Doorman.

  She pursed her butterfly lips, flung out her chest and with hands clenched to her gut, proclaimed in tones that would have won her an audition in a theatre without microphones:

  “Sugar is sweet,

  Violets are blue,

  Red is the blood,

  I shed for you.”

  Tears burned my eyes. “Mrs. Malloy, it’s wonderful! You must live to see it published.”

  Useless! She was headed for the cliffs.

  What followed is branded in my memory as one of those larger-than-life moments of truth. Mrs. M went for her leopard coat in the flash-grab manner of a gun-slinger going for his holster. At any cost she must be stopped. Grabbing up the newspaper, which I had brought in here with such high hopes that it would be used for cleaning the windows, I moved to roll it into a cudgel with which to whop her senseless if that was what it took to save the woman from herself … and along came déjà vu.

  I saw myself standing in the hall a scant few hours since, bent on doing the self-same thing to Jock Bludgett. And in a burst of shining joy I knew that were he to come knocking on the door that minute, washing-machine pump in hand, I would offer him a piece of cherry cake, even if so doing did constitute sexual harassment. Because thanks to the plumber with the Charlie Chaplin moustache and dodgy eye, I knew how to lure Roxie Malloy back to life and love.

  Look out, Mr. Walter Fisher, Funeral Director and Embalmer. Your horoscope says you are destined to forget the wife who deserted you. Surely by now you have earned the right to declare her legally dead and fall victim to the charms of a Fully Female woman!

  Humbling as it is to admit, I am not the perfect homemaker. When life-or-death situations intrude, I tend to let the housework slide. Ignore the washing machine still occupying the centre stage in the kitchen. Forget the unmade beds and grandiose plans for repapering the pantry shelves. I would resort to my secret hoard of disposable nappies in the airing cupboard, and Mrs. Malloy and I would be off down the Yellow Brick Road to keep my one o’clock appointment with Fully Female. Hadn’t that nice woman on the phone said two for the price of one?

  Only one problem. Her Mightiness kept putting obstacles in the way as fast as I could stick spoonfuls of mashed carrot into the twins, who sat in their feeder chairs on the kitchen table, ready to eat the spoon. My heart went out to mother birds everywhere. How do they cope?

  “Load of twaddle, Mrs. H.”

  “Mr. Bludgett doesn’t think so. He came to fix the washing machine this morning, got a call from his wife—who’s a member of Fully Female—and rushed home for … elevenses, as if someone had lit a firecracker under him.”

  Mrs. Malloy sniffed. “Jock Bludgett always was a horny devil. Everyone knows he did the hokey-pokey with Gladys Thorn.”

  Would I never cease to be devoutly shocked by the doings of our revered church organist? The lady had been through more men than there are hymns in the hymnal. But from the bombshell hints she had dropped in the past, Mrs. Malloy was in no position to throw stones. Seems true love makes prudes of us all. As does motherhood. I became aware that the twins were all eyes and ears as they sat chewing on their plastic straps. Possibly they were on the watch for the signs that more din-din was forthcoming, but ever ready to read disapproval in those periwinkle eyes, I steered the conversation away from illicit sex to the wholesome, holistic variety prescribed by Fully Female.

  “Mrs. Malloy,” I proclaimed, “you are a coward.”

  “I am not.” Standing up tall on her stilt heels, she folded her arms, forcing her taffeta bosom up to her chin. “When it comes to pleasuring a man, there’s not much I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t do to rest on our laurels!” If I snapped, it was because I’d tested a spoonful of applesauce for hotness by touching it to my lips. When I licked them, they sizzled and tasted of pork crackling.

  “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

  “Rubbish.” I’d got my mouth unstuck without tearing it. Swatting Tobias Cat off the table, I wiped my hands on my apron and began dolloping creamed rice and applesauce into the Peter Rabbit dish. “Mrs. Malloy, I’ll bet you five pounds that by the end of week one you’ll have Mr. Walter Fisher jumping through hoops and woofing at the moon.”

  “Five quid?” She bridled. “How bloody far do you think that’ll go toward paying for this f’ing course?”

  “For heaven’s sake,” I said, popping a spoonful of cooled applesauce into Abbey’s rosebud mouth, “they’re having a two-for-one special.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Malloy plump down on her laurels in the rocking chair.

  “Won’t cost me a penny?” Her face seemed to waver, as if all sorts of emotions were working their way up to the surface; but that could have been because I was in a tug-of-war with Tam over the spoon. “Thanks ever so, Mrs. H, but I don’t see as how I can accept.” She was back on her high horse. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not me pride. As Mrs. Pickle at the vicarage always says, ‘A lady keeps her pride in her pocket. She don’t flash it around, no more than she’d flash her bare behind in public.’ ”

  I couldn’t imagine Reverend Foxworth’s daily saying anything of the sort, but then I hadn’t believed Jonas when he claimed she was after him.

  “And I know, Mrs. H, as how you feel this is the least you can do, after all me years of loyal service. Never a job too big or too tall.” She swept a hand ceilingward.

  Remembering my earlier thoughts about Michelangelo, I spooned rice into first one beak, then the other. “So exactly what is the problem?”

  “Sounds to me as though this Fully Female is for married women
only.”

  “Rubbish. That would be discrimination. Besides, the number of times you’ve been married, you make me look a rank amateur.”

  “Well, since you put it that way …”

  Time to close in for the kill. “They’ll beg you to join. You’re a far more interesting candidate than I. Think about it. Mr. Walter Fisher is still a moving target, whilst Ben is already …” I broke off, shocked by where my babbling was headed. Was that how I saw myself—as the lady huntress who, having bagged her lion, could sit back and fan herself while watching him prowl the cage?

  Bother! I’d slopped applesauce down my apron.

  On the bright side, Mrs. Malloy was looking happier than I had seen her in hours. Getting onto her high-heeled feet, she rolled up her leopard cuffs, looked at the clock, which said twelve fifteen, and picked up the toaster—in lieu of a hand mirror—to check that every hair and beauty spot was in place. Satisfied, she wound up the electric cord, stashed the appliance in a cupboard, and signalling time was up, put on her feather hat. Poor Tobias Cat, diddled out of his inheritance.

  “Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning, Mrs. H. If we’re to be partners in this passion pit caper, I won’t have you making me late for appointments.”

  Success can be sweet, or it can come in other flavours. At that moment I, who had vowed never to smack my children, could have smacked my employee. Did she expect me to slip on my coat, wave the twins bye-bye, and tell them to fend for themselves until Mummy got home? I was about to tell Mrs. M that I had old-fashioned ideas on parenting, when the garden door burst open and, with the impact of Norman the Doorman arriving to save the day, in strode my cousin Freddy. Good heavens! Why was he dressed up like a horny Viking?

  “Hey, cos!” Kicking the door shut with his booted heel, Freddy dropped down on one knee and flung his arms wide. Rooms, along with people, cower when Frederick Flatts enters. He’s a six-foot stick of dynamite waiting to blow. “I come at your command, O radiantly disheveled maiden, to bend your ear with verses sweet from Balda Dead.”