Femmes Fatal

by Dorothy Cannell

  “Ellie! I saw you from the front window.”

  “Bunty!” Scraping up a smile, I blurted out the first words that came into my head. “Where are the peacocks?” Talk about drivel! If the birds weren’t flaunting their fans and doing the royal strut at the front of the house, they would be on the back lawn …

  Bunty’s blue eyes filled with tears that spilled onto her luxuriant black lashes. Drawing me into the house, she closed the door before breaking the news.

  “The peacocks have been kidnapped.”

  “No!”

  “That’s what I said when I went out this morning to find them buggering gone and a note tacked to the front door. You know what it contained?”

  “A demand for ransom?”

  “Bloomin’ heck! Nothing so civilized. It was a recipe for Bird of Paradise Fondue, the one from the Fully Female manual. What does that tell you, Ellie?”

  “We’re not dealing with a vegetarian?”

  Taking my elbow, she propelled me through the spacious hall to the white-on-white living room with its skylights and Egyptian pyramid tables and the orchestra pit occupied by the grand piano. “Know what I think, Ellie? There’s someone out there who’s jealous as cats of the success of Fully Female and is out to sabotage the operation.”

  “You don’t think you might …” My voice faltered.

  “Go on, spit it out.”

  Fixing my eyes on the wall hanging with its nouveau Bronze Age design, I made the heinous suggestion. “Might it be possible that you’re dealing with a dissatisfied client or the spouse thereof?”

  The tear-darkened lashes gave her the ingenuous look of the twins. “Ellie, you’re kidding, right? Sure I’ve had a couple of setbacks lately. First Mrs. Huffnagle kicked the bucket and now Mrs. Diamond is having to resign.” A pause. “But I don’t suppose you know about that.”

  I made the sort of helpless response you make to the dentist when he has you in the chair with your mouth full of instruments.

  “Horrible shame. Mr. Diamond fell last night while practicing for one of his TV stunts in the bedroom … and snuffed it. A real blow”—Bunty seemed impervious to the pun—“but not in any way connected with Fully Female.” The very strength of her denial made me wonder if she suspected that Norman’s death was linked to Jacqueline’s homework assignment.

  “What a tragedy!” I managed to say. “Poor Mrs. Diamond. She has been questioned by the police, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes, but she said they were real loves.” Bunty was standing on a llama rug, her coral nails plucking at the gold chain around her neck. “Flippin’ heck, into every commercial venture a little rain must fall, and no one can call me insensitive. I cancelled this afternoon’s program after talking to Jacqueline. Sorry you fell through the cracks, Ellie. You see why I keep grumbling about the office help. What do you think? Should I take Li’s advice and give Miss Thorn a try? She wasn’t bad the other day on the piano, and it would be handy having someone who could do both—play accompaniment for Retro-Relaxation and handle the office. If only she didn’t look like something Rover dragged in from the graveyard!”

  I didn’t answer because I was trying to pluck up the courage to tell Bunty to cross another name off her client list. But the moment was lost. Footsteps sounded in the hall and suddenly—talk of the devil … and make that plural—we were looking at the handsome silver-haired Lionel Wiseman and Miss Thorn, who looked gawkier and more myopic than ever in the presence of such urbanity.

  “Li, sugar! Home so early?” Bunty gave him a perky smile, but I suspected she wasn’t entirely pleased to be caught on the hop by her husband.

  “Afraid so, sweetie!” Mr. W was unbuttoning his cashmere coat with his usual savoir faire, while Miss Thorn stood panting down on him from her superior height, her spectacles fogged and her raincoat misbuttoned.

  “If this is not a convenient time …” She was tieing her hands into knots and trembling all the way down to her sensible shoes. “Perhaps if I come back another time, when Mrs. Wiseman isn’t entertaining dear Mrs. Haskell—”

  “Oh, I’m just leaving.” I sent an ottoman skidding across the floor in my eagerness to be gone.

  “Please”—Lionel Wiseman looked at me, while placing a hand on Miss Thorn’s arm—“both of you stay. We’ll all have a drink … and talk things through.”

  “Just as I suspected,” Bunty stage-whispered in my ear, as the other two retreated into the hall with their coats. “Li is about to twist my bra strap. And what the bloomin’ heck, Miss Thorn can have the job. A woman with my looks and charm,” she continued with a puckish grin, “can afford to be kind. Yes, I suppose I should be cross with Li, but he’s such a sweet old chauvinist, always looking out for his Bunty baby.”

  “But there’s no need for me to stay—”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Ellie. I could tell Li wanted you here so it wouldn’t look like two against one, and if you bugger off, we’ll spend forty-five minutes talking about Miss Thorn’s collection of telephone directories before getting down to pounds, shillings and pence.”

  “Thank you, I will take a glass of sherry.” My non sequitur alerted Fully Female’s fearless leader to the return of her husband and the job applicant. While he was busy with the decanters, we ladies seated ourselves—Bunty and I in the oyster-colored leather chairs, while Miss Thorn helped herself to the sofa. In anyone else this presumption might have been deemed bad form, but as always, she was so much atwitter it was hard not to smile … until I remembered slamming the garden door in her face yesterday afternoon when she came aknocking and I thought she was Freddy.

  Amazingly, her mushroom eyes—when they strayed my way—harboured no hostility. It was as though the incident had never existed outside my imagination. Such magnanimity was both heart-warming and scary. But this was no time for psychoanalysis. Someone had to get the conversational ball rolling before our smiles set permanently.

  “How are you, Miss Thorn?”

  “Tremulous.” She ducked her mousy head.

  “I’d never have guessed.” Bunty sucked in her smile. “You look cool as a cucumber in that sweetly pretty frock.”

  “Thank you.” Miss Thorn drew the skirt of the hideous garment way down over her knees and raised her spectacles to Lionel Wiseman, who was heading toward us with the drink tray. “Nothing for me, my dear Mr. Wiseman. As you know, hard liquor does not agree with me. I have very sensitive insides.”

  “You suffer from indigestion?” Bunty asked.

  “No, irregularity.”

  “Ah!” My exclamation went whispering to the lofty ceiling to vapourise on one of the skylights. I accepted a glass of sherry from Lionel and watched him hand one of the same to his wife before depositing the tray on a glass table and joining Miss Thorn on the sofa. As a married woman, I had no business noticing such things but he was one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen on the screen or off. Well into his fifties, he was still getting better. Those heavy dark brows, offset by that wonderful silver hair, promised passion as well as power. Blotting my drooling lips with a cocktail napkin, I waited for someone to say something.

  “So!” Bunty, cute as a kitten, raised her glass. “I say the occasion calls for a toast!”

  Lionel leaned forward, his handsome hands pressed to his handsome knees. “My sweet, I never expected you to be so readily amenable, so accommodating. Gladys and I were braced for all kinds of fuss.”

  “Indeed, yes.” Miss Thorn’s flush clashed with her sallow complexion. “I have been so frightened and, of course, tension is the very worst thing for my … condition.”

  “Why, you silly goose,” said Bunty. “As a Fully Female woman, my husband’s wishes are my command.”

  “So kind! But as I said to Lionel, having waited this long to bestow my hand on the man of my dreams, I wanted everything to be perfect and I stoically refused to become officially engaged until I had your blessing, dear Mrs. Wiseman. Isn’t that so, my Lionel, my treasure?”

&nbs
p; “It is indeed, my rose without a thorn!”

  Bunty dropped her sherry glass and I went into shock, whereupon Lionel Wiseman raised Miss Thorn’s hand and pressed it to his comely lips. There they sat on the nubby white sofa with its oversized throw pillows, the man-about-town and the mature woman—lost in each other’s eyes. A moment of hearts and flowers to be savoured and reverently stowed in the Precious Memories Album of their lives.

  The discarded wife gripped the sides of her chair and stood up. Her beautiful face was stiff with strong emotion. Suddenly, she threw back her blonde head and pealed out a laugh.

  “This is a joke! A belated April Fools’ joke, isn’t it? Li, darling, you almost had me fooled, and I really would be very cross with you and Miss Thorn if I weren’t even crosser with myself for being such a gullible nitwit. Ellie!” Bunty rounded on me as if I were a bodyguard who had failed her in a dark alley. “Stop looking like someone just ran over your grandmother! I tell you they’re kidding.”

  “No, my sweet.” Lionel’s sorrowful eyes spoke more eloquently than his deep-timbered voice. “Your pain is mine, dear one, but these last six weeks, when you have thought me working late at the office, I have been with Gladys, engaging in the affair of a lifetime. Ours is a passion so explosive that I finally understand the principle of fusion.”

  “Oh, my God!” Bunty’s face twisted in anguish. “To think I was so proud of you, carrying that organ donor card around in your wallet!”

  Mr. Wiseman’s broad shoulders sagged. He murmured, “We never meant to hurt Bunty, did we, beloved?”

  Miss Thorn gathered up his hand and pressed it to her nonexistent bosom. “Never!”

  This was worse than awful. I had never felt more horribly in the way. It was like opening a door into what you thought was the hospital gift shop and finding yourself in the chaos of a surgical procedure—blood spurting, guts flying, and a senior doctor jumping rope with a large intestine. Please … get me out of here!

  “So,” Bunty snarled, “Li wasn’t a big enough boy to face me on his own!”

  “We thought it best”—Miss Thorn gave one of the titters that were so much part of her charm—“that the three of us talk matters over with the hope that when the dust settles, we can all be the best of friends. I’ve always been a slave to convention and I said to Lionel …”—she paused to kiss his well-manicured hand in a slow voyage from fingertips to wrist—“ … I said I couldn’t agree to a formal engagement until you, dear Mrs. Wiseman, agreed to sever the tie that binds.”

  “Are we talking divorce?” Bunty screeched.

  “I’ve seen a sweetly pretty ring.” A dreamy Miss Thorn stretched out her hand, the better to picture the betrothal gem perched on her knobby finger. “A half hoop of diamonds in a Victorian setting with a ruby—”

  “To match your eyes?” Bunty lost all restraint. She lunged toward the dovesome twosome and let rip a scream that threatened to bring the skylights crashing down on our heads. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you both!”

  Thank heaven for the twins! Toting them around must have increased my upper body strength. For I was somehow able to restrain her from diving across the coffee table and shredding the two of them with her pearly-white teeth.

  While I held Bunty at bay, Mr. Wiseman and Miss Thorn exchanged concerned glances. “My dove, you see I was right to be deathly worried,” he said.

  “Hush, dear heart! Why don’t I play one of my tinkles on the piano?” Eyes closed, mousy head thrown back, the lady braced herself for the agony of placing a distance of some fifteen feet between herself and her True Love. Taking the long way round the room in order to avoid coming within fighting distance of the current Mrs. Wiseman, Miss T descended into the orchestra pit, seated herself on the piano stool, arranged her skirts over her knobby knees, flexed her fingers, cracked her knuckles, and began to play a movement so lachrymose, I could have sworn the piano wept.

  Miss Thorn raised her spectacles to Bunty’s foaming face. “Ah sweet music, your charms do soothe the savage beast.”

  “Breast, my dove,” corrected Lionel, his face as tender as that of a father listening to a child mispronounce its first words. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.”

  “Oh, you couldn’t expect Gladys to get that one right!” Bunty twisted free of my grasp. “You’re the expert of course, Li darling, but I’d say all your lady love can boast in the way of breasts is a couple of mosquito bites.”

  “How dare you!” Mr. Wiseman rose up from the sofa. “How dare you impugn the physique of the woman I love!”

  Miss Thorn uttered a mousey squeal.

  Somewhere in that House Beautiful room a clock pinged the half hour, but I mistook the sound for a boxing ring bell, signalling another round about to begin. And, my goodness, with the opponents both up and prancing on their toes they could be letting fly for hours. I wasn’t unsympathetic. My heart ached for Bunty, but I did have a life of my own outside these walls. My babies needed me. To say nothing of Freddy, who in return for favours rendered expected me to listen to his lines for that silly play.

  But I was the one destined to take part in a two-bit melodrama. Gasp! On this very stage the silver-haired, silver-tongued male lead was pulling a gun from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and aiming it at the the ex-chorus-girl wife and … there not being a sneeze of space between them … her dim-witted companion.

  Miss Thorn came to an echoing halt on the piano.

  “Bunty,” I cajoled, my eyes on the gun in Lionel’s hand, “promise him a divorce.”

  “Never,” shrilled the blonde numbskull. “I swear I’ll see him and his fleshpot dead first!”

  “Exactly as I thought.” Lionel Wiseman was staring at the weapon, distaste pinching his nostrils, and with the breath lodged in my throat, I waited for him to explain how he knew of no recourse but to do for Bunty before she did for him. I was shaking so badly that I had trouble following what he was saying. “When Mrs. Pickle gave me this gun the other day, after finding it hidden in an apron in the terra-cotta urn by the waterfall, I tried to tell myself you were worried about burglars, but as I sat in my office, sipping cafe au lait and smoking a Brazilian cigar, I became increasingly convinced, Bunty, that you were aware of my liaison with Gladys and bent upon revenge.”

  “Mr. Wiseman, you couldn’t be more wrong!” My voice raced along to get in ahead of him before he could stop—or shoot—me. “I’m the one who left that gun in the urn!”

  “You?” A weary smile creased his handsome features. “Dear lady, your loyalty does you credit, while insulting my intelligence.”

  “But truly—”

  “Shut up, Ellie!” Bunty pounced forward and, to a shudder of piano chords, whipped the snub-nosed gun away from her husband. “So, buster”—she chucked him under the chin with the butt before dancing backwards to rejoin me—“what took you so long? Why the bloomin’ heck didn’t you spill the beans about the gun when you first got your pudgy paws on it?”

  In response to the gun swivelling in her direction, Miss Thorn was edging across the room to her loved one’s side, hands raised above her head. “Lionel deemed it proper not to raise a rumpus until I had accepted his proposal of marriage.”

  “How friggin’ decent!” Bunty spat out the words. “Never sink the old boat until you have launched the new!”

  “One has one’s standards,” said Lionel.

  “Until this very afternoon”—Miss Thorn had reached the sanctuary of his embrace—“I was teetering on the brink of declining the honour of becoming the second Mrs. Wiseman.”

  “The third, you clot!” Savagely, Bunty closed in on the pair of them. “At least I had the decency to wait until the first Mrs. Wiseman had been put out to pasture. Mark my words, you scraggy-necked bitch, you’ll get what’s coming to you, and it won’t be any diamond ring with a bloody great ruby.” A chill smile spread over her face, turning colder yet as she pried them apart with the gun and prodded them toward the hall. “Now get out, th
e pair of you!”

  “You’re behaving like a child.” Lawyer Lionel managed to retain some dignity, even though he and his amour did resemble a couple of knock-kneed kiddies learning to skate backwards.

  “Out, I say, out, the pair of you!” Slam went the front door. Bunty returned to the living room, the gun dangling from her hand.

  “Here, let me take that.” I hurried over to her, but she flagged me away.

  “No, Ellie! Give me a moment—I’ll pull myself together.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I can’t shoot myself if my hand is shaking, can I?”

  “Now stop that!” Without thinking twice, I snatched the revolver away from her. “And don’t bother wrestling me for it, because it’s not loaded.” I devoutly hoped such was the case as I stashed it inside my raincoat pocket, but I didn’t have time to worry about blowing off my feet, for Bunty had collapsed on the sofa and was sobbing piteously.

  “Can you believe this? Li abandoning me for that woman? I adored him, you know that? I thought we had it all. Oh, why didn’t I listen to that wise old bird, my Aunt Et? She used to say to me when I was a teenager, ‘Bunty me girl, don’t you go making my mistake. Don’t make sex the be-all and end-all. Don’t spend your life worshipping at the shrine of the one-eyed god.’ And now look what I’ve done! Here I am, president of Fully Female, instructing other women on how to hold on to their men—and mine has bunked off with Miss Thorn!”

  Unlike me, whose nose takes over my entire face, Bunty cried exquisitely. Tears beaded on her lashes and her cheeks deepened to a damask rose. How in heaven’s name could Lionel Wiseman leave her? One could only wonder anew at Miss T’s success with the opposite sex and marvel that she had lived thus long without coming a cropper.

  “I am so sorry.” I sat down next to her latest victim.

  “What a laugh! Not satisfied with being a doting dolt myself, I persuaded dozens of other women to turn themselves inside out.”

  “You meant well.”

  “What will become of me?”