Mum's the Word

by Dorothy Cannell

  “I wanted to use up the cash Dorcas gave us before starting on the traveller’s cheques.”

  “Sensible. When she offered us the remains of her U.S. money, I thought she was talking about loose change. Maybe Dorcas robbed a bank?”

  Three women with spray net hair, about to enter the car parked next to us, clutched their handbags. All had the initials D.A.R. monogrammed on their knit suits. Was it my little jest about Dorcas that had shocked them or our British accents? Would one of them lift up her skirt, whip out a musket from her garter, and cry, “Charge!”?

  “Come along, Doris.”

  “Yes, Dillis Ann.”

  “You going in the back, Deborah?”

  Away they went with an engine blast that rocked my socks. Ben, tossing in the last of the bags, closed the boot and narrowly missed losing a hand. “You do have the traveller’s cheques?”

  “Gave them to me yourself, didn’t you, sir?” I patted my shoulder bag. “Said I’d be mincemeat for Christmas if anything untoward happened to them. And while we’re on the subject, I’ve never fully grasped what you have against credit cards.”

  “A foible which dates back to my days with Eligibility Escorts.” He was nursing a finger of his left hand. “Some insensitive clod of a woman, having hired me to be her date at a grouse shoot, wanted to put me on one of her charge cards.”

  “What?” I cried, aghast.

  “Ellie, please!” His black brows slashed together. “I’ve never made a secret of my past.”

  “You never told me you put on woolly britches to kill wee animals.”

  “If it makes you happier,” he said as he came around the side of the car, “I missed every shot. Miss God’s-Gift-to-Herself thought I was a complete incompetent and refused to pay me at all.” He held the car door open for me. “Why are you wearing that face?”

  “Why am I sitting in the driver’s seat?”

  Stepping backward, he almost got deveined by a motorcyclist zooming into the parking lot. “Because I want you to drive.”

  “Never! Dr. Melrose said I must not put my foot to the pedal on foreign soil.”

  One of those much vaunted earth-stopping silences.

  “Sweetheart, there’s nothing to driving over here. And I can’t find my glasses.”

  “You put them in the glove compartment.”

  “True enough. I didn’t want to worry you but …” Wincing, he held out his hand and averted his eyes. “You remember the time I poisoned my finger and nearly died?”

  “Rings a bell.”

  “I caught it with the boot lid just now.”

  “Ben, it’s not the same finger.”

  “Isn’t it?” Brow furrowed, he prodded the nail. “Well, do you concede it’s the same hand and that Dr. Melrose warned me to be exceedingly careful of post trauma? Ellie, I can’t take any risks. Not now. If you drive for an hour or so and I give my hand complete lap rest—”

  I shook the wheel, hoping it would come off and end this madness. “I can’t learn to do two new things at once. Pregnancy is enough. Driving on the wrong side of the road is too much.”

  He slid in beside my gibbering self, drew a pen from his breast pocket and triumphantly scrawled an R on my right hand.

  In the first flush of marriage I had thought I owed Ben my life. But not my life’s blood. A thousand curses on his head! May his anti-perspirant fail in the middle of a Mangé Meeting!

  Shaking like a paint pot in the grip of one of those mixing machines, I turned the key in the ignition. Vroooommmm. The car shot backward, snapping my neck like a dandelion stalk. Into a sickening skid before hurtling toward the parking lot exit. My foot had yet to touch the accelerator. The car rental man had spoken true when saying the car would take off with or without driver intervention. We were about to enter traffic in a single bound over four jam-packed lanes. Would we land on a car? Or something taller—providing a better view of the city?

  No time to hit the brake. I swung the wheel left—or do I mean right? Brilliant instinctive ploy. The sweat dried on my brow. Perhaps if I kept up not actually hitting anything …

  “Feeling better?” Ben rubbed my shoulder. “Told you there was nothing to it.”

  I couldn’t bite his good hand without taking my eyes off the road. The street was positively littered with traffic lights.

  “Sweetheart, I’m doing this for you. What would you do if something should happen to me?”

  “Marry a chauffeur,” I snarled.

  Traffic lights charged at us. And, making misery perfect, rain started down in slow, heavy plops. Barely enough to dampen a pile of ironing, but a little goes a long way in a convertible. Ben hates to drive in cars with the lids down because of his claustrophobia.

  “Want me to close …?” He pointed a magnanimous finger upwards; heavens, it was the injured one! Gently he restored his hand to his lap as if it were a sickly and dearly loved puppy.

  “No.” When we were sitting waist-deep in water, the man might realize what a prize—idiot—I was.

  Endeavouring to milk every ounce of fun, I pretended I was playing one of those driver safety games on a small screen. The kind where you can get killed more than once with no side effects. Vehicles, pedestrians, buildings whizzed by.

  “How far to our destination?”

  “Sweetheart, follow the signs to the motorway.” Ben sounded a bit choked up. Was he also catching pneumonia? Never mind that. Was I ever going to get a straight answer? “Somewhere outside Boston,” he had said when persuading me to answer the Mangé call with him. Truth finally reared its ugly head. I was about to spend the next several days one hundred miles from here in a suburb of a suburb.

  No time to extort a confession. Lots of honking from outside the car. Was that woman in the Volvo waving hello to a friend? Or shaking her fist at me? Feeling unwelcome in my lane, I switched and managed a nip-and-tuck retreat. Ben was pretending to be asleep. All was coming back to me now—the way he turned green at the airport when I mentioned being met by the Mangés, the way our sightseeing had been accomplished with the speed of a fast-forwarded video cassette.

  Poor baby’s finger, my foot! He had insisted I drive because he didn’t want my hands free when the truth sank in! Even his lovemaking of last night now attained sinister connotations.

  Wiping my face free of rain, the better to glare at him, my heart turned traitor. He looked so innocent with his hair damp and rumpled. Hadn’t I brought this on myself by being so difficult about this trip? Upon my admitting I wouldn’t mind seeing Boston, he must have been elated that the Mangé meeting place was in the general vicinity.

  Abstraction had turned me into a regular will-o’-the-wisp driving one handed; now a truck dive-bombed in front of me. Inadvertently I risked changing lanes again. Strange! The car immediately in front of me had a little white flag waving from its bonnet. So too, did the car in front of him. Time for a rear view mirror inspection. The car behind me had a flag. I was being pursued by a line of flags. My clammy hands slid off the wheel. I was remembering an American film I had watched recently. Opening scene—a funeral. These cars were headed for the cemetery, and I was among the mourners, without a wreath in my hand. Faces pressed against the back window of the car in front of us. The traffic in the other lane hooked together for a mile.

  “Ben!” I whimpered.

  “What?” He bolted upright.

  “Nothing.” Rain teemed down, bawling in sympathy. A huge green and white sign flashed before my eyes.

  Interstate.

  Ben wrenched a piece of paper from his pocket. “Ellie, this is where we get off … I mean on.”

  “Thanks for the advance warning.” Drying my face on my sleeve, I gripped the wheel, sucked in my breath and plunged sideways.

  Heading onto the ramp. The wipers being unable to keep up with the down-put, I can’t tell whether I’m supposed to be going thirty-five or fifty-five miles per hour. Merge! screams the sign now hurtling toward me. Somebody’s idea of a joke? To m
y left flows a river of trucks, each one taller than the average house, each one rocking in the wind. My hands keep sliding off the wheel. My ramp is dwindling to keyhole size. My feet cramp and go dead.

  “Merge!” Ben shouts.

  I close my eyes and do as I am told.

  Peace descended on my soul. The road unwound before me like black oil cloth, and the rain stopped as though God had snapped his fingers. Boston gave way to hills and fields, all sliding by like a giant mural. Surely that was a rainbow overhead? I was beginning to like the Colonies. Turning on the radio to a melodious hum, I flexed my fingers and smiled at Ben.

  “Where to, Mr. Haskell, sir?”

  His hair was washed Brutus-style over his forehead. And Brutus was an honourable man. “Sweetheart”—he made a valiant effort to muster his charm—“I may have misrepresented or should I say …”

  “Lied?”

  “That’s the word.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “I’m not angry, really. Every place has some charm.” My hands fell off the wheel. Had I blindly, ungratefully misunderstood the quality of his silence? Had he planned a wonderful surprise for me all along?

  I began steering again. “Is it that sort of place? Somewhere small and out of the way? Steeped in witchcraft, with a treasure trove of antique shops and a little white church on the hill?”

  A death rattle sigh. “Sweetheart, I’m sure the folks of Mud Creek, Illinois think it is all that and more.”

  Had Christopher Columbus reached Illinois he would have realized he was wrong about the world being round. Here was a land flatter than the ocean on a stone calm day. The road sliced broad and straight through cornfields stretching from here to eternity. Even the trees had been set down courtesy of the Tourist Board, the way people put those miniature ornamental ones on Christmas cakes. Any moment now, Mr. and Mrs. Bentley T. Haskell, in their LuxaLease convertible, would reach the Dead End sign and plummet into infinity.

  I had forgiven Ben his wicked deceit. I even understood why he hadn’t booked flights from Boston to Mud Creek. Who wants to land on a runway that gets rolled up at night? And to be fair to him, the man was completely incapable of translating the vastness of America into English terms. England is a country of day trippers. Dorcas and Jonas had quite thought when they went to Chicago that they would be able to motor off to the Grand Canyon, spend the night, and be back the next evening. Ben was a little more realistic. He appreciated that Mud Creek, Illinois, was a goodly distance from Boston, but he had figured it would be on a par with driving from Scotland to Devon, not from London to Warsaw.

  I hadn’t even complained when we stayed at the Happy Hang Out Hotel, in Plainsville, Ohio, last night. We had been lost for hours when we thought we were right, and right for miles when we thought we were lost. All I had asked then was to lie back upon pillows the thickness of sliced bread. And enjoy my migraine. What I couldn’t forgive was this merciless heat. Ben’s idolatrous obsession with the Mangés was the cause. Who could blame God for turning the heavens into an inferno?

  “Water?” I whispered through parched lips.

  Ben squeezed my shoulder. His finger had made a miraculous recovery. “Sweetheart, I offered to put the top up.”

  “Mustn’t spoil the view.”

  “I’ll stop at the next exit.”

  The sun was the yolk of a fried egg surrounded by a white of cloud. My frock clung damply to my body. Voluptuously appealing perhaps in someone with a model figure, but between breakfast and lunch I had added several more pounds to my misery.

  “Ben, look at those birds.”

  He followed the angle of my finger. “What about them? They’re just flapping along minding their own business.”

  “They’ve been following us for an hour.”

  “Ellie,” he adjusted those same glasses he claimed to have lost when insisting I drive, “those are a few harmless crows.”

  “Wrong. They’re vultures waiting to pick our bones clean the minute we admit that this cruel land has won.”

  “You said you liked Chicago—”

  “Loved it. I would have liked to stop and buy a post card.” The moment the words were out I regretted I hadn’t snapped at him sooner. Clear the air and start anew. Knowing marriage is oft times a bed of nettles makes the roses smell sweeter.

  Entering the parking lot of the Log Cabin Diner, he asked in a voice fraught with tenderness whether I had the traveller’s cheques handy, because he was down to a couple of dollars of Dorcas’ money.

  “Right here, darling!” I jiggled my bag strap as we drew into a space alongside the doorway. Optimism fired my soul. Our marriage was stronger for having been tested. “Won’t be a second.”

  Ben watched me drag out my huge key ring, my packet of tissues, my mother-in-law’s letter … “Ellie,” he said in wry amusement, “you cart around stuff that’s useless as an umbrella in the desert.”

  I shoved my hair out of my eyes. “Good news! I’ve found my comb. It’s in two pieces but who’s counting?”

  “This place could be closing any minute.”

  “Silly,” I soothed, “it’s only six o’clock and nothing ever closes in this land of convenience.” I spilled the contents of my makeup bag over my lap. “Maybe I put them in the side pocket.” My hands stopped rummaging and started trembling.

  The love light faded from his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost them.”

  I never could understand Henry VIII’s wives laying their heads down on the block, all nice and neat, waiting for the blow to fall. Now, fighting for my life, I realized that Ben was bigger than I remembered. “Those cheques are here. Just give me an hour or so to keep looking.”

  Ben was furious in that intensely masculine way of his. A growl tore from his lips, backing me against the door.

  “Say it!” I counterattacked. “Say you should never have trusted them to me! Say the holiday is ruined. Say I’ve dished your chances of becoming a Mangé.”

  A lion’s roar of thunder, coming out of the blue, drowned whatever it was he did say. Seconds later the sky darkened, I felt the first plop of rain, and remembered the Black Cloud. Chapter Three of Growing Babies From Seeds stressed that odd fancies are common.

  Bunging everything back in my bag, I flared, “Kindly remember, darling, who drove me to a state of nerves where I’m turned inside out and back to front.”

  He feigned patience. “Nothing gained in turning this into a merry-go-round of blame. Could you have put them in another bag or a pocket?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?”

  “Don’t talk to me in that tone. I am not a suspect in a robbery.”

  “I gave them to you at the airport.”

  “So you did.” Rain descended at quite a clip now, blurring his face and the whole miserable business, until … Memory struck like a blade between the ribs. Me—reading my mother-in-law’s letter, with all its dire warnings, to Ben on the plane. And the charming oriental gentleman saying, Very many bad people in this world. Oh, surely he couldn’t have been a gloating pickpocket? But think of Aunt Lulu! Looks like a middle-aged Shirley Temple and would steal the gold teeth out of a corpse.

  “Oh, hell!” Ben slumped back against his seat. “What’s the point! They’re gone. Too much to hope, I suppose, that you purchased American Expr—”

  “The bank was having a promotion on another brand, one apostle teaspoon for every five hundred pounds.”

  “Pity,” he remarked. “But thank God we have the receipts. We do have receipts, don’t we, Ellie?”

  I knotted my fingers into a cat’s cradle.

  “You left them in the folder with the cheques?” He doubled in bulk like the bread dough he is forever making. “I believe, Ellie, that is a federal offence over here.”

  People were emerging from the Log Cabin Diner looking well-fed and happy. Dreadful to think two dollars stood between us and starvation. Could we go in and pretend we had forgotten our doggie bag?


  Shame! Food should be meaningless when the life of a loved one hangs in tatters. Ben did not have to explain to me—although he did so—repeatedly, that he was due at the Mangés’ Mud Creek headquarters at seven-thirty that evening, meaning there was no time for us to go and throw ourselves on the mercy of the nearest police station.

  When everything had been said that could be said to make matters worse, Ben jammed in the ignition key and the car purred back onto the motorway. Not a companionable silence this. He had done the decent thing and purchased me a small carton of milk. While I sipped, he ostentatiously tightened his seat belt.

  The road unwound like paper towels being blown on the wind. The trees whizzing past us were beaten into fans and my hair kept escaping from its knot and flapping in my eyes.… I came to with a start to find that Ben had pulled over to the side of the road and was turning off the engine.

  “Time for a Thermos break?” My voice polluted the air with sarcasm. “After all your talk about time being scarcer than a good woman.” He was slumped over the wheel. He’d had a heart attack … he was dead! How could he do this to me—leave me a widow out here in the middle of nowhere? I grabbed his shoulders and pried up his head.

  “Ellie, we’re out of gas.”

  This was worse than death. If I hadn’t lost the traveller’s cheques, he would have bought petrol at the Log Cabin pumps. Now even if we could cut through this jungle of corn and reach life-giving fuel, what were the chances that we would be allowed to write an I.O.U.? I tried to reassure Ben that the Mangés would be understanding, that having assembled to meet him they wouldn’t turn tail and go home just because he was five minutes—or five hours—late. But my voice was blown away on the wind and I wasn’t sure whether that was rain or tears on my face when his hand closed over mine.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself, sweetheart.” His voice was a quiet blend of fatigue and heroism. “I’m beginning to believe in Chantal’s Black Cloud.”

  Being wet and scared was bad enough, but doomed? I wasn’t physically up to that. Opening my bag, I rummaged around for a tissue and drew out the envelope containing my mother-in-law’s letter. Funny, it felt bulkier than I remembered. And no wonder! Inside the envelope were the traveller’s cheques.