How to Murder Your Mother-In-Law

by Dorothy Cannell

  Mr. Savage, far from looking shocked, produced a smile as untarnished as any of the brass. But some of us still had a sense of what was fitting in civilized society.

  “Life will get back to normal at Merlin’s Court one of these days,” I said firmly. “And you will come back to us, Mrs. Malloy.”

  “Don’t count your chickens.”

  “Meanwhile, you have this job.” I held on to the tape recorder as if it were a life preserver that would enable me to keep my head above water. “It was good of Mrs. Pickle to suggest you apply.”

  “One in a million is Edna,” returned Mrs. M., conveniently forgetting that she had routinely kept me abreast of her pal’s shortcomings.

  “There’s nothing like a woman friend.” Mr. Savage looked dreamily into my face.

  “I shall be spending the night at her house.” Mrs. M. folded her arms, hefting her taffeta bosom up to her chin. “Wouldn’t take no for an answer, would Edna. She didn’t want me to be alone. Not under the circumstances. Being reduced to a charity case don’t suit me, but I’ve ways of making it up to her.” Gimlet stare. “I’ve decided to leave her me china poodle, the one I always promised would be yours after my day.”

  “That’s as it should be.” I endeavoured to sound suitably crushed.

  “Well, let’s cut the cackle. It won’t do me no good to get the sack twice in one day.” She reached for one of the brass taps. “A pint of bitter for the gent, and what about yourself, Mrs. H.?”

  My response never made it past my lips because we were in that instant hemmed in by an influx of stein-hefting, tongue-lolling imbibers, one of whom gained the advantage of added height by standing on the suitcase Mr. Savage had set down on the floor. This brief respite was not wasted on Mrs. M., who clasped a heavily ringed hand to her throat.

  “Where’s me brains, Mrs. H.? You haven’t come down here for a belt of lemonade; you packed your bags and walked out of that hellhole you call home, didn’t you now?”

  “No! I’m here on behalf of my father-in-law.”

  Either my voice was lost in the roar of the crowd, or she didn’t believe me. No doubt about it, she had brightened considerably. “There, now, ducky! What you don’t want to do is go from the frying pan into the fire.” She looked at my companion and pursed her damson lips. “Mr. What’s-his-name here could be a prince, I’m not saying he isn’t, but he’s getting you on the rebound.”

  “Am I?” Mr. Savage swallowed his Adam’s apple.

  “Of course not!” I thumped the tape recorder down on the bar for emphasis.

  “You can come and live with me,” offered my Lady Bountiful. “You can even bring the twins if you’re one hundred percent set on it.”

  A man in a tweed cap and knitted waistcoat asked for a pint of mild in a voice that was anything but, and was roundly told to bugger off.

  “That’s awfully kind of you, Mrs. Malloy,” I said, “but the only reason I came here was to bring Dad his suitcase. He’s staying here until things sort themselves out.”

  “So I heard. Room 4, top of the stairs, first on the right.” Wiping her hands on her apron front, she began pulling on the taps and foaming up the glasses at a furious rate. To my mind the day was wearing thin, but by the expedient of putting one foot in front of the other I made my way, with Mr. Savage in tow, past a pair of settles with tapestry cushions and through an open doorway into a narrow hall with the Ladies and Gents to our left and on our right a flight of stairs with more twists and turns than a gothic novel. It wasn’t until I was nearing the top step that I realized I had left the tape recorder on the bar. Luckily, every ounce of Mr. Savage’s being was concentrated on dragging the suitcase onto the landing, which was no bigger than a handkerchief. While he took a breather I knocked on the door of Room 4.

  Dad took his time opening up. Even then all that came poking through the crack was the tip of his white beard.

  “I don’t want more towels. What do you think I’m doing up here, running a Turkish bath?”

  Understandably unnerved by the lion’s roar, Mr. Savage’s spectacles fogged up, but I managed to remain calm.

  “Dad, it’s me—Ellie!”

  “Never rains but it pours!” Grudgingly, my father-in-law removed his foot from the crack and granted admittance. Behind him on the chest of drawers was a television with the sound turned off but the picture going full blast.

  “Very nice,” I said, looking around. Truth be told, the radiator was the handsomest piece of furniture in the room. The wardrobe had not seen better days, the walls were boring beige, the bedspread hospital-green, and the exposed pipes of the wash basin were unpleasantly reminiscent of someone who had ended up on the wrong side of Good Queen Bess and been hung, drawn, and quartered. As for Dad, he was not himself. His bald head was more in need of a shine than his shoes, and his attempt to brighten up the place with an artful arrangement of fruit and veggies on the windowsill made my heart ache. Was he hearkening back to his shop in Tottenham, or laying in provisions for a long siege?

  “We brought your suitcase.”

  “So I see.” Dad glared at Mr. Savage, who was dragging the leather carcass over the threshold. “And he’ll be your mother-in-law’s solicitor, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be silly.” I sat down on the bed and felt it sag to within an inch of the floor. “He’s a rock-and-roll singer. A friend of Freddy’s, who—”

  “Is that right?” To my surprise, Dad’s brown eyes showed interest.

  “I’m just starting out. Local gigs, that sort of thing, until the job market opens up.” Mr. Savage cleared his throat and took a couple of steps towards the windowsill. “Would you mind if I had an orange? I’ve been falling behind in my intake of vitamin C.” He had said the magic words.

  “Help yourself.” Dad tried to sound gruff and failed, which encouraged me to get down to the nitty-gritty of my visit.

  “We do wish you’d come home,” I told him.

  “Who’s we?” He went right on watching Mr. Savage peel his orange.

  “Ben and I, and … Mum.” My voice could have done with some oil to cure the squeaks. “There’s no doubt in the world that she misses you desperately. All it would take from you would be a teensy-weensy apology”—I crossed my fingers behind my back—“and a carefully worded assurance that you have no romantic interest in Tricks Taffer. Come on, Dad.” I leaned towards him. “Surely it would be worth it in the interest of salvaging a thirty-eight-year relationship.”

  “Did Magdalene say she wanted me back?”

  “Not in so many words, but …”

  “But me no buts!” His face turned so red, I was afraid it would set his beard on fire as he stomped up and down in front of the bed. “Magdalene was the one who turned me out on the street, so if there’s any running to be done, she’d better be the one to get her legs in gear.”

  “But think of all the good times,” I implored him.

  “Like when?”

  “Like when you were first in love.”

  “In what?” This bellow almost caused Mr. Savage to swallow the apple he had raised to his lips, but when Dad next spoke, it was in a curiously flattened voice, as if all the air had been let out of his lungs. “Speaking of rock and roll, I had a decent singing voice myself once upon a time.”

  “Did you?” I sat absolutely still.

  “Would you believe that back in the early days I once wrote a song for Maggie?” Incredibly, he was smiling, faintly but surely, and his eyes looked past me to the days when he and Mum were young and life and love were filled with promise. And suddenly, as I watched Mr. Savage reach for a banana, an idea popped into my head that made just as much sense as the notion of Dad doing volunteer work at a local greengrocers.

  Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. When I approached the bench—I mean the bar—and asked Mrs. Malloy if she had put the tape recorder behind the counter for safekeeping, she produced it with a wallop that would have given a woman with stronger insides than myself a p
rolapse.

  “Anything else I can do for your majesty?”

  In case she was on commission, I ordered a large gin and tonic. Then, horror of horrors, when she rang up the price I remembered I had not brought my handbag with me. The car keys were in my raincoat pocket, but no matter how far I pulled out the lining, I couldn’t come up with a penny in loose change. Asking if she would kindly keep a running tab, I looked around for a table that wasn’t under her eagle eye.

  All were occupied except one, bang up next to the bar, so there I retreated with a drink that was almost as tall as I, which I couldn’t drink because I would have to drive home. Even if Mr. Savage should abandon his newfound musical collaboration with Dad and return to me this side of morning, I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting him drive in the dark.

  Under different circumstances I could have asked Mrs. Malloy to let me write her an IOU. But given her present miffed state, the best I could hope for was to be ordered out back to do the washing-up. For a doleful few moments I sat twiddling the knobs of the tape recorder before depositing it on the floor in hope that it would be mistaken for a black leather handbag. I knew I was being silly. All I had to do was go upstairs to Room 4 and borrow some money from Dad. But on that particular night I balked at the thought of looking like a helpless female. If the shoe fits, you don’t have to wear it.

  A woman had come into the pub. A woman wearing a headscarf and a furtive expression. Not only did I recognize her, I presumed on our brief acquaintance to stand up and hail her over to my table.

  “Hello! It’s me, Ellie Haskell.” The welcoming smile died on my lips. Frizzy Taffer’s response wasn’t one of unbridled enthusiasm. She actually backed into a couple of people, a bald man in a loud plaid jacket and a woman in black leather, before moving with lagging steps towards me.

  “What a nice surprise.” Her nose should have grown at voicing this blatant lie. It was already red and puffy, as were her eyes, suggesting either a bad cold (which she hadn’t had that morning) or a prolonged bout of crying. Frizzy’s face was as drab as her raincoat. Not knowing what else to say, I told her I hadn’t expected to see her again so soon.

  “I never come here.” Frizzy checked the knot of her headscarf. Not a single hair escaped onto her forehead, making her look like a nun who, though prepared to humour modern times by wearing civvies, would not forgo her wimple.

  “This isn’t one of my usual haunts,” I assured her.

  “Really?” Her red eyes shied away from my double gin and tonic.

  “Just a prop.” I gave the glass a ping with my finger, almost sending it toppling over. “I came to bring Dad his suitcase and am still here because I can’t face going home yet.”

  “I know the feeling.” Frizzy shed her reserve but not her scarf, and sat down, elbows on the table, hands under her chin, to support its tremble.

  Resuming my own seat and trying not to notice that Mrs. Malloy was hanging over the bar, eavesdropping as if her job depended on catching every word, I said, “You were a brick letting Dad stay at your house last night. I do hope none of this has caused an upset between you and Tricks.”

  “She’d have liked Mr. Haskell to stay with us until he settled things with his wife.” Frizzy reached absently for my gin and tonic. “But you know Tricks, nothing ever gets her down.” This was said with surprising venom.

  “How about a nice bag of crisps, on the house?” Mrs. Malloy gushed.

  For once my frown had the desired effect, and my former daily retreated behind the bar in the manner of the Oracle of Delphi subsiding behind a cloud to bone up on his lines in readiness for the next supplicant.

  Downing the gin and tonic in one swallow, Frizzy stared at the glass as if unsure what it was or where it had come from. “This can’t be happening,” she said softly. “I’m a nice person.”

  “One drink isn’t wicked.”

  “What?” She looked at me as if I were no more real than the now-empty glass. Then she started to cry as if her insides were being put through the wringer and her tears squeezed out with every turn of the handle. It was awful, so awful that I couldn’t speak, let alone reach out a hand to her in her misery.

  “I had to get out of that house or I would have torn her hair out. That would have been a case of the punishment fitting the crime.” Frizzy placed a hand on her headscarf. “Because of my mother-in-law’s carelessness,” she told me dully, “I’m bald as an egg.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  Frizzy continued with a sob. “Tricks lost the cap to her bottle of Nake-It—”

  “That’s the stuff you use on your legs and under your arms instead of shaving, Mrs. H.,” explained Mrs. Malloy, who tends to think I just got off the Ark. “My third, or it could have been me fourth, husband used to say I had the loveliest armpits of any woman he had known, but don’t let me keep you from your story, Mrs. T.”

  Frizzy trembled. “She poured the Nake-It into an empty bottle of Bright and Breezy Cream Plush shampoo. Not a word to anyone about what she had done. I never thought twice when I went and washed my hair this evening. Why would I? And I gave the beastly stuff plenty of time to work, because I didn’t rinse it off my head for at least fifteen minutes. While I was massaging my scalp—trying to get the stuff to sudse, the baby started fussing and Dawn was carrying on to her dad about the goldfish that got cooked to death. So I wrapped a towel around my head to go and sort things out. When I did get a moment to stick my head back under the tap, there was my hair all over the towel, ready to be shaken out into the dustbin.”

  “Your lovely curls!” I could have cried for her.

  “My one claim to looking halfway decent.” She wept.

  “Whatever did your husband say?”

  “Tom was livid with his mother. And I know I shouldn’t have gone off the deep end when he told me it would grow back. He was just trying to make me feel better.”

  “Men don’t have our sensitivity.” Mrs. Malloy poked at her own black-and-white confection with unwonted nervousness as if afraid it would come away in her hands.

  “Was Tricks upset?” I asked my table companion.

  “She said we should look on the bright side, that now I could stop worrying about my dandruff.” A faraway look came into Frizzy’s eyes, and it took a moment for me to realize this was because she was watching the entrance door, or, rather, the young woman who had just walked through it. “That’s Pamela Pomeroy,” she said in a frozen voice.

  “Why, so it is!” Under the circumstances, I didn’t know whether to wave frantically or feign poor eyesight. Too late for debate. Pamela had spotted us and was heading our way, her ponytails waggling like spaniel ears and her brown eyes brimming with enthusiasm. Was this the same person who had stood with slouched shoulders and hangdog expression in Lady Kitty’s shadow that morning at the Taffer residence?

  “Thank goodness I’ve found you both!”

  “You were out looking for us?” Considering I had met her only that once and hadn’t received the impression that she and Frizzy were fast friends, I inevitably concluded that Pamela was one of a search party sent out to comb the hills and dales around Chitterton Fells for the missing wives. Was there a bounty on Frizzy’s poor bald head along with mine?

  “No, I had no idea you would be here.” Pamela gave a schoolgirl laugh as she sat down on the third of the four chairs. “But I had been thinking about how sweet and nice you both seemed, so it has to be fate! I was beyond desperate when I got up from the dinner table and ran out of the house. If the pond hadn’t looked so grotty, I swear I would have thrown myself in. That would have served Mumsie Kitty right, don’t you think?”

  Misery does love company. Frizzy brightened perceptibly and I immediately lost interest in my own troubles.

  “Whatever happened?” I asked before Mrs. Malloy could take a dive off the bar.

  Pamela bit her lip, looking for all the world like a fourth former who, having hung her hockey stick on the wrong peg, now waited in d
read of a summons to the headmistress’s office. “Mumsie Kitty invited Reverend Spike and her husband, Gladstone, over for dinner to talk about the St. Anselm’s Summer Fête. We were all at the dining room table, because with it being a special occasion, my father-in-law, Bobsie Cat, my husband, Allan, and I got to eat with the grown-ups.” Hiccupping sob. “And right in the middle of the treacle pudding, Mumsie Kitty asked me if I had remembered to take my temperature to see if this was the day for the big O.”

  “The what?” Frizzy’s jaw dropped an inch or so lower than mine.

  “You know.” Pamela was knitting her fingers together. “My time to ovulate. I’ve never been very regular, and Mumsie Kitty always carries on as if it’s my fault for not being better organized. But I couldn’t believe it, and Reverend Spike almost dropped the jug of custard when Mumsie whipped out a thermometer and stuck it in my mouth.”

  “I would have died,” I said.

  “I nearly did! I was so surprised, I almost choked on the thing.”

  “See if this will drown your sorrows!” Mrs. Malloy materialized with a loaded tray and would have availed herself of the vacant seat if some inconsiderate oaf hadn’t summoned her back to the bar for a double martini on the double.

  “I haven’t reached the worst part yet.” Pamela took a reviving sip from her glass. “When Mumsie Kitty pulled out the thermometer, she said all systems were go and not a moment was to be lost if there was ever to be a Pomeroy heir. She ordered Allan out of his chair and told him to rush me up to the bedroom and get busy.”

  “Did your husband flare up?” Frizzy had almost finished her drink and was eyeing mine.

  “He couldn’t speak. The poor darling suffers from asthma, and a confrontation with his mother always brings on an attack. I know the Spikes must have misinterpreted his heavy breathing. It was all so humiliating. Bobsie Cat tried to speak up for me. He’s a dear, but like always he didn’t get out three words before Mumsie Kitty ordered him to his room. I don’t suppose he minded. He would get to play with his trains in peace. But something inside me snapped. Right in front of the vicar and her husband I told my mother-in-law she was an old battle-axe.”