“Good for you,” I said, passing Frizzy my glass.
“I just couldn’t bear it.” Pamela’s eyes grew as big as the cardboard coasters on the table. “The thought of Mumsie Kitty sitting there in the dining room, watching for the chandelier to start rocking like mad, was the last straw. I’ve always told Allan his mother would be in the bedroom with us if she could, cheering him on from the sidelines. But before tonight I never dared stand up to her. When I said I was leaving, she called me a worthless, ungrateful girl. She said I wasn’t to dare take the bike she lent me. Would you believe it? That bike has to be thirty years old, and she gave it to me; I swear she did. The woman is a monster!” Pamela looked from Frizzy to me. “I’m sure you both know that I got to marry Allan as a result of winning the pie-baking contest Mumsie Kitty organized so as to find him a suitably domesticated wife.”
I was about to tell her that I had married Ben after renting him for a family reunion weekend, but Frizzy interjected, “It doesn’t matter how you got fixed up if you love each other.”
“And we do!” Pamela gripped the edge of the table. “We’re crazy about each other and have been ever since we met as teenagers at the St. Anselm’s Summer Fête. It was luck”—a rosy blush made her look more than ever like a schoolgirl—“the most brilliant luck that out of ninety-seven women I baked the best pie and won my darling Allan’s hand in marriage. It was as much for his sake as mine—to give him some breathing space—that I walked out tonight, but wonderful as he is, it does bother me a bit that he didn’t try to stop me.”
“Join the club,” I said glumly. “Ben didn’t give his mother the sack when she had words with me.”
“And come to think of it, Tom didn’t get down on his hands and knees when I headed for the door,” supplied Frizzy.
“You mean we three are in the same boat?” Pamela no longer looked as if she had been dropped from the hockey team.
“Sad but true,” I informed her.
“And room for one more.” Frizzy toasted the vacant chair. “Usually I don’t believe in fate and all that stuff, but …” Her voice wobbled to a fade-out.
A shiver crept down my spine, the result no doubt of the entry door being subjected to a prolonged series of openings and closings; anyway, I heard myself saying in rather an insistent voice that it wasn’t a mind-boggling coincidence, this being a one-pub town, that we three fugitives should meet up here.
Mrs. Malloy did her best to make our collective woes a paying proposition for the Dark Horse as she scuttled out on her stilt heels with yet another round of gin and tonics. I was still reluctant to indulge, but I felt compelled to offer a toast. “Down with mothers-in-law!”
“Oh, I do feel better,” Pamela sighed as the three of us clinked glasses, “even though I don’t know how I’ll ever face Reverend Spike again.”
“Well, speak of the devil!”
At Mrs. Malloy’s outburst we all turned, some of us a trifle woozily, to see St. Anselm’s presiding clergywoman enter the unhallowed portals of the saloon bar. Amazing, how quickly the place thinned out. Several ladies I recognized from the Hearthside Guild swiftly vacated by the back door, and a grey-haired gentleman in country tweeds, who had petitioned that fruit juice be substituted for wine at communion, shot past Mrs. Spike like a pointer, nose to the ground.
To add to the confusion, my heart started to thump. Not because I minded Eudora seeing me with a glass in my hand—the reverend lady had on occasion taken a glass of sherry at my house—but because it was no longer possible to deny that something beyond the realm of chance was happening here. Deep in my soul I knew that this day had by seconds and minutes been leading inexorably up to the moment when the circle would be complete.
Surprising the world did not stop spinning and Eudora did not stop dead in her tracks when I experienced this mind-boggling revelation. She walked up to the bar just like any other customer.
“What’ll it be, a half pint of best bitter?” Mrs. Malloy flexed her purple lips into an ingratiating smile.
“Nothing to drink, thank you. I stopped by on the off chance that you might remember an elderly lady coming in for a packet of cigarettes.”
“Does she have blue hair? White hair?” Mrs. M. replied with the wariness of a lawbreaker sniffing out an undercover cop.
“Dark, with silver streaks. A bit on the shaggy side.” Eudora ran an agitated hand through her windblown locks.
“Oh, her! Why didn’t you say right off the bat that you was talking about your ma-in-law, instead of making a sermon about it?” Chuckling at her little joke, Mrs. M. turned sideways to wipe off the counter and give me, Pamela, and Frizzy a here-we-go-again wink.
“You’ve seen her?” Eudora gripped her handbag with both hands.
“I should say I have! These last few weeks I haven’t once been over to the vicarage to have a cuppa with Mrs. Pickle and to give her a few pointers on how to get her work done this side of Christmas without that old lady buggering about the kitchen, looking for her fags.” Elbows on the bar, Mrs. M. leaned forward in patent hope of having a fiver pressed into her hand in return for this information.
“Yes, but have you seen her in here tonight?”
“Can’t say I have.” Having given vent to an irritated toss of the head, Mrs. M. remembered she was a member of the reverend’s flock and asked the lanky young man working the other end of the bar if he had recently served an elderly woman with an Irish brogue and a nose like a parrot.
“Not me!” He kept right on manning the brass taps.
“Thank you anyway.” Eudora extended a hand to Mrs. Malloy, who, instead of shaking it, made the assumption she was about to receive a blessing. St. Anselm’s is very High Church. Indeed, the ugly rumour persists that a photo of the Pope hangs in one of the vicarage bedrooms. Eyes closed, purple lips pursed, Mrs. M. humbly lowered her receptive head.
A woman of the cloth does not punch a time clock. Duty done, Eudora turned to leave and in so doing came within inches of our table. Pamela was seated with her back to her, but it was she Eudora focussed on first.
“My dear, I was so worried about you. How are you holding up?”
“I didn’t throw myself in the pond.”
“We’ve been telling her there are better ways of drowning her sorrows.” Frizzy raised her glass in wobbly salute.
“Well, don’t overdo.” Eudora’s worried glance included me, and with some justification. For reasons I didn’t delve into, I had decided to let the Heinz cool his wheels outside the Dark Horse, when it was time to leave—with or without Mr. Savage—and I was now on my third sip of Mother’s Ruin.
“I couldn’t help overhearing your enquiries about your mother-in-law,” I said. “We’re all a bit keyed up on that particular subject.”
“So things aren’t any better with Ben’s mother?”
“Worse!”
“And life at my house isn’t all sunshine and flowers.” Frizzy nibbled on her slice of lime as if intent on sucking out the last drop of alcohol. “This isn’t like me, you know. I haven’t drunk anything stronger than lemon squash in years.”
“Desperate measures for desperate times!” Her spaniel-ear ponytails wagging, Pamela hoisted her glass and cried, “Down the red lane!”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Eudora by now looked extremely concerned, and without doubt it was in her ministerial capacity that she pulled out the fourth chair and sat down. But we three musketeers were all eager to hear about her mother-in-law troubles, and halfway into her sorry tale she became a fellow victim with no easy answers to an age-old problem.
“I’ve always tried to be sensitive to the fact that Bridget is Gladstone’s stepmother. I never wanted her to think I would have treated his own mother differently. That’s the reason I tried not to fuss overly about her smoking, although Gladstone hates it worse than I do. The dear man tends to be chesty and Mrs. Pickle is always offering to make him up one of her potions.”
“Don’t go wasting yo
ur money.” Mrs. Malloy stuck her nose over the bar yet again. “If Edna had the power, she would have come up with a brew years ago as would have made sure she got her heart’s desire.”
Was she talking about Jonas? I wondered. Did Mrs. Pickle have serious designs upon his virtue?
“If I thought she could work magic, I would ask her for something to make my hair grow back, or better yet …” Flushing a deep orange, Frizzy said quickly, “Is your mother-in-law’s smoking the biggest bone of contention?”
“I’m afraid not.” Eudora shook her head. “Even worse is her way of talking about the Bible.” The rest of us grouped closer around the table as she lowered her voice. “She will go on about it being even spicier than Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But enough said, I shouldn’t be running Bridget down, especially when she’s not here to defend herself.”
“Oh, go on, ducks!” Mrs. Malloy set down more drinks before gathering up the empties. “Have a gin. Anyone watching will think it’s holy water.”
“Thank you.” Perhaps to resist the temptation of reaching for the glass, Eudora fingered the bracelet at her wrist as if it were a set of rosary beads. “Yesterday the bishop called on me to discuss church business, and I couldn’t get Mother out of the room. Within five minutes she had started in on St. Paul being a frustrated old bachelor who would have been better occupied improving his golf swing than poking his nose into other people’s married lives.”
“If I’d been you,” Pamela offered by way of support, “I would have rushed over to the church to drown myself in the font.”
Eudora smiled wanly at her. The vicar had lost weight, even in her nose, and her glasses kept sliding off. “I didn’t know where to look when she laid into St. Peter, saying he should have thought about his husbandly responsibilities—such as taking out the dustbins and helping the kiddies with their homework—before bunking off to become a saint. But the absolute worst part”—Eudora had to struggle to continue—“was the bit about the circumcision. Mother said it was the funniest part in the whole Bible and how anyone could keep a straight face at the idea of Abraham summoning all the men and telling them that God had spoken to him, so if they would all meekly drop their drawers he would wield the knife and get busy with his cropping. She actually asked the bishop if he would have stood still for that, or run like hell.”
“Did you have a row with her after he left?” I asked.
“I told her I wasn’t pleased.” Eudora took an inadvertent sip of gin and immediately pushed the glass away. “The whole thing was extremely upsetting for Gladstone. He had a sponge cake in the oven at the time I told him what had gone on—he’s so hoping he’ll win a ribbon this year at the fête—and when he remembered to take the cake out, it was burnt to a cinder. And speaking of burnt offerings”—she drew a shaky breath—“when we returned from the hall this evening, it was to discover there had been a fire in my study.”
“No!” Frizzy’s hands started to shake. She reached for another glass.
“Only a small one, thank God! My desk was hardly damaged, but next Sunday’s sermon had gone up in smoke. Accidents will happen, I know, but what upset me was Mother’s calm announcement that she had been smoking and had left the room to make herself a cup of tea. She hadn’t even bothered with an ashtray—just left her cigarette dangling off the paperweight, the one Gladstone won for flower arranging at our last parish. I lost my temper, and by the time I had cooled down, Mother was nowhere to be found.”
“Did your husband give her an ear full?” I asked.
“Gladstone was beyond words. He went to bed with a migraine. And I probably overreacted by setting off in the car to look for her. On a couple of other occasions Mother has hitched a ride down to the village to buy cigarettes. With the shops being closed, the pub seemed a logical place to enquire after her.”
“I expect she’s home by now, setting fire to the rest of the house.” Pamela had trouble focusing her big brown eyes on Eudora’s wan face. Her glass sat empty, as did Frizzy’s, and, realizing I had some serious catching-up to do, I took a huge swallow from mine. Either the gin had floated to the top, or I had previously failed to notice the stingy measure of tonic.
“Dawn told her dad she wanted a contract put out on her gran for poaching the goldfish and I said I was all in favour”—Frizzy tugged her headscarf down over her ears—“but Tom put his foot down.”
“Stick-in-the-mud!” Pamela giggled.
“I confess thoughts of murder did cross my mind a few times today,” I admitted.
“We all have those moments.” Eudora pushed her glasses back on her nose. “But we have to set them aside and get on with the business of reestablishing harmony in our lives.”
“Why?” Frizzy banged her glass down on the table, sending the copper warming pan on the near wall swinging to and fro like the pendulum of a clock trying to make up for lost time. “Why can’t we bump off our mothers-in-law and live peacefully ever after?”
“Sometimes it does pay to break the rules.” Pamela looked as if she were about to say more but didn’t.
“The tricky part,” I said with a perfectly straight face, “would be getting away with it.”
“Now then, ladies”—Eudora glanced uneasily around the pub before gathering up her handbag and pushing back her chair—“I suggest we call it a night.”
“Oh, go on! Be a devil, Vicar,” said Mrs. Malloy.
“Yes, do be a sport, Mrs. Spike,” urged Pamela tipsily.
“Do stay!” cried Frizzy, reaching for another glass.
“Deciding how to murder them all would be highly therapeutic.” The gin was doing the talking for me.
“I really don’t think—” Eudora hesitated on the edge of her seat.
“Surely even a clergywoman gets to let her hair down once in a while,” said Frizzy somewhat thickly.
“And it’s just a bit of fun.” Pamela almost nodded her head off.
“A time for every purpose under heaven!” Folding her hands piously, Mrs. Malloy leaned over the bar as if mistaking it for St. Anselm’s pulpit.
“I hope I don’t present myself as not of this earth.” Eudora eased back into her chair. Her eyes, behind the thick lenses, brimmed with vulnerability.
“So how do we do it?” Pamela demanded. “Push them down the stairs, or is that too corny?”
“It worked for my aunt Ethel.” Frizzy ran a finger inside her glass, then licked it thoughtfully. “True, she stuck to her guns that Herbert—her bully of a husband—tripped over the cat, but no one in the family believed her. Aunt Ethel gave herself away putting up a wacking big headstone with the inscription SORELY MISSED. Don’t worry, Mrs. Spike—she isn’t a member of your parish. She goes to the Methodist church around the corner from my house.”
When Frizzy had mentioned her aunt’s temper that morning, I had naturally supposed the woman’s tantrums were of the more socially acceptable sort, such as holding her breath until she passed out. Under different circumstances I would have responded with well-bred consternation to the revelation of Auntie’s unladylike excesses, but as it was, I found myself wanting to get back to the game afoot.
“Perhaps pistols?” I suggested.
“I don’t know anything about guns.” Eudora was making a worthy effort to get into the spirit of the thing.
“What I think”—Pamela’s face shone with glee—“is that we should administer justice of the poetic sort.”
“What do you mean?” I tried not to look dim-witted.
“The murder method should be directly connected to whatever our particular mother-in-law does to drive us barmy.”
“Such as Mother’s smoking?” Eudora shook her head. “Are you suggesting I make a bonfire out of her cigarette butts and lash Mother down on top?” The absurdity of the idea made the vicar laugh with her old heartiness. “I’d never get away with murder that way.”
“Give me a minute and I’ll think of something really nifty.” Pamela was nothing if not undaunted.
&n
bsp; We all sat and stared at each other until Frizzy said, “You make it sound so easy … like putting Reverend Spike’s mother-in-law out on the ice floe.”
“That’s it!” I straightened up to sit stiff as a board. “Eudora, you tell her that after tonight’s inferno you must insist she smoke outside, whatever the time of day or night, come sunshine or hailstorm. Afterwards, you make patience your accomplice. And one night when the snow lies cold and cruel on the ground—”
“What if we have another mild winter?” One of Eudora’s few faults might be an inability to suspend disbelief.
“Then you would make do with a pea-souper fog,” I said firmly. “The premise is still the same. When she picks up her ciggies and heads out into the night, you race around, locking all the doors and windows, before bundling your husband off to bed and turning the radio on full blast so he can’t hear his stepmother kicking up a racket in her attempts to be let back in.”
“Then what?” Head bent, Eudora sat twisting her wedding ring around on her finger. “My dear, I hate to burst your bubble, but Mother is definitely not one to die of fright.”
“That would be much too tame anyway.” Pamela spoke as if reading from a schoolgirl adventure story. “Think how much more novel it would be if Mrs. Spike wandered around and around the exterior of the house, growing more giddy and disoriented by the minute, in the ever-deepening fog. Poor little old lady! Thinking she was still in the garden, she would blunder out onto the road and go bouncy, bouncy over the cliff edge.”
“Oopsy daisy!” Frizzy turned a hiccup to good account.
Pamela smiled pridefully. “The verdict would be death by misadventure.”
“It’s a bit iffy.” Mrs. Malloy broke a marathon silence to pontificate from on high. “But then, as I’ve said time and again to Edna Pickle, you’ve got to take chances in this life if you want to get where you’re going. Of course in Edna’s case I’m usually talking about switching to a new kind of brass cleaner, which doesn’t take nerves of steel but …” Unfortunately a customer claimed her attention.
How to Murder Your Mother-In-Law Page 15