Time fell away, as the earth had done in Noah’s day. Then it came, a strident, almost explosive rattling of the car doors. Who? What? Oh, my heavens! Blood pounded through my veins. Perhaps nighttime and bedtime and privacy were not totally to be despised. In one movement I was upright, ripping my tablecloth veil and hurling Ben backward across the seat.
“What happened? Weren’t we enjoying ourselves?” His voice was peevish but his eyes were laughing.
The rattling had stopped. Perhaps only the wind… I bundled up my hair and stabbed it back to respectability.
“My darling,” I said, “let us vow never to let this happen again until tonight. Is it fair, is it decent, to create the possibility of some bereaved person entering his or her car to be met by the appalling vista of entwined lovers in a state of lascivious disarray?”
“If you will excuse me a moment, my dear.” Reaching for the handle, Ben battled the door open. He climbed out and seconds later climbed back in.
“A cold shower always helps,” he said with a grin.
I refrained from saying he had given the inside of the car one too. A good wife never nags. Drying his face with my veil, I asked, “You don’t think I am being frightfully spinsterish, do you?”
“Darling, I think you are being breathtakingly-right.” Ben realigned my tiara. “My mother wouldn’t want to live if word went up and down Crown Street that I had been had up for lewd conduct in a Vauxhall.”
“Mm.” Never having met Mrs. Haskell, I could be no judge of her feelings on any subject. Save one. Her belief that to set foot inside a Church of England was to be turned into a pillar of salt. But the loving wife keeps such thoughts to herself.
“What about you?” I said. “Haven’t you had enough catastrophe for one day?”
Ben smiled. “I’m hardened. As boys, Sid and I got routinely marched down to the police station by the wicked landlord of Crown Street whenever he caught us watching stag films in whichever of his houses happened to be vacant at the time. Ellie, I think we should try and swim for it.”
Aptly put. The rain was now battering the car and spurting through the partially open window, but we had to get home. Failure to do so would not endear us to the unknown neighbours who had responded so enthusiastically to the announcement in The Daily Spokesman.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, as I rummaged about on the seat. “Checking for an umbrella to steal?”
“Good idea, but my object was to straighten and remove all signs of our illicit occupancy.” A prickly stab and I triumphantly grasped the hairbrush which had wormed its way down the back of the seat. And what was this? Ah ha! A bulky cardigan with a woolly hat tucked up one sleeve. And here? A glove, a wad of newspapers, and a crushed box of tissues that would now fit through a letter box. Had the pretty pink and gold cardboard been this compact before our intrusion?
I attempted to plump it up. “Ben, dear, we should have climbed in the back.”
He gave a pained sigh. “I do wish you would stop toying with me like this.”
The tissue box came down on his head. “I meant that the owner of this car is a front seat dumper and we’ve squashed his-”
“Her. The owner of this car is a woman.”
“Forgive me, male… person, but you cannot so assume on the basis of one pink cardigan.”
“Ellie, an Englishman’s car is his castle. Only a woman would drive around in this state of chaos.” As if to prove his point, he picked up an earring and tossed it from hand to hand.
I took slow, deep breaths. Remember, Ellie, how far he has come in terms of eradicating chauvinistic leanings since first we met. “Darling, don’t you think that remark is just a teensy bit sexist?”
“Absolutely. Women get housework up to the chin; they don’t have anything left over to give to the car. Whereas we males”-he thumped his chest-“find fulfillment for our domestic urges in shining up leather and spitting on chrome in an area the size of the old tree house.”
“Mm!” I was only slightly mollified. A name tag on the woolly hat read Beatrix Woolpack. “Would you please budge? You’re sitting on more stuff.”
“Ellie, leave everything. She’s more likely to notice if-”
“Just look at this piece of paper! It’s all crunched up, as well as being decidedly damp.”
“Ellie, let’s go. We didn’t take a year’s lease.”
“One minute.” I was smoothing out the scrap of paper. “What if this is something important and you’ve got the writing all smeared? One quick peek and… oh, splendid! Just a shopping list and still legible, I think.” Tilting my body closer to the window I read out loud.
“Two tins cat food, twenty Players, one hair tint (Wistful Fawn), dog biscuits, one-quarter pound tea, steak and kidney pie, frozen peas, milk of magnesia-”
Ben’s voice broke into my ear. “Ellie, this comes as a hideous shock.”
In this light I doubted he could see that I was blushing. Even so, I held the paper in front of my face. “You’re right! I should have told you before we married that other people’s shopping lists hold this kinky fascination for me.”
“Ellie, you can read the labels on people’s underwear for all I care. What appalls me is my abysmal naiveté. I never realised that civilized people actually consume shop-bought meat pies.” Ben tried to take the list away, but I held on to it.
“Therein,” I said, “lies the fascination of shopping lists. They tell us all sorts of things. For example, the owner of this car is a middle-aged female (no one under fifty wants to be wistful); she smokes (cigarettes high on the list); she is a pet owner, does not like to cook, suffers from constipation, is disorganised-”
“You got that from the state of the car.”
I tut-tutted. “The items aren’t categorised. The pet foods should be together, ditto the chemist items.”
Ben leaned against me and continued reading the list. “Instant caramel blancmange.” His tone was one of extreme revulsion. “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned crême bruleé?”
“Dear, dear!” I skimmed to the bottom of the paper with one eye, while watching the window with the other.
Porridge oats, one lamb chop-obviously single; my guess was a widow-three wild mice.
My turn to shudder. Surely if the cat’s owner could eat convenience foods, Puss could be persuaded to do likewise.
“What’s wrong?” From the sound of him, Ben was still dwelling on the decadence of caramel blancmange.
I moved his finger up a notch to the offending item. His dark eyebrows drew together, but he shrugged. “Nothing wrong there. I happen to prefer white, because of the greater scope for play, but everyone to his own taste.”
“Taste!” I twitched the list away, staring at that mouth which I had so recently kissed. “Sweetheart, you are joking?”
“Do I ever joke about food?” Ben drew the list back from my nerveless fingers and laid it on the seat. “I concede that wild rice has its place in the scheme of things, but the texture is so often flawed by impetuous boiling. It is at its best when simmered for thirty-two and one-half minutes and served with almond butter.”
Light dawned-my mind had leapt to the macabre; it had been that sort of day. I saw again the widow going up the church steps, poor woman, so… so…
“Ellie, do let’s get out of here. This discussion reminds me that our nuptial bash is at the mercy of that woman Dorcas hired to serve, and I keep getting these flashes that something terrible has happened to the lobster aspic.” Ben had his door halfway open when we heard it-a roar, deeper, throatier than the wind and charged with a different kind of energy. We looked at each other.
We were outside the car, my dress and veil bundled up in my hands, when the motorbike leapt toward us through swirling rain, accompanied by a joyful hoot hoot loud enough and sacrilegious enough to waken all the dead in the churchyard. Bike and rider slithered between the lich-gate, dispersing gravel right, left, and center, and came to a lunging sideways stop millimeters from
us.
“Freddy!” exclaimed Ben, with rather more pleasure than I thought necessary or appropriate.
“You two sure are my kind of people. Couldn’t hold out till you got home, could you?” Freddy favoured us with his familiar leer. He was now dressed in everyday attire-a black leather jacket, a shirt collar, but no shirt; a weighty tangle of chains flattened the damp hairs on his chest.
“Sorry to disappoint you, old man, but we were merely seeking shelter from the deluge.” Ben wound an arm round me.
“Got you!” Freddy lowered an eyelid in a man-to-man wink. “Can’t wait to tell Jill. She was rather concerned, Ellie, that you might suffer from the flannel nightie and woolly bedsocks syndrome.”
He moved before I could grab hold of his long, untidily plaited hair and wrap it around his throat. A dark huddle of figures was forming outside the church. I could hear the distant murmur of Rowland’s voice, but Freddy wasn’t looking in that direction. “By the way, where is Jill? Don’t tell me the girl who worships the shadow I cast has nipped off to the wedding feast without me.”
“What did you think she would do, you turnip, stand under a tree until you returned or she got struck by lightning? Don’t worry, Jill is being looked after,” I said benignly. “She accompanied your parents in their car back to Merlin’s Court.”
“Oh, God!” he groaned. “Mum will have pinched her purse en route, and we all know what Dad will have tried to pinch!”
Damn Freddy! I watched his eyes, the lids still dusted with neon purple. Should I be held accountable for his romance with Jill simply because they had met at Merlin’s Court? Admittedly, Freddy considers being asked for the time by any female under ninety a romance. But I did suspect that Cupid’s arrow had got him in the aorta this time. Despite all my claims to sanity, I was fond of Freddy, and it was hard not to feel some pity for the person the fates had assigned Aunt Lulu and Uncle Maurice as parents.
Faking a yawn, Freddy yanked at the chains around his neck. “Okay, love doves, the meter’s running. Afraid I can only manage one passenger, so will it be you, Ellie?”
Motorbikes terrify me. However, the wedding guests were beginning to prey on my conscience and Ben refused to ride while I jogged home. I gazed into my husband’s face, memorizing every line, as I warned him to keep to the middle of Cliff Road. He tends to daydream while out walking about such things as the ultimate marinade.
Freddy leaned on the hooter. “Come on! I realise this is the first time you two have been parted since your marriage, but I would like to get there before Mum has nicked half the family heirlooms.”
One last lingering kiss and I hoisted aboard. The rain was now a gauzy mizzle; the elms were sketched in charcoal. Even though I knew it was unlucky I looked back over my shoulder. The dark morass of humanity around the newly dug grave was separating into forlorn shadows. Something squeezed inside me. Tonight, the widow would go home to her empty house, empty bed… The bike vibrated and we were off. Flung vertical, we zoomed onto the narrow, bumpy road.
“By gum, this is the life,” bawled Freddy over his shoulder.
Soaring like a seagull on airwaves of terror. Below us, the waves seethed against the jagged rocks. Think happy thoughts, Ellie! Do not focus on that Mr. Woolpack who had driven over the cliff edge one foggy night last spring. What would it take, a pebble in the wrong place at the wrong time, to send us in Mr. Woolpack’s flight path? I fear I almost gouged out Freddy’s appendix. Life was rather meaningful to me right now.
Through the wrought-iron gateway of Merlin’s Court we blasted. The motorbike hit a blemish on the surface of the drive, leapt two feet in the air, and flew like Mary Poppins onto the narrow moat bridge and under the portcullis.
“Aint much, but it’s home, right, El? The place has class-ivy-encrusted walls, turrets and battlements galore, whence the lovelorn can hurl themselves, and never forget the gargoyle doorbell. All mod cons, really! Except a comfy dungeon or two.”
“No house has everything,” I said stiffly. Ours was but a small-scale, nineteenth-century repro of a castle, but the dearth of dungeons with manacled skeletons crumbling to dust was rather a sore point with me.
“Ellie”-Freddy lurched to a stop-“how about spotting me a few quid so I can take Jill out tonight for a bang-up tofu dinner?”
“What’s a few?” I was struggling to flounce out my dress.
“A hundred?”
“Freddy.” Taking his arm, I moved us to the door. “Why don’t you get a job? A proper job instead of pinging a triangle in that dismal band.”
“Work?” He looked aghast. “The way I see it, cousin, if you have to be paid to do something, can’t be much fun, can it?”
“Wrong. Some people love their jobs. I do, and Ben can’t wait to begin another cookery book and open his restaurant in the village.”
Freddy reached for the doorknob. “My heart bleeds! Inventing new ways to fry bacon. My! My! I’ll wager that when Ben opens that restaurant, he won’t lift his pinky to crack an egg. Eh, but it makes a chap glad to be born shiftless. About that two hundred nicker, Ellie?”
“After the wedding cake, I’ll look and see what I’ve got stashed under the mattress.”
Simultaneously, Freddy released the brass knob and I grasped it; the iron-studded door flung inward, almost sending me sprawling.
After these many months in residence, I still experienced a sense of embrace on entering Merlin’s Court. “Thank you, Benefactress Ellie,” the house would whisper, “for everything-these gorgeous Turkish carpets on the flagstone hall floor, the peacock and rose elegance of the drawing room, the Indian Tree china in the blackened oak dresser in the dining room. And, especially, thank you for loving me as passionately as Abigail Grantham once did.” But on this most venerable day, I didn’t get that sort of greeting.
A complete stranger stood beyond the threshold-a stocky man with a sallow-skinned pug face and an oversized mop of glossy black curls. He held a half-filled wineglass and his expression was one of extreme disappointment, like someone expecting the postman and finding a policeman on the step instead. The man started to close the door with his foot as Freddy and I stepped inside.
He tapped the wineglass to his forehead in a mea culpa of embarrassment. Wine slopped out. “A thousand pardons. For the minute I didn’t recognise you, Mrs. Haskell.”
Oh well, when a man used the two most beautiful words in the English language, I had to smile at him. “It’s the veil,” I said. “We brides all look alike.”
The man with the black curls and eyes like ripe olives was graciously stepping aside, but as the door opened wide, my smile shrank; I found myself looking into a madhouse. Could this bellowing uproar be a cheering for my belated arrival? Afraid not. There was no escaping the raw truth. The mob milling in and out of doorways, crowding the stairs, jostling the two suits of armour, was, in the main, drunk.
6
… Hyacinth’s earrings swayed so fast back and forth, I feared they would nick her throat. “I must say, Ellie, had I been you, I would have grabbed the nearest broom and swept the lot of them into the garden and turned on the gardening hose. But where was Bentley?”
“He arrived at that very moment. He had thumbed a ride from Rowland, who had come driving up with Miss Thorn, the organist.”
“Pray tell me that Bentley swept you into his arms and carried you over the threshold.” Primrose sighed ecstatically. “I cannot think of anything more splendid.”
“It was, considering that one year earlier a crane could not have lifted me…”
How could Dorcas and Jonas have let things get out of hand like this? The mayhem intensified as I gazed around from the blissful haven of my husband’s arms. A blue-haired woman, sporting more chins than I had owned in my heyday, went squealing past us up the stairs, the skirt of her paisley silk dress clutched in both hands.
“I’m coming to get you, my sugar plum!” A paunchy gentleman transporting two champagne glasses broke through the crowd in hot an
d heavy pursuit of the Paisley Lady, who was now peeping coyly through the bannisters; he collided heavily with Ben.
“Beg pardon, children!” A glass of champagne was thrust at me. The gentleman proceeded to elbow his way onward and upward. He didn’t get very far. Freddy reeled out a hand and hooked a finger under his collar.
“Daddy, don’t be a tart,” he drawled, “you’re not cute with your brain sloshing around inside your skull.”
“Unfilial brat!” Uncle Maurice held the wounded expression for a full second, and then made a dive for the stairs.
“The man needs to have his mouth and his fly sewn up.” Whereupon, Freddy tipped my tiara over one eye, knocked his elbows sideways to clear a path, and went off to find Jill.
Ben having, I believe, enjoyed this vignette as much as I, now whispered, “Ellie, may I put you down?”
It seemed we said a kind of good-bye as he set me gently on my feet. My eyes clung to his, unwilling to disconnect, until I realised he was looking not at me, but at Miss Thorn. Had she been any other woman, I might have experienced a pang of jealousy. Instead, I fondled my wedding ring. Did this woman never tire of being always the organist, never the bride? Or was she resigned to her fate? She towered over Rowland, who was six feet; she made Ben look short. Many women turned height into an asset: Miss Thorn had succumbed to it. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, and her dreary brown coat drooped to her ankles. I was an ardent convert to thin, but Miss Thorn had carried a good thing too far. She caved in where she should have caved out. Her complexion was poor, her shoulders hunched, and her hair was lank and mouse-coloured, parted in the middle and clamped back from her forehead with two slides. Tucked into each of those slides was an artificial daisy. She collided with Ben and me and tipped her steamed-up spectacles down her nose to see who we were.
The Widows Club Page 6