“Nowadays, you can wear a brown paper bag and no one will bat an eye.”
“What time is it?” I was searching for my small gold watch. My usual Big Ben-sized one would not go with this rig. “He’s due here at three-thirty.”
“You’re fine! Although I wish you wouldn’t always wear your hair in that dowdy bun, or at least do something about the colour. Mid-brown isn’t in this year.” Jill had moved on to the right foot. “Ten more minutes.” The doorbell buzzed and Jill nearly lost her hand as I backed up.
I hate early birds. Punctuality comes high on my list of unforgivable sins. The bell buzzed again, insistently. Jill opened the door while I hovered between the bedroom and the sitting room like a great purple moth.
“Miss Simons?” He sounded pleasant and something else—relieved?
“No, Jill, a friend from downstairs; Ellie’s in here.”
Fanfare and drum roll—my wretched knees knocking again. We were face to face at last. He wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome, but two out of three wasn’t bad. His height was nothing more than average, perhaps five nine, an inch taller than me in heels. His hair was dark and curly, almost black. With his olive skin his eyes should by rights have been brown but they were a vivid blue-green. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that didn’t lose him any points at all (I later found out he wore them only for driving), and he was thin, thin, thin. Perhaps not theoretically handsome but decidedly attractive. Noting his well-cut coat over the dark wool suit, white shirt, and striped silk tie, I knew what I looked like—a fairground fat lady, bawdy, vulgar, grotesque.
Poor man, what a way to earn a living. I’d be nice to him. Tomorrow I would return to my tweeds and when the weekend was over I’d give him a really decent tip so he could take his mother or girlfriend—or wife—out for dinner. Was there any law that said escorts had to be single?
Tying on my best smile, I came forward to shake hands. He had a nice strong clasp, but his eyes were coldly impersonal. Irrationally I resented that. No one had twisted his arm to bring him here.
He spotted my suitcase and swung it up lightly in one hand, saying, “I’ll take this down to the car while you finish dressing.”
I stared frostily at the man. “You are looking at the finished product.”
Those brilliant blue-green eyes took in every inch of purple; his lips curled. “You must forgive me,” he said, “ladies’ apparel has always been beyond me. I thought that was a dressing gown. Are you ready?”
“Not quite.” My voice hit a false octave but to hell with that. “I’d like to explain something before we leave. Mr. Haskell, you are here to do a job, just like any other employee. Nothing wrong with that, most of us are forced to earn our daily bread. I have worked with some people I wouldn’t ask to tea if I were stranded with them on a desert island, but I have learnt one very important truth.”
“Yes?”
“Always try and please the boss, because if you don’t you may not get paid, by cheque, in cash, at all.”
His brows had drawn into one long black line. For a moment I thought he might pitch the suitcase at me and, athletic as he undoubtedly was, he would have hit target—on the nose.
“Have a wonderful time!” chirrupped Jill, handing me my coat.
We were on our way.
CHAPTER
Three
Not having been outside, or even drawn back my curtains that day, I was unprepared for the grim discovery that it was snowing. Large soft swirls like soapflakes powdered the air. Seaside weather? Apparently Bentley Haskell’s car laboured under the misconception that it was. The badly scarred rusty-grey vehicle was parked tight against the kerb and the top was down. I knew convertibles went in for that sort of thing, but with discretion. Not in the midst of snow flurries churning in from the east. Mr. Haskell had tucked my case inside the boot and was holding open the near-side door.
“Do you need help getting in my dear?” He smiled grimly. “Just practising.”
“No. What I do need is for you to put the lid on this thing.”
“Impossible, I’m afraid. The hinges have been rusted out for years. Don’t worry—you won’t get wet.”
As I sat down in astonishment on a very damp seat, he placed a scarlet-and-white-spotted umbrella in my hand, pressed the catch, and a giant fairy toadstool bloomed overhead. My feet found sudden and welcome warmth from a hot water bottle wrapped in the remains of an old grey cardigan. But I was not appeased. I could have been chugging along in a snug train compartment waiting for an attendant to announce dinner was being served in the dining car. Only one explanation made any sense: The man sitting calmly at my side, reading a road map, was an escapee from Dartmoor. In this instance Mrs. Swabucher should have listened to son Reginald, the accountant, and done her homework.
“You’ll find a couple of travelling rugs on your lefthand side.” Folding the map neatly and returning it to the leather pocket under the dashboard, Mr. Haskell set the monster in gear. It answered with a whine that turned to a snarl. We shot forward, clipped past a head-scarfed woman on a wavering bicycle, inched round a huge lorry and a double-decker bus, and were moving swiftly with the evening flow of traffic fighting to be clear of London before dark.
“Comfortable, my dear?” He had small, very white teeth. One overlapped slightly, emphasizing the evenness of the others.
“Frozen.”
“Tuck that other rug round you. My problem is I find this weather bracing. I forget others may not share my enthusiasm for nature in the raw.”
“The train would be too hot, no doubt?”
“Stifling.”
Was this how I would make my sweeping entrance down the carriageway at Merlin’s Court? Unable to pry my icy fingers free from this ridiculous umbrella? Prematurely aged with my snow-white hair? Men! To think I had hankered after one all these years.
“Try to keep moving,” he said, eyes fixed steadily on the road.
“Great! I’ll get up and jog around the back seat. Don’t stop if I topple overboard. I really do prefer a quick hit-and-run to dying of frostbite by inches.”
“I meant wiggle your toe, flap your hands about—not the one with the umbrella.” He winced. “I need both eyes for this drive—visibility is getting poor.”
“You noticed?” I closed my eyes and my lids immediately became heavy. It was snow that weighed them down, not sleep. Huddled under my blankets I could not reach the large bar of hazelnut chocolate hidden in my bag that was beginning to call to me in a plaintive voice.
“Can a person,” I asked, “contract rigor mortis while still alive?”
He snorted irritably, then added quite mildly, “It might help if we talked.”
Was the iceberg melting?
“To be convincing,” he continued, “I need to know something about who’s who at the country estate. Is this a mansion we are visiting?”
“More like a castle. Not the bona fide kind, of course,” I added hastily as I saw his eyebrows escalate. “A miniature reproduction, built well over a hundred years ago by Uncle Merlin’s grandfather. Family legend claims that he was senile when the plans were drawn. Only a person in the throes of second childhood would possess that sort of imagination. The house is straight out of a fairy tale—turrets galore, ivy-crusted walls, a moat no bigger than a goldfish pond, and even a teeny portcullis guarding the front door, though they keep that open now.”
“Sleeping Beauty revisited?”
“Exactly. The castle even has an official curse. Though, for a change of pace, we have a wizard instead of a witch.”
“Let me guess, Uncle Merlin himself?”
“Naturally! His wickedness lies in what he has done to the place, or rather not done. He’s allowed it to moulder away. Strictly speaking, he isn’t an uncle—more of a cousin several times removed—but my mother was a practical lady. She insisted on keeping up the connection with our one wealthy relative. As a child I was forced to knit bedsocks for him each Christmas and only twice got invited for a visi
t. Both times I was sent packing within the week. He said I was eating him out of house and home and he’d be on bread and margarine for a year making up for it.”
“I sincerely hope those won’t be our rations for the weekend.” Bentley Haskell guided the car around a slick curve. We were approaching the outskirts of London. I changed umbrella arms and sank as far as possible into my blanket cocoon. My companion unfortunately showed no signs of frosting up.
“What other fascinating characters may I expect to meet?”
“All kinds.” I shivered. “A wife-swapping foursome from the East End, a witch doctor who recently had his licence revoked for …”
“If you are going to be silly,” said Mr. Haskell through his nose, “I’ll merely concentrate on driving.”
Effectively squashed, I sat looking like a big round jelly shivering on its plate. Magnanimously he proffered an olive branch.
“Just family, I suppose?”
“We have Uncle Maurice,” I parroted like a child reciting. “He’s a stockbroker in his fifties—paunchy and not very tall, wears what hair he has left glued down with heavily scented hair cream. One can smell Uncle Maurice all over the house.”
“The perfect murder clue. He is not, I suppose, the type to bludgeon the butler to death?”
“Unlikely. If he had any flair for murder he would have done in his wife, Aunt Lulu, years ago. She’s a doorbell.”
“A what?”
“A dingaling. Aunt Lulu could have a complete brain removal and no one could tell the difference once they put her hair back on. She waxes her floors hourly, irons her lavatory paper before she hangs it up and exists for her thrice-weekly appointment with her hairdresser. She and Uncle Maurice have a son named Freddy. Nothing like either of them. Freddy is a free spirit: prides himself on never washing, wean his hair in a pony tail, and sprouts a beard that resembles a dish-cloth that went down the rubbish disposal. A very hip fellow, our Freddy—rips about the countryside on a motorbike, has one ear pierced, and smokes pot like a dragon.”
“Sounds more of a conformist than his father.” Bentley Haskell squinted through the scurrying snowflakes at a half-obscured signpost, hooked a right where the road forked, touched a patch of ice, swerved briefly, and we were on course again. I felt like a block of ice cream, frozen so solid it would bend the spoon that dared to take a poke at it.
“Freddy is a musician.” I chattered, “with one of those makeshift groups composed of scrubbing boards, nutcrackers, and electric hair dryers. At the moment he is resting. According to Aunt Astrid’s latest Bad News Bulletin the cuckoo has returned to the nest and Mama and Papa bird don’t have the strength to shove him out.”
“Aunt Astrid?” Mr. Haskell’s black brows drew into a line of intense concentration as we slid into the small town of St. Martin’s Mill and skated past a row of half-timbered cottages peering at us through the gathering dusk. The snow had stopped at last.
Lowering the umbrella I tenderly flexed my arm muscles. “Aunt Astrid is a widow, always dresses for dinner, and is never seen without her pearls. I believe she considers herself the reincarnation of Queen Victoria—you’ll note the use of the royal ‘we.’ Always looks like she just sat down on a red-hot poker. She has a daughter—Vanessa,” I mumbled. Mr. Haskell was pulling off the road so I was spared a description of Vanessa in all her femme fatale glory.
“Time for a fill up,” he said.
“Petrol or food?”
“Neither,” said Bentley Haskell repressively, as visions of egg and chips danced in my head. “I thought you might appreciate having your hot water bottle warmed up.”
“So I would,” I shot back at him. “It reverted to a tombstone hours ago. But if that’s a pub hovering about over there I am going inside to thaw out over a thick juicy steak and oceans of steaming coffee. You can suit yourself, stay out here and turn into Frosty the Snowman or join me.”
Poor Mr. Haskell, he looked outraged and tempted all at the same time. The flesh was weak, for he drew up under the creaking inn sign, aptly named The Harbour, yanked the water bottle from my grasp, and banged open his door.
“I hope you are paying for this!” he snarled, slapping the snow from his arms as he stamped round to help me out.
“Do I have a choice? You are getting to be a very expensive commodity, Mr. Haskell.” My dignity was somewhat lessened by having to cling tightly to his arm to prevent my legs sailing off on their own. “This coat”—it was ten years old—“is quite ruined, and if it wasn’t for your harebrained notion of travelling in your ventilated car we would both be toasty warm at Merlin’s Court tucking into one of Aunt Sybil’s marvellous dinners.”
“Really? From your description of the place I gained the impression we would be fishing very dead bats out of very cold soup.”
His vision was close to the truth, which further fired my wrath. Glaring, we made for the door. Once inside we ignored each other and informed the nervous girl behind the bar, as we stood making puddles on the floor, that we wanted a table for two. The echo was annoying but I looked straight ahead.
Soon we were seated by a roaring fire in a room gleaming with well-tended brass and ornately carved wainscotting. It was impossible not to mellow a fraction in the midst of this eighteenth-century charm. I decided not to treat Mr. Haskell like the worm he undoubtedly was.
“Cosy, isn’t it?”
“A bit overdone—this Ye Olde Worlde bit. Why is that ludicrous girl wandering around in a nightgown and curler cap?”
“The waitress? That’s the Nell Gwyn look. Are you afraid she will go tripping off to bed before we have time to order?”
We both decided on steak and mushrooms. Refusing potatoes was hard, but I wanted him to think my problem was glandular. Our food came, sizzling and spitting on earthenware trenchers.
“Miss Simons,” he said, picking up his fork, “I suggest we practise using first names so we don’t slip up upon arriving at the castle.”
I carefully speared a mushroom. “Your attention to detail is most impressive. Very professional. Are you always called Bentley, or do you shorten it? Benny?”
“Ben,” he said frigidly, “and Ellie, what would that be, Ellen?”
I cut a piece of beef, moved it around my plate, then cut it again.
“Not Ellen, I gather.”
“If we are supposed to be close friends you will have to know. My full name is Giselle.” I looked up in time to see his lips twitch. Would the waitress notice if I stabbed the man with my fork and got blood all over the clean white tablecloth? Surprisingly his face smoothed out and he reached over touching my hand.
“Parents can be very juvenile. These flights of fancy do very well for infants gurgling and bouncing around in their high chairs, but Petal and Daffodil have to grow up. Names should be given out on approval—exchangeable at the age of reason.”
“Thanks.” My voice came out gruff. I am uneasy when people, especially men, are kind to me. “Poor Mother, she meant well. She had visions of me following in her footsteps, fluttering around in a frothy pink tutu.”
“Your mother is a dancer?”
“Was. Only in the corps de ballet, strictly small town. All those pirouettes and arabesques and she tripped running down a flight of stairs at the railway station; like me she was always late. Anyway, she died ten years ago.”
“I’m sorry. And your father?”
“Off finding himself. At the moment he’s fanning in New South Wales. When last I heard, he had two—sheep, not farms—and if I know Daddy’s luck the ewe undoubtedly is on the pill. He’s great really; next year he may decide to be a fireman, or a circus clown.”
“Which validates my theory that lovable as they may be, parents are the real children.” Ben accepted a cup of coffee from the mob-capped waitress who was twitching round him in a disgustingly familiar way. Time for Mr. Haskell to remember he had a living to earn. I had provided him with all the scintillating details of my family history, bar Vanessa; now Bentley T.
Haskell—This Is Your Life.
He began by informing me that he had been disinherited, disowned, and dispatched to the devil by his parents. Another ancestral home gone west? This one turned out to be a greengrocer’s shop in Tottenham.
I could picture those poor parents, hands gnarled by hard honest work, pelting the prodigal out the door with handfuls of carefully trimmed cabbages, then bolting the door and hanging up the Closed sign. But why?
His offence was interesting. Mum and Dad had not taken kindly to the idea that their son was a practising atheist.
“Practising?”
“I helped stage a rally outside the Hallelujah Revival Chapel, one of those narrow, venomous sects that still believe in burning heretics at the stake. In this instance they had refused to bury a small child in consecrated ground. If that kind of piety is religion I don’t need it.”
“Your parents are very devout?”
“Very. Dad is an orthodox Jew and Mother a staunch Roman Catholic. To give the old folks their due, they have a great marriage. They have spent the last forty years consumed with missionary zeal, each trying to convert the other. We have a mezuza by the front door and a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the mantelpiece. Mother told me she baptized Dad years ago while washing his hair, and he continues to introduce her to his friends as Ruth, although her name is Magdalene.”
“Then I’m surprised they gave up so quickly on you. There must be more to your eviction than the Hallelujah Revival March. What other sins did you commit?”
Peering round for the waitress who had gone in search of the bill, Ben said in quite an amiable tone, “I’m surprised you don’t trip over your nose going down the street. What makes you so sure my misdeeds were many?”
Fascinated, I watched as, with the merest flick of one finger, he brought Nell Gwyn trotting to heel. She picked up the money, which I had laid on the table, with maddening slowness and finally padded off again, wagging her tail.
“Out with it!” I exclaimed. “The suspense is giving me indigestion. What did you do, kidnap the mayor’s daughter? Forget to return your library books?”
The Thin Woman Page 3