Femmes Fatal Read online

  “You’re doing a lovely job, Gladys,” Bunty reassured her. “I’m so glad Lionel suggested you as a change from records. Ladies, how about a nice hand for Miss Thorn?”

  Dutiful clapping.

  “That’s the ticket!” Bunty beamed her twenty-four-carat smile. “Time for Retro-Relaxation, Fellow Females. Everyone please fetch your mats, then lie down and make yourselves comfy.”

  Embarrassed to the gills, I was about to inch up my hand and confess I didn’t have a mat, when the rest of the class came scurrying back into place, leaving one red rubber oblong lolling against the wall. Stepping over the bodies now lining the floor, I introduced myself to the mat and surveyed the room. Not too promising. Rather like searching for available grave space in an overcrowded cemetery. But just when I was ready to take my mat and go home, a pair of eyes looked up at me from the floor, and a voice I recognized as belonging to Mrs. Thirsty—headmistress of the village school—said, “Here, next to me, Mrs. Haskell.”

  “Thanks. It’ll be like parking a lorry in a space reserved for a bubble car, but I think I can manage.”

  “Hold on a moment and I’ll move over.” Another voice that sounded familiar, and I found myself looking down into the face of Jackie Diamond, wife of Norman the Doorman. And this was her first day too! Amazing how much better I felt knowing I wasn’t the only new girl.

  “Everyone comfy?” Bunty asked as I flopped down. “Good! Now I want you all to close your eyes and imagine that you and your sweetie pie are alone in a secret place. A place known only to the two of you …”

  I lay on my red rubber mat. The sound of her voice washed over me and sunlight crept across my closed lids. The sound of rhythmic breathing became a summer breeze and suddenly Ben was there with me. We were in a rowboat, gliding down a golden river. I was wearing a white eyelet dress and a big shady hat. His profile was dusted with harlequin shadow. Above us the sky had that lovely shimmer you see only near water, and on the banks weeping willows grew, leaning far out to trail their tresses on that gleaming surface of beveled bronze.

  My love’s shirt rippled in the warm breeze while his muscular arms rhythmically pulled at the oars … clip clop, clip clop … Dreamily, I began to recite from The Forsaken Merman. “Now the wild white horses play/Champ and chaff and toss in the spray …” Whoa, there! Ugghh! A clip of smelly river water clopped me in the face.

  “Sorry, Ellie! The oar got away from me.”

  “Never mind, Ben, dear,” said I, folding my sun-dappled arms. “Romance is wasted on we old fogies.”

  “I’m not sure I agree, old bean.”

  “Really? You could have fooled me, Mr. Hearthside Guild Program Chairman. Leafing through Mr. Fisher’s coffin catalogue, I got the distinct impression I was being hustled through life so as not to keep the hearse waiting.”

  “Ellie, we had this same conversation last night.”

  “And it bears repeating. I had hoped to enjoy a few good years with my children before the lid falls.”

  Resting on his oars, Ben squinted the sun out of his eyes. “My dear, we are no longer free agents. Our role as parents demands we protect our offspring from all unpleasant inevitabilities such as our mutual demise.” Sensing I was about to open my mouth, he held up an oar. “I’m an old-fashioned chap, Ellie. I don’t subscribe to the Die Now, Pay Later viewpoint. The day my parents got married they started putting a couple of shillings a week by for … their last outing. And I intend to do as well by Abbey and Tam.”

  “Very well! But can’t we at least wait for a good sale?” My sigh was swept up into the breezes gusting merrily overhead. Suddenly the boat was being spun around in a whirlpool of light and shadow. Faster, faster until Ben’s eyes crossed and the boat rolled over, coming down on me with all the weight of a coffin lid so that there was only blackness …

  “Wakey, Wakey!” A disembodied hand was shaking my shoulder and I sat up on my red rubber mat to find a Fellow Female in a zebra-striped leotard kneeling over me. “You were out for the count, ducky.”

  “Thanks for bringing me back.” Still groggy, I stumbled to my feet and joined the tail-end of the class in exiting the room. As I passed Miss Thorn at the piano, she gave me a coy little wave. At the door, Bunty latched on to my arm.

  “Ellie, I’m tickled pink you joined.”

  “Me too.”

  “And we will do dinner sometime.” Her blonde curls shone and a smile danced over her pert features. “Promises, promises! I’ve been saying the same thing to Li for a month, but you know how it is.” Obviously she was kidding. As the founder of Fully Female, the woman who had made husbands Big Business, she had to be kidding, didn’t she?

  “Never enough time,” I quipped back. “In fact I made up a little poem about it.”

  “Recite!” Bunty seemed oblivious to the fact that we were blocking the doorway.

  “Well, if you insist!” Flexing my lips, I began:

  “I met myself the other day

  As I was going the other way

  Not much time to stop and chat,

  Was I really getting fat?

  We parted on a promise to get together

  Some time next year in the never never.”

  Why do I set myself up for embarrassment? Bunty stood rooted to the parquet, a smile glued to her face, while I wished the river had swallowed me up. Silence stretched into eternity, giving me a pretty good idea what hell would be like …

  Suddenly out of nowhere, meaning behind me, a gasp was heard, followed by the exclamation, “If that isn’t too beautiful for words!”

  Came the pitter-patter of Lycra feet and there, standing bang in front of me, was the effervescent Mrs. Bludgett. “I knew it, I knew you were a gentle spirit when we met at the vicarage last night.” She held up a hand to stay the rest of the Fully Female crowd who were trying to squeeze past us into the hall. “Everyone stop, you positively have to hear Mrs. Haskell’s rhyme. It’s so brilliant, I have goose bumps. Just writing a letter about does me in!” Fortunately, while she enthused, the other ladies escaped and I made it out into the hall without doing an encore.

  “See you upstairs at Marriage Makeover,” chanted Bunty as I wended my way to the changing room with my new admirer in tow.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Mrs. Bludgett was all ebullience. Her bobbed hair bounced. She had springs in her feet. “Do you know I couldn’t believe my ears when Jock came home and told me you had him up to fix the washing machine. ‘The Mrs. Haskell of Merlin’s Court?’ I kept saying it over and over until he thought he’d have to give me a sedative. I felt so awful for calling him off the job that we never did get around to making love. We both just lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, whispering your name.”

  “How kind.” I pushed open the changing room door to a rush of memories from my school days at St. Roberta’s. The smell of old lockers and tired linoleum.

  “And then to see you at the vicarage last night. I can’t find the words. It was so incredible. I kept wanting to rush over and hand you a coaster. Anything! Just so I could tell people I had spoken to the fairy tale lady of Merlin’s Court! But first you were talking to the vicar and then to Mrs. Melrose and then came the program …”

  At that point Mrs. Bludgett disappeared, sucked up into the crush of women in varying stages of undress like fluff into a Hoover, but seconds later she reappeared, still talking.

  “There you are. I was in such a panic! She’ll think me so rude, I thought. That lovely woman will never speak to me again! And on this day of all days I don’t believe I could bear it. Not after the shock of walking into that room and seeing her perched at the piano.”

  Somehow I managed to squish my face through a gap in the throng. “Gladys Thorn?”

  “Jock was carrying on with her a few months back.” Mrs. Bludgett was wriggling out of her leotard, her boobs bouncing a mile a minute. “And I’m ashamed to say I came entirely unglued. Instead of focusing on the positive, I phoned her up, yelled all sorts of threats …”r />
  “I’m sorry, but I don’t get the positive.”

  “When you think about it, what higher compliment can one woman pay another than to try and steal her husband? That’s why I had trouble facing her just now—I felt so small.”

  “I see.”

  Untrue. I couldn’t see anything. All that was left of Mrs. Bludgett was a nose. Voices floated over the tops of heads, but just as you can’t see the woods for the trees, you couldn’t see the women for the crowd.

  “Marjorie, lend me your comb.”

  “Someone button me up the back.”

  “Damn! Where did I put my bra?”

  My back was to the wall; I struggled to keep afloat but found myself going under. My dream came back to me, the one about the horror of being buried alive. Panting, I applied traction with my hands, but it was no good. Plonk. I thumped down onto a ledge—a bench, I suppose. Cheers! My nose was above sea level. I could breathe. All I had to do was sit quietly and pray I wouldn’t have to inspect a row of bare behinds while the lady jocks pulled on their tights.

  Heaven be praised! Between one breath and another, the changing room was emptied of all but echoes and Moll Bludgett, who stood sizing herself up in the wall mirror.

  “Guess I won’t feel right until I face Gladys Thorn and apologize for the awful things I said.” Bouncing over to me, the plumber’s wife grabbed my hands and clasped them between her own. “Thank you, thank you, Ellie, for being here for me when I needed a friend. You’re the best, you know that?”

  “Well …”

  “Yes, you are!” Her boisterous laughter evaporated; her face became deadly serious. “Now say it after me: I, Ellie Haskell, am the best … the very best.”

  Hot with embarrassment, my eyes locked to hers, I recited the fatuous nonsense.

  “Remember that, Ellie! You are a lovely woman and don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  I mumbled a thank you to the floor.

  “Make friends with life!” She waved bye-bye from the doorway and was gone. Thank God! The woman was a vampire. Her energy had drained away every drop of life from me. I hardly had the strength to remove my leotard. As for returning it to the lost-and-found box … My knees began to shake, but I couldn’t blame Moll Bludgett for that. I felt like a grave robber, one of those black-hearted villains who creep into the crypt at dead of night and steal the rings off the fingers of corpses. The label on the leotard indicated it belonged to the late Mrs. Huffnagle. That fearsome female of the Roman nose and ski-slope chin. That matriarch of Chitterton Fells society. A woman who might be alive today if she hadn’t joined Fully Female in hopes of making her sex life sizzle. Poor lass, she had sizzled all right when her electrical appliance fell in the bath.

  Dwelling upon this terrible accident got me back into my clothes and out of the changing room. Should I even bother going to Marriage Makeover? By now I must be a good five minutes behind everyone else, which in itself wasn’t a bad thing. Having the place to myself meant I could retrieve Mrs. Malloy’s gun from the grotto under the stairs. With the splish splash of the waterfall sounding in my ears, I knelt down and dipped a hand into the terra-cotta urn. Nothing. Not so much as a pebble. The gun was gone, along with the apron in which it had been wrapped.

  I was in the process of getting to my feet, not sure whether I should be terribly worried or not, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I looked up to see Mrs. Pickle leaning over the banisters.

  “Good morning.” I straightened up.

  As was her way, she took her time answering. Slow as treacle she glided a duster along the rail. “Lost something, have you, Mrs. Haskell?”

  Now I was the one who couldn’t get the words out.

  “Was it”—she drew the words out—“… a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wrapped in an apron?”

  “Yes!” By now I was ready to scream.

  “Oh, that!” Her bread-and-butter face was expressionless. We might have been talking about a dropped earring. “I spotted it when I was dusting that there pot this morning and gave it to Mr. Wiseman as he was leaving for work.” Another long pause as Mrs. Pickle moved her dusting arm in reverse. “Hope I haven’t caused no trouble.”

  “Oh, no!” Doubtless Mrs. Malloy would be thrilled to know her gun was now in the hands of Chitterton Fells’s most prominent solicitor. But in the meantime I had to assuage Mrs. Pickle’s curiosity. “Naturally you are dying to know why I put the gun in the pot …”

  “No.”

  “But surely …”

  “Your business is your business.” She continued to deal out the words with agonizing slowness. “I’m glad to have a job. When I rung up Mrs. Wiseman last night to tell her I couldn’t afford to come to class no more because of being sacked by the new vicar, she said she’d take me on here.”

  “I’m so glad.” As much to my surprise as hers, I climbed the spiral stairs and gave Mrs. Pickle a hug. My reward was the opening of the flood gates. Words poured from the lady’s lips as if she had that instant been released from a vow of silence.

  “Vicar said she didn’t need me because her husband just loved to do housework. Can you believe that?”

  “Well …”

  “I’d say love came into it, but not for scrubbing floors and the like, Mrs. Haskell. Yesterday, I heard Mr. Spike having a go-round with Gladys Thorn and it was plenty clear to me there was something between them. What’s more, he knew I heard. You should have seen the flash in his eyes. Talk about if looks could kill! And what do you know? A couple of hours later me and that trollop, Miss Thorn—we both get our walking papers.”

  Exhausted by this spate of words, Mrs. Pickle fell silent, the duster dangling limp in her hands.

  “I suspect you’re right,” was all I could say.

  “And I know you should be at Marriage Makeover.” She spoke, if possible, even more slowly. Stepping around me, she plodded down the stairs to stand in the pool of light from the skylight above us both. “Mrs. Haskell”—Mrs. Pickle folded her duster and laid it over the banister rail—“I want to tell you why Reverend Foxworth asked to be relieved of his duties at St. Anselm’s. It was all on account of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Bless his shiny white collar, he fell in love with you the day you came to Merlin’s Court.”

  “No!”

  “He said to me, ‘Mrs. Pickle, I can’t go on like this, one eye on my sermon, one on her. I’m going to speak to the Bishop and beg him to send me away, anywhere, so long as I can be free from the torment of her face.’ ”

  “Believe me, I had no idea.” Standing on that staircase, I was in no-man’s-land. There was no upstairs or downstairs, there was only the realization that kind, sensitive, handsome Rowland Foxworth had cherished for me a Grand Passion.

  “Was a time when I hated you, Mrs. Haskell, but I come to see you never meant to hurt him. Life can’t be a Fantasy Special Edition Romance for everyone. Take me for an instance. I’ve been in love with your gardener, Jonas Phipps, since time began.”

  I left her dusting the banister in slow motion, and wended my way up that spiral staircase. Never in my life had I felt more Fully Female than at that moment. I knew myself to be the object of Rowland’s Unrequited Regard. I never gave another thought to Mrs. Malloy’s gun. What hit me like a bullet between the eyes when I reached the top stair was the memory of the vicar’s surprised expression on meeting me last night. Now I understood she had been anticipating someone much different—a real femme fatale.

  Marriage Makeover was taking place in the dining room, which like every apartment in this Hollywood-style house redefined geometric space. Early Druid, Ben would have called it. I followed the sound of voices and entered with the whimsical feeling that I was taking an elongated peep at the room and its occupants through a keyhole. Bunty was seated at the far end of the mile-long table. Ranged down both sides, at strategic intervals, their chins down to their waists, sat a dozen or so members of Fully Female.

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p; I was tiptoeing toward a vacant chair when our leader held up a hand. A hush fell like a blanket over a birdcage.

  “Fellow Females, say hello to Ellie Haskell.”

  “Hello, Ellie!” The voices charged at me as I dropped quivering onto my seat. Everywhere I looked were smiles. I was beset by smiles.

  Bunty’s smile was as shiny bright as her blonde curls. “No need to break out in a cold sweat, love! All we do here is talk.”

  My worst fears realised. They would hold me prisoner until I had spilled every last bean concerning my intimate life … or present lack thereof. Bunty went on talking in a rush of words that went spinning around my head. My eyes darted here, there, and everywhere, searching for a break in the cover, and finally spied the familiar face of Jacqueline Diamond, wife of my favourite TV celeb, Norman the Doorman. How magnanimous! The great lady was removing her dark glasses to take a better look at me.

  My mistake. She was pushing back her chair and rising to her feet. Finally, Bunty’s spiel caught up with me in a sort of instant replay. Jacqueline, being one of the new members present, was to get the ball rolling by revealing what had brought her to Fully Female.

  She seemed such an urbane woman with her sweep of ash-blonde hair, Lauren Bacall eyes, and twenty-two-inch waist, shown off to perfection by her rhinestone cowboy outfit. It seemed all wrong that she should bare her soul to a bunch of yokels such as us. Across the vast table Mrs. Wardle, the librarian, sat bolt forward as if someone had grabbed the strap of her forty-four triple D, ready to catapult her across the room. Two seats down from her sat Mrs. Thirsty, the headmistress of the village school, click-clicking away with her steel knitting pins like a bloody revolutionary waiting for the guillotine to come slicing down. Not on my neck, by heck! But of course I was deluding myself. As soon as Jacqueline Diamond was through doing a mental striptease, it would be my turn. Desperate for some sort of emotional support, I searched that sea of faces for someone I could even loosely regard as a friend. But Moll Bludgett hadn’t made it up here after her talk with Miss Thorn, and Edna Pickle would still be dusting.