Femmes Fatal (7 page)

Stowing Abbey in his arms, I said, “There isn’t time. You know where everything is, don’t you? Disposable nappies in the airing cupboard and plenty of formula in the pantry, but I should be back way before their next feed.” I had unhooked my raincoat from its peg in the alcove by the door and slipped it on as I spoke. “If you should be the least bit worried about either of them, phone Dr. Melrose. And another thing …” Bother! Mrs. Malloy was toting me outside by the belt.

“Wave bye-bye to Mummy!” Freddy jostled the babies higher in his arms and flapped one of Tam’s tiny paws. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll get them down for their naps, put on my Viking headdress, and read to them about wicked Loki and the lethal mistletoe.”

Stumbling backward down the steps, I cried, “What’s wrong with a nice fairy tale?”

“Sure! How about Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters hacking off their feet to fit the glass slipper?” Freddy edged the door closed with his elbow.

“Roger,” I said and raced after Mrs. Malloy, who was teetering across the courtyard at a breakneck pace. We collided under the archway that leads to the stables where we house the cars—Ben’s Heinz 57 crock and the estate car we bought when the twins were born.

“That Freddy!” Mrs. M climbed in the passenger side. “Looks like something the cat coughed up, but he’s no fuzz brain, I’ll say that for him. I never heard mistletoe was poisonous. Now yew leaves, that’s a different matter. Mrs. Pickle’s been telling me how some bunch
of safety-conscious perverts has been after the vicar to take down the trees in the churchyard. Now that’s what I call putting nasty ideas in people’s heads.”

With Mrs. Malloy rattling away, I drove the estate car at an unlawful pace down the gravel drive, past Freddy’s cottage, through the iron gates, and out onto Cliff Road. The sky was the colour of damp blotting paper. It wasn’t so much raining as misting, so that the windscreen appeared to be perspiring heavily—as was yours truly. Definitely one of those times when one’s deodorant is all set to play either the hero or the villain of the hour. The thought of trying to shake hands with the interviewer at Fully Female with my arms locked to my sides sent me into a spin that brought a breathtaking view of the sea surging up the beach and cascading onto the crags at the base of the cliffs.

“It was an arrow,” I babbled.

“What?”

“In the story. Balda Dead, he was killed with an arrow made out of mistletoe.”

“Don’t break me heart, we all have to go somehow.” Mrs. Malloy bounced up in her seat when I hit a rock in attempting to get over to the middle of the road. With her window open, we were within grabbing distance of the hawthorn and honeysuckle bushes which rambled along the right-hand verge of rocky incline, which gave way above to meadows ripe with buttercups and clover. “The way I look at it, Mrs. H, dying is big business worldwide. No one has a monopoly on it, not even the bloody Yanks. And good thing, too, or my Walter would be out of business.”

Her Walter? From the sound of it she had high hopes of Fully Female, while I was growing more certain with every flash of road that disappeared under the wheels of the car that I had made the mistake of my life. For starters, I should never have left the twins with
Freddy. Remembering his good-bye wave, I was sure there had been something suspicious in his manner, a glint of mischief in his eyes. Surely he wouldn’t phone Ben and inform on me? No, whatever his faults, Freddy was not a sneak. But something was brewing. I would swear to it.

“Mrs. H, we are already two minutes late.”

“Oh, dear! And if your watch is slow, it could be worse than that. Perhaps we should turn back and reschedule—”

“Not on your Nellie.”

Blast! But hope—if it does not spring eternal—does tend to bubble up like a blocked drain. We could always develop a flat tire, or better yet, realize we had not brought the address of Fully Female with us.

“Well, here we are!” Glowering, I parked the car under a canopy of boughs provided by the copper beech, which rose up from a grassy island in the middle of a ritzy pink drive. My word! Fountains galore and flower beds in the shape of figure-eights, all bordered by mosaics of multicoloured tile. And behind a mesh enclosure a peacock spread his majestic fan and did the royal strut, trailed by a couple of watchful hens in governess garb.

“Don’t take much imagination to see why the place is named Hollywood. Built by some hotsy-totsy American in the sixties. Bloody Yanks.” Mrs. Malloy’s voice held a note of grudging admiration.

Being immeasurably grateful to her for having remembered the address of Fully Female, I didn’t burst her bubble by saying the house looked too much like a sacrificial temple for unsuspecting virgins for my taste.

“Can’t sit here gawking, Mrs. H, not when someone has already made us fifteen minutes late.” She cocked a
leg out of the car and I followed her across a mosaic piazza with a dragon-headed seahorse at its center and up the broad flight of marble steps. The wind batted against my legs, giving me the uncomfortable feeling that the hem of my raincoat had come down. I was straining over my shoulder to make sure that such wasn’t the case when Mrs. Malloy buzzed the bell. The door opened with such immediacy that we clutched each other like a pair of children caught sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night with Nanny’s body.

Most peculiar. No one stood in the doorway to greet us. We stepped into a blaze of white foyer, rising to a sloping ceiling of glass panels separated by stone beams. Directly ahead and two steps down was a living room the size of a football field, decorated in stark modernism with Egyptian overtones. Nubby white couches. Steel tables and free-form sculptures on block pedestals. One wall hanging in particular caught my eye—a floor-to-ceiling sheet of blocked canvas with hundreds of nails punched in between globs of bronze. The sort of artwork nobody expects you to like so long as you appreciate it. The one homey touch was the grand piano standing in a sort of orchestra pit by the glass wall overlooking the terrace, but it looked lost without the rest of the orchestra.

“Must be the right place.” Mrs. Malloy looked ready to thump me with her supply bag if I said otherwise.

“You couldn’t have made a mistake,” I said, my eyes slinking left to a glimpse of kitchen with white laminated cabinets, then right to a wide hall with lots of very tall, very closed doors. “How about …?” I took a step toward Mrs. M, with the unnerving impact of having trodden on the button of a loudspeaker. Instantaneously, a voice vibrated up through the floor to fill the entire foyer.

“Welcome to Fully Female! Kindly take the stairs
down to the lower level and enter the waiting room. Please excuse any delay. I’ll be with you as soon as possible.”

“Well, I never!” Far from being affronted by this disembodied reception, Mrs. Malloy’s damson lips curved into a smile. “Must’ve used one of the remote control contraptions to open the door.”

“Excuse me, where are the stairs?” Pumping my foot, I spoke to the floor, but got no reply; obviously a bad connection.

“Not standing here looking at us, are they, Mrs. H? But seems to me—what with you being a home decorator by trade—you’d know by the feel of the place where they stashed the stairs.”

Thus put on my mettle, like a pointer who’s been told not to come home without at least one dead duck, I took three giant steps toward the hall, pressed my fingers to my forehead, turned a half-swivel to my right, and there, tucked behind the foyer wall, was a spiral staircase, its bars intertwined with grapes and leaves, its steps comprised of pie-shaped wedges cut in extremely stingy portions. “Who wants to play Let’s Break an Ankle?”

Much to my surprise, Mrs. Malloy and I made the descent without tripping each other up, or rather, down. Upon reaching the spacious lower hall we spared a moment to admire the waterfall splashing down from the inside base of the stairs into a pebbled pool where a nymph sat on a rock catching the cascade in her cupped hands. Everywhere else—to the right, the left, the front, and the back of us—were closed doors. Hark! Music was creeping out from one as if desperate to escape the thumping and stumping that accompanied it. “Aerobics,” I whispered to Mrs. Malloy. Far from paling under her rouge, she went into a stomp-and-grind then and there, her leopard coat gyrating so fast the spots blurred.

“Believe it or not, Mrs. H, I was Miss Teenage Twist.”

“My word.”

“And me gone forty at the time.”

“Mustn’t loiter,” I admonished, and with what I was beginning to consider genuine ESP, I chose the door labelled Waiting Room and ushered Mrs. M in ahead of me.

Splendid! We found ourselves in a white box where a brisk row of chairs lined the wall under the narrow window. A coffee table stacked with magazines stood in the middle and a second door (to the inner sanctum) stared us in the face. After debating about knocking and deciding we wouldn’t—or shouldn’t, for fear of horning in on someone else’s interview—we perched on neighbouring chairs, feet together, hands neatly folded on our handbags. Mrs M looked so smart in her feather hat, her open coat revealing the crisp taffeta of her frock, that I felt like a real dowd.

“Like bloody waiting to go in the confessional.” Mrs. Malloy crossed herself, a habit she had picked up from my Roman Catholic mother-in-law, but whether for good luck or in hopes of absolution for swearing, I hadn’t the foggiest. I was busy replaiting my hair and licking my lips to give them a little gloss.

“We’re waiting as fast as we can.”

“Easy for you to talk, Mrs. H. You don’t have to go home and cook dinner.”

“Wrong. Ben recently got this bee in his bonnet that he was undermining my femininity by bringing meals home from the restaurant.”

“Men,” Mrs. Malloy said, and we sat in companionable silence for a moment, until I got a bird’s eye view—we’d left the door open a crack—of a troop of leotards heading up the spiral stairs. Good heavens! I recognized two of the rumps. There went Dr. Melrose’s wife and
 … Mrs. Pickle from the vicarage. Some heavy panting reminiscent of a northeast gale came our way and I knew—with the swift certainty of opening a cupboard door and having a heavy object land on my head—that I had made a ghastly mistake. I didn’t have the time, the interest, or the fortitude to rebuild my body from the ground up. This wasn’t the place for blushing violets. They would make you take communal showers with your clothes off. And I hardly ever let me see me naked. One makes exceptions for a husband. But a bunch of women, all of them with smaller waists and bigger … Already I was breaking out in a cold sweat.

“Mrs. Malloy, I can’t go through with this!”

The supply bag trembled on her knees. She was looking up at me like a wounded animal, but I was the one caught in the trap. For how could I balk at sacrificing myself on the altar of her survival? If we walked out of here, Mrs. Malloy would be back to Plan A. Clenching my hands, I sent up a prayer for guidance. A bit of cheek really. Sometimes I worry that I treat God like a distant cousin many times removed, to be remembered at Christmas and Easter, with the occasional reversed-charge call in between.

“Well?” The beauty spot on Mrs. Malloy’s cheek quivered and indeed seemed to buzz like a bee about to launch into the air. But before I could respond, the door from the hall opened and in walked a woman all in black, from the draped scarf around her head to her coat, gloves, and sunglasses.

I had been sent my sign. I could hardly go fleeing past this person without causing serious alarm. Sinking back in my chair, I whispered to Mrs. M, “Sorry, the wait was getting to me. This is worse than the dentist.”

The woman in black took a chair across from us, and the three of us sat in uncompanionable silence. A couple of times I cleared my throat in an attempt at
conversation, but I couldn’t get out so much as a “Good afternoon.” Those sunglasses spoke loud and clear. Unfortunately, Mrs. Malloy can be in some ways remarkably deaf. She was almost falling off her chair gawking; I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if she had produced an autograph album from the supply bag and gone groveling across the room. The woman is a confirmed celebrity-hound.

“That’s not the late great Greta Garbo,” I whispered.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Her hoarse whisper would have filled a stadium. “That there is Mrs. Norman the Doorman.”

“No!” Now I was the one with eyes as big as Frisbees. What an incredible experience: to be in the same room as the wife of my children’s favourite TV personality. I had known he was local, of course, but I had never dreamed, never dared hope that I would come this close to touching the cape of the Noble Defender of Tinseltown Toys. “Quick!” I jogged Mrs. Malloy’s furry arm. “Pencil … paper!”

“Hold your horses.” Opening up the supply bag, she produced a toilet roll. “Here, I can spare this. I took a couple from your airing cupboard this morning when I got all teary.”

She expected me to beg Mrs. Norman for a signature on toilet paper? Not even a pencil? A lipstick was the best she could produce. Still, beggars can’t be choosers. I was stumbling up from my seat, when the door to the inner sanctum opened and out came Mrs. Huffnagle, unquestionably the snootiest person in Chitterton Fells, one of those well-corseted women whose own hair never dares to come unpermed or stir in the wind. Amazing to find her here, cradling an armload of plastic containers and pamphlets as she stalked past without deigning to recognize any presence but her own.

“Barracuda.”

I dropped the toilet paper. The words fitted Mrs. Malloy’s style of commentary, but the voice … Mesmerized, I watched the woman in black slide back her head scarf and unpeel her sunglasses. “Relax, girls. If hoity-toity Huffnagel isn’t afraid to show her chassis here, why should we worry?” Raising a well-groomed eyebrow, she smoothed back her ash-blonde hair. Not a beauty exactly, but she possessed a ropy thin chic. Those sleepy eyes had a downward tilt and her mouth an amused twist. “Did either of you bring an extra toothbrush? We are planning on being here overnight, aren’t we?”

“It looks that way,” I managed.

“Indeed it do!” Mrs. Malloy contributed in her poshest voice. “It has been a frightful long wait. I were just saying to Mrs. H here that it don’t make a speck of difference to us. We’re nobodies. But a lady such as yourself, well, it do seem wrong, it do indeed.”