The Widow's Club (30 page)

Raisins showered into the mixing bowl, and Magdalene plunged a wooden spoon, which was too tall for her, round and round.

“Don’t worry about me, Giselle, I am quite capable of taking care of myself and Ben. He went off to work with a proper breakfast inside him. Gammon and tomatoes, just the way he likes them. He told me you don’t cut the crusts off the fried bread, but we all have our different ways.” She was scraping batter into a tin.

Would it make her like me better if I asked to lick the bowl? What were a few extra calories in so good a cause? Obviously she didn’t hear me or see my outstretched hands because the mixing bowl went bobbing in the sink.

“If you like to have a lie-in every morning, Giselle, you won’t get a word of criticism out of me.” She pushed at the sleeves of her grey cardigan. “I’ve always had to get up early, so as to get to Mass before the shop opened.”

This was getting worse. I needed a calculator to tabulate
my sins. Why hadn’t I thought to ask Magdalene whether she wanted to go to daily Mass? A splotch of batter stared up at me from the table; I stretched out a finger, then snatched it back. “Would you like to come down to the village when your cake comes out of the oven? The Catholic church is just off Market Street; you could pick up a timetable and have a kneel there while I take care of some things at Abigail’s, then I could fetch you over to see Ben and—”

“Have a kneel! I don’t think so, thank you, Giselle. In fact”—her lips quivered—“I can’t hope to get to church for awhile.… We can miss without fear of mortal sin in … times of illness, flood, blizzard, and other … sincere reasons, such as …”

I caught some words that sounded like “fear for life and limb.” I should have asked her what she meant. So many things might have been different if I had, but my mind was on my reconciliation with Ben.

If ever a day was a good omen, this one was. The snow had vanished, leaving a vibrant greenness. I could smell the promise of blossom in the air. Deciding against taking the Heinz, I walked to the village. The breeze was nippish, but I didn’t mind. Everything was going to be all right. Ben and I would rediscover the bliss of our early married life, my in-laws would discover they couldn’t live without each other, and Abigail’s premiere would be a mad success.

Mad was the word for the chaos which greeted me as I stepped into the foyer of the restaurant. A glance at the ceiling made me catch my breath. Straddling the second floor bannister railing and some other (invisible) prop was a plank. Tippy-tilting on this perch were a couple of painters, their brushes swooshing the ceiling in a Charlie Chaplin pantomime. A splatter of paint made me dodge sideways and collide with the plumber, who was staggering around in circles, a toilet clutched in his arms.

“What the bloody hell am I supposed to do with this, lady? Your husband had it straight from the horse’s mouth that all sales is final!”

“I’m sorry!” I had to shout over the radio music blasting from all sides. Over it, or under it, I could hear the voice of the world’s greatest upholsterer—Monsieur Rouche-Babou. I was about to charge into the Bluebell Room and pacify him when I saw Ben emerge from his
second floor office and duck around the painters’ aerie. The man with the paintpot dangling on his arm seesawed upward. When I opened my eyes, Ben was coming down the stairs.

“I got your note, darling,” I said, as he reached me. His lips smiled but his eyes weren’t quite focused.

“Good.” He moved; my lips grazed his ear. Shuffling a half-dozen menus in his hands, he scowled at the plumber, who set the toilet down and sat on it, arms akimbo.

“Ellie, we’ll have a romantic evening. Just the two of us … and Mum.” Ben’s fingers touched my arm as he strode forward, the menus slicing the air. “I want that toilet out of here, Johnson. I don’t care if you have to put it in your living room and plant daffs in it. How many stars do you think I will get docked if word ever leaks out that it had been misinstalled in my kitchen?”

I regained his attention, meaning his gaze lit on me in its travels and turned blank. He was surprised I was still here; but pleased. He pointed the menus at the Bluebell Room, nearly taking off my ear in the process.

“Talk to that twerp you hired to do the upholstery, Ellie. Spell it out for him that if he can’t get his fringes to lie flat by this evening, he’s out on his arse.”

“Ben,” I said gently, “I can’t run roughshod over a man of Monsieur’s calibre. I’ll bring him a posy of flowers and ask him nicely.”

“Whatever it takes.” Ben ran a finger across his brow. “Would you also go down on your knees to
your
wallpaperer. Take a look at that area by the front door!”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Come on, Ellie! It looks like a rhino’s back.”

Maybe I needed glasses. Two inches from the offending section of wallpaper, I couldn’t see anything. Wait a minute! My fingers found a hairline crease. Annoying, but due to an imperfection in the plaster.

“Darling,” I countered, slipping my arm through his, “let’s go into the kitchen. You’ve been holding out on me with the new menu, and I’m dying to see what you have settled on.”

His smile missed me by a quarter-inch, but on entering the kitchen, he handed me a menu. A special one, in a leather, gold-tooled folder. “Tell me what you think.”

“I will, I will. But do let my imagination savour this captivating cassoulet! I can almost smell the bouquet garni in which it is lovingly simmered for three hours …” My voice petered out. My eyes did a zigzag down the page and came to a shuddering stop. The words that zoomed out at me couldn’t … couldn’t be.

“What’s up?” Ben was moving along the stainless steel counter, assessing how well he could see himself in its surface. “You are not upset that I added an extra veal entree, are you?”

“Not a bit. I am somewhat surprised …” My eyes returned to the menu, then flinched away. “I am very surprised by item number four in the luncheon section—the ‘D’Ellie Delight.’ Not that I want to make a big deal about it …” My bright smile slipped and I had to clench my teeth to keep it in place.

Ben was now leaning against the counter, feet crossed at the ankle, laughter dancing in his eyes. Usually I melt like snow on the stove when he strikes that pose.

“Ever thought you would see the day, Ellie, when you would lend your name to such a classy restaurant?”

“That has never been one of my prime-time fantasies, but had I experienced such hopes, I … might have pinned them on being featured in the
dinner
section.” The menu twitched in my hands. “And I would have aspired to something a little more glamourous than a corned beef sandwich.”

Ben’s smile went out. “And I”—he swept a hand sideways, sending a glass shattering into the sink—“I thought I was paying you the highest possible compliment in giving your name to a dish which I consider uniquely mine.”

“Really!” My laugh turned a nasty little somersault. “No one has ever slapped corned beef between two slices of bread before?”

Another glass almost went the way of the other, but he caught it. “The rye bread is high density, low cal—”

“Terrific. I’m supposed to feel flattered when you proclaim to the world, in addition to your mother, that I have a weight problem?” A voice deep inside me whispered, stop this, you’re being petty and childish, but I was like a runaway sledge, out of control. It wasn’t just the D’Ellie Delight, it was his leaving that note, luring me down here
to be ignored. It was my mildewed stockings. It was my mother being dead when his wasn’t. It was …

“You’re being deliberately thin-skinned, Ellie. I take immense personal and professional pleasure in concocting healthful foods that you can push around on your plate or feed to your cat.”

“How noble of you!” I leaned against the opposite counter, but got my crossed ankles out too far and almost overbalanced. I rallied. “What sort of pleasure did it give you to create the Baked Alaska Angelica? Whatever that may be—other than numero uno dessert in the
dinner
section!”

His hiss was like a gas jet coming on. “A baked Alaska, decorated with angelica!” Somehow we were nose to nose; the sparks from his eyes could have burned me to a crisp. “If you ever read anything—other than romantic rubbish about soppy-eyed females and Greek gods with their brains in their pants—you would know that, Ellie.” He stepped back, rammed a hand through his hair and smiled compassionately. It was his fatal mistake.

“How soon we do forget, Bentley.” My voice, too, could pulsate with pity. “A year ago you would have given your right … arm to have your name emblazoned on a rubbishy novel.”

“Don’t talk bosh!” He snatched the menus from my clutch and held them against his chest. “I had dreams of writing something of redeeming social value. I had it in me to create the greatest blood-and-guts story ever written, but”—he bit his lip and swung around—“we all make compromises.”

“Marrying me was a
compromise
?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” He tossed the menus down and pressed his palms against his forehead, pushing hard. “I was talking about the cookery book. You know, Mum was right when she said that—”

An electrician came through the door, spotted us and immediately backed out.

“What did Benny’s mum say?”

He paced away from me, then back. “Only, Ellie, that you are supersensitive.”

“You can’t hurt me.” How
dare
she! I smiled at a point six inches above Ben’s head. Only the tensing of the facial
muscles kept the tears from sloshing down my face. “And I’m not surprised; such is the usual comment of the superinsensitive.”

Ben let his hands fall. He leaned, weary and spent, against the counter. “I wanted you to love my mother! Haven’t I always showered your relations with courtesy and kindness?”

“I suppose you have.”

“And they’re not easy to like, excepting Freddy.”

“I don’t know about that.”

A sigh. “Let’s not try and be funny, Ellie.”

“I’m serious.” A pause, as I realigned the facial muscles. “One of them left you money, didn’t he?”

As soon as I said them, I wanted to draw the words back. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and weep that I was sorry. But when he curled his lips and dusted his hands on a dish towel, as though ridding himself of my touch, I took a step backward instead.

“At last we have it,” Ben said. Every word a knife thrust. “You are suggesting I married you because I wasn’t content with my half of the inheritance. Greedy me wanted yours too.”

“Not at all,” I replied, digging my grave deeper. “I am suggesting
I
married
you
for
your
half.”

And with that I walked, rigid as a tin soldier, from the room.

As I left Abigail’s, I could hear Ben on the phone snarling about a case of goblets which had failed to get delivered. To hear him talk, he would be reduced to serving drinks in jam jars. For some, life went on. I made it back to Merlin’s Court, without coming undone, by means of adding up all the ways I had violated chapter six of
A Blow By Blow Approach to Fair Fighting
. But it was downhill the minute I entered the kitchen. Magdalene was having a bath, there was no one to save me from myself. I did a disgusting, revolting, unutterably vile thing. Opening up the refrigerator, I piled a plate with every fattening food I could find. When the plate was almost as tall as I, up I went to the bedroom, where I locked the door, climbed into my wardrobe and crouched down with my prey. But are we ever completely alone? Unseen?

As I chewed, my clothes spoke in rustling whispers. She’ll have to let out my waist. My sleeves will be too tight again. Back to a quadruple-D cup.

When the plate was empty, I buried my face in my arms and cried. My clothes weren’t the only ones that knew the truth about me. I knew: I had a fat mind.

Magdalene commented on my red eyes when I went downstairs, but I explained that I had recently had a cold and was given to the occasional relapse. To change the subject, I brought up her marital situation. She was adamant in refusing to contact Poppa or allowing me to do so.

Under normal circumstances, I would have taken the law into my own hands, but I was swept along on a tide of inertia. Besides, I had Freddy on my hands. He arrived at the house midafternoon, murmuring in a weakened voice that his meals would be cold if I had to carry them to the cottage. Once in the door, he slumped in the kitchen rocking chair, and there he remained all that day, defying doctor’s orders that he return to work. Amazingly, Magdalene had taken a fancy to Freddy. Not to bother, she told me, she would get his meals. And she would not listen when I told her she had already elected to do too much. By that evening, the china cabinets had been given a good going through; everything was rearranged so I would never find my egg cups again. The hanging plants were pruned down to stubble. The window ledge was lined with statues. And every flat surface, bar the floor, was covered with doilies. I became convinced that her black holdall contained a false bottom.

When Ben returned from Abigail’s that evening, we were frigidly polite to each other. He made only a token protest when I said his mother was cooking dinner. Later I was to wonder if perhaps one of us might have tried to bridge the row, had the timing not been all wrong. But his mother, Freddy, my binge, and Abigail’s premiere crowded in on us. Immediately after the Welsh rarebit, which he hardly touched, Ben took himself off to the study. When I peeked through the crack in the doorway later, he was asleep in the leather chair.

That night we lay in bed with an imaginary bolster running from pillow to post. Sometimes a foot would brush mine and I would roll away, clinging to the edge of the bed. Sometimes my foot would stray and he wouldn’t move
a muscle, compelling me to roll off the bed again to ensure he thought I thought he was the one doing the straying.

Wednesday morning at three o’clock I awoke from the worst nightmare I had experienced since the homicidal hamburgers. This time there had been no visual effects, only a vast blank screen and an offside voice whispering, “Someone’s going to die. Guess who? Guess who?”