Femmes Fatal

by Dorothy Cannell

“You have friends, Bunty.”

  “I mean, financially. Fully Female is down the tubes. And Li can be generous as Midas or cheap as old Nick, depending on which way the wind blows. He’ll blow hundreds of pounds on a tie, but won’t throw out a crust of bread. He’s always showered me with credit cards but now it wouldn’t surprise me if he cut me off without a farthing.”

  “You’ll have to get yourself—”

  “A good lawyer?” Tears splashed from her blue eyes, but incredibly, she was laughing too. “You know, Ellie, a cockney brat who grows up dancing for pennies learns a thing or two about survival.”

  Home sweet home. Freddy and Mrs. Malloy had returned to their own hearths. The afternoon had dwindled to dusk and I was feeding the twins late, I am ashamed to say, without putting one hundred percent of myself into the task. Removing Abbey’s empty bottle before she swallowed it whole, I rubbed her pink terry-cloth back and deposited her in the bouncer chair.

  “That’s my good girl!”

  “Goo!”

  “And now for Mummy’s big boy.” While Tobias prowled the kitchen sniffing the milky air, I settled with Tam in the rocking chair, tucked a nappy under his chin and whispered, “Bon appétit!” Ben, all being well, would not be home until late, which would give me time to accomplish something with the day. Ridiculous this feeling that women have—that they must present the mister with a report card at the end of the day and request that he initial it if satisfied. Behaviorists can say what they like about such things being environmentally based, I know it’s a matter of biology. When the caveman came home to find the place still littered with bones from breakfast, he wanted to know why, but don’t ask him about the bear he dragged home, whether he trapped it or won it playing pebbleante poker with the chaps.

  The rocking was peaceful and Tam was taking his bottle with the methodical zeal that characterized him, but my heart was heavy. I had failed not only myself, but Mrs. Malloy and the rest of womankind in getting involved with Fully Female. A sense of powerlessness and doom settled upon me. Bunty’s Aunt Et was right: those who make sex their idol shall pay a horrible price. Look at Mrs. Huffnagle and poor Norman the Doorman. And Mrs. Malloy—turned into a zombie by her Svengali. And now the founder of Fully Female—dumped! They had paid the price, but who was to say when enough pain, enough blood was enough?

  “You should be ashamed of your mother,” I informed both Tam and Abbey. “What sort of values is she teaching you? And goodness only knows what Daddy will say if—when—he finds out about Fully Female.”

  “Oooh!” Abbey pressed a hand to her rosebud mouth.

  “Exactly.” Holding Tam against my shoulder, I massaged his blue terry back, while giving my impersonation of Daddy on the warpath. “ ‘By Jupiter, Ellie, what am I to you? An object, a toy to be manipulated and mauled for your pleasure, picked up and discarded at will? I don’t think I have ever felt so cheap, so utterly used!’ ”

  As soon as I had my wee precious ones tucked into their cots and prayers said, I returned to the kitchen and ransacked the cabinet drawers for the Fully Female manual. Damn, Freddy must have had his disgusting paws on it. Ah, here it was under the toaster.

  Hands trembling, I fully intended to tear it into shreds and burn the thing, if it would burn—somewhere I had read that tomes of witchcraft were flame-resistant, and these pages certainly had a mind of their own. The manual flipped open to Chapter Five.

  Confess, Fellow Females, how many of you have been making do with love in the dark? What a thrill, huh? Every so often, just when you least expect it, this faceless nighttime creature gropes its way out of the swamp to feast upon your unseen flesh …

  “Ughhhh!” I was poised, ready to drop the book, when a knock sounded at the garden door. Unable to move, I squeaked, “Come in!” And lo and behold, the Reverend Eudora Spike entered my bawdy house. “What a lovely surprise!”

  Every hair, along with her decisive smile, in place, the new vicar stood holding a covered casserole dish in her kid-gloved hands. “Excuse my not phoning first, but …”

  “You’re so right.” I blushed. “The best part of having neighbours is never knowing when they will pop in.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner hour.”

  “Heavens, no! Ben works evenings and I was just indulging in a little inspirational reading.” Idiot! She would ask the name of the book.

  “How nice.”

  “Do let me take …”—I could hardly ask for the casserole without sounding grabby—“ … your coat.”

  “Thank you, but I won’t stay more than a moment.”

  “Oh, but surely a cup of tea?” Dropping the Fully Female manual behind the toaster, I breathed more easily, but the same couldn’t be said of Eudora; she appeared as stilted as our conversation.

  “Well, if you insist, Ellie. And I do hope”—she held out the casserole—“that you don’t distrust, as our youngsters say, geeks bearing gifts.”

  “What an idea! But I should be bringing you a house-warming gift.”

  She returned my smile. “Please accept this as a heart-warming gift. The pleasure being all mine. Your husband was so kind as to send over those delicious biscuits, I will be sending him a note. I should have done so before, but things have been … rather at sixes and sevens.”

  My eyes fell. I was picturing the anatomically correct gingerbread men.

  “This afternoon Gladstone poached this salmon and, inevitably, five minutes before tea he received a phone call from … someone and had to leave unexpectedly, so I thought I would bring it over in hopes that you might enjoy it—if not tonight, perhaps tomorrow.”

  “How kind.” There was something decidedly fishy about all this. Why couldn’t she have saved the salmon until she and Gladstone, reunited, could partake of its coral-colored flesh? Mercy me, I was beginning to think like the Fully Female manual. And, if my eyes did not deceive me, Eudora was glancing over toward the toaster.

  “How do you like the parish?” I bunged the casserole in the fridge, knocking over a jar of mayonnaise in the process.

  “Very well, thank you.” Mrs. Spike peeled off her gloves and unbuttoned her coat. “My, but Chitterton Fells seems a busy place. If the women aren’t working outside the home, they are off at this health place … Fully something.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, sidling toward her. “The name does ring a bell. Fully Female … I think that’s it.”

  “You don’t belong yourself?”

  “Eudora, as you can imagine”—I was doing the cat’s cradle with my hands—“I am run off my feet with my four-month-old twins, and my cat Tobias is not adjusting well to being displaced.” Said feline, hearing his name taken in vain, mewed loudly and swiped a pile of nappies off the work surface.

  “And we mustn’t forget your young and, unless appearances are deceiving, virile spouse.” The vicar folded her regulation navy blue coat over a chair and smoothed her helmet of hair. “I remember how extra demanding Gladstone was of my time following the birth of our daughter Brigitta. In other words, Ellie, I would have thought you a prime candidate for this Fully Female organization.” Her protuberant hazel eyes bored holes into my soul. Oh, dear God, I thought. The salmon is a sham. She knows about Freddy’s masquerade, and she is here because she thinks I put him up to it.

  “All right.” I flopped down in the chair across from her and braced my elbows on the table. “I confess! I am a card-carrying member of Fully Female, but I had no hand whatsoever in my cousin’s impudent charade and though I understand fully—hateful word—why you may well want to see the twit brought before the tribunals of Rome, or rather Canterbury, I do beg you to remember Freddy is an impressionable thirty-year-old who does have his good points. He is fond of children, kind to animals, and does not eat red meat to excess.”

  Alas, the vicar looked as immovable as any of the granite monuments in St. Anselm’s churchyard. “Ellie, I am sorry to say this …”

  “Yes?” My knees were doing a drum roll.
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br />   “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Well, I do grasp that your ne’er-do-well cousin’s name is Freddy and that he’s been up to some prank, but what that has to do with me I have no idea. You have to understand, Ellie, I am a cleric, not the public executioner.”

  “Ah!” In a wild impetuosity, born of my prevailing neuroticism, I had thrown a cousin and baby-sitter to the wolves. And much as I would have liked to leave the subject where it stood, I couldn’t, lest Eudora suspect some criminal activity on Freddy’s part the next time the poorbox came up short.

  “Won’t you take a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you,” she said, as she held up a capable hand, “and please don’t look so worried.”

  Did this mean we were still friends? Head bent, I recited the dreadful tale. “It was like this, you see. Freddy got wind of my having joined Fully Female and at once the possibilities for mischief were infinite—given the peculiar way his mind works. He also knew of your arrival on the Chitterton Fells scene and …”

  “Yes?”

  “He appeared at Fully Female headquarters dressed up as you, in a black hat with a veil, and led the Marriage Makeover session in prayer. Oh, Your Reverence”—I lifted my tear-spattered face—“I felt violated for you. He had us all join hands …”

  “For the Lord’s Prayer?”

  What a dreamer. “Not on your life. Freddy closed his eyes, swayed in his chair, and urged us to let the love flow. And when we had reached a state of oneness, he told us to open our hearts one to the other by turning to the person on our right and telling her what we most disliked about her. Oh, it was awful! Mrs. Wardle, the librarian, told the girl from The Bake Shop that she hated her for having hair that bounced. Mrs. Sturgess told Mrs. Olsen that she was sick to death of hearing about her multiple orga—… you know … and Mrs. Best told Mrs. Rose, who owns the dress boutique on Market Street, that she should be ashamed of her mirrors and it was a wonder more women weren’t found hanging from garment hooks in the dressing rooms. The latter I sympathised with. Mrs. Rose’s clothes always suit their hangers far better than they do me, but I didn’t open my mouth to say Boo! let alone denounce Freddy. He works with my husband Ben at the restaurant, and I was so afraid if those women knew what he had pulled, they would blackball Abigail’s.”

  Reverend Spike’s hazel eyes prompted me to continue.

  “As a mother—no, let’s make that a coward—I didn’t say a word to Freddy until I got him alone.”

  “I see.” The vicar stood, but instead of heading for the garden door, she crossed the room to the Aga cooker and turned on the kettle. “I see that this calls for a cup of tea.”

  “You’re not furious?”

  “No.” She reached for the copper caddy and turned to me with it clenched in those strong hands. “I’m amused and …”

  “What?”

  “Grateful.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m glad that you could be real with me.”

  “But …”

  “Most people, in their everyday dealings with the clergy, are not themselves. They see the image, not the person.” Reverend Spike—Eudora—got busy warming the pot.

  “I think I know what you mean,” I ventured. “When I was a little girl, I didn’t think nuns wore knickers.”

  “And I didn’t think nuns were women.”

  “You thought they were men?”

  “I didn’t think they were either. I thought they were just … nuns.” Ellie was returning to the table with a tray, laden with cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, and teapot. The window above the sink was dark as a blank television screen and Eudora had to shoo Tobias off her chair before sitting down. A cosiness had joined us in the kitchen, as real as a third person, as familiar as a friend. For the first time that day, I felt safe from the encroaching evil of Fully Female.

  “Ellie, I had an ulterior motive in coming to see you.” Eudora passed me the milk.

  “Tell me.”

  “This isn’t easy.” She stirred her tea. “But you came clean with me, so I suppose the least I can do is return the favour. I …” She added two spoonfuls of sugar. “I want you to tell me if you think I might find the tenets of Fully Female beneficial in … restructuring my marriage.”

  “Oh!”

  “This afternoon I drove very slowly down to that place; I was right behind your car all the way. I saw you turn in at the gates and right then and there lost my nerve, or rather came to my senses. I couldn’t go before a group of people, some of them my parishioners, and pour out my heart. The counsellor cannot seek counsel. She must have the answers, not be seeking them. But as I drove back home, Ellie, your face was in front of me.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t lift my cup.

  “When I met you on Monday, I was frankly surprised. I had expected the woman who had captured Reverend Foxworth’s heart to be, not to mince matters, a vamp. But what I saw was a fresh-faced country girl who seemed my kind of person. Someone who wouldn’t always get it right first time and, therefore, might know something about compassion. So, driving back to the vicarage this afternoon, I came up with a compromise. I could not join Fully Female, but I could pick the brains of one of its members and perhaps”—her eyes strayed toward the toaster—“perhaps even borrow the manual.”

  “No!” I rattled my cup over onto its side so that it lay in a saucer of tea.

  Slowly, she got to her feet. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t! Eudora, I am speaking as your friend. Do not dabble in the workings of this heinous organization!”

  Even more slowly she resumed her seat. “Why, Ellie! You make it sound like the haunt of the devil.”

  “That was never the founder’s intention. Believe me, Bunty Wiseman is a bit of a flake, but a nice person. Yet somehow her little venture has gone horribly awry. My first tip-off was that Jonas, who does the garden here, ran away from home, terrorized by the advances of Mrs. Pickle. Now two people are dead, a friend of mine is reduced to a lovesick zombie, and Bunty herself, who tried to turn other women into doting dolts, now realizes she has been the biggest doting dolt of all. Her husband Lionel Wiseman has fallen prey to the machinations of … well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm to name names, seeing the engagement is about to be made official …”

  “Yes?”

  “The lady in question is Miss Gladys Thorn, your former church organist.”

  “The woman from Gladstone’s past!” Eudora gripped the table with such force that the milk jug and sugar bowl jumped up and down on the tray. “This doesn’t make sense. I know there is still something between my husband and that woman. He has not been himself since we came upon her in the church. She was at the organ, thumping out some hymn or other, and the moment Gladstone’s eyes met hers and she uttered a squeal of joy, I knew my thirty-year marriage had hit a bump in the road. Then, when I was in the study, I heard them out in the hall. There was no doubt she wanted to pick up where they had left off, while he, poor lamb, was resisting with all his might. I knew I had to get rid of her, so I sacked them both—Miss Thorn and Mrs. Pickle—so it would look more like a new broom sweeping clean.”

  “Miss Thorn said you accused her of frequenting the Methodist Church.”

  “What I said was that someone, Mrs. Melrose, I believe, had mentioned seeing her going into Unity Methodist, and I wondered if she might not be happier serving that congregation.”

  “And when the deed was done, you felt awful.” I righted my cup and poured us both a fresh cup of tea.

  “That nice Mrs. Pickle!”

  “If it’s any consolation, Rowland was dying to sack her, but he—”

  “Don’t say it! He was too kind.” Eudora looked at me with the wounded eyes of an early martyr roasting on a spit on one of St. Anselm’s stained-glass windows. “Everything has changed. Last night Gladstone burned the treacle pudding, and breakfast this morning was a disaster. Only one
sausage, no bacon, and the merest dab of scrambled egg.”

  “But surely,” I said, indulging in a teaspoon … and a half … of sugar, something I never do except in times of stress, “surely if Miss Thorn is marrying Lionel Wiseman, your problems are over.”

  Eudora shook her head. “Ellie! That’s a smoke screen, it has to be. I tell you the woman is in love with my husband.”

  “Possibly, but what you don’t understand is …”

  I was hunting around for a nice way to say what Mrs. Malloy had phrased so pithily—“Gladys Thorn would throw her legs in the air and give the V sign to anything in trousers”—when a knock sounded at the garden door. And who should come gliding in, but Mrs. M herself.

  She had my purple caftan strung over one arm, but otherwise she was all in black, from the supply bag in her hand to the turban on her head. Even her damson lipstick had a blackish cast, as if it had grown old and mouldy in her service. Her complexion, robbed of its rouge, was the colour of death, and her eyes still had that faraway haze.

  “Good morning, Mrs. H.”

  With a sideways glance at Eudora I started to stammer that it was six in the evening, but Mrs. Malloy had gone sleepwalking into the pantry, the way a character in a farce will walk into a cupboard thinking it is the exit. Several awkward seconds later, she reappeared and without looking left or right, coasted past Eudora and myself to vanish through the hall door.

  “And that”—I smiled gently upon Eudora Spike—“is the work of Fully Female. Are you sure you still want to borrow the manual?”

  When Ben, the evening shadow on his chin matching the darkness at the window, came home from a hard day at the restaurant, he found me seated in the drawing room which was beginning to seem more than ever like a museum documenting the lives of an unknown couple living sometime B.C.—Before Children. These cream silk walls and Queen Anne furnishings had as much to do with my present lifestyle as my Aunt Astrid had to do with modelling naughty undies at lingerie parties.

  Loosening his tie, my husband crossed the rose-and-peacock Persian carpet to stand gazing, not at me, but at the portrait above the mantelpiece—Abigail of the auburn hair and periwinkle eyes, the Edwardian mistress of Merlin’s Court.