“No, it’s naught to do with this little fellow.” The milkman attempted a smile that turned into a grimace. “It’s just that I get these pains in my chest sometimes. Nothing but a bit of indigestion that goes as quick as it comes. A spoonful of bicarbonate mixed in with half a cup of milk always fixes me up a treat.”
“Are you sure you haven’t been overdoing things, Mr. Babcock?” I immediately realized the impertinence of posing such a question to a brand-new bridegroom.
“It’s more likely I haven’t been getting enough exercise,” he informed me valiantly.
“Oh, dear!” I buried my face over my teacup.
“Ever since my old dog, Rex—a real corker Rex was—died on me last spring, I haven’t been getting out for walks like I once did, and that’s a fact, true as I’m sitting here, Mrs. Haskell.”
“What a shame.”
“And I’m the sort that’s not myself without a dog at my heels.”
“Really?” I was glad to see that Mr. Babcock appeared to have recovered from his little bout, but uncertain how to respond to the hopeful look he was now bestowing on our Hound of the Chittervilles.
“As I understand it, Mrs. Haskell, you’re on the lookout for a permanent home for Cliffy here.”
“I’d certainly hate to think of him panhandling on the street,” I agreed warily. “But I can’t foist him on you, Mr. Babcock. For one thing, he’s a walking demolition squad, and secondly, in talking to Sylvia at the library, I got the distinct impression she doesn’t like dogs.”
“Don’t you believe it.” The milkman poured some of his tea into the saucer and held it out to the animal with a besotted smile. “Women talk that kind of rubbish, but I’ve never known one that wasn’t a softie for a hard-luck story. Believe you me, the missus will be dotty about this young man here five minutes after I walk him in the door.”
Remembering his new bride, I had my doubts. “You’re not afraid Sylvia will order you both out of the house and be on the phone to a locksmith before you can start apologizing?” This scenario appeared tame to me as I watched Heathcliff crunch down on the porcelain saucer.
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Haskell!”
Easy for Mr. Babcock to say! I couldn’t help but worry about my next meeting with Sylvia. She was the sort who burst into tears if a fly buzzed in her vicinity, who was forever poking at her hair to make sure that every pin curl stayed in place. But on the other hand, it would be marvelous to greet Ben with the news that Heathcliff was already on his way to a new home.
“Are you sure, Mr. Babcock, you’re doing the right thing?” Even as I spoke I was rummaging around in one of the drawers for a piece of cord to tie around the dog’s thick leather collar.
“We’ve got some good years ahead of us, him and me.” Draining his cup, Mr. Babcock took the makeshift lead from my hands and tied a solid knot before picking up the milk crate with his free hand and heading with his new soulmate for the garden door. “I feel like a bit of a grave robber, I do. But I hope that librarian woman, if she’s looking down from above, knows this little lad will be well looked after.”
“You’re a life-saver, Mr. Babcock,” I gushed heartily.
Thus I stood waving as man and dog set off across the courtyard. Just before climbing into the milk van, Heathcliff looked back at me, cocked his head as if to say “So long, chum” (or was that chump?), bared his teeth in a smile and … that was that. Closing the door, I collected the dustpan and broom and had just finished sweeping up the broken vase in the hall and setting the chair back on its remaining three legs, when Gerta came downstairs with the twins tugging on her alpine skirts.
“Good morning to you, Frau Haskell.” With the sunlight bursting in through the windows to gild the hair plaited around her head, our new au pair looked like a conventional nanny. I guessed her age to be between fifty and sixty, with a strawberries-and-cream complexion that any young girl might have envied. “You see, I meet the little lambkins?”
“Why we got a new mummy?” Tam came trotting across the flagstones to grasp me around the knees and peer up at me with a face that was growing uncannily like his father’s. The same blue-green eyes, the same silky thick lashes and tumbled dark hair.
“She’s not your new mummy, darling!” I scooped my son up into my arms and pressed my face against his peachy-soft cheek. “Her name is Gerta and she’s going to help me look after you.”
“We like him. Don’t us, Tam?” Abbey’s curls shone like sunbeams as she took hold of the other woman’s hand and jigged up and down.
“Her, darling,” I said. “Gerta is a ‘her,’ and I’m so glad you’re pleased she’s come to stay with us for a while.”
“This morning, Frau Haskell, I give you names and addresses of the references you contact, does that satisfy!”
“There’s no rush,” I said, “seeing that our mutual friend Jill recommended you so highly.”
“You must check me up!” Gerta shook her head with enough vehemence to knock one of her plaits down and set it swinging like a bell rope. “These days it does not do to be too trusting. For all you know, I could be a bad can of worms.”
“I doubt that.” Ben’s voice broke in upon us as he came down the stairs. He looked like a study in black and white in his dark suit and crisply starched shirt.
“You are one of the few kind men in this world, Herr Haskell!” Gerta’s gratitude showed in her glowing eyes as she pinned up the errant plait. I was immediately flooded with a profound satisfaction. Two lives salvaged as the result of the Haskells’ intervention. Ben and I were undoubtedly quite a team.
And moments later I was assured of our domestic bliss when he bent to kiss my lips as I finished telling him how Heathcliff had landed on all four paws in finding a new home. “You’re a miracle worker, Ellie. Why don’t you walk out with me to the car and we’ll talk about how you would like to celebrate your birthday tomorrow?”
“Darling, I would love to”—I handed Tam into his arms—“but I think I just heard Mrs. Malloy coming in the back way. Gerta will go with you so the twins can say bye-bye to Daddy. See you tonight, Ben.”
Typical husband! He stood rooted to the spot in mute reproach as I whisked around and headed down the hall. Even as I entered the kitchen, I knew he still hadn’t moved and that Abbey, sensing the moment was less than idyllic, had stopped jigging up and down. What Ben didn’t understand was that I had to explain Gerta to Mrs. Malloy. My faithful daily was liable to get her powdered nose out of joint upon learning I would now have less need to impose on her good offices.
“Morning, Mrs. H!” The words were dourly spoken and I immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had been found out already.
“It is a nice day.” I resisted the cowardly impulse to babble on about the lovely month of May. Mrs. Malloy is famed among her colleagues and clientele as a woman who takes no back chat from anyone. So far I had not entirely mastered the knack of holding my own with her. Part of her mystique was linked to the fact that she invariably turned up for work in a fur coat and sequinned toque, with her feet squeezed into impossibly tiny shoes with rhinestone clips and four-inch heels. “Nobody talks down to me when I’m on me stilts,” Mrs. M. had informed me balefully on the morning she conducted the interview set up by her to determine whether I met her standards of employment. And it was weeks into our “trial marriage” before I saw a friendly gleam flicker in her neon-lidded, heavily mascaraed eyes, let alone a smile make a crack in the rouge she laid on with a trowel.
She certainly was not smiling now as she removed her chapeau to reveal the full glory of her jet-black hair with its trademark two inches of white roots. “This is the life, Mrs. H.” She tossed the hat on the kitchen table, along with her supply bag, in which she kept a bottle of gin for emergencies, such as buffing up a piece of badly tarnished silver. “One bloody upset after another.”
Common sense should have told me she couldn’t have got wind of Gerta’s arrival on the scene, but while scurrying over to c
heck whether the tea was still warm in the pot so that I might ply her with a cup, I began apologizing for having had the temerity to hire an au pair without first consulting her.
“A what do you call her?” Mrs. Malloy started to raise a painted eyebrow, wearily gave up the attempt, and sank onto the rocking chair in front of the hearth.
“It’s a fancy name for a nanny.” I narrowly missed tripping over her black fishnet legs in my haste to place the teacup in her hands.
“What? One of those foreign ones?” She said the “F” word with obvious distaste. “Some young girl who can’t get out two words of English without parlez-vousing, who’s got bright-yellow hair down to her backside and has to be shown how to turn on the kitchen tap?”
“This one is very nice!” Glancing up at Tobias, who had still not forgiven Gerta for bringing a dog into the house, I dared him to meow a contradiction. “She’s a little older than the usual au pair.”
“That won’t stop her!” Mrs. Malloy smacked her glossy butterfly lips in grim satisfaction.
“Stop her from what?” I attempted a laugh. “Making off with the children?”
“Making eyes at your husband is more like.” She set the cup down in the saucer with a rattle that I could see was due to the fact that her hands were shaking. “But I’m not here to judge you, Mrs. H., we’ve all sinned. And I’ve never been one to throw stones … even before I found out …”
“Whatever is the matter?” I grabbed the cup away from her before she could drop it and watched in distress as she dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her black taffeta sleeve.
“Now, don’t you go getting worked up, Mrs. H., I’m the one what has to live with the shame. I’m the one who will be pointed at in the street when word gets out.”
“Word about what?” I was bewildered.
“That I’m …” A sob went down the wrong way.
“Yes?” I prodded when she started breathing again.
“That I’m expecting.”
“Expecting what?” My mind gyrated wildly between the possibility of a visitor from Mars, to a summons to meet the Queen.
“The same thing any woman means when she says she’s expecting.” Mrs. Malloy reared up her black-and-white head and fixed her raccoon eyes on my face. “A kid on the way, that’s what I’m talking about! The flesh of me loins, the fruit of my lapse from grace in the back seat of a Rover.”
“Isn’t it possible you’re mistaken?” Dragging a chair away from the kitchen table, I dropped down on it with a wallop that reverberated right through my skull. Mrs. Malloy was in her early sixties.
“Mistaken?” She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “How can I be bloody well mistaken, when the lad’s coming up for forty? Sometimes I worry about you, Mrs. H., you’re off in cloud cuckoo land half the time. What I’ve been trying to tell you is that I’m expecting a visit from George—the son nobody here knows about, because he was grown and gone when I moved to Chitterton Fells and I never thought to mention him. An unnatural mother, that’s what the muckrakers will call me.”
“Surely not.”
Mrs. Malloy ignored my attempt to soothe. “Haven’t heard a dicky bird from George in years. Then last night I get a phone call from him. Seems he’s getting married to a very posh young lady and the two of them want to come down here for a kiss and cuddle from the old mum.”
“Well, I think that’s lovely.”
“You won’t be singing that tune much longer,” Mrs. Malloy said icily, “not when I tell you the name of George’s fiancée.”
“What difference can it make to me who she is?” I began bustling about, laying the Beatrix Potter china for the twins’ breakfast. “Buck up, Mrs. Malloy. You’re getting yourself upset over what should be a happy event. You’re not losing a son, you’re gaining a daughter.”
“It’s you what’s going to be upset, Mrs. H.!” She tottered onto her high-heeled feet, squared her padded shoulders, and looked me straight in the eye. “I’ve been trying to break it to you gently; but I suppose it’s best to say it straight out and watch you fall apart. My son George has got himself engaged to your cousin Vanessa.”
Chapter
4
Mrs. Malloy must surely have had a few nips of gin before coming to Merlin’s Court. Her son George could not possibly be betrothed to my nemesis! To my indecently gorgeous cousin! She who had been a thorn in my flesh since we first met at the age of six and she asked me whether I was a boy or a girl.
Vanessa, the successful fashion model and quintessential femme fatale, had only once in her life looked at me with a flicker of envy in her luminous, sherry-coloured eyes. That was on the glorious occasion when I announced my engagement to Ben. But she had very quickly weaseled around that weakness by informing me that a man of Ben’s looks and charm could be marrying me only for my money.
It was hard for me not to blame Mrs. Malloy for the hideous turn of events that would land Vanessa on my doorstep after a halcyon period of absence.
“According to George,” his aggrieved parent said as she plunked the kettle down on the cooker, emptying half its contents in a shower that watered the plants in the greenhouse window, “they met at some party or other in London. It was love at first sight.”
“Your son must be a real catch.” I stared morosely out into the garden, where Gerta was playing chasing games with Abbey and Tarn, the object of which appeared to be who could fall over fastest. It should have been a day-brightener, given my now-jaundiced view of life, that she hadn’t absconded with my children to parts unknown for the fell purpose of holding them captive until they learned how to yodel. But I had trouble working my face up into a smile. At the back of my mind was the conviction that if Mrs. Malloy had kept a closer eye on her offspring, Vanessa could never have got her claws into him.
“George isn’t what you’d call handsome.” Mrs. M. unearthed a bottle of gin from the supply bag and poured a slug into her tea. “When he was a few months old I took him to a plastic surgeon, but there wasn’t nothing as could be done short of turning his face inside out. The poor little bugger took after his father, who if I remember rightly was my second … or it could have been my third … husband.” On this mournful pronouncement, Mrs. Malloy came over to the table with the teacups and flopped onto a chair. “I changed George’s surname to coincide with mine when I got married for the last time, and this is the thanks I get for doing right by the lad. He gets himself engaged to a woman who’s bound to look down her snooty nose at me.”
Here was an interesting thought. Why would Vanessa, the ultimate snob, have stooped to such a misalliance? Her mother, my aunt Astrid—of the gold pince-nez and the pedigree of a prize Pekingese—would hardly be falling over herself to place the announcement in The Times.
“If Vanessa isn’t marrying George for his looks”—I picked up a teacup and stood tinkering with the spoon—“he must have sex appeal to spare.”
“Not so as I ever noticed.” Mrs. Malloy pursed her butterfly lips, the better to blow on her tea. “What he does have is cash. Pots of it!”
“Really?” The unpleasant image presented itself of Vanessa appearing on the doorstep of Merlin’s Court with an engagement ring the size of the Rock of Gibraltar on her finger.
“I have to give George his due”—Mrs. Malloy poured another swig of gin into her teacup—“he’s done well for himself, all right. Him and a friend opened an exercise equipment business some years back and he’s been raking in the lolly ever since. The last time I had a Christmas card from George he mentioned as how he was about to open his third factory.”
“Vanessa finds that sort of thing incredibly sexy. She loves nothing better than to skip barefoot through a forest of crisp, crackling fifty-pound notes and to inhale the sensual fragrance of Avarice upon the wind while the birds in the trees tweet ‘Spend! Spend! Spend!’ ” I failed in my attempt to speak lightly.
“Well, you certainly know how to put the finishing touches on my happiness.” Mrs. Malloy dab
bed at her eyes with a purple hankie and gusted a sigh that toppled Tobias off the Welsh dresser. “No, don’t say another word, Mrs. H., it’s clear you blame me for giving George ideas above his station and—”
“Rubbish.” I took the teacup out of her hands and endeavoured to hold them steady. “I’m being absolutely hateful about all this. The fact that Vanessa and I never got along doesn’t mean she won’t make your son a marvelous wife and that you won’t come to love her dearly as a daughter-in-law.”
“That’ll be the day!” Mrs. Malloy was forced to resort again to the purple hankie. “The time I met her at your wedding, the woman treated me like I was the hired help.”
“That’s the way she treats everyone,” I soothed, “but let’s hope she makes an exception with George and that the fire he has ignited in her heart will thaw the ice in her veins. Everyone has their good points, and I’m sure that if I rack my brains all day and all night, I will remember some instance of Vanessa’s lovableness.”
“You’re breaking my heart!” Mrs. Malloy returned the hankie to the pocket of her black taffeta frock and pressed a hand loaded with rings against her substantial bosom. “This is my punishment for keeping quiet about George.”
“We all have our little secrets.” I turned away and began filling up the sink with hot, sudsy water. Watching one of the saucers float upon the surface like a survivor from a shipwreck, I thought about Eligibility Escorts and how much I would dislike having the commercial aspect of my first meeting with Ben surface. The fact that he never cashed the check I wrote for the privilege of having him escort me to the family reunion at Merlin’s Court and pass me doting looks guaranteed to turn Vanessa as green as the watercress in the sandwiches wouldn’t stop the tongues from wagging in Chitterton Fells. And wasn’t it possible that in the process, the certainty of Ben’s loving me devotedly would become tarnished?
Trying to shake off my unease along with the suds from my hands, I told myself that the likelihood of my past catching up with me was infinitesimal. And then it hit me, like a spray of soapy water, that in the space of the last dozen or so hours I had been made aware of the inexorable link between what was and what is.
How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams Page 5
