First there had been the arrival of Gerta, at the behest of my former flatmate Jill, and now there was Vanessa, not actually on my doorstep, but soon to arrive in an ebony swoop of mink coat. Stepping back from the ominous gloog-gloog of the sink emptying itself, I wrung my hands on the dish towel and wondered: Was it too far-fetched to picture myself colliding with Mrs. Swabucher, the owner of Eligibility Escorts, in the village High Street? Mrs. Swabucher, with her hair tinted a delicate shade of rose to match her tulle-swirled hats, was a figure impossible to miss. Who wouldn’t gawk, were this miracle of corseting and cosmetics to stop traffic by dashing across the road, with a speed that belied her advancing years, to envelop me in her flamingo-pink feather boa and cry: “Ellie Haskell! How could I forget you—the success story of all time at Eligibility Escorts! And how is that lovely young man you rented for a weekend and ended up marrying?”
A chill invaded the kitchen to worm its way into my soul, but the cause was innocent enough. Gerta had come in through the garden door with Abbey and Tam in tow. And a merry little trio they made! Abbey dancing around the woman as if she were a pine tree straight from the mountain slopes and Tam squealing gleefully as he jigged up and down.
“Gerta, I show you my choo-choo train!”
“Soon, my little munchkin! But first we have the breakfast of cereal that goes popsy-daisy!”
“Ja!” shrieked my darlings.
It was a joy to realize my offspring were both so well adjusted that they did not feel the need to rush over to me and bury their shy little faces in my skirts. Gerta was proving to be a treasure. She did not even turn white as her frilly apron when Tobias pounced out of nowhere to take a shortcut through her legs to the hall door, and a friendly smile appeared on her apple-dumpling face when I introduced Mrs. Malloy.
“It is a pleasure to meet you!” Gerta’s knees buckled into a curtsy of sorts, due to the twins swinging Tarzanfashion on her arms. And, taking this obeisance as her due, Mrs. Malloy put her best smile forward.
“At least you speak English, not some heathen gobbledygook; so as long as you don’t go forgetting who’s senior around here, we should muck along all right.”
“Thank you.” Gerta lost a few of the points she had gained by adding, “Mrs. Mop.”
“Malloy,” I said quickly.
“It is a good name. And I do mean to do the good job in my work here. Never do these little children know my life is ruined by my so-wicked husband, who forgets the joy I give him with my apple strudel.” Gerta blinked tears from her eyes and smoothed down her apron in a businesslike fashion. “This is the new day starting! Now I stuff my broken heart down my jumper and get busy. How do you like, Frau Haskell, if after I feed the munchkins I let them help me make the Geneva butter cake and my yodel-hey-hey torte with the chocolate and black cherries and the kirsch and the clotted cream?”
Oh, my heavens! What evil had I admitted to my home? I felt my waistline expand as I pictured weeks of being subjected to such caloric barbarism. Was there any way to safely rid myself of this demon nanny?
Unaware of my alarm, the twins settled happily down at the kitchen table and Gerta got out a bottle of milk from the fridge, whereupon Mrs. Malloy apologized for its not being fresh-squeezed, seeing as how we had stopped keeping cows after one of them attacked the postman. Sensing that I might make myself more useful elsewhere, I went upstairs, wallowed in a nice hot bath, got dressed, made my bed, and on going to straighten up the nursery found it all shipshape. After which I proceeded to spend an industrious half-hour wondering what on earth to do with the rest of my day.
When I last looked, there had been a basket of ironing to be done, but something told me that Mrs. Malloy, not to be outdone by Gerta’s Teutonic efficiency, would already be dashing away with the smoothing iron. And I had no doubt she would have the floors mopped and the furniture polished with Johnson’s Lavender Wax by the time I headed downstairs. In other words, the inevitable rivalry between the two women bade fair to put me out of a job.
My plans to return to work part-time as a free-lance decorator were still in the aspiration stage. As of that moment I had no clients waiting with bated breath for me to order them to toss their present furniture on the fire and make ready for a totally new look. So, faint heart, I told myself sternly, get started on your advertising campaign. Is it too much to ask that you go and order a dozen business cards? Reaching into the wardrobe for a cardigan, I remembered something: The Reverend Eudora Spike had mentioned the other day that she would appreciate my help in selecting a new wardrobe for her bedroom, and she had also done some hemming and hawing about having the sitting room sofa reupholstered. Which led to my wondering whether Vanessa’s perfect figure might be due in part to having had her bust reinforced with foam rubber.
Feeling somewhat cheered, I decided against the business cards in favour of popping over to the vicarage to discuss the wardrobe and sofa with Eudora, while at the same time getting in a moan about my lethally lovely cousin. Undaunted by the fact that the mirror, having nothing better to do than stand around all day, was only too eager to point out my physical shortcomings, I headed downstairs in a rush. More haste less speed, as it turned out, because when I heard the scream I had to grab hold of the banister to keep myself from pitching headlong the rest of the way.
Was the house on fire? Had Tam eaten his cereal bowl or had Abbey, convinced she would never learn to yodel, crawled away from home? Racing towards the scream—which seemed to be fueled by one of those long-life batteries—I found myself breathless in the study. Thank God the twins appeared whole and healthy. They were seated on the floor watching entranced as Mrs. Malloy and Gerta faced off against each other in front of the telly. Gerta was the one doing the screaming, in German, or Swiss, from the guttural sound of it, and when the two of them turned to see me in the doorway, she scuttled towards me with hands locked in prayer.
“Frau Haskell, you come not too soon a minute.”
“Whatever is the matter?” I looked from her to Mrs. Malloy, whose face was a thundercloud of righteous wrath.
“I bring the children in this room because they want to watch What the Dino Saw on the television”—Gerta struggled to speak calmly—“and I ask Mrs. Mop if we bother her dusting—”
“To which I says, if memory serves me right”—Mrs. Malloy’s black taffeta bosom inflated to mammoth proportions as she addressed herself strictly to me—“that if it was all the same as made no mind with Frau Goatherd here, I’d appreciate being allowed to watch the upcoming interview with the man of my dreams.”
“You don’t mean …?” Clasping a hand to my tumultuous heart, I came close to swooning and was forced to steady myself by grabbing hold of the desk. “You can’t mean … Karisma?”
“That was his name!” Gerta evinced relief that I was as shocked as she. “They show the picture of him on the screen before I turn off the television, snip, snap, stop! It is not right, I tell Mrs. Mop, for the munchkins to see this black leather man with too much hair on his head and none on his chest. I read about this Karisma in News of the World. He gives the bad ideas to women. He makes them think he is the Prince Charming.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” Mrs. Malloy folded her arms, thus inflating her bosom still further.
“Frau Haskell”—Gerta’s plaits were unravelling along with the rest of her—“perhaps I was wrong to scream, but I cannot make her turn off the television and I know you’d not want for the little Abbey here”—she pointed a trembling finger to where my daughter sat on the floor happily hitting her brother on the head with a plastic brick—“to grow up thinking the prince will come along one day and pick her up on his sheet-white horse.”
“No, of course I don’t want Abbey to be reared with that sort of mind-set,” I said stoutly. “But what would be so bad about her Prince Charming galloping up in a Rolls, if—that is, he were to let her drive?”
Gerta could not hide her dismay. Her face fell like a soufflé taken out of the o
ven too soon.
“Look, ducky”—Mrs. Malloy mellowed sufficiently to bestow a kindly smile on her vanquished opponent—“it stands out a mile you’ve had it up to the eyeballs with men. But Karisma’s not like the rest of them. He’s as close to human as the buggers get. Go on, see for yourself.”
So saying, she switched the telly back on; and I had to sit down before my knees gave way when the cover of All Passion Spent flashed before my dazzled eyes. An off-screen female voice informed us that for this novel Karisma had posed as an Apache brave, standing on a solitary rock with his marvelous hair cascading over the woman draped in languorous delight over his bronzed arm. Did the announcer think we were blind? Did she think the likes of Mrs. Malloy and I needed a tour guide in order to appreciate this Marvel of Modern Male?
“Pretty man!” Abbey proved herself my daughter by her delighted squeal, but I was not without the makings of responsible parenthood.
“Perhaps it would be a good idea,” I suggested to Gerta, “for you to take the children outside. This really isn’t suitable viewing for them.”
“What Mrs. H. means,” Mrs. Malloy kindly interpreted, “is she doesn’t want the kiddies to see her like this with tears rolling down her flushed face. As for me, I don’t usually get this emotional”—she wiped her eyes—“over a man’s bare chest.”
“He shave it!” Gerta gathered Tam into her arms and reached out a hand for Abbey, who showed no eagerness to be budged.
“When you’ve got muscles like his, I say flaunt ’em.” In another moment Mrs. Malloy would have her hands all over the television screen.
“It is unnatural, it is sick, it is against what the Bible teaches. I know it is not my place to say this to you, Frau Haskell, but I have to live inside myself.” Before bundling the children out the door, Gerta gave me a look that expressed more clearly than words her fear that I was the Demon Mummy.
With the study mercifully ours alone, Mrs. Malloy and I perched on the edge of our seats, biting down on our lips to keep from moaning when the man himself—not the cover shot—appeared on the screen.
“Welcome, Karisma.” The interviewer, an attractive blond woman in a black suit and pearls, sat resolutely back in her chair. The intensity of her gaze, however, was not one-hundred-percent professional. “Welcome to Good Morning U.K.” She dragged her eyes away from him to face the camera. “For those viewers just tuning in, I am Joan Richards. And today I have with me in the studio the man hailed as every woman’s ultimate fantasy.”
“Thank you, Joan.” Karisma shook back his tousled mane and smiled his heart-stopping smile.
Miss Richards pressed a hand to her throat and quickly converted the gesture into playing with her pearls. “Karisma—you have the most amazing hair. Do you have to work at it?”
“Every day of my life.” Karisma spoke with a sincerity that was impossible to resist, especially when it was accompanied by that thrilling hint of a continental inflection. “It is not true I was born beautiful. My hair”—he slid his fingers through it so that it spilled in sensual splendour through his hand—“it looks like this, because always I use the body-building shampoo. It is a discipline with me, but one I embrace with my entire soul … because I lorve women. All women. Everywhere.”
“There are women from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s”—Mrs. Malloy gripped the arms of her chair—“who are having orgasms right this very minute.”
“Well, don’t you have one.” I glared at her. “I’d like to be able to hear what he’s saying.”
“Karisma, I understand”—Ms. Richards spoke brightly over the ping-pinging of her pearls dropping off her neck onto the studio floor—“that you left Spain as a teenager because your father wanted you to be a bullfighter.”
“I lorve animals.”
“And how do you feel about your critics?”
“I lorve them. For someone like me”—Karisma shrugged his black leather shoulders and spread his hands in a gesture that was as beautiful as it was expressive—“there is no bad publicity.”
“Then you were not offended …” Ms. Richards reached out to touch his knee, but swiftly came to her professional senses. “Then you were not the least bit upset by the tabloid article that accused you of being the only man alive who would pick up his dinner plate in order to look at his reflection in it?”
“A newspaper’s job is to sell newspapers.”
“And yours, Karisma?”
“To adore women, to make every one of them know that she is a treasure to be caressed and cherished for-ever-more.” That way he had of rolling his r’s and making every syllable sing would have made him irresistible even had he not appeared to be looking into my eyes alone, so that I was drawn into their wondrous depths, down labyrinths of pleasure …
Unfortunately Mrs. Malloy had to ruin the moment by falling back in her chair, flinging wide her arms, and crying out, “Take me, Karisma, take me—I’m yours!” Talk about reducing the sublime to the ridiculous!
I missed most of what he had to say about Desire, his new fragrance for women, and his latest exercise video.
“Your calendar is a lunar sensation.” Ms. Richards had undone the top button of her suit jacket and was fanning herself with her hand. “Any fears of over-exposure?”
The month of June appeared on screen. It featured a glistening Karisma stepping out of a swimming pool in a strip of bathing trunks that molded itself to his incomparable proportions.
“You are not concerned”—Ms. Richards tore her attention from the calendar image and returned to her guest and the viewing audience—“that you are a passing sensation and that one day, perhaps sooner than later, you may be replaced as the king of the romance cover models?”
The camera closed in, for the kill it seemed to me, on Karisma’s face. His response was the continental shrug and a smile that did not quite reach his eyes.
Ms. Richards laughed, to indicate that she was teasing. “I understand you have a birthday coming up and, whilst thirty-four isn’t exactly over the hill, isn’t it possible that you may be passed over in favour of a younger man—with a new look—for the cover of A Knight to Remember, the eagerly awaited sequel to the late Azalea Twilight’s Crossing the Moat?”
“What will be, so it is!” Karisma stilled my beating heart, with that continental throb in his voice and the smile that once more lit up his magnificent eyes. “I am here, I have a good time and lorve women. What more can I say? I do not speak English so good.”
“You speak it a bloody sight better than most foreigners, my darling.” Mrs. Malloy directed a virulent glance at the door in blatant hope that Gerta had her ear pressed to the keyhole. Shame on her! She did not pale under her rouge when the au pair walked into the room.
“Frau Haskell!” Gerta had flour all down her front and on the tips of the plait that looked as if she had been using it for a pastry brush. “You are wanted on the telephone.”
“If it’s my husband, please tell him I will ring him back when”—I shifted my chair closer to the television—“when I have finished rearranging the furniture in here.”
“No. It is a brigand …”
“A what?”
“A brigand, Lester-Smith.”
“Bother!” My decision to go and speak to my fellow Library League member was made when Karisma vanished from the screen to be replaced by a dancing teabag with spider-leg eyelashes, stumpy legs ending in impossible red shoes, and a smile that went up or down as the puppeteer kettle pulled on the string.
It wasn’t easy to come down to earth after the transcendent experience of being in the same room with the man of my dreams, but I endeavoured to pay attention to what Gerta was saying when I followed her into the hall and across the flagstones and square of Persian carpet to the telephone.
“Frau Haskell, it was not my place to make a big stink bomb about what you choose to watch on television.”
“You were quite right, Gerta, to monitor the children’s viewing.” I reached for the phon
e on the trestle table, but she got to it first and dusted off the receiver with her apron before presenting it to me—coated like a chicken leg in flour.
“Then you don’t turn me out into the street?”
I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Of course not.”
“Then”—her smile filled up all her worry lines so that her face became plump and smooth—“I go back to the kitchen now, Frau Haskell, and tell the children the story about the old clockmaker and the snow elves, while I finish making my special beef stew—just how my wicked husband used to like. It is not easy for me, Frau Haskell, thinking of him in Putney with Mr. Meyers, both of them so laughing and so gay.”
“Very difficult,” I said.
“It is a small revenge that never again will Ernst taste my stew made rich and thick with gingersnaps.”
Feeling my waist thicken as she bustled down the hall, I spoke into the phone. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Brigadier Lester-Smith—”
“I do hope, Mrs. Haskell, that I’m not catching you at an awkward moment?”
“Absolutely nothing that won’t keep.” I resolutely banished Karisma to the dark recesses of my mind. “Is there something you need me to do in the way of Library League business?”
“It’s about Miss Bunch.”
I guessed immediately what he was going to say. The police hadn’t been taken in by all the medical mumbo-jumbo of death from natural causes. They were convinced she had met her end by foul means and an order to exhume the body would shortly be forthcoming.
“It all came as quite a shock.” Brigadier Lester-Smith sounded suitably glum.
“Of course.”
“It’s going to mean quite an upheaval.”
“Before the earth has even settled over her grave,” I agreed.
“You could have knocked me down without the aid of a shovel, Mrs. Haskell, when her solicitor, Mr. Lionel Wiseman, rang me up yesterday after I got back from the funeral and broke the news that Miss Bunch had left me what modest amount of money she possessed, along with her little house on Mackerel Lane.”
How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams Page 6
