“It’s a coffeepot,” I said frigidly.
“And I suppose darling Bentley gave it to you for your birthday or for some equally special reason.” Vanessa turned her chair away from Abbey, who stood staring at her with blue eyes wide in her cherub face. “I don’t blame you, Ellie—really I don’t, for wishing I were anywhere but here. I actually feel guilty because that army tank of a woman didn’t finish me off! You’ve always been just the teensy-weeniest bit jealous of me, and who can blame you?” She smoothed the lace at her peerless throat. “And I suppose at times I have rubbed it in a bit that I got all the looks in the family. But,” she added kindly, “I have always admitted that you have the nicer nature.”
“Thank you!”
“And that is why, darling, when Mummy threw the most awful fit about my marrying George Malloy, screaming herself into hysterics and turning violet, I thought okay, I will go down to Merlin’s Court. Ellie will forget the past when she learns that my one remaining parent has cast me off. Ellie will take me to her matronly bosom. And I will know that I am not without a family.”
“You have George,” I reminded her.
“Yes, and see how he adores me!” Vanessa held out her left hand to dazzle me again with the brilliance of her obscenely sized diamond solitaire. “Big as some mirrors, isn’t it?”
“You can use it for touching up your makeup,” I said with my eyes on Abbey, who was still standing immobile, a scant six inches from my cousin.
“Did God turn that child into a pillar of salt”—Vanessa drew in her shoulders—“or did she come that way?”
“Pretty lady.” Abbey took an entranced step closer and placed a chubby hand on my cousin’s gauzy knee. “Is you a fairy?”
“Oh, my goodness!” Vanessa amazed me by reaching out her arms and gathering my daughter onto her lap. And when she looked at me, her eyes were made the more lustrous by the shine of tears. “What a precious, priceless little creature! Why didn’t I realize before that she looks like me? When I was a child, my hair was just this shade of gold as little Ashley’s. Or is it Allison? Whatever! She most definitely has my divine nose!”
Tam, determined not to stand in his sister’s limelight, immediately dropped his picture book with a plop and raced over to Vanessa, crying “Me loves you too!”
“Dear, intelligent little boy!” Vanessa sat with chiffon arms wrapped around my children. “Oh, I was right to come where I can recover from the turmoil of Mummy’s tirade.”
“And get to know Mrs. Malloy.” I tried not to look at my offspring as if they were a pair of turncoats.
“Oh, yes! My future mother-in-law!” Vanessa kissed the tops of the twins’ heads. “But there doesn’t have to be any rush. I’m sure I’ll see her when she comes here to clean, and we’re bound to have a little chat, especially if she starts vacuuming outside my bedroom door at some ungodly hour. I’m certain she’s a lovely woman, just thrilled out of her simple wits to know that her son is going to marry”—Vanessa tapped Abbey coyly on the cheek—“a fairy princess.”
This called for a strong cup of tea. Pouring myself one, I banished the evil thought that my cousin might no longer be getting the plum modeling jobs, making marriage an excellent career move. “You must be very much in love with George Malloy,” I ventured kindly.
“Darling, you’re such a romantic! I’m enormously fond of him. He’s well-off and really quite presentable. I like being with him. We have good times. And he came along in the nick of … I mean at the right time. But as for my being madly, agonizingly nuts about George Malloy, good heavens no! And don’t look at me like that, Ellie. I wouldn’t be doing the man any favours by being all goo-goo-eyed in love with him. That sort of full-blown emotion can’t ever last. Not if you intend to stay married.”
“You’re wrong.” I took a sip of tea, but it was so stewed, I couldn’t take the bitter taste and poured it down the sink.
“Look at you and Ben.” Vanessa spoke over the top of Tam’s dark head as he stood on her knee to kiss her damask cheek. “He has to be one of the handsomest, sexiest men alive, but are you floating around in a state of permanent rapture, counting every moment lost that you cannot be in his arms? No! Your mind is mostly on higher things, like being the perfect mummy to these adorable kiddies and keeping the wheels of dull domesticity turning. And that’s just as well, Ellie, because one day Ben will be old and grey and it will be hard for you to remember what there ever was about him to set your pulses racing.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.” Vanessa, looking like the Madonna with an extra child, smiled angelically. “With dear George I’m not setting myself up to wish him underground when he gets the gout and can’t get up the stairs without puffing. I realize that romantic love should be reserved for the men one has loved in days of moonlight and roses. ‘Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,’ or whatever the mournful saying is! The men we once thought we couldn’t live without remain enshrined in our hearts, never growing a day older or steadily more tiresome when they can’t remember where they put their dentures.”
“Well”—I held my empty teacup aloft—“here’s hoping you and George will be very happy in your own special way. When may I hope to meet your fiancé?”
“Goodness only knows, darling!” Vanessa put the twins down on the floor, stood up, and stretched her arms in lovely languor. “I telephoned Georgie Porgie last night and he felt quite wretched about Mummy being so beastly, but he can’t come rushing down here today because he’s up to his eyes with work at his factory.”
“And what is it he manufactures?”
“Exercise machines. That’s how I met him.”
“You collided with him on your stationary bike?”
“George needed a model for his advertising campaign.” Vanessa studied a fingernail that would appear to have disgraced itself by acquiring a chip in its pearl-pink varnish. “I applied for and got the job. Simple as that.”
“It certainly beats working for Vogue,” I replied with my eyes on the clock. It was almost time for me to get the twins’ lunches prepared, after which I would have quite a rush getting myself ready to go to the library meeting. It wouldn’t do to keep Brigadier Lester-Smith and the rest of the league members drumming their pencils on the table. We would need every ounce of available brain power to come up with a means of raising the necessary for Miss Bunch’s memorial.
“It suddenly strikes me, Ellie”—Vanessa drifted about the room with the twins each holding up their end of her peignoir train—“something, or, I should say, someone is missing in this house.”
“Gerta went shopping for some odds and ends.”
“I wasn’t thinking about her.” My cousin pressed a hand to the back of her head, where no doubt the bump she had received from her assailant still lingered. “What’s lacking is that old curmudgeon—Judas the gardener.”
“Jonas is off on a camping trip with Freddy.”
“Our cousin with the ponytail and the tattoo and the skull-and-crossbones earring?” Vanessa swayed artistically. “Would you believe I get amnesia where he is concerned.”
“He remembers you.” I took another look at the clock that appeared to be chasing its tail in ever faster circles. “When Freddy telephoned last night and I told him you were here, he promised that he and Jonas would forget about their nettle rash and lie low in the woods for a while.”
“How sweet, considering I may be here for ages!” Vanessa swung around to face me, with the result that Abbey and Tam released her skirts and sat smack down on the floor. “I’ve been thinking that it would work out perfectly for me to be married at St. Anselm’s.”
“Really?” I almost landed on the floor beside the twins.
“Ellie, I don’t have a church of my own, so why shouldn’t I borrow yours for the day?” She might have been talking about the nightie she was wearing. “It would put Mummy’s nose out of joint. We would have the reception here at Merlin’s Court
, with Ben doing the catering, and Gerta, the human hand grenade, getting stuck with all the washing up. What could be more heavenly than me in miles and miles of white satin and French lace, sweeping down the stairs of the ancestral home? A vision of misty-eyed beauty to be witnessed only once in a dozen lifetimes.”
With a bedazzled Abbey and Tam clapping their hands in time to the wedding march playing inside their heads, it was perhaps unnoticeable that I was not one hundred percent enthusiastic. “There is one thing you need to know, Vanessa. St. Anselm’s Church has rather an unhappy history in the nuptials department.”
“Because you and Ben were married there?”
“Because of the Virgin Bride, and the wedding that didn’t take place some sixty years ago. The story is that the groom forgot to show up or was unavoidably detained. And his lovelorn lady went off her rocker as a result. She’s still alive, in her eighties, and has been spotted on numerous occasions after dusk. Only the other night Gerta saw her keeping her doleful vigil.”
Setting a saucepan of Gerta’s stew down on the Aga, I hoped I had convinced Vanessa that the Virgin Bride’s bitter unhappiness was bound to have permeated every inch of St. Anselm’s Church and cursed the once-hallowed ground on which it stood. Meaning my cousin would rather die than be married within two hundred miles of the site lest she meet with some awful fate in the years to come—my eyes went to the cappuccino machine—such as receiving a coffeepot from George on her birthday.
“You’ve just proved the point of what I was saying earlier,” Vanessa said without a tremble in her voice. “It’s a thousand times easier to remain madly in love, even into one’s dotage, with a man who fails to show up at the altar than it is to experience enduring passion for a husband with whom one lives alongside year in and year out in various stages of physical and emotional disintegration. Thanks for the warning, darling Ellie, but I think I’ll ring up the vicar this afternoon and discuss suitable dates for my wedding to George Malloy.”
Was there no escape from the grisly prospect of being saddled with the job of attending Vanessa at every fitting for her bridal gown, and having to watch the dressmaker swallow a mouthful of pins upon realizing she was beholding the stuff of legends? An eighteen-inch waist. It did cross my mind to tell my cousin that Eudora Spike was in the midst of a crisis in her own marriage and might not be in the mood to talk with any great enthusiasm about the blessed state of matrimony. But as I vigorously stirred the stew to keep it from scorching on the bottom, I couldn’t bring myself to betray a single word of what I had discovered regarding Gladstone Spike’s impending sex-change operation. It would be bad enough when the time came for people like Vanessa to make vulgar jokes about his having a coming-out ball … now that he didn’t have the ones he received at birth.
“Ellie, you’re standing too close to the cooker, your face looks like it’s on fire,” my cousin kindly informed me. “Thank God, George understands that buttering a piece of toast is all the cooking I’m prepared to do when we are married. And how I wish Mummy would be happy that he’s got pots of money and would overlook the fact that he earned every penny without even the saving grace of a proper education.”
Knowing Aunt Astrid, a woman composed of whalebone corsets and an iron tongue, I had little hope of her ever having an egalitarian conversion and every fear she might even now be issuing a royal summons for a taxi, intent upon making a matriarchal raid on Merlin’s Court. Had I believed for a minute that Aunt A. would succeed in whisking Vanessa away to be deprogrammed by a pioneer in the field of class-defection disorders, I would have welcomed the old battle-axe with open arms. But I knew my cousin well enough to realize she would not be budged an inch were she truly hell-bent on marrying George Malloy.
Vanessa went out into the hall with the avowed intention of gazing soulfully at the staircase which one day soon she would descend in all her bridal glory. While preventing the twins from trotting after her, at the risk of missing their lunch, I reflected that it was typical of my cousin to have failed to wish me happy birthday. Admittedly she had a lot on her mind, but I knew that the date was engraved on her mind because it was the one on which she had first appeared in Beauty Magazine. What did surprise me was that Mrs. Malloy had not rung me up to sing “Happy Birthday to You” in a voice guaranteed to make a songbird cringe. Was she in a snit because she had heard from George that her future daughter-in-law was at Merlin’s Court and the carriage had not been sent round to convey her here with all pomp and circumstance?
I felt guilty over this neglect as I got Abbey and Tam into their booster seats. And resentful in knowing that Vanessa was unlikely to lift a finger that afternoon to phone Mrs. Malloy. But I didn’t have time to wallow, because Gerta came in through the kitchen door, her salt-and-pepper plaits uncoiled in her haste and a carrier bag from Marks & Spencer in her hand.
“I am late, Frau Haskell?”
“No, you’re back at exactly the right moment,” I assured her. “I hope you had a successful shopping spree.”
“Yes! But I am careful in what I buy.” She took off her coat. “From now on, with no husband anywhere I look, I have to keep the werewolf from the door.”
“If you’ll give the twins their stew, and some fruit to follow, I’ll go and get ready for my meeting.” Handing her the serving spoon, I hurried upstairs and saw Vanessa flit into the bathroom in a silken drift of sea green. She would spend an hour making up her face, which didn’t require any improvement to be a work of art, while I needed to scrap everything I owned in the way of body parts and would have to make do with putting on my turquoise frock that looked as if it expected to be taken out to dinner and twisting my hair into a French pleat.
There was, through no one’s fault but my own, not a spare minute to pinch a little colour into my cheeks. But I did remember to put two notepads into my handbag. One for the Library League meeting, and the other to be used for recording measurements and creative inspirations when I went to look at the house Brigadier Lester-Smith had inherited.
The day was blue but decidedly chilly. Even so, I kept the car window down as I drove down Cliff Road and into the village. I was hoping that a good dose of fresh air would unclog my brain, thus enabling me to come up with some terrific idea for a fund-raising event that would enable the league to commission a bronze statue worthy of the woman who had given her life to the Chitterton Fells library. I hadn’t thought of anything beyond the ubiquitous raffle when I parked the car—illegally—in the alley to the rear of the library.
I went in through the back door marked Employees Only, which entered onto the narrow hall with the toilet on one side and the stairs leading up to the reading room on the other. A glance at my watch as I took two steps at a time showed me I was one minute late.
“Sorry,” I panted to Brigadier Lester-Smith, who held the door open for me, “I hope I didn’t keep the coffee … I mean everyone waiting.”
They were all there. Gladstone Spike sat at the table with his knitting in his hands. The new bride, Sylvia Babcock, had every pin curl in place. Mrs, Dovedale handed around a plate of sponge cake. Mr. Poucher looked his usual disgruntled self. Sir Robert Pomeroy was saying “What! what!” in response to something someone had said, or just because he felt like it. And my friend Bunty Wiseman, the blond bombshell, looked wickedly sexy in earrings that were longer than her black leather miniskirt. She whipped over to me on heels that were almost as high as Mrs. Malloy’s, and dragged me into the room.
“Ellie, you have to help me convince some of these fuddy-duddies that my idea for a fund-raiser is brilliant beyond belief!” Bunty had grabbed hold of me and I was afraid to speak for fear she would hug me tighter and I would become impaled on one of her dangerously pointed breasts. “Maybe I’m dreaming the impossible dream but I have this feeling that if we asked nicely, he would come!”
“Who?” I gasped, looking around at the other members of the league in hopes of enlightenment.
“Karisma!” Bunty breathed triumphantly.<
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Chapter
8
My fantasy life was on a collision course with reality! I didn’t know whether to burst into song, the way people do at the slightest provocation in musicals, or to tell Bunty she had another think coming if she imagined I would risk going into a lifelong trance as the result of being in the same room as Karisma. But surely I was getting all worked up over nothing! The king of the cover models must be booked from now until doomsday with public appearances. He undoubtedly had a business manager who monitored every invitation he received to breathe in public. And why would Karisma want to come to Chitterton Fells? We were charming enough in a chocolate-box sort of way, but so were hundreds of other villages.
No wonder my thoughts were in a whirl! Bunty was waltzing me in ever faster circles, as if we were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “You do think it’s a knock-dead idea?” she demanded, and released me with a final spin that sent me into Brigadier Lester-Smith’s arms. “When I saw Karisma interviewed on the telly yesterday morning, I decided I’d gladly go without sex for the rest of my wicked life in exchange”—orgasmic sigh—“for being able to touch the hem of that God-like man’s trousers!”
“Most intriguing.” Brigadier Lester-Smith let go of me before his blush finished burning a hole in my back.
“And then”—Bunty blew him a kiss—“you telephoned, Brigadier, and told me about how you thought it would be nice for the Library League to put up a statue of Miss Bunch, and really I’d have been a complete idiot not to have thought of Karisma as the perfect way to raise the lolly!” Her smile included the others, who were hovering around like extras in a movie, eager to be directed in their minuscule roles. “Is there anyone here who wouldn’t pay up like a shot for the once-in-a-lifetime chance of spending five seconds in Karisma’s heavenly arms?”
Gladstone Spike stopped knitting and looked thoughtful, but Sir Robert said, “Can’t say as I would, what! what! But I do see your point, my dear young lady. Even an old codger like me has heard about Karisma. The streets will be standing-room-only with panting women if we can bring the chap here to Chitterton Fells. M’daughter-in-law, Pamela, is always mooning on about him, as if she didn’t have a husband who, if he’s a chip off the old block”—Sir Robert gave a jocular laugh—“is quite the lady’s man.”
How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams Page 11
