The Thin Woman

by Dorothy Cannell

  A second irate summons of the gong forced me to set my daydreams aside for the moment. As I trod down the last stair the telephone burp-burped from its hiding place on the hall table. I groped for it under Dorcas’s grey felt hat; the line crackled and seemed to go dead for a moment. My “Hallo” came back in a halting echo. “Is anyone there?” I asked, getting bored.

  The voice was muffled, as though the speaker wore a thick woollen scarf wrapped across his mouth to ward off the cold. But this was May, an unusually clement one, too warm for thick woollies—“Tell me, dear, did you enjoy the chocolates?”

  So Ben had not sent them, a pity but in a way a relief. That last helping of soft centres was beginning to make me feel somewhat queasy and I would have hated the slightest resentment to spoil the possibility of a new closeness.

  “Absolutely delicious,” I enthused. “I just finished the last one!” An electric pause while I waited for my fairy godparent to be revealed.

  There was a throaty snorting laugh, and words so low I had to press my ear tight against the receiver to hear them: “Glutton, fat slobbering hog. I knew I only had to push the trough close enough and you would start to gobble.” Wheezing, hiccupping, horrible laughter. The receiver slipped from my grasp. It hung down, slapping back and forth against the table legs like a dead pelican, while I doubled forward, clinging to the wall as a life support.

  I was going to be very sick. The kitchen door swung open and footsteps pounded a path through my head. “Ellie, what’s with you?” Ben stood a few feet away waving a metal spatula. “I know the house is in bad shape, but you don’t have to shore it up with your bare hands. Hey.” He bent forward, picked up the receiver, and stood looking at it. “Have you had bad news? My God, Ellie. you look positively green—here, hold on to me.” He threw the spatula down.

  “An obscene phone call, a rather nasty one.” My mind was reeling. One thing I did not want was to have Ben touch me. I had the absurd idea that some of my shame would rub off on him. Pressing my fingers against my temples I backed away from him towards the stairs but I was not fast enough; he caught hold of me. I tried to pull away but my hands were trapped against his chest. I could feel the tenseness of his muscles under his light wool shirt, the steady beating of his heart. I could smell the spicy clean scent of his after-shave. My body for once in its uncooperative life did me a great big favour. I felt like a girl in one of those stupid adverts where someone in the background is singing, “And He Wears Wild Desire.” I was responding to Ben’s nearness with a feeling so new, so stupendous it blotted out everything else. Even the Voice. I yearned to move even closer.

  “Ellie.” Ben spoke the word caressingly against my hair. “Tell me all about it.”

  The moment shattered like a teacup dropped in the sink, not because he was uncaring; his voice, his touch told me he did care. My guilt kept me silent. I wanted only a place where I could hide away like a mole underground. The oldest excuse in the world. I told him I had a headache and had been lying down when the phone rang.

  I don’t think he believed it, but he did not press me. Dinner was not ready anyway; he had only rung the gong to invite me down for a birthday drink. Dorcas was out scouting for Tobias, who was missing again. If I felt better later on, I could have dinner on a tray in my room. Ben’s concern made me want to cry. How he would despise me if he knew that I had played into the hands of the enemy. Glutton! I shuddered again at the memory. This lovely day with its discoveries about Abigail and Ben’s sensitive gift was spoilt. I had not even thanked him for the photo frame. Tomorrow.

  Lying on my bed I tried to puzzle out who would be the most likely suspect. Three of them had been down here and lunch with Aunt Sybil would not have taken all day. Had they pumped her about our movements? Was it possible that she knew something, had seen one of them slipping past her cottage to sneak into the house while Ben was busy at the typewriter and Dorcas and I were out? And if she had, would she tell me? They had made sure they were in her good books. The Voice might even have confided in her, explained the little practical joke, but no, I really couldn’t see Aunt Sybil approving anything that might put a spoke in the wheel of Uncle Merlin’s plans. Vanessa would always be my prime choice for villainy, but what about Freddy? His not joining the others as arranged did not let him off the hook. He might have come down as planned and then decided his time could be better spent … that feeling of being secretly observed at the Hounds and Hare … One point in Freddy’s favour was that he had applied the direct approach for money. But then, a hand-out wasn’t a handful, or better still, the whole flaming lot. Did he want the money for himself or for his father, who on the surface appeared the one in dire need? Perhaps if Ben and I offered Maurice a loan or a gift? Thinking about his other habits I realized that Maurice was a very greedy man. Look who was casting stones! Sighing, I sank back further against my pillow. I was left with Astrid and Lulu, both of whom, in their own ways, I felt could be extremely ruthless.

  Dorcas came up an hour later. By that time my headache was real. She persuaded me to take a few sips of brandy out of an eggcup. She had found Tobias. No need to worry about that old scallywag; Ben was the one. She had never seen him so glum, he was in the kitchen taking out his frustrations whipping up another of Abigail’s recipes. With those words of encouragement she tiptoed out of the room.

  Eventually I sank into an uneasy doze broken by flashes of nightmare. I was tucking Freddy into a bed shaped like a bird’s nest, at least I thought it was Freddy—I never really got a good look at his face—and Aunt Lulu was pecking at me with a long beak made out of playing cards. I bolted upright in bed with the sheets clutched protectively about me; the house sounded alive, bones grating in worn sockets. Footsteps softly padding. I was on the brink of crying out when reason returned. Ben often got up in the early hours to wrestle with a difficult chapter. The last I had heard of his dauntless heroine, Sister Marie Grace, she had been knotted into a sack and tossed into the Bongo River, pursued by a territory-conscious crocodile. Easing back under the bedclothes, I willed myself back to sleep.

  I woke before the sun had fully risen. A pale grey light crept through the crack in the curtains. What did surprise me was how much better I felt. The enemy had won the first round, but I was eager to climb into the ring and come out swinging.

  A quick hot bath further revived me. While dressing, I considered whether I should tell Ben what had happened. Crossing to the window, I opened the curtains and discovered I was not the first one up. In the breeze below me was the clothesline swelling with small, jaunty, clothes-pegged flaps of white, lifting and falling. Miniature sheets? Handkerchiefs? I had to find out.

  Ben was coming across the landing when I left my room. He almost knocked me over in his haste to reach the stairs first.

  “Out of my way,” he yelled.

  Ignoring this cheery morning greeting, I pelted after him. “What’s wrong? Fire or flood? Have you left the kitchen sink overflowing, or …?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t speak to me, don’t even come near me!” He sped across the hall, smashed into one of the suits of armour, kicked it clangingly aside, went through the side door and across the paved courtyard to halt abruptly under the clothesline strung between two trees. He emitted a howl of such hideous primitive anguish that I fell back a step. Following the direction of his eyes, I looked up and saw what he had seen. The squares of white strung in a row were not handkerchiefs, they were pieces of paper—typing paper.

  “My book,” panted Ben, rolling on the ground like a wounded dog. “A note was shoved under my bedroom door. I found it when I woke up. With your sense of humour, Ellie, you’ll love the next part. It said, ‘I didn’t think you could write a clean book if you tried, so I washed every page in very hot water and bleach and hung them out to dry.’ ”

  The enemy had struck from both sides. But surely all was not lost. The carbon copy! I spoke quietly but firmly to the creature on the ground. “Ben, calm down. You’ll strangle yourself if
you wrap your arms around your neck like that. Where did you keep your copy? Perhaps the person who perpetrated this atrocity didn’t find it.”

  “Copy!” Ben surged to his feet with a bellow which I took for hope reborn. “I didn’t make a copy. Call it laziness, call it artistic preoccupation, call it what you will! And do you know what else I, the Fool, did?”

  I backed away from the savage display of sharp white teeth. “Don’t bite me! I haven’t had my rabies shots.” This small touch of humour did not have the desired conciliatory effect. Ben continued to advance upon me. Grabbing my arm, he shook me until my head was ready to snap off like a poppy from a stalk. “Show some normal curiosity, ask in what other ways I aided and abetted the enemy.”

  My head continued to smack back and forth in frantic assent. Ben’s eyes were so glazed I doubt that he even saw me. “Erasable bond”—he whapped me again. “I liked the ease with which I could rub out a superfluous word, a cumbersome line. Very handy stuff, that kind of typing paper, a little extra money but, for the lousy typist, worth it. I’ll bet the creeping, crawling fiend who committed this crime must have been highly chuffed. When I think of how I agonized over every word—then one dunk and away they rolled. Look at these pages!” He ripped a couple off the line and a clothespin hurtled towards me, missing my nose by an inch as I ducked. “Clean and white! Shining bright! I think I’ll go inside and write an accolade to the makers of bleach.”

  For the first time I realized how alike we were, hitting out angrily at others when the person we blamed most was ourselves. Damn it, I thought viciously as I stumped indoors, the trouble with acquiring your sex education through romantic novels is you don’t realize that love is miserably hard work. Not that I was, theoretically, in love with Ben—physically attracted, yes—and when it came down to it that was a rotten alternative. Ben’s body was as much off limits to me as any of my favourite foods, and the hunger pangs a damn sight worse. Sometimes lately I seemed to catch a glimpse of that hunger in his eyes, but now the only thing Ben was ravenous for was revenge.

  Breakfast was a black-edged meal. Fortunately for Jonas, he missed it. Dorcas broke down when informed of the tragedy, but after blowing noisily into one of her plaid handkerchiefs, she squared her shoulders and rallied.

  “Mustn’t think of ourselves, Ellie,” she urged bracingly as she plugged in the coffee pot and popped bread into the rattrap toaster. “Ben needs all the support we can give, if we are to get him back behind the typewriter before he loses his nerve.”

  The recipient of all this fellow feeling lay slumped across the table, his arms flung out. Every three minutes or so he would go into a spasm. His whole body would vibrate and his knees would jerk, heaving up the wooden table surface and causing the coffee cups, which Dorcas had set down, to slither away in different directions.

  “Counter-attack! We will trounce the unseen foe!” Dorcas deftly retrieved a flying saucer as it was about to skim out of bounds. “We should organize. Make up a list of suspects, grading them according to motive and accessibility.”

  The head on the table lifted briefly and a mirthless chuckle contorted its features. He reminded me of the late Merlin Grantham. “If going by the latter,” he said, “you two are prime suspects. Anyone want to confess? I won’t kill you, at least not quickly.” The sharp white teeth flared again.

  “Ben!” I meticulously spread butter into every pore of his slice of toast. “Remember the old saying misery loves company? Well, this is going to cheer you no end. You were not the enemy’s number one choice.” I told him and Dorcas at a gallop about those sickening chocolates. Neither interrupted. Ben sat with his elbows on the table, his chin cupped in his hands, eyes closed. Was he listening? Or just being sensitive to my acute embarrassment? I told them about the phone call.

  “Monstrous,” stormed Dorcas. “But what we need to understand is how this was all accomplished and when. Sneaking into the house with those chocolates could be done pretty speedily, would require only minor risk of being caught. This is a big house. The attack on Ben would necessitate more time.”

  Reconstructing the plot against him seemed therapeutic for Ben. He was in shock. Later the real pain would set in. Now we had to keep him talking.

  “Seems to me the pages must have been hung out an hour or so before dawn,” Dorcas spoke up. “Working in pitch darkness extremely difficult. Even light from a torch might have alerted someone.”

  “Damn!” I exclaimed. “What a pity Aunt Sybil wasn’t out on one of her night-time prowls and could have set up the alarm.”

  “Perhaps it is just as well she did not get in the way”—Ben grimaced—“or we might have found her strung up on the line too; we are dealing with someone completely mad.”

  “Diabolical but patient.” Dorcas sat down again and stirred her cup. “Have to hand it to him—forgive the pronoun, a little chauvinism in all of us—perfect sense of timing. Waited until you, Ben, were more than halfway through the book and Ellie well underway with her diet before fattening her up for the slaughter.”

  “I think the attack on me was primarily psychological,” I said. “Eating one box of chocolates would not put back all the weight I have, hopefully, lost. That ghastly phone call was aimed at making me feel unworthy to be thin. And you know! It is working. Here I am doing what I haven’t done in weeks, shovelling sugar into my coffee, eating one slice of bread after anotner. But no more.” I pushed my plate aside. “The enemy has made one big, fat error. If getting even means total abstinence, I’m ready.”

  “Good for you,” said Ben wryly, dropping his head back down on his arms. “But don’t kid yourself you are doing it for the inheritance. If you chain me to a chair day and night I can never write that book in the time left. Perhaps we don’t have to fear another attack from the enemy—his job is done.”

  “And the third condition—the treasure?”

  “Why bother looking now?”

  It wasn’t until sometime later that I wondered whether that wasn’t exactly what the enemy wanted.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  Whatever thoughts obsessed the mind of the unseen enemy, he seemed to give up on us for the present. The succeeding weeks passed without another attack. We might be living on false security but I could have been almost content, involved as I was with work in the house and my search for the identity of Abigail Grantham, if only Ben had not turned so aloof. He wasn’t unpleasant, just politely distant. He was fine with Dorcas so I had to assume this attitude was separate from any depression over his book. To give the man his due, he had come to terms with his loss remarkably well, and for that Dorcas was partially responsible. She had refused to let him sit up in his room and mope.

  “Sulk,” she had growled, “and you know who will end up doing the cooking. Ellie’s still busy sorting furniture in the attics. Know I should be able to make a tomartichoke quiche or whatever, but don’t know how to crack an egg let alone boil one.”

  That night dinner was on the table at the usual time, at the usual gourmet standard. Ben even looked moderately pleased with his raised pheasant pie.

  “Well done,” applauded Dorcas. “Tomorrow we will have you propped up back at the typewriter. Know writing isn’t like knitting, you can’t just pick up the dropped stitches but …”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” said Ben. “While I was plucking that bird and wishing like hell I had the enemy in my hands I kept thinking, oh God, if only I had been blessed with a photographic memory—which gave me an idea of sorts. What if I could acquire one through hypnotism? I would need an expert, someone tiptop, not the usual run-of-the-mill nonsmoking types, but where to look? We don’t even have a damn phone book in this accursed house.”

  “I think we did, once,” I responded vaguely, still thinking about his idea, “but it got boxed up with Aunt Sybil’s junk and sent down to the cottage. Anyway, it was years out of date. Besides, I can do better for you than thumbing through the H section. Jill.”

 
; “Jill?” Ben eyed me without enthusiasm. “That funny little runt of a friend of yours? She’s not a hypnotist.”

  “True, but she’s bound to know one. She’s into reincarnation and regression and all that stuff. If she can produce someone who is in the business of taking people back to former lives, your case—a matter of months—should be child’s play. I’ll write to Jill tomorrow.”

  I did. And I must say Ben was properly appreciative. It wasn’t until later that he grew cool, I think. The change was so gradual it was hard to say when it began.

  Fortunately in other respects I had some good moments. While lifting aside a pile of rugs in the attic I found the oak overmantel. Abigail’s overmantel, the one mentioned in her ledger. I had Jonas polish it for me. Scowling, he rolled up his shirt sleeves. “Proper shameful this is, men being put to women’s work.” But I noticed he was humming under his breath, and unlike Aunt Sybil he didn’t favour funeral dirges. Life eased all round the next day when the two rather condescending char-women arrived. On the following Wednesday an army of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and painters began their work on the ground floor. The bedrooms and bathrooms would have to wait. In all probability Ben and I would no longer be at Merlin’s Court when the time came to redo them. The greatest, immediate inconvenience was being unable to use the kitchen. The men installing the new cabinets and working surfaces seemed to consider it a great intrusion if one of us came in for a glass of lemonade, and with the dining room also out of commission, meals had to be eaten either in the old wash house or picnic fashion out-of-doors. Ben, whether to take his mind off his book (Jill had still not answered my letter) or because he could not help himself, had turned very temperamental about the kitchen. As soon as any decision was made, he would hear it over the start and stammer noise of his typewriter, and march out to alter it. He argued with the plumber, insulted the electrician who was installing the strip lighting, and hovered underfoot like an overanxious new father while the Aga cooker was being installed.