Femmes Fatal (15 page)

“Coming, my darlings!”

What angels! They partook of breakfast with an enthusiasm to gladden a mother’s heart and accompanied me on the drive to Dr. Melrose’s office without protest.

The one whose smile occasionally dimmed was mine. After managing a nip-and-tuck parking job in a space clearly reserved for a skateboard, I got through the business of unloading with only the loss of a scarf, which got sucked away by a passing lorry. Next came the trauma of shouldering my way through the double glass doors while gripping the babies’ pushchair with one hand and dropping the nappy bag with the other. Waiting for the lift in the brown linoleum lobby, I thought jeeringly of those tough-guy triathletes, the ones who aren’t satisfied with making it a one-sport event. Oh, no! They have to cycle up the slopes of Kilimanjaro, parachute onto their dogsleds, and canoe down subterranean rivers with stalactites dropping like spears out of the bat-infested darkness. What these gluttons for punishment need is a day in the life of a mother on the go.

When the lift grudgingly cranked open its doors, I got myself and the pushchair aboard with my usual spry
grace, but somehow the nappy bag didn’t quite make it. The metal jaws snapped shut, leaving two inches of strap attached to my arm. Why me, Lord? Machinery hates me. Vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, coffee pots, my washing machine … they all spend their tinny little lives plotting ways to bring me down. Fortunately, the lift was out of condition. Before it could wheeze upward, I managed to press the Open button with my nose and rescue the nappy bag.

“Mummy saves the day,” I boasted, feeling rather like Norman the Doorman, who was performing as we entered Dr. Melrose’s waiting room, for the television set had been tuned to my darlings’ favourite program. Scooting over to the woman at the desk—a woman who looked as though she had been born for the sole purpose of shouting “Next!”—I gave the twins’ names and surveyed the area with its rubber plants and magazine-littered table. Business was certainly brisk this morning. Faces, faces everywhere and not an empty chair. The words jingled inside my head to the music coming from the telly. I was wheeling the Porta-Pram into a corner when a wheezing old gentleman with a tobacco-stained moustache offered me his seat.

I smiled. “That’s awfully nice, but really, I’m glad to stand.”

He groped a hand toward the pram. “Got your hands full there, Mother!”

Pink with pride, I drew back the covers to let him take a peek at Abbey and Tam sleeping like angels, their sweet little hands clutching the satin ribbon of the blanket, their mouths working as if they were blowing bubbles in dreamland.

A rosy-cheeked woman to my left leaned forward for a look. “Aren’t they lovely?”

“Thank you.”

“Are they twins?”

Amazing how often this question was asked, but I never found it irritating. One baby is a miracle; two at once is so mind-boggling that people tend to blither. I was recounting the babies’ life histories, starting with my heroic labour, when one of the doors off the waiting room opened and Miss Thorn emerged. A black hat was clamped on her head and her coat skimmed the floor in the manner of a downtrodden governess. A squeal from Abbey caused her to look across the room directly at me.

Lifting a hand in salute, I felt my smile congeal. For Miss T looked right through me—actually cut me dead before gliding from the room. Silly of me to feel quite so spooked, even though I told myself her spectacles probably needed cleaning.

“Next!” boomed the keeper of the desk, and away bustled the rosy-cheeked woman.

“Now you sit down,” she told me, with a bye-bye wave at the twins. Glad to do as bid, I went to sit in her seat and found she’d left a paperback novel lying there. From the bodice-buster cover it didn’t look like something I could read to the twins, so I laid it down on the pram cover and settled down to watch Norman the Doorman. Noble and solitary, he stood in the doorway of Tinseltown Toys, his black cloak swirling about him.

“My word,” he said, cupping a hand over his mask, “do my peepers deceive me, or do I see lots of my little friends coming to help in a very important rescue? Yes! Here come Billy and Josie—hope your broken arm is better, Josie—and a big hello to Edward, Nancy, Patrick, Julie, Lisa, and all my special friends. Now”—Norman lifted his cloak as if to draw the children under its shelter—“I really do need the help of everyone. Once upon a time, not very long ago or far away, a nice lady named Mrs. Brown decided to make a special treat for her
little boy’s birthday. The little boy’s name was Barry and Mother made him a red jelly rabbit with licorice whiskers. When teatime came and Mother reached out her big spoon, a voice as sweet as red jelly said, ‘Please don’t eat me. I am a magic rabbit. All I ask is to be able to live happily ever after in your refrigerator.’ Barry’s daddy wasn’t too pleased at first. ‘What? Give up a whole shelf to a plate of plop! Am I supposed to turn my bottles of fizzy pop out on the street?’ But at last Daddy stopped huffing and puffing and the Jelly Rabbit became one of the family, until last night when he was kidnapped from the refrigerator by the evil Mr. Melt, and if we don’t get to Jelly Rabbit in time, he will be fruit juice—”

“No!” The word whipped around the room, and I came out of my glassy-eyed stare to discover I was not the only one in the waiting room on the edge of my seat. The wheezy old gentleman next to me had almost chewed off his moustache. I nonchalantly informed him that I was personally acquainted with the star of Tinseltown Toys.

“You know
Norman
?” The old gent almost wheezed his last.

“In a manner of speaking.” Rocking the pram with one hand, I smoothed back my hair with the other. “I know his wife.”

“What’s she like?”

“Friendly, nice …”

“And you think that one day she’ll get you together with the old man?”

“I hadn’t thought …” My eyes returned to the television where Norman was propping a ladder up against the moon. Magical, harmless make-believe. Fantasies. Suddenly, on the outskirts of my mind, I heard Mrs. Malloy’s voice informing me that tonight was the night for my homework assignment. And I felt a stirring of
girlish,
childlike
anticipation. I wasn’t embarking on a lifetime of slime, I was rescuing my marriage from the evil clutches of neglect. As if fate so decreed, Norman the Doorman was replaced by an advert for cat food, and my eyes fell on the pram cover, where lay the paperback book
Voyage to Valhalla
. My hands reached out and the book fell open to this page as if waiting for me.

The great god Thor, who once drank from the ocean and made the tide, now drew back the clouds with one sweep of his wrathful hands. You could have heard a pin drop upon the field of battle. Cringing mercenaries fell to their knees, their eyes fixed upon a grassy knoll, where stood the warrior princess, Marvel.

Her fiery hair burned like the sun’s fierce rays. Her amethyst eyes rivalled the jewels pillaged from her father’s castle. The hem of her kirtle was stiff with blood and her creamy shoulders ached from wielding the sword which at daybreak she had removed from the hand of her dying henchman, Bod the Unmerciful. Dry-eyed, Marvel had sworn to hunt down his murderer, that vilest of all Saxons—Baron Derick of Dryadsville. Safe in Thor’s protection—one hand trailing the sword, the other pressed to a waist no bigger than a laurel wreath—she paced the knoll all bright with buttercups.

Across the weir, eyes steely as his shield, Derick stood in the shadow of his men and thought her fairer than any flower. By Wodin! Before the moon set over this accursed vale he would make the warrior princess his own. His chiselled lips curved into a boyish smile, which as quickly froze hard as ice. Herold of Leeth was creeping up the far side of the knoll. The scurvy knave was within a hand’s breadth of crushing that lovely neck in
his yeoman’s hands. But suddenly, with the delicacy, the elegance that was hers by right of royal blood, Princess Marvel whirled about and with a flash of silver sword put a period to Herold’s existence. In the golden hush of that April afternoon, the lifeless head went somersaulting down the knoll—eyes bulging, lips mouthing Gadzooks! until with a final bounce it came to rest at Derick’s feet.

Kneeling, he doffed his helmet and raised his eyes to the lady of the hour. “Ye gods, you’ve come a long way, baby …”

I was laying
Voyage to Valhalla
down on the pram cover when a twentieth-century war cry sounded.

“Next!”

Abbey and Tam bopped up and—yes! Three cheers! We were the chosen ones! Under the envious gaze of the rabble, who looked as though they had been there since the dawn of penicillin, I pushed the pram into the hallowed presence of Dr. Melrose.

My goodness! The good physician was slumped in his chair, eyes closed, leading me to assume he was dead (anything else being completely unprofessional), but suddenly he sat up, scaring me spitless.

“Mrs. Haskell, isn’t it?” This from the man who had been my M.D. since my arrival at Merlin’s Court. The doctor was a large man, both tall and bulky. He usually wore tweeds which heightened his resemblance to a bear, but today he seemed to have shrunk. His face had caved in and his eyes possessed a glassy look that brought forcibly to mind the severed head bouncing like a football down the knoll.

“Yes, ’tis I,” responded
moi
, with all the perkiness that was mine by right of good old peasant stock. “Time for the babies’ checkups.” The need to remind him why
we were here was overwhelming. Still seated, Doc Melrose watched me lift Abbey from the pram as if he had no idea what—let alone who—she was.

“I haven’t been sleeping well.” His hands were trembling. Unnerving because they were of a particularly hairy sort.

“Oh, dear!” I sat across from him with both babies in my lap. “Lots of middle-of-the-night stuff, I suppose.” I meant emergency bunions, that sort of thing; but his response almost resulted in Tam’s falling over the precipice of my right thigh.

“Yes!” The doctor squeezed the neck of his stethoscope as if trying to choke himself. “Morning, noon, and middle-of-the-night stuff. Flo hasn’t been herself since she joined that Fully Female organization. You haven’t joined, have you?”

“Heaven forbid!” I said, flustered.

“For your sake and your husband’s, I pray you never do.” His bloodshot eyes darted to the door. “You didn’t spot my wife out there in the waiting room?”

“No.”

“She could have been disguised.” He was now tying the stethoscope into knots. Worse, his face was getting tied up in knots. “Flo likes to stage these little surprises. I have no idea when she will fling open that door and bare her teeth … the lot … at me. The woman has turned into a vampire. She’s insatiable. Last night when I got home … before I could take off my hat, she had flung me across the dining room table. We were to have played bridge.”

“Mrs. Melrose cancelled?”

“No. And thank God the doorbell rang in the nick of time. I’m too old for this, Mrs. Haskell. I’m looking forward to retirement and the two of us sitting in the garden, wearing straw hats and holding hands.”

“She does like to sketch.” I offered what encouragement
I could while snuggling Abbey and Tam closer. Poor darlings, they were both rubbing their noses, a sure sign they were pooped.

“Sketch!” Flinging down his stethoscope, Dr. Melrose ground his teeth. “Do you know what subjects now obsess her artist’s brain?”

“Uhmmmm …” Full well I remembered Flo telling me at the Hearthside Guild meeting that she was into painting nude dudes. She had even suggested that Ben would make a lovely subject. But for all I knew she had told Doc that she was into still life, which could have passed as a varnished version of the truth if she instructed her subjects not to move, not even to scratch their goose bumps.

“Mrs. Haskell, Flo is into Male Anatomy.”

“Really!”

“Localized areas of the Male Anatomy.”

It took a moment for the penny to drop, whereupon I was truly shocked. Perhaps I have an impure mind. But to my peasant way of thinking, there is a big difference between an artist who paints only hands and those who focus on what books such as
Voyage to Valhalla
address with euphemisms. The Princess Marvel might feast her eyes on Lord Derick’s manhood to her little Nordic heart’s delight, but Flo Melrose was not getting her paintbrush within an inch of my Ben’s—

“And I’m not the only one to be driven crazy!” Dr. Melrose was on his feet and bumbling around a tray of instruments. “Do you seriously believe that Huffnagle woman’s death was an accident? Mark my words, her husband couldn’t go one more round and ended the high jinks by tossing that electrical appliance into her bath.”

“Murder?” I gasped.

“A mere figure of speech.” Dr. Melrose pursed his lips and waved a hairy hand. “And difficult to prove, lucky devil.”

“Well, as Reverend Foxworth always said, and I am sure the new incumbent would echo, let Heaven be the judge.” I popped the babies in the Porta-Pram and began edging towards the door.

“Not so fast!” He held up a syringe, whose wicked point glinted in the sun streaming through the prison-sized window. “This is no fun for Mummy, but Alice and Tom must have their jabs.”

Appallingly rude of me, I know, but I wasn’t about to let that sleep-deprived man come at my babies with, for all I knew, the wrong serum. Shouldering the door open, I fled through the waiting room and was in the car with my angels safely installed in the backseat before drawing one full breath.

Driving up Cliff Road at a maternally responsible rate of speed, I wondered anew if I had done something awfully silly in joining Fully Female, even assuming Dr. Melrose had lost his professional perspective regarding the Huffnagles. What Ben would say if—
when
—he found out was the big question. The male ego is unfathomable. He might be delighted at my investing time and energy in preserving our marriage or he might think the whole thing an insult to his manhood—in the broadest sense of the word.

I was on that stretch of road where the iron fence of the churchyard breasts the hill when I saw a man emerge from the archway of yews. Unfortunately, he didn’t see me and ploughed across the road a hair’s breadth from the nose of the car. If not for my ladylike speed, he would either have ended up on the bonnet or gone whopping over the cliff edge into the waiting jaws of the hungry sea, whose belly-rumbles came up to us loud and clear.