The Thin Woman (9 page)

“Sorry.” He sounded huffy. Backs turned, we paced off in different directions. When I looked back he hadn’t moved and I imagined he was thinking how funny I looked from the rear—just like Aunt Sybil.

The flat wasn’t a bad place to come home to. Tobias greeted me with unusual warmth and a rasp of his rough pink tongue. He even followed me into the bathroom and watched me take a scalding bath from which I emerged gleaming pinkly through a haze of steam. Tobias closed his eyes. “Cut that out,” I snapped. Yawning rudely, he disappeared round the door. “Go ahead, turn tail and run, you cad!” I called after him. “So what else is new?”

“Anyone home?”

Jill! She had the most unnerving habit of appearing out of nowhere. I should never have given her my spare key. Even my mirror hadn’t seen me stripped to the buff for years so I wasn’t giving anything human the chance. Grabbing a towel, I went out to the sitting room with the intention of telling her I was about to take a nap. But she foiled me by coming as the bearer of gifts. The casserole she carried might be stewed seaweed, but after Aunt Sybil’s cooking it would taste like ambrosia.

“You’re an angel”—I smiled—“and a dear friend. Put that down and I’ll get the kettle going.”

“A new recipe. Tuna and peanut butter fricassee.”

I should have stayed at Merlin’s Court.

Work helped. I went in early and stayed late. One of my most demanding clients, Lady Violet Witherspoon, was going through a midlife crisis that found relief in redecorating her cottage on the Norfolk Broads from top to bottom every six months.

After posting my cheque to E.E. I told myself that I was finished with Mr. Bentley T. Haskell, but the man was unprincipled. He kept popping into my head with much the same impudent abandon with which Jill came tripping into my flat. During the day I was able to keep him at bay, but at night when I closed my eyes there he was, the rogue—turning on the charm. He was crazy about my hair, my eves, my ears. “Such skinny little ears,” he would whisper, his breath warm upon my neck, and I would melt with delight.

What a blessing, I would say in the cold light of day, that he is such an impossible man or I might have been upset at the prospect of never hearing from him again.

To prove how indifferent I was, I had the telephone reinstalled. Spending money was one way of keeping busy. On one of my empty Saturdays I went into the West End and bought a royal blue dressing gown and had Uncle Merlin’s initials monogrammed on the pocket. His response was a curt note by Aunt Sybil saying I should have better things
to do with my money than waste it on fripperies when I was about to be married.

“Ungrateful old.” Unfortunately I was not done with my relatives. Vanessa rang. She knew I would be ecstatic to learn she had won another fabulous modelling assignment, and why had she not seen an announcement of my marriage in
The Times?

That telephone call clinched my need to escape the pressures of life in the big city. The next morning I invited Lady Witherspoon to the showroom and suggested that her new drawing room might benefit from the Italian influence. Would she like me to make some purchases for the room? In Rome?

Dabbing her moist eyes with a lace handkerchief, she breathed, “And to think one’s acquaintances are always complaining about slackness among the work force.”

Professional integrity would not permit me to accept Lady Witherspoon’s offer to defray all expenses, but her cheque—for which I put in many hours casing the fabric houses—did permit me to travel in more style than usual. Once arrived in that city of fabulous antiquity and sunshine, I settled into a small but charming hotel where the view was excellent and every meal a sonnet. With so many double chins bobbing over their fettuccine Alfredo, I began to feel that my proportions were quite reasonable and ordered thirds without a pang. What was even better, Ben slipped back where he belonged, within the pages of paperback romance, chapter—and book—closed. With only the merest tinge of regret—a girl likes to have her memories—I put the book on a high shelf in some inner corner of my mind and let it gather cobwebs. I called the airline and was on my way home.

London in early April was wet and grisly, the pavements dark and slick. The tall narrow house on Queen Alexandra Place stood hunched and indignant with cold. Grabbing his tip with fingers poking through the holey fingers of his knitted gloves, the taxi driver spun off into the fog. Jill was out, but I found Tobias looking well-fed and dapper on the bottom stair.

“The one person in the world who really loves me!” I cried, bending to clasp him in a fond embrace. With a curl of his lip, the ungrateful feline lifted his tail, gave it an arrogant flick as if to say, “Don’t come crawling back to me, you cat deserter,” and marched upstairs.

I respected his grievance. After three weeks of Jill’s cooking I might, not be speaking either. Fitting my key in the lock, I shoved my suitcase over the threshold with one foot just as the phone rang.

“Have you been wetting on Miss Renshaw’s doormat again?” I yelled after Tobias as he scooted into the kitchen. “If I have to listen to any more complaints from that old biddy …” I informed his hindquarters. “Hallo,” I said, snatching the receiver and speaking in the tones of weary world traveller.

“Ellie, where the devil have you been?” snarled Ben. “I telephoned Jill and she said you were due back two days ago. I got this number from her and …”

The colossal cheek of the man coming back to haunt me when I had finally laid his ghost to rest! I cradled the phone in my hands and did an on-the-spot tap dance. He was grinding his teeth, those dear, small pearly teeth that had nibbled my ear in all those banished dreams.…

“Look,” he said with exaggerated slowness, “I do know the sound of my voice leaves you breathless, but would you come out of your coma for one minute—just long enough for us to hold a rational conversation?”

Rational? I didn’t like that word. I stopped tap dancing.

“You lost the cheque?”

“Must you keep harping on about money? I hate to criticize at a time like this, but I find it extremely vulgar. If you ever checked your bank statement, but of course women don’t, you would have seen that I never cashed the pittance.”

“Back up a minute.” I sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa, almost crushing Tobias, who had crept up silently. Needle-like claws shot into my posterior and I stood up abruptly. “What do you mean, at a time like this?”

Now he was the one to be silent.

Shoving Tobias rudely aside, I sat down again. “Break it to me gently.…” My voice came out in the uneven gasps of a ninety-year-old woman running the marathon. “You and Vanessa have been seeing each other on the sly, and now you’re getting married?”

“No.”

“Oh, well in that case.…” I swung poor Tobias over my shoulder and nuzzled my face into his soft warm fur.

“Ellie, I get the crazy feeling that you don’t know.”

“Mm?” I tickled Tobias under the chin.

“Uncle Merlin’s dead.”

“He can’t be!” I expostulated. “The man is immortal—he predates the flood.”

“Obituaries printed in
The Times
do not lie. Look,” said Ben, “I’m sorry to be the one to break the news, but I …”

“Don’t turn this into a Greek tragedy.” My voice was muffled by Tobias’s fur. “The man was a stranger to me. That weekend was the first time I had seen him for years.” I paused to take a deep breath. “And he behaved in the most foul fashion—maybe that is why I felt sorry for him … afterwards.”

“You’re not snivelling, are you?” asked Ben accusingly. “Hang it all, Ellie, you’re just like a big slobbering kid. I’m coming over.”

“Thanks,” I sniffed.

Persuading Ben to accompany me down to Merlin’s Court was not all that difficult. Actually, I think the suggestion was his—after I had encouraged Tobias to be nice to him and had stressed the difficulties of travelling by public transportation. Ben was back in the escort business.

“About that business of our engagement?” We were standing in the hall saying goodnight when I brought up this ticklish subject. “So far I haven’t done anything about breaking the news to the family that we are no longer a couple.”

“Then we will have to continue the charade.” Ben was wrapping a long striped scarf which looked like a souvenir from his schoolboy days around his neck. “We don’t want to upstage the funeral by denouncing our relationship as a fraud. But I do expect you to do the right thing and throw me over the minute this family crisis is over, understood?”

“Absolutely! Cross my heart and hope to die.” Such lighthearted foolish words.

“I wonder if Merlin shared your sentiments!” said Ben succinctly as he went out the door.

When we drove through the sagging iron gates up the weed-ridden gravel driveway just before noon the next day, Merlin’s Court looked more than ever like an enchanted castle with a curse laid upon it by a belligerent fairy.

Someone had been watching for us. Aunt Sybil met us at the door, dressed in black. Her lips were drawn down at the corners, but her face was otherwise expressionless.

“Auntie, this must be so hard for you.” I tried to hug her but she backed away.

“No fuss, dear, please. In Merlin’s and my young days, grief was always considered a very private matter.” Her broad hand smoothed one of the many ripples in her silk dress, and I thought she looked more like a rhinoceros than ever with her muggy skin and sagging jowls. And then her lips quivered. Poor old girl, with the possible exception of the gardener, she might well be the only friend Merlin ever possessed.

“Was the end very sudden?” I asked, handing Ben my coat so he could add it to the pile of other garments on the trestle table.

“Very. The doctor came in the morning and Merlin was gone in the afternoon. Pneumonia, it was. He went quite peacefully.”

“I’m surprised. I would have expected Uncle Merlin to go out cursing the fact that he had been forced to see a doctor for the first time in, what was it, forty years?”

“Forty-five.” Aunt Sybil registered restrained pride. “Merlin never was a man who fussed about his health, as I think I told you when you finally managed to come down and see him.”

Unjust! This was no time to argue with a bereaved elderly woman, but Uncle Merlin had made his own choice when he marooned himself in this house like a hermit. He had never acknowledged my Christmas cards or shown the least interest in seeing me. Ben interpreted the sparkle in my eyes and silently gestured a memo to stay cool.

The other members of the clan had already gathered in the drawing room and were once more clustered around an inadequate fire.

“Darling, let me see your ring.” Vanessa held out her hand for mine like an eager child, but she was looking at the man standing beside me, her delicate winged brows lifted enquiringly.

To give Ben his rather begrudging due, he did rise to the occasion and protect me from the enemy. “Ellie and I have had our share of arguments over an engagement ring,” he said smoothly. “She insisted that the money could be put to better, more practical use. What was it you wanted?” He turned toward me and grinned to imply the sharing of an inside joke.

“A battery-operated electric blanket, sweetheart, so we can snuggle up and stay warm on our little jaunts in your car.”

“Isn’t she a sport,” Ben beamed.

The words were not loverlike, but the man was trying. Freddy, who had been lounging on the floor looking shaggier than ever, stood up and made a strangling gesture around his mother’s neck. “Lay off, Ma,” he said. “That sherry’s weak enough without you diluting it with your tears.”

“He was too good, too good to live,” whimpered Aunt Lulu. “His kind are always the first to go!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Aunt Astrid. “The man was over seventy. He’d been here quite long enough.”

“Yeah,” agreed Freddy, “cut the cackle, Ma. You’ll be singing a different tune a couple of hours from now when the will is read and you discover the old screw didn’t leave you the bundle you’ve been expecting.” Freddy swigged down his mother’s sherry and reached for the decanter. “I wonder who will get the lolly.”

Aunt Astrid drew herself up in her chair. “I wouldn’t put it past the old fool to have left everything to charity, but if he had any sense he will have bequeathed his fortune to those who know how to spend it well. Vanessa and I have always appreciated the finer things in life.” Aunt Astrid cast a disparaging glance at Freddy and me.

Vanessa twisted a stray curl around a long slim finger. “I’m sure I don’t expect a penny,” she demurred gently.

Freddy said something very vulgar.

Aunt Astrid rose out of her chair. “How dare you, you disgusting unkempt creature, how dare you insult my beautiful daughter?”

“And how dare you insult my tall, handsome son?” Aunt Lulu banged down her glass on top of a pile of old newspapers littering a fireside table. She seemed to sprout feathers like an angry chicken. “Who do you think you are, Lady Muck? Don’t put on airs and graces with me! My mother remembered the day when your father drove a rag-and-bone cart through the streets of Bethnel Green. To hear you talk, he was in textiles! Ha! For all the fancy finishing schools and your la-de-da ways you and that daughter of yours are nothing but a pair of jumped-ups!”

The victims of this onslaught looked staggered, while the rest of us had trouble hiding our enjoyment. Uncle Maurice made a token protest, but we could all see his heart wasn’t in it. “Now, now, my dear. Enough said, don’t get yourself het up.”

“I will not be quiet!” shouted Aunt Lulu, getting her second wind. “If that woman had one ounce of breeding she would know that in the better families, an inheritance always passes through the male line.”

“I’ll drink to that!” smirked Freddy, pouring himself another glass.

“Insolence,” gasped Aunt Astrid.

“Calm down, Mummy.” Vanessa poured a glass of brandy and handed it to her trembling parent. “You are upsetting yourself over nothing. I am sure Uncle Merlin possessed enough of his faculties at the end to leave his fortune to the most deserving family members.”

Uncle Maurice tucked his pudgy fingers into his waistcoat pockets, puffed out his chest like a penguin, and frowned. He was obviously about to say something remarkably astute. “Over the years,” he intoned, “I have on a variety of occasions offered Merlin the benefit of my investment experience. True, he was at times inclined to be testy, but that was his manner. And as, in my opinion, Merlin would have selected as his legatee someone of financial background, I do think myself a likely candidate for the bulk …”