“Excuse us, if you please.” Charles Delacorte raised a gilded eyebrow at me and beckoned Miss Thorn with a frostbitten smile.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Haskell.” Handbag clasped to her concave bosom, she moved along the counter. “Do please remember me kindly to Miss Fitzsimons next time she comes down to visit you.”
“I will.” To admit that Vanessa hadn’t been near Merlin’s Court since the wedding would make me look the mean sort who wouldn’t offer my own cousin a cup of tea.
Miss Thorn, with an expectant smile, followed Charles into the back room. I put down the lamp shade I had been pleating into a fan as Ann came through the curtains wearing a beaver coat and a wide-brimmed black hat dipped at the front. She pulled on a pair of leather gloves.
“Miss Thorn will enjoy talking to Charles alone-you know how these spinsters are-and I felt like going out to lunch today.” She hesitated. “Would you like to join me?”
I explained about meeting Bunty and her husband’s secretary and suggested that Ann join us. She seemed hesitant. “Oh, do come.” I propelled her across The Square. “We may bump into my husband and Freddy and get treated to drinks.”
I pushed open the heavy oak and glass door of the pub.
“They’re quite close, aren’t they?” said Ann, following.
Same old song. “Mmmm.” I gave a secure married laugh. “Isn’t that Bunty Wiseman over there in the corner, next to the man in the raincoat?” It wasn’t. And I couldn’t see Ben and Freddy among the beer swillers at the bar or among the diners seated at the benches against the walls. The stout woman presiding at the bar, pulling on the brass tap handles and handing over foaming tankards, had pale gold hair and wore rhinestone-studded glasses. Mrs. Hanover (as I heard her addressed) spoke with meticulous poshness. A kind but crisp smile was affixed to her lips.
“That’s the last one for you, Mr. Daffy.”
Quite right, Mrs. Hanover. Having escaped death by inches, it behooved the real estate agent not to walk blithely under a bus. But when Mr. Vernon Daffy turned his curly black head and his ripe olive eyes in my general direction, my smile faded. I had no desire to buy a piece of residential property just to get rid of him. Spying a corner staircase, I suggested to Ann that we avail ourselves of it and look for our luncheon associates on the second floor. She nodded, and we circumvented a group of plaid-suited young men who were attempting to gulp down pints of bitter without dislodging the cardboard coasters balanced on their heads.
Snatches of song followed us up the poorly lit, steeply pitched stairs. At the top was a door. I had opened it a wedge when Ann said from the rear, “Ellie, I think that room is reserved for private parties.”
Too late I saw the little brass plate that said Reserved. The scent of cut flowers wafted toward me and inside I saw rows of women seated at white-clothed tables, sipping from sherry glasses. Chairs scuffed back; all persons were now standing. A voice commandeered the floor, but the speaker was out of my sight.
Ann tugged at my arm, but somehow (it was becoming a habit) I had lost a shoe. I fumbled around for it with my foot, keeping my mutterings low and my ear to the door. Terrible, isn’t it, but remember I am the sort who reads other people’s shopping lists while making myself at home in their cars.
“Ladies, dear friends, our monthly meeting having been called to order, I wish to address a subject of concern. Yes, Mrs. Beatrix Woolpack has suffered a major nervous breakdown. She collapsed last evening while attending the Amateur Symphony. She has been admitted to The Peerless Nursing Home, where I understand she has placed herself unreservedly in the good Dr. Bordeaux’s hands. In view of Mrs. Woolpack’s current standing in the club, Correspondence will confine itself to sending a card with printed good wishes. No visitors are permitted.”
A buzzing from the assemblage.
Ann handed me my shoe and I followed her downstairs, not wanting to linger any longer. Poor Mrs. Woolpack. I felt I knew her through her car. Stumbling down the last step, I took a couple of seconds to realise that the voice hailing me above the babble was Mrs. Lionel Wiseman’s.
Sidney had whipped Bunty’s hair into a blond cloud, the kind which must present doorway difficulties. “Sorry we’re late! Ellie, you remember Teddy?” Bunty tapped her tweedy middle-aged companion on the head. “And I see you’ve brought Ann.”
Perhaps she didn’t mean to sound the way she did. Her eyes slid over Ann, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “Let’s bag a table over by the window, as far as possible from that creep in the raincoat. Yes, over there-doesn’t he give you the willies?”
The man was standing in front of the Gents. He had a beer glass tilted up to his face. My heart skipped some beats, then put them back in the wrong place. Could he be the man I had seen before? No, Ellie, don’t be paranoid. England is a country of raincoats.
“Is this hunky-dory?” Bunty patted the floral cushion in the window nook overlooking The Square.
“Very nice,” said Ann. There was a slight draft, but not from the window.
The Raincoat Man opened a box of matches, tumbled the contents into his palm and began snapping them in half, a stick at a time, dropping them on the floor.
Teddy removed her gloves and adjusted one of the combs poked at random through her bundled-up hair. She looked a safe sort of secretary for a married man. When she spoke, her voice was as beige as the rest of her. But to be fair, Bunty’s vivacity probably did that to all of us. Certainly Ann looked more wan than usual.
“This is nice, Mrs. Haskell,” Teddy’s projecting teeth gave a slight catch to her speech. “I enjoyed your wedding. Please tell your husband I liked the little chicken tarts.”
“He’ll be delighted.” This sort of chitchat was the real world. I stopped eyeing the Raincoat Man.
“Teddy,” I said. “Is that short for Theodora?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you Lady Theodora Peerless?” The mysterious Theodora who had grown up in the mansion that was now a nursing home? The Theodora on whom Miss Gladys Thorn was to bestow the music found in an old trunk?
She was easing out of the tweedy coat, revealing a hand-knitted oatmeal cardigan and twin strands of pearls. Pink plastic ones.
“Mrs. Haskell-”
“Ellie, please.”
“All right, Ellie, I’m Teddy to my friends. I gave up the title years ago, along with other unimportant things.”
“To make it short and sweet,” Bunty interrupted cheerfully, “Teddy said balls to the ancestral home when Daddy, the earl, left all the lolly to unlovely brother Walter, who offered in turn to give her two quid a week pocket money.”
“You exaggerate, Bunty,” scolded Teddy gently.
“Okay. So it was twelve pounds a week. Walter is as miserly a worm as my first hubby, but things turn out for the best.” Bunty grinned at me. “Teddy is devoted to Li. Although I have to admit (don’t I, Teddy?), the reason I first decided to be chums with the other woman in my sugar’s life was to make damn sure that when they worked late at the office, they kept the lights on. I may not look too smart but, believe me, I learned my sums from hubby number one.”
Ann clearly didn’t like this baring of the soul. She touched her dark hair and said, “Mr. Wiseman’s professional reputation has always been above reproach.”
The Raincoat Man was going into the Gents.
Bunty crossed shapely legs. “Listen, pals, when the likes of me has angled long and hard to reel in a rich and able-bodied husband, he has to be kept safe from those who might also want to stick a hook in his neck. And Teddy here is a very fascinating woman.”