Getting up from the Queen Anne chair, I set my glass on the mantel. “Nice of you to take on the burden of planning Christmas, Freddy.” I ignored Ben’s look. “Will Jill be joining us, too?”
“No.” Freddy punched down his hat. “We agreed when we parted on total noncommunication, except of a telepathic nature, until the eighteenth of May. My birthday.”
“Shrewd move.” Ben gathered the glasses onto the silver salver. “Ellie, perhaps you should get in touch with Vanessa. If she’s been coming down here, she must be very much at loose ends. And it does look bad, our not having her over even for tea.”
“All right… darling.” Anything else would have sounded insecure. I read his eyes; he was already orchestrating that tea, succulent shrimp toasts, gooseberry tarts. Vanessa would rave while I said the radishes tasted fresh. Damn. It would have been so much easier if Ben had been a banker or an undertaker.
“Freddy, want to give me a hand with dinner?” Ben picked up the salver. “Ellie, sweetheart, put your feet up and relax.”
Nothing is more tension-inducing than striving to relax. I stared at the closed door. Phoning Vanessa might be an improvement. First, I would ask Ben how many minutes we should invite her to stay.
The kitchen door was ajar and I heard him say, “Darn it, Freddy, of course I’m worried about my mother, but I don’t want Ellie to think-” The electric mixer blared on. “You know how she’s been lately.”
Tobias came meowing down the hall. He’d get me caught eavesdropping on my own husband. “You know how she’s been lately;” that had to mean since the wedding. I scooped up Tobias. Was it possible Ben, too, had noted the absence of violins? But supposing he had. Surely he wouldn’t discuss anything of so intimate a nature with Freddy, of all people. Wait-hadn’t I read that men did that sort of thing? Engaging in male-bonding conversations such as, “I say, old chap, been having a spot of bother with the wife. Isn’t twanging as she should.”
Everything I had read in Marriage Takes Two stressed the importance of confronting issues head-on, before insecurities grew like weeds and took over the marital flower garden.
I scratched Tobias’s ears and told both of us that Ben had only meant I was depressed about Dorcas and Jonas leaving. A secure wife wouldn’t resent his talking to Freddy about me-or his mother.
I went to the phone and dialed. She answered at the exact moment I felt justification in hanging up.
“Hello, Vanessa.”
“Oh, it’s you. Imagine you’ve heard I’ve seen the light. It happened when I saw my first miracle, your wedding. Ellie, don’t screw up your face like that; it makes your cheeks bag.”
“I am not.” Now I would spend the rest of this bloody conversation kneading my cheeks.
“You will remember, Ellie, that Mummy was being particularly obnoxious that day, trying to seduce that suit of armour. I don’t know how I could have borne the anguish”-Vanessa yawned into the phone-“if Reverend Foxworth hadn’t been so divinely Kind. He made me finally see what I have been missing all my life-spiritually speaking.”
Naturally he had been kind to her. She was my cousin. I gritted my teeth. “Vanessa, you are welcome to stay at Merlin’s Court whenever you are in Chitterton Fells.”
“Have you left it to me in your will?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I don’t think so, thank you. As I said to someone-I think it was Reverend Foxworth-Ben and Ellie only have a couple of dozen bedrooms; I would feel I was intruding.”
Stuffing the telephone cord into my mouth, I clawed at the air. Calm again, I said, “So you couldn’t manage Christmas?”
“Let me check my calendar.” A pause. “No, darling, I have other plans.”
Good. I would invite Rowland and Miss Thorn.
Both declined with regret. Previous engagements. Ben’s father didn’t, of course, celebrate the twenty-fifth of December and explained over the phone to me that this was a very busy time for him, selling Christmas trees.
“On Christmas Day?”
“A lot of last-minute shoppers.”
“Any word from Mrs… Mum?”
“Paris got another card a couple of days ago.”
She had been absent almost a month and still no word for Ben. It really was awful, but when I tried to console him he got snappish, saying it was clear his mother did not wish to put him in the middle. How could a postcard put him in the middle?
Speaking of the mail, I had heard from my Chicago correspondent, Dorcas.
Dear Ellie old sock,
Best way to describe this place is tall and cold. Breath freezes to your face. But natives are charming. Get bombarded with such questions as, do we Brits have hot and cold running water? Inside loos? Can’t count the times I’ve been told I speak English frightfully well for a foreigner. Our monetary system also fascinates them. Want to know what’s a sixpence, a shilling and a farthing. Get frightfully disappointed when I say the old coinage has gone the way of the bustle. Now Ellie, no need to worry about Jonas, unless you are averse to baseball caps and TV dinners-only food the man eats anymore. You have my word-won’t let him out of the apartment until weather breaks. Enjoyed all news in your last letter. How is the household help situation?
Ah, yes. During the latter days of December we had received several applications in response to our ‘Help Wanted’ advertisement in The Daily Spokesman. The first woman, a Mrs. Philips, was aged. How would I ever be able to leave her alone in the house, let alone see her wheezing into her bucket? For her interview I sat her in the rocking chair, fed her lunch, and heard how she was working to buy a knitting machine, something she had always craved.
The next day I had one sent to her anonymously and proceeded to interview Mrs. Hodgkins, who was young and stalwart, but wanted to bring her boxer dog, Alfred. Personally, I didn’t object, but Tobias is rather given to these silly prejudices.
The upshot of these negative experiences was that when Mrs. Roxie Malloy presented herself on the back doorstep, on the twenty-seventh of January (Christmas had been pleasant but nothing to write about), I didn’t say the position had been filled.
“Well, what’s it to be, Mrs. H., am I to be left standing on the step like a milk bottle?”
Time is a great mellower. The memory of how she had taken an uppish attitude when Freddy threatened to jump from the tower on my wedding day had scabbed over.
Which doesn’t mean I clasped Mrs. M. to my bosom and begged her not to leave us till retirement. She entered the kitchen carrying an enormous bag containing “me supplies, Mum.” Off came her coat, revealing her tree trunk figure compressed into a bronze-and-black taffeta cocktail suit, its hem three inches lower at the rear. She wore stacked black suede shoes, and so many rings I doubted she could bend her fingers. While I put her coat on a chair, she toted the bag over to the table, stepped out of her shoes, and disparagingly assessed the navy Aga cooker, the wallpaper with its wheatsheaf pattern, and Ben’s beloved copper pans.
“Husband not home?”
“He’s at work.”
“Quite a superior establishment, this”-a hiccup punctuated this observation and confirmed my suspicion that she had diluted her morning orange juice with gin-“and in a fairly salubrious neighborhood, but we both know that anyone deciding to work here would have their work cut out for them.” Exhausted by the prospect, Mrs. Malloy sagged into a chair and lit up a fag.
“Work cut out for you?” The place gleamed. I had spent hours keeping everything shipshape for the stream of candidates.