The Widow's Club (8 page)

“Nothing for it, Ellie, we have to take cover.”

My bridegroom opened a random car door, and I made a token protest as we settled ourselves on the front seat.

Ben rolled his window one-third of the way down and the wind burst in upon us. It yanked at my veil and crawled icily inside my thin bodice.

“This is cosy,” I said. A good wife understands all about male pride. Ben was extremely self-conscious about the claustrophobia which had plagued him since an early childhood trauma. He had been trapped inside a potato bin while playing hide-and-seek in his father’s greengrocer’s shop.

“If you aren’t one hundred percent satisfied with this accommodation, I am sure I can find you something nicer further down the line.” Ben nuzzled my neck.

“This is ch–charming.”

“You mean it’s musty and we’re sitting on a hairbrush.”

Rain does have that nasty habit of ripening fusty odours, and the car interior did smell rather pungently of spilt milk, cigarette butts, old newspapers, and dog hair. The hairbrush wasn’t the only object making the seat less than comfortable, but I was not about to subject our port in a storm to the white-glove test. Any more than I would dwell on that moment when I had seen my bouquet reverently laid on a coffin lid.

All things considered, this was wickedly snug. And, after a life of deplorable virtue, it was thrilling to be in a stranger’s car with Ben’s lips on mine and the warmth of his body closing in. How should I comport myself if he suggested our climbing over to the back seat?

The car doors vibrated. The wind had deepened to an anguished lowing; the windows were awash with rain. But for all that, Ben and I were as blissful as Mr. and Mrs. Noah when the wicked drowned, the earth sank, and the ark went bobbing on its merry way.

What cared I if the Aunts Astrid and Lulu were enlivening the reception by throwing wedding cake at each other? Or if Uncle Maurice were assiduously attempting to seduce the most sexually repressed woman in the room? Ben and I needed these moments alone to gird ourselves for the fray.

Ben’s hands moved under my veil. He was loosening my knot of hair. I felt the weight of it tumble heavily, wantonly, about my shoulders. I closed my eyes. My mother’s idea of informing me of the facts of life had been to hand me a brandy and say dreamily, “People who make love at night in bed are past it.” Ben’s breathing became possessed of a wondrously ominous rasp. His jacket buttons were embedding themselves into my flesh, but I felt no pain. I was having trouble breathing, and my temperature kept going up and down like a department store lift. Perhaps I had already caught pneumonia. I was turning limp, utterly unable to resist as, his hand cradling the back of my head, I was borne backward by his body. I could see
only his eyes, brilliant as emeralds—no, sapphires—their colour changing, blazing from one to the other until I had to close my own for fear of being scorched.

Time fell away, as the earth had done in Noah’s day. Then it came, a strident, almost explosive rattling of the car doors. Who? What? Oh, my heavens! Blood pounded through my veins. Perhaps nighttime and bedtime and privacy were not totally to be despised. In one movement I was upright, ripping my tablecloth veil and hurling Ben backward across the seat.

“What happened? Weren’t we enjoying ourselves?” His voice was peevish but his eyes were laughing.

The rattling had stopped. Perhaps only the wind … I bundled up my hair and stabbed it back to respectability.

“My darling,” I said, “let us vow never to let this happen again until tonight. Is it fair, is it decent, to create the possibility of some bereaved person entering his or her car to be met by the appalling vista of entwined lovers in a state of lascivious disarray?”

“If you will excuse me a moment, my dear.” Reaching for the handle, Ben battled the door open. He climbed out and seconds later climbed back in.

“A cold shower always helps,” he said with a grin.

I refrained from saying he had given the inside of the car one too. A good wife never nags. Drying his face with my veil, I asked, “You don’t think I am being frightfully spinsterish, do you?”

“Darling, I think you are being breathtakingly—right.” Ben realigned my tiara. “My mother wouldn’t want to live if word went up and down Crown Street that I had been had up for lewd conduct in a Vauxhall.”

“Mm.” Never having met Mrs. Haskell, I could be no judge of her feelings on any subject. Save one. Her belief that to set foot inside a Church of England was to be turned into a pillar of salt. But the loving wife keeps such thoughts to herself.

“What about you?” I said. “Haven’t you had enough catastrophe for one day?”

Ben smiled. “I’m hardened. As boys, Sid and I got routinely marched down to the police station by the wicked landlord of Crown Street whenever he caught us watching stag films in whichever of his houses happened to be vacant at the time. Ellie, I think we should try and swim for it.”

Aptly put. The rain was now battering the car and spurting through the partially open window, but we had to get home. Failure to do so would not endear us to the unknown neighbours who had responded so enthusiastically to the announcement in
The Daily Spokesman
.

“What are you doing?” Ben asked, as I rummaged about on the seat. “Checking for an umbrella to steal?”

“Good idea, but my object was to straighten and remove all signs of our illicit occupancy.” A prickly stab and I triumphantly grasped the hairbrush which had wormed its way down the back of the seat. And what was this? Ah ha! A bulky cardigan with a woolly hat tucked up one sleeve. And here? A glove, a wad of newspapers, and a crushed box of tissues that would now fit through a letter box. Had the pretty pink and gold cardboard been this compact before our intrusion?

I attempted to plump it up. “Ben, dear, we should have climbed in the back.”

He gave a pained sigh. “I do wish you would stop toying with me like this.”

The tissue box came down on his head. “I meant that the owner of this car is a front seat dumper and we’ve squashed his—”

“Her. The owner of this car is a woman.”

“Forgive me, male … person, but you cannot so assume on the basis of one pink cardigan.”

“Ellie, an Englishman’s car is his castle. Only a woman would drive around in this state of chaos.” As if to prove his point, he picked up an earring and tossed it from hand to hand.

I took slow, deep breaths. Remember, Ellie, how far he has come in terms of eradicating chauvinistic leanings since first we met. “Darling, don’t you think that remark is just a teensy bit sexist?”

“Absolutely. Women get housework up to the chin; they don’t have anything left over to give to the car. Whereas we males”—he thumped his chest—“find fulfillment for our domestic urges in shining up leather and spitting on chrome in an area the size of the old tree house.”

“Mm!” I was only slightly mollified. A name tag on the woolly hat read Beatrix Woolpack. “Would you please budge? You’re sitting on more stuff.”

“Ellie, leave everything. She’s more likely to notice if—”

“Just look at this piece of paper! It’s all crunched up, as well as being decidedly damp.”

“Ellie, let’s go. We didn’t take a year’s lease.”

“One minute.” I was smoothing out the scrap of paper. “What if this is something important and you’ve got the writing all smeared? One quick peek and … oh, splendid! Just a shopping list and still legible, I think.” Tilting my body closer to the window I read out loud.

“Two tins cat food, twenty Players, one hair tint (Wistful Fawn), dog biscuits, one-quarter pound tea, steak and kidney pie, frozen peas, milk of magnesia—”

Ben’s voice broke into my ear. “Ellie, this comes as a hideous shock.”

In this light I doubted he could see that I was blushing. Even so, I held the paper in front of my face. “You’re right! I should have told you before we married that other people’s shopping lists hold this kinky fascination for me.”

“Ellie, you can read the labels on people’s underwear for all I care. What appalls me is my abysmal naiveté. I never realised that civilized people actually consume shop-bought meat pies.” Ben tried to take the list away, but I held on to it.

“Therein,” I said, “lies the fascination of shopping lists. They tell us all sorts of things. For example, the owner of this car is a middle-aged female (no one under fifty wants to be wistful); she smokes (cigarettes high on the list); she is a pet owner, does not like to cook, suffers from constipation, is disorganised—”

“You got that from the state of the car.”

I tut-tutted. “The items aren’t categorised. The pet foods should be together, ditto the chemist items.”

Ben leaned against me and continued reading the list. “Instant caramel blancmange.” His tone was one of extreme revulsion. “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned crême bruleé?”

“Dear, dear!” I skimmed to the bottom of the paper with one eye, while watching the window with the other.

Porridge oats, one lamb chop—obviously single; my guess was a widow—three wild mice.

My turn to shudder. Surely if the cat’s owner could eat convenience foods, Puss could be persuaded to do likewise.

“What’s wrong?” From the sound of him, Ben was still dwelling on the decadence of caramel blancmange.

I moved his finger up a notch to the offending item. His dark eyebrows drew together, but he shrugged. “Nothing wrong there. I happen to prefer white, because of the greater scope for play, but everyone to his own taste.”

“Taste!” I twitched the list away, staring at that mouth which I had so recently kissed. “Sweetheart, you
are
joking?”

“Do I ever joke about food?” Ben drew the list back from my nerveless fingers and laid it on the seat. “I concede that wild rice has its place in the scheme of things, but the texture is so often flawed by impetuous boiling. It is at its best when simmered for thirty-two and one-half minutes and served with almond butter.”

Light dawned—my mind had leapt to the macabre; it had been that sort of day. I saw again the widow going up the church steps, poor woman, so … so …

“Ellie, do let’s get out of here. This discussion reminds me that our nuptial bash is at the mercy of that woman Dorcas hired to serve, and I keep getting these flashes that something terrible has happened to the lobster aspic.” Ben had his door halfway open when we heard it—a roar, deeper, throatier than the wind and charged with a different kind of energy. We looked at each other.

We were outside the car, my dress and veil bundled up in my hands, when the motorbike leapt toward us through swirling rain, accompanied by a joyful
hoot hoot
loud enough and sacrilegious enough to waken all the dead in the churchyard. Bike and rider slithered between the lich-gate, dispersing gravel right, left, and center, and came to a lunging sideways stop millimeters from us.

“Freddy!” exclaimed Ben, with rather more pleasure than I thought necessary or appropriate.

“You two sure are my kind of people. Couldn’t hold out till you got home, could you?” Freddy favoured us with his familiar leer. He was now dressed in everyday attire—a black leather jacket, a shirt collar, but no shirt; a weighty tangle of chains flattened the damp hairs on his chest.

“Sorry to disappoint you, old man, but we were merely seeking shelter from the deluge.” Ben wound an arm round me.

“Got you!” Freddy lowered an eyelid in a man-to-man wink. “Can’t wait to tell Jill. She was rather concerned,
Ellie, that you might suffer from the flannel nightie and woolly bedsocks syndrome.”

He moved before I could grab hold of his long, untidily plaited hair and wrap it around his throat. A dark huddle of figures was forming outside the church. I could hear the distant murmur of Rowland’s voice, but Freddy wasn’t looking in that direction. “By the way, where is Jill? Don’t tell me the girl who worships the shadow I cast has nipped off to the wedding feast without me.”

“What did you think she would do, you turnip, stand under a tree until you returned or she got struck by lightning? Don’t worry, Jill is being looked after,” I said benignly. “She accompanied your parents in their car back to Merlin’s Court.”

“Oh, God!” he groaned. “Mum will have pinched her purse en route, and we all know what Dad will have tried to pinch!”

Damn Freddy! I watched his eyes, the lids still dusted with neon purple. Should I be held accountable for his romance with Jill simply because they had met at Merlin’s Court? Admittedly, Freddy considers being asked for the time by any female under ninety a romance. But I did suspect that Cupid’s arrow had got him in the aorta this time. Despite all my claims to sanity, I was fond of Freddy, and it was hard not to feel some pity for the person the fates had assigned Aunt Lulu and Uncle Maurice as parents.

Faking a yawn, Freddy yanked at the chains around his neck. “Okay, love doves, the meter’s running. Afraid I can only manage one passenger, so will it be you, Ellie?”

Motorbikes terrify me. However, the wedding guests were beginning to prey on my conscience and Ben refused to ride while I jogged home. I gazed into my husband’s face, memorizing every line, as I warned him to keep to the middle of Cliff Road. He tends to daydream while out walking about such things as the ultimate marinade.

Freddy leaned on the hooter. “Come on! I realise this is the first time you two have been parted since your marriage, but I would like to get there before Mum has nicked half the family heirlooms.”

One last lingering kiss and I hoisted aboard. The rain was now a gauzy mizzle; the elms were sketched in charcoal. Even though I knew it was unlucky I looked back over my shoulder. The dark morass of humanity around the
newly dug grave was separating into forlorn shadows. Something squeezed inside me. Tonight, the widow would go home to her empty house, empty bed … The bike vibrated and we were off. Flung vertical, we zoomed onto the narrow, bumpy road.

“By gum, this is the life,” bawled Freddy over his shoulder.

Soaring like a seagull on airwaves of terror. Below us, the waves seethed against the jagged rocks. Think happy thoughts, Ellie! Do not focus on that Mr. Woolpack who had driven over the cliff edge one foggy night last spring. What would it take, a pebble in the wrong place at the wrong time, to send us in Mr. Woolpack’s flight path? I fear I almost gouged out Freddy’s appendix. Life was rather meaningful to me right now.