A woman had come into the pub. A woman wearing a headscarf and a furtive expression. Not only did I recognize her, I presumed on our brief acquaintance to stand up and hail her over to my table.
“Hello! It’s me, Ellie Haskell.” The welcoming smile died on my lips. Frizzy Taffer’s response wasn’t one of unbridled enthusiasm. She actually backed into a couple of people, a bald man in a loud plaid jacket and a woman in black leather, before moving with lagging steps towards me.
“What a nice surprise.” Her nose should have grown at voicing this blatant lie. It was already red and puffy, as were her eyes, suggesting either a bad cold (which she hadn’t had that morning) or a prolonged bout of crying. Frizzy’s face was as drab as her raincoat. Not knowing what else to say, I told her I hadn’t expected to see her again so soon.
“I never come here.” Frizzy checked the knot of her headscarf. Not a single hair escaped onto her forehead, making her look like a nun who, though prepared to humour modern times by wearing civvies, would not forgo her wimple.
“This isn’t one of my usual haunts,” I assured her.
“Really?” Her red eyes shied away from my double gin and tonic.
“Just a prop.” I gave the glass a
ping
with my finger, almost sending it toppling over. “I came to bring Dad his suitcase and am still here because I can’t face going home yet.”
“I know the feeling.” Frizzy shed her reserve but not her scarf, and sat down, elbows on the table, hands under her chin, to support its tremble.
Resuming my own seat and trying not to notice that Mrs. Malloy was hanging over the bar, eavesdropping as if her job depended on catching every word, I said, “You were a brick letting Dad stay at your house last night. I do hope none of this has caused an upset between you and Tricks.”
“She’d have liked Mr. Haskell to stay with us until he settled things with his wife.” Frizzy reached absently for my gin and tonic. “But you know Tricks, nothing ever gets her down.” This was said with surprising venom.
“How about a nice bag of crisps, on the house?” Mrs. Malloy gushed.
For once my frown had the desired effect, and my former daily retreated behind the bar in the manner of the Oracle of Delphi subsiding behind a cloud to bone up on his lines in readiness for the next supplicant.
Downing the gin and tonic in one swallow, Frizzy stared at the glass as if unsure what it was or where it had come from. “This can’t be happening,” she said softly. “I’m a nice person.”
“One drink isn’t wicked.”
“What?” She looked at me as if I were no more real than the now-empty glass. Then she started to cry as if her insides were being put through the wringer and her tears squeezed out with every turn of the handle. It was awful, so awful that I couldn’t speak, let alone reach out a hand to her in her misery.
“I had to get out of that house or I would have torn her hair out. That would have been a case of the punishment
fitting the crime.” Frizzy placed a hand on her headscarf. “Because of my mother-in-law’s carelessness,” she told me dully, “I’m bald as an egg.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Frizzy continued with a sob. “Tricks lost the cap to her bottle of Nake-It—”
“That’s the stuff you use on your legs and under your arms instead of shaving, Mrs. H.,” explained Mrs. Malloy, who tends to think I just got off the Ark. “My third, or it could have been me fourth, husband used to say I had the loveliest armpits of any woman he had known, but don’t let me keep you from your story, Mrs. T.”
Frizzy trembled. “She poured the Nake-It into an empty bottle of Bright and Breezy Cream Plush shampoo. Not a word to anyone about what she had done. I never thought twice when I went and washed my hair this evening. Why would I? And I gave the beastly stuff plenty of time to work, because I didn’t rinse it off my head for at least fifteen minutes. While I was massaging my scalp—trying to get the stuff to sudse, the baby started fussing and Dawn was carrying on to her dad about the goldfish that got cooked to death. So I wrapped a towel around my head to go and sort things out. When I did get a moment to stick my head back under the tap, there was my hair all over the towel, ready to be shaken out into the dustbin.”
“Your lovely curls!” I could have cried for her.
“My one claim to looking halfway decent.” She wept.
“Whatever did your husband say?”
“Tom was livid with his mother. And I know I shouldn’t have gone off the deep end when he told me it would grow back. He was just trying to make me feel better.”
“Men don’t have our sensitivity.” Mrs. Malloy poked at her own black-and-white confection with unwonted nervousness as if afraid it would come away in her hands.
“Was Tricks upset?” I asked my table companion.
“She said we should look on the bright side, that now I could stop worrying about my dandruff.” A faraway look came into Frizzy’s eyes, and it took a moment for me to realize this was because she was watching the entrance door, or, rather, the young woman who had just walked through it. “That’s Pamela Pomeroy,” she said in a frozen voice.
“Why, so it is!” Under the circumstances, I didn’t know whether to wave frantically or feign poor eyesight. Too late for debate. Pamela had spotted us and was heading our way, her ponytails waggling like spaniel ears and her brown eyes brimming with enthusiasm. Was this the same person who had stood with slouched shoulders and hangdog expression in Lady Kitty’s shadow that morning at the Taffer residence?
“Thank goodness I’ve found you both!”
“You were out looking for us?” Considering I had met her only that once and hadn’t received the impression that she and Frizzy were fast friends, I inevitably concluded that Pamela was one of a search party sent out to comb the hills and dales around Chitterton Fells for the missing wives. Was there a bounty on Frizzy’s poor bald head along with mine?
“No, I had no idea you would be here.” Pamela gave a schoolgirl laugh as she sat down on the third of the four chairs. “But I had been thinking about how sweet and nice you both seemed, so it has to be fate! I was beyond desperate when I got up from the dinner table and ran out of the house. If the pond hadn’t looked so grotty, I swear I would have thrown myself in. That would have served Mumsie Kitty right, don’t you think?”
Misery does love company. Frizzy brightened perceptibly and I immediately lost interest in my own troubles.
“Whatever happened?” I asked before Mrs. Malloy could take a dive off the bar.
Pamela bit her lip, looking for all the world like a
fourth former who, having hung her hockey stick on the wrong peg, now waited in dread of a summons to the headmistress’s office. “Mumsie Kitty invited Reverend Spike and her husband, Gladstone, over for dinner to talk about the St. Anselm’s Summer Fête. We were all at the dining room table, because with it being a special occasion, my father-in-law, Bobsie Cat, my husband, Allan, and I got to eat with the grown-ups.” Hiccupping sob. “And right in the middle of the treacle pudding, Mumsie Kitty asked me if I had remembered to take my temperature to see if this was the day for the big O.”
“The what?” Frizzy’s jaw dropped an inch or so lower than mine.
“You know.” Pamela was knitting her fingers together. “My time to ovulate. I’ve never been very regular, and Mumsie Kitty always carries on as if it’s my fault for not being better organized. But I couldn’t believe it, and Reverend Spike almost dropped the jug of custard when Mumsie whipped out a thermometer and stuck it in my mouth.”
“I would have died,” I said.
“I nearly did! I was so surprised, I almost choked on the thing.”
“See if this will drown your sorrows!” Mrs. Malloy materialized with a loaded tray and would have availed herself of the vacant seat if some inconsiderate oaf hadn’t summoned her back to the bar for a double martini on the double.
“I haven’t reached the worst part yet.” Pamela took a reviving sip from her glass. “When Mumsie Kitty pulled out the thermometer, she said all systems were go and not a moment was to be lost if there was ever to be a Pomeroy heir. She ordered Allan out of his chair and told him to rush me up to the bedroom and get busy.”
“Did your husband flare up?” Frizzy had almost finished her drink and was eyeing mine.
“He couldn’t speak. The poor darling suffers from asthma, and a confrontation with his mother always
brings on an attack. I know the Spikes must have misinterpreted his heavy breathing. It was all so humiliating. Bobsie Cat tried to speak up for me. He’s a dear, but like always he didn’t get out three words before Mumsie Kitty ordered
him
to his room. I don’t suppose he minded. He would get to play with his trains in peace. But something inside me snapped. Right in front of the vicar and her husband I told my mother-in-law she was an old battle-axe.”
“Good for you,” I said, passing Frizzy my glass.
“I just couldn’t bear it.” Pamela’s eyes grew as big as the cardboard coasters on the table. “The thought of Mumsie Kitty sitting there in the dining room, watching for the chandelier to start rocking like mad, was the last straw. I’ve always told Allan his mother would be in the bedroom with us if she could, cheering him on from the sidelines. But before tonight I never dared stand up to her. When I said I was leaving, she called me a worthless, ungrateful girl. She said I wasn’t to dare take the bike she lent me. Would you believe it? That bike has to be thirty years old, and she
gave
it to me; I swear she did. The woman is a monster!” Pamela looked from Frizzy to me. “I’m sure you both know that I got to marry Allan as a result of winning the pie-baking contest Mumsie Kitty organized so as to find him a suitably domesticated wife.”
I was about to tell her that I had married Ben after renting him for a family reunion weekend, but Frizzy interjected, “It doesn’t matter how you got fixed up if you love each other.”
“And we do!” Pamela gripped the edge of the table. “We’re crazy about each other and have been ever since we met as teenagers at the St. Anselm’s Summer Fête. It was luck”—a rosy blush made her look more than ever like a schoolgirl—“the most brilliant luck that out of ninety-seven women I baked the best pie and won my darling Allan’s hand in marriage. It was as much for his sake as mine—to give him some breathing space—that I walked out tonight, but wonderful as he
is, it does bother me a bit that he didn’t try to stop me.”
“Join the club,” I said glumly. “Ben didn’t give his mother the sack when she had words with me.”
“And come to think of it, Tom didn’t get down on his hands and knees when
I
headed for the door,” supplied Frizzy.
“You mean we three are in the same boat?” Pamela no longer looked as if she had been dropped from the hockey team.
“Sad but true,” I informed her.
“And room for one more.” Frizzy toasted the vacant chair. “Usually I don’t believe in fate and all that stuff, but …” Her voice wobbled to a fade-out.
A shiver crept down my spine, the result no doubt of the entry door being subjected to a prolonged series of openings and closings; anyway, I heard myself saying in rather an insistent voice that it wasn’t a mind-boggling coincidence, this being a one-pub town, that we three fugitives should meet up here.
Mrs. Malloy did her best to make our collective woes a paying proposition for the Dark Horse as she scuttled out on her stilt heels with yet another round of gin and tonics. I was still reluctant to indulge, but I felt compelled to offer a toast. “Down with mothers-in-law!”
“Oh, I do feel better,” Pamela sighed as the three of us clinked glasses, “even though I don’t know how I’ll ever face Reverend Spike again.”
“Well, speak of the devil!”
At Mrs. Malloy’s outburst we all turned, some of us a trifle woozily, to see St. Anselm’s presiding clergywoman enter the unhallowed portals of the saloon bar. Amazing, how quickly the place thinned out. Several ladies I recognized from the Hearthside Guild swiftly vacated by the back door, and a grey-haired gentleman in country tweeds, who had petitioned that fruit juice be substituted for wine at communion, shot past Mrs. Spike like a pointer, nose to the ground.
To add to the confusion, my heart started to thump. Not because I minded Eudora seeing me with a glass in my hand—the reverend lady had on occasion taken a glass of sherry at my house—but because it was no longer possible to deny that something beyond the realm of chance was happening here. Deep in my soul I knew that this day had by seconds and minutes been leading inexorably up to the moment when the circle would be complete.
Surprising the world did not stop spinning and Eudora did not stop dead in her tracks when I experienced this mind-boggling revelation. She walked up to the bar just like any other customer.
“What’ll it be, a half pint of best bitter?” Mrs. Malloy flexed her purple lips into an ingratiating smile.
“Nothing to drink, thank you. I stopped by on the off chance that you might remember an elderly lady coming in for a packet of cigarettes.”
“Does she have blue hair? White hair?” Mrs. M. replied with the wariness of a lawbreaker sniffing out an undercover cop.
“Dark, with silver streaks. A bit on the shaggy side.” Eudora ran an agitated hand through her windblown locks.
“Oh,
her
! Why didn’t you say right off the bat that you was talking about your ma-in-law, instead of making a sermon about it?” Chuckling at her little joke, Mrs. M. turned sideways to wipe off the counter and give me, Pamela, and Frizzy a here-we-go-again wink.
“You’ve seen her?” Eudora gripped her handbag with both hands.
“I should say I have! These last few weeks I haven’t once been over to the vicarage to have a cuppa with Mrs. Pickle and to give her a few pointers on how to get her work done this side of Christmas without that old lady buggering about the kitchen, looking for her fags.” Elbows on the bar, Mrs. M. leaned forward in patent hope of having a fiver pressed into her hand in return for this information.
“Yes, but have you seen her in here tonight?”
“Can’t say I have.” Having given vent to an irritated toss of the head, Mrs. M. remembered she was a member of the reverend’s flock and asked the lanky young man working the other end of the bar if he had recently served an elderly woman with an Irish brogue and a nose like a parrot.