Mum's the Word (17 page)

This time I got a reaction. Ben abandoned my hands and started to pace—although, space being limited, he appeared to be treading water. “Lois Brown is a gem. Kind, decent, always thinking the best of others. Damn her! Why did she have to be on the team! I have absolutely no compunction about beating out the chaps—and that includes Miss Rumpson. She can take it on the chin; but when it comes to Mrs. Brown …”

“You're afraid of Lois Brown, hubby mine!”

“Hell, Ellie”—he kicked a shoe toward the door—“must you see through me, to the venal core? My feelings aren't those of chivalry. She's the one to be knocked off the horse. I can compete with a man who pulls cooked rabbits out of a
hat. I'm not afraid of some snotty-nosed child star who asks several times during the evening “to be excused.” I can surpass Dame Lovecharm. But a woman who puts three meals on the table for a family of eight, day after day, year after year—never once being sued for botulism poisoning—
she
has me worried.”

“Darling, you'll fight a fair fight,” I soothed. Should I mention Valicia's likeness to Vanessa so he could explain away the rude way he had stared? Too late! The peace of our boudoir away from home was shattered by a piercing scream.

“Don't worry,” I reassured my hero as he grabbed for me. “Old houses always manufacture these strange noises. Our group heard such a scream earlier. But no bodies turned up. We concluded that Jim Grogg and his lady Divonne must be having a moon howl.”

“What, Mr. Baking Powder? That weedy chap?” Ben smiled at my gullibility. “Not so!
That
was a scream that bears investigating. Sweetheart, hide under the bed if you feel the least bit insecure. Remember your delicate condition.” And with that he was gone.

Was this to be the story of my stay at Mendenhall? Bedtime always an unrealized hope? Stop, cried a voice inside my head. Must you forever carp? Ben didn't leave you to rush out on a date. He … Footsteps beyond my door, voices congregating in the hallway … My stomach began to churn. I was afraid to venture into the hall to discover what dread misfortune had occurred, but I couldn't stay here. Peering around for my dressing gown, I remembered it now belonged to Miss Rumpson. Never mind. When without, go like Scarlett O'Hara. Dragging up the poppy field spread, I wrapped it around me. That lump in my throat must be my heart!

As far as my eye could see, the hall was empty. Then the bathroom door opened and out came Bingo Hoffman. A towel rolled up under his arm, he wore a bright red dressing gown which made him look like an apprentice Father Christmas.

“Get a load of you!” He thumbed his specs back on his nose. “What you supposed to be, an American Indian?”

Refusing to explain my attire, I solicited information on the scream.

“Oh, that!” His scowl filled out his already full cheeks.
“I told the possé it wasn't me, but when in doubt—blame a kid. I was on my way along to Mum's room to tell her something, when I glanced over the railing and saw the ghost of Mendenhall. She was dressed up in a freaky long dress and a black bonnet with a ruffle of white round the face. And this is the fun part …” Bingo smacked his lips “… she was sticking up her finger.”

“Dame Gloom,” I whispered.

“What?”

“The woman in the portrait downstairs.” Gingerly—I tend to approach children as if they are stray dogs—I touched his shoulder. “You poor old thing; someone's idea of a joke, which gave you a real scare.”

He hugged the towel tighter. “So! I yelled. More of a gasp really. Sure didn't scream like I was in a Stephen King movie. My guess is it was Ms. Faith, waking up from a nightmare.”

“You are a genius!” Convinced Bingo was anxious to see the back of me, I excused myself and entered the bathroom. Leaning against the door I took a couple of restorative breaths—one of which went down the wrong way. What was that scratching sound behind the bath curtain? Would a knife plunge through the fabric if I moved a muscle? I had my hand on the doorknob, when there came a whirring sound—rather like an electric blender. Sometimes I think I spend my life in a blender. The curtain moved and … that damn pigeon plopped onto the exposed portion of bath ledge.

“You!” Drawing back the curtain to ascertain he was alone, I saw scrawled on the tile behind the bath in big green letters: THIS HOUSE IS GOING TO GET YOU. Ah ha, was that why Bingo was carrying a towel? Somewhere to hide his markers. Was the prodigy a mean-spirited kid at heart? For a moment Pigeon and I looked at each other, before I turned pointedly away and opened up the medicine cabinet. If ever a night called out for an antacid tablet this was it! And I remembered seeing a bottle when Mary Faith showed Marjorie Rumpson and me the added dimensions of the cupboard.

I don't know what made me do it. A chance to show off for the pigeon? Removing the deodorants and such like, I pressed the miniscule button above the third shelf. Abracadabra! I was a magician equal to the comte. I could see right
into the secret meeting room. I could see the stand with the coffee pot and paper cups. I could see the table … and I could see the demoralizingly beautiful Valicia X talking to Ben!

My heart squeezed closed, but I managed to press the button to my left; his voice was so close he could have been talking to me. “The moment you walked into the room I knew,” he said.

“Did you?” Her Titian hair rippled back from her ivory brow. “And have you been counting the minutes until we could talk alone?” Her laughter was an avalanche burying me in cold. “Do tell, Ben, does your wife suspect?”

There being nowhere else for me to turn, I went home that night to St. John's Wood where I grew up. I had always thought the house rather like my Uncle Maurice—double-breasted, glassy eyed, a little shabby under the new coat of paint, but none the less thinking itself a cut above the neighbours. We lived in the top floor flat, a makeshift renovation of what had been servants' quarters—Dad's little joke being that one day we would move down to something better.

The dream wasn't fuzzy around the edges. No sensation of looking through the tattered film of sleep. I was there, climbing the sheer rock face of stairs, the naked boards worn slick as ice. I could feel my skirt grazing my legs, I could smell damp newspapers, and brass polish and fish. The banister was hard and real under my hand. Up, up, past Flat No. Five where old Mrs. Bundy lived. Terrible woman, forever thumping on the ceiling with her stick. But given to kindly lapses. I remember she let me stroke her cat Angela on my seventh birthday. And another time she slipped a tube of fruit gums into my school satchel, accompanied by a wheezy, “Not a word to Father.” She meant Mr. Bundy, not my father.

The air grew thin. Out of condition, I was forced to use the banister as a tow rope. Dad took pleasure in proclaiming that we lived up in the Gods. Theatrical expressions fell lightly from his lips. He had trod the boards in his youth. Bit
parts. Soldiers or policemen, that sort of thing. “Paid to be seen and not heard,” was the way he put it. A severe test of the spirit for someone who believed Shakespeare wrote with him in mind. Once when playing a corpse in a graverobbing scene he burst into fiery rhetoric, failing to shut up until run through by the leading man's sword. He and my mother, a dancer, met while performing in the
Mikado
.

Always a performer, my mother. Was the role of parent any more real to her than Giselle, for whom she named me? Would she be home? My hand weighed heavy when I knocked on No. Six. The door barely visible under the collage of theatrical posters. And suddenly, I was terrified that I had made a mistake in coming. There was nothing for me here. Mother had been dead for years and Dad was God alone knew where. Neither had met Ben or, for that matter, Mrs. Bentley Haskell.

Too late. The door had slowly blown open, and a dreamy voice called out, “Come in, Ellie darling.”

The sitting room was exactly the same as the day we moved in. Cosily, crazily crowded, with furniture set down in most peculiar places. The grandmother clock stood in the middle of the bare floor. And a desk was edged in front of the fireplace as if waiting to be moved into proper position. Christmas ornaments from years back dangled from the candelabra. A rug was rolled into a bolster, while linen curtains lay folded up on the window ledge waiting to go up. When there was time. My parents never had enough time to do everything they wanted to do. Case in point—Mother had been racing down a flight of steps—not the death-defying ones I had just mounted, but ones leading to a railway station, when she fell and died.

For a ghost, she looked awfully good. No more altered than the room. One of the few advantages of dying young. Strange to think that one day, before too long, I would be older than she had ever been. But then some people have a talent for being young. At age six I was the one reminding her to wear a scarf out in the smog. I'd even threatened to sew her gloves on elastic strings inside her coat, if she lost another pair.

“Come and give me a hug, darling!” She was attired in several transparencies of muslin draped into a sort of Grecian
tutu. Naturally she was as at the barre. Dad had installed the ballet barre and, true to form, it didn't run true. I blew her a kiss. She was in the arabesque position and a trifle unsteady en pointe.

“Ages since I heard from you.” She wobbled slightly as she went into a deep knee bend.

“You're not easy to reach.” I sat on a chair stacked with papers. “Mother, we have to talk.”

“Any time, my little girl.” She was doing a floaty motion with her right arm. “So lovely of you to come. Your father's always too busy being alive to keep in touch. And people have this silly idea that I've grown deadly dull since I passed over.”

“Mother!”

“In all due vanity, I'm more alive dead than many people I know …”

“Oh, please!” I pressed my hands to my temples. “You never change! Always adrift in your own private sea.”

Mother stopped standing on one leg, removed her hand from the barre and pressed it to her elegantly boney breast. “My darling, are you and that gorgeous husband having problems?”

I fought the snuffle in my voice. “Our relationship is in shreds and, Mother, I am here to assign blame. Had you but raised me to be beautiful, charming, and witty, Ben would never have turned to another woman.”

She raised her left eyebrow and right leg simultaneously, but I didn't give her a chance to open her mouth. “How can you justify bringing a child into the world who would weigh more at age eight than you did at thirty? Where was your sense of responsibility when saddling me with a father who believes everything one owns should pack into one suitcase? You say he doesn't have time for you, well, what about me? I'm supposed to be
alive
.”

“Ellie, dearest.” She kept going at the barre. “All this resentment! Was I too busy to notice?”

“Too busy to be a mother. I wrapped my own Christmas presents.”

“Was that wrong? Daddy and I wanted you to experience every facet of the excitement.”

“I hosted my own birthday parties from age six.”

“We wanted you to be self-reliant.”

“Thank you. That explains your sending me alone by train and taxi to Merlin's Court to stay with an ancient great uncle whom I had never met? Let me tell you, Mother, that experience scarred me for life. The breakup of my marriage is the result. And don't tell me that I would never have met Ben but for Uncle Merlin. This is no time for relevancies. You never even noticed I'm going to have a baby, did you? Did you?”

“Ellie,” Mother was standing still, only her tutu astir. “You could write a book about my sins.”

“Why not!” I stood up and rigorously smoothed down the sleeves of my blouse. “Other people do it. How else is a divorced expectant mother to support herself?”

“My poor darling.” Her voice was a whisper against my face, but I couldn't see her any more.

What a relief to wake up and realize that sleep had not impaired my memory. I could recall every anguished breath of last night's betrayal. Thank God for pride. When Valicia X referred to me as the unsuspecting wife, I had switched off the medicine cabinet and fled back to the bedroom. And when Ben returned some five or ten minutes later, I pretended to be dead. Oh, the horror of that Judas kiss upon my neck, the treachery of his hands smoothing back my hair, the anguish of hearing him murmur, “Sleep well, my love.”

Sunlight knifed through the window and spattered the walls. Nine A.M. by the travel clock. Turning over, I found Ben's side of the bed empty. He must have heard me talking in my sleep and realized his life was in danger. Life loomed before me, insurmountable as a mountain of clothes to be washed. No one to bring me flowers; no one to tell me I looked great when I felt like hell; no one to do the ironing. The beast! Why couldn't he have made life unbearable so it would be easy to leave him?