“I thought it might be too big.”
“How kind… of you to worry.”
“My dear wife lives and breathes worry.” Charles Delacorte’s voice chilled the room. “What is one more sleepless night in a good cause?” Horrible man. Other than sharing his interest in antiques, what could have possessed Ann to marry him? That she could ever have loved him was frightening.
“I did appreciate your help in selecting the dress,” I told her.
“You are certainly intrepid, Mrs. Haskell,” commented the man with acid flowing through his veins. “My wife might have sent you down the aisle dressed as the ghost of Joan Crawford.” He picked up a silver-backed mirror and buffed it. “Not that your wedding lacked excitement.”
Ann touched my arm and gave a low laugh. “Charles likes to tease about my taste in dress.”
“I have never found the forties interesting.” He jiggled a finger on one of the keys of the till.
Ann, who would never see thirty-nine again, pressed a hand to her throat and laughed. “I suppose I am time warped, but I admire everything about that era. Those were the days when I was happy, perhaps not a child prodigy, but a child success. I could sing, and I had parents who wanted me to shine. They entered me in talent contests and for several years I toured the country.” Her eyes took on a far-away look; she leaned against the counter, one hand rippling along its surface as if it were a piano keyboard.
And suddenly, incredibly, she began to sing, “Where did you go, man of my tears, leaving nothing on my horizon, but lonely, lonely years…”
I was excruciatingly embarrassed. Charles Delacorte was smiling as if his wife had finally made his day. Her voice (which wasn’t great) petered out. She gave a choked laugh.
“As well I retired at age ten, isn’t it? I never had the magic of the greats like Sylvania. Hers was a voice like Irish whiskey, all fire and passion. I did a show with her once.” The far-away look was back in Ann’s eyes. “She must have been about eighteen at the time, and she lit up the place with her sequins and her flaming hair. She sang ‘Goodbye, Again.’ I wanted to grow up to be exactly like her.” Ann lifted a hand to her face. “I don’t need you, Charles, to tell me that she was a great beauty and I never was. But I think my figure is comparable; I’m still thirty-eight, twenty-three, thirty-seven. One of the benefits of never having had children.”
Charles fixed his arctic gaze on me, increasing my discomfort. A clock chimed the quarter hour and I slid the picture frames across the counter and opened my bag. I had yet to overcome my feeling that measurements were a private matter, never to be casually discussed, especially in mixed company.
“I’m not really familiar with this Sylvania.” I glanced at the bill Charles handed me and started writing out a cheque.
Ann moved around the counter. “She shunned publicity. Her private life was always exactly that. There were rumours that she was secretly married, first to this man and that and even that she had children. But then her music went out of style, like this dress. For ages nothing was written about her, except for the occasional piece in the gossip papers pondering her fade-out and hinting that some tragedy had befallen her.”
Poor lonely Ann. Forty-some years old and a crush on a dead singer. I was tucking my parcel under my arm when the
Surprisingly, Charles Delacorte warmed to tepid enthusiasm. He smoothed his transparent hair and adjusted the knot of his tie.
“Good afternoon, Miss Thorn. Have you come to look at that sheet music which Dr. Simon Bordeaux discovered in an old trunk at The Peerless Nursing Home?”
“Oh, how well you read me, Mr. Delacorte!” The organist’s skin soaked up an unbecoming blush and she adjusted her spectacles to a more lopsided angle. “I have long been aching to do something special for Lady Theodora. She has been so good, assisting with the children’s choir. And always so jolly-saying she is the ideal person because she is tone deaf. Do you agree, Mr. Delacorte, that she would like the music as a souvenir of the childhood home whence she was so cruelly evicted by her male relations?”
“Why not? I almost wish I could make a present of the music to you.”
Ann, who had come to stand beside me, looked at him as though she couldn’t believe her ears.
Miss Thorn twisted her hands. “Oh no, I couldn’t permit that. I do have my little private income, you know. Of course, I’m not an heiress like-” Miss Thorn gave a start and squinted at me through the thick lenses which magnified her eyes to mushrooms.
“Mrs. Haskell! How rude of me! But truly I didn’t see you, or rather”-another grievous adjustment to the spectacles-“see that you were you.”
“Nice to see you.”
“How incredibly kind-oh, Mrs. Haskell, I do wish to mention that I find your cousin so convivial. As does the vicar. Twice at services, on consecutive weekends. And to come such a distance!”
“Freddy?” He who eschewed habitual churchgoing on the grounds that familiarity breeds contempt? Well, it must be all of two minutes on the bike…
Ann murmured that she was slipping into the back to fetch her coat.
“The person who interrupted our-
That blouse made Miss Thorn look as though all her blood had drained from her to it. Vanessa! How dare she go to church-
“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
