Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
“That’s all it ever was, though. Companionship. At a time when them boys needed it the most.”
At which point, his eyes welled up, he grasped both my hands in his, said that was “the warmest, most wonderful, selfless act of charity he’d ever heard of,” then dropped to his knees and promptly begged me to marry him.
I ask you. Who’d say no to that?
There were changes. Obviously. Stiletto heels were out. Not the right image, the bishop felt, which was a laugh, considering his penchant for patting little girls’ bums. I scaled back on the port and brandies, learned to say “isn’t” instead of “ain’t,” and how not to drop me h’s, but ooh, I didn’t half miss sashaying around in them tight halternecks a la Sophia Loren! Tailored suits and button-to-the-collar blouses made me feel I was being strangled by a python, and between you and me, I’d have given anything to go striding down the High Street with Richard on me arm in a wife-beater T-shirt and denim jeans, like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Not that Richard had the muscles. Or the pout. Or the passion, come to that. But a girl can dream, can’t she? Besides. The War had been over ten long years, the bloom on my skin was slipping away, along with my options, and crikey, I’d put up with a bloody sight worse for a half-decent pair of nylons and a can of condensed milk.
What you need to remember, too, is that a vicar’s wife carried a certain cachet in those days. Because now when I stepped out, it was Mrs. Jenkins this and Mrs. Jenkins that, and people made time for me, can you believe it? They’d actually stop me in the street to chat. Church stuff, as you’d expect. But still. They stopped. Showed respect for the first time I remember, and as though an invisible hand had flicked a switch, suddenly there was no more sniggering about my name, my nose, my whiny voice and lack of table manners. Dolly Sneed was Someone. Mrs. Someone, at that. So they could stick their ugly babies, bawling in their cheap perambulators, and their rented council houses, and their ugly husbands with work-rough hands and beery breath. Stick it where the postmen don’t deliver letters.
No more being lied to. No more used, abused, and treated with contempt by G.I. Joe. I mattered now. And guess what? I enjoyed it.
Thank you, thank you, Little Richard, and your beauti tutti frutti.
With me, of course, nothing good ever lasts for long. I should have known. That first winter, less than six months into our marriage, Richard (my Richard, not Little Richard!) went down with pneumonia. This wasn’t new. He’d had it as a kid, three times, as it happens. Left him with a weak chest, which is why he wasn’t eligible to fight, and all credit to him, rocking round the clock to show the kids at the church dance that God was cool, even though it left him wheezing with a wracking cough for days. But if you think wearing prissy clothes and making polite conversation was not my forte, don’t even think about my nursing skills. Patience, I’m sorry to say, was most definitely not one of my virtues in them days. Still isn’t, come to that.
But.
For better or worse and all that — and let’s face it. Marriage to the Rev. Someone was a million times better than being an old maid and working in the Co-op. So once again I astounded everybody in the parish (myself included) by making soup and filling hot-water bottles, carefully mixing lemon with honey, washing him, helping him to the toilet, holding him while he hacked to bleeding point. At the time, I felt sure I deserved a medal. Or at the very least, a sainthood. “March third, St. Dolly’s Day.” Nice ring to it, don’t you think? Because despite the advances in penicillin, Richard took a week to ditch the fever, a month before the chest pain and the mucus had died down, and another couple of months before the fatigue cleared away and he was back to giving sermons and going on his rounds.
His flock, I have to say, were bleedin’ marvellous. They brought round stews, cakes, and home-baked bread, they pitched in with the gardening — weeds don’t half sprout in springtime! — leaving presents on the hall table, and not just for the vicar. For the vicar’s wife, can you imagine that! A bag of parma violets. Embroidered handkerchiefs. A pair of white lace gloves. In my entire life, no one had given me anything without a quid pro quo, and, hand on heart, I was touched. Especially when the only way to catch my mum’s attention was to steal money from her purse, kick the paint off the front door, or beat up my tittle-tattle of a sister, because even a clout round the ear and a night in the coal cellar without supper meant she was making time for me.
“Do you have any idea of how hard it is, being a widow and raising two kids on yer own?” she’d yell.
“Not so ’ard, you can’t keep a bottle of gin glued to yer lips,” I’d yell back.
That constituted conversation as far as my mother and me was concerned. I don’t recall her ever hugging me, even when I had me tonsils out. No, the best I had to look forward to was Christmas, with an orange, a few walnuts, and a bar of soap that was not carbolic. While birthdays meant a new liberty bodice and a bag of toffees, which I was meant to share. Dream on.
Of course, they’re both gone now, my mother and my sister. Bombed out in 1940, the week I ran away from home.
Who knows? Perhaps there is a God?
“You should have been a cat, you know that, don’t you?”
Richard was just back from his weekly tour of the sick, the poor, the dying, the bereaved. I was at the dining-room table, head down over me new Singer sewing machine, because that’s another skill I didn’t know I had. The ability to make me own clothes. And I was good at pinning on the paper patterns, cutting out the fabric, tacking, hemming, pinking, sewing seams. I was. A skill, admittedly, which sprung from my desire (some might say obsession) with trawling through them great big pattern books in the department stores. Vogue being my favourite, but give me a Butterick or a McCall’s and I’d be lost for days. Drooling over film-star evening gowns with fishtail hems and off-the-shoulder necklines, or big, wide skirts, be-bop-a-lula, and skintight pants like Audrey Hepburn wore in Funny Face.
“Own up, Richard Jenkins. Who was it snitched about how I spend my time curled up at the foot of the bed when you’re out?”
He laughed. Kissed me on the ear, having missed my mouth because I needed to fix a seam that unexpectedly needed repinning. “Secrets of the confessional, I’m afraid.” He slumped down in the armchair. “But the thing about you, Dolly, and the reason I say that, is that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be totally domesticated.”
“You called in on that Miss Cox again, didn’t yer?” For all I’d turned my lips away, I was smiling. “How many of the furry monsters does she have now? Four?”
“Six, but she’s eighty-two and lonely,” he said, picking a scrap of ginger fur off his trouser leg. “She deserves all the love she can get at her age.”
“And you deserve a cup of tea at yours, luv.”
“I’ll give you a hand.”
“You’ll sit in that armchair and read the paper, Richard Jenkins.” Back end of May, and the colour was only just coming back in his cheeks. “I am the cat that walks by itself and all places are alike to me, remember?”
“Even the kitchen?”
“Especially the kitchen.”
By the time I’d made the tea, he was fast asleep.
After the pneumonia, there was no more awap-bop-a-lu-bop awap-bam-bam in the church hall for us. No shake, rattle, and rolling. No stepping on anyone’s blue suede shoes. Of course, we still tuned our wireless to Radio Luxembourg of an evening. At least those evenings when Richard wasn’t at church meetings, taking choir practice, or running Beetle drives. Which, I might add, I avoided like the plague.