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obviously close by, in one of those whispers that have more carrying power than a shout.
    He was answered in screeching accents by a woman who was not Mrs. Pickle. Would Mrs. P have left a divorcing couple cooling their heels, if not their tempers, in the hall? Never! Besides, that scenario didn’t work. What I had tapped into sounded more like an untoward meeting than the grand finale.
    “This has come as a nasty shock.” The man’s voice blew in my ear like a rush of chill air through a ventilator. “It won’t do at all, you know. For twenty years I’ve thought myself safe from your wanton ways.”
    “Does this mean you’re not thrilled to see me?” The female voice vibrated on the verge of hysteria.
    “Enough! In the name of what we once shared, I ask you to vacate these premises.”
    “Not until I have spoken to your wife.”
    “Never. You’re not worthy to enter the same room as that saintly woman. If you try, I’ll take whatever steps are necessary …”
    “Gladstone, how can you be such a cad?”
    Fade-out, leaving me trapped in the place where fact and fiction merge. I could only suppose I had been listening to a keyhole dramatization of the life and times of the great prime minister. A man carved in stone, before ever death saw his statue installed in Westminster Abbey, but whom modern muckrakers suspect of taking more than a political interest in ladies of the night. It didn’t surprise me that Mrs. Pickle toted the wireless around while polishing. Heaven forbid that someone abscond with it while her back was turned.
    Had the woman forgotten me? How long would she take to come back and tell me the vicar was nowhere to be found? Glaring at the receiver, ready to chew on it in frustration, I was clobbered by a chilling thought. What if Mrs. Malloy, encouraged by my absence, madea break from the house by way of the window? At this very moment she might be skittering on her four-inch heels down the gravel drive, bent on hurling herself off the cliff edge.…
    Dropping the phone—my heart as much a lead weight as the gun in my pocket—I was at the study door before I knew how I got there. Shoving it open, I beheld Mrs. Malloy’s fur coat slumped across the desk. No need for heart failure—she wasn’t in it. A rhinestone clip glinted in her two-tone hair as she stood stuffing the china poodle and other earthly treasures into the supply bag.
    “Won’t do to ply me with liquor.”
    “I wasn’t …”
    “Nor kind words neither.” She settled the feather hat on her hat, then took it off and handed it to me. “Here, give this to that bloody cat to remember me by once in a now and then. Well, that’s it then, except for this.”
    Numbly, I took the envelope she handed me.
    “Give that to Mr. Fisher. I wrote him a poem.”
    Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be anything like the rhymes of Norman the Doorman.
    She pursed her butterfly lips, flung out her chest and with hands clenched to her gut, proclaimed in tones that would have won her an audition in a theatre without microphones:
    “Sugar is sweet,
    Violets are blue,
    Red is the blood,
    I shed for you.”
    Tears burned my eyes. “Mrs. Malloy, it’s wonderful! You must live to see it published.”
    Useless! She was headed for the cliffs.
    What followed is branded in my memory as one of those larger-than-life moments of truth. Mrs. M wentfor her leopard coat in the flash-grab manner of a gun-slinger going for his holster. At any cost she must be stopped. Grabbing up the newspaper, which I had brought in here with such high hopes that it would be used for cleaning the windows, I moved to roll it into a cudgel with which to whop her senseless if that was what it took to save the woman from herself … and along came déjà vu.
    I saw myself standing in the hall a scant few hours since, bent on doing the self-same thing to Jock Bludgett. And in a burst of shining joy I knew that were he to come knocking on the door that minute, washing-machine pump