Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

But what Ivan said in this letter — and especially coming as it did on this significant birthday — completely threw her. She read it with increasing disbelief and fury. He spoke of his approaching retirement (he was older than she was — of course) and Tamsin’s wish to move to Marbella, or Majorca. In view of this, and of the rising maintenance costs, her flat was an encumbrance he could do without. In short, he intended to sell it. Fighting off the panic, Lynda scrunched up the letter and threw it across the room in a rage. How couldshe possibly move? What would she do without her bridge cronies, her nearness to Harrods and Harvey Nicks, the little restaurants, the flower shops — all the amenities of Knightsbridge that made up her pleasant life here?

He would of course, Ivan had gone on to say smoothly, provide her with other accommodation. Having once worked in an estate agent’s office, Tamsin knew someone who could help in that direction. I’ll bet she does, Lynda thought savagely. She could just imagine the sort of cheap flat that would be found for her, in some dismal corner of Earl’s Court, no doubt — or even worse, a semidetached out in the sticks! Why, she raged, should this — this Tamsin — this floozy, nothing more than a common tart, young enough to be his daughter — why should she dictate the course of the life of a woman whom she had never even met? She would see them both in hell, first.

The second momentous happening of the day, not, perhaps, entirely unconnected with the first, and the hateful name of Tamsin which had haunted her like ear-music all day, was that as she prepared for bed that night, Lynda steeled herself to take a good, long, honest, and overdue look at herself in the full-length mirror. Fortieth — or perhaps forty-fifth — birthdays were said to be a time for reassessment and she wanted to be prepared for the battle which was to come, for battle there would be. This Tamsin might be nothing more than a common little office scrubber, but she had youth on her side.

Lynda’s lifestyle guru was right: honesty was a girl’s best friend. Ruthless honesty. Taking a deep breath as she critically examined herself from top to toe, she began to wonder, for the first time, if that multi-layered hairstyle wasn’t perhaps a little too long, too youthful. Maybe she should aim for sophisticated maturity. Looking even closer, she acknowledged that she had — oh horrors! — the faint beginnings of a double chin, that the “laughter lines” at her eye corners were — well, crow’s-feet. Plunging even deeper into the dark well of truth, it had to be admitted that the interesting shadows under her eyes were fast becoming, let’s face it, bags. That terrifying piece she’d read in the paper a few weeks ago, about the possibility of face transplants, didn’t seem quite such a horror story now as it had then. She would willingly consider the possibility, given the chance.

There was more. Even with the help of the beautifully cut designer clothes which she spent a fortune on, she couldn’t completely hide the love handles on her thighs. (Love-handles, that was a laugh! she thought bitterly.) Her breasts were firm no longer, and it required a determined effort and magic knickers to keep those tummy muscles pulled in.

Knowing she wouldn’t sleep that night anyway, she thought, what the hell, and made herself a pot of black coffee. She needed to think. Where was that magazine she’d bought after seeing it when she was having her hair done at Carl’s? Finding it at last, she flicked through until she came to the article she remembered reading.

Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam, FRCS (Plast), was middle-aged and wore a pink shirt under his impeccably tailored charcoal-grey suit. He was plump and fair-haired, though balding, a man with light eyelashes and soft white hands with a sprinkling of freckles on the back of them, like mouldy cheese. These cool hands with their beautifully manicured nails slightly repelled her when they lifted her chin to the light, turned her face this way and that, scrutinised her hairline, but his immediate understanding of her position enabled her to repress a shudder. He could indeed sympathise with why she wanted these slight adjustments made, he assured her, a beautiful woman was right to wish to keep her looks as long as she could; indeed, in some cases, a little help was a necessity. Was Mrs. Parker, perhaps, an actress, a film star? No? He had thought at first her face was familiar. She saw his eyes flicker, and for a moment, she could have sworn... But she must have been mistaken. He shrugged, and merely added that she was entitled to keep her self-respect, her pride in her pretty face, whatever her reasons. A face which would be even more beautiful when he had finished with it. Perhaps just a tuck here and there to begin with?

No, Lynda (Mrs. Parker for the time being) had thought it all through and wanted more than a nip and tuck. She wanted the works. The sky was the limit. Her face first, and then she’d turn her attention to a remake of her body, she told him. Very well. He murmured about facial peels, dermal fillers, brow lifts, watching for adverse reactions. There were none. She was not afraid, not even apprehensive, being no stranger to Botox injections and having had all her teeth capped. What he proposed would involve a little more discomfort than that, perhaps, but afterwards... Ivan and his Tamsin, look out! With newfound confidence, she would show them who could strike the best bargain.

She arranged to go away for a month. She would see Ivan, she wrote to him, when she returned. It would do him no harm to wait.

She lay on the trolley in the operating theatre, warm and relaxed, drowsy from her pre-med injection. She could hear the murmur of the nurses’ conversation around her and tried to understand what they were talking about, but their voices seemed to come from a long way off and she soon lost the thread... something about Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam and a sudden, unfortunate attack of flu...

“No operation today, then, after all?” She thought she had asked the question, and maybe she had, except that no one answered sensibly; she couldn’t make any sense of what they were saying through the cotton-wool mists in her brain. It didn’t seem to matter. She felt deliciously sleepy and heavy. A masked face loomed over her, an injection by the anaesthetist into the back of her hand, and she knew no more.

The replacement surgeon who had stepped in to cover Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam’s list was always popular with the theatre staff. He joked with the sister while scrubbing up and congratulated the anaesthetist on his golf handicap. It was known that he liked to work to music and “Clair de Lune” played softly as he approached the first patient, Mrs. Parker.

For a moment, when he bent over her, Ivan thought he was hallucinating. And the next instant, with a shock that actually made his heart skip a beat, he remembered that cocktail party... Harvey-Pilbeam squinting down the cleavage of the delectable Tamsin, and then winking one of those pale-lashed eyelids at Morrison, and giving him an old-fashioned look. Ivan had shrugged it off, putting it down to H-p’s jealousy, and thought nothing of it, until now. But — could he possibly have been remembering what Lynda, to whom he had been introduced, briefly, some years ago, looked like? And comparing her with this patient of his, this Mrs. Parker? She did indeed bear a resemblance to Lynda. Except that it was more than a resemblance. Mrs. Parker was Lynda. Ivan’s wife.

No, of course Harvey-Pilbeam could not have engineered this eventuality, ethical questions apart. It was nothing more than Fate, beautiful Fate, intervening by giving Harvey-Pilbeam a bad dose of flu. And going further by nudging his efficient secretary to take upon herself the decision, on his behalf, to request that Mr. Morrison might be willing to take over the list in the emergency, thus delivering to him the patient on the operating table. Ivan felt dizzy for a moment, his hand trembled. Tamsin had read his horoscope that morning and told him Scorpio was in the ascendant and for once it seemed the mumbo-jumbo she believed in might have some semblance of credibility.