Mrs. Pargeter's Pound of Flesh

by Simon Brett

  Mrs Pargeter, whose experience at Brotherton Hall had not been one of unalloyed joy, made some suitably non-committal response and moved the conversation on. ‘How long now till you see Thicko?’

  Kim Thurrock grinned nervously. ‘Only a week. Next Friday. Oh, I can’t wait. And I daren’t imagine what state Thicko himself is in. He’s a very stable kind of bloke normally, but he always gets funny a month or so before he comes out. I think most of them do. Did you find that your . . . ?’

  A sharp look from Mrs Pargeter dried up the flow of the sentence and Kim hastily changed the subject. ‘Ooh, incidentally, I’ve got another favour to ask, Melita . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I know it’s something you don’t approve of . . .’

  The twinkle was back in the violet eyes as Mrs Pargeter asked, ‘Oh really? Now I wonder what you could be talking about?’

  ‘It’s this plastic surgery business.’

  ‘Thought it might be.’

  ‘Look, I have actually gone to the extent of making the first appointment with this Mr Littlejohn . . . you know, the free consultation . . .’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There, I knew you’d start criticizing me about it.’

  ‘Kim, all I said was “Oh”.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Well, the appointment’s for next Tuesday and the thing is . . .’

  ‘You feel nervous about going up to Harley Street on your own and wonder whether I’d mind going along with you for moral support . . . ?’ Mrs Pargeter suggested.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Kim was rewarded with a warm, comfortable smile. ‘Course I’ll come with you, love.’

  ‘Oh, bless you, Melita.’

  ‘It’s this one, isn’t it?’ asked Gary, as the limousine drew up outside the Thurrocks’ modest house in Catford.

  For the next hour Mrs Pargeter was caught up in the tornado of Kim Thurrock’s reunion with her three daughters, poodles, and mother. There were lots of hugs, and, from the poodles, lots of slobbering. Mrs Pargeter was included in the hugs, but, mercifully, not the slobbering.

  The only awkwardness occurred when Kim’s mother Mrs Moore produced the cake she had baked to welcome her daughter home. It was a rich chocolate one, filled and crested with cream, and Mrs Moore was very put out when Kim refused a slice. The old lady subscribed to the East End tradition that equated food with love, and was offended to have her affection spurned.

  Kim tried to explain, but all her mother could see was filial ingratitude. When Mrs Pargeter left, Kim was still holding out, but with a resolve that was wavering under a heavy barrage of emotional blackmail. Mrs Pargeter didn’t think many hours would pass before Kim succumbed to a peace-making slice of cake. The principles of self-denial inculcated by a few days at Brotherton Hall would be no match for the sheer force of Mrs Moore’s personality.

  Gary took Mrs Pargeter to Greene’s, the discreetly expensive London hotel where she was currently residing. The house Mrs Pargeter was having built was not yet completed; and indeed, given who was building it for her, the prospect of its ever being completed continually receded.

  Loyal as ever, Mrs Pargeter had employed one of the late Mr Pargeter’s associates to construct the house in which she planned to spend what she rather coyly (and, given her personality, rather inappropriately) called her ‘declining years’.

  Now it wasn’t that Jimmy Jacket – or ‘Concrete’ as he was known to his intimates – was a bad builder. He was one of the best. Indeed his construction of the hidden basement to the Pargeters’ big house in Chigwell stands out as one of the architectural marvels of the late twentieth century; and the tunnel with which he linked Spud-U-Like and the National Westminster Bank in Milton Keynes bears comparison with many more publicly applauded feats of engineering.

  But the drawback to employing ‘Concrete’ Jacket on a project was his availability. He wasn’t like some cowboy builders, who’re off on another job the minute their employer’s back is turned. He had assured Mrs Pargeter that, from the moment he started on her house, he wouldn’t take on any other work until its completion.

  But the fact had to be faced – ‘Concrete’ Jacket’s attendance record at the site was not good. Maybe he was accident-prone; maybe he just had bad luck; maybe he chose the wrong kind of friends; whatever the reason, he kept having to be away from the job for periods of varying lengths. And, as a result, the building of Mrs Pargeter’s dream house tended to progress slowly.

  Which was why she moved around a lot, and why she was currently staying at Greene’s.

  As Gary ushered Mrs Pargeter into the hotel, its manager, Mr Clinton (who, under the soubriquet ‘Hedgeclipper’ Clinton, had in the past done some useful if unsophisticated work for the late Mr Pargeter) bustled forward in his jacket and pin-striped trousers to fawn tastefully over his most favoured guest.

  ‘We’ve missed you, my dear Mrs Pargeter. But I do hope that you’ve had an enjoyable break. Oh, and while I think, there was a message for you to ring a Mr Mason . . .’

  ‘Truffler?’

  ‘I would assume so,’ Mr Clinton replied with a discreet wink.

  Mrs Pargeter rang through as soon as she was in her room with a tray of coffee and biscuits.

  ‘Mrs Pargeter,’ said Truffler with funereal directness, ‘how’d you fancy a trip to Cambridge?’

  ‘Cambridge? Have you got something from Jenny Hargreaves’ university friends?’

  ‘I would say I very definitely have, Mrs Pargeter. Some very useful pointers they’ve given me. But I think I’ve got as much as I’m going to get out of them . . . you know, kids of that age’re, like, suspicious of a man snooping into their private affairs.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Whereas I think they’d be much more likely to open up to a woman. Particularly to you, Mrs Pargeter.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, they probably would.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Mrs Pargeter had never had much to do with students. She had left school at sixteen, and though the sum of knowledge accumulated during the early years of her marriage far exceeded that with which most graduates leave university, the process by which she had gained it did not qualify under the traditional definition of formal education.

  Nor, though the late Mr Pargeter, philanthropic as ever, had assisted many young people with further education courses (particularly in the fields of law and accountancy), had he introduced many of these aspirants to his wife.

  As a result, the word ‘student’ conjured up for Mrs Pargeter an image of sixties hedonism, of beautiful but scruffy young people drifting around, either in a benign drug- and pop music-induced haze, or in a white heat of determination to take the world apart and reconstitute it from its basic ingredients.

  The only real live student she had met in recent years, the painfully idealistic Tom O’Brien, had done something to endorse the second stereotype.

  But neither Tom nor Mrs Pargeter’s other preconceptions had done much to prepare her for the three young ladies whom she met, through Truffler Mason’s introduction, at Jenny Hargreaves’ college.

  True, all three were dressed scruffily, but it was that neat designer scruffiness affected by all of their generation, a Levi-led conformity as staid as the twin-sets of a few decades earlier. Chloe, Candida and Chris manifested all the bohemian get-up-and-go of building society cashiers.

  Though perhaps they were a bit higher up the social scale than building society cashiers. All their voices were tinged with that distinctive public school quack and clearly none of them had ever for a moment questioned her right to anything.

  Mrs Pargeter did not know by what shadings of the truth Truffler had set up the encounter, but the young ladies showed no reluctance in speaking to her about their absent friend. Chloe, who acted as their spokesman, met her at the porter’s lodge and took her up to her room. Mrs Pargeter was led into an austere and institutional space, on whose walls soft-focus black-and-white posters of lovers kissing looked asex
ual and sanitized.

  Chris and Candida were summoned from adjacent rooms on the same corridor (where Jenny Hargreaves had also lived) and the four sat down with all the formality of a charity committee.

  Mrs Pargeter accepted an offer of tea (when it arrived, it was Earl Grey) and Chloe spelled out the parameters of their meeting. ‘I’m afraid we can only give you half an hour.’

  ‘Because, you know,’ Candida explained, ‘it is, like, Saturday, after all, and one does tend to sort of go out Saturday night to—’

  ‘I meant because of work,’ said Chloe reprovingly.

  ‘Oh yes, right.’

  ‘We all have exams at the end of this term, right, and must get back to revision as soon as possible.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Candida concurred. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So Jenny’s missing important work, being away at the moment . . . ?’ suggested Mrs Pargeter.

  ‘Oh right, yes, certainly,’ Chris agreed. ‘With languages the whole four-year course is very intensive. Missing even, like, a couple of days means you have a lot of catching up to do, know what I mean?’

  ‘Are you all doing the same course as Jenny?’

  Chris was. Chloe and Candida were doing English. ‘Not that that’s any less intensive,’ Mrs Pargeter was assured.

  ‘I see. And Jenny wasn’t having any trouble with the course, was she? I mean, not finding the work too hard? You don’t think there’s any chance she’s given up because she couldn’t cope.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Chris replied firmly. ‘She’s very bright, right? Even though she came through the state system.’

  ‘She’s quite incredible,’ Candida agreed. ‘You wouldn’t know it to meet her.’

  ‘No,’ Chris went on, ‘the tutors were really expecting good results from her in this year’s exams – and in her degree in two years’ time.’

  ‘A model student, eh?’

  ‘Well, in most respects.’

  Mrs Pargeter was quick to pounce on Chris’s hint. ‘In what respects wasn’t Jenny a model student?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t that she wasn’t hard-working, right,’ Chloe interposed defensively, ‘just that she did one or two things that the authorities wouldn’t have approved of.’

  Candida added to the defence. ‘But she did it from the best of motives, know what I mean. Isn’t that right, Chloe?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But Jenny was technically breaking university regulations.’

  ‘Right. Not that anyone in authority ever actually found out what she was doing.’

  ‘What are we talking about here?’ asked Mrs Pargeter gently.

  ‘Well, it was just . . .’ Chloe looked at her doubtfully.

  ‘It’s all right. I’m not the kind of person who’d ever shop anyone to the authorities.’ (Little did the young ladies know how exemplary, given the information she had from time to time held, Mrs Pargeter’s record had been in that respect.)

  Chloe was reassured. ‘No, no, right, of course you wouldn’t. Right . . . well, all Jenny was doing was taking a part-time job during term-time – which you’re not supposed to do, right?’

  Candida provided more detail. ‘She was working as a barmaid five evenings a week – right out of town, so nobody from the university was ever likely to see her, know what I mean, but I suppose it was a risk.’

  ‘And presumably she was just doing that for money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But just money to supplement her grant?’ Mrs Pargeter persisted. ‘I mean, she wasn’t supporting a drug habit or anything like that?’

  Chris snorted with laughter. ‘Anyone who can support a drug habit on a student grant and a part-time barmaid’s earnings deserves a Queen’s Award for Industry. Need a private income for that kind of thing.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Candida agreed.

  ‘Do any of the rest of you have part-time jobs?’

  They shook their heads. Colouring slightly, Chloe said, ‘No, but then we don’t need to. Our parents all help us out. But Jenny’s parents . . . well, I gather they haven’t got any money – I mean, really absolutely none, right? Or at least, if they have, she never likes to ask them for any . . . isn’t that right, Chris?’

  Chris nodded. ‘Yes. I mean, we all complain about money all the time, right, but we have got some kind of cushion from our parents . . . you know, they give us a bit extra and they’ll bail us out if we get absolutely stuck. Jenny hadn’t got anything like that. She really was hard-up, know what I mean?’

  ‘Being in the room right next door and seeing a lot of her, I sometimes felt almost guilty about how little she’d got . . . you know, clothes and whatnot. I mean, if I really need something new, right . . . I can just go out and buy it – new frock for a party, whatever – but Jenny really had to make her stuff last. I mean’ – Chris’s voice dropped to an awestruck whisper – ‘she even used to mend tights.’

  The other two young ladies looked appropriately shocked at this revelation.

  ‘And was Jenny still working as a barmaid right up to the end of last term – well, I mean up to the time she disappeared, anyway?’

  ‘No. That was it, you see,’ Chris replied. ‘She didn’t tell them when she got the job that she was an undergraduate . . . well, obviously . . . you know, she behaved like she was taking it on permanently, right, and when the manager of the pub found out she wasn’t going to be around for the vacation, well, she was out on her ear. He wanted someone regular, know what I mean?’

  ‘There just aren’t any part-time jobs around these days,’ Chloe complained. ‘So many real unemployed people looking for work, it’s pretty tough for students to get a look in.’

  ‘I haven’t even bothered trying,’ said Chris plaintively. ‘I mean, you know there’s going to be absolutely zilch, right . . . so why put yourself through all that heartache?’

  ‘No, right. I mean, last summer vacation,’ Candida confided, ‘I tried to get something – anything. No, I was really prepared to slum it – muck out stables, be a chambermaid, even a cleaner or something, but, know what I mean, there was nothing. Absolute zilch. Eventually Mummy sent me on a word-processing course just so’s I wouldn’t be sitting round the house twiddling my thumbs all the time.’

  ‘So you did that right through the vacation, did you?’ asked Mrs Pargeter.

  ‘Yes. Well, till we went to Saint Tropez, anyway.’

  Mrs Pargeter began to realize some of the social pressures that a girl from Jenny Hargreaves’ modest background must have experienced at Cambridge. Or at least at Cambridge surrounded by these three.

  Time to move the subject on, though. She was in little doubt that the embryonic charity committee members would restrict her to the half-hour they had promised. ‘I believe Jenny had a boyfriend, didn’t she . . . ?’

  The temperature in the room dropped by a good ten degrees.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chloe was the first to speak. ‘Yes. Yes, she did.’

  ‘Tom O’Brien,’ Mrs Pargeter prompted.

  ‘Huh.’ The monosyllable left no doubt about Candida’s contempt for the young man in question. ‘I mean, honestly, you’d think someone like Jenny’d realize that coming to Cambridge was, like, an opportunity for her to meet some men out of her kind of . . . well, some different sort of people, right . . . and she ends up with someone like Tom.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Well, he’s . . . I mean, he comes from a comprehensive . . . he’s, like, the kind of person Jenny might have met if she’d never even gone to university – any university, let alone Cambridge.’

  ‘Maybe that was part of his appeal. Maybe that was why she felt relaxed with him.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but what a waste.’

  Chloe elucidated, not without vindictiveness. ‘I think what Candida’s saying is that Tom is a bit . . . common.’

  ‘No, I’m not! I wouldn’t use the word “common”, anyway.’ Candida fell back on a long-hel
d article of faith, certainly learned at her mother’s knee. ‘Only common people use the word “common”, as it happens.’

  ‘Listen, Candida, if you’re saying I’m common, you’d better—’

  ‘All I happen to be saying, Chloe, is—’

  Mrs Pargeter broke discreetly into this unseemly squabble. ‘Girls, please . . .’

  Perhaps this phrase brought back to Chloe and Candida the remonstrance of some half-remembered house mistress; certainly it had the effect of silencing them. They turned demurely to Mrs Pargeter.

  ‘What I’d like to know,’ she asked, ‘is what – apart from his class – you find objectionable about Tom O’Brien?’

  ‘Well, he’s got all these ideas . . .’ Chloe replied.

  ‘All these notions . . .’ Candida agreed.

  ‘All these principles . . .’ said Chris with distaste.

  ‘Anything wrong with principles?’ asked Mrs Pargeter innocently.

  ‘No, obviously not,’ Chris replied. ‘Not in their proper place. And not if they’re the right principles.’

  ‘What would you say are the right principles?’

  Chris’s answer dispelled Mrs Pargeter’s last illusion of student dissidence. ‘Well, keeping things as they are. Protecting property. Law and order. I mean, those are principles worth standing up for.’

  ‘But they’re not the ones that Tom stands up for?’

  ‘No. His principles are little short of terrorism.’

  ‘I thought he was into ecology . . . you know, ways of saving the planet . . .’

  ‘Yes, but the methods he reckons are legitimate to actually save the planet’ – Chris shook her head in disapproval – ‘well, they’re absolutely terrifying.’

  ‘Perhaps he believes that extreme problems require extreme solutions.’

  ‘Oh yes, right, I can see the thinking, but they don’t have to be that extreme. I mean, it’s all very well imagining that you can do things to help the Third World, all that stuff, absolutely fine, nothing against it, but you’ve got to get your priorities sorted out.’

  ‘So what are the proper priorities?’ Mrs Pargeter suggested ironically. ‘You make the odd gesture to the Third World every now and then, but never forget that charity really begins and ends at home?’