by Simon Brett
Also the development had the inestimable advantage for Mrs Pargeter that its residents were not all elderly. Her experience of private hotels, like the Devereux in Littlehampton, had made her eager to avoid being compartmented into another geriatric ghetto. Though she had no illusions about the fact that she was in her late sixties, Mrs Pargeter retained a lively interest in the world about her, and had come to the conclusion that this would be stimulated more by the company of younger people than by her contemporaries.
She had encountered so much distressing defeatism amongst the old, too many of whom seemed to regard their remaining years as a spiralling-down process. This was not Mrs Pargeter’s approach to any part of her life. Though she could not possibly know how many more years she would be allotted, she was determined to enjoy every one of them to the full.
She did not rush her furniture-shifting. Though in remarkably good condition for her age, Mrs Pargeter recognised that now she had to husband her energy. So she worked in short bursts, with plenty of tea- and biscuit-filled intervals.
She had bought the Cottons’ kitchen appliances, as well as their thick-pile carpets and Dralon curtains, all brand new a mere eighteen months before. Though they did not coincide exactly with her own taste, she could live with them. The time to make changes would be when her self-imposed six months’ probation was over. If then she had decided that Smithy’s Loam was for her, she would invest in decorations more expressive of her own personality. No point in splashing out all at once. In spite of her considerable wealth, Mrs Pargeter was not careless with money. It was one of the many qualities in her which the late Mr Pargeter had admired.
As she worked in the house that first day, and on her one necessary expedition down to the Shopping Parade (conveniently adjacent, a fact of which the original brochure for the development had made much), Mrs Pargeter absorbed the atmosphere of Smithy’s Loam. She was a woman of unusual perception and, though people were rarely aware of her scrutiny, little was missed by those mild blue eyes.
The main quality of the development which struck her was its neatness, its decorum, almost its formality. Though the houses were all of different designs and their plots of different shapes (indeed, that had been one of their chief selling points when first built), they had about them a uniformity.
Each lawn was punctiliously mowed and, though the clocks had already gone back to denote the end of Summer Time, the plants in the front gardens defiantly resisted the raggedness of autumn.
Each house was beautifully maintained. On each the paintwork and windows gleamed. So did the Volvos, Peugeots and Renault hatchbacks that stood in the drives, and so, when seen at the weekend, would the BMWs, Rovers and Mercedes that the husbands brought home.
The absence of men was another striking impression that Mrs Pargeter received from Smithy’s Loam. By the time she had woken on that first day, all of the husbands had left for work, and the early darkness ensured that the only evidence she would see of their homecomings would be the sweep of powerful headlights. All were of the aspirant classes; all worked long, ambitious hours to maintain the acquisitive executive standards of Smithy’s Loam.
As a result of this, Mrs Pargeter wondered whether she had moved into another kind of ghetto, a ghetto of women rather than of the old. Behind each immaculate, anonymous house front lay a female intelligence, with its own secrets, desires and ambitions. She was glad she had accepted the invitation for the Friday coffee morning. Already she was intrigued to meet the women, to find out how they spent their gender-segregated hours of daylight.
Darkness had fallen by half-past six when Mrs Pargeter decided to call it a day. She was satisfied by what she had achieved. Already the careful disposition of her furniture had drawn attention away from the Cottons’ carpets and curtains. Already the sitting-room at least bore a distinct Pargeter imprint. She felt she deserved a drink before she cooked her steak.
It was comforting to see bottles back in the glass-fronted corner cupboard which had been delivered to their Chigwell home one night at three a.m. after another of the late Mr Pargeter’s more spectacular business coups. She opened the doors, took out a glass and poured in generous measures of vodka and Campari. Then she went to the kitchen for ice and lemon.
It was there that she became aware of how cold the house had become. She went to the cupboard under the stairs, where the central heating controls were, to remedy the situation.
She switched the heating to ‘Constant’. No indicator lights came on, but she gave the system the benefit of the doubt. It had worked perfectly to give her a hot bath that morning. She went into the sitting-room to enjoy her drink and wait for the house to warm up.
It didn’t. After half an hour it was colder rather than hotter. She felt the largest radiator in the sitting-room. No heat at all.
She checked those in the hall. They were the same.
She opened the fusebox in the kitchen. But all the fuses were intact.
She looked again in the cupboard under the stairs. Still no indicator lights. More ominously, there was not even the softest hum from the boiler.
She paused for a moment in the hall. This was a nuisance. Of course she could ring up an emergency repair service. Or she could wait till the morning and summon someone less expensive to check the system out.
But, like anyone else in a new house, her first instinct was that she was at fault. She was unfamiliar with the controls and must have switched something off by mistake. If she did call a repair man, he would most probably walk straight in and, after the patronising flick of a single switch, overcharge grossly for her embarrassment and discomfiture.
It was probably something very simple. But, as the evening got chillier, Mrs Pargeter wanted it sorted out. She hadn’t paid all that money for a house to sit and freeze in it.
Of course the simplest thing would be to ring the former owner. Mrs Pargeter didn’t really want to do that on her first day of residence, but, on the other hand, Theresa Cotton had seemed an extremely amiable – if anonymous – young woman who, if it were a simple matter of one switch, would be only too ready to help out.
Mrs Pargeter looked through her diary for the Cottons’ new address. The husband, Rod, she recalled, had got some promotion which involved being based up North for a few years. Near York. Yes, that was right. Mrs Pargeter found the address.
But there wasn’t a phone number. Of course, she remembered now. Theresa Cotton had said the phone was only being connected the day they moved, and they hadn’t yet been given the number.
Still, they’d been there nearly two days now. Mrs Pargeter rang Directory Enquiries.
‘What town, please?’
‘It’s near York. Place called Dunnington.’
‘And what name?’
‘Cotton. The address is “Elm Trees, Bascombe Lane”.’
There was a silence from the other end of the phone.
‘“Cotton” you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. Sorry, no one of that name at the address you mention.’
‘They only moved in yesterday, and had the phone connected then.’
‘Just a minute. I’ll check.’ Another silence. ‘No, no record of a new number for anyone by the name of Cotton. Sorry.’
‘Are you sure there isn’t anywhere else you could check?’
‘Certain, Madam. Maybe you were given the wrong address . . . ?’
‘Hmm. Maybe. Thank you, anyway.’
After she had put the phone down, Mrs Pargeter looked thoughtful. She still looked thoughtful as she went through into the kitchen and started preparing her steak.
Must be Directory Enquiries’ mistake – the service had gone downhill so much since privatisation, she decided, as she reconciled herself to a cold night. The paperwork on the Cottons’ new number couldn’t have got through. Or maybe there had been a delay on connecting the phone.
Yes, something like that.
It was odd, though . . .
4
The next morning Mrs Pargeter made no further attempt to contact Theresa Cotton. Instead, she risked the scorn of a gas repairman and was rewarded – or at least vindicated – by the discovery that there was something genuinely wrong with the central heating boiler.
The gas repairman, obedient to the long tradition of his calling, had not got the relevant replacement part with him, but managed, in direct contradiction to the long tradition of his calling, to locate and fit it within twenty-four hours.
So Mrs Pargeter, with warmth now restored to her new home, thought no more about her failure to contact its former owner.
At eleven o’clock on the Friday morning there was more concerted movement in Smithy’s Loam than Mrs Pargeter had seen since her arrival.
Up until then she had noticed how rare it was to see more than one of the residents walking out of doors at any given time. Each morning, some time after the husbands had left, there was a flurry of motorised departures, as those women blessed with children took the second cars out for the school runs. They did not all come back at the same time, their returns staggered by the demands of shopping and other errands.
Then, through the day, most of the residents would make occasional forays on foot, to shop, to walk dogs, to wheel infants. But these expeditions seemed rarely to coincide, and the Friday morning was the first occasion Mrs Pargeter had seen more than two of the women out at the same time, as they converged on Vivvi Sprake’s house.
She watched them through the net curtains left by the Cottons. Mrs Pargeter did not really like net curtains, but the late Mr Pargeter had always favoured them. Though of course he never did anything in their marital home of which he needed to be ashamed, he had always valued privacy. One of his recurrent aphorisms had been, ‘What is not seen requires no investigation.’ And his wife, respecting his judgement in all such matters, subordinated her taste to his caution in the matter of net curtains.
She thought, as the newcomer, it would be appropriate for her to arrive a little later than the others, and she watched them as they crossed from their neat front doors to Vivvi Sprake’s equally neat front door. She had glimpsed most of them during the preceding days and had already, as most people do with unintroduced neighbours, formed impressions of them.
Vivvi was the only one she could actually identify by name, but the others she had christened in her own mental shorthand.
The six houses in Smithy’s Loam curled in an elegant horseshoe around the road which enclosed the central green. Their individuality had been used as another selling point at the time of their building – look what an unregimented development this is, a random cluster of distinctively designed houses, all different, all set in plots of different shapes. But each plot had the same area and the conformity of materials used made the houses look more like a matching set than if they had been identical.
The resident of Number One, ‘High Bushes’, directly opposite, had apparently not left the house since Mrs Pargeter’s arrival. But there was no doubt that she was there. Her windows also had the protection of net curtains, and from behind them a shadowy figure monitored each coming and going to the loop of road at whose entrance the house stood like a sentry-box. Each time Mrs Pargeter entered her front door, she could feel the eyes boring into the back of her head, but whether their motive was malevolence or simple curiosity she could not tell.
In Mrs Pargeter’s mental shorthand, the woman in ‘High Bushes’ became Mrs Snoop the Spy.
She carried this Happy Families notation into her names for the other residents. Two women lived in Number Two, ‘Perigord’. Mrs Pargeter had in fact only seen one of them, but the existence of the other was a logical deduction. The one she had seen looked too young, and too uninterested in the pair of small children she shepherded, to be anything other than a foreign au pair. Mrs Pargeter had dubbed her Miss Bored the Belgian’s Daughter.
And in her fancy, Miss Bored’s mistress, whose car left the close as early as those of the husbands, became Mrs Busy the Businesswoman.
Vivvi Sprake’s house was Number Three, incongruously called ‘Haymakers’, and next door at Number Four, ‘Hibiscus’, lived a woman whose hasty exits and averted eyes made her Mrs Nervy the Neurotic.
Mrs Pargeter’s immediate neighbour at Number Five, ‘Cromarty’, who had made no gesture of welcome to the newcomer but who cleaned her windows at least once a day, was dubbed Mrs Huffy the Houseproud.
As she moved away from the net curtains and picked up her handbag, Mrs Pargeter looked forward to putting real names to her cast of Happy Families’ wives.
But of course at that stage she had no reason to suspect that amongst them might be included Mrs Merciless the Murderess.
5
Vivvi Sprake was an over-hearty presence in yellow dungarees, one of those people whose emotional range does not encompass subtlety.
‘And what did your husband do, Mrs Pargeter?’
The object of her interrogation gave an equable smile. ‘He was in business on his own account.’
‘Oh, what sort of line?’
‘All kinds,’ Mrs Pargeter replied, charmingly but uninformatively.
‘Finance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Commodities?’
‘At times.’
‘Was he a broker?’
‘That kind of thing, yes.’
Vivvi seemed tacitly to recognise that that was as far as she was going to get, so she shifted her approach. ‘Carole’s husband Gregory’s in Commodities.’
‘Oh?’
‘I assume you must have met Carole by now.’ Vivvi Sprake spoke with great care, restraining her northern accent as one might a kitten capable of suddenly breaking free to do something disgraceful on the floor. ‘I mean, with her being right next door to you.’
‘No, I haven’t yet.’ So Mrs Huffy the Houseproud was called Carole. Slowly the names were coming together.
‘Oh well, I must introduce you.’ Vivvi darted away to collar a woman with rigidly coifed blonde hair, who wore a grey blouse and matching skirt.
The quarry was brought forward for presentation to the guest of honour. ‘This is Melita Pargeter – Carole Temple.’
‘Hello.’ Carole made no pretence of being interested in her new neighbour.
‘Hello, I’ve seen you cleaning your windows,’ said Mrs Pargeter comfortably.
‘Oh?’ The tone implied affront.
‘Well, I could hardly miss you, love, could I? I’ve been going in and out so much the last few days. You know how it is with a new house – you keep remembering things you’ve forgotten. Didn’t you find that when you first moved in here?’
‘No,’ Carole Temple replied. ‘But then my husband and I had made lists of all the things we might possibly need.’
Yes, well, you would have done, wouldn’t you, thought Mrs Pargeter. She somehow couldn’t see a close relationship developing with this neighbour.
Still, she went through the motions. ‘We’re very conveniently situated here, though, aren’t we? You know, for the shops. You can get virtually everything you need on the Parade, can’t you?’
‘Well, you can,’ Carole Temple conceded, ‘but they’re all very over-priced. I go and do a weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. And then once a month I stock up with basics at the Cash and Carry.’
Once again, you would.
‘I gather your husband’s in Commodities,’ said Mrs Pargeter, hoping that a change of subject might stimulate the conversational flow.
‘Yes, he is,’ Carole Temple confirmed with a finality which confounded such hopes.
Mrs Pargeter took refuge in a sip of coffee before attempting another foray. ‘Do you have children?’ Surely that was a safe, uncontroversial subject.
‘Two. At boarding school.’
‘Oh?’
Mrs Pargeter waited for fond parental amplification of these minimal details, but she wasn’t even granted the sex of the Temple offspring. All she got was: ‘Very expensive, boarding schools these days.’
‘So I believe.’
‘Do you have children?’
The suddenness of this enquiry took Mrs Pargeter by surprise. But when she looked at Carole Temple’s face she saw no flicker of interest; the question had been asked merely as a matter of convention.
‘No. No, I don’t.’ The fact was still a cause of mild regret to her. But then, given the unpredictable demands made on the late Mr Pargeter’s time and his occasional absences, she had long ago concluded that their childlessness had probably been for the best. When they were together, they had been able to devote all their energies to each other.
By now roadblocks seemed to have been set up in all conversational avenues, and it was with some relief that Mrs Pargeter saw Vivvi Sprake bearing towards her, bringing in her wake two women who, by a process of elimination, must be Mrs Busy the Businesswoman and Mrs Snoop the Spy.
6
They were introduced to her respectively as Sue Curle and Fiona Burchfield-Brown. The former was in her early forties, a woman whose lined face enhanced rather than diminished her attractions. She had the rueful air of someone who has suffered but is not going to let that inhibit her future enjoyment of life.
But Fiona Burchfield-Brown, Mrs Snoop the Spy, was the surprise. Mrs Pargeter had been expecting someone beady and guarded, not the tall, slightly scruffy figure with the horse-brass scarf around her neck, who greeted her in exaggerated Sloane Ranger tones.
‘Hello, such a pleasure to meet you.’ Mrs Pargeter’s hand was seized and clumsily shaken. There was about all of Fiona Burchfield-Brown’s movements a coltish gaucheness, as if she had only just grown to her current dimensions and not yet learned to control her body.
‘Sorry,’ she continued in her English public schoolgirl’s voice, ‘I kept intending to come across and say hello, but I’ve had to wait in all week for these wretched little men who were supposed to be coming in to install the jacuzzi. I didn’t dare leave the house in case they arrived or rang up. My husband Alexander had set it all up and he’d have been frightfully cross if I’d missed them. Anyway, finally they ring this morning and say they’re not coming till next week. Honestly. I ask you.’