Mrs Pargeter 03; Mrs Pargeter’s Package

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

Three

“I really am desperate now. Must find the Ladies. You get a table, won’t you, Melita?”

“Yes,” Mrs Pargeter called after Joyce’s retreating back, before picking up her flightbag and moving at a more sedate pace out of the coach. She saw Joyce hurry into the stone building, only to re-emerge a few seconds later, redirected round the side where a painted notice with an arrow read ‘Toilets’. It seemed that language wasn’t going to be a problem in Agios Nikitas.

This impression was endorsed by the greeting of the tall man who rose from a roadside table to greet the coach party. “Welcome to Spiro’s,” he said expansively. “Here we will give you good time. Good drink and food to relax you after your journey. Ask Spiro what you want – anything – no problem.”

He was olive-skinned, in his fifties, but well-preserved, with muscular shoulders. Despite his bonhomie, a latent melancholy lurked in eyes that gleamed like black cherries under bushy eyebrows. The hair on his head was dusted with grey, but it still grew black in the ‘V’ of chest exposed by his open white shirt. He wore waiter’s uniform black trousers and shoes, but carried an air of undisputed authority. He snapped fingers at the younger waiters to have the newcomers distributed to tables and drinks orders taken. From the doorway to the taverna he orchestrated the distribution of this first round, and within moments everyone had been served with glasses and bottles sweating from the fridge.

The orders had varied. Half-litres of lager, bottles of Greek white wine, Cokes, a fizzy orange for Craig from South Woodham Ferrers, a few traditionalists’ gin and tonics, a couple of more daring ouzos. Mrs Pargeter, safely ensconced at a table for two with her flightbag stowed beneath the seat, did not know where Joyce had reached in her alcoholic cycle, but was in no doubt about what she herself wanted to drink. The Pargeters had developed an enthusiastic appetite for retsina on Crete, where they had spent three months after one of the late Mr Pargeter’s more spectacular business coups. An all too rare sustained period of conjugal togetherness, Mrs Pargeter recollected fondly.

By the time Joyce returned from the Ladies, the coach had departed with Ginnie aboard to supervise the disposition of luggage and tired tourists, and Spiro had disappeared inside the building to supervise food orders. Joyce looked flushed and anxious, and had certainly been gone a long time. Mrs Pargeter hoped that her friend wasn’t ill. There was something disturbingly jumpy in her manner, but maybe it was no more than continuing reaction to her bereavement.

“Loos are spotless,” Joyce announced as she sat down.

“Oh, good. You all right, love?”

The concern was waved aside. “Yes, yes. Have you ordered me a drink?”

“Wasn’t sure what you wanted. Try some of this?” Mrs Pargeter proffered the retsina bottle.

Joyce sniffed the contents and grimaced. “No, thank you.” She looked round and was immediately rewarded by the approach of a young waiter, carrying paper cloths and a metal holder for oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and toothpicks. “Could you get me a drink, please?”

“Yes, please.” Deftly he lifted the retsina bottle and glasses, slipped the paper cloth under them on to the polythene-covered table top and snapped its corners secure under elastic cords. “What you like, please?”

“An ouzo.”

“An ouzo, of course, please. No problem.”

“Thank you. Can I ask what your name is?”

“Name, please? I am Yianni, please.”

He flashed an even-toothed smile and whisked away, his improbably slim hips gliding easily between the tables.

“Hm, how do you get one like that?” Joyce asked wistfully.

“I hadn’t thought of you as on the look-out for a toyboy,” said Mrs Pargeter.

“Chance’d be a fine thing. No, first time in my life that I’d be free to have a toyboy, and now I’m fiftysomething and stringy, so nobody’s going to be interested.”

“Oh, well…” Mrs Pargeter shrugged philosophically. “That’s the way things go. I once heard someone say that experience is the comb life gives you after you’ve lost your hair.”

“Sickening, isn’t it? Trouble is, Melita, when you actually do have the freedom, you don’t realise it. I mean, when I was about twenty I could have been having a whale of a time, lots of affairs, no strings, but did I? No, I just spent all my time worrying because nobody appeared to want to marry me. Didn’t you find that?”

“Well, not exactly.” Mrs Pargeter didn’t really want to elaborate. In fact, she had had a vibrantly exciting sex-life before she met the late Mr Pargeter – and indeed a vibrantly exciting sex-life throughout their marriage – but she had always believed that sex was a subject of exclusive interest to the participants.

Joyce was fortunately prevented from asking for elaboration by the arrival of Yianni with her ouzo. She diluted it from the accompanying glass of water, watched with satisfaction as the transparent liquid clouded to milky whiteness and took a long swallow, before continuing her monologue. “Conchita’s just the same as I was. I mean, there my daughter is, lovely girl, early twenties, successful career, could have any man she wants, and what does she do? She keeps falling for bastards – married men, usually – and keeps getting her heart broken when they won’t leave their wives and set up home with her. Why goes that happen?”

“In my experience,” said Mrs Pargeter judiciously, “women who always go after unsuitable men do so because deep down they don’t really want to commit themselves.”

“Huh,” said Joyce. “Well, I just wish Conchita’d settle down and get married.”

“Why? Do you really think marriage is the perfect solution?”

“I don’t know. I just think life is generally a pretty dreadful business and maybe it’s easier if there are two of you trying to cope with it.”

This seemed to Mrs Pargeter an unnecessarily pessimistic world-view. She had never regarded life as an imposition, rather as an unrivalled cellarful of opportunity to be relished to the last drop. Probably it was just bereavement that had made her friend so negative.

“I don’t know, though,” Joyce went on, digging herself deeper into her trough of gloom. “How much do you ever know about other people? I mean, you think you’re close, you live with someone, sleep with them for twenty-five years, then they die and you realise you never knew them at all. I don’t think you ever really know anything about another person.”

This made Mrs Pargeter think. It did not make her question her own marriage – she had never doubted that she and the late Mr Pargeter had known each other through and through – but it did make her ask herself how much she knew about Joyce Dover.

The answer quickly came back – not a great deal. Mrs Pargeter had met Joyce some fifteen years before in Chigwell, during one of those periods when the late Mr Pargeter had had to be away from home for a while. Joyce’s husband, Chris, it transpired, was also away at the time (though on very different business), and she and their daughter Conchita, then a tiny black-eyed six-year-old, were living in a rented house till his return. The two women had seen a lot of each other for three months, and kept in touch intermittently since.

Though there was a ten-year age difference between them, they had got on from the start, without ever knowing a great deal about each other’s backgrounds. Joyce, Mrs Pargeter was told, had always lived in London. Her husband Chris had been born in Uruguay, but, politically disaffected with the governing regime, had fled to England in his late teens. He had made a success of some kind of export business (dealing chiefly with Africa) and had, from all accounts, turned himself into the perfect English gentleman. His origins were betrayed only in details like his daughter’s unusual Christian name. That was all Mrs Pargeter had ever known about the life and business of Chris Dover.

And she had seen to it that his wife Joyce knew even less about the life and business of the late Mr Pargeter.

Joyce maundered on, but Mrs Pargeter only half-listened. The retsina was as welcome as ever, and in the soft, warm breeze that flowed off the sea, lulled by the recorded strumming of bouzoukis, she started to relax. It had been a tiring day, and the prospect of a lethargic fortnight in the sun became very appealing. There was always, Mrs Pargeter found, something seductive about being in a new place. So many exciting details to find out when you start from total ignorance. Yes, she was going to enjoy herself in Agios Nikitas. Very relaxing, she thought, to be in a place where I know no one, and no one knows me.

Which was why she was so surprised to hear a voice saying, “Ah, good evening. Mrs Pargeter, isn’t it…?”