Mrs Pargeter 02; Mrs, Presumed Dead

∨ Mrs, Presumed Dead ∧

Fourteen

Through the net curtains, whose advantages she was coming to appreciate increasingly the longer she spent in Smithy’s Loam, Mrs Pargeter saw her next-door neighbour emerge from the front door of ‘Cromarty’ with a bucket, sponge and cloths. Not content with the daily drubbing she gave to the inside of her windows, Carole Temple was now set to punish the outside.

Mrs Pargeter decided it was time she should do a little gentle gardening. A little gentle front gardening.

She went to the shed at the back and selected a hoe, an edging tool, a trowel and a trug. Those ought to cover most eventualities, she thought. The trug in particular seemed to say ‘gardening’ to her. She remembered walking with the late Mr Pargeter through the garden of the big house in Chigwell, carrying a trugful of flowers on many a Sunday afternoon. She had loved that garden; it was always so beautifully cared for.

Not of course that she actually had to do any of the caring herself. The late Mr Pargeter had always ensured that her gardening efforts were restricted to cutting flowers and putting them in a trug. He organised the men who were their frequent guests to do the real work. It was surprising how happy those men had always been to do a little gardening in exchange for a few days of unobserved calm in Chigwell.

Mrs Pargeter went round the side of the house to the front garden, and when she saw Carole Temple she called out a cheery, “Good morning.”

Her neighbour froze in mid-wipe, and nodded a perfunctory ‘Good morning’ back. Then she returned determinedly to her window-cleaning, the set of her shoulders a fierce deterrent to further conversation.

But Mrs Pargeter was not daunted by that sort of thing. After a little tentative scrabbling with her hoe in one of the front beds, she said, “Do you do your garden yourself, Carole?”

This prompted another affronted freeze, before a reply was conceded. “Yes. My husband does most of it.”

“Handy things, husbands,” Mrs Pargeter commented breezily. “I miss a good few of the things my husband used to do.”

The innuendo was deliberate and, Mrs Pargeter knew, a bit childish. But Carole Temple’s stuffiness had that effect on her. She was determined to get some reaction, any reaction, out of her neighbour.

But that was apparently not the way to get it. Carole continued rubbing the glass as if she hoped to come through on the other side.

“I think I might have to get a little man in to help out.” Mrs Pargeter went on and then, realising that she was keeping the innuendo going, chuckled throatily. “Oh dear, aren’t I dreadful?” she said, still trying to get a rise out of Carole.

The rubbing became even more vigorous.

“Did the Cottons do this garden themselves?”

Faced with a direct question, Carole could not stay silent without overt rudeness, so she had to reply. “Yes. Well, of course, for the last few months Theresa did it all.”

She couldn’t have set up a better cue for Mrs Pargeter if she had tried. “Yes. I gather Mr Cotton hadn’t been around for some time…?”

“No.”

Mrs Pargeter was not going to be deterred by monosyllables. “Got a job up North, did I hear?”

“Yes.”

“Where was that exactly?”

Carole looked with slight annoyance away from her cleaning, and what she saw brought an expression of shock to her face. Mrs Pargeter had now moved forward and was actually leaning against the dividing wall between their properties, for all the world like a gossip from a northern soap opera.

“I have no idea,” Carole Temple snapped, her eyes blazing the message that Mrs Pargeter’s behaviour did not conform with the usages of Smithy’s Loam.

Mrs Pargeter, fully aware of the effect she was having, gave no sign of taking the hint. Instead, she beamed cheerfully and asked, “And how long ago was it he got transferred?”

Again Carole could not evade the direct question.

“I suppose about six months ago. Round March, I think.”

Ah, so the lie about promotion had been around as long as the reality of redundancy itself.

“And did you see him much after he started work up North, Carole?”

“Hardly at all. Presumably he was busy with the new job.”

“Yes. When you say ‘hardly at all’, do you mean that, or do you mean ‘not at all’?”

“What?” Carole had now given up any attempt at polishing and was looking at her interrogator with undisguised irritation.

“I meant, Carole love,” – Mrs Pargeter knew exactly how much the endearment would grate – “did you see Rod Cotton at all after he had changed jobs?”

“Well, I think so. I think he was here for a while between the two. I don’t know, quite honestly. I mean, he wasn’t around much before.” She was getting flustered, and annoyed that she was getting flustered. “I’m not the sort of person who spends all the time minding my neighbours’ business rather than my own.”

Mrs Pargeter gave a beatific smile, as if unaware of any possibility of sarcasm in the last remark. “No, no. Neither am I,” she agreed equably.

She still showed no signs of moving away from the wall. Carole took her frustration out on the windows, which squeaked with protest at their chastisement.

“Must’ve been lonely for Theresa…” Mrs Pargeter mused. “Stuck down here, husband away all the time. I wouldn’t have liked it. My husband always had to be away a certain amount…you know, in connection with his business…and I never really felt right until he came back.”

This did not seem to Carole to be worthy of reaction.

“No, I didn’t like it. Still, I know there are some couples it doesn’t worry…Some seem a lot happier to be separated than to be together…Depends how close they are, really, I suppose…how things are going between them…”

But if Mrs Pargeter had hoped that this fishing would elicit any comment on the state of the Cottons’ marriage, she was disappointed. Carole Temple just wrung out her cloth as if she were strangling it and attacked a top corner of the window with an air of finality.

Recognising that she had pushed as far as she dared and got as much information as she was going to get that morning, Mrs Pargeter rubbed her hands together and moved back from the wall. “Still, haven’t got time to stay here chatting all day, pleasant though it is. Things to get on with. See you soon, I’m sure. ‘Bye ‘bye, love.”

Again the familiarity stung Carole, whose head spun round to face her neighbour. She looked upstaged and very cross. If anyone should be curtailing this unwanted conversation, it should be her and not the person who had forced it on her.

But she was too late. Mrs Pargeter had picked up her unused garden tools and, with a little twitch of mischief at the corners of her mouth, waved serenely, before disappearing round the side of her house.