‘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-held 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?’
‘Exactly,’ said Chris, and her two friends nodded agreement, reassured that, in spite of her rather common accent, deep down Mrs Pargeter was their sort of person.
She took advantage of the hiatus to move the investigation on. ‘You don’t think Tom had anything to do with Jenny’s absence, do you?’
‘In what way?’ asked Chloe.
‘Well, that they might have run off together…?’ Although she knew that that wasn’t what had happened, Mrs Pargeter still wanted to find out what the girls thought.
‘Oh, no,’ Chris and Candida replied in unison.
‘No,’ Chloe agreed. ‘No, we’re fairly certain that Jenny went off to work… you know, make some money after she lost the pub job.’
‘But why would she do that before the end of term?’
‘Because that’s when the job came up, we assume. And we reckon it must have been something so well paid that, to her mind, it justified the risk of missing a week of term.’
‘And do you know any more about what kind of work Jenny might have been doing?’
