Dunstridge, but now it looked like a private school. So many such buildings became private schools when the depredations of death duties ousted family owners that the architectural style now says ‘private school’ rather than ‘manor house’ to the casual onlooker.
And at Dunstridge Manor this impression was reinforced by a scattering of low, apparently prefabricated buildings around the central Tudor pile. (It is a rule, quickly observed by prospective parents doing the rounds, that in all English private schools the majority of classrooms shall be in prefabricated buildings. A secondary rule supports the thesis that, the higher the fees are, the tattier these prefabricated buildings shall be.)
The Manor House, or ‘private school’, was in good repair, and so were the low prefabricated buildings, offering the hope to an inspecting parent that the fees might be quite reasonable. But such an inspection was not the purpose of Mrs Pargeter’s mission. Once she was out of her hired limousine, she merely noted the condition of the buildings, observed evidence of well-organised agricultural activity in the surrounding area, and tugged at the long wrought-iron bell-pull beside the studded oak door.
After a pause, the door was opened by a tallish man of indeterminate age, who wore a cassock of some rough dark blue material. He had black-framed glasses and a straggling beard. His hair had that unrubbed-tobacco texture of hair that could do with a wash.
He identified himself as ‘Brother Brian’, and led the way across the stone-flagged hall towards a pointed doorway. As she followed, Mrs Pargeter received the distinct impression that it wasn’t only his hair that needed washing. The fumes of ancient sweat assailed her nostrils.
This Mrs Pargeter did not like. She was aware that Man created the deodorant, but she liked to feel that the act had been performed under God’s direction. She did not subscribe to any fundamentalist view that, if God hadn’t intended people to smell, then He wouldn’t have given them sweaty armpits. If that was one of the beliefs of the Church whose premises she had just entered, then she thought it was taking Simplicity too far.
The hall they crossed could have been magnificent, but wasn’t. It needed thick rugs on the flagstones, heavy brocade curtains at the windows, ancestral portraits on the wall, maybe the odd stag’s head, stuffed pike or spray of halberds. Instead, no doubt in accordance with the precepts of Simplicity, there were thin cotton check curtains, chipboard notice-boards, metal filing cabinets and rows of the sort of coat-hooks found in municipal swimming baths.
But it was all clean and tidy. When they entered, two girls in their twenties, sleeves of their navy blue cassocks rolled up, were polishing the magnificent oak banisters of the staircase. They showed no interest in the new arrival. Neither looked up. The face of the one Mrs Pargeter could see was blank. Not blank in rapt contemplation of the Almighty Simplicity, but blank as if devoid of thought.
Through the doorway, Mrs Pargeter and her rancid usher found themselves in an office. Here, too, all was neat, but, again, no concession had been made to the beauty of the room. Its stately lines were broken by more metal cabinets, and its finely panelled walls obscured by more notice-boards, as well as some rather unattractively printed texts. These were of the not-quite-biblical variety popular in the late sixties and early seventies. They even included, Mrs Pargeter noted with distaste,
The office equipment was all very up-to-date, though its anonymous beige plastic casings provided another jarring contrast to the ancient elegance of the room. Behind the word processor keyboard and adjacent to the modern switchboard sat a woman with faded blonde hair and rimless glasses which accentuated the paleness of her eyes. Her perfunctory “Good morning. Mrs Pargeter, is it?” identified her as the American voice which took spiritual enquiries so much in its stride.
“Brother Michael is busy on the telephone at the moment. Would you like to sit down, please, until he’s free.” Though phrased as a question, the sentence had no interrogative quality; it was an order.
The chair on which Mrs Pargeter sat was again unnecessarily functional. A tubular steel office chair. Like everything else she had seen in the building, it aggressively denounced the temptations of materialism. Too much so. Mrs Pargeter knew, from her own experience, that, for less money, the Manor House could have been furnished with more congenial second-hand stuff. But then the intrusion of a little taste wouldn’t have given off the same ‘Look at us – aren’t we being unmaterialistic?’ message.
As soon as she was seated, Brother Brian, without saying anything, turned on his heel and padded off across the hall. As he did so, Mrs Pargeter noticed that the bottoms of grubby jeans and stained trainers showed beneath the hem of his cassock. They seemed of a piece with the rest of his image.
Though he had gone, Brother Brian seemed, vindictively, to have left his smell behind him. Mrs Pargeter wrinkled her nose in distaste.
The bloodless American woman opposite tapped at her keyboard, uninterested in the visitor. Through a window two navy-cassocked figures could be seen listlessly splitting logs with axes. From somewhere in the recesses of the house a recorder or tin whistle was playing
Something on the desk buzzed. Without looking away from her screen, the American woman said, “He’s ready for you now”, and waved Mrs Pargeter across the room.
The door, like others in the house, was oak with a pointed top, but its surface was insensitively spoiled by a taped-on notice, on which felt-penned letters read:
BROTHER MICHAEL
Spiritual enquiries
Between 2.00 and 4.00 p.m. only.
Mrs Pargeter supposed she was privileged, as an outsider, to be making her enquiry in the morning. If – and heaven forbid – she ever joined the Church of Utter Simplicity, then she would have to restrict her spiritual anxieties to two hours in the afternoon like everyone else.
She knocked, heard the fruity voice bellow “Come!”, and walked in.
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Nineteen
Mrs Pargeter had dressed carefully for the encounter. She wore a silk dress of a rather vibrant purple, which emphasised the voluptuousness of her figure. Over her shoulders was slung one of her better minks, and she wore the diamond-and-garnet necklace, bracelet and earring set which the late Mr Pargeter had given her as a reward for her patience during a long absence when his work had taken him to Monte Carlo. She knew that the ensemble was over-the-top everyday wear for anyone other than a very successful romantic novelist, but it had been chosen quite deliberately, as had her arrival by limousine, to see whether it would have any effect.
She was instantly rewarded. As he rose to greet her, Father Michael’s eyes moved straight to the necklace, then took in the bracelet and the rest of the ensemble.
“Sit you down,” he said in the same charmless, hectoring manner he had used on the phone.
He wore the uniform navy blue cassock, and there was about him an overpowering masculinity. Not the masculinity that stirs sexual attraction, but the masculinity which manifests itself in large features, huge splayed hands, bushy eyebrows and thick hair in nostrils and ears. He was about sixty, a little portly and balding. The hair that remained on his head was still black, though the odd hairs missed by careless shaving were white.
(How was it, Mrs Pargeter often wondered, that some men could manage always to miss the same bit when shaving? She could understand doing it once, even doing it a couple of days in a row, but the little tufts of quite long hairs which she often saw on otherwise smooth chins suggested a carefully planned campaign of avoidance. Most bizarre. Still, she concluded philosophically, it was probably one of those questions to which women were destined never to find the answer.)
He waited till she was seated before sitting down himself, but this seemed merely an act of conformity, not of genuine chivalry. He clasped his hands together on his desk and looked at her with the indulgence of a doctor treating a patient for recurrent hypochondria.
“Now, Mrs Pargeter, you said on the phone that you found yourself obsessed with material things…”
“Yes.” She launched into fabrication. “I suppose the problem is one of values, really. You know, not values in the sense of what people pay for things, or what things are worth…not
