Stewkey blues, p.10
Stewkey Blues, page 10
All this required a fair amount of disturbance, but still Terry slept on. From outside the window I could hear the late-afternoon life of Stannard Road starting up. There were car doors slamming, the sound of loud voices suddenly falling away as their owners stepped through front doors and side-gates. Standing in the doorway of the Runacles’ living room, I took a last look at Terry, whose mother had died, and who had disliked the Scouts, hated school and wanted to join the Merchant Navy, and had a copy of Cunning Stunts concealed in his sofa, for I knew that I would never speak to him again, or he to me, that whatever compact we had sealed between us that afternoon would never be renewed. Thinking about it afterwards, ten or even twenty years later, I realised that I had fundamentally misjudged him, that all the time I had wanted to see him as a symbol of something – exclusion, ostracism, class, who knew what? – when all he really represented was himself. And in fact, only a month later, at a safe distance in Bunnett Square, I saw him with a woman who to judge from the faint facial likeness and the exasperated gestures she directed at him could only have been his mother. And so I turned on my heel, shut the door carefully behind me and set off back down Colman Road and along the Avenues towards the familiar world that had been allotted me, that world of high teas and Startrite sandals and the Morecambe and Wise Show, settled destinies and – it had to be allowed – boredom.
FUN WITH DICK AND JANE
The Pargeters were only a quarter of a mile away, so they walked it through the twilight. This was a desirable thing to do as it took them past several local landmarks that could not be properly inspected through a car window. The Pargeters’ house was the most expensive in the village, but not for that reason the best appointed. The back garden was overhung by a gargantuan stretch of deodars that some previous owner had thought would do as a wind-break and a truck full of aggregate had once come to grief on the over-narrow drive.
‘What did you say you thought of – Jeremy, is it?’ Henrietta asked as they tramped purposefully along, putting out occasional hands to fend off the encroaching cow parsley.
‘Rather minor public school,’ Giles said, who had never been anywhere near any kind of public school but prided himself on his grasp of social detail.
‘Whatever do you mean by that?’
Giles wondered what he did mean by it. Social codes were difficult to explain to anyone beyond the furnace in which they were forged. Choosing his words carefully, he said: ‘Oh, you know, a bit assertive, a bit dogmatic. I mean, he told me you can get to Shropham along that backway and everyone knows you can’t.’
‘Well I’ve driven down there several times,’ Henrietta said, a fallen branch from a beech tree savaged in the last equinoctial gale snapping under her feet, and he bowed his head, as he always did, at his wife’s rebuke. They had lived in this part of Norfolk for a decade and a half, and he felt himself becoming meeker and more self-effacing from one year to the next.
As they reached the lip of the Pargeters’ gravel drive, a tiny walkway that broke unexpectedly through the leylandii hedge, a security light went on above their heads. ‘That’s new,’ Henrietta said, with the slightly suspicious tone she brought to leaflets on the parish noticeboards offering lifts to the elderly or help with their shopping. Rounding the bend in the path, they found the front door open, a tiny dog rooting around in the daffodil bed and a burly, red-faced man standing on the doorstep.
‘My wife, Henrietta,’ Giles said, a bit stiffly, as they came up. Another light went on somewhere over to the right, disclosing that the garage doors had been repainted in bright, arsenical green and that two gigantic porphyry pots had taken the place of the old water butt. ‘Darling, this is Richard Pargeter.’
‘Call me Dick,’ the burly man said earnestly, as if this was the greatest compliment anyone appearing at his front door on an October evening had ever been paid.
There was a woman lurking just inside the door, her face and figure indistinguishable in the complicated mixture of light and shade produced by what looked like a halogen lamp and some blackout curtains, who now edged cautiously out onto the steps. ‘Jane Pargeter,’ she said, giving an odd little twist to the final syllable, so that it came out as Parget-ah.’ She was small and slight to the point of being practically elfin, and the contrast between her and the big, red-faced man was so marked that it was as if they had done it deliberately and for comic purposes, like a Hollywood director casting Meryl Streep and Danny DeVito alongside each other in a romcom.
‘Well, come in, come in,’ Mr Pargeter said briskly, as if they were purposely holding things up and it was all he could do not to administer a rebuke. ‘I’ll just hoof the blasted dog out of the shrubbery and then we’ll, we’ll …’
He was one of those people, Giles realised, who never finished their sentences. This was not a good sign. Neither were the family portraits that hung on the wall of the vestibule to which they were now admitted: supple boys in smart jackets; big-bosomed girls with cow-like features sitting placidly at tea tables with their hands folded in their laps. The blasted dog had been hoofed out of the shrubbery by now and came scampering over their feet. ‘This rascal is called Dido,’ Mr Pargeter said, as if committees of dog-lovers had set in conclave to give the animal its name. ‘Ate a bloody pincushion the other night. Had to take it to the emergency vets at Fakenham.’
‘It was only a very small pincushion,’ Jane glossed, ‘but even so.’
They were in the sitting room now, where the riot of fresh sensations was almost too bewildering to be taken in. The Oldroyds, who had owned the house previously, had gone in for lime-green walls decorated with Hockney prints and views of old cathedrals, and long, low, quaintly-antimacassared sofas. The Pargeters, alternatively, had clearly spent a small fortune furnishing the room with antique club fenders and comfortless high-back armchairs that defied you to sit on them. There was a substantial bookcase where the Oldroyds had kept their sideboard full of china whose contents suggested that Mr Pargeter liked old-fashioned thrillers and studies of the Third Reich. But here they were, anyway, drinking glasses of the Pargeter’s sparkling wine (‘Have some fizz’), which Mr Pargeter presented with a little flourish, as if he had missed his vocation as a sommelier, talking about what people tended to talk about here, which was the amenities of village life.
‘Actually,’ Jane said, who Giles had previously assumed to be entirely under her husband’s thumb but had since threatened to strike out on lines of her own, ‘we nearly bought a house at Forncett St Peter. But it turned out that the surgery was three miles away.’
‘Need a GP handy at my age,’ said Mr Pargeter, who did not look more than sixty-five. ‘What with all these … all these …’ Not absolutely discouraged by his wife, he began to list the medical conditions from which he suffered and the treatments that had been prescribed. Giles occupied the time by examining an engraving of Putney Bridge executed in 1825 by someone with a defective sense of scale that hung on the wall a foot above his head. ‘Not to mention these little chaps,’ said Mr Pargeter, whipping out his two big fists and looking as if he meant to do some serious damage with them, and displaying a cluster of horny nodules at the base of each thumb.
‘How are you finding the village?’ Henrietta asked, with an artificial brightness that Giles knew meant trouble.
‘We had lunch at the pub the other day,’ Mr Pargeter said. ‘Not really an experience I’d care to repeat.’
‘I liked it,’ Jane said mildly.
‘They didn’t cook the beef long enough,’ Mr Pargeter went on mournfully. ‘Seemed all right to begin with, and then … and then …’ Giles, looking at the photos exhibited around the room, was struck by their adversarial juxtapositions. Just as you thought Mr Pargeter had gained the upper hand with an outsize portrait of himself in check trousers and tam o’shanter bent over a golf putter, so Mrs Pargeter popped up before a bunch of rose bushes at the Chelsea Flower Show to confound him. They were being ushered through into the dining room now – this, he noted, was pretty much as the Oldroyds had left it – watching Jane dawdle back and forth with a soup tureen. Mr Pargeter, seating himself at the head of the table, began to cram bread rolls into his mouth, a lump at a time.
The soup turned out to be reasonably good. While he was attending to it he heard Jane and Henrietta trading information about their respective daughters (‘Such a nice young man, we thought … Works in library supply … Bound to settle down soon’) and their husbands’ previous careers (Mr Pargeter, he learned, had been and was still peripherally employed in re-insurance.) Having disposed of the bread, and eaten his bowl of soup so quickly that it seemed to vanish from his plate, Mr Pargeter reverted to the subject of village life.
‘Of course, everywhere’s like everywhere else these days. That’s the pity of it. I mean, I was driving back the other day when I came across some twit riding one of those motorised scooters down the middle of the street.’
‘I don’t think he was a twit,’ Jane said. ‘It’s quite legal to ride a motorised scooter.’ The tone of her voice had changed from mild remonstrance to pretty serious chiding.
‘A twit,’ Mr Pargeter said. He was carving the duck now with surprising dexterity, as if he had been born to the task. ‘Knows the things are dangerous but still scoots around the village scaring old ladies.’
‘Not a twit,’ Jane said, even more sharply.
‘I mean,’ Mr Pargeter said, changing the subject abruptly, ‘what do you do in the evenings? We tried that man who was lecturing about medieval Norfolk at the parish hall, and he … and he …’
What did they do in the evenings, Giles wondered. But Mr Pargeter did not look like the kind of man who would warm to the topic of Jane Austen box sets and Scrabble marathons. ‘Oh, we have our resources,’ he said.
Henrietta had caught the scent of Jane’s dissatisfaction. ‘You see,’ she said, with a little flicker of ulterior motive that Mr Pargeter really should have caught, ‘we’ve always enjoyed spending time in each other’s company.’
The duck was less nice than it looked, but they plugged gamely away. Giles thought of his study and his books about Anglo-Saxon field settlement and wild fowling in the Breckland. Why did anyone ever think that social life made a change from the domestic round?
‘Do you like reading?’ Jane asked very quietly. There was steam rising off the vegetables that Mr Pargeter had just heaped onto her plate and her face, with its emerald earrings and carefully sculpted eyebrows, looked suddenly ancient and witch-like, stricken in some odd and indefinable way. Outside the mist was rising up out of the hedges and the night was settling in. He was about to say that he did and that he liked nothing better when Mr Pargeter suddenly raised his hand from his plate and, like a dinosaur calling to its mate across a primeval swamp, said:
‘The new Bill Bryson is jolly good. I bought it for Jane, but she only likes thrillers.’
Instinctively Giles knew that some line had been crossed, that nothing – not the pictures in their frames, the shine of the Pargeters’ dinner service or the laws of hospitality – could prevent what was going to happen next. He could see, too, that Jane had experience in these matters and would know that timing was everything. She waited several seconds, long enough for Mr Pargeter to feel – if such thoughts ever occurred to him – that he had got away with this, might venture, now that the coast was clear, to some other subject, before slamming her glass of wine down on the table-top with such force that the top broke away from the stem and saying – no, practically shrieking – ‘Why don’t you shut up, you fat fuck?’
Thankfully, Henrietta had always known how to handle herself in these situations. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear. Giles!’ And Giles saw she was referring to the little pool of red wine that had leaked onto the edge of the white tablecloth. Obediently, he took the salt cellar and began to sprinkle the contents over the small, bloody puddle. Chastened but fascinated, Mr Pargeter watched him do it.
Later, torches to hand, the owls swooping out of the beech trees above their head, they walked back along the path. Giles wondered what the Pargeters were doing now that their guests had gone. Were they throwing plates at each other? Had they lapsed into sulky silence? Or had they settled their differences and decided to get on with the washing-up? It was hard to tell. Meanwhile, his own home with its Jane Austen box sets and its books about wild fowling in the Brecks, drew him back like a magnet.
‘I think I could just about bring myself to send them a Christmas card,’ Jane said. ‘But I don’t ever want them in my house … That poor man,’ she added as an afterthought.
LADS FROM STRAT
‘Of course, there’s hardly such a thing as a genuine rural culture any more,’ Mr Ferris said, drumming his fingers angrily on the table top, which magnified the sound in some obscure way and made it sound like someone doing ‘noises off’ of approaching horses with a couple of coconut shells. He was a tall, hunched man in his late fifties with a scatter of receding hair that had been dyed an odd chestnut colour. ‘Certainly not round here. All gone with the Barrett homes and satellite TV and the flight from the land. There are no agricultural labourers now. Just people to drive the combines at harvest time.’
There were people who said that Mr Ferris was too highbrow to be station manager of Norfolk FM and that he would have been better off working for the BBC. But Simon rather liked him and enjoyed listening to his stories of how he had begun his career in TV drama bringing cups of tea to Dame Judi Dench. Thinking that Mr Ferris probably had a lot more to say about the decline of rural culture, he stared hard through the Perspex surround where, twenty feet away, the morning’s broadcasting was getting into gear. Over in the corner studio he could see Rossy Boy, a.k.a. the Ross-meister, bouncing up and down in his chair as he cackled into the microphone. Nearer at hand, three stolid, put-upon girls seated before a line of telephones were taking calls from benighted villages out on the flat. Simon knew that the callers were always the same people: Harvey from Hempnall, Marjorie from Stratton Strawless, the lady from Corpusty who had to be shushed when she tried to talk about immigration. He shortened the focus of his gaze and examined other familiar artefacts: the wall-hung photographs of the Norfolk FM ‘DJ Posse’; the piles of cardboard boxes; the crate of bottled water that had been lying there for a fortnight and was still waiting for someone to come and take it away.
‘So what have you got for us this afternoon?’ Mr Ferris wondered, without much enthusiasm. Simon knew, or thought that he knew, that this was a feint, for he and Mr Ferris were allies, united by the seriousness with which they went about things. There would be no phone-ins from pubs or reports from dwile-flonking competitions if they had their way. Over in the corner studio, Rossy Boy had stopped cackling into the microphone and, with huge enthusiasm, was playing a Buck’s Fizz single from 1983.
‘Well,’ he began, cautiously, ‘this afternoon’s heritage village is Clenchwarton. We’re going to get the lollipop lady from the local primary school. And then Professor Trunnion – you know, the linguistics expert -is coming in to do his dialect master-class. Oh, and the “What Happened in Norfolk” feature will be getting up to 1994.’
‘What did happen in Norfolk in 1994?’
‘I think the it was the year the Norwich Central Library burned down.’
‘This I like,’ Mr Ferris said, who always said this whether he liked it or not. ‘How are you getting on with the local personalities?’
‘I saw a couple of them yesterday. There’s another one coming in tomorrow.’
The local personalities spot was a new idea of Mr Ferris’s. The people who applied to be on it had names like the Buttercup Boy and Sheringham Stevie. They wore picturesque clothing, spoke in exaggerated rustic accents and said things like: ‘Whatever are you like?’
‘Any of them any good?’ Mr Ferris wondered hopefully.
‘Not really.’
‘Never mind. There’s gold in them thar hills,’ Mr Ferris said, reverting to his second signature remark.
Outside the window the pale East Anglian sky was streaking over with grey. Simon, who had been hoping that Mr Ferris was going to say that he was entering him for one of the local radio awards, wandered off along the long, serpentine passageway where Rossy Boy, his show now complete, stood awkwardly balanced against the granite-slab wall tying the lace of one of his sneakers. His real name was Ross Boythorn and he held the station record for the number of times you could smuggle the phrase ‘Norfolk ‘n’ Good’ onto the airwaves without the management noticing.
‘Did you like the programme, Simon?’ No Norfolk FM presenter ever passed another in a corridor without seeking reassurance on this point.
‘I loved it.’ Ross’s twisty, anxious face went pink with gratitude. ‘But where was the lady from Corpusty?’
‘Oh, she was so furious this morning that Angie wouldn’t let her past the switchboard.’
The afternoon show passed without incident. The lollipop lady from Clenchwarton; Professor Trunnion; the man who did the historical look-backs: none of them cared to disappoint. Afterwards Simon bought two small dressed Cromer lobsters from the stall on the market and took them back to the flat, where Myfanwy sat amidst her box files. When she saw him she made a little pawing motion in the dead air like the MGM lion.
