“Wondered where you were,” Blunt heard Mrs Pargeter’s voice say. “Denise was beginning to get a bit worried about you.”
“Sorry. Got carried away. Just had to take her out again after supper. She’s such a beauty, I can’t stop driving her,” said the chauffeur’s voice.
“Glad you’re pleased with it – her.”
“Pleased? That’s an understatement. Step inside, Mrs P. Just have a look at her.”
Mrs Pargeter did as she was bidden, and when the passenger door closed, Blunt could hear no more of their conversation. His eyelids lowered even further, till they were only a paper’s breadth apart. But he remained vigilant.
Inside the car, Mrs Pargeter was properly appreciative of all the features lovingly detailed by Gary. She nodded approvingly at the polished chestnut dashboard, the array of gleaming metal instruments, the leather plushness of the upholstery. It had clearly been a good buy.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Gary kept saying.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. It was a business loan. An investment. I firmly intend to make money out of my stake in your company.”
“Don’t worry, you will, Mrs Pargeter. I guarantee you will.” Gary caressed the steering wheel lovingly. “Fancy a quick spin, do you?”
“Well…” She was tempted. “What about Denise, though? Won’t she mind? Won’t she want to come too?”
“No worries. She’ll be asleep by now. Come on, just a quick circuit of the lanes.”
“OK.” Mrs Pargeter sat back luxuriously as the powerful engine took command.
The ride was as smooth as a dream of flying. Very relaxing. Mrs Pargeter knew that she would sleep even better than usual that night. (Not that she ever actually had trouble sleeping. At ease with herself, Mrs Pargeter’s nights were always as sleek as the sheen on her silk stockings.)
Only as they drew up once more outside the cottage, while Gary was deliberating whether to leave the Roller outside or lock it up for the night, did a troubling thought enter Mrs Pargeter’s mind. “Gary,” she said, “you remember Fossilface O’Donahue, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And you know that he’s embarked on this orgy of misguided charity, bringing ‘restitooshun’ to everyone he’s wronged in the past?”
“Yeah, I heard a bit about that.”
“Well, I’ve suddenly remembered that your name was on the list of people he wanted to make ‘restitooshun’ to.”
“Oh. Right. I’ll be on the lookout.”
“So I was wondering… what wrong did he do you in the past? I mean, if we know the area in which he might be trying to make it up to you, perhaps we’ll have a chance of stopping him from messing anything else up.”
“Good thinking. All right, well… Fossilface O’Donahue done the dirty on me in connection with a matter of transport. Bound to be, wasn’t it?”
“Oh yes, I remember you mentioned something. About a getaway car. He didn’t drain the petrol tank, did he?” asked Mrs, Pargeter, thinking of what had happened to Hedgeclipper Clinton.
“No, no, it was different from that. Quite as destructive, mind you. What Fossilface done was, he put nails in the tyres… not so’s to puncture them straight away, but so’s the nails’d work themselves in once you was up and running. I was up and running fast – doing ninety in the outside lane of the Ml – when the first tyre went. Dead hairy, swirling round like Torvill and Dean I was, nearly lost control. Tell you, Mrs P., if your husband hadn’t insisted on me doing that skid-pan training before he let me work for him, I’d’ve been a goner. He was a really caring employer, you know, Mr Pargeter was. Thought of everything.”
“True,” his widow replied distractedly. She was too concerned with thoughts of Fossilface O’Donahue to take much notice of yet another compliment. “Hm, so knowing the way Fossilface’s mind works – or trying to get into the perverse workings of Fossilface’s mind – maybe we should be on the lookout for some kind of ‘restitooshun’ involving tyres?”
“Any idea what?”
Mrs Pargeter shrugged. “If I had the skills to predict that, I’d win the National Lottery every week.”
“Right.” Gary yawned. “I’m for bed. It’s a mild night. Maybe I will leave the Roller out for –”
“I’d lock it up if I were you,” said Mrs Pargeter firmly. “I’m not having my investment put at risk.”
She went back to the cottage and bed. Gary drove the Rolls-Royce into the converted barn, and locked the large doors front and back. Then he too went to bed.
Neither Mrs Pargeter nor Gary knew that all their actions were still being watched.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Twenty-Seven
The next stage of Truffler Mason’s enquiries, forced on him by the loss of his archives, brought him up against that common British phenomenon, middle-class upward mobility. In all their researches into tribes from Poluostrov Tajmyr to Papua New Guinea, anthropologists have yet to discover a less secure social grouping than the British middle class. The status of this section of society is always fluid. They cannot find stasis, as the aristocracy and the genuine working class frequently do. The middle classes are never able to forget where they’ve come from, and spend all their time in heart-searching assessment of the number of degrees by which they are on the way up or down from that starting point.
The dilemma was well expressed by the household in which Truffler Mason found himself. Stan Gertler – known professionally as Stan the Orang-Utan, for reasons which you will either understand instinctively or which you don’t need to know about – was definitely born ‘lower middle class’. In fact, the young Stan might have slipped back quite comfortably into the working class, but for an aspiring mother who was determined to make something of her husband and her child. For there is nothing more daunting in the world than an aspiring mother with middle-class ambitions.
Stan Gertler’s social instability was then aggravated by his own marriage. Rita, with whom he fell in love as suddenly and heavily as he habitually knocked over nightwatchmen, regarded herself as ‘middle class’ – though she would more accurately have been described as ‘upper lower middle class’ – and, needless to say, her only ambition was to become ‘upper middle class’.
To this end, she moved her husband away from his Stoke Newington roots to the nice genteel suburb of Muswell Hill, and never did anything so lower-class as to ask him where his money came from but instead proceeded to spend a great deal of it on stripped pine, spice racks and Laura Ashley curtains.
When their son was born, she branded him for life with the hopefully classy name of Sebastian, and tried to use him as a crampon to pull the family further up the sheer cliffs of middle-class fulfilment. This involved sending the boy to a public school to develop both his vowels and his inbuilt antennae for the recognition and avoidance of anything ‘common’.
It had been Mrs Gertler’s hope that in time her son would meet a nice girl from the ‘upper upper middle class’ – or even, dare one hope it, “the aristocracy’ – to produce a new generation of children who, instinctively and without prompting, would for the rest of their days treat au pairs and waiters like dirt.
But her fond aspirations did not look likely to be realized. Sebastian was a sad disappointment to his mother. Even his expensive vowels had become deliberately roughened by that inverted snobbery to which public school boys are so prone. And his taste in women was proving to be decidedly down the tacky – not to say ‘rough trade’ – end of the market.