Stewkey Blues by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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