Mrs, Presumed Dead

by Simon Brett

  ‘Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,’ Mrs Pargeter lied. The late Mr Pargeter, she knew, would forgive her in the circumstances, although what she said went very strongly against one of the basic tenets of his life. He could never have been described as a greedy man, but he had always had – and encouraged in his wife – a proper sense of the value of material things.

  ‘And I don’t know . . .’ she went on with increasing confidence. Now she had a line to follow, the words came with no problem. ‘The more things one accumulates, the more unimportant they all seem. And the more complicated everything gets.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Brother Michael asserted eagerly, pouncing on the cue. ‘And the more one feels in need of a more simple life.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘This is a conclusion I myself and certain like-minded brethren reached some twenty years ago. And it was from that that the Church of Utter Simplicity was born.’

  ‘Yes. I really would like to know more about your Church.’

  ‘You are welcome to any information you may require. If, that is to say,’ he admonished, ‘you ask in a spirit of genuine enquiry after Eternal Truth.’

  Mrs Pargeter crossed her fingers. ‘Oh yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Am I to understand that you are considering the possibility of joining our church?’

  ‘Well, I had thought of it. I mean, I’d certainly like to know more about the set-up. There isn’t an age limit on entry, is there?’ she added anxiously. ‘I’m not exactly in the first flush of youth.’

  ‘There are no restrictions on entry to the Church of Utter Simplicity,’ Brother Michael boomed. ‘The only qualification is a heart empty of acquisitiveness and a mind ready to devote itself to the contemplation of the Almighty Simplicity of God.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, well, I think I could probably manage that,’ Mrs Pargeter lied again.

  ‘I must ask,’ Brother Michael pressed on, ‘just a few details about yourself. You know, it would be time-wasting to arrange an interview if there were some obvious reason why we would not suit.’

  What a strange way of putting it, Mrs Pargeter thought. In her own mind, she had already reached the conclusion that what wouldn’t make someone ‘suit’ was a completely empty bank balance. She had a feeling that the Church of Utter Simplicity, though emphasising that people could take nothing with them, would not welcome aspirant members who brought nothing with them. But perhaps she was being overcynical.

  ‘First,’ Brother Michael continued, ‘what is your marital status?’

  ‘I am widowed,’ she replied in appropriately subdued tones.

  He produced an uninterested reflex condolence. ‘So your problem is not a husband who keeps lavishing worldly goods upon you?’

  ‘Oh no. Mind you, he did in the past. He was very lavish, the late Mr Pargeter. But now, I’m afraid, I have to do most of the lavishing on myself.’

  ‘You are at least fortunate – even though in the unhappy state of widowhood – that you do not have to worry too much about money.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, no. That’s not a problem.’ She stopped herself, and continued soberly. ‘Well, yes, it is a problem – that is what makes me so materialistic, which is the cause of my spiritual problems. But the lack of money is not a problem in the conventional sense.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Brother Michael judiciously. And then he went straight on to arrange an interview for the next morning. The ‘just a few details about yourself seemed to have become less important once the health of her bank balance had been established.

  Or, again, Mrs Pargeter asked herself, was she letting her natural scepticism get the better of her?

  18

  Dunstridge Manor had presumably in its time been the home of the Lord of the Manor of 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, Desiderata.

  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 Morning Has Broken without expression.

  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.

  19

  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 The Price Is Right sort of values .. . but what things are really worth. Or if anything’s really worth anything, come to that.’

  Brother Michael gave a smile of predatory sympathy. ‘I understand. Those who live solely by the values of this world all eventually find them to be inadequate. What is the value of money in the face of the ultimate reality, which is death? Oh, a rich man may pay for medical care that can extend his life long beyond that of a poor man, but no man yet has been rich enough to postpone death for ever.’

  ‘No. I know that. And I suppose, as my own death gets nearer . . .’

  Brother Michael did not offer the token contesting of this statement which most people would have provided.

  ‘. . . as my own death gets nearer, I think more about that kind of thing. You know, where are my real values . . . ? What is life really about . . . ?’

  ‘And why are you here . . . ?’ Brother Michael supplied.

  Mrs Pargeter thought it would be just as well if she didn’t give a truthful answer to that one. ‘Exactly. And sometimes, you know, I wish I could just shed all the trappings of wealth and concentrate on things that really matter.’

  Brother Michael made an awkwardly expansive gesture. ‘That is what we are here for. The Church of Utter Simplicity was formed for those who feel the needs you describe.’

  ‘Yes, how was the Church actually formed?’ asked Mrs Pargeter, thus condemning herself to a full twenty minutes of the history of the movement.

  It had been, as she had suspected, founded in the Sixties, and in Brother Michael’s exposition, along with the biblical overtones, were references to ‘doing one’s own thing with God’, ‘letting God into one’s own space’ and ‘joining hands in the peace and love of God.’

  It was another example of how the carefree, non-materialism of the Sixties has been channelled into the hard-nosed businesses of the Eighties. The unfettered world of rock music developed, through price-cutting record outlets, into a multimillion-pound leisure industry. The woolly principles of the ecology movement were groomed into companies making ‘natural’ cosmetic products. And the Church of Utter Simplicity channelled the drifting spirit of Woodstock into the discipline of organised religion.

  All these organisations were doing the same thing, playing on the guilt of those people who had grown up through the values of the Sixties and now felt embarrassed by their middle-class materialism. And all of them demonstrated the eternal history of business – that the urge to make money is a permanent force, which will adapt itself to whatever happens to be current at any given moment.

  When Brother Michael reached the end of – or at least a paragraph-break in – his peroration, Mrs Pargeter asked innocently, ‘And how is it all funded?’

  He was not embarrassed by the question. Clearly it was one he had been faced with and dealt with on numerous occasions. However, the vehemence with which he answered suggested that he might be anticipating disagreement.

  ‘Well, of course, we do sell some produce from the estate, but the majority of our income comes from voluntary contributions.’

  ‘Oh? And how are those voluntary contributions made?’

  ‘Novices who join the Church make over much of their wealth to us.’

  He responded immediately to her raised eyebrow. This, too, was an objection he had encountered before. ‘When I say “make over to us”, of course I do not mean that it’s made over to any individual. The money goes into the charitable trust set up to run the Church.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘It would hardly be appropriate,’ he joked heavily, ‘for the novices to give up all their worldly goods simply so that the leaders of the Church could live the life of Reilly.’

  ‘No. No, it wouldn’t.’ Mrs Pargeter paused. She wondered whether it was the moment to change tack. After all, the last thing she wanted was to become a novice of the Church of Utter Simplicity. She was only there in an investigative capacity. ‘As it happens,’ she continued casually, ‘I heard about the Church through a friend.’


  ‘Oh?’ The priest – or whatever he called himself . . . probably just ‘Brother’, Mrs Pargeter reflected – was instantly alert, anticipating trouble.

  ‘Yes, a friend called Theresa Cotton.’

  At the name the black eyebrows drew together into one bristling line, like a particularly noxious caterpillar.

  Mrs Pargeter wondered for a moment whether she had overstepped the mark, but it soon became clear that Brother Michael’s anger was directed not at her but at her supposed friend.

  ‘Theresa Cotton is not, I am afraid, a name that is heard with great enthusiasm within these walls. She misled us into believing that she would be joining us as a novice.’

  ‘Sister Camilla.’

  ‘That is correct. She was—’ The eyebrows grew even bushier as a new thought struck him. ‘Was it you? Were you the one who rang up asking for her?’

  No point in denial. ‘Yes, it was me.’

  But this did not divert his anger from Theresa either. ‘She left us in the lurch. We had made plans for her joining the Church. We had set up her Becoming Ceremony . . .’

  ‘Yes, she mentioned that. I didn’t quite understand what she meant.’

  ‘Before you can be a part of the Church,’ he explained with limited patience, ‘you have to become a member of the Church.’

  ‘And once you are a member of the Church, what do you do then?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Well, having become, what do you do after that? Do you just be?’

  ‘Yes. From then on you are.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs Pargeter nodded wisely, as if that explained everything. ‘Erm, one thing that did interest me,’ she continued, ‘was something Theresa said about how one prepared oneself for entry to the Church.’

  ‘Yes?’ The question was guarded. He became very self-protective each time Theresa Cotton’s name was mentioned.