Mrs Pargeter's Package Read Free

lost your hair.'
    'Sickening, isn't it? Trouble is, Melita, when you actually do have the freedom, you don't realise it. 1 mean, when I was about twenty I could have been having a whale of a time, lots of affairs, no strings, but did I? No, I just spent all my time worrying because nobody appeared to want to marry me. Didn't you find that?'
    'Well, not exactly.' Mrs Pargeter didn't really want to elaborate. In fact, she had had a vibrantly exciting sex-life before she met the late Mr Pargeter – and indeed a vibrantly exciting sex-life throughout their marriage – but she had always believed that sex was a subject of exclusive interest to the participants.
    Joyce was fortunately prevented from asking for elaboration by the arrival of Yianni with her ouzo. She diluted it from the accompanying glass of water, watched with satisfaction as the transparent liquid clouded to milky whiteness and took a long swallow, before continuing her monologue. 'Conchita's just the same as I was. I mean, there my daughter is, lovely girl, early twenties, successful career, could have any man she wants, and what does she do? She keeps falling for bastards – married men, usually – and keeps getting her heart broken when they won't leave their wives and set up home with her. Why goes that happen?'
    'In my experience,' said Mrs Pargeter judiciously, 'women who always go after unsuitable men do so because deep down they don't really want to commit themselves.'
    'Huh,' said Joyce. 'Well, I just wish Conchita'd settle down and get married.'
    'Why? Do you really think marriage is the perfect solution?'
    'I don't know. I just think life is generally a pretty dreadful business and maybe it's easier if there are two of you trying to cope with it.'
    This seemed to Mrs Pargeter an unnecessarily pessimistic world-view. She had never regarded life as an imposition, rather as an unrivalled cellarful of opportunity to be relished to the last drop. Probably it was just bereavement that had made her friend so negative.
    'I don't know, though,' Joyce went on, digging herself deeper into her trough of gloom. 'How much do you ever know about other people? I mean, you think you're close, you live with someone, sleep with them for twenty-five years, then they die and you realise you never knew them at all. I don't think you ever really know anything about another person.'
    This made Mrs Pargeter think. It did not make her question her own marriage – she had never doubted that she and the late Mr Pargeter had known each other through and through – but it did make her ask herself how much she knew about Joyce Dover.
    The answer quickly came back – not a great deal. Mrs Pargeter had met Joyce some fifteen years before in Chigwell, during one of those periods when the late Mr Pargeter had had to be away from home for a while. Joyce's husband, Chris, it transpired, was also away at the time (though on very different business), and she and their daughter Conchita, then a tiny black-eyed six-year-old, were living in a rented house till his return. The two women had seen a lot of each other for three months, and kept in touch intermittently since.
    Though there was a ten-year age difference between them, they had got on from the start, without ever knowing a great deal about each other's backgrounds. Joyce, Mrs Pargeter was told, had always lived in London. Her husband Chris had been born in Uruguay, but, politically disaffected with the governing regime, had fled to England in his late teens. He had made a success of some kind of export business (dealing chiefly with Africa) and had, from all accounts, turned himself into the perfect English gentleman. His origins were betrayed only in details like his daughter's unusual Christian name. That was all Mrs Pargeter had ever known about the life and business of Chris Dover.
    And she had seen to it that his wife Joyce knew even less about the life and business of the late Mr Pargeter.
    Joyce maundered on, but Mrs