The Charmers (19 page)

The beams disappointed her by turning out to be of some inferior wood, instead of the oak for which she had hoped. But when they were well-scraped, and painstakingly oiled, and
she
had given herself what she said might be “my strained heart come back again” by reaching up to polish them during the whole of one very hot day, they did look clean.

But Christine’s opinion was that you could say no more than that for them. A white ply-board ceiling put up by a handyman, she thought, would have been easier, and would have looked twice as nice.

“Well, I can’t help it if she is worn to a frazzle coping with my beams,” Diana said, coming out of Mrs. Traill’s bedroom, where the latter was extended prone. “I told her I didn’t care how they looked … now we shall never hear the end of it, I suppose, because they don’t look as good as oak would have.”

“Isn’t she coming down to supper?” Christine asked.

“No … I’m going to make her one of my special cold soups … is there any sherry open?”

Restored by the soup and a night’s sleep, Mrs. Traill was at work again the next morning, fixing up the blind to meet Diana’s complaint of glare; lavishing delicate care and ferocious energy on rotting brick and worm-eaten wood, and Diana alternately grumbling at her for being an ass and cherishing her with nourishing recipes when she fell exhausted on her bed. Sometimes she did both at once, offering the tray laden with egg-nog while telling Mrs. Traill that she was bonkers and they had to face it.

When, after fourteen days concentrated labour, the shed was finally painted a greenish-blue carefully mixed by Mrs. Traill herself, and its floor had been covered with Japanese matting, and she announced that it was finished, Christine felt that everything seemed flat; she had been unconsciously looking forward to some kind of climax at the end of all the activity. She ventured to ask if they were going to have a house-warming?

“Who for? The wheel?” Diana asked smartly.

“No, Mrs. Meredith, but people do, don’t they? When they move in, and it is a kind of moving in, if you’re going to be working there most days.”

“We’ll see. Mr. Lennox’s first night is coming off in about three weeks, I might ask some people in, if I can get enough
stuff
done to show them, and we could sit up and wait for the notices to come in—I hope those swine of critics will lush themselves well up beforehand, or they’ll be bitchy about it … I’ll talk to the others.”

Apparently the others agreed because, later that day, Christine found Mrs. Traill fallen into a fever of longing for pink and orange Chinese lanterns to hang from the trees in the garden, where the party was to be held. Dressed in her oldest and toughest trousers and an ancient sleeveless blouse, she descended next day into London in search of them.

“That’s it, you see,” Diana observed to Christine while they were drinking coffee in the garden after her departure. “If you ever wonder why she’s had four husbands and got through them all, that’s the answer. She gets these
ideés
fixes about things, absolute obsessive compulsions, and everything has to go overboard until she’s worked through them. Husbands and all. I know, I’ve seen her at it, for getting on for forty years … Men just will not stand it. Of course,” she went on absently, “she didn’t wear out all four of them; she was married the first time at eighteen, that gives her about nine years with each of them—not so startling. And the first one died. But it always came to the same thing with the others. Off she had to go, to Mexico or Turkey or somewhere. Even Dick couldn’t put up with it in the end, he was the last one—and he’s by no means a conventional type. It’s a good thing she never had any children.”

“Haven’t any of you, all you great friends, I mean—got any family?” Was this the same Dick who had been crazy about her, Christine’s flat? At least they’d never think of having him and his Amanda here, if he’d once been married to Mrs. Traill. Christine felt a little satisfaction at thus neatly summing up the relationship of her employers—
all you great friends
.

“We belong to the first generation that didn’t
like
it’s family,” Diana said hardly, “and was too busy having a good time after the First War to want brats … Glynis was a mistake. Clive adores her now, of course, but when he knew Tasha was
going
to have her, neither of them was delighted, I can tell you.”

Christine was silent, listening to the Two Voices
which
, increasingly as the weeks went on, lifted themselves up within her mind.
I do think it’s sad when a little one isn’t wanted
, said Mortimer Road.
They’re a terrible nuisance and there’s no peace
, crisply retorted the voice of Pemberton Hall.

Only That Day was silent. She did not know, she had not the dimmest, faintest idea, of what That Day would say, or how its voice would sound. Had it a voice—That Day?

I must be going crackers, she thought, recalling herself with a start and looking quickly at Mrs. Meredith.

“When I see the way the world’s going, I’m damned glad
I
never slipped up,” Diana was saying.

But here Christine said that it was time she did some shopping and went.

A NEW NOTE
had been struck in the rhythm of her life by the butting-in—she thought of it as a butting-in—of Tom’s sister Moira.

Moira was Mrs. Rusting, and she lived in one of the older suburbs north of London, where a few streets of pleasant old brown brick Edwardian houses—Smith houses—were being hemmed in at a voracious rate of consumption of the few remaining open fields, by well-planned blocks of two-storey houses, with sinks under the kitchen windows. Lately Tom had been talking of Christine’s going to tea there.

“I’ve been thinking for some time that you and she ought to get together,” he would say. “She’d love to meet you, she’s always so interested in people.”

The word ‘nosey’ would lodge itself in Christine’s mind. And then, when she took a plunge and confided to Tom her suspicion that Mr. Johnson was about to desert them for the attractive family in Hampstead, he said, “Moira could help you there. She doesn’t have a cleaner herself, they’re too expensive these days, and Anne, that’s my niece, helps in the house of course, but Moira might just know of someone.”

Christine’s satisfaction at Tom’s having understood her terror of bringing Mrs. Benson into Pemberton Hall was marred by this patronizing suggestion. Just as she had decided that although he might be full of his miners and all those Problems, he completely understood and sympathized about having Mrs. Benson in your home, out he came with his old Moira again.

She made a sound which was intended to convey gratitude but gratitude was the last emotion she felt. A cleaner recommended by Moira Rusting, perhaps on chatty terms with Moira Rusting, and reporting back to Moira Rusting all that
went
on at Pemberton Hall—no, thank you.

Moira was certain to think that Christine’s employers were ‘funny’. And Christine did not want this.
She
liked it at Pemberton Hall;
she
liked her employers;
she
was having what she liked for the first time in half a century, and she wanted no criticism from anyone.

“We really
must
fix up this tea-party,” he would say. “I know you’ll like her. Only we’ll have to give at least a week’s notice. She’ll want to make one of her special cakes and they take three days.”

Christine did not mind the week’s notice; of course you let people know well in advance when you were coming to tea, but—three days to make a cake! Moira must be one of those cushion-straighteners, ash-tray-whisker-away, mind-the-linoleum types, of which she had had a lifetime’s surfeit in her own family; Auntie Beryl, she would be like Auntie Beryl, Christine was sure. Auntie Beryl was a wonderful cook.

She had so far imbibed the manners of Pemberton Hall as to think
Strewth
, which was one of Diana Meredith’s expressions, but her face, now deeply rosed by hatless days in the sunniest part of the garden, expressed only the amiable interest of a prospective guest.

Nearly six months ago, that face had
almost
shown what its owner was: her true nature had been so deeply overlaid by the habits acquired in years of monotony and lovelessness that never a hint of it had showed in her firm, well-moulded lips and candid eyes; and the expression had been nearly unchanging in its cheerful alertness. But now it was a mask: a rosy, polite, attentive mask … and Christine Smith was becoming accustomed to wearing it.

But it was not easy to wear it when she realised that the visit to Tom’s sister must be followed by an invitation from herself to tea in her flat. She contrived to keep it on, but—she’ll get no cakes that take three days from me, thought Christine.

Mrs. Traill’s pursuit of the Chinese lanterns and Mr. Johnson’s growing lateness in arrival and slackness in his work
seemed
to be the chief topics discussed during the next week, though there was an increasing sense of slightly anxious excitement about the first night of what Christine called “Mr. Lennox’s show.”

She had gathered, from remarks dropped by the friends, that while it would not matter to Mr. Coward what the brutes of critics said, it would matter to Mr. Lennox, because he had not yet been on the stage long enough—only about thirty years—to establish him as an Old Favourite, and until you were an Old Favourite, you were never safe from the critics.

And even Agatha Christie, Mr. Meredith said, had come in for a slating from them over the past few years; presumably because she had made a fortune out of not writing plays about The Problems. The sight of a tennis-racquet on the stage, said James with an unaccustomed flight of fancy, threw those chaps into the sort of state other chaps got into about blood sports or hanging.

Christine had cautiously sounded Tom on his views about the forthcoming production, and from his replies, had most reluctantly decided that she
would
have to ask him to go with her. He had said that that kind of show did no harm, and then added the ominous remark that he wouldn’t mind seeing it himself.

What with Moira, and the threat of her visit to Mr. Lennox’s show being spoiled, Christine’s new assumption that life would go on steadily getting pleasanter was slightly checked during the month of June—and then Mr. Johnson ‘turned traitor’, very suddenly.

That was how his behaviour would have been described by Mortimer Road. Smiths are not much good at nursing injuries and betrayals which have occurred on a large scale; they quickly forget what the Germans are, keeping their long memories for that red-haired assistant in Miller’s who was always so impatient with poor Flo, and they accept astounding changes with a placid “Fancy” or “Whatever will they think up next.” But just occasionally, confronted by what strikes
them
as some flagrant breach of contract or human decency, they come out with the deep organ-note of the melodrama popular throughout
the
fifty or so Victorian years during which the Smiths were England. Christine used this note now, and thought of Mr. Johnson as a
traitor
.

Mr. Meredith and Mrs. Traill had come out from the shed, where they had been making final preparations for the potter’s wheel which was to arrive later that week, and were strolling towards the house, gossiping, when they heard a voice, raised in annoyance outside the lower garden door. Christine was addressing the slight black form, drawn up close to the wall, and looking fixedly down into the bucket of rubbish it carried.

“Well, I must say you might have given us warning. Going off at a moment’s notice like this. You know perfectly well I can’t get anybody else outside two or three weeks, if that. You’ve been well paid here, Mr. Johnson” (the title was spoken with sarcastic emphasis) “and I think it’s too bad of you.”

Her firm tone faltered a little as the two ladies came up, for she did not want them to hear her rebuking the traitor to Pemberton Hall whom her own rashness and inexperience was responsible for bringing there. They would think she was inefficient, and easily taken in, and—alarming thought—not fit to be trusted with the running of the place.

“What’s the trouble?” Mrs. Traill enquired easily, pausing, while Diana stared coldly at Mr. Johnson’s down-bent wool. “Mr. Johnson thinking of leaving us?”

“Thinking!” Christine’s indignation and alarm gave fresh force to her tone. “He’s going off this very evening—going to live in, in that place in Hampstead. I’ve just been telling him, I think it’s too bad.”