The Charmers (21 page)

But it was she who had failed.

It was all nothing but a messy, depressing bore. And no one likes being a freak …

“… so that’s what I’m going to do, just ease myself out. Nigel will soon see what I’m doing, of course. You can’t hope to deceive Nigel, but I think he’ll be grateful to me for going gracefully.”

“He’ll come crawling to you, in a year or two.”

“Oh, yes, that would be fab! I’m a swine to want it, I know, but wouldn’t it be fab! But he never would, Clive. When he’s run through Ferenc—and at my worst moments I’ve never thought Ferenc would last, he hasn’t any basic talent—he’ll find someone else of the same kind …”

And so on, for the half-hour that Clive had to give before going to the theatre.

Mrs. Traill was still searching for Chinese lanterns.

It was partly with the celebration of Clive’s first night in mind, but it was more that she had now become obsessed with them.

“I must have them and I’m going to have them,” she declared in a grim tone one evening at supper. They’re somewhere in London and have them I will.”

“Haven’t seen a Chinese lantern in years,” observed James Meredith, conscious that his interest in England’s agonizing situation in the Test Match had been taking up his attention to the verge of discourtesy. “Probably those blighters have stopped making ’em—now.”

“For pity’s sake,” Antonia muttered aside, “don’t say that.…”

“Oh, I’m sure not.” Mrs. Traill turned distressed eyes on him. “I saw some as recently as last month. In quite a small shop somewhere. In Catford, I think it was.”

“What in the name of all that’s unlikely,” demanded Diana, “were you doing at Catford?”

“Someone told me there was a row of little Edwardian houses there, quite unspoiled, tucked away at the side of a great new block of offices. I went down there to draw them as background.”

“Couldn’t you have imagined them—gables, and those coloured-glass panels in the front-doors? Easy enough, and it would have saved you the sweat,” said Diana.

Mrs. Traill shook her head. “You know that’s not the way I work. If you try to imagine a thing that’s
real
, you always miss something—perhaps just one thing—you never
could
have imagined, which would make your drawing just that bit better. You must always go and look at the thing.”

“That’s beyond me,” Diana announced.

“It always was, dear, ever since we started this conversation thirty years ago.”

Diana shook her head, and Mrs. Traill returned to the subject of Chinese lanterns.

They continued to click and chatter—in the background, so far as Christine was concerned—during the next week. She was busy settling in Mr. Banks.

Antonia’s friend had not been able to fulfil the latter’s promise of sending a cleaner along the next day, but she guaranteed one for the end of the week; and sure enough on
Friday
afternoon Banks arrived, a tall, broad, elderly cockney with a red face, with whom Christine at once felt comfortable.

This was not because Banks did anything to make her feel comfortable; his manner towards her stopped just short of the line between off-handedness and rudeness.

“I know all that,” he interrupted her, when she attempted to explain what she wanted done and how to do it. “General clean down and you tell me when there’s anything special.”

She seemed fated to employ cleaners who ‘knew how to do it’, and was not to enjoy the pleasure of giving instruction to the domestic arts. But what a relief it was to understand every word that was said, and to see a white face—well, plum-colour, if you must be particular—instead of a black one, and not have to be extra nice because of him being coloured, to say nothing of not hearing funny remarks about the house saying things; and to learn, flung off as a comment upon the difficulty of getting up to the Village, that he had lived in the neighbourhood for all of his seventy-odd years.

“Laying aside the years I was in the Army,” he amended.

“You’re ex-Service, then?” said Christine.

“I suppose you may say so,” said Banks, not encouragingly.

He then seemed to unbend a little, and slapped the left leg that moved with a slight dragging motion when he walked. “Somme, I got that. 1916.” He rolled up his sleeve and indicated a rather horrifying, though small, blue-ridged pit in his forearm. “Warden. 1940. Shrapnel, that was.”

Christine found nothing to say. But she liked Banks, with his Tunes of Glory marching faintly in his background, and saw to it that he did not leave Pemberton Hall without being at least offered the cup of tea which he never seemed to want or to appreciate when he had it.

“If you’re making,” he would say. Once he added, “I’m not one for drowning meself in slops.”

The only thing she did not like about him were his ironical glances. She would pass him in the hall or working on the stairs—
and
he did not bang the brush against the banisters—and his eye, bloodshot, small and grey, would be moving
around
, taking in the space and the comfort and the beauty of it all.

“Plenty of room round ’ere,” he once observed, looking at her over his cup while drinking one of the slops at the kitchen table, and it was surprising what volumes—she did not care to think what
of
—he could convey in five words.

But he had not said it again, and she was well satisfied with him at the end of the week.

It was pleasant to be able to forget the stairs and banisters and the kitchen floor and the outside work until the next Monday or Friday came round. Banks did his work thoroughly and tacitly, rolled and smoked a cigarette, and left dead on the minute. The dreaded spirit of Mrs. Benson retreated from Pemberton Hall as though she had never threatened it.

Suddenly, the background pother about Chinese lanterns died away.

One afternoon Mrs. Traill returned by taxi from one of her grim excursions into London with fifteen of them; large and small, bulbous, instantaneously festive, in softest shades of orange and pink, fascinatingly pleated, and adorned with cherry blossom, and little temples, and almond-faced ladies in trailing robes, and storks and cranes and tiny crookback bridges.

She was calmly triumphant.

“Oh, I knew they were
there
all right,” she said as if someone had been devoting the last week to hiding the lanterns in some peculiarly inaccessible place. “It was just a question of sticking to the search and ferreting them out. Aren’t they angels?” holding up the smallest, which had a design of monkeys at play in a fir-tree. “I can’t wait to see them alight.”

“CAN YOU BE
in this evening? That child is coming up to fetch her dress. I brought it home this afternoon and I’d like your verdict,” said Antonia abruptly.

“I
can
. I was going to the Music Club. But they’ve replaced those enchanting early water-colours of Hampstead by contemporary stuff and it looks so wildly wrong in the house where they have the concerts that I really can’t
face
it.”

“Oh … Well, can you be in?” Mrs. Traill nodded.

Christine overheard these remarks as the two ladies were going upstairs after the evening meal. The Merediths were out to dinner, and Clive Lennox at rehearsal; the rehearsals had increased in frequency and fierceness as the first night drew near and Clive was looking tired; no wonder, and him no chicken, nice though he is, thought Christine. But there—
better to wear out than rust out
.

This was an adage sometimes quoted at Mortimer Road, small though the likelihood of any inhabitant there wearing themselves out might be. Buried deeper than Ariel’s corals, dodged around with a skill greater than that of the most spectacular of centre-forwards, swathed in layers of protective cosiness beside which the mufflings of atomic reactors would seem mere drifts of down, were all the feelings that might lead any Mortimer Roadite to wear him or herself out.

Christine hoped that she might be asked to give
her
‘verdict’ on Glynis Lennox’s dress. But she was not; and never even saw it; though fortunately the ladies kept the door of Antonia’s living-room open and Christine, calmly propping that of her own ajar, could hear most of what was being said, and imagine what was being done, while she sat by the window with her magazine.

She did see ‘that child’ arrive, bounding lithely up the stairs
in
stained jeans and the leather jacket with her mane flying. But it had been brushed; well-brushed. Christine, peeping over the banisters, could tell that it had.

“Hullo, hullo, come on in,” she heard Miss Marriott call, with youthful energy and brightness. “Well, now, here it is.” Pause, while the dress was evidently being held out for inspection. “Like it?”

Christine, lingering on the landing, almost pressed her hands together in the fervency of her hope that Glynis would.

“Beautiful colour,” said Glynis at last, coolly. “It looks a bit queer, a funny shape or something.…”

“That’s because it fits, sweetie. Your eye is used to clothes in chunks and blocks. Those seams make it
fit
.”

“I rather … like that ruffle. Ruffles are being worn, aren’t they? One of the girls I share with is clothes-mad. She spends all her money on them and starves. I couldn’t do that. She bought a dress with a ruffle the other day.”

“This isn’t just a ruffle. Look—it goes down at the back and you can wear it like a boa.”

“A what?”

“A boa. They were called feather-boas—I suppose because it’s like a boa-constrictor.’

“What is, or was, a boa? I mean, what was it that was constricted originally?” put in Mrs. Traill earnestly; Christine imagined her as sprawling on Antonia’s sofa, “By the constrictor, I mean?”

“
Oh, God
,” Miss Marriott exploded, “
will no one ever give their full
attention to clothes? Put it on, Glynis—how
extra-ordinary
you are, Fabia—a Nigel Rooth model, and you go on like Webster’s Dic …
You’re
the original … bore … Here, let me help …”

Another pause. Christine had given up her pretence with chair and magazine by the window. She imagined Glynis wriggling into the dress, guided by the expert hands of Antonia. The pause lengthened.

“There.” She heard the excitement and triumph in Antonia’s voice; she must have led Glynis up to the long mirror. The pause lengthened.

“I look absolutely different,” Glynis pronounced at last. “I … I say, I do look different, don’t I? I didn’t think I could look so different, I haven’t worn costume yet.”

“You look absolutely fab,” said Antonia shrilly. “Doesn’t she look fab, Fabia?”

“Yes, she does. She really does. I wish Clive could see her—he’d be proud of his beautiful daughter,” said Mrs. Traill; in the straightforward, kind way she sometimes had.

“Now pull the boa round your shoulders, that’s right, now up round your neck—delicious! Doesn’t it make you feel good, Glynis?” Antonia persisted, like an adult coaxing a child to express its pleasure in a present and thus increase the pleasure of the giver.

“I don’t feel like me,” said Glynis, and laughed suddenly.

“Well, you’ll have to get used to that, won’t you, if you’re going to act?” observed Mrs. Traill. “She’ll need shoes, Antonia.”

“Yes … white satin … medium heel … you’re tall enough …

I’ll give you a bit of the stuff and you can take it along to a shop where they’ll dye it to match; and be sure they do, Glynis. If they don’t, you must take it back and have it done again more than once if necessary, until it’s
right
.”

“Oh, all right—but what a fuss … and I’m having a work-crisis; I’m a slow study, worse luck; I have to study parts longer than most people … Won’t all this take ages?”

“Think of it as a stage costume that’s got to be just right,” Mrs. Traill said soothingly. “Here, let me help.”

Swish, swish, a gentle, careful sound, as Miss Marriott folded away the dress into its box. She evidently thought this was the occasion for a small lecture, for Christine heard her begin—

“These details are very important, you know. Some writer—I think it was Nancy Mitford, my memory is getting simply awful—said that the entire standard of the
luxe
trades in Paris was kept up by a group of old women who
will
not accept anything but the
best
from the Houses they deal with … I wish to heaven we had something like that over here, but all that Englishwomen seem to care about is their dogs and their blasted gardens. Their flowers are divine, but their clothes
simply
make you want to die on the spot and, as for hair or scent, they never think about it. One duchess who comes to us told Nigel she ‘always forgot’ to use scent. What can you do with such women? You make up your little mind not to be like that, Glynis.”