The Charmers (27 page)

After another ten minutes, however, Miss Marriott trailed in, followed by Mr. Lennox. They greeted Christine with languid half-smiles and Clive, after muttering something about would she be a sweetie and get them some coffee, continued the sentence Christine had heard coming down the stairs …

“… congratulated me, calling her a ‘lovely child’, and said where had I been hiding her all this time? I was a bit took aback, I’m so used to seeing her look all beatnik. Then he said she certainly had the looks for the stage, and when I said Oh, that doesn’t count as it did in our day, he said looks were always useful no matter whose day it was, ha ha. So there you are.”

“Well, I know Mummy was pleased. She’s been really worried about her.” Antonia, smiling absently in Christine’s direction, groped for a cup of coffee. “Thank you, Christine.”

Clive managed to look as if he thought Mrs. Marriott capable of worrying about something beyond invitations to parties, and Antonia went on, fingers thrust in her falling locks and still-drowsy eyes fixed on his face, “Mummy’s so
sensible
. I don’t usually worry her about my worries but some weeks ago I felt so—well, I did write to her. When she was in Bermuda. Pages and pages, I wrote. And she—”

“And she told you to see your doctor,” Clive interrupted,
“and
get a good tonic, and buy some new clothes, and keep your eye on United Aluminium or something because they’d gone up threepence ha’penny in the last few days. Am I right?”

“Dead right,” she said, laughing, “but it
was
sensible. I did get a tonic and I did get some new clothes and Herzie made a little bit for me on the United Aluminiums … it wasn’t Aluminiums, I forgot what it was … But Herzie knew.”

“Herzie’s quite useful, isn’t he?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Christine saw Antonia’s hand steal across the table to lie over his. “I meant to tell you, darling …” she heard, in the most lulling of murmurs, “our walk is off … Peter carried on so last night—you know, sitting in the same corner for hours and staring into his drink with a face like a lobster—”

“It always is. (Boy, a saucer of milk for Mr. Lennox.”) Clive moved his hand away to take his cup.

“I know but last night it was like a lobster’s that’s been
crying
. So I said I’d go for a drive this afternoon. I couldn’t be sorrier; it’ll be nothing but a dead loss but what was I to do?”

“I see. Yes. Well. I wasn’t quite certain I could make it, and as the boys seem to have got out the black cap in a bunch for that casino bit in our second half, I suppose I’d better contact Max and spend the afternoon on a nice bit of postmorteming.”

She was looking at him woefully.

“It’s all right. I’ll survive,” he said, and patted her hand.

“I wanted to talk to you about—you know. What you say I
thought
I heard.”

“Then go ahead. Aren’t you a bit clearer about things this morning?” He had half-risen from the table but now sat down again, looking patient.

Antonia glanced at Christine, who had been finishing her tea at the other end of the table with eyes fixed immovably on the sheets of a newspaper. Thus, she might with credibility on the part of all be supposed out of earshot. “Christine, you remember my asking you last night if you heard someone singing in the Long Room?” Christine looked up.

“Yes, Miss Marriott. I didn’t, I said so … we went up and
looked
… Don’t …” She choked off the sentence which might have suggested that Miss Marriott had had too much drink to remember.

“Yes, of course, I remember. But I do want you to
think
hard. It’s most frightfully important.” Antonia’s enormous eyes were fixed on Christine’s calm face, “You see, I thought it was a … ghost.”

“Oh, Miss Marriott!—you don’t believe in all that superstition, do you?”

Clive just stirred in his chair.

“Well, not the sort of ghost with its head under one arm, or chains, and that sort of thing, of course. But … a spirit. It, the voice I heard, was so like the voice of that great friend of ours who was killed in the war …”

“Mr. Condron, yes,” Christine nodded. The name, and the thought of him, were now joined in her mind with those of the others, who lived in the house. In a way it was sometimes as if he lived there too; the thoughts of him, in all their minds, were so friendly and so strong.

“Are you quite sure?” Antonia persisted.

“As a matter of fact I did hear someone singing, after I was in bed, Miss Marriott. A gentleman’s voice, it was. I thought someone must have come up to the Long Room …”

“It was in the Long Room? You’re sure?” Antonia was leaning across the table now.

“I …
thought
so,” Christine said slowly; for some reason she felt reluctant to admit that she had taken for granted that it was there. “Some song about lanterns, it was. I noticed it particularly, the words, I mean, because of our lanterns in the garden.”

Antonia looked at Clive. She said nothing.

“If I whistled it to you,” he said slowly, “would you recognize it?”

“I think so, Mr. Lennox. It wasn’t an ordinary tune; I remember thinking it was rather original.”

Lifting his head slightly, Clive whistled the opening bars of the air.

“That’s it,” she said, nodding her head in time to the dropping cascade of notes.

“And the words—” Antonia joined in eagerly—“how does it go, Clive? ‘In spring for sheer delight m … m … m … lanterns swinging through the trees—’”

“Yes, I heard that, Miss Marriott. About the trees, and the lanterns. I noticed that particularly. It was such a clear voice.”

There was silence for a moment. Christine looked from one face to the other. Then Clive got up from the table.

“The music is on the piano, Antonia. Someone might just have … or perhaps it was wireless, outside somewhere.”

“The Light does go on until two now, Mr. Lennox … though who they think’ll be listening to it at that time in the morning I don’t know,” said Christine.

“Well, you were, for one,” he said, laughing. “No,” putting an arm round Antonia’s shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’d like to believe it but I can’t. I simply cannot imagine what the explanation is; it’s all mixed up with E.S.P., I suspect. … I’d like to believe it, very much …

“Then believe it,” Antonia said. “Darling Maurice was playing his favourite song to us at a party. It’s perfectly simple and just what he would do. Isn’t it?”

“Yes … but …”

“Isn’t it?”

“Antonia, it’s no use … I can’t. I’m sorry. I must go and call Max,” and he went out.

When Miss Marriott, too, had drifted away—having gone so far as to confide sighingly that she supposed she must get dressed, she was being fetched at half-past twelve, it was nothing but a dead loss—Christine sat staring out of the kitchen window.

Last night had been Midsummer Eve; it had said so in one of the papers, with jokes about fairies; and she felt that all the past weeks of sunlight and flowers had been leading up to it, and to their party, and now everything was flat. She was also suffering from a slight reaction against her employers. Their
affairs
, usually so absorbing to her, were receding this morning before a preoccupation with her own.

It was ten days since she had snubbed Tom’s approach to the unwelcome subject, and she had not heard from him.

The shower of cold water had acted more effectively than she had expected it to, and now—although her conception of a husband in her life had gradually taken the form of imagining two large black boots permanently planted in the very middle of the Swedish rug beside her bed—she was missing Tom, her friend, and missing male attention, and she was irritated with herself for not having managed things better, and with him for being so touchy, and her peace of mind was ruffled.

He need not have gone off ‘like that’.

The only brightness in the picture glowed about his sister’s home.

That house in Avalon Road! She liked the atmosphere there better than that of any other home she had ever visited; but she only knew that it was what she called ‘just my style’, for the particular kind of courage needed to use the words ‘love and contentment’ had been unknown at Mortimer Road, and were not in Christine Smith’s vocabulary.

But she had felt the presence of that bond, between Moira and Frank Rusting, which she had felt between married pairs glimpsed walking arm in arm in the street or sitting by their own fireside, while she rushed past on the top of a bus. It drew her like a magnet. She didn’t want to marry Tom Richards, but she wanted to sun herself in that glow from his sister’s happiness, and once or twice she had even thought it might be worth marrying Tom to get inside his family.

Mortimer Road, of course, would say contemptuously that she must be crazy to hesitate. A nice fellow, steady, round about the right age, a widower, she must be out of her mind.

Christine crossly told her old home to ‘Oh, shut up’.

Sitting at the table, with hands folded before her in a highly unusual state of idleness, she tried to work it all out.

Mightn’t Tom be more like his sister than he seemed to be?
And
would this likeness perhaps ‘come out’ after they were married?

Christine could not believe it.

Tom meant to be kind, and Moira was very kind, but that was all they had in common. He had often criticized his sister’s home, saying the youngsters were noisy and old Frank so wrapped up in the garden that he cared about nothing else—“The real world seems to pass him by, somehow, I don’t know—” (Recalling various contemporary circumstances Christine could not feel that this mattered much). And he—Tom—made silly, un-understanding jokes.

But—to marry into that family! She had liked them all so much, even Michael of whom there had been only a glimpse: their homely faces, their bulbous communal nose and wide smiles, their playfulness towards each other. They would be a grand crowd to marry into, and Moira would be her sister-in-law.

Nevertheless, the boots with the untidy laces remained immovably present in her mind’s eye, and, presently, she thumped the table with both fists, muttered, “Well, this won’t buy the baby a new frock,” and set to work tidying the kitchen. Those waiters hadn’t made too bad a job of it, but, of course, not how you’d do it yourself; people never did.

BY THE MIDDLE
of August, she had not heard from him for a month. It was as plain as the nose on your face: he had dropped her.

Going on like some boy of nineteen, thought Christine with mingled mortification and regret. Having firmly dealt with his attempts to broaden her mind (Thank you—if that was broadening she’d stay narrow) and stopped him, by mutters and a mulish expression, from going on about coal-miners or that bomb or travelling conditions before the war, and made it quite clear to him what shows she enjoyed and what kind of thing
she
liked talking about—in short, having made him into the kind of man-friend she wanted, he had to turn sulky and cool off.

There was no doubt that Mortimer Road had been right about men: you had to manage them, for your own comfort and their good. But it hadn’t been right about there always being other fish in the sea and pebbles on the beach: Christine Smith was left without an admirer.

What else can you expect, Mortimer Road asked, at your age?

But she missed him. Some faint excitement, some sense of self-congratulation at being like everyone else now, had gone out of her life. Perhaps it would be truer to say that she missed these feelings more than she missed the man.

And she felt quite depressed, really worried, you might say, at th idea of never seeing the Rustings, particularly Moira, again. I could have been real friends with her, Christine often thought.

It never seriously occurred to her to write to Tom or telephone him. Deeply wounded feelings and real grief and longing
might
just have compelled her; pride and irritation and Mortimer Road wouldn’t hear of such a thing.

And then Moira wrote to her. Such a surprise—such a nice one! Saying they didn’t seem to have seen her for ages and wouldn’t she go over to tea there next Tuesday or Wednesday: if Moira didn’t hear to the contrary, she would expect her on either of those afternoons, nice and early, say about half-past three.