The Charmers (3 page)

No, ‘spitefully’ was not the word, of course, what a silly idea. She must not take it all so seriously. And she even succeeded in making some timid excuses for herself after she was in bed;
thinking
that, after all, no one could say she had not been a good daughter to them; and surely someone might be permitted to feel tired, and excited, when, after fifty-three years of life, of which thirty-five had been passed in earning money to buy more and more electric toasters and irons—that someone had shaken the very last survivors off the raft, and firmly kicked the raft itself off into the troubled sea, and was, for the first time, truly Leaving Home.

BUT SHE AWOKE
with the shocked realization that now she had no furniture, and, in that first moment, even considered asking it back from Mrs. Benson.

At once, she knew that this was impossible.

Encountered later, on the previous evening, Mrs. Benson had already shown an altered manner, replacing rudeness by the condescending familiarity befitting a benefactress, one who had done that soft fool, what had given all her stuff away, a good turn. Christine, no weakling, did not like to imagine the scene were she to suggest going back on her word.

She
would
have to go to the junk-shops. Quite an adventure, that would be.

She had glimpsed them occasionally, here and there, as she went home by bus on summer evenings, cosily peopling them with types she had read about in fiction a quarter of a century old (Christine, and Mortimer Road, did not read anything contemporary except the headlines in the papers).

A junk-shop was dark, and dirty and cavernous, with a vaguely Oriental atmosphere imparted by a gilt Buddha seated in its shadowiest corner, and some alabaster godlets with chipped noses displayed on a tray outside. Inside, there were desks and tables and chairs, decrepit but fine old pieces, of which the proprietor did not realise the value. They were, nevertheless, easily repairable by an amateur. The proprietor was male, and slightly mysterious.

The shops explored by Christine on that morning were certainly arranged to appear alluringly cavernous, but they were neither shadowy nor dirty, and in charge there was a Character, bearing small resemblance to Little Nell’s Grandfather and dyed deep in the sacred consciousness of Personality.

These Characters saw slap through her or thought they did,
at
the first peep; and indeed, they saw that she knew nothing about second-hand furniture, which was all that concerned them about Christine Smith, and they at once rattled off an imposing history of whatever object she happened to be looking at.

“Yes,” they invariably began, “that’s a …” and away they went; date, period, maker, type, variation if any, rarity or otherwise, had a lady in yesterday was crazy about that, and suddenly, accompanied by a holy kind of smile—wham! the Price.

Those well-informed articles in the more expensive women’s papers and the informative little talks over the air had done their work. Little Nell’s Grandfather knew exactly what he was selling and what the time of day was, and Christine ate her lunch at an Italian restaurant in Camden Town feeling vaguely snubbed and disappointed. But she was accustomed to both sensations and hardly noticed them.

Was it because she had made so many tiny decisions, over so many years, so carefully, that she now seemed able to make large ones casually?

Anyway, she came out of that restaurant determined not to waste any more time hunting for junk. She would buy some new furniture. Modern, perhaps, really modern.

She turned aside into the premises of a large local firm that was both old-established and progressive, and at once saw something she liked very much.

Mansfields had tried the experiment of placing an order with a Scandinavian firm, which designed and made a series of light, angular pieces in birchwood, processed to give it the silvery-pink hue associated in popular imagination with the trees, and it was this ‘line’, cunningly displayed against a drop-scene vaguely Northern, that had caught her eye.

She bought two chairs, and a table, a bed and a chest of drawers and a wardrobe and a bookshelf, lean and elegant, the sparry crystalline grace of the snowflake translated into wood, and they cost her three hundred pounds of her money and she came out of the department feeling rather as she used to at
the
Office Party every Christmas, when she had had some sherry.

On her way through the Soft Furnishings she saw a curtain material, trails of bright green ivy on a white ground, and felt that she must have it, so she bought twelve yards. That ought to be enough, and if there’s any over, I’ll just have cushions, thought Christine, flown with furniture and looking rather glassy about the eyes … Lots of cushions.

She also bought three pairs of sheets and some fluffy green-blue blankets and a saucepan or so. She ordered the curtain material to be sent to her sister’s house at Edgware, and then rang her up, to announce its forthcoming arrival.

Mary Smith had early escaped from earning money to buy toasters by marrying and passing this task over to her husband. The eldest of her three clever sons had just left home and was training for a job, and she would have time to machine Christine’s curtains.

She would be glad to do it, not only because she was fond of her sister, but because all the married Smiths (there were three of them) regarded Christine with suppressed and largely unconscious guilt because she had borne the heat and burden of the Forty-Five Mortimer Road day for so long. They had an uneasy feeling that they owed her something. “The same stuff for all three rooms?” asked Mary. “Even in the kitchen? I always think gingham looks nice in a kitchen. So fresh. Linda was looking at a lovely pattern of chianti bottles and French loaves the other day. Very modern. But I like gingham, myself, for a kitchen. Of course, poor Linda …”

Linda was betrothed to Mary’s eldest son.

“How are they?” Christine, with skill born of years’ practice in Mortimer Road, turned the subject aside from the desirability of gingham in the kitchen.

Mary said, Oh, they were fine. Only she did wish they had a proper home of their own to go to and not just a room and use of bath and kitchen in someone else’s flat. Poor Lin, she wouldn’t be having her own curtains for her kitchen, it did seem a shame … And then, pouncing like some mother-elephant emerging from the jungle on a point in her sister’s
remarks
which she had only half-heard, she exclaimed with a sharpening of tone—

“Chris—this place you’re going to—did you say you’ve got a
flat
?”

“Yes …”

“… because is there any chance of your getting it for Lin and Michael? How big is it?”

“Yes, but Mary …” Christine patiently inserted her voice through the flow of excited maternal instinct, “that’s quite out of the question. The flat goes with the job.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. No, I suppose you couldn’t … I was going to say, suppose Lin gave up
her
job and …”

“They particularly wanted someone over fifty, Mary. It said so, in their advertisement.”

Mary gave a loud exasperated sigh. She longed to see Michael and Linda started off properly.

Their prospects were uncertain enough, goodness knows, what with Michael only training for his job, though it was true they were paying him well while he trained, and Linda not twenty … It made all the difference, having your own place. She could remember her feelings when she and Dick came back from their honeymoon in 1939; the hall at Glendene with the new hatstand gleaming, and the pretty wallpaper … of course, you could buy a house for next to nothing, in the days just before the war.

“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” she said, and then, for the Smiths had their gleams of sensibility and affection, “Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean that. I’m glad you got such a nice job and your own place.” Pause, while the sentence
Shut up all those years with Mother and Father
scurried across Mary’s mind and was ignored. ‘What kind of people are they?”

“Well … artistic, really, I suppose.”

Mary said simply, Oh help, and sooner Christine than her.

“But not in a crazy kind of way. I mean, this Mrs. Traill, she was spotlessly clean, and seemed quite sensible. She draws illustrations for those stories in the women’s mags: They’ve all known each other for years and years, she says.”

“Is it a family?”

“Oh, no. Just friends, I gathered.”

“Sounds weird,” said Mary. “Well, I must fly, I’ve got masses to do. I’ll send the curtains off as soon as I’ve got them done, Wednesday, probably. Depends when the stuff comes. Or I could … but you aren’t on the ’phone at that place, are you?”

That place
was Iver Street. She knew that her sister was not, but could not resist a sisterly dig at Christine’s going to live in that awful street off the Archway.

Having promised to post off the measurements that afternoon, Christine came out of the call-box, to receive a glare from a young woman waiting outside, with hair piled into that tower which has not been seen in England for two hundred years. She gave her glare for glare, and decided to go up to Pemberton Hall and take the measurements now.

Pemberton Hall showed most of the symptoms affecting a three-hundred-year-old mansion which is having its entrails pulled about; mud, stray planks, exuberant young workmen with transistor-sets in the breast-pocket where their grandfathers would have carried a pencil, hideous distant singing, a pervading smell of putty, and slapdashery.

Christine walked in, as the front-door stood open, saying distinctly “Good-morning,” with a firm nod, to a workman crouching in front of the wainscotting with a blow-lamp who said “Morning, love,” with a bright upward glance out of impudent young eyes. The blowlamp hissed, the transistor wailed, and upstairs someone was banging and sawing.

Christine, taking a tape-measure out of her bag, went right up to
her
flat and shut the noise away and began measuring.

When she came down again, a big fair gentleman in sporting clothes was talking to one of the workmen in the hall. He glanced vaguely at her as she reached the lower stairs and she said, “Good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” said the gentleman.

“I am the housekeeper. Miss Smith,” said Christine, whom thirty years of receiving customers at Lloyd and Farmer’s had left without any hampering consciousness of her own personality.

“Oh, yes. Splendid,” he exclaimed. “My name’s Meredith. Very glad to … just having a look round. Awful mess, isn’t it. But Mr. Ryan here tells me we really shall be straight by the twenty-first.”

Mr. Ryan said nothing but looked sardonic.

“I was taking some measurements,” said Christine. “In my flat.”

Before Mr. Meredith could say more, a tallish slender woman, also wearing rather sporting clothes, came out of one of the adjoining rooms and paused, looking quickly at Christine. She was noticeably thin, and had been noticeably pretty.

“Ah, Diana—this is Miss Smith, darling, she’s going to be our housekeeper. My wife, Miss Smith—Mrs. Meredith.”

“We’re so thankful to have got you,” said Mrs. Meredith. “You mustn’t be put off by the mess. It’s all going to be cleared up by the end of the week. Isn’t it, Mr. Ryan?”

Mr. Ryan, who was comely and carried no transistor set, began a rigmarole in an unintelligible Irish accent which gradually, for lack of hearers who could understand what he was saying, died away. He walked off, looking sarcastically at a slide-rule.

“Isn’t your flat charming?” Mrs. Meredith went on, in a tone firm as Christine’s own, “I’m sure you’ll love it … so
lucky
, with accommodation in London what it is …
I
think its the nicest in the house. Two old friends of ours are mad about it—they’re dying to have it.”

“It is very nice,” Christine said, inwardly alarmed at this news.

“When I saw that north light, in the sitting-room, I nearly decided to have it for myself—for my wheel, you know. I’m a potter.”

“Oh, do you do those hand-made jugs and vases? There were some lovely ones in a shop at Lulworth, where I went on holiday last year. All black and brown, with white sort-of whirls,” said Christine.

“Yes. Oh, I shall be at work again, as soon as we’re settled in. Well, we mustn’t keep you. We shall be seeing each other
again
, I expect, running in and out, before we all move in. My husband and I are staying in the village.”

She smiled and nodded and turned away. Mr. Meredith smiled slightly more warmly, and did likewise.

Christine went down the steps and out past the daffodils, open now, and glowing in the sun. Not so nice as Mrs. Traill. A bit stand-offish. But a lady all right, which perhaps Mrs. Traill …?

A certain kind of easiness of manner was not, for Christine, associated with birth.

But these were regions of speculation unfamiliar to her, and she put them aside with the thought that she would not be seeing much of her employers anyway, and so long as they were pleasant to her and she satisfied them, what did anything else matter?

“I don’t like that woman,” said Diana Meredith, the instant Christine was gone.

“Oh come, darling.”

“I always know, James. I know
people
. It’s my thing. I’m a natural psychologist. Not a glimmer of imagination, I should think. She just doesn’t realise—or more likely won’t acknowledge—her enormous luck. Typical lower-middle class. It’s just like Fabia to land us with someone like that, she probably felt sorry for her.”