The Charmers (32 page)

“I really can’t bear it!” Antonia exclaimed at last, as the impersonal B.B.C. voice proclaimed another victory for the dreaded forces of democracy, “I’m going to bed. Someone can wake me up in the morning and break it gently.”

“Talking of breaking things gently, who’s going to tackle our Christine?” Diana said, yawning with long arms in silver-grey cashmere stretched behind her head, “I think that will have to be you, ducky,” to James.

“All right,” was all he said; he was relighting a cigar.

“Well, darling, you are the only one of us who’s had to do dirty work officially, sacking people you like personally, I mean. None of us have.”

“I always leave it to Nigel,” shivered Antonia. “I can’t bear hurting people.”

“Nor me,” said Mrs. Traill, “James, is Clive quite certain he wants to let his flat?”

“Oh, I think so. He hasn’t any capital, you know. He was out of work for months before he got this job and he told me just before he did get it that he was down to his last hundred. Of course, he’s making a good bit now but you know he never could save—”

Short confirmatory laughs from the women.

“—and I’m prepared to bet he’s spending up to the hilt at this very minute. It’s a chancy profession, God knows; if he wants to let his flat and keep the proceeds, we can’t blame him.” James drew peacefully on the cigar, and the delicious azure smoke crept out with aristocratic slowness.

“He won’t let it to strangers, for God’s sake, will he? Bessy Mendel wants a flat but she hasn’t much money either. (Oh do switch that thing off, Antonia, it’s giving me the heebie-jeebies,)” said Mrs. Traill. “How much do you think he’ll ask?”

Click. The voice announcing a victory for their favoured Party, with an alarmingly reduced majority in a hitherto safe seat, ceased adruptly.

“(Thank God.) She hasn’t, you know,”

“Oh, ten guineas, I should think. He’d get that easily from any outsider,” said James.

“No garage and not self-contained,” Diana pointed out.

“Yes, but we don’t want that kind of person, and it wouldn’t appeal to them anyway. Situation, and house of character, and congenial professional fellow tenants, and that kind of thing is what we’re offering.”

“To someone we all
know
,” Diana said emphatically.

“And ten from Dick and Amanda?” suggested Antonia.

“Ha! ha! You’re optimistic, aren’t you?” Diana scoffed.

“Sh’sh … I think I heard Christine’s key,” said Mrs. Traill.

A moment later the door opened softly, and Christine’s face, cheerful in a silk scarf, and with cheeks rosed by the autumn’s wind, looked in.

“Good-evening,” she said.

“Hullo, Christine … nice evening?”

“Yes, thank you, Miss Marriott, I went to see Audrey Hepburn in
The Nun’s Story
with a friend. It was lovely. Rather sad, but lovely, really. What a time those nuns do have! It quite upset me … but I did enjoy it.”

“I’m glad someone’s enjoyed something, this evening,” Mrs. Meredith said.

Christine looked enquiringly from one face to another, then smiled.

“Oh … the Election. They kept on interrupting the film to tell us … My friend and I got so wild. But I suppose you have to know. Difficult to tell who’s going to win, isn’t it?”

“It’s not difficult to tell who’s going to lose. It’s us,” Diana said smartly. “Well … goodnight, Christine.”

“Good-night, Mrs. Meredith; I have turned down the heating.”

“Thanks. Good-night.”

“Good night, Christine,” murmured the rest of the group, and their housekeeper withdrew. There was silence for a moment.

“It does seem a shame,” Mrs. Traill said at last.

“It’s a shame all right. And you know, I don’t go all that much for Bessy; she flaps and dithers,” Diana said. “But, of course, Dick and Amanda …”

“Oh, Dick’s so
amusing
,” cried Antonia, “I adore him.”

“I know, and Bessy’s awfully amusing, too, and one can’t help liking her,” Mrs. Traill loyally said. “Besides, she’d be Clive’s tenant, not ours.”

“It won’t make much difference whose tenant she is—she’d be in and out just the same,” James said. “Has she any personal life, do you know?”

“Bessy? A bit too much, I should say. Why?” Diana asked.

“I meant Christine. Friends, family, that kind of thing?”

“Oh, how should I know? Family’s a bit unsympathetic, I gather. There is this friend out in the wilds somewhere. The usual voice was asking for her on the telephone the other night. That’s ‘my friend’ I suppose.”

“Female?” Antonia demanded.

Mrs. Traill nodded. “Oh, yes. No such luck,” was her cryptic answer.

“Well …” said James, “if you girls have really made up your minds I’m afraid she’s ‘for it’.”

THE STORM BROKE
: the party they detested was in and for a few days the household at Pemberton Hall went about with noticeably long faces.

But there was also a late spell of fine weather that soothed and lulled, and really it was not possible to feel depressed, under such a sky filled with so much light. Faces shortened, and no one yet cared to tell Christine Smith that the crystalline globe of peace and beauty in which her dear Pemberton Hall seemed to be enclosed was due for shattering.

It was on a Wednesday morning that Mr. Meredith put his head round the door of the Long Room, where she was dusting.

“Can I have a word with you?” he asked.

Christine, who was sliding her duster along the rich black surface of the piano, looked up in a little surprise.

The tone was amiable, he carried
The Times
under one arm as he always did at this hour in the morning. All was as usual—yet a faint foreboding began to creep upon her.

She came towards him, and as she walked down the length of the room, its grace, and the sheen of its old wood floor, and its white walls shaded and lightened by the play of the clouds outside, and its furniture, and the flowers she had chosen for it, held her as if in some delicate casket—Christine Smith, late of Mortimer Road.

“Sit down, won’t you.” Mr. Meredith just pushed forward an old wing-chair covered in olive brocade, and himself took a seat on the long sofa opposite.

“You don’t smoke, do you?” he said, half-getting out his case, then, as she smilingly shook her head, “No, I thought not.”

“I did used to, Mr. Meredith, I took it up after my parents
died
—a kind of wanting to be independent, I suppose—they never liked the idea. But I never really liked it, myself, so I soon gave it up again.”

She laughed; she had always liked Mr. Meredith best next to Mr. Lennox. He was her idea of a perfect gentleman; always so easy.

“Very sensible of you. But you’re a sensible woman—I’ve always thought so. Now it won’t take long to say what I have to, and the first thing I want to make clear to you is that we’ve been perfectly satisfied with all you have done for us in the time you’ve been here—I know you have always done your best, and a very good best it’s been. No one—and we’re all agreed about this—could have done the job better. We’ve all become—er—attached to you during the months you’ve taken such good care of us. Er …”

He paused for a second, to tap the ash from his cigarette into a jade ashtray at his elbow. Christine sat upright, hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed steadily on his stubby, highbred face—the face she had always thought of as ‘kind of sporting’. But the heavy eyelids were cast down; not yet was Mr. Meredith ready to meet Christine Smith’s eyes. As she faced him, honest-countenanced and fresh in the soft autumn light, he was actually finding his task a little painful, as well as awkward.

Christine’s heart was hammering, for she knew, now, what was coming. If Pemberton Hall and its people had given her an increased sensibility, it had bestowed with the gift an added capacity for suffering, and oh, she guessed what was coming. Beyond his face, the wide, quiet, sunlit room extended indefinitely into light and peace, into a world from which she was being banished.

“We’re going to let Mr Lennox’s flat to a friend of Mrs. Traill’s, and we shall let some old friends have the top flat.”

The words came out distinctly; perhaps Mr. Meredith had in mind the old advice,
never explain and never apologize
; he had not called it ‘your flat’; there was no play with the cigarette-ash this time, and as he spoke, he looked her full in the eyes: with his own, whose temperate official gaze had sized
up
many a trembling, weak, stupid, petty criminal in Africa. You must always look them in the eyes.

She was trying to speak. Her lips were moving. He waited, not taking his eyes from her face.

“Take your time,” he said. “I expect it has come as a shock. Er—what are your plans?”

Wild thoughts had attacked her like a storm—offer to stay on and work for nothing—what have I done—too bad treating me like this—where will I go—what will I do?

But none of them came out. All the self-respect and courage of the Smiths moved up, in one great silent surge, to the help and support of their far-from-faithful daughter. Offer to stay on? Creep and crawl to
them
? Traitors! Never.

“It’s all right. When would you like me to go?” asked Christine Smith quietly.

It would be stating the case too dramatically to say that she made for Avalon Road like a wounded bird. Indeed, as she hurried through the pelting rain which had inevitably replaced the Lorelei brightness of the morning, the last image suggested by her large raincoat-draped figure was of anything light and winged—and her umbrella was almost blown inside out, and the pavement was all over those wet leaves, so dangerous when you were in a hurry—and—

“Chris! Chris!”

Oh, wasn’t that just like Moira? No one but Moira would have been out at the gate with a newspaper over her head in all that rain and her face alight with welcome and affection and concern.

“Come in, dear, I’ve got the kettle on. You must be soaked. Did you ever see such a change in the weather?
Don’t
trouble to shut the gate!”

Moira’s arm was round her, Moira was steering her up to the open front door and into the welcoming hall. “Oh, I’ve been so worried about you, Chris—and so has Frank. How
could
they? How could they? But come in, and let’s get those wet things off.”

But Christine had known what was going to happen to her for four hours now, and she had remembered to shut Moira’s gate.

She was in outward control of herself—indeed, she had never lost control—not even in the appalling moment when she had stood, alone, in her sitting-room, after she had left Mr. Meredith—and seen her furniture.

She and Moira exchanged a hearty kiss, and then there was bustle and disconnected remarks in the warm kitchen, where the cat got up lazily to welcome her and her raincoat was hung up to drip.

Then—dry, already soothed by the cessation of blustering wind and rain, and sitting by the small open fire Moira had lit in the living-room, she told Moira all about it.

Moira was a most satisfactory confidante. She listened without comment, beyond a faint outward breath or a movement of lids and eyebrows, while Christine explained exactly what had been done to her.

It was not a ‘pouring-out’. The story was told without drama or much emphasis, and she did not interrupt herself with condemnations of her employers; a kind of sulky cheerfulness best describes her manner. But Moira thought it kindest not to inflame feelings already wounded and startled to full capacity by any repetition of her first “How
could
they!”

“I don’t blame them,” Christine ended. “Mr Lennox has got a right to do what he likes with his own flat and … and … my flat … they do want it for some very old friends … I’ve heard them speak of them … very old friends …” The first gulp came. She was leaning slightly forward in her chair, paler than usual, her hands linked together, staring into Moira’s bright little leaping fire. She swallowed painfully, not looking at her friend.

“Nice to see a fire on a day like this,” she said in a moment. “You’d think it would be too warm, being so mild outside. But it’s just nice.”

“Ah, he’s a clever boy, my fire,” Moira said, gently moving the poker among coal and miniature logs from the prunings of
Frank
’s apple trees. “He knows when to burn up fiercely and when to just tick over, as they say.”