The Charmers (2 page)

“Used to them,” Christine briskly said. “Our house had fifty,” and they began the climb.

Pausing when Mrs. Traill did, and looking about her, Christine Smith saw peach walls, their tint deepened by the light pouring through a landing window. Three doors, opening off the little square place.

“A bedroom, and a living-room, and this is your kitchen,” said Mrs. Traill, opening them one by one. Christine only glanced in, and said nothing, as each closed on a vision of plain eggshell-blue distemper and—a spiffing electric cooker, embattled with gadgets from plate-rack to horizontally-opening door. Mrs. Traill did not notice that the rosy colour in Christine Smith’s cheeks had deepened to burning crimson.

“Loo and bathroom on the next floor, they’re
minute
but yours. No room up here and it would have meant endless fuss with pipes. We rather spread ourselves on your cooker, to make up.” She glanced at Christine. “Do you like it?”

“It’s very nice … I should think you get quite a view from here, don’t you?” The unnoticed blush had faded.

“Over the Square to the Heath.” Mrs. Traill was leading the way down again, and was absent in her manner, as she inwardly sketched a conversation with Antonia Marriott:
Never batted an eyelid when I showed her the flat, took it entirely for granted, didn’t even react to the cooker, I sometimes think some people …

But Christine Smith would have agreed with Kipling’s advice in
How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin
— “I shouldn’t ask about the cooking-stove, if I were you”—because thirty-five years of her life had been given to people who had felt for electric cookers, and radios, and electric fires and irons and toasters, and, later on, for tape recorders and television sets, what most people feel for their families or their God.

But this, she thought, following Mrs. Traill downstairs, will be my cooker …

In the hall, Mrs. Traill paused. She was a small woman, and she now looked up thoughtfully at Christine Smith.

“That’s settled then, isn’t it? You’ll come on the twentieth.”

“Yes. At eleven if I can get the removal people to give me a definite time. There’s a little place round the corner from where I’m living that does light removals.”

“That’s fine. Well … good-bye, then, until the twentieth. Oh, my ’phone number’s HIG 1111. Like me to write it down?”

“Whoever could forget that?” cried Miss Smith, with her
first
hint of a sparkle as distinct from an overall brightness, and Mrs. Traill laughed back, as she stood at the top of the steps, watching her walk away.

Down the flagged path, between the neglected beds where some greeny-yellow daffodils moved in the evening wind, out through the heavy gate of wrought-iron and into the Square, went Christine Smith. Dusk had fallen suddenly, and the old lamps, with their gentle glow, had come on, and now the five o’clock rush of traffic was in full cry. The rather sturdy figure walked briskly off in the direction of the bus-stop.

She seems a nice old thing, reflected Mrs. Traill, whose name was Fabia, beginning the climb up to her studio.

In fact, she was herself a little older than Christine Smith, but life, and travel, and being an artist, and a husband or so, and even details like her clothes, and what she ate and drank and read and listened to, had had the effect of making her seem years younger. I’m usually right about people. I think she’ll do, decided Mrs. Traill.

ALONE UNDER THE
benevolent glow of the lamps, the rather sturdy figure opened her bag and took out a new-looking cigarette-case and a mildly expensive lighter. The smoke went down into her lungs with the sensation of mingled discomfort and satisfaction that was becoming familiar. She coughed.

Christine doesn’t smoke. It’s such a relief to us, when all the girls do nowadays
.

The inward voice was old and contented. It had made that remark for more than a quarter of a century, following it with remarks about expense and, as time went on, about horrors which might result from the pernicious habit.

Christine turned her mind away from the voice, and looked down the hill in search of the bus.

It was easy to forget the kind of things Mother had said, because her mind was full of her flat: three rooms, and Oh, the cooker. Not all those years, during which the sight of the newest electrical device had instantly alerted a number of emotions, none of which were agreeable or fully acknowledged, had been able to spoil her first sight of that cooker. I’ll cook very … I’ll cook some … I’ll
cook
, thought Christine Smith.

Her cigarette went out while she was on the bus, to the amazement of the conductress who, the downward-going vehicle being almost empty at this hour, had dared to sit down for three minutes.

“It’s gone out,” she said, watching, but not believing, as Christine ineffectually puffed. ‘Cor, see mine go out. I hardly get lit up when it’s done. Want a light?”

“Oh, I’ve got a lighter, thanks all the same … I’m nearly home when I get down, I won’t bother.” The bus stopped, and she swung herself neatly off, and away across the dusky,
roaring
road. The conductress rang the bell as three late, shrieking schoolgirls scrambled aboard.

“
Oh
I’ve got a
lighter
, thanks all the same,” mimicked the conductress to herself. “There are some types about.”

Christine left the High Street and its towering block of new offices, standing arrogantly over the derelict Victorian shops and houses, a streetful of which had been pulled down to make room for it; and made her way into the back streets.

Here, the coarse aggressive faces and the voices of almost unendurable harshness, and the glaring shops, and the reek and roar of traffic, were exchanged for a more bearable squalor, silent and almost dark. The houses were more than a hundred years old, two-storeyed, faced with grey stucco, shabby and dirty, but restored to much of their first modest domestic charm by the dimness, for most of the faint glow illuminating the street came from their windows. Halfway down, a dark passage occurred between them, running between high walls, and Christine unhesitatingly turned down it.

Her footsteps sounded loudly on the paved way, echoing back from the ancient, filthy bricks, that were scrawled in white chalk with moon-faces and the brief feuds and love-affairs of the local children. The still, sharp air smelt of soot and cats.

The street into which she came out was wider, and cleaner, and lit by a shadowless orange glare; at one end of it a high hill, black against the dimmed afterglow, unexpectedly loomed, as if the beholder had been suddenly transported to Innsbruck or Surrey. Christine gave a last glance at Parliament Hill (this was the apparition’s name) as she shut her front door.

But it was not truly her front door, and in the hall she came face to face with her landlady.

Under the glare of a light with a fringed and patterned shade, on the dazzlingly-patterned linoleum, against the wallpaper crawling with what looked like stylized germs stood Mrs. Benson. The hall was bright, and gay, and challengingly clean. “Go on, dare you to find a speck of dirt,” it shouted.

Mrs. Benson looked at Christine Smith from under her terrible tower of brass hair.

“How djer get on?” she demanded. She had, to do her justice, meant to say, “So you got back, then,” but curiosity, which gnawed her from half-past seven in the morning until twelve at night, would have its passionate way.

‘Oh … thank you … it seems very nice … they offered me the job and I’ve taken it.”

“Quick work.” Mrs. Benson would have preferred to hear that it was a rotten kind of job but Christine had had to take it because there didn’t seem to be anything else going. “Made up your mind all of a sudden, then,” she went on.

“Yes.”

Christine and Mrs. Benson looked at one another.

Mrs. Benson did not like Christine, and Christine detested Mrs. Benson. Lacking the inexhaustible bank-balance of birth, she did not feel herself untouched by Mrs. Benson’s curiosity, grudgingness, and spite, and she clung in Mrs. Benson’s presence the more tenaciously to her own lady-like imitations of what she deeply admired. Mrs. Benson, more simply, thought that Christine was stuck-up.

But she was a little embarrassed by the naked stare of clear brown eyes. Such a look, who does she think she is? said Mrs. Benson’s own eyes. “When you thinking of going?” she demanded. “I can let that room of yours tomorrow.”

Her lodger nodded, recognizing her resentment at losing a tenant who expressed no word of regret at going.

“On the twentieth.”

“You’ll be going to Drake’s, then. Better get round there quick, if you are. He was telling me yesterday he’s that busy he don’t know whether he’s coming or going. I’d pop round this evening, if I was you.”

Is this good-nature on Mrs. Benson’s part? Or is it a lifetime’s habit of arranging other people’s affairs for them? We must be careful here, remembering that Mrs. Benson is not just a cow; she is a sacred one.

“Oh, tomorrow will do, I think, thanks all the same.”

Christine was turning away to the door of her room when, suddenly, and with the force and colour of a vision, a picture entered her mind: with such strength and authority that afterwards
she
wondered if it could possibly have been a Message from Mother and Father, who perhaps Knew Better now, and wanted her to be free at last of Mortimer Road?

She saw her furniture, the pieces she had chosen before the sale, and sent away in a van to be stored at Messrs. Jeffrey’s emporium somewhere out at Enfield: the Sideboard, the Dining-Room Table, her Bed, the familiar pictures no one had ever looked at, Father’s Chair, and the Best Bedroom Carpet—she saw them all, in their hallowed associations and venerable comfort sitting in those three rooms with their walls of birds-egg tint in Pemberton Hall. For an instant, she experienced a pure, overwhelming feeling of repudiation.
No
, said her spirit.

She did not stop to think. Turning to Mrs. Benson, who had also moved away in the direction of her own quarters, she cried, rather than said, so excited and high was her voice:

“Oh—Mrs. Benson—would you like to have my furniture?”

Mrs. Benson turned, face alight with greed and suspicion.

“’Ow do you mean, have? Store it ’ere—or buy it off of you? I can tell you here and now I’ve got no room for storing, in my place. And I’ve not money to buy second-hand stuff, neither.”

“No—not store it or buy it. Have it. As … a present.”

“I don’t need anyone’s old bits and pieces thank you … What is there, then?”

Christine rapidly ran through the list, with every second feeling more strongly impelled to get rid of it all, and with every other second crushing down the sensations of guilt.

“Quite a flatful,” was Mrs. Benson’s comment. “They giving you your own place, up at this place, then? I said to Stan, ‘I’m sure she’s got her own stuff, in store,’ I said. They don’t half charge you in those places neither.” She paused.

Christine was now trying to work out how much of her share in the money from the sale of the house could be safely spared for new furniture … pale wood, against those walls … or … very dark perhaps? Second-hand ‘finds’, from junk-shops … she could glue, and polish, and re-cover … Yes, dark would look best.

“I don’t mind obliging you, if you want a home for it,”
Mrs
. Benson was saying. “My sister always says I’m a fool to myself. Soft. But I’m like that. I don’t mind. I’ll have it.”

Christine was still inexperienced in the ways of the Benson world, and she felt that she had misjudged her landlady. She did not realise that her possessions were as good as reposing in Mrs. Benson’s place from the first instant that the words ‘have’ and ‘furniture’ had penetrated Mrs. Benson’s consciousness.

It was arranged that the vanload from Enfield should be delivered on the afternoon of the twentieth.

Christine insisted on this, with adamant firmness. She did not want to see the Dining-Table and its attendant devoted crew being decanted into the road outside the Benson ‘place’, grandly unconscious of the ruthless way it had been disposed of.

Mrs. Benson agreed. If there “was some pieces that wasn’t too bad” among the vanload, she did not want to have to admit as much to their donor, and thank her.
Gratitude
, in Mrs. Benson’s view, was among the dirty words: it was as well that her tenant should leave before the furniture arrived.

Christine went into her chilly, be-patterned, too-clean bed-sitter, and cut bread and butter and boiled a kettle, and dined.

She felt tired, which was not usual with her. It had been quite an exciting afternoon, what with seeing those greeny-blue rooms and the cooker, and taking on a new job, and then giving away the furniture—actually
giving it away
, all that was left, in the material sense, of Forty-Five Mortimer Road—although, in another sense, the house and its contents and inmates were still—could
spitefully
be the word?—alive and kicking.

They were kicking her spiritual shins, as she sat at the table drinking tea and eating bread and butter; kicking away, and muttering over and over again,
faithless, unkind, disloyal
, and plucking with the experienced hands of many years practice, every muted chord of love and grief in her heart.