The Charmers (8 page)

Suddenly there sounded a long peal on the front-door bell, conveying an immediate impression of urgency and despair. Mrs. Traill started, spilling her wine, and said resignedly, “There she is.”

“You gave her a key, surely? She is an old ass.”

“She’ll have lost it.” Mrs. Traill was beginning hastily to carve slices of the big tinned tongue that Christine had laid in as a week-end standby.

“And that’s a waste of time,” Diana pointed out. “She’ll only want hot rum.”

“Is there any?”

“How should I know?” She shrugged. “Sure to be, I should think—James brought some of everything that’s bottled, for that place of his.”

Christine now looked with interest towards the door. Through it, after a prelude of slow steps descending stairs, came, in a touching procession—Clive, James, a youngish-elderly man with a silly pink face, and a tall shape wrapped in glorious mink, diffusing an aroma of eucalyptus from a huge paper handkerchief held to its nose.

“Here she is,” James proclaimed tenderly.

The youngish elderly man leapt a little way in the air and made exuberant gestures of greeting towards Mrs. Traill and Mrs. Meredith, which they returned with an air of being used to him and not all that glad to see him. There now settled over the kitchen an atmosphere suggesting that someone desperately ill had arrived at a log-cabin in the middle of a blizzard.

“Darling!” cried Mrs. Traill softly, “what appalling luck! Is it one of your very bad ones?”

The handkerchief oscillated, as the head, covered in big loops of ashy-glittering hair, feebly nodded. Clive, guiding her by an arm encircling the mink, settled her in a chair.

“James, is there any rum?” he asked importantly.

“Rum …” breathed a husky voice “… best thing.”

“Yes, darling, right now … Christine, the kettle … Clive, take off her coat, she mustn’t get over-heated.”

Seated, and with her coat whisked away by tender hands, Miss Marriott at last removed the hankerchief and revealed a face of purest 1906 Chocolate-Box—Gabrielle Ray and Evelyn Laye and Phyllis Dare—graced by swooning false eyelashes. “She looked, perhaps, if you wished to be ill-natured, eight-and-twenty,”
as
Ouida said of her Russian princess in
Moths
, and wore a skirt and sweater of the same colour as the plums on the table; the eyelashes were a perfect match to both.

She blinked round on the circle of anxious, affectionate faces, while Christine, standing by the Aga to remove the kettle the second it boiled, looked at her curiously and thought that she was so like a big doll she hardly seemed real.

“Divine to be here at last,” Miss Marriott sighed. “How adorable it all looks. How are you all, dears?” smiling wanly round.

“Rather flat out with settling in,” Diana said. “When did all this start?”

“Oh …” Antonia made a pettish gesture, and the man with the pink face said eagerly, “It’s all my fault. We ran out of petrol near Ferrow Ley, it’s a tiny place, not more than a crossroads and two cottages, one empty, really, and would you credit me, when I did get to the nearest garage, it was shut. She had to sit in the car for nearly two hours—”

“Freezing. Heater flaked out,” Antonia murmured with closed eyes.

“… until I found an A.A. box …”

The recital continued, the pink one delivering it in a deprecating tone revealing his deep sense of guilt, while Mrs. Traill listened with a grave, judicial expression and Clive and James hovering, darting off to fetch aspirins, or administering sips of rum.

“… only hope to God she’ll be up to it tomorrow,” and Peter’s tale wavered off into silence, with an anxious glance at his love. She was sucking down the boiling concoction with an air of weary endurance but instantly sat upright and announced in a voice ringing with energy—

“Of course I’ll be all right. I daren’t be ill with that little swine getting his foot in whenever there’s half an inch … Don’t be silly,’ with a crushing look at Peter.

He instantly said, well, he must be pushing, and she wailed, “Oh don’t get all hurt now, please. You must have some dinner.” She turned to Mrs. Traill. “He can have some tongue, can’t he?”

Peter, however, earnestly persisted in his intention of pushing, and was at length languidly waved off by Antonia and seen out by James. He retreated in a diminuendo of apologies, still explaining that it had all been his fault.

No one said anything when James reappeared, but Mrs. Traill drew the biscuits towards her and Clive leant over the table to cut himself a wedge of cheese.

“Antonia, darling, this is our Miss Smith—she’s going to look after us,” Diana said, in a moment, and Christine exchanged smiles with Miss Marriott. There was something likeable, something immediately winning, about her; Christine felt that she would not hurt a fly. She also felt that she was rather wet.

The party stayed long over the supper-table that first evening; at half-past ten, Christine stopped trying to tidy up and went off to bed, dismissed with absent, flashing smiles from her absorbedly gossiping employers.

Someone called Amanda was providing the laughter: she seemed to have had a stormy time of it following her second divorce and the attempts of her discarded first husband to get back jewellery that had belonged to his mother. In every country in Europe. And then, of course, there was Dick. Christine went out with her ears full of the gurgling, affectionately-malicious voices—Oh, you know Amanda, that’s typical Amanda—he
couldn’t
have, Fabia; you’re
embroidering
. Miss Marriott’s cold seemed to be better.

Slowly, as she climbed the long flights of stairs, she entered into a realm of silence and peace, while the laughter and voices from the kitchen grew fainter and fainter until she heard it no more.

Stars looked in at landing windows, lamplight shone through the branches of a flowering tree in the Square, making every blossom and leaf into some fantastic tropical butterfly. Distant traffic droned, paused, droned on again, as it climbed Highgate Hill. My flat, thought Christine, pausing to look out of her landing window over dark sleeping roofs and the rounded masses of sleeping trees, my home. Mine.

Cries about hot-water bottles,
Vick
, boiling baths, that
wonderful
stuff that man in Paris put Fabia on to, and a final landing colloquy between Fabia and James about the pathetic and extraordinary behaviour of that poor ass, Peter, floated up to her until past midnight, breaking in on a wakefulness due to the excitement that she had felt, and controlled, throughout the day. Into the small hours, it seemed to her between waking and sleeping, she heard the light gay murmur of their voices and, surely once there was singing, and a scatter of applause. They keep all hours, she thought drowsily, as she at last fell asleep.

MISS MARRIOTT REMAINED
invisible throughout the quiet Sunday that followed. But on Monday morning she appeared in the kitchen at nine o’clock, looking dewy, fresh and cold-less.

“Is there any coffee?” she asked, smiling a little at Christine.

“I have got it all ready to make. But I was just wondering who would be coming down … Mrs. Traill said would I give you all breakfast for the next few days, just while you’re settling in …”

“Divine,” Miss Marriott said lifelessly, sitting down at the table and beginning to fidget with the cups. ‘Oh, I think everybody’ll want coffee.”

Christine was about to measure the powder from a tin into the first cup when there came a low shriek and an arresting hand.

“
Not
that muck out of a tin! Haven’t we any
real
coffee?” Enormous sapphire eyes swept the kitchen distractedly, coming to rest on Christine’s face.

“There is half a pound. I did get some. Mrs. Traill said to get it but I thought it’ud save time.” Christine was slightly flustered and thinking that she had excuse to be.

“And don’t boil the milk. Scald it. It spoils the flavour to boil it. And sugar. Yes, sugar—two teaspoonfuls—for once.” Miss Marriott sighed and her voice died away.

Nervy, thought Christine, piecing together the fragments of gossip overheard, and shovelling coffee beans into the patent grinder fixed to the wall. Looks older by daylight, too. She concentrated on the grinding, resisting a temptation to count the strings of pink beads that filled the scooped-out neck of Miss Marriott’s black suit. Her eyelashes were black this morning, as well.

“Hullo, darling. Better?” Clive Lennox came in, smiling absently at Christine while bending over Miss Marriott. She opened her eyes long enough to rub her cheek against his, then shut them again, and Christine approached with a cup, saying, “Your coffee, Miss Marriott,” with an intonation unconsciously modelled on that of a butler she had seen in some film. Antonia groped for it, and drank.

“Oh …” she sighed, cradling improbably long fingers about the cup, “that’s good … that’s very good,” nodding at Christine. “Yes, I’m better … I hope I’ll be better still at five this evening, when that little bastard’s numbers are out of the way.”

“The first-night feeling. Don’t I know it,” Clive muttered.

“No. No, it isn’t like that now, Clive. It used to be, but at least then I did know I had a clear field; some numbers would just be more of a hit than others. But this time—that little so-and-so’s first show, and sharing it with him—it’s all so
muddly
. I do loathe him so, and his horrible little jackets all over pearly-king buttons.”

She waved away the bread which Christine was holding towards her and rested her head on her hand.

“Better eat something. Can’t face up to things on an empty stomach,” said James Meredith, who came in humming and was the first to give Christine what she called ‘a proper good-morning’.

“James, I couldn’t. I’m having milk and sugar in my coffee, that will have to do. You’re both being so sweet, but honestly this morning it will just have to do.”

James shook his head.

“Bacon and egg, Mr. Meredith?” Christine enquired, feeling sure of her ground this time, and having received a beam and a silent and definitely conspiratorial nod in answer, set to work.

“I’ll take some coffee to the girls to wake them up,” he said in a moment, and while Antonia slowly drank her coffee and was persuaded by Clive to try a piece of toast, Christine made two trays ready.

She hoped that there wouldn’t be this fuss every morning,
meals
on trays, and people sitting about half-crying. Still, she hadn’t got to take anything upstairs and yesterday no one had come down to breakfast at all.

James went out, having deftly put everything onto one tray.

“… and his frightful, frightful old mum,” Antonia was sighing, “all bursting out of black satin and her shoes three sizes too small and short sleeves. Her huge arms make me feel quite ill—and Nigel said she was ‘wonderful’. Wonderful! I used to think Nigel had taste.”

Clive confined himself to fondling her long limp hand.

“She keeps hinting that one of us might be trying to marry him. As if we would, or he could. I really don’t think she knows anything about … anything,” glancing sideways under the eyelashes towards Christine. “She was one of those Ivor-worshippers—well, we all know what a darling Ivor could be—I’m not blaming the boy for his name—but—”

She got up slowly, a long, black, immoderately-slender shape topped with loops of hair neither silver nor gold, pressing distraught hands against the barely visible, scrupulously creamed wrinkles on her forehead.

“I want to see him design a suit. That’s all I want,” she sighed. “One suit—the kind of thing you wear to go shopping in, and put something on it if you go on to lunch with people. Lunch!” The hands came down, dropping to her sides. “All he’s ever heard of is high tea—with chips.”

Clive sat looking up at her, with distress and one or two other feelings gliding cloudily over his face.

“Nigel says—and I know it’s true, in a way—his name and his mum and that waify look and his accent are just handed to us on a platter so far as publicity goes—but when did Nigel Rooth’s want that kind of publicity or need it? ‘Beautiful clothes for gentlewomen’. Yes, I know it sounds corny now. Twenty years ago it didn’t.”

She gave a last gusty sigh, then glanced at the clock and uttered one of her subdued shrieks.

“I’ll only take twenty minutes, the worst rush is over,” said Clive soothingly.

“You are sweet. They said they’d only keep mine a week, and it’s already ten days, blast them. Thank you, love,” as she slipped her arms into the coat he held out.

“’Couldn’t let you go off without a word,” croaked Mrs. Traill, hobbling in on a pair of sandals that looked vaguely Javanese and carrying an empty cup. “Best of luck, honey.”

“Oh, I shall need it—” she shook her head at them despairingly.

“Bear up,” said Diana, following, and also carrying one. “All the luck in the world, pet.”

They called it after her affectionately, heartily, as she went out supported by Clive; then they sat down and pushed the cups hopefully at Christine and began to nibble fruit and toast. Both wore exotic and becoming dressing-gowns.

“It would be this week of all weeks, her car being laid up,” Mrs. Meredith said. “It must be the last straw.”