The Charmers
About the Book
Thrown out of her long-established office job, Miss Christine Smith takes up a new role as housekeeper for a group of middle-aged artists. Charmed by a previous mystical experience, her spirituality is nurtured further by the tenants, who seem stuck in their own personal lull. Written in the 1960s, surrounded by social and political transitions, the novel focuses on change, or the lack thereof.
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the
Evening Standard
. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems,
The Mountain Beast
(1930), and her first novel
Cold Comfort Farm
(1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Amongst her works are
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
(1940),
Westwood
(1946),
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
(1959) and
Starlight
(1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
Starlight
To Spencer without whom …
STELLA GIBBONS
“AND IT’S MISS
Smith, isn’t it? Christine Smith. Do forgive me, but we’ve had so many replies, and quite a lot of them were Smiths. Your letter is on that table somewhere, but—”
She glanced, rather hopelessly, across the room. “I only moved in myself three days ago, and I haven’t even started to get straight.”
She wore a sad-coloured dress of a material resembling sackcloth, which was fashionable that spring, and no jewellery except an outsize brooch with a sullen look on its copper face, but the impression she conveyed was winning; her indistinctly-uttered words sounded softly, and her movements were restfully slow.
“Yes, I’m Christine Smith.” The words were perfectly distinct and the tone bright. “Oh, I know what it is—moving. I’ve just been—I moved out of my old home some months ago and—”
“Yes. Well, I’d better tell you a little more about what we want.”
Another glance, towards the window this time, and then, after a pause, large eyes came to rest on Christine Smith’s face.
“Five of us, you see, very old friends, who’ve known each other for ages and ages, decided it would be cheaper and more fun to live together. So we put our money into this old place and we’re having it made into four flats—no, five, with yours— Oh, and the big kitchen, and a music-room. That won’t fit into anyone’s flat, you see, so we’re having my piano in it and we shall use it for a kind of communal sitting-room when we feel like it. We, Antonia and I, that’s Miss Marriott, she lives in London, she found this place for us, decided we must have a
housekeeper
. It will be nice to have an evening meal always on tap—unless we’re all out, of course. Breakfast
and
lunch, and if anyone wants to eat things at tea—I know Diana Meredith can’t live without hers—we’ll do that ourselves. It’s the evening meal, and getting someone in to clean the stairs and so on, and
managing
the house. And the catering. You see, we all do something artistic. I draw, and Miss Marriott designs clothes for Nigel Rooth’s, and Clive Lennox, I expect you’ve heard of him, yes,” (as Christine Smith vigorously nodded) “of course, he acts, so none of us want to cook in the evening. I don’t quite know what Diana and James Meredith do, admire the rest of us, I suppose. Diana did do pottery at one time but she’s been stuck down in the country for years and she’s given it up, I think. Well, I think that’s all. Six guineas a week and the flat.”
She stopped abruptly, peering short-sightedly into the other’s face.
The large, stately room was warmed by a stove, with a pipe which stood out from the fireplace; well-warmed, and quiet. Its windows, set in a wall papered in a design of white and blue stars on brown, overlooked a square where old white houses glimmered behind budding trees and where, at this hour in the afternoon, not much was going on.
The room was disorderly, filled with the picturesque objects that an artist—of the older generation, at least—might be assumed to have collected during a working lifetime, and the light falling into it was a pale clear orange; thin, yet serene with the promise of summer sunsets to come. A warm, quiet, oddly attractive place, and noticeably unlike the living-room at Forty-Five Mortimer Road, Crouch End, N.
Christine Smith leant slightly forward.
“Are you—offering me the job?”
Mrs. Traill nodded, looking a little bewildered, as if the situation had come to this point quicker than she had expected or meant.
“I suppose I am, really. Yes, I am. Would you like to come?”
“I’d like it very much,” Miss Smith said decidedly. “But you’ll want to take up references first, won’t you? I did give you the name of my employers, in my letter. Lloyd and
Farmer
, the big office-equipment firm on Ludgate Hill. I was with them for nearly thirty-five years.”
“A long time,” Mrs. Traill murmured, looking at Christine Smith, for the first time, as if she truly saw her.
“Yes. I never was in another job, went there when I was eighteen. But they were reorganizing, and couldn’t fit me in.”
Neatly incised in memory was Mr. Richards’ face, as he sat at his desk that morning, explaining that it was really a question of her age. Very nice, he had been. He did not get on with his wife, it was rumoured. Mr. Richards.
“Mr. Richards, he’s the manager, I know he would give me a reference, he said he would.”
Mrs. Traill put on another kind of face from her usual one and said, “I don’t like references, they seem kind of squalid, somehow. I mean, if we can’t trust each other—” and she smiled. She was lovely when she smiled. Tiny lines and deep ones suddenly, fascinatingly, appeared in the porcelain of her skin, and her wide eyes grew wider.
Christine Smith said nothing. The remark seemed to her plain silly. But she had offered a reference, and if it was declined, that was her prospective employer’s affair. She waited, alert and cheerful, for what was to come next.
Mrs. Traill leant forward and lightly put her hand, with its raspberry nails and faint brown blotches and another cross-looking lump of copper (a ring, this time), on hers.
“I knew, from the minute I saw you that you were
the right one
. You’re so
cheerful
and
placid
. I felt at once that you’re going to be the person to manage the house for us, and keep us all in order (I’m afraid we’re rather scatty). Like an old-fashioned nannie.”
Christine gave a little laugh. It was only slightly embarrassed, because she had expected the people who had drafted that advertisement to be unconventional—artistic types always were. But in Mortimer Road jokes about nannies had not been made, and Mortimer Road would have thought this a queer sort of interview; interviews for jobs were among the serious things of life, together with money, and domestic electrical equipment.
“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I like the sound of the job and it will be nice to have my own place; I’ve been living in a bed-sitter—”
“Dreadful, so depressing. And so expensive round here.” Mrs. Traill’s tone was absent, for what did it matter how Christine Smith had been living when she was here, and firmly secured, in the neat black and white tweed and good walking-shoes, with her thick greying hair cut short and firmly curled about her ordinary but slightly-rosier-than-ordinary face?
That complexion must be a nuisance, get too red sometimes, mused Mrs. Traill, who had never yet conceded a physical inch to another woman in the battle of looks.
“Now, when can you come?” she said.
Miss Smith was about to reply, “Any time that suits you, I’m free now,” when Mrs. Traill drifted on, “The Men are still in the house, of course. It makes everything
fearfully messy
but I rather like it, they’re so
vital
. Mike, he’s the foreman, says they’ll be out by the twentieth. The others are moving in on the twentieth, so—” she hesitated, gazing out of the window, as if her eye had been caught by the sunset.
“Then suppose I come on the twentieth, early,” Miss Smith spoke more decidedly than usual, for being artistic was one thing and dithering was another, “and then I can get things organized a bit, before your friends come.” She paused. “Would it be convenient for me to see—the flat you said I could have?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Traill got up. “It’s right at the top. You do sound
sensible
, Miss Smith, and that’s so
cosy
because we’re all scatty, you see, and usually thinking about our creative work—I hope we shall all get on. I think we shall. I hope you don’t mind stairs.”