The Charmers (16 page)

He laughed, and glanced at his watch. He looked younger and more cheerful.

“I don’t want to break up the party, Christine, I should like to sit here talking all evening but my sister has got some friends coming in this evening, and I promised I would be there.”

“Are you living with her, then?” Christine asked another of those unconsciously leading questions, as they got up from the table.

“With her and her family, yes. Just until I get a place of my own again. I sold the house, when my wife died … It’s comfortable enough there, but too full of noisy teenagers for my taste … I’m not used to young people, she has a boy and a girl and the house is always full of their friends.”

The face at the next table now had its arm round its friend’s neck and was calling everybody to witness that Leni was vonderful. Christine glanced at them in mild wonder as she went by.

Evening shadows were stretching themselves under the beeches that shelter the little old red-and-gold caravan outside Kenwood House, as they walked up towards the bus-stop. The distant grassy slopes looked larger and more golden in that light than they were; almost majestic, and as if in the real country.

Mr. Richards suddenly took Christine’s arm.

“I’ve enjoyed our afternoon,” he said, “very much. We must do it again, Christine.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ve enjoyed it too. It’s been very nice.”

Nicer if you hadn’t kept on about those miners, though. Christine allowed her arm to hang rather slackly; she seemed to be getting on with Mr. Richards—Tom—quicker than she liked or wanted.

“I’ll ’phone you, then, Christine.” Could that be a gentle pressure on her arm?

It could; it was repeated as he helped her on to the bus, on
which
—and Christine was not sorry—there was room for only one.

“In you get—no, I’ll get the next one—I’ll be all right-Good-bye, Christine, or rather,
au revoir
.”

She wished that he would not do what she thought of as
Christine-ing me all over the place
. She looked down at her gloves; good, they were clean enough to serve for a second time. Then she glanced back. He was standing there, gazing after the bus, and waving. She did remember to smile and wave in return but she did not feel like smiling; was Mr. Richards—Tom then—going to be a nuisance?

CHRISTINE THOUGHT OFTEN
about this outing and two others which took place during the next ten days or so; and she would have liked to talk to someone about what might become a problem.

This was a wish almost unprecedented, with her. At home, no one had shown much interest in what she had to say or listened for long if she had begun hesitatingly to confide any of her small private worries, few as they were, because her brothers and sister were all livelier and a little more articulate. They were also more positive and more demanding, with opinions which they believed to be their own, and they got themselves listened to.

Slightly more attention had been paid to Christine between the age of seventeen and twenty-seven. But as it gradually became clear that she was not going to marry, the family, also gradually, ceased to take much notice of what she said. As to what she may have been thinking or feeling … in that house, thoughts and feelings came a bad second, as we know, to electric toasters.

Now, of course, she could not have talked to any of her family, and did not want to. There might, she knew, have been a show of real interest if they had thought that this renewed acquaintance with Mr. Richards was going to ‘lead to anything’, but she did not want to talk to anyone who would think in that way; in spite of beginning to fear, rather than to hope—as the days went on and there was more than one longish telephone chat with Tom—that ‘something might be brewing’.

She needed to talk to someone more intelligent. That was how she put it to herself. Yet although she felt certain her employers were just that, every instinct warned her—and shyness
was
there, too—against talking to any of them (well, it could only have been Mrs. Traill: she was still slightly nervous of the other four). Of them all, she was most drawn to Mr. Meredith. But one didn’t confide in men about that kind of thing. Men were there to be asked about mending fuses or getting cars to go when they stuck, and, besides, it would have been quite out of the question.

She was also prevented from even considering confiding in her employers because of what they might immediately think.

They might suppose that she was going to get engaged right away ‘or some such rubbish’, and begin looking around for … other tenants … She had never quite forgotten that the frequently-mentioned and always laughter-inducing Dick and Amanda had been ‘mad about it and dying to have it’.

No: she would have to think things out for herself, as she always had and as, she supposed, she always would. On my lonesome, as usual, thought Christine.

After all, was there so much to think out? There was no more than a strong suspicion that later on she might have to make up her mind about something important.

Well—she could always say ‘No’.

But she felt cross, and embarrassed, and afraid of looking a fool, at her age, and sometimes she wished she had never come across Mr. Richards again on the top of that bus. She had liked seeing him every day at Lloyd and Farmer’s; looked up to him, somehow; she knew that, now. She had not wanted to be taken out to tea and to hear about all those problems and coal-miners.

If you had asked her, Christine would have said it was all a bit of a bother.

But there was always plenty to take her mind off it; the care of her flat, the household shopping, the preparation of the evening meal which they all found enjoyable at the end of those days which, Christine still could not help feeling, were a bit aimless and idle.

True, three of them worked. Miss Marriott worked hard; she did not leave in the morning until after the horror of the
rush
-hour had slackened, but she never got home until nearly eight in the evening and always looked white and drained when she did. Mr. Lennox was rehearsing hard; he slept late, left the house at a quarter to ten, and often wasn’t back until the small hours; Christine would often hear his little red Mini-minor drawing up in the Square after two in the morning. Gay, sweet to everybody, he dashed in and out wearing a light overcoat and frequently bringing large bunches of carnations to adorn the hall.

Christine sometimes compared him with Tom. Never a word from Mr. Lennox about those old Problems; all he cared about was the Stage. She thought of him as a perfect gentleman.

Mrs. Traill worked, too; she was perpetually gently occupied, drawing her pictures in her big sunny studio and then “beetling off” as she called it, to Fleet Street with her wares; but so unhurriedly, so driftingly, that her activities scarcely seemed to deserve the name
work
, which for Christine had all her life been associated with dullness and pressure and a certain numbing monotony.

When she had been with them three months she discovered one day that what made her employers’ work different from the work done outside the tranced circle of Pemberton Hall, was the fact that they enjoyed it; even Miss Marriott, driven, exasperated, often calling upon Heaven to witness that one day she would resign, would say now and then that she adored her job: as the summer went on, Christine heard her say it less.

Mr. Meredith was as regular in his habits as if he went out to business, Christine thought. His bath-water running, the slight sounds as he moved about taking tea in to his wife, then his descent to the hall for his
Times
and a lordly slam of the front-door, followed by the long quietness while they breakfasted—these were repeated every day at precisely the same times.

He had his sherry at eleven, with Mrs. Meredith if she had not gone down into London, sometimes in their flat and sometimes—under protest, Christine knew, because she had
heard
him—in that shed which got the morning sun, where Mrs. Meredith was one day going to make her pottery. Most afternoons he went off to watch the cricket; sometimes he was out all day watching it, and during the Test Matches the wireless in his fiat could be heard, muffled by distance, giving out descriptions of play and scores.

There was not one television set in all the five flats.

Mrs. Traill had spoken to Christine about this after she had been there for some weeks.

“We thought we’d wait until we saw whether you were the kind of person who would like one,” she said candidly. “You see, if we’d said in our advertisement that there was one in your flat, we might have got the kind of person we didn’t want.”

Christine was looking at her intently.

“Would you like one?” Mrs. Traill went on, and Christine started slightly and said, colouring deeply and with actual agitation in her unually placid voice—“No, Oh, no—thank you, Mrs. Traill, but I don’t want it at all. I … I don’t care for it.”

“Really can’t stand it, can’t you?” Mrs. Traill was looking at her curiously, but her eyes were kind.

“I don’t mind it all that much; I think it’s very nice for the old folks and for people who can’t get about, but I would never want one. Thank you all the same,” she added.

“All right, then. I can’t stick it myself, all bluey-mauve and wobbling up and down and sideways, and mostly sheer rubbish … All right then, we’ll just forget about it.”

But while Mrs. Traill went off on one of her excursions to look at people in streets and parks who might act as unconscious models, Christine could not, all day, forget that conversation.

She
to want a television! She who had lived for years with people who cared so much more for television than they did for human beings, or for anything that might faintly suggest the feeling of That Day! The mere idea of a television, with its small cold face, in
her
flat made her feel faintly sick.

She told herself not to be so silly. She told herself all the
arguments
in favour of the invention, and how educational it was, and what a blessing to those in hospital, and so on.

It was useless. She passionately did not want one.

Because, behind the surely harmless toy, there were ranged like little implacable sightless ghosts, all the devices—the heaters and the hair-dryers and the toasters and the blankets and the kettles—to buy which she had worked for thirty-five years at Lloyd and Farmer’s.

I was—half-starved, that’s what I was she thought, standing at the window above the Square and looking out unseeingly at life going quietly on there.

I didn’t know it, but I was. All that electric stuff … so expensive … and always going wrong. Catch
me
having a television.

I might have been asleep, all those years, for all I heard, or felt, or saw.

She continued to stand there, looking out with resentful eyes at the quiet trees, and gradually a voice inside herself began telling her that there was no need to feel resentful.
You need not have one; no one is making you; there is no danger, the voice said. You can go on doing what you like, without any of the people in the house wanting to stop you
.

I am lucky, thought Christine, It’s true, I can. And slowly her thoughts became calm again.

It seemed to her that Diana Meredith did nothing but go down into London every day.

“She’s getting her bearings,” Mrs. Traill had once remarked. “After being stuck in Africa, longing to be back, she feels stunned, I really do believe, at having got here at last. She’s had about thirty years of longing to be Home. So you can understand that she feels a bit stunned.”

Christine now looked with mingled curiosity and sympathy at Mrs. Meredith. She was beginning to understand what it was to long to be Home; though where Home exactly was, she had not even dimly decided.

Diana would get back about six o’clock, fagged and flushed,
and
laden with paper bags printed with the names and devices of all the most elegant London shops. Most of them bore the sober greenish-grey, and the restrained design, of the great building that houses Harrods.

“Oh, that place!” Diana once sighed out one evening on her return from one of these forays. “Sometimes I think I’d like to go there when I die.”

She was lying back, exhausted, in a long chair in the garden, where Mrs. Traill was enjoying the end of a hot day in an exiguous sun-dress, and Christine was watering some seedlings.