The Charmers (18 page)

“A pair of freaks,” was what Diana said, leaning forward to stub out her cigarette.

“Sometimes you can be so stupid and hard, I wonder we haven’t split up years ago.” Mrs. Traill said, with none of her usual indistinct articulation or dreamy manner, and Diana looked a little taken aback.

“Yes … I’m sorry,” she said in a moment, “that was bitchy. But though I’m not one of your children-and-marriage worshippers,
I
do like normal people. I suppose the fact is I’m fond of Antonia, and she maddens me. I’d like to see her settled and happy, and she wobbles and drifts about until I could hit her.”

“She’s got herself into this situation and ther’s no one to get her out of it, that’s the trouble. She’s never got over that disastrous time with Clive in Italy—”

But what happened in Italy was never revealed to Christine, who for some time had been listening with all her ears, for both ladies, absently gathering up their bags and cigarettes, drifted out of the room and up to the Long Room, whence she presently heard tunes loved in the thirties being played, and laughter.

She continued tidying the kitchen. Her hope of picking up some hint, some revelation about the behaviour of men and women in their relation as wooer and wooed, which might help her inexperience in her own situation, had been disappointed.

She would also liked to have known why that time in Italy had been disastrous.

Really … Christine scrubbed vigorously at a stain on a tea-towel … they were funny people. They were charming, and kind, though not what you would call really friendly, and ever so interesting, but some of their talk and ideas made her think of those plays Tom had taken her to.

Tom was fond of going to the theatre. Much of Christine’s pleasure in the thought of tickets for the new Noël Coward, which Mr. Lennox had promised her (“Always provided we get a run, gallant laughter”) had been marred by the thought that there were sure to be two, and she would have to invite Tom, and she felt sure he would not enjoy it.

She was growing to like their outings; her first irritation—which had been largely shyness—at his attentiveness had vanished, and she had come to look for the guiding hand on her elbow and the little compliments. “Got to take care of you, haven’t we? Mustn’t lose a good thing when we’ve got it”—small, stiff jokes.

But how he did like talking !

It seemed that he could not have enough of sitting at some table with Christine, drinking tea and eating those buttered buns he was so wild about, and talk, talk, talk about the state
the
world was in, and how much better the state was that it used to be in, and what he would do about it if he was in charge.

Christine listened. Oh, yes, she listened; she even heard what he was saying and tried to think about it. But she would have preferred just an occasional remark about the Chinese geese on the pond, or the weather, or merely sitting and enjoying the buns and tea and the sunshine and saying nothing.

In the museums and art galleries he still found what she thought of as ‘plenty to say,’ and here it was pleasanter, because there was always something to look at, though often Christine did not care for what they were looking at; some old Roman thing, for instance, or some ugly great muddle of a picture.

Tom said that it was their duty to keep up with the times: “get with it,” he said playfully; there was no reason why they should be old-fashioned because they were middle-aged; hence these excursions to galleries and jazz concerts (though here Christine did put her foot down; one visit to one of those, and she told him flatly that she would never go to one again. “The noise,” she said, “was enough to deafen you.”

Tom, after muttering that it could be a new and vitalizing experience, gave in and said that in fact he agreed with her. Christine added that she supposed it was all right for teenagers, but he did not answer.)

So, having also firmly dealt with suggestions that they should go to more of a certain kind of play to which he had twice taken her, she felt that, if she had not succeeded in guaranteeing the kind of enjoyment she liked from their outings, she had at least quashed his attempts to let her in for a series of thoroughly disagreeable occasions. Those plays had been nothing but a waste of her time and his money—and I’m sure, she thought, that he’s not all that comfortably off.

THERE WERE BOTHER
and change, perhaps, but they were a long way off on the horizon, and perhaps would not come any nearer. The roses came out, and Christine bought a second pair of white gloves.

June was marked by great activity on the part of Mrs. Meredith.

Having wearied of her daily visit to London because everything was so changed and the traffic was appalling and the petrol fumes sickened her and the streets were crammed with foreigners, she took to staying at home. Almost at once she was making plans for transforming the garden shed into her workshop.

“It’s nothing but a pipe-dream,” Mrs. Traill confided to Christine. “She used to make pots when we were all young, before, she went off to Africa with James, and Maurice encouraged her, and told her she had talent, as he told poor Dick he could write.

(He encouraged me, too, but I really do have it). And now she thinks she’d like to take it up again and make a few what she calls ‘pennies’. As if anyone would want to buy the kind of thing she’ll make! She’s got quite a good bit of money of her own and James has a good pension; they don’t need ‘pennies’! It’s all an excruciating bore, and we shall never hear the end of it.”

The first sign that Diana’s plans were beginning to take shape was her appearance in a series of becoming overalls, in lilac or blue or pink, and made of the newest materials that almost take care of themselves, so washable and dryable and uncreasable and generally biddable are they. Very elegant she looked in these loose, flower-hued garments, with her dark hair
newly
and expertly cut so as to bring out its streaks of silver, and what Christine thought of as ‘a kind of French fringe’.

“Real artists don’t get themselves up in special clothes,” Mrs. Traill said scornfully, one afternoon when Diana had gone humming down the garden to inspect the proposed workshop, wearing one of these creations. “They’re much too busy thinking about their work. You don’t see me,” she enlarged, “buying clothes to draw in.”

“Well, no, Mrs. Traill, but I would say you have your own definite style.”

“One works it out over the years,” murmured Mrs. Traill, pleased, “but with me it’s been more or less unconscious. I’ve never been a clothes-horse, and I could
never
stick those ’lons and ’lenes she’s so sold on, I must have
natural
materials. It’s nothing but subconscious laziness, you know, really, liking all these materials that practically wash and dry themselves. That khaki shift of mine takes three days to dry properly.”

Christine was tactfully silent. The gloomy garment in question seemed to her much less desirable than Diana’s airy new acquisitions; she had been quite depressed by it, hanging on the line for the three days, dripping, and slowly swinging its mud-coloured scanty folds in the breeze.

“There is no substitute for wool! as the adverts, say,” she contributed at last, with a little laugh.

“Well, it’s quite true, for once. And it’s so dotty, because all those pinks and blues will only get all over clay … It’s a waste of ‘pennies’… but they’re her ‘pennies’ and if she likes to waste them … I’d better go and see what she’s up to, I suppose.”

She wandered away, and Christine knew that she would give advice, and point out the advantages and disadvantages of the shed, in the kindest way.

She had learned that the criticisms of one another made by Mrs. Traill and Mrs. Meredith, often in strong terms, did not mean that they did not like one another, nor, when they groaned in concert about Miss Marriott, deploring her mismanagement of her affairs, did it mean that they would offer her anything but eager sympathy and affection when the opportunity came.

Miss Marriott herself greeted any statement of strong opinion on the part of Diana with the muttered, “She’s bonkers and we have to face it,” which Christine had first heard Diana herself mutter about Mrs. Traill.

Mr. Lennox and Mr. Meredith did not criticize one another to her, nor did they comment upon the behaviour of the ladies unless everyone was gathered together round the supper-table or in the Long Room. Then their judgements or criticisms were delivered so that everyone could hear them, and were often emphasized with a wave of James’s cigar or Clive’s long double-jointed finger.

Christine had come to the conclusion, after some vague thoughts, that in Mortimer Road you were always running people down and didn’t really like them though you were nice to their face, and in Pemberton Hall you ran people down and weren’t always nice to their faces but you did like them.

The next thing that happened was Diana announcing that she had been over to Hampstead enquiring about paint and whitewash and brushes, and was going to do up the shed herself.

“You can’t,” Mrs. Traill said flatly. “You’re no good at that kind of thing. Remember the time we had that room in Swiss Cottage, and we thought we’d do it up ourselves because the landlord was such a swine about repairs, and the mess you made of the ceiling?”

“Well,
ceilings
! I’m not proposing to do the ceiling. Of course I shall get a man in to do that.”

“Why not get a man in to do the lot?” James suggested, who, Christine could see, was dismayed at this plan. (Mr. Meredith was the kind of gentleman, she thought, who believed that Men, respectful, able-bodied and willing, still lived just round the corner and could be ‘got in’.)

“Actually I can’t remember the ceiling,” said Diana. “It isn’t the ordinary kind, anyway.”

“It’s beams,” said Mrs. Traill, “quite old beams. You could scrape them down and wax them and they would look very good.”

“I am
not
waxing beams, Fabia. Good heavens, there’s no need to tart the place up—I only want a shed to work in.”

“What are the walls?” Antonia enquired languidly.

“Brick. They’re filthy. If you had them washed down and re-whitewashed, with the beams waxed, they’d look very good indeed.” Mrs. Traill’s eye was sparkling.

“Pink would look heavenly,” said Antonia. “Rather Spanish.”

“
I don’t want it to look Spanish or anything else
: it isn’t going to be a show-place.”

“We could have tea in there on wet days,” put in Clive; he and James were laughing.

Diana put her head in her hands.

“I wish I’d never mentioned the damned place … just leave me alone to get on with it in my own way, will you, please?”

Someone changed the subject. The next afternoon Christine, coming out to hang tea-towels in the little yard immediately beyond James’s wine-cellar, saw, down at the end of the garden, Mrs. Traill’s trousered form standing by the shed, serenely removing its one small window.

“She’ll need more light,” she called, “she’s gone over to the Arrchway to buy a frame … I hope she won’t make a muddle of the measurements.”

“Can you do all that? Fancy,” marvelled Christine, coming to stand by her and watch for a moment the skilled use of the chisel.

“One of my husbands taught me. He carved,” Mrs. Traill answered. “I enjoy it.”

“And can you put the new window in and everything?”

“Oh yes.”

“The glass too?”

“Oh yes. I like doing it.”

And, Diana reappearing at this moment followed by a largish Scout earning his Bob-a-Job by carrying the window-frame, Christine went back to the house, followed by Diana’s favourable comments on the parking facilities in Archway as compared with those of Knightsbridge. (Christine knew that,
after
her first attempts, she had given up taking the Mini-minor they had bought down into London; it was permanently sitting outside Pemberton Hall in the Square, and was used only as a local runabout and for very occasional drives out into what Diana, emphatically said, were the “hopelessly spoiled Home Counties.”)

By the evening the window was installed, and Mrs. Traill was carefully polishing a large single pane that flung back the late sun.

“Queer how they had no idea in those days of letting in light,” she commented to Christine, who had strolled out to gaze and admire. “You’d think they were afraid of it.”

“I don’t like too much glare, myself,” said Christine, and Mrs. Traill turned and looked at her as she said, “Oh, I adore light. I can’t have too much of it.”

“It does fade the carpets,” Christine said; she sometimes had a sensation as if every tradition she had ever held was being swept away in a great flood of novelty, that, though it usually carried her along willingly and even pleasurably, must sometimes be resisted if she were not to feel entirely without roots.

And it did fade the carpets.

“Blow the carpets,” said Mrs. Traill absently, and then Diana came out of the shed, where she had been dabbing ineffectually at a wall with a broom, and sighed that the glare in there was unbearable and she would never be able to see.

“I’ll fix you up a blind, blast you,” Mrs. Traill promised, with no lessening of amiability.

Christine, after this, expected to see Mrs. Traill take over the transformation of the shed entirely, and that was what happened. Diana was told to concentrate on finding herself a suitable wheel and buying all the other things that she would require, and Mrs. Traill neglected possible commissions for drawings byabandoning hervisits to editors and telephone talks with her contacts, while contentedly scraping and distempering and waxing from early in the morning until dusk.