The Charmers (10 page)

“Bless him,” carolled Mrs. Traill.

These remarks, admirably in the spirit of togetherness as they were, only reinforced her decision to keep Mr. Johnson as much as possible out of Mrs. Traill’s way.

She sat down, and began to eat her interrupted supper.

Antonia seemed to have revived under the stimulus of food and drink.

“Nigel was all out. He’d been up all night, of course, and then this morning he had a terrible turn-up with Ferenc because the little brute wouldn’t wash or shave before the show. It really was frightful. You could hear them screaming at each other all over the house. Some of the girls were crying, they all adore Nigel, of course, and would like to murder Ferenc. You could hear every word they said, Nigel shouting that he didn’t make clothes for the kind of women who liked
dirty
unshaven little boys and Ferenc shrieking they were a lot of old trouts and better dead … It really was so ugly … I was shaking all over.”

“What happened?” James asked, as Antonia paused; he had been listening with an expression of disbelief. “Has Nigel gone off his head? He was all through the War. Didn’t he get a D.S.O.?”

“Oh, lord, yes. With bar. I don’t know. It’s all … it’s just ugly.”

Christine ventured to ask a question. She was so interested in the story that her desire to know the end of it overcame shyness.

“And did he get him to wash and shave?” she asked.

Antonia turned and looked at her; perhaps it was the appearance of a new listener, to whom all this was as interesting as it was to herself, that gave the first touch of warmth to her manner.

“Oh, yes, in the end. Nigel usually gets what he wants; he isn’t at all a weak person, or he wouldn’t be where he is. Ferenc went out and had a Turkish bath.”

“I should hope so,” said Christine, satisfied with this happy ending. “I should think you all never heard of such a thing—a smart Dress Show, and one of the designers dirty and not shaved.”

“You’re quite right—we never did,” said Antonia, laughing hysterically, “but the world’s getting to be a very funny place.” She pushed her empty glass towards Clive.

“Was his mum there? I must say I like the sound of her,” said Mrs. Traill.

“Oh, God, yes, in a sort of plum cocktail dress—a horror if ever there was one—Madame Netté of Wood Green High Street, I should think—and short sleeves, of course. How can you like the sound of her, Fabia? She’s quite dreadful.”

“You know I adore vital people.”

“She’s vital all right. You can have her. Every time one of his glitter-and-sparkles jobs came on she stood up to clap. No one in the audience minded, of course. I think they all thought she was rather sweet. I wouldn’t mind her so much
myself
, if she and Ferenc between them weren’t ruining Nigel Rooth’s as fast as they can ruin.”

“Perhaps, he won’t last,” said Mrs. Traill thoughtfully. “Everyone can’t always be wanting to wear glitter and sparkles.”

“I wish I could believe it. But don’t you worry, he’ll learn. He’ll learn, the little louse. I’ve said I just want to see him design one wearable suit, but the day he does design it, it’ll be all up with me.”

“Nigel would never let you resign, Antonia. He really does love you.”

Antonia said something about ‘infatuation’ that Christine, who was busy for a moment at the dresser, did not catch; then turned to Clive, saying, “Well, darling? How did yours go?”

Christine then learned that Mr. Lennox had been up that morning for an audition for ‘the new Noël’, and had got the part. She listened with such interest, while grinding the beans that had replaced her despised tin of coffee powder, that she did not realise Miss Marriott’s absorption in her own affairs, and her account of them, had crowded out the announcement of his news until this moment.

But it did strike her that everyone, even Miss Marriott, seemed more pleased about this than they had been about the success of
Fall Folly
. James slapped him on the back, Mrs. Traill and Diana kissed him, and Antonia herself sat on his knee and gave him sips of the champagne James had at once gone to fetch.

What a house it was—Dress Shows, and auditions for new musicals, and champagne! And everybody so charming, so good to look at and leading such interesting lives. Christine could hardly believe her luck in coming to live here; Mortimer Road, Lloyd and Farmer’s, her family living and dead, seemed far away.

THE LONG DAYS
full of quiet occupation, the peaceful nights, and the awakenings unrasped by any thoughts of having to hurry up because that Number 127a never stops a second longer than it need—they began to flow past, and in no time, it seemed to Christine, she had been at Pemberton Hall a month.

Mr. Johnson continued to arrive on Monday and Thursday evenings, sometimes he was very late and sometimes he was just late. He was never punctual or early, but he soon acquired competence, if not enthusiasm or skill, in his tasks, and gradually—but not so gradually that Christine Smith was not aware of what was going on—he began to have a couple of sandwiches with his evening cup of tea.

He came down into the kitchen for this ‘little break’ as he called it; and sat at the table in his thick sensible clothes to have it. Christine did not know even that she liked to look at him, much less that the reason for her liking was the gracefulness of his young body.

“Sometimes they are very graceful. They fall into marvellous poses,” Mrs. Traill had remarked, having (unfortunately, in Christine’s opinion) strayed into the kitchen one evening while Mr. Johnson was having his break. She did not say this while he was actually there, though Christine had a secret conviction that she would have been capable of it. “It’s his blackness, you know. It defines the pose, just as a silhouette defines shape.”

Yes. Christine thought a little about this, after Mr. Johnson had returned to his work and Mrs. Traill had gone upstairs. I can see what she means—in a kind of way.

But her chief feelings were those of relief: that Mr. Johnson had showed no tendency to respond to Mrs. Traill’s rather
caressing
manner, and also that he was sensible about his clothes; wearing strong thick shoes and sweaters all through that bitter spring, and even now only beginning to emerge cautiously into open-necked shirts. She felt a bit responsible for him, so black and young as he was, and would not have liked to see him shivering in a thin suit.

Her own relationship with him remained precisely what it had been on the first evening; a firm, sensible attitude on her part meeting occasional childish moodiness on his. But although this capriciousness was tiresome, Christine preferred Mr. Johnson, whom she could manage perfectly, to any of your Mrs. Bensons whom she was quite sure she could not.

She had never seen Mrs. Benson since the day when she had left Iver Street for ever. But she had not forgotten her.

Iver Street had
gone
. London was changing so quickly that someone born before 1914 could hardly realise the rate at which old houses were being torn down and massive, whitish blocks of flats and offices going up; and when Christine happened one day to go down to the Archway Road, she actually gasped to see, where the gardens and little cream-coloured façades of Iver Street had faced the sun, a gap that must have been all of two hundred yards long and a hundred wide. On its far perimeter were a few old houses, looking shaky and forlorn as if their turn were coming next, and already a new building had been run up, an arrogant, dazzling white oblong with hundreds of windows suggesting supercilious eyes. Two great machines, trembling and rumbling about like prehistoric monsters, were clawing out giant lumps of brick and earth under a smiling blue sky.

Christine stood watching for a while, feeling oddly sad, and wondering where Mrs. Benson had gone, and hoping it was out of the neighbourhood.

In her light summer coat, with a new scarf tucked in at her neck, and her hair kept neatly in place by one of the new chemical sprays, she stood watching the scene and thinking, now, of That Day.

It was four months since she had seen or heard anything that reminded her of That Day, and now it was only a memory
of
Iver Street that did: Iver Street, existing no more except as a kind of ghost street, a picture in some people’s minds. Something in the memory of those lost cream façades that used to look so modestly at the sun reminded her of it.

Sighing, and feeling that it was foolish to sigh, she turned away.

The Long Room, the one overlooking the Square, where the piano stood in its glossy, quiet blackness against the white-rose walls, was the one room in Pemberton Hall into which Christine did not think she would be invited.

She had been shown over the rooms of all her fellow-tenants; usually about six in the evening, when they assembled in someone’s flat for a drink; and she went into the Long Room almost daily to dust it and to replace faded or dead flowers. But she had supposed that its true use would be for parties, to which she would not go; it had been nice of them to show her their flats; they had wanted to make her feel at home, she supposed; but parties were another matter.

One afternoon she was dusting the piano, Mr. Johnson’s cloth having left broad expanses untouched, when Mrs. Traill put her head round the door and invited her to come and see her latest drawing. She had just finished it, she said, and wanted an audience’s opinion.

Christine, interested and flattered, followed her into the big room full of sun, where the picture, pretty in the anaemic, shapeless contemporary fashion of prettiness, stood amidst the clutter on Mrs. Traill’s long working-table.

“It’s for a story called
Nevermore, Beloved
,” remarked the artist, bending forward to scrawl a more delicate tip to the nose of the unmistakably feminine shape entwined with a squarer male one. “Terrible tripe, of course …”

“I think it’s wonderful, I can’t think how you do it,” Christine marvelled. “Oh, I like some of those stories, I think they’re lovely. I take in
Homemaker
.”

“There was a Talk on the Third Programme some weeks ago about them,” Mrs. Traill went on. ‘This man—he was
very
clever, with several degrees—he said they were really
harmful
, they gave girls a wrong idea about Life.”

“Well, I expect they’ll learn soon enough,” Christine said comfortably, still admiring the picture. “And do they just tell you what they want you to draw, and then you draw it?”

“I have to read the story, of course.”

“Well, I think it’s wonderful, I do really, Mrs. Traill.”

“I wish you would call me Fabia,” Mrs. Traill said, smiling up at her. “‘Mrs. Traill’ sounds so formal.”

“Oh I couldn’t do that, thank you all the same for thinking of it,” Christine said decidedly. “I expect it’s being in business all those years. I never could get used to it. Some of those bits of girls took to calling Mr. Richards—he was our manager—Tom, if you please. Not to his face, of course, but
I
thought it was shocking—so disrespectful.”

“But friendlier, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Traill. “You don’t mind my calling you ‘Christine’, do you?”

“Oh, no, I like it,” hastily, “but that’s different.”

Mrs. Traill laughed and they went back to their separate occupations.

Crossing the landing, Christine was thinking that Mrs. Traill couldn’t know much about the homes some of the girls came from, those girls who spoke of Mr. Richards as ‘Tom’ and read the stories she had called ‘terrible tripe’. Christine herself did not know much. But she did know that anything giving them nice ideas about Life was all to the good.

Nice ideas about Life, reflected Christine, putting out a hand to push open the door of the Long Room, could never do anyone harm. Because sometimes in the papers—and even on television … but it didn’t do to think about such things, as Mother always used to say.

Suddenly, while her hand was on the door, it swung wide open revealing the room’s entire impressive length of warm white wall and shining, polished, narrow-planked floor. A vase of Spring flowers stood on a table by the window, and petals blew off in a shower, scattering along the dim blue and purple carpet.

That’s the second time that door’s done that. I’ll have to
speak
to them about it and get it seen to, thought Christine, it must be loose on the hinges or something, because it isn’t all that windy today.