The Charmers (28 page)

Just like Moira saying it wouldn’t matter which day you went. The invitation reinforced Christine’s conviction that Moira was not one of the fussy kind. She sent off an eager postcard saying that she would love to come on Tuesday.

She hoped that Tom would not be in. It was always embarrassing when men started cooling off (women didn’t cool off; they had too much to gain—at least in Mortimer Road they had—from staying warm) and during the awkward period it was as well to avoid them.

But no doubt Tom understood this as well as she did, and would take care not to be at home.

The Merediths, it occurred to Christine, were having a spending spree. Diana had been encouraged to go on with her work by some small successes in local exhibitions, and purchases from shops displaying her pots and bowls in Hampstead and Highgate, but it could not be these miniature triumphs and their resultant ‘pennies’, which were causing both of them to splash their money about.

They had bought a handsome new record-player, to hear the
café chantant
songs they both enjoyed, and the full scores of some successful musicals, and James was boasting a new set of golf-clubs, which he took up to the Club in a neat new dark-green car.

“We’re going it, aren’t we,” Diana observed to Christine as he drove off one morning in this latest toy. “And talking of going it,” she went on, “who do you think I saw in Hampstead the other day? Our late Mr. Johnson.”

“No! did you, Mrs. Meredith—not really? Did you—did he speak to you?”

“Yes, he spoke to me. Would you like to hear what he said?”

Christine nodded, though shrinking inwardly from the smooth, controlled tone. She was never easy when Mrs. Meredith and Mr. Johnson were in conjunction.

“He was swaggering down the High Street in tan trousers and a striped Italian shirt and a guitar over his shoulder, with three little boys tagging after him. Bursting with prosperity and cheek. I was going past without stopping, of course. It made me sick, because he used to be a decent boy, as they go, but he stopped me and said, ‘Hullo, Mrs. Meredith. Lovely day.’ I asked him how he liked his new place—I said ‘place’ deliberately—and he grinned and ruffled one of the boys’ hair and said, ‘Oh, I quite one of the family now, dear. Bye-bye—give them all my love over Highgate way.’”

“Well!” Christine compressed her lips. “Just what you always said … ‘quite one of the family’ and ‘dear’, too! The cheek of it. It just shows you can’t give them an inch, doesn’t it?”

“Probably the people he’s with are stinking rich and think it’s smart or amusing or God knows what to dress him up like that and let him roam around with a guitar. If he doesn’t murder someone they’ll be lucky.”

“I wonder what happened to those ‘responsibilities’ he was always going on about?”

“Dropped them, I should think—if he ever had any.”

Diana went on into the house but Christine lingered, looking thoughtfully across the Square.

Mr. Johnson had been disgracefully familiar and it did no good to blacks to pamper them up. All the same, she would have liked to see him; in his striped shirt, with his three little admirers. What harm did it do anyone? It only meant there was one more lucky person in the world, and she was glad that Mr. Johnson, instead of going down down down, had landed neatly on his feet.

She wondered why Mrs. Meredith was so hard on blacks. She seemed to mind being in the same world with them. I
suppose
, Christine reflected, it’s like me and Mrs. Benson. And that explained it perfectly, for her, and she dismissed the matter.

The memory of Mrs. Benson never crossed her mind without leaving its faint disagreeable stain, half detestation, half fear, and it was strange how often she saw her by chance; from the top of a bus, perhaps, or from the other side of a hideously crowded street while she was waiting to cross the road.

Wherever the throb and grind of traffic was most hellish, wherever the glare from the confusion of goods in shop windows was weariest and the stench of petrol fumes most overpowering, there, at the worst moment, she would happen to glance up and see Mrs. Benson.

Sometimes the woman seemed to recognize her; more than once there had been a grin and a wave of a thick hand, a parody of pleasure at the sight of her that surprised and sickened Christine; anyone would have thought that they had been real friends.

She could not always be sure that it was Mrs. Benson, either; those great stout women with dyed hair all looked alike, especially with a cigarette sticking out of their face.

It was a common face, in both senses of the word; moving like some embodiment of the scene through the noise and the sickening smells.

Christine summed up her feelings towards this figure from the past, in the thought:
she makes me think of everything I hate most
.

“Three changes of bus and then that walk to the pillar-box—I always think ‘hooray’ when I see the pillar-box—yes, it is a difficult journey,
I
think it’s nice of people to come out all this way to see us.”

“It’s nice when you get here,” said Christine, and Moira rippled.

They were standing—of all places—in Tom’s bedroom. Tea was over, and, after some comfortable talk, Moira had suggested that Christine might like to see over the house; she herself
loved
seeing over people’s homes; and Christine’s acceptance had been more eager because she knew that Tom was out. She had half-expected to see The Boots standing by his bed, and told herself not to be silly, and leant forward to look out of his window.

“What’s that blue hill you can just see between the trees?”

“Oh—up Mill Hill way—it might be the country, mightn’t it, with all the trees.”

“And so quiet. I like all these shady roads.”

“Oh, so do I. I love living here—never want to go anywhere else. We’ve been here nearly thirty years—came here before the war.”

Christine looked down into Frank’s garden. A drowsy scent floated up from its tiny parterres and brick paths, framed in their thick beech hedge and shaded by their laburnum and lilac.

“Anne cut the grass on Sunday. It looks nice, doesn’t it?”

Christine admired, then went on to ask how Anne was getting on with her mathematics, over which there had been difficulty. Now there was improvement, Moira said; Michael had been helping her.
He
found
English
difficult. Having been ‘set on’ being a dentist since he was twelve, he was more interested in ‘that kind of thing’, and in machinery, than in poetry and essays and
that
kind of thing.

“I don’t see why you need poetry to be a dentist,” Christine said.

“You don’t use it while you’re pulling out teeth, you silly girl,” said Moira, rippling again. “It’s to give you a broad general education. Culture. That’s what the Grammar Schools aim at—so I’m told. Oh, I used to love poetry when I was Anne’s age. Did you?”

Christine’s mother used to say ‘you silly girl,’ but not in the affectionate tone that Moira had used, and her question about liking poetry had not been put in the form ‘didn’t you?’, which would have implied that all nice people did like it.

“I never read any.” At school, Christine remembered, they used to say
You’re a poet And don’t know it
. And poetry rhymed. Poetry?

“My favourite poem used to be
Sohrab
and
Rustum
, by Matthew Arnold,” said Moira. “I know bits of it by heart. I was always saying them over to myself, I was so crazy about it.”

And then and there, sounds began to come out on the shady air of the room above the glowing garden; the blue hill looked between its leaves; the scented air listened; marriages of the ordinary vowels and consonants that Christine heard and used every day, but had never in her life heard used as they sounded now—

“
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had

In his high mountain-cradle in Pamir
,

A foiled circuitous wanderer—till at last

The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide

His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars

Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”

Moira’s coarse-featured face, with its surrounding curls of greying hair, was full of gentle delight. Her eyes were fixed questioningly on Christine’s face.

Christine was looking down, pulling slowly at the hem of her jacket. She was so moved that the struggling of the feelings with herself—to escape, to express themselves—to make some sound that should not spoil the sounds she had just heard—was actual pain. Oh, what was it? This something—this world hinting at its own existence but no more than hinting—that could neither be had for the wanting nor would tell you what and where it was? Surely, it had nothing to do with the real world? It hardly seemed to be there at all. It was something you just saw or felt or heard for an instant—and wanted ever afterwards with all your heart and never forgot.

And there was no one to talk to, and Mortimer Road still held her in its dull grip.

“Where’s Tom these days?” she asked, looking up at last. “Yes—fancy your remembering all that—I haven’t seen him for ages.”

The confused sensations of delight and pain showed themselves only in the directness of her question. She didn’t care
a
straw where Tom was, and usually she would have been too conscious of what Tom’s sister would think, to ask such a thing. But now she blurted it out without hesitation.

Moira sat down on a chair beside the window, keeping her eyes fixed on Christine’s face. Her expression was still gentle, but faintly troubled now. Yet she did not hesitate as she said:

“He’s got a girl-friend, much younger than he is. They’ve been going out every night; she lives just down the road. I think he means to marry her, Christine.”

Silence.

“I kept it from you as long as I could, dear—but I feel sure, now, that you don’t
really
mind. Not mind in the way you and I were talking about that first afternoon you came here.”

Another pause.

“It’s all right, I don’t mind,” Christine said slowly.

“I’m so glad, Chris. I knew you wouldn’t, but it’s a relief to hear you say so.”

Nevertheless, there was yet another silence, during which Moira kept her eyes rather carefully away from Christine’s brooding face. A bee flew in from the garden and flung itself against the window and banged about exasperatedly; Moira got up, and steered it, without co-operation on its part, out on to the air again.

Christine was feeling surprised, amid all her other confused, shocked, angry thoughts, that Moira and she had come into the open like that about the situation between herself and Tom.

Moira had spoken right out. She had known, all along, that Christine might be her sister-in-law. Well, Christine had guessed that. But she seemed to have it all so clear in her mind—how, Christine felt, how Tom must be feeling—how she herself felt—all of it; all the feelings and facts that in Christine’s old home would have been muddled or ignored. Christine liked this clarity; she hung on to it, through her sensation of shock, with one of comfort. Yes, Moira was a dear.