The Charmers (5 page)

“Are you there?” said Christine.

“Yes, I am here, madame. I coloured man, you know,” said the voice with the faintest note of questioning.

“Oh. Yes, well,” Christine liked Mr. Johnson’s polite madame and what was the use of being, as her employers were, artistic, if you were not also broad-minded? “Of course that doesn’t matter at all if you do your work properly,” she went on firmly. “Now you just hold on, and I’ll run across the road; the house is right opposite where I’m ’phoning from, and I’ll ask …”

She hurried over, Mrs. Traill almost certainly wouldn’t
mind
, but Mrs. Meredith … Christine herself had never thought about coloured people, and there was no time to think about her views now.

By luck, Mrs. Traill was just coming down the steps, in Bedford-cord slacks and an enormous navy sweater, with her silver-gilt hair blowing about and a shopping-bag on her arm.

“Hullo,” she said, waving, as Christine hurried up.

“Good-afternoon, Mrs. Traill. I’ve got a cleaner holding the line in the box across the road. Would you mind a black? You see I thought they’re so strong; he can lift things and perhaps clean the windows. What do you think we ought to pay?”

“Oh heavens; I don’t mind. I love coloured people, they’re so vital. Oh … I don’t know … whatever he asks … Good for you—quick work.”

She smiled and drifted away, and Christine hurried back to the telephone.

“Yes, I still here,” said Mr. Johnson, but cheerfully now. “What money you be paying you think? I must have five shillings per hour. I engineering student. Electricity.”

A more experienced hirer of cleaners than Christine might have pointed out that the fact of his being a student of electrical engineering did not imply his being qualified, as a house-cleaner, to demand five shillings an hour, but she was too relieved at having apparently secured a cleaner—even a black one—at all that she did not meditate pointing out anything. She did dare to say, however—

“That seems rather expensive.”

“Oh, I must have five shillings per hour. Yes. I got responsibilities,” was the instant reply: Mr. Johnson appeared to have soared in a remarkably short time from a humble recognition of disadvantages connected with the hue of his skin to an enviable state of self-confidence.

Christine pondered this fact, as she hung up the receiver, having arranged that he should present himself at Pemberton Hall at six o’clock on the following Monday evening. His studies at a local Polytechnic prevented his coming during the day.

“I be there. I brought up in Christian household,” were
Mr
. Johnson’s parting words. This was more than Christine had been. If Forty-Five Mortimer Road had had a God, it was the sacred promise of coloured television in years to come.

As she walked up the steps of Pemberton Hall, Christine faced the fact that she had engaged a coloured man as a cleaner.

A black man. As a cleaner
.

I must be going mental, she thought. But she also had a feeling that she was not so appalled as she should have been. He didn’t sound too bad, she reflected, and anyway it will make a change.

It was not clear what she meant by this last thought, and she forgot everything when once she had reached her own landing.

Her furniture stood, lean and elegant, against the duck-egg walls, and there, in a neat large parcel on the floor, were what must be her curtains. Someone had taken them in; kind. But these people, she was sure, were kind.

Mrs. Traill, arriving half-an-hour later with the frank admission that she had come up to have a peep, stopped at the living-room door and said “Oh.”

“Do … Don’t you like it?” Christine gave a small, not quite confident laugh. She was standing on a chair putting up the curtains.

“I love your furniture. And I love the curtains, too. But not with that furniture. You should have something peasanty, with scarlet and black, on very coarse white stuff … it would look wonderful. Why not scrap these and shop around? I’ll help you.”

Christine’s reply was to smile brightly and not answer. It was the technique perfected by years of life with Mother and Father, who had always told you, when you had made up your mind to go to Ilfracombe, that you ought to go to the Isle of Wight; you would like it better at the Isle of Wight; Mrs. Smith had a cousin who always went to the Isle of Wight and she spoke very well of it.

“But of course you know what you like and you must have it!” suddenly cried Mrs. Traill, her lovely battered face alight
with
the kindest of smiles. “And that very dark green does look awfully good against the greeny blue … well, I must fly … I’m in the middle of an orchid … very difficult to draw.”

She tottered away on one of the pairs of curious Mexican or Japanese sandals which she affected, and Christine drew a stealthy breath of relief and looked affectionately at the ivy sprays.

MRS. BENSON’S MANNER
had become ever more condescending as the days drew on towards her lodger’s departure. Such time as she could spare from the pursuit of Bingo and harrying Mr. Benson (who harried back with all his might and main; no one need sigh for Mr. Benson) was given to the tolerant questioning of Christine; how had she got on today, there was always plenty to do, moving, wasn’t there? Those old places, they often had the dry rot, give her a Council house any day—and on the last evening, as Christine was letting herself into the house about nine o’clock, she said, laughing with her head on one side: “I’ll be paying you a visit one of these days, up in your little nest, you see.”

“That will be the day,” Christine retorted robustly, feeling that their mutual dislike could be brought into the open now that they were about to part, she heartily trusted, for ever.

“Yer off tomorrow, then,” Mrs. Benson said, after a pause, shocked and surprised.

That stuck-up toffee-noses never answered back was one of the foundations of the Benson creed. Decent pretence of neighbourliness must always mask spite, nay, courtesies must be exchanged, like those taking place between two knights about to knock each other silly in a tournament.

“Yes. They’ll be here in the afternoon, about three, with … the … stuff.”

“I’m sure I don’t know where I’m going to put it all. I was saying so to Stan last night. Still, I’ve said I’ll have it and I will. I stick by my word. My sister always says, ‘Ruby’d never let you down, she’s that sort.’”

“I hope it will be … useful,” was all that Christine could force herself to say. The thought of the furniture had come upon her again, in fullest force.

“Oh, I daresay it’ll do upstairs—don’t matter what you give lodgers—they’re all so-and-so’s.” She darted a glance up the stairs. “Don’t suppose we’ll be here long ourselves, anyway, now. We’ll be off to a Council flat. These places are coming down—hadn’t you heard? Making room for one of those big blocks like they got up the Archway. Offices and that. Good thing too—dirty old holes they are—I’m sure it’s not worth the trouble cleaning the place, it’s as bad again in half-an-hour.”

“I’m just getting out in time, then.” Christine nodded and escaped to her room with “See you” shrieking in her ears.

So the graceful old row was to be demolished. The thought was painful, and linked in some way with her memory of That Day. She knew that Mrs. Benson had told her because she had divined, by the instinct that led her unerringly to any weakness in another human being, that Christine liked Iver Street, and for a moment her detestation of the woman glowed into real hatred. Oh, well. Only one more night under the same roof.

She left well before eleven o’clock the next morning. Mrs. Benson had rushed out on some errand, announcing that she wouldn’t be half a tick, back in time to see the last of yer. But Christine, knowing that Mrs. Benson’s ticks were of the expandable kind, snatched up her case and was gone for ever.

She did glance once down to the end of Iver Street. The houses, small, grubby-white, stared placidly at the sun, children skipped and shrilled, a few poor Spring flowers glowed in the little front gardens, all under the benevolent eye of old green Parliament Hill; but of the van with The Furniture, of course, there was not a sign. But, unsuspecting and complacent, The Furniture would arrive that afternoon, grandly secure in the belief that it would shortly be entering some new version of Forty-Five Mortimer Road and then … Bensonia. Don’t be mental, thought Christine crossly, riding in the bus up to the Village. Furniture isn’t like people.

“Hullo!” Mrs. Traill called gaily, through the open door of
Pemberton
Hall, “Come on in … Awful news … Mick has just told me the boys won’t be out for another week.”

Mr. Ryan, who now appeared as Mick, was standing in the hall accompanied by his partner, the slide-rule. He muttered what Christine supposed was good-morning—keeping on Mrs. Traill a gaze at once sardonic and touched with proud exasperation. Look at her, it seemed to say, isn’t she a wan?

Mrs. Traill said, Oh well, she supposed they would have to put up with it, and Mr. Ryan went away to drink some tea. The sunny house responded with hammering, hissing and wailing.

“They put a pipe in all wrong. A wall will have to come down,” Mrs. Traill sighed. “Talking of tea, come on down to the kitchen and we’ll have some. James and Diana will be here presently and Clive, I think, but Antonia isn’t coming until tomorrow. This way.”

The stairs, concealed behind a thick door covered with green baize (“We kept that, don’t you adore the colour?” said Mrs. Traill), were so dark, steep and dangerous, and so shut away from the delicate proportions and airy grace and floods of light in the rest of the house, that Christine was almost shocked, until she remembered that they led to the part where the servants used to live. Of course, anything was good enough for Mrs. Benson.

But when, after going down a stone-floored passage, they came out into the kitchen, she forgot everything in her first sight of a Boiler.

“Isn’t it fearsome?” said Mrs. Traill, noticing her fascinated stare. “And we’re stuck with it for ever, because Mick says they daren’t move it: it would bring both walls and the ceiling down and cost thousands.”

The thing was eight feet high, made of some dirty bluish metal, with a thick rusty pipe coming out of the top and many smaller pipes, apparently made of copper, wreathing around it. The largest pipe vanished into a hole in the ceiling, now neatly squared off.

“Goodness, you don’t heat the water in that?” breathed Christine.

“Of course not!” pealed Mrs. Traill. “Mick said we must never light it; I suppose he thinks we’re all bonkers … as if anyone would dare … No, the boiler is in a little cellar round at the back, oil-fired, and it heats the house as well—”

“I’d noticed how warm it is.”

“—and the oil is in another little cellar. There are four of them, gardening tools and things in the one near the backdoor, and James has made the other one into his wine place. I’ll just put the kettle on, and show you.”

Christine, awed by the spectacle of the Great Boiler, had received an impression that the rest of the kitchen was equally Victorian, for the walls were papered in a shiny green-and-brown design which absorbed light, and the massive old dresser and cupboards had been retained, newly painted white.

But although this kitchen did not correspond with those Dream ones promoted by advertisers, she now saw that it was efficient. The cooker was of the newest design, and on the walls were many shining devices for unscrewing and grinding and opening. There was something else there: cosiness. As this had been the only redeeming feature of Forty-Five Mortimer Road, Christine had grown to rely upon it, and now, having missed it for some months, she welcomed it. But, because she was a Smith, she said nothing.

“Cosy, isn’t it?” Mrs. Traill glanced at her. How dreary some people were. Never a word of appreciation.

“It’s a bit dark, isn’t it?” Christine said, and indeed she thought so, not realising that much of the cosiness was due to the dimness.

“Oh, we did that on purpose—had a dark paper, I mean. I chose it. Antonia had taken a fancy to something all over little houses. It is queer, she’s so good about clothes, and has no feeling at all about that kind of thing. Let’s go and see the cellars.”

While they were looking round the whitewashed walls of Mr. Meredith’s wine-cellar, where the racks and bins awaited their tenants, there were muffled sounds of arrival from upstairs.