The Charmers

  Christine had cautiously sounded Tom on his views about the forthcoming production, and from his replies, had most reluctantly decided that she would have to ask him to go with her. He had said that that kind of show did no harm, and then added the ominous remark that he wouldn’t mind seeing it himself.

  What with Moira, and the threat of her visit to Mr. Lennox’s show being spoiled, Christine’s new assumption that life would go on steadily getting pleasanter was slightly checked during the month of June—and then Mr. Johnson ‘turned traitor’, very suddenly.

  That was how his behaviour would have been described by Mortimer Road. Smiths are not much good at nursing injuries and betrayals which have occurred on a large scale; they quickly forget what the Germans are, keeping their long memories for that red-haired assistant in Miller’s who was always so impatient with poor Flo, and they accept astounding changes with a placid “Fancy” or “Whatever will they think up next.” But just occasionally, confronted by what strikes them as some flagrant breach of contract or human decency, they come out with the deep organ-note of the melodrama popular throughout the fifty or so Victorian years during which the Smiths were England. Christine used this note now, and thought of Mr. Johnson as a traitor.

  Mr. Meredith and Mrs. Traill had come out from the shed, where they had been making final preparations for the potter’s wheel which was to arrive later that week, and were strolling towards the house, gossiping, when they heard a voice, raised in annoyance outside the lower garden door. Christine was addressing the slight black form, drawn up close to the wall, and looking fixedly down into the bucket of rubbish it carried.

  “Well, I must say you might have given us warning. Going off at a moment’s notice like this. You know perfectly well I can’t get anybody else outside two or three weeks, if that. You’ve been well paid here, Mr. Johnson” (the title was spoken with sarcastic emphasis) “and I think it’s too bad of you.”

  Her firm tone faltered a little as the two ladies came up, for she did not want them to hear her rebuking the traitor to Pemberton Hall whom her own rashness and inexperience was responsible for bringing there. They would think she was inefficient, and easily taken in, and—alarming thought—not fit to be trusted with the running of the place.

  “What’s the trouble?” Mrs. Traill enquired easily, pausing, while Diana stared coldly at Mr. Johnson’s down-bent wool. “Mr. Johnson thinking of leaving us?”

  “Thinking!” Christine’s indignation and alarm gave fresh force to her tone. “He’s going off this very evening—going to live in, in that place in Hampstead. I’ve just been telling him, I think it’s too bad.”

  “Why are you going there?” Diana shot out. “Come on, now, you tell us. And look at me while you’re talking.”

  It was the first time that Christine had heard her address him in the weeks that he had been working there, and the note in her voice and the transformation of her personality contrasted so extraordinarily with the evening quiet of the garden that she stared at her in something like consternation.

  “Come on, now,” she repeated. “You tell.”

  There was a pause. Then he slowly lifted his head and looked at her, fixing his jetty eyes on hers in a stare that was only solemn, neither resentful nor timid.

  “Is a good place there, madame,” he answered. “They give me my own room and a television set just for me and two pounds ten shilling per week.” He bent, and picked up the bucket. “So I finish my work this evening and I go off there,” He sidled past them, almost whispering, “Pardon, madame, excuse,” and disappeared along the passage before any of the three could say a word.

  Diana surprised Christine by suddenly laughing.

  “Oh—let him get on with it,” she said. “What else did we expect? At least you,” to Mrs. Traill, “needn’t fret your social conscience over him … He’s going to be what the good Lord intended him to be … a slave.”

  Mrs. Traill was smiling. “I don’t think it’s only the room and the television set … didn’t he say something once about there being children there? They’re always wonderful with children—I think that’s the attraction. It’s rather sweet.”

  Christine did not think it rather sweet. The words ‘sly’ and ‘feathering his nest’ occurred to her whenever, during the evening, she heard Mr. Johnson’s brush rattling for the last time against the banisters, and she could not see why a black, however clean and decent, should have a television set all to himself. It was the last thing, as we know, that she would have wanted, and what had Mr. Johnson done to deserve this contemporary blessing?

  It did not occur to her that slaves nowadays are at the very top of a sellers’ market.

  Mrs. Traill was coming down the stairs on her way to post a letter about ten that evening, when she was surprised to see Mr. Johnson in the hall. He was seldom in the house as late as this, adding to his habit of arriving nearer seven than six that of invariably leaving nearer a quarter to nine than nine o’clock, and this evening he must have kept himself out of the occupants’ way while finishing up some small tasks or putting an extra sheen on the surface of Antonia’s bath (which, James Meredith swore, he must clean with her toothbrush if one judged by the time he spent in there). Mrs. Traill liked, as she was fond of saying, to think the best of people and to give them the benefit of the doubt, and she believed that Mr. Johnson felt pangs of conscience, and had been working them out by a final, more scrupulous, attention to his duties.

  “Hullo, Johnnie—” she said (‘Mr. Johnson’ had always seemed rather absurd, to her) “just off? You’re late this evening.”

  “Yes. I wash all the broom, the stair brushes, the dustpan, all,” said he. “Clean for the woman that come. I think you have a woman the next time. This woman’s work, I tell Miss Smith so.”

  “Well, never mind, you’re going off to a new place … I hope you’ll be happy.” She studied him in the faint light from the afterglow that filled the hall; let people say what they would, the jet skin and the shining obsidian eye, rimmed by a blue paler than the hottest sky of his native island, did veil him with a mystery that was impenetrable. He was a young male creature, gentle as some gazelle or lemur that had never tasted any food but fruits, thought Mrs. Traill, but that was all you could tell.

  A kind old lady, thought Mr. Johnson, and speaks softly to me. He smiled broadly at her.

  “I been happy here, madame, is a happy house. I told Miss Smith, when I come into this house it say happy welcome. But in that house where I go to live, there three little boys, and when I go to the door I say ‘Yoo-hoo’ through letter-box and they all shouting ‘Johnnie, Johnnie,’ and when they open the door the littlest boy he jump up in my arms and kiss me. That better for me, I think. So I go. Good-night, madame.”

  He bowed and opened the door and went out, shutting it noiselessly.

  Mrs. Traill stood for a moment, surprised. It was true, the hall did say happy welcome. Though the summer dusk and the quiet could have seemed sad, the faint light coming through the landing windows was not melancholy, the silence was not dead; the shapes of the furniture and colour of the flowers all silently breathed the same message, Happy welcome. Maurice! she thought suddenly, where are you, and shall we ever all be together again? And that was strange, because she had not been thinking of him, she had not been thinking of him at all. Yet—if his spirit still existed, wouldn’t it love this house where five of his oldest friends lived together? Wouldn’t he want to be with them?

  And then she remembered how he could always make them laugh, all of them, even Dick and Amanda at their worst—dear Maurice. She went quietly back to her studio, thinking of him. In what unimaginable country was he now?

  Chapter 15

  CHRISTINE’S FEAR OF descending into Bensonia and hunting in its chip-scented shades for a cleaner had scarcely turned into a dread before Antonia Marriott rescued her.

  Miss Marriott had taken to walking on Hampstead Heath.

  She looked out of place there, Christ
ine was sure; her height, and her perfect grooming and her exotic necklaces did not seem to fit in among shabby hazel bushes and trodden grass and old trees. But she went, and on the increasingly rare occasions when Clive Lennox was not rehearsing, he went with her.

  A few days after the traitorous defection of Mr. Johnson, while Christine was still telling herself that tomorrow she would put an advertisement on that board outside the Post Office, she was coming in from shopping—and from failure to put any advertisement on the board, no advertisement was yet written—when she met them at the gate.

  “I hear we’ve lost our Massa Johnson,” said Clive, as they all paused together; Miss Marriot was untying a chiffon scarf from under her chin.

  “Yes, Mr. Lennox, he went off the other night, without so much as a by-your-leave,” answered Christine. “It’s cured me of having blacks as cleaners, anyway,” she went on, encouraged by their interested expression to confess those misgivings which had so recently been justified. “I didn’t like the idea, right from the start, but I hadn’t had much experience with cleaners, I don’t mind saying so now. And sure enough, off he went.”

  “‘He was a good cleaner, as cleaners go, and as cleaners go, he went’,” Clive murmured, and Antonia uttered an absent laugh; she was resettling a loop of hair, peering into a little mirror. “Not to worry,” she said, “I know a girl who runs one of those domestic bureaux, she’ll fix us up.”

  She took from her great handbag a notebook bound in olive leather and stamped with her initials in gilt, and scribbled in it. “My secretary will ring her tomorrow. Happy now?”

  When she ceased to look preoccupied and worried, her smile was very sweet. Christine could understand why a man should look at her as Mr. Lennox was looking.

  “Thank you, it’s ever so kind of you. The only thing is—what are they asking?”

  “What are—Oh, how much an hour you mean. I don’t know exactly, but I do know that it’s under two pounds for the afternoon, because Mary told me. Quite cheap.”

  So long as you think so, thought Mortimer Road.

  “Well, thank you ever so much, Miss Marriott. I don’t mind telling you, I was a bit worried about getting the right kind of person for us … then someone will just come along?”

  “Positive to. (A man, incidentally. Mary doesn’t have women.). Tomorrow, probably …”

  She smiled again, as she went up the stairs before Christine, Clive standing aside to let them pass. Christine heard them muttering something about a drink as they went into his flat.

  The right kind of person for us. Yes, Christine could think of them, all six, as us now. They had their own ‘ways’, as a household, and she enjoyed thinking about her position as their housekeeper. She felt herself to be fully and firmly established, in a job with very nice, refined people … at least, in some ways they were refined.

  When someone known and loved for years is seen again after a long absence, there is a shock; the familiar face has grown older. This was expected by the reason but not by the heart, and it is the heart that takes the impact. Then the weeks pass, and the well-known face becomes entirely the heart’s again, and the change is accepted.

  Clive had not seen Antonia for some years when they met again just before the household assembled in Pemberton Hall, and he had been startled by the change in her; thinner, so fine drawn, her huge eyes and delicate nose and wistful mouth and long neck all older—older—older: Antonia, who he unconsciously thought of as personifying Lost Moonlight, and the Thirties, and a certain kind of dancing. He had never thought of Antonia as growing older.

  Today was a day when she looked younger;—yes, she had reached that stage known to invalids who are not going to recover; and had her good days and her bad days, for age had set in like a turning tide and now the years when a night of deep sleep or three hours in the open air would restore the look of youth, had gone for ever. The tide was going out.

  As he stood pouring and mixing at the table, he studied her for a long moment. Yes, today she looked younger; even healthier. Healthy was a word that had never been used of Antonia: her beauty was not of the kind suggesting the word, yet today her cheeks had caught a little glow from the steady sunlight and the careful pallor of her hair was a shade more gold; she did look healthier.

  He passed her the glass and lifted his own, and they sipped.

  “Good.” She put down her glass, and stretched, “Oh, that was a nice walk, wasn’t it, darling? I feel full of good air and I didn’t think what they were doing at Rooth’s without me, all the afternoon … at least, I didn’t often think. It’s ages since I’ve been for a walk; I’d forgotten what fun it is. We must go again soon.” She looked across at him, “You liked it, didn’t you?” she asked uncertainly, holding out her hand.

  He leant forward and took it. “Very much.”

  “Didn’t find me a shocking bore after all these years?”

  “No, darling, I did not.”

  “Well—” Antonia settled herself more comfortably in her chair, “I think I’ve been a bore lately. I’ve only been able to talk about one thing, and that’s being a bore, isn’t it? But—I don’t know—I think I’m beginning to feel better, somehow.”

  Clive was listening with every muscle in his face effortlessly conveying sympathy. While she talked, he gently held her hand as if it were something precious, and she felt soothed, as if she were standing under a soft rain of scented water.

  Clive’s my Old Faithful, she had sometimes thought, and then accused herself of unkindness and decided that the honour belonged rather to Peter. Clive had been there for longer: in fact he had known him for twenty-five years, but it seemed as if she had always known him … and they had been drifting on sweetly until the holiday in Italy, all those years ago.

  It had rained. You do not expect rain in Italy, if you are an ordinary person and go there in June. It had poured in Venice; so hard that drops from the rain-smitten Grand Canal had bounced up into the gondola. “The bee’s kiss, now …” there was some poem he had quoted … and it had rained … and gone on raining … and she had known from the first that it was not going to work, and of course it hadn’t worked … and now one avoided the subject of Italy when one was talking with him; Clive, dearest of friends, failed lover.

  But it was she who had failed.

  It was all nothing but a messy, depressing bore. And no one likes being a freak …

  “… so that’s what I’m going to do, just ease myself out. Nigel will soon see what I’m doing, of course. You can’t hope to deceive Nigel, but I think he’ll be grateful to me for going gracefully.”

  “He’ll come crawling to you, in a year or two.”

  “Oh, yes, that would be fab! I’m a swine to want it, I know, but wouldn’t it be fab! But he never would, Clive. When he’s run through Ferenc—and at my worst moments I’ve never thought Ferenc would last, he hasn’t any basic talent—he’ll find someone else of the same kind …”

  And so on, for the half-hour that Clive had to give before going to the theatre.

  Mrs. Traill was still searching for Chinese lanterns.

  It was partly with the celebration of Clive’s first night in mind, but it was more that she had now become obsessed with them.

  “I must have them and I’m going to have them,” she declared in a grim tone one evening at supper. They’re somewhere in London and have them I will.”

  “Haven’t seen a Chinese lantern in years,” observed James Meredith, conscious that his interest in England’s agonizing situation in the Test Match had been taking up his attention to the verge of discourtesy. “Probably those blighters have stopped making ’em—now.”

  “For pity’s sake,” Antonia muttered aside, “don’t say that.…”

  “Oh, I’m sure not.” Mrs. Traill turned distressed eyes on him. “I saw some as recently as last month. In quite a small shop somewhere. In Catford, I think it was.”

  “What in the name of all that’s unlikely,” demanded Diana, “were
you doing at Catford?”

  “Someone told me there was a row of little Edwardian houses there, quite unspoiled, tucked away at the side of a great new block of offices. I went down there to draw them as background.”

  “Couldn’t you have imagined them—gables, and those coloured-glass panels in the front-doors? Easy enough, and it would have saved you the sweat,” said Diana.

  Mrs. Traill shook her head. “You know that’s not the way I work. If you try to imagine a thing that’s real, you always miss something—perhaps just one thing—you never could have imagined, which would make your drawing just that bit better. You must always go and look at the thing.”

  “That’s beyond me,” Diana announced.

  “It always was, dear, ever since we started this conversation thirty years ago.”

  Diana shook her head, and Mrs. Traill returned to the subject of Chinese lanterns.

  They continued to click and chatter—in the background, so far as Christine was concerned—during the next week. She was busy settling in Mr. Banks.

  Antonia’s friend had not been able to fulfil the latter’s promise of sending a cleaner along the next day, but she guaranteed one for the end of the week; and sure enough on Friday afternoon Banks arrived, a tall, broad, elderly cockney with a red face, with whom Christine at once felt comfortable.

  This was not because Banks did anything to make her feel comfortable; his manner towards her stopped just short of the line between off-handedness and rudeness.

  “I know all that,” he interrupted her, when she attempted to explain what she wanted done and how to do it. “General clean down and you tell me when there’s anything special.”

  She seemed fated to employ cleaners who ‘knew how to do it’, and was not to enjoy the pleasure of giving instruction to the domestic arts. But what a relief it was to understand every word that was said, and to see a white face—well, plum-colour, if you must be particular—instead of a black one, and not have to be extra nice because of him being coloured, to say nothing of not hearing funny remarks about the house saying things; and to learn, flung off as a comment upon the difficulty of getting up to the Village, that he had lived in the neighbourhood for all of his seventy-odd years.