The Charmers

  Christine marched down to the hall. The thought of that cup had suddenly become more attractive. Miss Marriott ought to get a good tonic; it must be all the worry at that place that had upset her nerves—and even now, when all the fuss seemed to be over, Christine had not a real clue as to what it had been about. Some man singing a song in the Long Room …?

  She turned back, prompted by some instinct which she did not think about, for a last look at the landing. The candle burned on, the far moon sailed, the curtains hung straight and full. Suddenly, the one on the left floated straight out, hung there a second revealing the empty sill behind it, and subsided again just as if a hand had given it a quick, impudent flick. Funny, thought Christine, smiling; you had to smile, it was only a breeze but it was just as if someone was teasing … can’t catch me … had you that time … but all in good nature, as it were. Well, we couldn’t have had better weather for our party, could we?

  Silly of me, just as if I was asking someone, she thought; I suppose I’d better go and find that cup.

  Chapter 19

  SOMETIME IN THE small hours, Clive Lennox’s little car drove into the Square and stopped outside the iron gates. Hell, he thought, glancing at the lighted windows, they’re still at it—though he had expected them to be. He locked the car and pushed open the gates and went, rather slowly, up the steps.

  The door opened before he could put in his key.

  “Darling …” Antonia said agitatedly, standing there alone, and almost on tiptoe in her smoky draperies … “Thank God you’re here …”

  “Something wrong?” with a tired smile.

  “Not wrong, really, but … Oh, Clive … I heard Maurice singing.”

  “Maurice?”

  “Well, a voice so like his I could have sworn … in the Long Room … and it … he … was singing … Oh, darling … he was singing ‘A Feast of Lanterns’.”

  He took her by the elbow and steered her down the passage.

  “Let’s get a drink … then you can tell me all about it.”

  The ‘all’ held the note he would have used to a child, but when they were almost at the door of the room overlooking the garden, in which most of what was left of the party had collected, he burst out, “My God, Antonia, you are extraordinary … don’t you want to know how it went?”

  “Of course, darling,” looking back at him contritely over her shoulder, “how awful of me … only I’ve been in such a state … how did it go?”

  “Oh, like a bomb … ten curtain-calls … I got four and some of them were still shouting for me when they brought Max out in front … I think we’ve got a smash hit … and I had an encore …”

  “Fab, darling,” she said with her Christmas-card angel’s smile.

  “Darling! Well, how did it go?” Mrs. Traill disengaged herself from four men to totter up to her old friend and peer into his face.

  “Oh, marvellously … I got an encore … bless you …” he ended suddenly, stooping to kiss her.

  Mrs. Traill was always ready to be kissed and she returned his with warmth. People came up, questioning and eager; James Meredith clapped him on the back with the hand that wasn’t holding the bottle he had been carrying around since midnight, repairing oversights on the part of the drowsy waiters; Diana Meredith started a small burst of clapping; and Clive’s spirits, which had dropped on the homeward drive because he was in his sixth decade, began to climb up like a column of mercury.

  “Now you’re here—” said someone, “couldn’t we go to that Long Room—”

  “Clive, won’t you sing for us?”

  “Oh, yes, do.”

  “Sing the thing you had to encore … what is it? …”

  “‘Me and My Ego’…”

  “Yes … yes … ‘Me and My Ego’ …”

  “No, no,” Antonia called lightly, taking him by the fingers, “we’re going to sit in the garden. He doesn’t want to sing any more, do you, sweetie-pie, and he must be starving”—

  “Starving! Don’t anyone mention food for days—he gave us a party at the ‘Yellow Bird’. But drink is another story …”

  ‘He’ must be Mr. Noël Coward, Christine thought, watching the pair—so tall, so romantic—going down the iron steps. She was very pleased that the first night had been a success. Dear Mr. Lennox, thought Christine.

  “‘Me and My Ego’ … is that one of Noel’s?”

  “I don’t think so …” The voices began to fade into the distance.

  Antonia led Clive to a table beside a syringa bush in flower, where a solitary candle burned. While he went to find them some drink, she sat upright on the edge of her chair, staring straight ahead, with hands tightly clasped, and when he came back with a bottle of champagne she impatiently waved away him and his glass and his question as she burst out—

  “Oh, do let me tell you … I’m dying to …” and began at once on the story.

  Clive sat listening. He was very tired; his throat was taut; his eyes were stinging; he felt as if the sixty-year-old machine that housed him were rattling like a vintage car at the end of the run to Brighton; and the story was just absurd enough—told in Antonia’s little-girl voice with her enormous eyes silly with wonder—to irritate him; there was pain, too; of several kinds.

  “Nonsense,” he said flatly, when she had finished.

  “I had a feeling you’d say that. I do know it sounds like nonsense … Open that, will you?” indicating the neglected bottle.

  “I don’t know what to say, Antonia. I’m damned tired and … I don’t know what to say.” He untwisted the last wire and began cautiously to ease out the cork.

  “Well you might say something … I’ve been so longing to tell you … I was … oh, thrilled and scared and so excited, and I thought Clive’s the person to share this with … You were so fond of him … You were such friends.”

  “Can’t you see …” he paused while he deftly steered the wine into their glasses “… it’s just because of that that I can’t take it quite as you do … You see, darling, I can’t feel certain you heard anything at all. Did you ask anyone else if they’d heard it?”

  She shook her head. “I thought if I did it would start silly rumours—you know people love that sort of thing—and most of the people here didn’t know Maurice well, it would just have been a kind of stunt …”

  “But Fabia—or Diana or James? Didn’t you ask any of them?”

  “Fabia’s been so high all the evening I thought she’d start telling everyone—and I couldn’t get at Diana. She and James have been stuck in that shed showing people her wretched pots and twizzling that wheel round … I did ask Christine …”

  “And what did she say? That was sensible of you, she’d have heard anything—if there was anything to hear …”

  “Oh, I don’t agree at all. She’s the last person—about as psychic as a teapot, I should think—but she was in the hall all the first part of the evening and she must have heard it if …”

  “There you are, you see.” The comment ended the sentence for her.

  “But not at all, Clive! It doesn’t follow that if she didn’t hear it … If she was there she must have … Only of course if she isn’t in the least psychic … Oh, yes. I see what you mean. Oh, dear.” And Antonia sank her face dejectedly onto her hands. “I can’t make you believe I heard it.”

  “Darling, I do believe you think you heard it. I can’t imagine why. But I certainly don’t believe it—the voice—whatever it was you heard—was Maurice.”

  “Why not?”

  Clive shrugged, and there was a silence.

  The softly-burning Chinese lanterns and the newly-lit candles on the tables seemed to make no sensible inroad on the thin, balmy darkness that comes just before dawn in the months of summer; it pressed close upon their auras of painted gold, bringing a sense of night and sleep; hushing voices and summoning up memories. The spirit had crept into the room at the top of the stairs, where, by the dim light, people were gossiping smilingly about the pa
st.

  But champagne was at work again in Clive and Antonia; she began to remember the gaiety of the song heard, or imagined, in the Long Room, and, gazing at the lanterns through a haze, began to hum it.

  “‘For sheer delight!’” she carolled softly, “—Isn’t it delicious? I’m sorry I pounced on you, honey, … Now here’s something you will enjoy. Your daughter has been the belle of the ball.”

  “What?” Clive roused himself. “Glynis, How?”

  Antonia gleefully described Glynis’s arrival in the red dress, and her conversing with Lord Belsize at the foot of the stairs. It appeared that a lot of people had noticed her—she being the only young creature there—and asked who she was, and had admired her looks and been interested to hear she was Clive’s daughter: and Lord Belsize had kept on about her until Mummy was quite annoyed. “She doesn’t like him to be a silly old man.”

  Clive laughed. “But tell me about Glynis. She’d actually been to work with a hairbrush?”

  “Oh, yes. And scent—Lord Belsize particularly noticed the scent—the works. I couldn’t be more pleased.” She smiled hazily, ghosts and tensions forgotten, twirling the stem of her glass. “I hoped that dress would do something for her.”

  “It’s sweet of you to take an interest,” Clive said after a pause. “No, it is, darling, I mean it.”

  “But I would, Clive, wouldn’t I? It’s a question of clothes—and she is your daughter.”

  Yes: but in her answer clothes had come, as they always did, first. She would have done as much, and been as interested, if any other young girl with whom no dress-sense had been involved. Clive was touched; but it was a detached emotion. Poor Antonia—and the cruel word cripple just glided through his mind and was instantly banished. Oh, so much was left, unfortunately; tenderness, companionship, delight in her delicate beauty—but it was all spoiled by this over-riding pathos and sense of failure.

  He had once or twice thought of suggesting that they should try again. But was what had failed in youth likely to succeed in—age?

  Ugly word … he never thought about it unless he were low in spirits.

  “How ghostly that looks—those lights down in the city … just those few,” she was saying, and then, in surprise—“Oh—it’s getting light.”

  He glanced round. While they were talking the leaves and grass had crept into view, all bathed in eerie silver-grey, and suddenly a bird chirrupped impudently. Antonia said “Listen to that darling thing,” and shivered.

  “You’re cold, we’ll go in.”

  “No, no, I’m not. Let’s stay and see the sunrise, I’ve never seen that.”

  “Never seen the sunrise?” Another bird called, an astoundingly fresh sound, as if newly-made. Now the candles and the Chinese lanterns were beginning to look more coloured than alight. “I’ve seen it often in the wars—worse luck—and I can tell you one thing, it takes a jolly sight longer to come up than you think it will.”

  “Oh, do let’s stay.”

  “All right … Fabia’s trying not to look at us out of the window.” Antonia giggled.

  “Let’s go down to the wall. We can see it better from there.”

  “What a child you are.” He put his arm round her and drew her close to him as they strolled across the lawn, gently crushing the smoky chiffon she had drawn for warmth round her head and shoulders, “Aren’t you?”

  Antonia did not reply. If she could have put her feelings into a murmur, it would have been to the effect that she did so wish that time in Italy could have worked: the pressure of his arm about her shoulders gave her the sense of being protected that she was always, consciously or unconsciously, seeking … No one like my Clive, she thought.

  They stood in silence, looking out over the delicate grey mass of the city—where a few green lights glittered—conveying an impression of evil which was erroneous, as they were hard-working ones on the railways.

  “I warned you,” said Clive, after they had been standing there some time. “You think it’s never coming.”

  “But it’s all right really—you know it will—it always has—it always does,” she babbled.

  “Until this morning, yes. But there was something on the late-news bulletin—they interrupted the music at ‘The Yellow Bird’ to tell us—I expect you missed it, I’m trying to break it gently—”

  “Oh, don’t—” shaking his arm, “No, please, it’s horrid—let’s just be quiet. It’s so lovely and peaceful.”

  But the birds were carolling as if demented; joyous shrieks, piercing jets of tiny sound so shrill they seemed to burn the ears like showers of glacial water. The miniature screams hopped from leaf to leaf, far and near, tearing the grey air that was changing, at a snail’s rate, to yellow and rose. Gradually the slow east streamed and flooded with fire.

  “Oh, there he is! Oh, isn’t he gorgeous!”

  Up he came, majestic and ordinary, and every dew-wet roof gleamed argent to meet him.

  “Beautifully produced,” said Clive. “The lighting effects especially worthy of mention.”

  “There—he did come, you see, I knew he would. Let’s go in now, and see what the others are up to.”

  Clive had been about to suggest bed. But it was a word which, absurdly, he found himself hesitating to use. He followed her into the house, leaving the sunrise strictly to the birds.

  Mrs. Traill had been hoping that he was proposing. Not exactly proposing marriage; marriage was something which, on the blurred map of Mrs. Traill’s own matrimonial experiences, was an afterthought; something you arranged when everything else was working satisfactorily. Her tactful glances through the French windows had been in hope of seeing some conclusive embrace, and it was with hope that she studied their faces as they came into the room. But all she saw was what a less romantic type might expect to see on two faces, long past youth, that had been up all night.

  The few stalwarts who were left now exclaimed in horror at the spectacle of dawn. Ones with cars began to arrange to ferry those who were earless back to their homes. A little crowd wandered out into the hall, coats and furs were donned, cars began to drive away.

  “Christine must have brought them down,” Diana Meredith said, yawning, as she indicated the row of visitors’ garments carefully arranged in a row along a wooden chest, “She really is rather a gem, you know. She drives me up the wall sometimes but she brought ‘em down to save us the sweat of going up for them … lose her? Oh, she’d never leave of her own accord; she adores us. But we might want her flat, one day, for Dick and Amanda.”

  In fact, Christine had been overcome by champagne and sleep about two o’clock. She had wondered for some time whether she was expected to sit up; those waiters seemed decent enough to leave without stealing anything; she would have liked to stay up to see Mr. Lennox come in and hear how his show had gone, but really she could hardly keep her eyes open. So she had arranged the company’s coats, and crept off.

  The lanterns were still burning; she took a last glance out at the garden through her window before she got into bed. And then, just as her eyes shut themselves, if someone hadn’t started playing the piano in the Long Room! At this hour in the morning—well, it was the morning now, wasn’t it?—a nice tune, though, kind of gay, and exciting.

  Singing, now. One of the gentlemen. She hoped that it would not keep her awake, and it didn’t.

  Chapter 20

  SHE DID NOT awaken until eleven o’clock, and never remembered either having done such a thing in her life before, or feeling as she did when she opened her eyes. She wondered if she had caught the flu somewhere.

  But quiet attention to dressing steadied her head and lessened its ache, and by half-past eleven she was in the kitchen, making tea.

  The house was absolutely silent. Bells had rung from the church almost next door to Pemberton Hall; rung again half-an-hour or so later; sunlight was reflected sudbuedly into the kitchen; Sunday life was going on as usual in the Square. Christine collected the papers from the front step
and ventured to glance through the pages of her own favourite to see what it thought of Mr. Lennox’s—well, Mr. Coward’s really—show. Here it was … Oh, dear.

  Well, really! Quite insulting.

  Still, he did say that his remarks woud make no difference to the theatre-going public who enjoyed musicals; they would flock to Mr. Coward’s latest effort in their tens of thousands. So that was all right; I’m glad he’s got the face to admit it, thought Christine, sipping tea.

  The door was slowly opened and, accompanied by a low complaining sound, Mrs. Traill tottered in.

  “Hullo,” she moaned, “is there any coffee?”

  “I’ll have it for you in a minute, Mrs. Traill. I say, please don’t mind me saying so, but you do look bad. Hadn’t you better see the doctor? It must be some germ about; I had ever such a headache when I woke up and felt all shaky.”

  Mrs. Traill had seated herself at the table with her freckled arms extended on it at full length as if they must have support; and was looking wanly at her wrist, manacled by an enormous bracelet of yellow pottery which suggested a variation on the marital neck-ring, introduced by some experimental Ostrogoth. She now uttered a short laugh.

  “That’s a hangover, my dear woman. What I’ve got.”

  “Oh.” Christine turned her attention to the coffee. She was certain that it was no such thing. Mrs. Traill might have one; Christine Smith was not the kind that had hangovers. “There.” She handed the sufferer a brimming cup, ebony and scalding.

  “Thank God,” said Mrs. Traill, shutting her eyes and beginning to sip. “Oh, damn this thing—” as the bracelet slid clumsily down her wrist and threatened to break the cup.

  “It’s very original,” Christine said, eyeing the monstrosity.

  “I got it in Chile.” Mrs. Traill could always be revived by admiration. “The Indians make them. I thought it looked so primitive and honest.”

  Christine had suspected that the feeble scratchings of pattern on the thing’s surface could scarcely have been made by any civilised hand, but, having spoken half of her thoughts, said no more. Mrs. Traill droned on—