The Charmers Read Online Free PDF Page A

but nevertheless retained some Smith common-sense, said that she must naturally be psychologically disturbed by Mother and Father dying in the same week like that and losing her job and the home breaking up. So Christine had been spared the fashionable prescription for bewilderment and grief.
    Mary had confined herself to marvelling at old Chris going to live in a slum, and allowing her thoughts to play not uninterestingly around the subject of her sister’s age.
    All were thankful that she had not suggested coming to live with any of them, for all three led lives crammed to bursting with the usual ingredients of family life, and Christine had only her share of the money from the sale of the house to live on, and was decidedly old to set about looking for a new job. There was satisfaction and relief among the Smiths when she announced that she had found employment, and they were now leaving her to get on with it. She always had.
    And Christine, never having had much to tell her brothers and sister, now began to keep her affairs even more to herself.
    She did not even hint to them at her early disillusionment with life in Iver Street, where she found that it was one thing to be reminded of That Day and its revelation by the exterior of the house, and another to live in one of its dark, narrow, stuffy, clean-smelling rooms, and not a word did she breathe about having given her share of the furniture to Mrs. Benson, knowing how the news of this reckless and extraordinary bestowal would be received.

     
    She was sitting in a coffee-bar in Hampstead while thus musing over the past months. April sunlight poured through its wide windows on to the foreign cakes and the dirty English hair and beards. The place was warm and, under the serious babbling of young voices, it was quiet, and Christine was enjoying being there; the sensation of leisure was still pleasant and unfamiliar to her after some months of idleness, and even the aftertaste of a smallish gill of coffee, weak and expensive, which was a sort of
döppelganger
of the real thing, was agreeable.
    But she could afford one-and-sixpence now, without a thought, because she was going to have a flat and six guineas a week.
    Why guineas? She would have been surprised to hear that this was Antonia Marriott’s idea, “because it sounded prettier.” Indeed and indeed, Garfield would have found food for his psychological interpretations of human behaviour in Pemberton Hall.
    Six guineas a week and that flat. Christine suddenly inwardly glowed. It was wonderful, quite wonderful, that she had really got it—especially when she remembered Mrs. Meredith’s remark about those friends of hers being after it.
    For the first time since the day of her engagement, she wondered why they—Mrs. Traill—had chosen
her
. Thirty-five years in one job had never exposed her to the chances and humiliations of looking for a new one, and, from her sheltered retreat with Messrs. Lloyd and Farmer, she had actually assumed that what was wanted was a mere capacity for hard work, and honesty (taken for granted), and experience. Only now, when she had taken in her leisure to listening to people talking at café tables and in buses, did she realise that hard work and honesty and experience were never mentioned. Age was.
    Shall I go over there now? thought Christine. Straightaway, and see if my things have come? She (‘She’ was Mrs. Traill) is sure to have the door open.
    This habit had struck Christine on her visits to the Hall because of its striking difference to that prevailing in Mortimer Road , where you exclaimed at a knock, advanced reluctantly and suspiciously upon the front-door, and opened it four inches while putting part of your nose round it and demanding, “Yes, what is it?”
    Yes, she would go. And—the disagreeable thought invaded her mind at the sight of a background figure doing something to the floor with a mop—there was the question of getting a cleaner.
    The idea was so