The Charmers Read Online Free PDF Page B

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