(He encouraged me, too, but I really do have it). And now she thinks she’d like to take it up again and make a few what she calls ‘pennies’. As if anyone would want to buy the kind of thing she’ll make! She’s got quite a good bit of money of her own and James has a good pension; they don’t need ‘pennies’! It’s all an excruciating bore, and we shall never hear the end of it.”
The first sign that Diana’s plans were beginning to take shape was her appearance in a series of becoming overalls, in lilac or blue or pink, and made of the newest materials that almost take care of themselves, so washable and dryable and uncreasable and generally biddable are they. Very elegant she looked in these loose, flower-hued garments, with her dark hair newly and expertly cut so as to bring out its streaks of silver, and what Christine thought of as ‘a kind of French fringe’.
“Real artists don’t get themselves up in special clothes,” Mrs. Traill said scornfully, one afternoon when Diana had gone humming down the garden to inspect the proposed workshop, wearing one of these creations. “They’re much too busy thinking about their work. You don’t see me,” she enlarged, “buying clothes to draw in.”
“Well, no, Mrs. Traill, but I would say you have your own definite style.”
“One works it out over the years,” murmured Mrs. Traill, pleased, “but with me it’s been more or less unconscious. I’ve never been a clothes-horse, and I could never stick those ’lons and ’lenes she’s so sold on, I must have natural materials. It’s nothing but subconscious laziness, you know, really, liking all these materials that practically wash and dry themselves. That khaki shift of mine takes three days to dry properly.”
Christine was tactfully silent. The gloomy garment in question seemed to her much less desirable than Diana’s airy new acquisitions; she had been quite depressed by it, hanging on the line for the three days, dripping, and slowly swinging its mud-coloured scanty folds in the breeze.
“There is no substitute for wool! as the adverts, say,” she contributed at last, with a little laugh.
“Well, it’s quite true, for once. And it’s so dotty, because all those pinks and blues will only get all over clay … It’s a waste of ‘pennies’… but they’re her ‘pennies’ and if she likes to waste them … I’d better go and see what she’s up to, I suppose.”
She wandered away, and Christine knew that she would give advice, and point out the advantages and disadvantages of the shed, in the kindest way.
She had learned that the criticisms of one another made by Mrs. Traill and Mrs. Meredith, often in strong terms, did not mean that they did not like one another, nor, when they groaned in concert about Miss Marriott, deploring her mismanagement of her affairs, did it mean that they would offer her anything but eager sympathy and affection when the opportunity came.
Miss Marriott herself greeted any statement of strong opinion on the part of Diana with the muttered, “She’s bonkers and we have to face it,” which Christine had first heard Diana herself mutter about Mrs. Traill.
Mr. Lennox and Mr. Meredith did not criticize one another to her, nor did they comment upon the behaviour of the ladies unless everyone was gathered together round the supper-table or in the Long Room. Then their judgements or criticisms were delivered so that everyone could hear them, and were often emphasized with a wave of James’s cigar or Clive’s long double-jointed finger.
Christine had come to the conclusion, after some vague thoughts, that in Mortimer Road you were always running people down and didn’t really like them though you were nice to their face, and in Pemberton Hall you ran people down and weren’t always nice to their faces but you did like them.
The next thing that happened was Diana announcing that she had been over to Hampstead enquiring about paint and whitewash and brushes, and was going to do up the shed herself.
“You can’t,” Mrs. Traill said flatly. “You’re no good at that kind of thing. Remember the time we had that room in Swiss Cottage, and we thought we’d do it up ourselves because the landlord was such a swine about repairs, and the mess you made of the ceiling?”
“Well, ceilings! I’m not proposing to do the ceiling. Of course I shall get a man in to do that.”
“Why not get a man in to do the lot?” James suggested, who, Christine could see, was dismayed at this plan. (Mr. Meredith was the kind of gentleman, she thought, who believed that Men, respectful, able-bodied and willing, still lived just round the corner and could be ‘got in’.)
“Actually I can’t remember the ceiling,” said Diana. “It isn’t the ordinary kind, anyway.”
“It’s beams,” said Mrs. Traill, “quite old beams. You could scrape them down and wax them and they would look very good.”
“I am not waxing beams, Fabia. Good heavens, there’s no need to tart the place up—I only want a shed to work in.”
“What are the walls?” Antonia enquired languidly.
“Brick. They’re filthy. If you had them washed down and re-whitewashed, with the beams waxed, they’d look very good indeed.” Mrs. Traill’s eye was sparkling.
“Pink would look heavenly,” said Antonia. “Rather Spanish.”
“I don’t want it to look Spanish or anything else: it isn’t going to be a show-place.”
“We could have tea in there on wet days,” put in Clive; he and James were laughing.
Diana put her head in her hands.
“I wish I’d never mentioned the damned place … just leave me alone to get on with it in my own way, will you, please?”
Someone changed the subject. The next afternoon Christine, coming out to hang tea-towels in the little yard immediately beyond James’s wine-cellar, saw, down at the end of the garden, Mrs. Traill’s trousered form standing by the shed, serenely removing its one small window.
“She’ll need more light,” she called, “she’s gone over to the Arrchway to buy a frame … I hope she won’t make a muddle of the measurements.”
“Can you do all that? Fancy,” marvelled Christine, coming to stand by her and watch for a moment the skilled use of the chisel.
“One of my husbands taught me. He carved,” Mrs. Traill answered. “I enjoy it.”
“And can you put the new window in and everything?”
“Oh yes.”
“The glass too?”
“Oh yes. I like doing it.”
And, Diana reappearing at this moment followed by a largish Scout earning his Bob-a-Job by carrying the window-frame, Christine went back to the house, followed by Diana’s favourable comments on the parking facilities in Archway as compared with those of Knightsbridge. (Christine knew that, after her first attempts, she had given up taking the Mini-minor they had bought down into London; it was permanently sitting outside Pemberton Hall in the Square, and was used only as a local runabout and for very occasional drives out into what Diana, emphatically said, were the “hopelessly spoiled Home Counties.”)
By the evening the window was installed, and Mrs. Traill was carefully polishing a large single pane that flung back the late sun.
“Queer how they had no idea in those days of letting in light,” she commented to Christine, who had strolled out to gaze and admire. “You’d think they were afraid of it.”
“I don’t like too much glare, myself,” said Christine, and Mrs. Traill turned and looked at her as she said, “Oh, I adore light. I can’t have too much of it.”
“It does fade the carpets,” Christine said; she sometimes had a sensation as if every tradition she had ever held was being swept away in a great flood of novelty, that, though it usually carried her along willingly and even pleasurably, must sometimes be resisted if she were not to feel entirely without roots.
And it did fade the carpets.
“Blow the carpets,” said Mrs. Traill absently, and then Diana came out of the shed, where she had been dabbing ineffectually at a wall with a broom, and sighed that the glare in there was unbearable and she would never be able to see.
“I’ll fix you up a blind,
blast you,” Mrs. Traill promised, with no lessening of amiability.
Christine, after this, expected to see Mrs. Traill take over the transformation of the shed entirely, and that was what happened. Diana was told to concentrate on finding herself a suitable wheel and buying all the other things that she would require, and Mrs. Traill neglected possible commissions for drawings byabandoning hervisits to editors and telephone talks with her contacts, while contentedly scraping and distempering and waxing from early in the morning until dusk.
The beams disappointed her by turning out to be of some inferior wood, instead of the oak for which she had hoped. But when they were well-scraped, and painstakingly oiled, and she had given herself what she said might be “my strained heart come back again” by reaching up to polish them during the whole of one very hot day, they did look clean.
But Christine’s opinion was that you could say no more than that for them. A white ply-board ceiling put up by a handyman, she thought, would have been easier, and would have looked twice as nice.
“Well, I can’t help it if she is worn to a frazzle coping with my beams,” Diana said, coming out of Mrs. Traill’s bedroom, where the latter was extended prone. “I told her I didn’t care how they looked … now we shall never hear the end of it, I suppose, because they don’t look as good as oak would have.”
“Isn’t she coming down to supper?” Christine asked.
“No … I’m going to make her one of my special cold soups … is there any sherry open?”
Restored by the soup and a night’s sleep, Mrs. Traill was at work again the next morning, fixing up the blind to meet Diana’s complaint of glare; lavishing delicate care and ferocious energy on rotting brick and worm-eaten wood, and Diana alternately grumbling at her for being an ass and cherishing her with nourishing recipes when she fell exhausted on her bed. Sometimes she did both at once, offering the tray laden with egg-nog while telling Mrs. Traill that she was bonkers and they had to face it.
When, after fourteen days concentrated labour, the shed was finally painted a greenish-blue carefully mixed by Mrs. Traill herself, and its floor had been covered with Japanese matting, and she announced that it was finished, Christine felt that everything seemed flat; she had been unconsciously looking forward to some kind of climax at the end of all the activity. She ventured to ask if they were going to have a house-warming?
“Who for? The wheel?” Diana asked smartly.
“No, Mrs. Meredith, but people do, don’t they? When they move in, and it is a kind of moving in, if you’re going to be working there most days.”
“We’ll see. Mr. Lennox’s first night is coming off in about three weeks, I might ask some people in, if I can get enough stuff done to show them, and we could sit up and wait for the notices to come in—I hope those swine of critics will lush themselves well up beforehand, or they’ll be bitchy about it … I’ll talk to the others.”
Apparently the others agreed because, later that day, Christine found Mrs. Traill fallen into a fever of longing for pink and orange Chinese lanterns to hang from the trees in the garden, where the party was to be held. Dressed in her oldest and toughest trousers and an ancient sleeveless blouse, she descended next day into London in search of them.
“That’s it, you see,” Diana observed to Christine while they were drinking coffee in the garden after her departure. “If you ever wonder why she’s had four husbands and got through them all, that’s the answer. She gets these ideés fixes about things, absolute obsessive compulsions, and everything has to go overboard until she’s worked through them. Husbands and all. I know, I’ve seen her at it, for getting on for forty years … Men just will not stand it. Of course,” she went on absently, “she didn’t wear out all four of them; she was married the first time at eighteen, that gives her about nine years with each of them—not so startling. And the first one died. But it always came to the same thing with the others. Off she had to go, to Mexico or Turkey or somewhere. Even Dick couldn’t put up with it in the end, he was the last one—and he’s by no means a conventional type. It’s a good thing she never had any children.”
“Haven’t any of you, all you great friends, I mean—got any family?” Was this the same Dick who had been crazy about her, Christine’s flat? At least they’d never think of having him and his Amanda here, if he’d once been married to Mrs. Traill. Christine felt a little satisfaction at thus neatly summing up the relationship of her employers—all you great friends.
“We belong to the first generation that didn’t like it’s family,” Diana said hardly, “and was too busy having a good time after the First War to want brats … Glynis was a mistake. Clive adores her now, of course, but when he knew Tasha was going to have her, neither of them was delighted, I can tell you.”
Christine was silent, listening to the Two Voices which, increasingly as the weeks went on, lifted themselves up within her mind. I do think it’s sad when a little one isn’t wanted, said Mortimer Road. They’re a terrible nuisance and there’s no peace, crisply retorted the voice of Pemberton Hall.
Only That Day was silent. She did not know, she had not the dimmest, faintest idea, of what That Day would say, or how its voice would sound. Had it a voice—That Day?
I must be going crackers, she thought, recalling herself with a start and looking quickly at Mrs. Meredith.
“When I see the way the world’s going, I’m damned glad I never slipped up,” Diana was saying.
But here Christine said that it was time she did some shopping and went.
Chapter 14
A NEW NOTE had been struck in the rhythm of her life by the butting-in—she thought of it as a butting-in—of Tom’s sister Moira.
Moira was Mrs. Rusting, and she lived in one of the older suburbs north of London, where a few streets of pleasant old brown brick Edwardian houses—Smith houses—were being hemmed in at a voracious rate of consumption of the few remaining open fields, by well-planned blocks of two-storey houses, with sinks under the kitchen windows. Lately Tom had been talking of Christine’s going to tea there.
“I’ve been thinking for some time that you and she ought to get together,” he would say. “She’d love to meet you, she’s always so interested in people.”
The word ‘nosey’ would lodge itself in Christine’s mind. And then, when she took a plunge and confided to Tom her suspicion that Mr. Johnson was about to desert them for the attractive family in Hampstead, he said, “Moira could help you there. She doesn’t have a cleaner herself, they’re too expensive these days, and Anne, that’s my niece, helps in the house of course, but Moira might just know of someone.”
Christine’s satisfaction at Tom’s having understood her terror of bringing Mrs. Benson into Pemberton Hall was marred by this patronizing suggestion. Just as she had decided that although he might be full of his miners and all those Problems, he completely understood and sympathized about having Mrs. Benson in your home, out he came with his old Moira again.
She made a sound which was intended to convey gratitude but gratitude was the last emotion she felt. A cleaner recommended by Moira Rusting, perhaps on chatty terms with Moira Rusting, and reporting back to Moira Rusting all that went on at Pemberton Hall—no, thank you.
Moira was certain to think that Christine’s employers were ‘funny’. And Christine did not want this. She liked it at Pemberton Hall; she liked her employers; she was having what she liked for the first time in half a century, and she wanted no criticism from anyone.
“We really must fix up this tea-party,” he would say. “I know you’ll like her. Only we’ll have to give at least a week’s notice. She’ll want to make one of her special cakes and they take three days.”
Christine did not mind the week’s notice; of course you let people know well in advance when you were coming to tea, but—three days to make a cake! Moira must be one of those cushion-straighteners, ash-tray-whisker-away, mind-the-linoleum types, of which she had had a lifetime’s surfeit in her own family; Auntie
Beryl, she would be like Auntie Beryl, Christine was sure. Auntie Beryl was a wonderful cook.
She had so far imbibed the manners of Pemberton Hall as to think Strewth, which was one of Diana Meredith’s expressions, but her face, now deeply rosed by hatless days in the sunniest part of the garden, expressed only the amiable interest of a prospective guest.
Nearly six months ago, that face had almost shown what its owner was: her true nature had been so deeply overlaid by the habits acquired in years of monotony and lovelessness that never a hint of it had showed in her firm, well-moulded lips and candid eyes; and the expression had been nearly unchanging in its cheerful alertness. But now it was a mask: a rosy, polite, attentive mask … and Christine Smith was becoming accustomed to wearing it.
But it was not easy to wear it when she realised that the visit to Tom’s sister must be followed by an invitation from herself to tea in her flat. She contrived to keep it on, but—she’ll get no cakes that take three days from me, thought Christine.
Mrs. Traill’s pursuit of the Chinese lanterns and Mr. Johnson’s growing lateness in arrival and slackness in his work seemed to be the chief topics discussed during the next week, though there was an increasing sense of slightly anxious excitement about the first night of what Christine called “Mr. Lennox’s show.”
She had gathered, from remarks dropped by the friends, that while it would not matter to Mr. Coward what the brutes of critics said, it would matter to Mr. Lennox, because he had not yet been on the stage long enough—only about thirty years—to establish him as an Old Favourite, and until you were an Old Favourite, you were never safe from the critics.
And even Agatha Christie, Mr. Meredith said, had come in for a slating from them over the past few years; presumably because she had made a fortune out of not writing plays about The Problems. The sight of a tennis-racquet on the stage, said James with an unaccustomed flight of fancy, threw those chaps into the sort of state other chaps got into about blood sports or hanging.