Moira was a most satisfactory confidante. She listened without comment, beyond a faint outward breath or a movement of lids and eyebrows, while Christine explained exactly what had been done to her.
It was not a ‘pouring-out’. The story was told without drama or much emphasis, and she did not interrupt herself with condemnations of her employers; a kind of sulky cheerfulness best describes her manner. But Moira thought it kindest not to inflame feelings already wounded and startled to full capacity by any repetition of her first “How could they!”
“I don’t blame them,” Christine ended. “Mr Lennox has got a right to do what he likes with his own flat and … and … my flat … they do want it for some very old friends … I’ve heard them speak of them … very old friends …” The first gulp came. She was leaning slightly forward in her chair, paler than usual, her hands linked together, staring into Moira’s bright little leaping fire. She swallowed painfully, not looking at her friend.
“Nice to see a fire on a day like this,” she said in a moment. “You’d think it would be too warm, being so mild outside. But it’s just nice.”
“Ah, he’s a clever boy, my fire,” Moira said, gently moving the poker among coal and miniature logs from the prunings of Frank’s apple trees. “He knows when to burn up fiercely and when to just tick over, as they say.”
“Of course you don’t get the gales here like we do … up … up … our … way … being so high.”
“No. We’re nicely sheltered here.”
A longish pause followed. But Moira was not merely looking gloomily into the flames; she was thinking, compressing and uncompressing her lips, raising her eyebrows calculatingly, and occasionally a small smile of satisfaction would pass over her face. Presently Christine looked up, and, the lump in her throat having been more or less satisfactorily dealt with, laughed.
“Why are you making all those faces?”
“Was I?” Moira’s ready laugh came out too.
“Smiling away—I’m glad someone’s got something to smile about. Fact is, I haven’t really faced it yet, Moira. What am I going to do? Where can I go? I’ve got a bit of money, but—”
“Now look, Chris. This was Frank’s idea really. You know I’ve got this back—”
“Yes I do, and very good it must’ve been for it, you standing out in the rain like that, you crazy monkey. How is it, dear?—I’m sorry, I was so taken up with my own troubles, I never asked.”
“It’s been bad lately. And Dr. Mason says it isn’t going to get much better. He says I’ve got to learn to live with it (so helpful, but I do know what he means) and I’d sooner do that than be everlastingly dosing myself up with their old tablets and hoping. I must just accept it. You know. But Frank said—when I ’phoned him this morning about you, I was so upset I had to talk to him—he said, right away, why not ask her if she’d come to us? There!”
The twitch of pain that moved her face as she sat upright and looked at Christine with her eyes very wide-open did not affect the eager brightness of her expression. She looked all cheerfulness and hope.
“Do you mean … for a visit?” Christine asked—cautiously, but the glow on her friend’s face seemed to be already reflected faintly on her own.
“No—no!” Moira shook her head impatiently. “I mean for good. Listen, Chris—” she bent forward, wincing again, in her earnestness, “you could have Tom’s room. You remember you did like it, didn’t you? It’s nearly empty now; he had a lot of his own stuff in it, you know, and he took that of course when he left, and what’s left is so old—I vote we send it off to the Old Folks’ Home at Martindale, they’re just starting and they’re voluntary, and appealing for furniture, or it could go to the Church Hall, they’re always crying out for stuff—and clear out absolutely everything. Curtains and all.” (Moira’s face appeared actually to shine as she disposed of the curtains.) “Then you could have all your lovely Swedish stuff and those curtains with the ivy. Oh, Chris, wouldn’t it be lovely?”
The passionate dark colour that no one at Pemberton Hall had ever noticed had crept up over Christine’s face as she stared at Moira, but she said nothing and Moira hurried on—
“We’d love to have you. You know that. But you could be such a help to me, too, Chris. You see—” for the first time her voice faltered in its full, cheerful tide—”Dr. Mason says this back of mine’s going to get really bad, some day. I may be bedridden, Chris. While I’m still a comparatively young woman. It’ll spread all over me, he says. And I do worry about that with the children just growing up, and Frank not so young as he was. Who’s going to take care of them, I keep on thinking—and you know I don’t worry as a rule. But—bedridden! … You never know what’s coming, do you? I never thought I’d be bedridden.”
“Well, you aren’t—yet,” Christine said with sturdiness in her tone; her colour had deepened and deepened during Moira’s talk. “But—about this idea, Moira—oh, it is kind of you both. It’s—I won’t ever forget it. I’ll always remember what you and Frank said. But—I’ve only got three hundred pounds. I did mean to save when I went … there … but somehow—I suppose never having been able to spend my money as I liked and always seeing it having to go on all those electric things, I went a bit wild when I had it all to myself, and I never saved anything. But I’m not in debt,” Christine ended seriously, fixing her eyes on her friend’s face.
“I should think not!” Moira’s peal rang out. “The day you get into debt will be the one. But why all this business about money? We—”
“I’d have to pay you something, Moira. Oh yes, I should. It … wouldn’t be right.”
“Well, we could work that out with Frank later. Besides, just until I do get bedridden—and p’raps I mayn’t, you never know, you could get a little job somewhere, just locally, not somewhere in London where you’d have to spend shillings and shillings on fares and lunches. I know!” Moira sat upright, as if recharged with energy by the new delightful notion. “Miss Peters at the wool-shop!”
“What-?”
“She was telling me only the other day she wants someone elderly. Her sister got married, of all things, at fifty-six—they’d been running the shop for years, the two of them—and when she went off Miss Peters tried girl after girl and none of them could read or write properly, let alone add up—think how awkward with all those little bills for stockings and needles and elastic all day long—and now she’s in despair and going to try for someone elderly. She said she was well on the way to being ruined.”
“Oh, but—”
“We’ll go round there now, this minute,” Moira cried, glancing out at the silvery-wet trees glinting in watery sunlight. “Oh, never mind my back, I’m too excited to think about backs now. Come along. Look, it’s stopped raining.”
This statement turned out to be a true one for Christine Smith. It had stopped raining.
She was safely in harbour at Avalon Road. Each morning, she made the short walk through the shady streets of Cooper’s Green to the shop of Miss Gertrude Peters, where the varying tints of wool, and its different thicknesses, and the perennial misbehaviour of those customers who left deposits on an order and never came back to collect it after it had arrived, were the most moving events in a gently cheerful day.
Antonia finally married Mr. Herz; and six months after she had given him her hand, and was by degrees giving him her heart, the Lennox-Dettinger marriage broke up and Clive came back to England, certain at last that she was the only girl for him.
Alas! alas for Italy, and Lost Moonlight!
Bessy Mendel set everyone’s teeth on edge by the harsh modernisms of her decorative style in Clive’s former flat, and the house resounded to her smart bickering with Dick and Amanda on the top floor; of whom it was customary for the company to say, “Oh, Dick and Amanda have been together for centuries.” Diana Meredith bought her summer hats and her winter jerseys, and Mrs. Traill’s silvery head was still bent dreamily over her drawings.
For some time,
life continued at Pemberton Hall almost as formerly.
One Thursday afternoon in late autumn, when the shop closed at one, Christine was again sitting by the fire with Moira Rusting—not yet bedridden, though undeniably less active than formerly.
The sun was setting behind those low ridges of the Home Counties near London, hiding their gentle debauched beauty, and giving to them a long, long-ago country darkness and loneliness; and the clouds were scudding across the sky, and there had already been ominous references to Force Five and Force Nine on the afternoon news flashes, and the first crumpets of the year were buttering in a dish before the fire, and Christine had just returned, as from some foray to a dangerous foreign land, from a shopping expedition to the Archway. She had got Them, in the shops where she thought They would be, and it had been, on all accounts, a satisfactory—a really extraordinarily satisfactory—afternoon.
“And, oh, Moira,” she was saying, kneeling beside the sleepily-glowing red fire to add more butter to the already butter-soaked dainty, “I was on a bus … I must tell you. Who do you think I saw? No—not anybody from there—I don’t often think about them now, after all it is nearly three years—yes, doesn’t time fly, it is really—and I was on top of this bus going down the hill, and the traffic’s worse than ever there; I don’t know how anyone ever gets across the road, and oh, the noise … and suddenly—it was all like That Day. You remember. I told you.”
“Of course I remember, dear.”
“But Moira, everything was like it—the buses and the terrible traffic and the advertisements and the dirty houses and those great office blocks—everything. Everything was beautiful.”
The word came out like a bird from a thicket, effortlessly, winged.
“Yes, everything. Just like That Day. And I happened to be looking over the side of the bus when it happened, and I saw her—Mrs. Benson—you know. That woman. And—I know you’ll hardly believe it, I can hardly believe it myself, now, and she looked just as she always has, not even a bit older, and—oh, Moira, Mrs. Benson was beautiful.”
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1965
Stella Gibbons has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd in 1965
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ISBN 9780099560548
Stella Gibbons, The Charmers
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