The Charmers
Stella Gibbons
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Stella Gibbons
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Copyright
About the Book
Thrown out of her long-established office job, Miss Christine Smith takes up a new role as housekeeper for a group of middle-aged artists. Charmed by a previous mystical experience, her spirituality is nurtured further by the tenants, who seem stuck in their own personal lull. Written in the 1960s, surrounded by social and political transitions, the novel focuses on change, or the lack thereof.
About the Author
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
Starlight
To Spencer without whom …
STELLA GIBBONS
The Charmers
Chapter 1
“AND IT’S MISS Smith, isn’t it? Christine Smith. Do forgive me, but we’ve had so many replies, and quite a lot of them were Smiths. Your letter is on that table somewhere, but—”
She glanced, rather hopelessly, across the room. “I only moved in myself three days ago, and I haven’t even started to get straight.”
She wore a sad-coloured dress of a material resembling sackcloth, which was fashionable that spring, and no jewellery except an outsize brooch with a sullen look on its copper face, but the impression she conveyed was winning; her indistinctly-uttered words sounded softly, and her movements were restfully slow.
“Yes, I’m Christine Smith.” The words were perfectly distinct and the tone bright. “Oh, I know what it is—moving. I’ve just been—I moved out of my old home some months ago and—”
“Yes. Well, I’d better tell you a little more about what we want.”
Another glance, towards the window this time, and then, after a pause, large eyes came to rest on Christine Smith’s face.
“Five of us, you see, very old friends, who’ve known each other for ages and ages, decided it would be cheaper and more fun to live together. So we put our money into this old place and we’re having it made into four flats—no, five, with yours— Oh, and the big kitchen, and a music-room. That won’t fit into anyone’s flat, you see, so we’re having my piano in it and we shall use it for a kind of communal sitting-room when we feel like it. We, Antonia and I, that’s Miss Marriott, she lives in London, she found this place for us, decided we must have a housekeeper. It will be nice to have an evening meal always on tap—unless we’re all out, of course. Breakfast and lunch, and if anyone wants to eat things at tea—I know Diana Meredith can’t live without hers—we’ll do that ourselves. It’s the evening meal, and getting someone in to clean the stairs and so on, and managing the house. And the catering. You see, we all do something artistic. I draw, and Miss Marriott designs clothes for Nigel Rooth’s, and Clive Lennox, I expect you’ve heard of him, yes,” (as Christine Smith vigorously nodded) “of course, he acts, so none of us want to cook in the evening. I don’t quite know what Diana and James Meredith do, admire the rest of us, I suppose. Diana did do pottery at one time but she’s been stuck down in the country for years and she’s given it up, I think. Well, I think that’s all. Six guineas a week and the flat.”
She stopped abruptly, peering short-sightedly into the other’s face.
The large, stately room was warmed by a stove, with a pipe which stood out from the fireplace; well-warmed, and quiet. Its windows, set in a wall papered in a design of white and blue stars on brown, overlooked a square where old white houses glimmered behind budding trees and where, at this hour in the afternoon, not much was going on.
The room was disorderly, filled with the picturesque objects that an artist—of the older generation, at least—might be assumed to have collected during a working lifetime, and the light falling into it was a pale clear orange; thin, yet serene with the promise of summer sunsets to come. A warm, quiet, oddly attractive place, and noticeably unlike the living-room at Forty-Five Mortimer Road, Crouch End, N.
Christine Smith leant slightly forward.
“Are you—offering me the job?”
Mrs. Traill nodded, looking a little bewildered, as if the situation had come to this point quicker than she had expected or meant.
“I suppose I am, really. Yes, I am. Would you like to come?”
“I’d like it very much,” Miss Smith said decidedly. “But you’ll want to take up references first, won’t you? I did give you the name of my employers, in my letter. Lloyd and Farmer, the big office-equipment firm on Ludgate Hill. I was with them for nearly thirty-five years.”
“A long time,” Mrs. Traill murmured, looking at Christine Smith, for the first time, as if she truly saw her.
“Yes. I never was in another job, went there when I was eighteen. But they were reorganizing, and couldn’t fit me in.”
Neatly incised in memory was Mr. Richards’ face, as he sat at his desk that morning, explaining that it was really a question of her age. Very nice, he had been. He did not get on with his wife, it was rumoured. Mr. Richards.
“Mr. Richards, he’s the manager, I know he would give me a reference, he said he would.”
Mrs. Traill put on another kind of face from her usual one and said, “I don’t like references, they seem kind of squalid, somehow. I mean, if we can’t trust each other—” and she smiled. She was lovely when she smiled. Tiny lines and deep ones suddenly, fascinatingly, appeared in the porcelain of her skin, and her wide eyes grew wider.
Christine Smith said nothing. The remark seemed to her plain silly. But she had offered a reference, and if it was declined, that was her prospective employer’s affair. She waited, alert and cheerful, for what was to come next.
Mrs. Traill leant forward and lightly put her hand, with its raspberry nails and faint brown blotches and another cross-looking lump of copper (a ring, this time), on hers.
“I knew, from the minute I saw you that you were the right one. You’re so c
heerful and placid. I felt at once that you’re going to be the person to manage the house for us, and keep us all in order (I’m afraid we’re rather scatty). Like an old-fashioned nannie.”
Christine gave a little laugh. It was only slightly embarrassed, because she had expected the people who had drafted that advertisement to be unconventional—artistic types always were. But in Mortimer Road jokes about nannies had not been made, and Mortimer Road would have thought this a queer sort of interview; interviews for jobs were among the serious things of life, together with money, and domestic electrical equipment.
“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I like the sound of the job and it will be nice to have my own place; I’ve been living in a bed-sitter—”
“Dreadful, so depressing. And so expensive round here.” Mrs. Traill’s tone was absent, for what did it matter how Christine Smith had been living when she was here, and firmly secured, in the neat black and white tweed and good walking-shoes, with her thick greying hair cut short and firmly curled about her ordinary but slightly-rosier-than-ordinary face?
That complexion must be a nuisance, get too red sometimes, mused Mrs. Traill, who had never yet conceded a physical inch to another woman in the battle of looks.
“Now, when can you come?” she said.
Miss Smith was about to reply, “Any time that suits you, I’m free now,” when Mrs. Traill drifted on, “The Men are still in the house, of course. It makes everything fearfully messy but I rather like it, they’re so vital. Mike, he’s the foreman, says they’ll be out by the twentieth. The others are moving in on the twentieth, so—” she hesitated, gazing out of the window, as if her eye had been caught by the sunset.
“Then suppose I come on the twentieth, early,” Miss Smith spoke more decidedly than usual, for being artistic was one thing and dithering was another, “and then I can get things organized a bit, before your friends come.” She paused. “Would it be convenient for me to see—the flat you said I could have?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Traill got up. “It’s right at the top. You do sound sensible, Miss Smith, and that’s so cosy because we’re all scatty, you see, and usually thinking about our creative work—I hope we shall all get on. I think we shall. I hope you don’t mind stairs.”
“Used to them,” Christine briskly said. “Our house had fifty,” and they began the climb.
Pausing when Mrs. Traill did, and looking about her, Christine Smith saw peach walls, their tint deepened by the light pouring through a landing window. Three doors, opening off the little square place.
“A bedroom, and a living-room, and this is your kitchen,” said Mrs. Traill, opening them one by one. Christine only glanced in, and said nothing, as each closed on a vision of plain eggshell-blue distemper and—a spiffing electric cooker, embattled with gadgets from plate-rack to horizontally-opening door. Mrs. Traill did not notice that the rosy colour in Christine Smith’s cheeks had deepened to burning crimson.
“Loo and bathroom on the next floor, they’re minute but yours. No room up here and it would have meant endless fuss with pipes. We rather spread ourselves on your cooker, to make up.” She glanced at Christine. “Do you like it?”
“It’s very nice … I should think you get quite a view from here, don’t you?” The unnoticed blush had faded.
“Over the Square to the Heath.” Mrs. Traill was leading the way down again, and was absent in her manner, as she inwardly sketched a conversation with Antonia Marriott: Never batted an eyelid when I showed her the flat, took it entirely for granted, didn’t even react to the cooker, I sometimes think some people …
But Christine Smith would have agreed with Kipling’s advice in How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin— “I shouldn’t ask about the cooking-stove, if I were you”—because thirty-five years of her life had been given to people who had felt for electric cookers, and radios, and electric fires and irons and toasters, and, later on, for tape recorders and television sets, what most people feel for their families or their God.
But this, she thought, following Mrs. Traill downstairs, will be my cooker …
In the hall, Mrs. Traill paused. She was a small woman, and she now looked up thoughtfully at Christine Smith.
“That’s settled then, isn’t it? You’ll come on the twentieth.”
“Yes. At eleven if I can get the removal people to give me a definite time. There’s a little place round the corner from where I’m living that does light removals.”
“That’s fine. Well … good-bye, then, until the twentieth. Oh, my ’phone number’s HIG 1111. Like me to write it down?”
“Whoever could forget that?” cried Miss Smith, with her first hint of a sparkle as distinct from an overall brightness, and Mrs. Traill laughed back, as she stood at the top of the steps, watching her walk away.
Down the flagged path, between the neglected beds where some greeny-yellow daffodils moved in the evening wind, out through the heavy gate of wrought-iron and into the Square, went Christine Smith. Dusk had fallen suddenly, and the old lamps, with their gentle glow, had come on, and now the five o’clock rush of traffic was in full cry. The rather sturdy figure walked briskly off in the direction of the bus-stop.
She seems a nice old thing, reflected Mrs. Traill, whose name was Fabia, beginning the climb up to her studio.
In fact, she was herself a little older than Christine Smith, but life, and travel, and being an artist, and a husband or so, and even details like her clothes, and what she ate and drank and read and listened to, had had the effect of making her seem years younger. I’m usually right about people. I think she’ll do, decided Mrs. Traill.
Chapter 2
ALONE UNDER THE benevolent glow of the lamps, the rather sturdy figure opened her bag and took out a new-looking cigarette-case and a mildly expensive lighter. The smoke went down into her lungs with the sensation of mingled discomfort and satisfaction that was becoming familiar. She coughed.
Christine doesn’t smoke. It’s such a relief to us, when all the girls do nowadays.
The inward voice was old and contented. It had made that remark for more than a quarter of a century, following it with remarks about expense and, as time went on, about horrors which might result from the pernicious habit.
Christine turned her mind away from the voice, and looked down the hill in search of the bus.
It was easy to forget the kind of things Mother had said, because her mind was full of her flat: three rooms, and Oh, the cooker. Not all those years, during which the sight of the newest electrical device had instantly alerted a number of emotions, none of which were agreeable or fully acknowledged, had been able to spoil her first sight of that cooker. I’ll cook very … I’ll cook some … I’ll cook, thought Christine Smith.
Her cigarette went out while she was on the bus, to the amazement of the conductress who, the downward-going vehicle being almost empty at this hour, had dared to sit down for three minutes.
“It’s gone out,” she said, watching, but not believing, as Christine ineffectually puffed. ‘Cor, see mine go out. I hardly get lit up when it’s done. Want a light?”
“Oh, I’ve got a lighter, thanks all the same … I’m nearly home when I get down, I won’t bother.” The bus stopped, and she swung herself neatly off, and away across the dusky, roaring road. The conductress rang the bell as three late, shrieking schoolgirls scrambled aboard.
“Oh I’ve got a lighter, thanks all the same,” mimicked the conductress to herself. “There are some types about.”
Christine left the High Street and its towering block of new offices, standing arrogantly over the derelict Victorian shops and houses, a streetful of which had been pulled down to make room for it; and made her way into the back streets.
Here, the coarse aggressive faces and the voices of almost unendurable harshness, and the glaring shops, and the reek and roar of traffic, were exchanged for a more bearable squalor, silent and almost dark. The houses were more than a hundred years old, two-storeyed, faced w
ith grey stucco, shabby and dirty, but restored to much of their first modest domestic charm by the dimness, for most of the faint glow illuminating the street came from their windows. Halfway down, a dark passage occurred between them, running between high walls, and Christine unhesitatingly turned down it.
Her footsteps sounded loudly on the paved way, echoing back from the ancient, filthy bricks, that were scrawled in white chalk with moon-faces and the brief feuds and love-affairs of the local children. The still, sharp air smelt of soot and cats.
The street into which she came out was wider, and cleaner, and lit by a shadowless orange glare; at one end of it a high hill, black against the dimmed afterglow, unexpectedly loomed, as if the beholder had been suddenly transported to Innsbruck or Surrey. Christine gave a last glance at Parliament Hill (this was the apparition’s name) as she shut her front door.
But it was not truly her front door, and in the hall she came face to face with her landlady.
Under the glare of a light with a fringed and patterned shade, on the dazzlingly-patterned linoleum, against the wallpaper crawling with what looked like stylized germs stood Mrs. Benson. The hall was bright, and gay, and challengingly clean. “Go on, dare you to find a speck of dirt,” it shouted.
Mrs. Benson looked at Christine Smith from under her terrible tower of brass hair.
“How djer get on?” she demanded. She had, to do her justice, meant to say, “So you got back, then,” but curiosity, which gnawed her from half-past seven in the morning until twelve at night, would have its passionate way.
