The Charmers Read Online Free

exclaimed with a sharpening of tone—
    “Chris—this place you’re going to—did you say you’ve got a
flat
?”
    “Yes …”
    “… because is there any chance of your getting it for Lin and Michael? How big is it?”
    “Yes, but Mary …” Christine patiently inserted her voice through the flow of excited maternal instinct, “that’s quite out of the question. The flat goes with the job.”
    “Oh. Oh, I see. No, I suppose you couldn’t … I was going to say, suppose Lin gave up
her
job and …”
    “They particularly wanted someone over fifty, Mary. It said so, in their advertisement.”
    Mary gave a loud exasperated sigh. She longed to see Michael and Linda started off properly.
    Their prospects were uncertain enough, goodness knows, what with Michael only training for his job, though it was true they were paying him well while he trained, and Linda not twenty … It made all the difference, having your own place. She could remember her feelings when she and Dick came back from their honeymoon in 1939; the hall at Glendene with the new hatstand gleaming, and the pretty wallpaper … of course, you could buy a house for next to nothing, in the days just before the war.
    “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” she said, and then, for the Smiths had their gleams of sensibility and affection, “Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean that. I’m glad you got such a nice job and your own place.” Pause, while the sentence
Shut up all those years with Mother and Father
scurried across Mary’s mind and was ignored. ‘What kind of people are they?”
    “Well … artistic, really, I suppose.”
    Mary said simply, Oh help, and sooner Christine than her.
    “But not in a crazy kind of way. I mean, this Mrs. Traill, she was spotlessly clean, and seemed quite sensible. She draws illustrations for those stories in the women’s mags: They’ve all known each other for years and years, she says.”
    “Is it a family?”
    “Oh, no. Just friends, I gathered.”
    “Sounds weird,” said Mary. “Well, I must fly, I’ve got masses to do. I’ll send the curtains off as soon as I’ve got them done, Wednesday, probably. Depends when the stuff comes. Or I could … but you aren’t on the ’phone at that place, are you?”
    That place
was Iver Street. She knew that her sister was not, but could not resist a sisterly dig at Christine’s going to live in that awful street off the Archway.
    Having promised to post off the measurements that afternoon, Christine came out of the call-box, to receive a glare from a young woman waiting outside, with hair piled into that tower which has not been seen in England for two hundred years. She gave her glare for glare, and decided to go up to Pemberton Hall and take the measurements now.
    Pemberton Hall showed most of the symptoms affecting a three-hundred-year-old mansion which is having its entrails pulled about; mud, stray planks, exuberant young workmen with transistor-sets in the breast-pocket where their grandfathers would have carried a pencil, hideous distant singing, a pervading smell of putty, and slapdashery.
    Christine walked in, as the front-door stood open, saying distinctly “Good-morning,” with a firm nod, to a workman crouching in front of the wainscotting with a blow-lamp who said “Morning, love,” with a bright upward glance out of impudent young eyes. The blowlamp hissed, the transistor wailed, and upstairs someone was banging and sawing.
    Christine, taking a tape-measure out of her bag, went right up to
her
flat and shut the noise away and began measuring.
    When she came down again, a big fair gentleman in sporting clothes was talking to one of the workmen in the hall. He glanced vaguely at her as she reached the lower stairs and she said, “Good-morning.”
    “Good-morning,” said the gentleman.
    “I am the housekeeper. Miss Smith,” said Christine, whom thirty years of receiving customers at Lloyd and Farmer’s had left without any hampering consciousness of