The Charmers Read Free Page A

firmness. She did not want to see the Dining-Table and its attendant devoted crew being decanted into the road outside the Benson ‘place’, grandly unconscious of the ruthless way it had been disposed of.
    Mrs. Benson agreed. If there “was some pieces that wasn’t too bad” among the vanload, she did not want to have to admit as much to their donor, and thank her.
Gratitude
, in Mrs. Benson’s view, was among the dirty words: it was as well that her tenant should leave before the furniture arrived.
    Christine went into her chilly, be-patterned, too-clean bed-sitter, and cut bread and butter and boiled a kettle, and dined.
    She felt tired, which was not usual with her. It had been quite an exciting afternoon, what with seeing those greeny-blue rooms and the cooker, and taking on a new job, and then giving away the furniture—actually
giving it away
, all that was left, in the material sense, of Forty-Five Mortimer Road—although, in another sense, the house and its contents and inmates were still—could
spitefully
be the word?—alive and kicking.
    They were kicking her spiritual shins, as she sat at the table drinking tea and eating bread and butter; kicking away, and muttering over and over again,
faithless, unkind, disloyal
, and plucking with the experienced hands of many years practice, every muted chord of love and grief in her heart.
    No, ‘spitefully’ was not the word, of course, what a silly idea. She must not take it all so seriously. And she even succeeded in making some timid excuses for herself after she was in bed; thinking that, after all, no one could say she had not been a good daughter to them; and surely someone might be permitted to feel tired, and excited, when, after fifty-three years of life, of which thirty-five had been passed in earning money to buy more and more electric toasters and irons—that someone had shaken the very last survivors off the raft, and firmly kicked the raft itself off into the troubled sea, and was, for the first time, truly Leaving Home.

Chapter 3
     
    BUT SHE AWOKE with the shocked realization that now she had no furniture, and, in that first moment, even considered asking it back from Mrs. Benson.
    At once, she knew that this was impossible.
    Encountered later, on the previous evening, Mrs. Benson had already shown an altered manner, replacing rudeness by the condescending familiarity befitting a benefactress, one who had done that soft fool, what had given all her stuff away, a good turn. Christine, no weakling, did not like to imagine the scene were she to suggest going back on her word.
    She
would
have to go to the junk-shops. Quite an adventure, that would be.
    She had glimpsed them occasionally, here and there, as she went home by bus on summer evenings, cosily peopling them with types she had read about in fiction a quarter of a century old (Christine, and Mortimer Road, did not read anything contemporary except the headlines in the papers).
    A junk-shop was dark, and dirty and cavernous, with a vaguely Oriental atmosphere imparted by a gilt Buddha seated in its shadowiest corner, and some alabaster godlets with chipped noses displayed on a tray outside. Inside, there were desks and tables and chairs, decrepit but fine old pieces, of which the proprietor did not realise the value. They were, nevertheless, easily repairable by an amateur. The proprietor was male, and slightly mysterious.
    The shops explored by Christine on that morning were certainly arranged to appear alluringly cavernous, but they were neither shadowy nor dirty, and in charge there was a Character, bearing small resemblance to Little Nell’s Grandfather and dyed deep in the sacred consciousness of Personality.
    These Characters saw slap through her or thought they did, at the first peep; and indeed, they saw that she knew nothing about second-hand furniture, which was all that concerned them about Christine Smith, and they at once rattled off an imposing history of whatever object she