The Charmers Read Free Page B

happened to be looking at.
    “Yes,” they invariably began, “that’s a …” and away they went; date, period, maker, type, variation if any, rarity or otherwise, had a lady in yesterday was crazy about that, and suddenly, accompanied by a holy kind of smile—wham! the Price.
    Those well-informed articles in the more expensive women’s papers and the informative little talks over the air had done their work. Little Nell’s Grandfather knew exactly what he was selling and what the time of day was, and Christine ate her lunch at an Italian restaurant in Camden Town feeling vaguely snubbed and disappointed. But she was accustomed to both sensations and hardly noticed them.
    Was it because she had made so many tiny decisions, over so many years, so carefully, that she now seemed able to make large ones casually?
    Anyway, she came out of that restaurant determined not to waste any more time hunting for junk. She would buy some new furniture. Modern, perhaps, really modern.
    She turned aside into the premises of a large local firm that was both old-established and progressive, and at once saw something she liked very much.
    Mansfields had tried the experiment of placing an order with a Scandinavian firm, which designed and made a series of light, angular pieces in birchwood, processed to give it the silvery-pink hue associated in popular imagination with the trees, and it was this ‘line’, cunningly displayed against a drop-scene vaguely Northern, that had caught her eye.
    She bought two chairs, and a table, a bed and a chest of drawers and a wardrobe and a bookshelf, lean and elegant, the sparry crystalline grace of the snowflake translated into wood, and they cost her three hundred pounds of her money and she came out of the department feeling rather as she used to at the Office Party every Christmas, when she had had some sherry.
    On her way through the Soft Furnishings she saw a curtain material, trails of bright green ivy on a white ground, and felt that she must have it, so she bought twelve yards. That ought to be enough, and if there’s any over, I’ll just have cushions, thought Christine, flown with furniture and looking rather glassy about the eyes … Lots of cushions.
    She also bought three pairs of sheets and some fluffy green-blue blankets and a saucepan or so. She ordered the curtain material to be sent to her sister’s house at Edgware, and then rang her up, to announce its forthcoming arrival.
    Mary Smith had early escaped from earning money to buy toasters by marrying and passing this task over to her husband. The eldest of her three clever sons had just left home and was training for a job, and she would have time to machine Christine’s curtains.
    She would be glad to do it, not only because she was fond of her sister, but because all the married Smiths (there were three of them) regarded Christine with suppressed and largely unconscious guilt because she had borne the heat and burden of the Forty-Five Mortimer Road day for so long. They had an uneasy feeling that they owed her something. “The same stuff for all three rooms?” asked Mary. “Even in the kitchen? I always think gingham looks nice in a kitchen. So fresh. Linda was looking at a lovely pattern of chianti bottles and French loaves the other day. Very modern. But I like gingham, myself, for a kitchen. Of course, poor Linda …”
    Linda was betrothed to Mary’s eldest son.
    “How are they?” Christine, with skill born of years’ practice in Mortimer Road, turned the subject aside from the desirability of gingham in the kitchen.
    Mary said, Oh, they were fine. Only she did wish they had a proper home of their own to go to and not just a room and use of bath and kitchen in someone else’s flat. Poor Lin, she wouldn’t be having her own curtains for her kitchen, it did seem a shame … And then, pouncing like some mother-elephant emerging from the jungle on a point in her sister’s remarks which she had only half-heard, she