Read Online The Charmers by Stella Gibbons - Free Book Online

take off her coat, she mustn’t get over-heated.”
    Seated, and with her coat whisked away by tender hands, Miss Marriott at last removed the hankerchief and revealed a face of purest 1906 Chocolate-Box—Gabrielle Ray and Evelyn Laye and Phyllis Dare—graced by swooning false eyelashes. “She looked, perhaps, if you wished to be ill-natured, eight-and-twenty,” as Ouida said of her Russian princess in
Moths
, and wore a skirt and sweater of the same colour as the plums on the table; the eyelashes were a perfect match to both.
    She blinked round on the circle of anxious, affectionate faces, while Christine, standing by the Aga to remove the kettle the second it boiled, looked at her curiously and thought that she was so like a big doll she hardly seemed real.
    “Divine to be here at last,” Miss Marriott sighed. “How adorable it all looks. How are you all, dears?” smiling wanly round.
    “Rather flat out with settling in,” Diana said. “When did all this start?”
    “Oh …” Antonia made a pettish gesture, and the man with the pink face said eagerly, “It’s all my fault. We ran out of petrol near Ferrow Ley, it’s a tiny place, not more than a crossroads and two cottages, one empty, really, and would you credit me, when I did get to the nearest garage, it was shut. She had to sit in the car for nearly two hours—”
    “Freezing. Heater flaked out,” Antonia murmured with closed eyes.
    “… until I found an A.A. box …”
    The recital continued, the pink one delivering it in a deprecating tone revealing his deep sense of guilt, while Mrs. Traill listened with a grave, judicial expression and Clive and James hovering, darting off to fetch aspirins, or administering sips of rum.
    “… only hope to God she’ll be up to it tomorrow,” and Peter’s tale wavered off into silence, with an anxious glance at his love. She was sucking down the boiling concoction with an air of weary endurance but instantly sat upright and announced in a voice ringing with energy—
    “Of course I’ll be all right. I daren’t be ill with that little swine getting his foot in whenever there’s half an inch … Don’t be silly,’ with a crushing look at Peter.
    He instantly said, well, he must be pushing, and she wailed, “Oh don’t get all hurt now, please. You must have some dinner.” She turned to Mrs. Traill. “He can have some tongue, can’t he?”
    Peter, however, earnestly persisted in his intention of pushing, and was at length languidly waved off by Antonia and seen out by James. He retreated in a diminuendo of apologies, still explaining that it had all been his fault.
    No one said anything when James reappeared, but Mrs. Traill drew the biscuits towards her and Clive leant over the table to cut himself a wedge of cheese.
    “Antonia, darling, this is our Miss Smith—she’s going to look after us,” Diana said, in a moment, and Christine exchanged smiles with Miss Marriott. There was something likeable, something immediately winning, about her; Christine felt that she would not hurt a fly. She also felt that she was rather wet.
    The party stayed long over the supper-table that first evening; at half-past ten, Christine stopped trying to tidy up and went off to bed, dismissed with absent, flashing smiles from her absorbedly gossiping employers.
    Someone called Amanda was providing the laughter: she seemed to have had a stormy time of it following her second divorce and the attempts of her discarded first husband to get back jewellery that had belonged to his mother. In every country in Europe. And then, of course, there was Dick. Christine went out with her ears full of the gurgling, affectionately-malicious voices—Oh, you know Amanda, that’s typical Amanda—he
couldn’t
have, Fabia; you’re
embroidering
. Miss Marriott’s cold seemed to be better.
    Slowly, as she climbed the long flights of stairs, she entered into a realm of silence and peace, while the laughter and voices from the kitchen