The Charmers by Stella Gibbons

some sort of a dim feeling it might do that little Glynis good to see a bit of formal entertaining—he’s given her some money to have the kind of party she’ll really enjoy with all her weirdy beardy friends. Of course she won’t
enjoy
coming to us. But we really couldn’t face having all the noise and the mess here. She’ll just have to put up with nothing but conversation, for once.”
    Even Christine could feel that this was hardly the spirit in which you gave a party for someone, and experienced a little sympathy for this Glynis.
    “Is she pretty, Mrs. Traill?” she asked.
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say pretty. Mostly mouth and eyes, like they all manage to be, nowadays. She’s very
unfeminine
. Too thin, and her hair always needs brushing. And you simply cannot get anywhere with her. I think it’s one’s
duty
to know the young, and realise what goes on in their heads and usually I’m pretty good with them but honestly she won’t let you in an inch. I expect it will be a flop. I can’t bear conventional parties; when we lived in Esthonia we always had them on the shore. Baked our own fish. Caught it, and then baked it on stones. Delicious. But Diana and Antonia are both
deadly
conventional about entertaining.”
    It had struck Christine before now that so far as Mrs. Traill was concerned there was only one way of living, and looking, and thinking, and that was Mrs. Traill’s.
    She condemned in others what she approved in herself; rebuking the yet-unseen Glynis for thinness, for example, while keeping the severest watch on her own exiguous waist and hips, and wagging her head dolorously if, at the end of each week’s ritual weighing, she had put on an ounce. And what could be less feminine than her trousers, and her sombrely-hued old men’s shirts, and her jerkins embroidered by peasants in whom the traditional merriment had died some collective death?
    Yet she had had four husbands. There must be
something
that attracted them, thought Christine, who described as
not exactly pretty
Mrs. Traill’s face, with its brown bulging brow, and heavy-lidded grey eyes and mouth shaped like a bow, unpainted and serene, all framed in the fleece of wanton silver hair.

     
    When Christine came into the Long Room about nine o’clock on Sunday evening, her first thought was one of self-congratulation.
    Under protest, she had spent the larger part of the day polishing, and dusting, and arranging the claw-legged table with its load of bottles and what to her seemed a thin display of tiny biscuits and scraps of strongly-flavoured foods. But there were flowers and flowers. She had spent three hours, picking and arranging them; and gleams from burnished silver here and there, and a warm apricot light from many little lamps lying along the walls. The long curtains at the windows were not drawn.
    She had remained upstairs, changing her dress, while the company arrived. There were only five of them, beside her employers, and everybody was sitting in an informal circle before the fireplace hidden in lilac and young fern; there was a scent from the lilac, and the light rise and fall of voices, and laughter.
    Christine sidled in, so far as a large person could sidle, and, excited and full of pleasant anticipation, took a chair next to a wall slightly outside the circle. A large dark man in evening-dress with a red carnation in his buttonhole at once turned his head to stare at her, with a look of open interest.
    “Ah …” said Clive Lennox, in a tone that welcomed her pleasantly, and turning from where he stood pouring out something beside the table to smile at her, “here’s Christine … she’s kind enough to look after us all.”
    “Keeps us in order, don’t you, Christine.”
    “Won’t stand any nonsense,” said Diana Meredith, winking.
    “It’s utter bliss, we never have to think about a thing,” muttered Antonia mechanically; she was almost lying on the sofa beside the dark man who had stared at Christine, with his