thing against one’s interests, which in some people stands for guilt. And in this frame of heart she repented, and decided, as she stood by Charmian’s neatly-made bed, to establish her position more solidly in the household, and from now on to treat Mrs Anthony with remoteness.
A smell of burning food rose up the well of the stairs and into Charmian’s bedroom. Mrs Pettigrew leaned over the banister and sniffed. Then she listened. No sound came from the kitchen, no sound of hurried removal of pots from the gas jets. Mrs Pettigrew came half-way down the stairs and listened. From the small garden-room where Charmian had been sitting came voices. Mrs Anthony was in there, recounting her wrongs to Charmian while the food was burning in the oven and the potatoes burning dry and the kettle burning on the stove. Mrs Pettigrew turned back up the stairs, and up one more flight to her own room. There she got from a drawer a box of keys. She selected four and putting them in the black suede handbag which, perhaps by virtue of her office, she always carried about the house, descended to Charmian’s bedroom. Here, she tried the keys one by one in the lid of Charmian’s bureau. The third fitted. She did not glance within the desk, but locked the lid again. With the same key she tried the drawers. It did not fit them. She placed the key carefully in a separate compartment of her handbag and tried the other keys. None fitted the drawers. She went to the landing, where the smell of burning had become alarming, and listened. Mrs Anthony had not yet left Charmian, and it was clear to Mrs Pettigrew that when she did, there would be enough to keep her busy for ten minutes more. She took from her bag a package of chewing gum, and unwrapped it. There were five strips of gum. She put the paper with three of the pieces back in her bag and two pieces of gum in her mouth. She sat on a chair near the open door and chewed for a few seconds. Then she wet the tips of her fingers with her tongue, took the soft gum from her mouth and flattened it. She next wet the surface of the gum with her tongue and applied it to the keyhole of one of the drawers. She withdrew it quickly and put it on Charmian’s bedside table to set. She took two more pieces of gum, and having chewed them as before, moistened the lump and applied it to the keyhole of another drawer. She slung back her bag up to her wrist and holding the two pieces of gum, with their keyhole impressions, between the finger and thumb of each hand, walked up the flight of stairs to her bedroom. She placed the hardened gum carefully in a drawer, locked the drawer, and set off downstairs, through the houseful of smoke and smell.
Mrs Anthony came rushing out of the garden-room just as Mrs Pettigrew appeared on the first flight of stairs.
‘Do I,’ said Mrs Pettigrew, ‘smell burning?’
By the time she reached the foot of the stairs Mrs Anthony was already in the kitchen holding the smoking raging saucepan under the tap. A steady blue cloud was pouring through the cracks of the oven door. Mrs Pettigrew opened the door of the oven, and was driven back by a rush of smoke. Mrs Anthony dropped her potato saucepan and ran to the oven.
‘Turn off the gas,’ she said to Mrs Pettigrew. ‘Oh, the pie!’
Mrs Pettigrew, spluttering, approached the oven and turned off the gas taps, then she ran coughing from the kitchen and went in to Charmian.
‘Do I smell burning?’ said Charmian.
‘The pie and potatoes are burned to cinders.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t have kept Taylor talking,’ said Charmian. ‘The smell is quite bad, isn’t it? Shall we open the windows?’
Mrs Pettigrew opened the french windows and like a ghost a stream of blue smoke obligingly wafted out into the garden.
‘Godfrey,’ said Charmian, ‘will be so cross. What is the time?’
‘Twenty past,’ said Mrs Pettigrew.
‘Eleven?’
‘No, twelve.’
‘Oh, dear. Do go and see how Mrs Anthony is getting on. Godfrey will be in any moment.’
Mrs Pettigrew remained by the french windows. ‘I expect,’ she said, ‘Mrs Anthony is losing her sense of smell. She is quite aged for seventy, isn’t she? What I would call an old seventy. You would have thought she could have smelt the burning long before it got to this stage.’ A sizzling sound came round the back of the house from the kitchen where Mrs Anthony was drenching everything with water.
‘There’s Mr Colston,’ said Mrs Pettigrew, ‘just come in.’ She went out to the hall to meet him.
‘What the hell is burning?’ he said. ‘Have you had a fire?’
Mrs Anthony came out of the kitchen and gave him an account of what had happened, together with accusations, complaints, and a fortnight’s notice.
‘I shall go and make an omelette,’ said Mrs Pettigrew, and casting her eyes to heaven behind Mrs Anthony’s back for Godfrey to see, disappeared into the kitchen to cope with the disorder.
But Godfrey would eat nothing. He told Charmian, ‘This is all your fault. The household is upside down just because you argued about your pills this morning.’
‘An overdose may have harmed me, Godfrey. I was not to know the pills were harmless.’
‘There was no question of overdose. I should like to know why the pills were harmless. I mean to say, if the fellow prescribes two and you may just as well take four, what sort of a prescription is that, what good are the pills to you? I’m going to pay the bill and tell him not to come back. We’ll get another doctor.’
‘I shall refuse to see another doctor.’
‘Mrs Anthony has given notice, do you realize what that means?’
‘I shall persuade her to stay,’ said Charmian. ‘She has been under great strain this morning.’
He said, ‘Well, I’m going out again. This place is stinking.’
He went to get his coat and returned to say, ‘Be sure to get Mrs Anthony to change her mind.’ From past experience, he knew that only Charmian could do it. ‘It’s the least you can do after all the trouble …’