you.' He raised his glass and drank to her. 'You know I adore you.'
Chapter 3
Gwendolen Chawcer's home in St. Blaise Avenue had been built in 1860 by her grandfather, her father's father. Notting Hill was countrified then, with lots of open spaces and new buildings, and was supposed to be a healthy place to live. The Westway was not to be thought of for another hundred years, the first section of the London Underground, the Metropolitan Railway from Baker Street to Hammersmith, would be built in three years' time, but the site of the street later called Rillington Place was open land. Gwendolen's father, the professor, was born in St. Blaise House in the nineties of that century and she herself in the twenties of the next one.
The neighborhood went down and down. Because it was cheap, immigrants moved in in the fifties and lived in rundown North Kensington and Kensal Town, in Powis Square and Golborne Road, and it was a man from the Caribbean who found the first body in the Christie case when taking down a wall in the flat he had moved into. Hippies and flower people lived up there in the next two decades. Ladbroke Grove was so familiar a part of their lives that they called it affectionately 'the Grove.' In their rented rooms and flats they grew cannabis in cupboards with ultraviolet light inside. They dressed in cheesecloth and the concept of the Global Village was born.
Miss Chawcer knew nothing of this. It flowed over her. She was born in St. Blaise House, had no brothers or sisters and was educated at home by Professor Chawcer, who had a chair of philology at London University. When she was a little over thirty her mother died. From the first the professor had been against her taking any sort of job, and what the professor was against invariably didn't happen, just as what he was in favor of did. Someone had to look after him. The maid had left to get married and Gwendolen was a natural to take her place.
It was a strange life she led but a safe one, as any life must be that is without fear or hope or passion or love or change or anxiety about money. The house was very large, on three floors, innumerable rooms opening out of square hallways or long passages, with a great grand staircase consisting of four flights. When it seemed certain Gwendolen would never marry, her father had three rooms on the top floor converted into a selfcontained flat for her, with its own hallway, two rooms, and akitchen. The lack of a bathroom had nothing to do with her disinclination to move in. 'What was the point of being up there when her father was always down in the drawing room and always, it seemed, hungry for his meals or thirsty for a cup of tea? Her unwillingness to go up to the top floor started at that point. She only went up there if she had lost something and had exhausted all other places where it might be.
Nothing had been painted in the rest of the house and no other rooms had been modernized. Electricity had been installed, but not everywhere, and the place had been rewired in the eighties because the existing wiring was dangerous. But where the old cables had been taken out and the new ones inserted, the walls had been plastered up over the holes but no redecoration had been done. Gwendolen said herself she wasn't much of a cleaner. Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to. When she shopped for food, she kept to the old shops as long as she could, and on the departure of the grocer and the butcher and the fishmonger, she went to the new supermarkets without registering that the change had affected her. She liked her food well enough and had made few changes to her diet since she was a young girl, except that with no one to cook for her she barely ate hot meals.
Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books, learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the
The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of ninety-four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle-aged, care for him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.
There had been moments in his life when he had looked at her with a cool unbiased eye and had acknowledged to himself that she was good-looking. He had never seen any other reason for a man to fall in love and marry, or at least wish to marry, than that the woman he chose was beautiful. Intellect, wit, charm, kindliness, a particular talent or warmth of heart, none of these played any part in his choice nor, as far as he knew, in the choice made by other intelligent men. He had married a woman for her looks alone and when he saw those looks in his daughter he became apprehensive. A man might see them too and take her away from him. None did. How could such a man have met her when he invited no one to the house except the doctor, and she went nowhere without her father's being aware of it and watching her with an eagle eye?
But at last he died. He left her comfortably off and he left her the house, now in the eighties a dilapidated mansion half buried among new mewses and closes, small factories, local authority housing, corner shops, debased terraces, and streetwidening schemes. She was at that time a tall thin woman of sixty-six, whose belle epoque profile was growing nutcracker like, her fine Grecian nose pointing markedly toward a jutting chin. Her skin, which had been very fine and white with a delicate flush on the high cheekbones, was a mass of wrinkles. Such skin is sometimes compared to the peel of an apple that has been left lying too long in a warm room. Her blue eyes hadfaded to pastel gray and her once-fair hair, though still copious, was quite white.
The two elderly women who called themselves her friends, who had red fingernails and tinted hair and dressed in an approximation of current fashion, sometimes said that Miss Chawcer was Victorian in her clothes. This showed only how much they had forgotten of their own youth, for some of Gwendolen's wardrobe could have been placed in 1936 and some in 1953. Many of her coats and dresses were of these vintages and would have fetched a fortune in the shops of Notting Hill Gate where such things were much prized, like the 1953 clothes she had bought for Dr. Reeves. But he went away and married someone else. They had been good in their day and were so carefully looked after that they never wore out. Gwendolen Chawcer was a living anachronism.
She had cared for the house less well. To do her justice, she had determined a year or two after the professor died that it should be thoroughly redecorated and even in places refitted. But she was always rather slow in making decisions and by thet ime she reached the point of looking for a builder, she found she was unable to afford it. Because she had never paid National Insurance and no one had ever made contributions for her, the pension she received was very small. The money her father had left paid annually a diminishing return.
One of her friends, Olive Fordyce, suggested she take a tenant for part of the top floor. At first Gwendolen was appalled but after a time she gradually came around to the idea, but she would never have taken any action herself. It was Mrs. Fordyce who found Michael Cellini's advertisement in the Evening Standard, who arranged an interview and who sent him round to St. Blaise House.
Gwendolen, the Italian speaker, always addressed him as Mr. Chellini but he, the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war, had always pronounced it Sellini. She refused to change: she knew what was correct and what was not if he didn't. He would have preferred that they should be Mix and Gwen, as he lived in a world in which everyone was on first-name terms, and he had suggested it.
'I think not, Mr. Cellini,' was all she had said.
It would probably have killed her to be called by her given name, and as for Gwen, only Olive Fordyce, much to Gwendolen's distaste, used that diminutive. She called him, not her tenant, or even 'the man who rents the flat,'
