Charlie and Me. The Saga Continues

Charlie and Me. Chapter 10

More fun and games, and a couple of new characters to play with. I'll dedicate this one to Bobbi, because I just met her and it seems like a nice thing to do.

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Charlie used to be a professional music tutor, before our money made her a lady of leisure. But she does pay her dues. She now, for free, teaches music to disadvantaged children at a place not far from us. Unlike her general behaviour with the world at large, she is incredibly patient when she teaches, coaxing the absolute best out of these children. She is astounding. I’ve been to watch her teach, and tears were welling in my eyes. She is so gentle with them.

I pay my dues too. I go over and do general handiwork on the place. I’m reasonably good at DIY, but a bit slow. I won’t bodge it. If I’m going to do a job the anal retentive in me comes out; I have to do it properly. So, free but slow. Charlie and I pay for materials too, so the powers that be don’t tend to whinge too much if I take a long time.

I said I’m reasonably good at DIY. Just don’t ever ask me to do any plastering for you. Plastering is an acquired skill, and I haven’t acquired it. For me, some days it’s easy. I can get the plaster on so smooth it looks like glass. Bish bosh, run a wet float down it, you can see your face in it till it dries off. Other days it looks as if I used a rake to do the polishing off. I’ve been reduced, on occasion, to sanding things down so the job doesn’t look like a relief map of the moon. Sanding plaster creates a lot of dust. It takes me longer to clean up than it took me to do the job in the first place.

The plasterer Arry’n’Barry use has about my level of competence.

The place where Charlie teaches , and I don’t bodge things, is where she met and befriended Constance, who has a problem. Bollocks. As if I weren’t juggling enough things by this point, since this was right in the thick of the Len’s Patio Doors project..

Constance is a rather starchy mid thirty year old who voluntarily devotes a lot of time to teaching English language to the children, while holding down a high powered job. I said starchy. She may be only about four or five years older than we are, but she behaves as if she were born in the days of Queen Victoria. She is the only person I know for whom Charlie tries, though mainly unsuccessfully, to moderate her swearing. ‘Charlotte (Charlotte? Who she?), there really is no need for such words. They are a sign of an inadequate intellect and a limited vocabulary.’ You may be able to imagine the stream of invective this would normally unleash from Charlie, but it is just as if she were back at school. ‘Sorry, Constance.’ Charlie saying ‘Sorry?’ That’s rare.

I first met Constance when Charlie invited her home one day when they’d both been teaching. Somehow or other her grammar sessions and my plaster raking had never overlapped. I knew she was a friend of Charlie’s, though; Charlie often talked about her.

‘Constance this is Rick, Rick this is Constance.’

Constance extended a very small but rather elegant and well manicured hand.

‘How do you do Richard? I am very pleased to meet you.’

I glanced uncertainly at Charlie, a bit unsettled by the formality and the Roedean accent. Being around Charlie has accustomed me to a woman who swears like a baggage handler when he can’t get your suitcase to break open and strew your smalls all over the conveyor belt.

Then I took a brief time to examine our guest. The first thing I noticed is that she is tiny, about 4’ 6” at best; she won’t pay VAT on her shoes. I later found out that her mother, Emily Won, is half Chinese, and Constance inherited her stature from Emily and her hair from her father Peter, an Old Etonian who met Emily when he was in the diplomatic service in Beijing. Constance is the only person I know whose paternal parent was expelled from a foreign country for spying, which seems to be the main function of special envoys when they aren’t being diplomatic.