Mariette Charlton

Mariette Charlton is the Larkin family’s daughter and, by the end of the story, Charley Charlton’s wife and working partner. Her decisive change is not a break with her family but an expansion of it: the young tax inspector whom her father first tries to distract becomes her husband, welcomed by Pop Larkin and eventually established with her in an egg business.

Identity and First Encounters

Mariette’s attention to Charley is perceptive and direct. When he asks how she knew what he was thinking, she tells him she guessed from his eyes because she had been watching him; she then takes his face in her hands and kisses him. The scene gives her an active part in the courtship. Charley’s startled response contrasts with her light, unhesitating touch, while the farm’s animals and crowded household form the decidedly unceremonious setting for their attraction.

Her father’s hospitality helps keep Charley at the farm, though it is never simply a matter of food and lodging. When Charley tries to leave, Pop explains that the eight o’clock bus no longer runs, and Ma confirms that it was never restored after petrol rationing began. Pop then invites him to stay the night, with a bed made up on the billiard table. Later, when Charley says he will find a cold meal on Sunday, Ma is appalled at the prospect and insists he eat with the family. These repeated invitations draw him into Mariette’s daily world before he has formally become part of it.

Courtship and Charley’s Change of Course

The attraction develops alongside Pop’s campaign against Charley’s work at the tax inspector’s office. Pop urges him to take sick leave and make use of the National Health service he has paid for, treating public provision as a chance to stop working rather than as an obligation to return to the office. Mariette’s intimacy gives that advice a personal consequence: late one night she pins Charley against the dark staircase’s newel post, kisses him, and tells him he could stay a week, then the following weekend as well. Her invitation turns an extended visit into the prospect of a shared life.

The strawberry-picking tent becomes a practical turning point. When Mariette learns that Charley is not feeling well, she tells him he needs sick leave and takes him to have the picking baskets weighed and checked. There Pop introduces him to the foreman as a friend and an office man from the tax business. The foreman promptly offers Charley work weighing and recording baskets. Through the farm’s informal network, Charley moves from the tax office into the harvest; Mariette’s place in that network is part of the transition from visitor to participant.

Marriage and Family Welcome

The marriage receives Pop’s enthusiastic consent in the middle of a firework celebration. As Pop runs among the flower beds setting off fireworks, Charley manages to tell him that Ma has said Mariette may marry him if Pop agrees. Pop’s answer is immediate: he will let her. The exchange is brief, but its setting matters: the proposal is made amid family noise and spectacle rather than in a formal, private scene, and Pop’s approval confirms that Charley is being accepted into the household.

At a later family gathering, Pop pours port and thinks warmly of Mariette and the baby. He kisses her with sudden affection and says she could not be more perfect; Ma, unwilling to be left out, kisses both Mariette and Charley, after which Pop and Charley shake hands. The sequence makes welcome reciprocal: parental affection is shown in gestures, and the new son-in-law is included in the family’s celebration.

Mariette’s affection for her father remains conspicuous after the marriage. When she enters with her dark hair loose, wearing a green silk dressing-gown and crimson slippers, she goes straight to Pop and kisses him while he is eating sausage, mushroom, and mustard. Her delighted praise echoes the family’s customary word, Perfick. Marriage has changed her household and responsibilities without diminishing this bond with Pop.

Work, Independence, and the Limits of Pop’s Promise

After marrying Mariette, Charley leaves the tax inspector’s office, a change Pop regards as sensible and respectable. Pop is especially pleased that nobody in the family is now connected with the tax business. In recognition, he gives the couple five hundred laying pullets, setting them up in egg production. Within less than a year, Mariette and Charley have made enough profit to buy another five hundred birds and are doing well. The gift becomes a material foundation for their independence, turning the family’s welcome into a working livelihood.

Their success does not mean that the couple adopts Pop’s approach to money. Charley continues to submit proper income-tax returns, a habit Pop considers a serious mistake even as he admires Charley’s competence with figures, forms, bills, and discounts. Pop leaves much of his paperwork to him, while treating the egg business as another way of getting money from the government before it can take money from the family. The difference is affectionate but real: Mariette and Charley prosper within Pop’s enterprise-minded world while Charley retains his own sense of fiscal obligation.

Pop also promises to build the couple a bungalow from materials salvaged from Sir George Bluff-Gore’s mansion. The project remains unfinished: Pop is too busy with other schemes even to demolish the house, and the bungalow must wait. Mariette and Charley therefore achieve a profitable business before they receive the separate home promised to them. Her ending is one of practical establishment, but not complete separation: family support has helped them start, while their independent house remains deferred.

Narrative Role

Mariette’s courtship is set against the book’s recurring collision between official systems and the improvised economy of the Larkin farm. Charley first arrives as the tax official confronting Pop over an unfiled return; he is then fed at a table crowded with pineapples, fish and chips, jam, tea, and other provisions, invited to stay, drawn into strawberry work, and finally married into the family. Mariette is central to this transformation, not merely its romantic reward: she watches, initiates intimacy, welcomes Charley into the rhythms of farm life, and shares in the enterprise that follows.

Her later life holds both continuity and change. The old family’s exuberant affection persists in Pop’s kiss and her spontaneous return of it; the new marriage brings a business of a thousand laying pullets and the prospect, still postponed, of a bungalow. Through Mariette, the narrative makes belonging something enacted in meals, work, gifts, and touch—and shows that leaving the tax office need not mean leaving the family’s complicated relation to taxes behind.