The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he wanted to say. ‘I’m just trying to say “Goodbye” to someone. I couldn’t do it before-think of my situation. I didn’t care-it didn’t matter to me-but there was trouble at the office. My wife had broken with that wretched man Duncan who had gone off with a girl called Irmgard and when my wife heard of it she made him throw Irmgard over and took him back and once she’d got him she took up with the Professor—you saw him twiddling his gold chain. In my opinion it’s a surprise that the Exhibition ever got going, what with the Professor and Duncan playing Cox and Box in the office. But I had to deliver my drawings. And so I saw this girl a second time. I also took a rug with me, a rug my wife had asked for from the debris. Oh yes, I’ve got debris.

  ‘The girl got up quickly from her desk when she saw me. I say quickly. She was alone and my sadness went. She pointed to the glass door at the end of the room.

  ‘ “There’s a Committee meeting. She’s in there with her husband and the others.”

  “I said –and this will make you laugh Mrs. Whatever-your-name-is, but please move on-I said:

  ‘ “But I am her husband,” I said.

  ‘With what went on in that office how could the girl have known? I laughed when I said this, laughing at myself. The girl did not blush; she studied me and then she laughed too. Then she took three steps towards me, almost as if she was running–I counted those steps–for she came near enough to touch me on the sleeve of my raincoat. Soft as her face was she had a broad strong nose. In those three steps she became a woman in my eyes, not a vision, not a sight to fear, a friendly creature, well-shaped.

  ‘ “I ought to have known by your voice–when you telephone,” she said.

  ‘Her mistake made her face shine.

  ‘ “Is the parcel for the Exhibition?” she said.

  ‘I had put it on a chair.

  ‘ “No, it’s a rug. It weighs a ton. It’s Leopold’s rug.”

  ‘ “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Just say it’s Leopold’s. Leopold is a dog.”

  ‘ “Oh,” she said. “I thought you meant a friend.”

  ‘ “No. Leopold wants it, apparently. I’ve got a lot of rugs. I keep them in the garage at my studio. You don’t want a rug, do you? As fast as I get rid of them some girl comes along and says, ‘How bare your floor is. It needs a rug,’ and brings me one. I bet when I get back I’ll find a new one. Or, I could let you have a box of saucepans, a Hoover, a handsaw, a chest of drawers, firetongs, a towel rail…”

  ‘I said this to see her laugh, to see her teeth and her tongue again and to see her body move under its blue dress which was light blue on that day. And to show her what a distance lay between her life and mine.

  ‘ “I’ve got to go,” I said again but at the door I said, ‘ “Beds too. When you get married. All in the garage.” ‘She followed me to the door and I waved back to her.’

  To the back of the fur-coated woman he said, ‘I can be fascinating. It’s a way of wiping oneself out. I wish you’d wipe yourself out and let me pass. I shall never see her again.’

  And until this night he had not seen her again. He started on a large design which he called The Cornucopia. It was, first of all, a small comic sketch of a dustbin which contained chunks of the rubbish in his garage-very clever and silly. He scrapped it and now he made a large design and the vessel was rather like the girl’s head but when he came to drawing the fruits of the earth they were fruits of geometry-hexagons, octagons, cubes, with something like a hedgehog on top, so he made the vessel less like a girl’s head; the thing drove him mad the more he worked on it.

  September passed into October in the parks and once or twice cats on the glass roof of the studio lost their balance and came sliding down in a screech of claws in the hurly-burly of love.

  One night his wife telephoned him.

  Oh God. Trouble,’ he said when he heard her plaintive voice. He had kept out of her way for months.

  ‘Is it all right? Are you alone?’ she said. ‘Something awful has happened. Duncan’s going to get married again. Irmgard has got her claws into him. I rang Alex-he always said I could ring-but he won’t come. Why am I rejected? And you remember that girl-she’s gone. The work piles up.’

  ‘To Canada?’ he said.

  ‘What on earth makes you say that?’ she said in her fighting voice.

  ‘You said she was.’

  ‘You’re always putting words into my mouth. She’s in hospital.’

  ‘Ill,’ he said. ‘How awful. Where is she?’

  ‘How do I know?’ she said. ‘Leopold,’ and now she was giggling. ‘Leopold’s making a mess again. I must ring off.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Ill! In hospital! The picture of the girl running towards him in the office came back to him and his eyes were smeared with tears. He felt on his arms and legs a lick of ice and a lick of fire. His body filled with a fever that passed and then came back so violently that he lost his breath. His knees had gone as weak as string. He was in love with the girl. The love seemed to come up from events thousands of years old. The girl herself he thought was not young but ancient. Perhaps Egyptian. The skin of her face was not rose-like, nor like bread, but like stone roughened by centuries. ‘I am feeling love,’ he said, ‘for the whole of a woman for the first time. No other woman exists. I feel love not only for her face, her body, her voice, her hands and feet but for the street she lives in, the place she was born, her dresses and stockings, her bus journeys, her handbags, her parties, her dances. I don’t know where she is. How can I find out? Why didn’t I realize this before?’

  Squeezed like a rag between the crowd he got to the doorway and there the crowd bulged and carried him through it backwards because he was turning to look for her. Outside the door was an ambitious landing. The crowd was cautiously taking the first steps down the long sweep of this staircase. There was a glimmer of light here from the marble of the walls and that educated man gripped his arm and said, ‘Mind the steps down,’ and barred the young man’s way. He fought free of the grip and stood against the wall. ‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said the educated man, waving his arms about. ‘If anyone slips down there, the rest of you will pile on top of them.’ The man now sounded mad. ‘I saw it in the war. A few at a time. A few at a time,’ he screamed. And the young man felt the man’s spit on his face. The crowd passed him like mourners, indecipherable, but a huge woman turned on him and held him by the sleeves with both hands. ‘Thornee! Thornee! Where are you? You’re leaving me,’ she whimpered. ‘Dear girl,’ said a man behind her. ‘I am here.’ She let go, swung round and collided with her husband and grabbed him. ‘You had your arm round that woman,’ she said. They faded past. The young man looked for a face. Up the stairs, pushing against the procession going down, a man came up sidling against the wall. Every two or three steps he shouted, ‘Mr. Zagacheck?’ Zagacheck, Zagacheck, Zagacheck came nearer and suddenly a mouth bawled into the young man’s face with a blast of heavily spiced breath.

  ‘Mr. Zagacheck?’

  ‘I am not Mr. Zagacheck,’ said the young man in a cold clear voice and as he said it the man was knocked sideways. A woman took the young man’s hand and said:

  ‘Francis!’ and she laughed. She had named him. It was the girl, of course. ‘Isn’t this wild? Isn’t it marvellous? I saw you. I’ve been looking for you,’ she said.

  ‘I have been looking for you.’

  He interlaced his fingers with her warm fingers and held her arm against his body.

  ‘Are you with your wife?’ she said. ‘No,’ he said.

  She squeezed his hand, she lifted it and held it under her arm.

  ‘Are you alone?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d gone.’ Under her arm he could feel her breast. ‘I mean for good, left the country. I came to say “Goodbye”.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ she said with enthusiasm and rubbed herself against him. ‘Why didn’t you come to the office?’


  He let go of her hand and put his arm round her waist. ‘I’ll tell you later. We’ll go somewhere.’ ‘Yes!’ she said again.

  ‘There’s another way out. We’ll wait here and then slip out by the back way.’

  The crowd pressed against them. And then, he heard his wife’s voice, only a foot away from him. She was saying: ‘I’m not making a scene. It’s you. I wonder what has happened to the girl.’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ the man said. ‘Stop trying to change the subject. Yes or no? Are you?’

  The young man stiffened: ‘This is the test. If the girl speaks the miracle crashes.’

  She took his arm from her waist and gripped his hand fiercely. They clenched, sticking their nails into each other, as if trying to wound. He heard one of the large buttons on his wife’s coat click against a button of his coat. She was there for a few seconds; it seemed to him as long as their marriage. He had not been so close to his wife for years. Then the crowd moved on, the buttons clicked again and he heard her say:

  ‘There’s only Leopold there.’

  In a puff of smoke from her cigarette she vanished. The hands of the girl and Francis softened and he pressed hard against her.

  ‘Now,’ he whispered. ‘I know the way.’

  They sidled round the long wall of the landing, passing a glimmering bust–‘Mr. Zagacheck,’ he said – and came to the corner of a corridor, long and empty, faintly lit by a tall window at the end. They almost ran down it, hand in hand. Twice he stopped to try the door of a room. A third door opened.

  ‘In here,’ he said.

  He pulled her into a large dark room where the curtains had not been drawn, a room that smelled of new carpet, new paint and new furniture. There was the gleam of a desk. They groped to the window. Below was a square with its winter trees and the headlights of cars playing upon them and the crowd scattering across the roads. He put his arms round her and kissed her on the mouth and she kissed him. Her hands were as wild as his.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘This is the director’s room,’ as he pushed her on to the sofa but when his hands were on the skin of her leg, she said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘When did you start to love me?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. Just now. When you didn’t come. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. Just now, when you said you loved me.’

  ‘But before?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  And then the lights in the building came on and the lights on the desk and they got up, scared, hot-faced, hot-eyed, hating the light.

  ‘Come on. We must get out,’ he said.

  And they hurried from the lighted room to get into the darkness of the city.

  The Spree

  The Old Man– but when does old age begin?–the old man turned over in bed and putting out his hand to the crest of his wife’s beautiful white rising hip and comforting bottom, hit the wall with his knuckles and woke up. More than once during the two years since she had died he had done this and knew that if old age vanished in the morning it came on at night, filling the bedroom with people until, switching on the light, he saw it staring at him; then it shuffled off and left him looking at the face of the clock. Three hours until breakfast; the hunger of loss yawned under his ribs. Trying to make out the figures on the clock he dropped off to sleep again and was walking up Regent Street seeing, on the other side of it, a very high-bred white dog, long in the legs and distinguished in its step, hurrying up to Oxford Circus, pausing at each street corner in doubt, looking up at each person as he passed and whimpering politely to them: ‘Me? Me? Me?’ and going on when they did not answer. A valuable dog like that, lost! Someone will pick it up, lead it off, sell it to the hospital and doctors will cut it up! The old man woke up with a shout to stop the crime and then he saw daylight in the room and heard bare feet running past his room and the shouts of his three grandchildren and his daughter-in-law calling, ‘Ssh! Don’t wake Grandpa.’

  The old man got out of bed and stood looking indignantly at the mirror over the washbasin and at his empty gums. It was awful to think, as he put his teeth in to cover the horror of his mouth, that twelve or fourteen hours of London daylight were stacked up meaninglessly waiting for him. He pulled himself together. As he washed, listening to the noises of the house, he made up a speech to say to his son who must be downstairs by now.

  ‘I am not saying I am ungrateful. But old and young are not meant to be together. You’ve got your life. I’ve got mine. The children are sweet-you’re too sharp with them-but I can’t stand the noise. I don’t want to live at your expense. I want a place of my own. Where I can breathe. Like Frenchy.’ And as he said this, speaking into the towel and listening to the tap running, he could see and hear Frenchy who was his dentist but who looked like a rascally prophet in his white coat and was seventy if he was a day, saying to him as he looked down into his mouth and as if he was really tinkering with a property there:

  ‘You ought to do what I’ve done. Get a house by the sea. It keeps you young.’

  Frenchy vanished, leaving him ten years younger. The old man got into his shirt and trousers and was carefully spreading and puffing up the sparse black and grey hair across his head when in came his daughter-in-law, accusing him – why did she accuse?

  ‘Grandpa! You’re up!’

  She was like a soft Jersey cow with eyes too big and reproachful. She was bringing him tea, the dear sweet tiresome woman.

  Of course I’m up,’ he said.

  One glance at the tea showed him it was not like the tea he used to make for his wife when she was alive, but had too much milk in it, tepid stuff, left standing somewhere. He held his hairbrush up and he suddenly said, asserting his right to live, to get out of the house, in air he could breathe:

  ‘I’m going in to London to get my hair cut.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he said severely. ‘I’ve got several things I want to do.’

  And, when she had gone, he heard her say on the stairs: ‘

  He’s going to get his hair cut!’

  And his son saying, ‘Not again!’

  This business, this defiance of the haircut! It was not a mere scissoring and clipping of the hair, for the old man. It was a ceremonial of freedom; it had the whiff of orgy; the incitement of a ritual. As the years went by leaving him in such a financial mess that he was now down to not much more than a pension, it signified desire-but what desire? To be memorable in some streets of London, or at least, as evocative as an incense. The desire would come to him, on summer days like this, when he walked in his son’s suburban garden, to sniff and to pick a rose for his buttonhole; and then, already intoxicated, he marched out of the garden gate on to the street and to the bus stop, upright and vigorous, carrying his weight well and pink in the face. The scents of the barbers had been creeping into his nostrils, his chest, even went down to his legs. To be clipped, oiled and perfumed was to be free.

  So, on this decent July morning in the sun-shot and acid suburban mist, he stood in a queue for the bus, and if anyone had spoken to him, he would have gladly said, to put them in their place:

  ‘Times have changed. Before I retired, when Kate was alive-though I must honestly say we often had words about it-I always took a cab.’

  The bus came and whooshed him down to Knightsbridge, to his temple-the most expensive of the big shops. There, reborn on miles of carpet he paused and sauntered, sauntered and paused. He was inflamed by hall after hall of women’s dresses and hats, by cosmetics and jewellery. Scores of women were there. Glad to be cooled off, he passed into the echoing hall of provisions. He saw the game, the salmon and the cheese. He ate them and moved on to lose twenty years in the men’s clothing department where, among ties and brilliant shirts and jackets, his stern yet bashful pink face woke up to the loot and his ears heard the voices of the rich, the grave chorus of male self-approval. He went to the end where the oak stairs l
ed down to the barbers; there, cool as clergy they stood gossiping in their white coats. One came forward, seated him and dressed him up like a baby. And then-nothing happened. He was the only customer and the barber took a few steps back towards the group saying:

  ‘He wasn’t at the staff meeting.’

  The old man tapped his finger irritably under his sheet. Barbers did not cut hair, it seemed. They went to staff meetings. One called back:

  ‘Mr. Holderness seconded it.’

  Who was Holderness?

  ‘Where is Charles?’ said the old man to call the barbers to order. Obsequiously, the man began that pretty music with his scissors.

  ‘Charles?’ said the barber.

  ‘Yes. Charles. He shaved me for twenty years.’

  ‘He retired.’

  Another emptiness, another cavern, opened inside the old man.

  ‘Retired? He was a child!’ ‘All the old ones have retired.’

  The barber had lost his priestly look. He looked sinful, even criminal, certainly hypocritical.

  And although the old man’s head was being washed by lotions and oils and there was a tickling freshness about the ears and his nostrils quickened, there was something uneasy about the experience. In days gone by the place had been baronial, now it seemed not quite to gleam. One could not be a sultan among a miserable remnant of men who held staff meetings. When the old man left, the woman at the desk went on talking as she took his money and did not know his name. When he went upstairs, he paused to look back-no, the place was a palace of pleasure no longer. It was the place where-except for the staff-no one was known.

  And that was what struck him as he stepped out of the glancing swing doors of the shop, glad to be out in the July sun, that he was a sultan, cool, scented and lightheaded, extraordinary in a way, sacred almost, ready for anything—but cut off from expectancy, unknown now-a-days to anybody, free for nothing, liberty evaporating out of the tips of his shoes. He stepped out on the pavement dissembling leisure. His walk became slower and gliding. For an hour shop windows distracted him, new shops where old had been, shocked him. But, he said, pulling himself together, I must not fall into that trap. Old people live in the past. And I am not old! Old I am not! So he stopped gliding and stepped out wilfully, looking so stern and with mouth turned down, so corrupt and purposeful with success, that he was unnoticeable. Who notices success?