The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  It was always-he didn’t like to admit it-like this on these days when he made the great stand for his haircut and the exquisite smell. He would set out with a vision, it crumbled into a rambling dream. He fell back, like a country hare, on his habitual run, to the shops which had bought his goods years ago, to see what they were selling and where he knew no one now: to a café which had changed its decor, where he ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee; but as the dream consoled, it dissolved into final melancholy. He with his appetite for everything, who could not pass a shop window, or an estate agent’s, or a fine house, without greed watering in his mouth, could buy nothing. He hadn’t the cash.

  There was always this moment when the bottom began to fall out of his haircut days. He denied that his legs were tired, but he did slow down. It would occur to him suddenly in Piccadilly that he knew no one now in the city. He had been a buyer and seller, not a man for friends; he knew buildings, lifts, offices, but not people. There would be nothing for it but to return home. He would drag his way to the inevitable bus-stop of defeat and stand, as so many Londoners did, with surrender on their faces. He delayed it as long as he could, stopping at a street corner or gazing at a passing girl and looking around with that dishonest look a dog has when it is pretending not to hear its master’s whistle. There was only one straw to clutch at. There was nothing wrong with his teeth, but he could ring up his dentist. He could ring up Frenchy. He could ring him and say: ‘Frenchy? How’s tricks?’ Sportily. And (a man for smells) he could almost smell the starch in Frenchy’s white coat, the keen, chemical, hygienic smell of his room. The old gentleman considered this and then went down a couple of disheartened side streets. In a short cul de sac, standing outside a urinal and a few doors from a dead-looking pub, there was a telephone box. An oldish, brown motor coach was parked empty at the kerb by it, its doors closed, a small crowd waiting beside it. There was a man in the telephone box, but he came out in a temper, shouting something to the crowd. The old man went into the box. He had thought of something to say:

  ‘Hullo, Frenchy! Where is that house you were going to find me, you old rascal?’

  For Frenchy came up from the sea every day. It was true that Frenchy was a rascal, especially with the women, one after the other, but looking down into the old man’s mouth and chipping at a tooth he seemed to be looking into your soul.

  The old man got out his coins. He was tired but eagerness revived him as he dialled.

  ‘Hullo, Frenchy,’ he said. But the voice that replied was not Frenchy’s. It was a child’s. The child was calling out: ‘Mum. Mum.’ The old man banged down the telephone and stared at the dial. His heart thumped. He had, he realized, not dialled Frenchy’s number, but the number of his old house, the one he had sold after Kate had died.

  The old gentleman backed out of the box and stared, tottering with horror, at it. His legs went weak, his breath had gone and sweat bubbled on his face. He steadied himself by the brick wall. He edged away from the bus and the crowd, not to be seen. He thought he was going to faint. He moved to, a doorway. There was a loud laugh from the crowd as a young man with long black hair gave the back of the bus a kick. And then, suddenly, he and a few others rushed towards the old man, shouting and laughing.

  ‘Excuse us,’ someone said and pushed him aside. He saw he was standing in the doorway of the pub.

  ‘That’s true,’ the old man murmured to himself. ‘Brandy is what I need,’ and, at that, the rest of the little crowd pushed into him or past him. One of them was a young girl with fair hair who paused as her young man pulled her by the hand and said kindly to the old man:

  ‘After you.’

  There he was, being elbowed, travelling backwards into the little bar. It was the small Private Bar of the pub and the old man found himself against the counter. The young people were stretching their arms across him and calling out orders for drinks and shouting. He was wedged among them. The wild young man with the piratical look was on one side of him, the girl and her young man on the other. The wild young man called to the others: ‘Wait a minute.

  What’s yours, Dad?’

  The old man was bewildered. ‘Brandy.’

  ‘Brandy,’ shouted the young man across the bar.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the girl to the old man, studying his face. ‘You have one. You ought to have got on the first coach.’

  ‘You’d have been half-way to bloody Brighton by now,’ said the wild young man. ‘The first bloody outing this firm’s had in its whole bloody history and they bloody forgot the driver. Are you the driver?’

  Someone called out: ‘No, he’s not the driver.’

  “I had a shock,’ the old man began, but crowded against the bar no one heard him.

  ‘Drink it up then,’ the girl said to him and, startled by her kindness, he drank. The brandy burned and in a minute fire went up into his head and his face lost its hard bewildered look and it loosened into a smile. He heard their young voices flying about him. They were going to Brighton. No, the other side of Brighton. No, this side – well to bloody Hampton’s mansion, estate, something. The new chairman-he’d thrown the place open. Bloody thrown it, laughed the wild man, to the Works and the Office and, as usual, ‘the Works get the first coach’. The young girl leaned down to smell the rose in the old man’s buttonhole and said to her young man, ‘It’s lovely. Smell it.’ His arm was round her waist and there were the two of them bowing to the rose.

  ‘From your garden?’ said the girl.

  The old man heard himself, to his astonishment, tell a lie.

  ‘I grew it,’ he said bashfully.

  ‘We shan’t bloody start for hours,’ someone said. ‘Drink up.’

  The old man looked at his watch; a tragic look. Soon they’d be gone. Someone said: ‘Which department are you in?’ ‘He’s in the Works,’ someone said. ‘No, I’ve retired,’ said the old man, not to cause a fuss. ‘Have another, Dad,’ said the young man. ‘My turn.’

  Three of them bent their heads to hear him say again, ‘I have retired,’ and one of them said: ‘It was passed at the meeting. Anyone retired entitled to come.’

  ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ the old man began to explain to them. ‘I was just telephoning to my dentist …’

  ‘No,’ said one of the bending young men, turning to someone in the crowd. ‘That bastard Fowkes talked a lot of bull but it passed.’

  ‘You’re all right,’ the girl said to the old man.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said another and handed the old man another drink. If only they would stop shouting, the old man thought, I could explain.

  ‘A mistake …’ he began again.

  ‘It won’t do you any harm,’ someone said. ‘Drink up.’

  Then someone shouted from the door. ‘He’s here. The driver.’

  The girl pulled the old man by the arm and he found himself being hustled to the door. ‘My glass,’ he said.

  He was pushed, holding his half empty glass, into the street. They rushed past him and he stood there, glass in hand, trying to say, ‘Goodbye’ and then he followed them, still holding his glass, to explain. They shouted to him ‘Come on’ and he politely followed to the door of the bus where they were pushing to get in.

  But at the door of the bus everything changed. A woman wearing a flowered dress with a red belt, a woman as stout as himself, had a foot on the step of the bus and was trying to heave herself up, while people ahead of her blocked the door. She nearly fell.

  The old man, all smiles and sadness, put on a dignified anger. He pushed his way towards her. He turned forbiddingly on the youngsters.

  ‘Allow me, madam,’ he said and took the woman’s cool fat elbow and helped her up the step, putting his own foot on the lower one. Fatal. He was shoved up and himself pushed inside, the brandy spilling down his suit. He could not turn round. He was in, driven in deeply, to wait till the procession stopped. ‘I’m getting out,’ he said.

  He flopped into the seat behind the woman.
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  ‘Young people are always in a rush,’ she turned to say to him.

  The last to get in were the young couple. ‘Break it up,’ said the driver.

  They were slow for they were enlaced and wanted to squeeze in united.

  The old man waited for them to be seated and then stood up, glass in hand, as if offering a toast, as he moved forward to get out.

  ‘Would you mind sitting down,’ said the driver. He was counting the passengers and one, seeing him with the glass in his hand, said, ‘Cheers.’

  For the first time in his adult life, the old man indignantly obeyed an order. He sat down, was about to explain his glass, heard himself counted, got up. He was too late. The driver pulled a bar, slammed the door, spread his arms over the wheel and off they went, to a noise that bashed peoples’ eyeballs.

  At every change of the gears, as the coach gulped out of the narrow streets, a change took place in the old man. Shaken in the kidneys, he looked around in protest, put his glass out of sight on the floor and blushed. He was glad no one was sitting beside him for his first idea was to scramble to the window and jump through it at the first traffic lights. The girl who had her arm round her young man looked round and smiled. Then, he too looked around at all these unknown people, belonging to a firm he had never heard of, going to a destination unknown to him, and he had the inflated sensations of an enormous illegality. He had been kidnapped. He tipped back his hat and looked bounderish. The bus was hot and seemed to be frying in the packed traffic when it stopped at the lights. People had to shout to be heard. Under cover of the general shouting, he too shouted to a couple of women across the gangway:

  ‘Do we pass the Oval?’

  The woman asked her friend, who asked the man in front, who asked the young couple. Blocks of offices went by in lumps. No one knew except someone who said: ‘Must do.’ The old man nodded. The moment the Oval cricket ground came into sight, he planned to go to the driver and tell him to let him off. So he kept his eyes open, thinking:

  What a lark. What a thing to tell them at home. ‘Guess what? Had a free ride. Cheek, my boy,’ he’d say to his son, ‘that’s what you need. Let me give you a bit of advice. You’ll get nowhere without cheek.’

  His pink face beamed with shrewd frivolity as the coach groaned over the Thames that had never looked so wide and sly. Distantly a power station swerved to the west, then to the east, then rocked like a cradle as the young girl—restless like Kate she was-got out of her young man’s arms and got him back into hers, in a tighter embrace. Three containers passed, the coach slackened, then choked forward so suddenly that the old man’s head nearly hit the back of the head of the fat lady in front. He studied it and noticed the way the woman’s thick hair, gold with grey in it, was darker as it came out of her neck like a growing plant and he thought, as he had often done, how much better a woman’s head looks from behind, the face interferes with it in front. And then his own chin went slack and he began a voluptuous journey down corridors. One more look at the power station which had become several jumping power stations, giving higher and higher leaps in the air, and he was asleep.

  A snore came from him. The talking woman across the gangway was annoyed by this soliloquising noise which seemed to offer a rival narrative; but others admired it for its steadiness which peacefully mocked the unsteady recovery and spitting and fading energy of the coach and the desperation of the driver. Between their shouts at the driver many glanced admiringly at the sleeper. He was swinging in some private barber’s shop that swerved through space, sometimes in some airy corridor, at other times circling beneficently round a cricket match in which Frenchy, the umpire, in his white linen coat, was offering him a plate of cold salmon which his daughter-in-law was trying to stop him from eating; so that he was off the coach, striking his way home on foot at the tail of the longest funeral procession he had ever seen, going uphill for miles into fields that were getting greener and colder and emptier as snow came on and he sat down plonk, out of breath, waking to hear the weeping of the crowds, all weeping for him, and then, still walking, he saw himself outside the tall glass walls of a hospital. It must be a hospital for inside two men in white could be clearly seen in a glass-enclosed room, one of them the driver, getting ready to carry him in on a stretcher. He gasped, now fully awake. There was absolute silence. The coach had stopped; it was empty: he was alone in it, except for the woman who, thank God, was still sitting in front of him, the hair still growing from the back of her neck.

  ‘Where …’ he began. Then he saw the hospital was, in fact, a garage. The passengers had got out, garagemen were looking under the bonnet of the bus. The woman turned round. He saw a mild face, without make-up. ‘We’ve broken down,’ she said.

  How grateful he was for her mild face. He had thought he was dead.

  ‘I’ve been asleep,’ he said. ‘Where are we?’

  He nearly said: ‘Have we passed the Oval?’ but swallowed that silly question.

  ‘Quarter past three,’ he said. Meaning thirty miles out, stuck fast in derelict country at a cross roads, with a few villas sticking out in fields, eating into the grass among a few trees, with a hoarding on the far side of the highway saying, blatantly, ‘Mortgages’ and the cars dashing by in flights like birds, twenty at a time, still weeping away westwards into space.

  The woman had turned to study him and when he got up, flustered, she said in a strict but lofty voice:

  ‘Sit down.’

  He sat down.

  ‘Don’t you move,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to move. They’ve made a mess of it. Let them put it right.’

  She had twisted round and he saw her face, wide and full now, as meaty as an obstinate country girl’s, and with a smile that made her look as though she were evaporating.

  ‘This is Hampton’s doing,’ she said. ‘Anything to save money. I am going to tell him what I think of him when I see him. No one in charge. Not even the driver-listen to him. Treat staff like cattle. They’ve got to send another coach. Don’t you move until it comes.’

  Having said this she was happy.

  ‘When my husband was on the Board nothing like this happened. Do you know anyone here –I don’t. Everything’s changed.’

  She studied his grey hair.

  The old man clung for the moment to the fact that they were united in not knowing anybody. His secretiveness was coming back.

  ‘I’ve retired,’ he said.

  The woman leaned further over the back of the seat and looked around the empty bus and then back at him as if she had captured him. Her full lips were the resting lips of a stout woman between meals.

  ‘I must have seen you at the Works with John,’ she said. ‘It was always a family in those days. Or were you in the office?’

  ‘I must get out of this,’ the old man was thinking and he sat forward nearer to her, getting ready to get out once more. ‘I must find out the name of this place, get a train or a bus or something, get back home.’ The place looked nameless.

  But, since his wife had died, he had never been as near to a strange woman’s face. It was a wide, ordinary, babylike face damp in the skin, with big blue eyes under fair, skimpy eyebrows, and she studied him as a soft, plump child would study—for no reason, beyond an assumption that he and she were together in this; they weren’t such fools, at their ages, to get off the coach. It was less the nearness of the face than her voice that kept him there.

  It was a soft, high voice that seemed to blow away like a child’s and was far too young for her, even sounded so purely truthful as to be false. It came out in deep breaths drawn up from soft but heavy breasts that could, he imagined, kick up a hullabaloo, a voice which suggested that by some silly inconsequent right she would say whatever came into her head. It was the kind of voice that made the old man swell with a polite, immensely intimate desire to knock the nonsense out of her.

  ‘I can smell your rose from here,’ she said. ‘There are not many left who knew the firm in John’s time. I
t was John’s life work.’

  He smiled complacently. He had his secret.

  She paused and then the childish voice went suddenly higher. She was not simply addressing him. She was addressing a meeting.

  “I told him that when he let Hampton flatter him he’d be out in a year. I said to John, “He’s jealous. He’s been jealous all the time.” ‘

  The woman paused. Then her chin and her lips stuck out and her eyes that had looked so vague, began to bulge and her voice went suddenly deep, rumbling with prophecy.

  ‘ “He wants to kill you,” I said. You,’ said the woman to the old man, ‘must have seen it. And he did kill him. We went on a trip round the world, America, Japan, India,’ her voice sailed across countries. ‘That’s where he died. And if he thinks he can wipe out that by throwing his place open to the staff and getting me down there, on show, he’s wrong.’

  My God, she’s as mad as Kate’s sister used to get after her husband died, thought the old man. I’m sitting behind a mad woman.

  ‘Dawson,’ she said and abruptly stood up as the old man rose too. ‘Oh,’ she said in her high regal style gazing away out of the window of the bus. ‘I remember your name now. You had that row, that terrible row-oh yes,’ she said eagerly, the conspirator. ‘you ring up Hampton. He’s afraid of you. He’ll listen. I’ve got the number here. You tell him there are twenty-seven of his employees stranded on the Brighton road.’

  The old man sighed. He gave up all idea of slipping out. When a woman orders you about, what do you do? He thought she looked rather fine standing there prophetically. The one thing to do in such cases was to be memorable. When is a man most memorable? When he says ‘No’.