‘No, I wouldn’t think of it,’ he said curtly. ‘Mr. Hampton and I are not on speaking terms.’
‘Why?’ said the woman, distracted by curiosity.
‘Mr. Hampton and I,’ he began and he looked very gravely at her for a long time. ‘I have never heard of him. Who is he? I’m not on the staff. I’ve never heard of the firm.’ And then like a conjuror waving a handkerchief, he spread his face into a smile that had often got him an order in the old days.
‘I just got on the coach for the ride. Someone said “Brighton”. “Day at the sea,” I said. “Suits me.” ‘
The woman’s face went the colour of liver with rage and unbelief. One for the law, all the rage she had just been feeling about Hampton now switched to the old man. She was unbelieving.
‘No one checked?’ she said, her voice throbbing. She was boiling up like the police.
The old gentleman just shook his head gently. ‘No one checked’ – it was a definition of paradise. If he had wings he would have spread them, taken to the air and flown round her three times, saying, ‘Not a soul! Not a soul!’
She was looking him up and down He stood with a plump man’s dignity, but what saved him in her eyes were his smart, well-cut clothes, his trim hair and the jaunty rose; he looked like an old rip, a racing man, probably a crook; at any rate, a bit of a rogue on the spree, yet innocent too. She studied his shoes and he moved a foot and kicked the brandy glass. It rolled into the gangway and he smiled slightly.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said, her smile spreading.
‘Sick of sitting at home,’ he said. Weighing her up-not so much her character but her body – he said: ‘I’ve been living with my daughter-in-law since my wife died.’
He burst out with confidence, for he saw he had almost conquered her.
‘Young and old don’t mix. Brighton would suit me. I thought I would have a look around for a house.’
Her eyes were still busily going over him.
‘You’re a spark,’ she said, still staring. Then she saw the glass and bent down to pick it up. As she straightened she leaned on the back of the seat and laughed out loud.
‘You just got on. Oh dear,’ she laughed loudly, helplessly. ‘Serves Hampton right.’
‘Sit down,’ she said. He sat down. She sat down on the seat opposite. He was astonished and even shy to see his peculiar case appreciated and his peculiarity grew in his mind from a joke to a poem, from a poem to a dogma.
‘I meant to get off at the Oval, but I dropped off to sleep,’ he laughed.
‘Going to see the cricket?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Home-I mean my son’s place.’
The whole thing began to appear lovely to him. He felt as she laughed at him, as she still held the glass, twiddling it by the stem, that he was remarkable.
‘Years ago I did it once before,’ he said, multiplying his marvels. ‘When my wife was alive. I got a late train from London, went to sleep and woke up in Bath. I did. I really did. Stayed at the Royal. Saw a customer next day. He was so surprised to see me he gave me an order worth £300. My wife didn’t believe me.’
‘Well, can you blame her?’ the woman said.
The driver walked from the office to the garage and put his head into the coach and called out:
‘They’re sending a new bus. Be here four o’clock.’
The old man turned: ‘By the way, I’m getting off,’ he shouted to the driver.
‘Aren’t you going on?’ said the woman. ‘I thought you said you were having a trip to the sea.’
She wanted him to stay.
‘To be frank,’ said the old man. ‘These youngsters we’d been having a drink-they meant no harm-pushed me on when I was giving you a hand. I was in the pub. I had had a bit of a shock. I did something foolish. Painful really.’
‘What was that?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said the old man swanking in his embarrassment, and going very red. ‘I went to this telephone box, you know, where the coach started from, to ring up my dentist—Frenchy. I sometimes ring him up, but I got through to the wrong number. You know what I did? I rang the number of my old house, when Kate-when my wife—was alive. Some girl answered, maybe a boy, I don’t know. It gave me a turn, doing a thing like that. I thought my mind had gone.’
‘Well, the number would have changed.’
‘I thought, I really did think, for a second, it was my wife.’
The traffic on the main road sobbed or whistled as they talked. Containers, private cars, police cars, breakdown vans, cars with boats on their roofs-all sobbing their hearts out in a panic to get somewhere else.
‘When did your wife die?’ said the woman. ‘Just recently?’
‘Two years ago,’ he said.
‘It was grief. That is what it was – grief,’ she said gravely and looked away from him into the sky outside and to the derelict bit of country.
That voice of hers, by turns childish, silly, passing to the higher notes of the exalted and belligerent widow-all that talk of partners killing each other!-had become, as his wife’s used to do after some tantrum, simply plain.
Grief. Yes it was. He blinked away the threat of tears before her understanding. In these two years he seemed, because of his loneliness, to be dragging an increasing load of unsaid things behind him, things he had no one to tell. With his son and his daughter-in-law and their young friends he sat with his mouth open ready to speak, but he could never get a word out. The words simply fell back down his throat. He had a load of what people called boring things which he could not say; he had loved his wife; she had bored him; it had become a bond. What he needed was not friends, for since so many friends had died he had become a stranger: he needed another stranger. Perhaps like this woman whose face was as blank as his was, time having worn all expression from it. Because of that she looked now, if not as old as he was, full of life you could see; but she had joined his lonely race and had lost the look of going nowhere. He lowered his eyes and became shy. Grief-what was it? A craving. Yet not for a face or even a voice or even for love, but for a body. But dressed. Say, in a flowered dress.
To get his mind off a thought so bold he uttered one of his boring things, a sort of sample of what he would have said to his wife.
‘Last night I had a dream about a dog,’ he began to test her out as a stranger to whom you could say any damn silly thing. A friend would never listen to damn silly things.
The woman repeated, going back to what she had already said, as women do:
‘Remembering the telephone number—it was grief.’
And then went off at a tangent, roughly. ‘Don’t mention dreams to me. Last week at the bungalow I saw my husband walk across the sitting-room clean through the electric fire and the mirror over the mantelpiece and stand on the other side of it, not looking at me, but saying something to me that I couldn’t hear-asking for a box of matches I expect.’
‘Imagination,’ said the old man, sternly correcting her. He had no desire to hear of her dead husband’s antics, but he did feel that warm, already possessive desire, to knock sense into her. It was a pleasant feeling.
‘It wasn’t imagination,’ she said, squaring up to him.
‘I packed my things and went to London at once. I couldn’t stand it. I drove in to Brighton, left the car at the station and came up to London for a few days. That is why when I heard about Hampton’s party at the office I took this coach.’
‘Saved the train fare. Why shouldn’t Hampton pay?’ she grinned. ‘I told him I’d come to the party, but I’m not going. I’m picking up the car at Brighton and going home to the bungalow. It’s only seven miles away.’
She waited to see if he would laugh at their being so cunningly in the same boat. He did not laugh and that impressed her, but she sulked. Her husband would not have laughed either.
‘I dread going back,’ she said sulkily.
‘I sold my place,’ he said. ‘I know the feeling.’
�
�You were right,’ said the woman. ‘That’s what I ought to do. Sell the place. I’d get a good price for it, too. I’m not exactly looking forward to going back there this evening. It’s very isolated-but the cat’s there.’
He said nothing. Earnestly she said:
‘You’ve got your son and daughter-in-law waiting for you,’ she said, giving him a pat on the knee. ‘Someone to talk to. You’re lucky.’
The driver put his head into the door and said:
‘All out. The other coach is here.’
‘That’s us,’ said the woman.
The crowd outside were indeed getting into the new coach. The old man followed her out and looked back at the empty seats with regret. At the door he stepped past her and handed her out. She was stout but landed light as a feather. The wild young man and his friends were shouting, full of new beer, bottles in their pockets. The others trooped in.
‘Goodbye,’ said the old man, doing his memorable turn.
‘You’re not coming with us?’ said the woman. And thenshe said, quietly, looking around secretively. ‘I won’t say anything. You can’t give up now. You’re worried about your daughter-in-law. I know,’ she said.
The old man resented that.
‘That doesn’t worry me,’ he said.
‘You ought to think of them,’ she said.
‘You ought to.’
There was a shout of vulgar laughter from the wild young man and his friends. They had seen the two young lovers a long way off walking slowly, with all the time in the world, towards the coach. They had been off on their own.
‘Worn yourselves out up in the fields?’ bawled the wild young man and he got the driver to sound the horn on the wheel insistently at them.
‘You can ring from my place,’ said the woman.
The old man put on his air of being offended.
‘You might buy my house,’ she tempted.
The two lovers arrived and everyone laughed. The girl—so like his wife when she was young—smiled at him.
‘No. I can get the train back from Brighton,’ the old man said.
‘Get in,’ called the driver.
The old man assembled seventy years of dignity. He did this because dignity seemed to make him invisible. He gave a lift to the woman’s elbow, he followed her, he looked for a seat and when she made room for him beside her, invisibly he sat there. She laughed hungrily, showing all her teeth. He gave a very wide sudden smile. The coach load chattered and some began to sing and shout and the young couple getting into a clinch again, slept. The coach started and shook off the last of the towny places, whipped through short villages, passed pubs with animal names, The Fox, The Red Lion, The Dog and Duck, The Greyhound and one with a new sign, The Dragon. It tunnelled under miles of trees, breathed afresh in scampering fields and thirty miles of greenery, public and private; until, slowly, in an hour or so, the bald hills near the sea came up and, under them, distant slabs of chalk. Further and further the coach went and the bald hills grew taller and nearer.
The woman gazed disapprovingly at the young couple and was about to say something to the old man when, suddenly, at the sight of his spry profile, she began to think—in exquisite panic-of criminals. A man like this was just the kind, outwardly respectable, who would go down to Hampton’s Garden Party to case the place-as she had read – pass as a member of the staff, steal jewellery, or plan a huge burglary. Or come to her house and bash her. The people who lived only a mile and a half from where she lived had had burglars when they were away; someone had been watching the house. They believed it was someone who had heard the house was for sale. Beside her own front door, behind a bush, she kept an iron bar. She always picked it up before she got her key out-in case. She saw herself now suddenly hitting out with it passionately, so that her heart raced, then having bashed the old man, she calmed down; or rather she sailed into one of her exalted moods. She was wearing a heavy silver ring with a large brown stone in it, a stone which looked violet in some lights and she said in her most genteel, faraway voice:
‘When I was in India, an Indian prince gave this ring to me when my husband died. It is very rare. It is one of those rings they wear for protection. He loved my husband. He gave it to me. They believe in magic’
She took it off and gave it to the old man.
‘I always wear it. The people down the road were burgled.’
The old man looked at the ring. It was very ugly and he gave it back to her.
‘What fools women are,’ he thought and felt a huge access of strength. But aloud he said:
‘Very nice.’ And not to be outdone, he said: ‘My wife died in the Azores.’
She took a deep breath. The coach had broken through the hills and now cliffs of red houses had built up on either side and the city trees and gardens grew thicker and richer. The sunlight seemed to splash down in waves between them and over them. She grasped his arm.
‘I can smell the sea already!’ she said. ‘What are you going to tell your daughter-in-law when you ring up? I told the driver to stop at the station.’
‘Tell them?’ said the old man. A brilliant idea occurred to him. ‘I’ll tell them I just dropped in on the Canary Islands,’ he said.
The woman let go of his arm and, after one glance, choked with laughter.
‘Why not?’ he said grinning. ‘They ask too many questions. Where have you been? What are you doing? Or I might say Boulogne. Why not?’
‘Well, it’s nearer,’ she said. ‘But you must explain.’
The wild young man suddenly shouted:
‘Where’s he taking us now?’ as the coach turned off the main road.
‘He’s dropping us at the station,’ the woman called out boldly. And indeed, speeding no more, grunting down side streets, the coach made for the station and stopped at the entrance to the station yard.
‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my car.’
She pulled him by the sleeve to the door and he helped her out.
They stood on the pavement, surprised to see the houses and shops of the city stand still, every window looking at them. Brusquely cutting them off, the coach bumped away at once downhill and left them to watch it pass out of sight. The old man blinked, staring at the last of the coach and the woman’s face aged.
It was the moment to be memorable, but he was so taken aback by her heavy look that he said:
‘You ought to have stayed on, gone to the party.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking brightness on to the face. ‘I’ll get my car. It was just seeing your life drive off-don’t you feel that sometimes?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not mine. Theirs.’ And he straightened up, looked at his watch and then down the long hill. He put out his hand.
‘I’m going to have a look at the sea.’
And indeed, in a pale blue wall on this July day, the sea showed between the houses. Or perhaps it was the sky. Hard to tell which.
She said, ‘Wait for me. I’ll drive you down. I tell you what –I’ll get my car. We’ll drive to my house and have a cup of tea or a drink and then you can telephone from there and I’ll bring you back in for your train.’
He still hesitated.
‘I dreaded that journey. You made me laugh,’ she said.
And that is what they did. He admired her managing arms and knees as she drove out of the city into the confusing lanes.
‘It’s nice of you to come. I get nervous going back,’ she said as they turned into the drive of one of the ugliest bungalows he had ever seen, on top of the Downs, close to a couple of ragged firs torn and bent by the wind. A cat raced them to the door. Close to it, she showed him the iron bar she kept behind the bush. A few miles away between a dip in the Downs was the pale blue sea again, shaped like her lower lip.
There were her brass Indian objects on the wall of the sitting-room; on the mantelpiece and, leaning against the mirror he had walked through, was the photograph of her husband. Pull down a few walls, reface the front, move out the f
urniture, he thought, that’s what you’d have to do, when she went off to another room and came back with the tea tray, wearing a white dress with red poppies on it.
‘Now telephone,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the number.’ But she did not give him the instrument until she heard a child answer it. That killed her last suspicion. She heard him speak to his daughter-in-law and when he put the telephone down:
I want £21,000 for the house,’ she said grandly.
The sum was so preposterous that it seemed to explode in his head and made him spill his tea in his saucer.
‘If I decide to sell,’ she said, noticing his shock.
‘If anyone offers you that,’ he said drily, ‘I advise you to jump at it.’
They regarded each other with disapointment.
‘I’ll show you the garden. My husband worked hard in it,’ she said. ‘Are you a gardener?’
‘Not any longer,’ he said as he followed her sulking across the lawn. She was sulking too. A thin film of cloud came over the late afternoon sky.
‘Well, if you’re ever interested let me know,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you to the station.’
And she did, taking him the long way round the coast road and there indeed was the sea, the real sea, all of it, spread out like the skirt of some lazy old landlady with children playing all along the fringes on the beaches. He liked being with the woman in the car, but he was sad his day was ending.
‘I feel better,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go to Hampton’s after all,’ she said watching him. ‘I feel like a spree.’
But he did not rise. Twenty-one thousand! The ideas women have! At the station he shook hands and she said:
‘Next time you come to Brighton …’ and she touched his rose with her finger. The rose was drooping. He got on the train.
‘Who is this lady-friend who keeps ringing you up from Brighton?’ his daughter-in-law asked in her lowing voice several times in the following weeks. Always questions.
‘A couple I met at Frenchy’s,’ he said on the spur of the moment.
‘You didn’t say you’d seen Frenchy. How is he?’ his son said.
‘Didn’t I?’ said the old man. ‘I might go down to see them next week. But I don’t know. Frenchy’s heard of a house.’
The Camberwell Beauty Page 12
