The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘Full of Huguenots,’ I said.

  Trevor heard out this dispute, and then he uttered three original sentences. ‘My mother has got one,’ he said. ‘We had a lot of trouble with it. I got it right in the end.’

  I gazed at Trevor’s hands. Like his voice they were limp and tired. They were long and thin.

  ‘I wish you’d mend ours,’ Molly said to him in a businesslike way. ‘And then we’d get some sleep.’ She gave me a sharp look.

  ‘It’s probably like my mother’s,’ Trevor said. ‘They’re all alike. I don’t mind having a go. Tomorrow?’

  I saw that I had found a treasure. The boat was as good as mine, if Trevor and I worked together on it. And there was more to it than the boat.

  ‘There you are!’ said Molly, sneering gaily at me at having an order obeyed as simply as that.

  The following evening I found Trevor on the sofa in our sitting-room with a large broken-veined bruise on his forehead. He had mended the lock, but he had moved my wedges, and just as he was testing it the door swung open and hit him on the head. Molly was mopping the wound.

  I elected him at once as Molly’s additional husband.

  Our life-or rather my life-is more peaceful now. I don’t mean less noisy or less of a wrangle, but simply that Trevor now bears some of the burden. He comes round most evenings and if he misses a few days she is out after him to find out what he is up to.

  ‘He has girls in his flat,’ she says angrily when she comes back. ‘I know! Making out he stays in and listens to records. He never listens to ours!’

  ‘He likes noise,’ I tell her. ‘He said so last time when he was here. It’s company.’

  Trevor turns up again, and he and I say nothing about our transaction. She has been out with him in his racing car, which terrifies her, and to me she says ‘It’s nothing but sex. A substitute. You defend him, of course.’

  It is true that when he runs her up to London for the day I go sailing. When he brings her back, she says: ‘Racing drivers are a lot of impotent morons.’

  I say to Trevor: ‘She’s an old character.’

  ‘Character,’ says Trevor, slapping his knee at the word. Then, with a sly look at me-for he likes danger as much as I do-he perhaps says, ‘Let’s go and eat at The Ship.’ (It is near the mooring where I keep my secret boat.)

  We drive down, and at the first sight of a sail she starts about ‘the stinking yachtsmen’. At dinner, she says, in a voice that makes everyone in the restaurant stop eating and stare at us, ‘Guilt, that is what it is! There is something going on between you two. Men!’

  And when her voice drops for a second, she entrances both of us with that other noise, the little dog-like sniff.

  The Last Throw

  The New Week began for Karvo. For him weeks were always new. Cheered by the doorman, receptionists, secretaries, he went voluptuously into purdah in the lift; on the silent top floor he came out, all animal, on to the stretches of green carpet which seemed to grow like the lawns of the country house life he had just left. He raced to his enormous desk on which lay an elephant’s foot mounted on silver presented to him by an African ruler after his latest film, and he pressed a button. The call was answered by the fit of dry coughing that contained Chatterton.

  ‘Chatty,’ Karvo began vigorously. Then, reproachfully, ‘I thought you had given up smoking?’

  ‘I have,’ said Chatty. ‘That was nostalgia. I live in the past.’

  ‘Can you spare a minute?’

  It always took Chatty longer to get to Karvo than Karvo could bear. Passing the open doors of offices, meeting people in the corridors, anywhere in the building, Chatty paused and, with the cough and the ravaged smile of dandyish human wreckage, asked people how they were. How far downhill on the way to dilapidation are you, when shall we all be human souls together? his large eyes seemed to ask. One or two hypochondriacs would tell him. Why does this preposterous organization run so well, Chatty sometimes asked himself-for he had the vanity of casualties, and replied: ‘I am the oil in the wheels, the perambulating clinic, the ambulance, the Salvation Army, the conscience—if it has one—kept alive by a sunlamp, an expensive tailor and dozens of teeny weeny little pills.’ And with the air of one saying ‘Goodbye’ to himself, Chatty walked on.

  Also, he added honestly, kept alive by Karvo, King of Kings, the Elephant’s Foot, the Life Force. Now for the Monday morning shot! At board meetings Chatty often doodled pictures of Karvo as an elephant sitting in the studio with a crown on his head, a cigar in his mouth and a sceptre in his hand, while a naked cast of well-known actors, actresses and teams of cameramen the size of ants, crawled before him. Now Chatty slipped into Karvo’s room like a well-dressed fever and saw Karvo in clothes that Karvo supposed were the right thing for high life in the English countryside. He was sitting in front of a very fat book that looked like the Family Bible and there was an uncommon expression of piety or, at any rate, of elevation on his large, unmanageable face.

  ‘When did you go to the doctor last?’ said Karvo kindly, but passed immediately to what he loved to do on Mondays: his weekend.

  Karvo was at that period in his life when the tide of democracy and cinema had floated him into the private boscage where peers, millionaires and merchant bankers spent their lives. Chatty sat down on a sofa and waited to be carried into Karvo’s dreamland. At once Karvo was on to the Hamilton-Spruces for a second, advanced to the Holinsheds and then, after a long detour among the connections of the Esterhazys, the Radziwills, the Hohenzollerns, the Hotspurs, Talbots, Buckinghams, the Shakespearean cast of the English counties, finally swerved to France to meet the Albigenses.

  ‘Aren’t they cousins of the Radziwills?’ Karvo wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ said Chatty. ‘The Albigenses were a persecuted race. They are extinct.’

  Karvo turned to the title page of the book before him. It was not the Bible; it was not the Almanach de Gotha. It was a bound typescript.

  ‘They were massacred,’ said Chatty. ‘In the South of France. About the twelfth century. Because of their religion.’

  ‘The South of France,’ said Karvo. His eyes switched on a sharp commercial light. ‘How many were massacred?’

  He was thinking of a crowd scene.

  ‘I don’t know-a million; no, perhaps only a few hundred thousand,’ said Chatty.

  ‘The French Ambassador gave this manuscript to me at the Hamilton-Spruces. His wife wrote it,’ said Karvo. ‘Will you have a look at it?’ Chatty had one more of his coughing fits as he took the manuscript.

  ‘You haven’t given up,’ Karvo accused him. ‘Cheating never pays.’

  ‘It ‘s your cigar,’ said Chatty.

  Chatty went to his office, opened the bottom drawer of his desk where he kept his dozens of bottles of pills and rested his feet on the open drawer as he sat down to read. First he looked up the name of the Ambassador. Then he studied the name on the title page. As he expected, the author could not possibly be the wife of the French Ambassador. In the hot house of Society, Karvo usually misnamed the blooms. The name of that lady was not even in the long list of acknowledgements which began with a few eminences, went on to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Museum, combed the universities, and ended with inexhaustible gratitude to a dearest husband without whose constant advice and patience, etc. etc. The dedication read ‘To Doggie from Pussy’.

  Chatty studied the index and appendices and then, rearranging his feet on the drawer, was unable to prevent himself from memorizing 600 pages of historical research. On Friday he went in to see Karvo.

  ‘I’m just off to the country,’ he said. ‘I’ve read that thing. The author is Christine Johnson, a learned woman, first-class historian-no doubt about that. If you’re interested in the Albigenses, this is the last word. You’ll be glad to hear about the Cathari heresy. You know, of course, that the Cathari were dualists. Early dieters too; fast Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week. This annoyed the pope. I think she’ll have
trouble all the same in Chapters Nine and Ten. Speaking as an historian …’

  Karvo looked up from the script he was reading.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Chatty. ‘Speaking as an historian I would say she is entirely speculative in Chapter Ten. Mad, I’d say. Massacres, of course. Several. The Albigenses were exterminated. There’s nothing in it for us.’

  ‘Massacres?’ said Karvo again. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Page 337. Incest,’ said Chatty. ‘Brother and sister, separated at birth by religious fanatics, meet again, don’t know each other, get married—not knowing that, after she’s been raped in Toulouse and as they escape over the Pyrenees, that a woman called Clothilde de San Severino has betrayed them to the Inquisition, who torture both. Roughly that.’

  ‘Torture,’ said Karvo looking up. ‘What kind? Incest? Have you marked the pages I’d like to see?’

  He softened. ‘My sister would never have let you get into the state you’re in, Chatty. Would you mind seeing this woman-just politeness-tact, you know.’

  ‘All right,’ said Chatty.

  Karvo’s face blurred into one of his occasional looks of shame.

  ‘Do you know her?’ Chatty said.

  Karvo shrugged.

  The woman, Christine Johnson, had gone to her house in Paris but came to Chatty’s office a fortnight later. Chatty spent an hour and a half with her. Late in the afternoon he went to Karvo’s office, opening the door wide instead of sliding in, and shutting it with careful ceremony. He sat down on Karvo’s distant sofa, put his feet up and said nothing.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ said Karvo.

  ‘Have you ever experienced a miracle?’ said Chatty.

  ‘Many,’ said Karvo.

  ‘Yes, I know. So have I. I’ll put it another way. Have you ever met again or accidentally passed in the street, your first girl friend whom you haven’t seen or heard of for fifteen or twenty years?’

  ‘Mine was in my pram,’ said Karvo. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I’m not talking of childish vice. I mean your first adult girl friend. Have you seen her since, even at a distance?’

  ‘That’s a miracle I’ve avoided.’

  ‘Why?’ said Chatty. ‘I can see her: short, very fat, strong glasses, a touch of something on the skin, spots perhaps, dirty raincoat, sullen with congested virtue, round-shouldered. (There’s nothing against that. A lot of girls go in for being round-shouldered; they are trying out ways of being important or graceful, learning the job.) But wearing a seaman’s heavy black jersey, no breasts or, rather, creased woollen bumps. The jersey is too large. Walking as if still marching into the classroom. ‘Girls! Forward March! Follow Diana.’ Another thing-you could never see her alone. She was always with some other girl-very pretty, but for some insane reason the pretty one didn’t appeal to you.’

  ‘Come to the point,’ said Karvo.

  ‘And I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen her years later with the man she married eventually. You imagined he was a weed who kept a small electrical shop or something like that and they lived out at-well, you know those places – with four children who have kicked the garden to pieces. Informative, rebuking, that’s what she was. Always ticking you off—“No, Karvo. Stop it, Karvo.” ‘

  ‘I remember that,’ said Karvo, putting on his martyred face. ‘Stop wasting my time. Kitchen sink is finished in pictures-you know that, Chatty.’

  ‘I’ve just met mine,’ said Chatty. ‘Can I have a drink? No, don’t ring for it. I’ll get it myself.’

  Chatty went to Karvo’s drink cabinet. It was large and designed to look like the west front of a Gothic cathedral but without the saints.

  ‘I can see why you shy off the subject,’ said Chatty. ‘I would have done so two hours ago, until Christine walked into my office. Except for the electrician and the four children, she used to be exactly as I have told you—but, my God! A butterfly has risen from that awful chrysalis. If it had been her pretty friend Ann I would not have been surprised-but Christine! The miracle has happened. As a matter of fact I must have changed too. Down at reception she told the girl she had an appointment with Sir Arthur Chatterton. She is not the wife of the French Ambassador.’

  ‘Who said she was?’ said Karvo.

  ‘Sweet Jesus-but let it pass.’

  ‘She’s not only exquisite. She has brains.’ Chatty’s voice became sad. ‘More than brains. Considering what she’s got-what a waste.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ said Karvo. ‘Many women have first-class minds.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of her mind,’ said Chatty. ‘I was thinking of her money. She’s rich. I was thinking of her clothes. How many distinguished lady historians do you know with emeralds on their fingers, who have sacked Paris for their clothes, whose hats seem to have blown over from the Place Vendôme and who, besides owning houses in London and Paris, spend their winters on their dear, dear brother’s estate in Toulouse?’

  ‘She was wearing a hat like a birthday cake made of air and a very short dress. I suppose it was a dress? She seemed to be getting out of it rather than wearing it – pretty well succeeded on the left thigh and the right shoulder. A hot-house flower with large glasses like windows. All the fat gone. A butterfly-but what am I talking about? A dragonfly,’ he said.

  Chatty coughed.

  ‘You oughtn’t to talk so much,’ said Karvo.

  ‘I knew her by her teeth,’ Chatty said sadly. ‘And her voice. It used to come out frosted out of the heart’s deep freeze. It still does. Oh dear, it brought it all back. Christine and then her pretty friend Ann and me all sitting in Lipps,’ said Chatty.

  ‘Is she married?’ said Karvo.

  ‘To a man in the Foreign Office, an adviser, whatever that is. Ronnie,’ said Chatty.

  ‘So,’ said Karvo. ‘You’ve missed the boat.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Chatty, ‘they’ve asked me to dinner the week after next when they come back from Scotland. They’re staying with the Loch Lomonds.’

  Karvo raised both his chins.

  ‘I’ve stayed with the Loch Lomonds,’ he said.

  ‘So what was it like?’ Karvo sneered. ‘Bollinger, Mouton Rothschild …’

  Chatty was lying once more on the sofa in Karvo’s room.

  ‘You remember the husband of your first girl friend,’ said Chatty. ‘The man with the small electrical shop or television rentals, if you like, the man who replaced you in the loving heart you broke …’

  ‘I never broke any girl’s heart,’ said Karvo looking up from his letters. ‘Accountants break mine.’

  ‘Imagine you are back in Paris. Now here’s a girl, Cambridge, double first, ruins her poor pink-rimmed eyes in the Bibliothèque Nationale, borrows the occasional ten or twenty francs from you because she’s hungry—you see her, this Miss Sorbonne in her chrysalis days, your friend, suddenly avoiding you in the Boulevard Saint Germain, walking by night, in silence, except that she scrapes a foot. She is with a tall young man who keeps bumping his dirty raincoat into hers because he walks aslant and bends to talk down into the top of her head, as if he were trying to graze there-not that there was much to graze on, her hair was very thin. He edges her towards the gutter or into those walls saying Défense d’Afficher, as the case may be, talking about the Guermantes, say … And you say bitterly to yourself, ‘Two pairs of strong glasses, two sets of rabbit teeth have felt an irresistible attraction.’ ‘

  One of Karvo’s telephones rang.

  ‘Karvo,’ said Karvo, heaving half of his body over the desk and in a voice suddenly plaintive said:

  ‘No, my darling. Yes my darling. You’d better not, my darling. In that case you must, my darling.’

  And then put down the telephone and got his body back on to the chair, breathless, his eyelids blinking, paler than his face. He had his crucifixion look and he said to Chatty:

  ‘What were you saying? That was Dolly.’

  ‘I was saying,’ said Chatty sitting up and raising his voice, ‘they now l
ive in a bloody mansion! Cézannes, Picassos, Soutines, Renoirs, up the stairs, everywhere. From the drawing-room window you can see all the most expensive flowering shrubs and trees in bloom in the Crescent. A manservant brings in the champagne and in comes the adviser to the Foreign Office.’ ‘Who is that?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Chatty. ‘Ronnie.’

  ‘There he is,’ said Chatty. ‘And he leans down and starts grazing on. your hair now. He is young but has gone bald early, very confidential and nods at every word you say. Congratulating himself. As she floats into the room, he says, “It’s a winner, isn’t it!” ‘

  ‘She is wearing a dress made of two sheets of flame. One of the flames appears to be looped between her legs, but of course that can’t be true and for the rest of the evening you keep trying to work out how she got it on. And she says, as she comes in: “Doggie!” And he looks at her and says “Pussy!” They’ve come back from Scotland via Vienna and Paris.’

  ‘Who else was at the party?’ said Karvo thirstily.

  ‘No party,’ said Chatty. ‘Just his sister Rhoda. Up from the country for a couple of days shopping. A nice pensive woman, older than her brother, looking like an engraving of George Eliot, heavy dark hair peacefully parted in the middle, Victorian brooch, a long romantic poem. A woman you see talking to gardeners, walking on lawns, driving off in a little car to local education committees. A botanist too, in a religious way. We talked about a bowl of white peonies in the drawing-room. “Paeonia,” she said. She was very reserved and shy. She said the plant had been introduced into Cornwall by the Brethren of Saint Michael. In the thirteenth century. She wouldn’t interest you, Karvo, she’s a good woman.’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said Karvo.

  ‘Quite a medieval evening up till then,’ said Chatty. ‘Suddenly Ronnie, the husband, says, “Pussy, you must show them!” As he says this he gives a lick of glee to his lips and his hands jump about in his trouser pockets. “Oh, Doggie,” she says. “Shall I be naughty? It’s dreadful, dearest Chatty. Hats, Chatty! I’ve robbed the Place Vendôme. Bring your champagne.” ‘