The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  And what were these stories? Impossible to say. I would set off in the morning and see the grey, ill-painted buildings of the older quarters leaning together like people, their shutters thrown back, so that the open windows looked like black and empty eyes. In the mornings the bedding was thrown over the sills to air and hung out, wagging like tongues about what goes on in the night between men and women. The houses looked sunken-shouldered, exhausted, by what they told; and crowning the city, was the church of Sacré Coeur, very white, standing like some dry Byzantine bird, to my mind, hollow-eyed and without conscience, presiding over the habits of the flesh and-to judge by what I read in newspapers-its crimes also; its murders, rapes, its shootings for jealousy and robbery. As my French improved the secrets of Paris grew worse. It amazed me that the crowds I saw on the street had survived the night and many indeed looked as sleepless as the houses.

  After I had been a little more than a year in Paris, fourteen months in fact, a drama broke the monotonous life of our office. A consignment of dressed skins had been sent to us from Rouen. It had been sent by barge-not the usual method in our business. The barge was an old one and was carrying a mixed cargo and, within a few hundred yards from our warehouse, it was rammed and sunk one misty morning, by a Dutch boat taking the wrong channel. The manager, the whole office, especially Claudel, who saw his commission go to the bottom, were outraged. Fortunately the barge had gone down slowly near the bank, close to us; the water was not too deep. A crane was brought down on another barge to the water’s edge and soon, in an exciting week, a diver was let down to salvage what he could. Claudel and I had to go to the quay and, if a bale of our stuff came up, we had to get it to the warehouse and see what the damage was.

  Anything to get out of the office. For me the diver was the hero of the week. He stood in his round helmet and suit on a wide tray of wood hanging from four chains and then, the motor spat, the chains rattled and down he went with great dignity under the water. While the diver was under the water, Claudel would be reckoning his commission over again-would it be calculated only on the sale price or on what was saved? ‘Five bales so far,’ he would mutter fanatically. ‘One and a half per cent.’ His teeth and his eyes were agitated with changing figures. I, in imagination, was groping in the gloom of the river bed with the hero. Then we’d step forward; the diver was coming up. Claudel would hold my arm as the man appeared with a tray of sodden bales and the brown water streaming off them. He would step off the plank on to the barge where the crane was installed and look like a swollen frog. A workman unscrewed his helmet, the vizor was raised and then we saw the young diver’s rosy, cheerful face. A workman lit a cigarette and gave it to him and out of the helmet came a long surprising jet of smoke. There was always a crowd watching from the quay wall and when he did this, they all smiled and many laughed. ‘See that?’ they would say. ‘He is having a puff,’ and the diver grinned and waved to the crowd.

  Our job was to grab the bale. Claudel would check the numbers of the bales on his list. Then we saw them wheeled to our warehouse, dripping all the way, and there I had to hang up the skins on poles. It was like hanging up drowned animals—even, I thought, human beings.

  On the Friday afternoon of that week, when everyone was tired and even the crowd looking down from the street wall had thinned to next to nothing, Claudel and I were still down on the quay waiting for the final load. The diver had come up. We were seeing him for the last time before the weekend. I was waiting to watch what I had not yet seen; how he got out of his suit. I walked down nearer at the quay’s edge to get a good view. Claudel shouted to me to get on with the job and as he shouted I heard a whizzing noise above my head and then felt a large, heavy slopping lump hit me on the shoulders. I turned round and the next thing I was flying in the air, arms outspread with wonder. Paris turned upside down. A second later, I crashed into cold darkness, water was running up my legs swallowing me. I had fallen into the river.

  The wall of the quay was not high. In a couple of strokes I came up spitting mud and caught an iron ring on the quay wall. Two men pulled my hands. Everyone was laughing as I climbed out.

  I stood there drenched and mud-smeared, with straw in my hair, pouring water into a puddle that came from me, getting larger and larger.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me shout?’ said Claudel.

  Laughing and arguing, two or three men led me to the shelter of the wall where I began to wring out my jacket and shirt and squeeze the water out of my trousers. It was a warm day and I stood in the sun and saw my trousers steam and heard my shoes squelch.

  ‘Give him a hot rum,’ someone said. Claudel was torn between looking after our few bales left on the quay and taking me across the street to a bar. But, checking the numbers and muttering a few more figures to himself, he decided to enjoy the drama and go with me. He called out that we’d be back in a minute.

  We got to the bar and Claudel saw to it that my arrival was a sensation. Always nagging at me in the office, he was now proud of me.

  ‘He fell into the river. He nearly drowned. I warned him. I shouted. Didn’t I?’

  The one or two customers admired me. The barman brought me the rum. I could not get my hand into my pocket because it was wet.

  ‘You pay me tomorrow,’ said Claudel, putting a coin on the counter.

  ‘Drink it quickly,’ said the barman.

  I was laughing and explaining now.

  ‘One moment he was on dry land, the next he was flying in the air, then plonk in the water. Three elements,’ said Claudel.

  ‘Only fire is missing,’ said the barman.

  They argued about how many elements there were. A whole history of swimming feats, drowning stories, bodies bound, murders in the Seine, sprang up. Someone said the morgue used to be full of corpses. And then an argument started, as it sometimes did in this part of Paris, about the exact date at which the morgue was moved from the island. I joined in but my teeth had begun to chatter.

  ‘Another rum,’ the barman said.

  And then I felt a hand fingering my jacket and my trousers. It was the hand of Mme. Chamson. She had been down at the quay once or twice during the week to have a word with Claudel. She had seen what had happened.

  ‘He ought to go home and change into dry things at once,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘You ought to take him home.’

  ‘I can’t do that. We’ve left five bales on the quay,’ said Claudel.

  ‘He can’t go back,’ said Mme. Chamson. ‘He’s shivering.’

  I sneezed.

  ‘You’ll catch pneumonia,’ she said. And to Claudel: ‘You ought to have kept an eye on him. He might have drowned.’

  She was very stern with him.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she said to me.

  I told her.

  ‘It will take you an hour,’ she said.

  Everyone was silent before the decisive voice of Mme. Chamson.

  ‘Come with me to the shop,’ she ordered and pulled me brusquely by the arm. She led me out of the bar and said, as we walked away, my boots squeaking and squelching:

  ‘That man thinks of nothing but money. Who’d pay for your funeral? Not he!’

  Twice, as she got me, her prisoner, past the shops, she called out to people at their doors:

  ‘They nearly let him drown.’

  Three girls used to sit mending in the window of her shop and behind them was usually a man pressing clothes. But it was half past six now and the shop was closed. Everyone had gone. I was relieved. This place had disturbed me. When I first went to work for our firm Claudel had told me he could fix me up with one of the mending girls; if we shared a room it would halve our expenses and she could cook and look after my clothes.

  That was what started the office joke about my not having a mistress. When we got to the shop Mme. Chamson led me down a passage inside which was muggy with the smell of dozens of dresses and suits hanging there, into a dim parlour beyond. It looked out on to the smeared grey wall of a courtyard.
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br />   ‘Stay here,’ said Mme. Chamson planting me by a sofa. ‘Don’t sit on it in those wet things. Take them off.’

  I took off my jacket.

  ‘No. Don’t wring it. Give it to me. I’ll get a towel.’ I started drying my hair.

  ‘All of them,’ she said.

  Mme. Chamson looked shorter in her room, her hair looked duller, her eyebrows less dramatic. I had never really seen her closely. She had become a plain, domestic woman; her mouth had straightened. There was not a joke in her. Her bosom swelled with management. The rumour that she was Claudel’s mistress was obviously an office tale.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find for you. You can’t wear these.’

  I waited for her to leave the room and then I took off my shirt and dried my chest, picking off the bits of straw from the river that had stuck to my skin. She came back.

  ‘Off with your trousers, I said. Give them to me. What size are they?’

  My head went into the towel. I pretended not to hear. I could not bring myself to undress before Mme. Chamson. But while I hesitated she bent down and her sharp fingernails were at my belt.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said anxiously.

  Our hands touched and our fingers mixed as I unhitched my belt. Impatiently she began on my buttons, but I pushed her hands away.

  She stood back, blank-faced and peremptory in her stare. It was the blankness of her face, her indifference to me, her ordinary womanliness, the touch of her practical fingers that left me without defence. She was not the ribald, coquettish, dangerous woman who came wagging her hips to our office, not one of my Paris fantasies of sex and danger. She was simply a woman. The realization of this was disastrous to me. An unbelievable change was throbbing in my body. It was uncontrollable. My eyes angrily, helplessly, asked her to go away. She stood there implacably. I half-turned, bending to conceal my enormity as I lowered my trousers, but as I lowered them inch by inch so the throbbing manifestation increased. I got my foot out of one leg but my shoe caught in the other. On one leg I tried to dance my other trouser leg off. The towel slipped and I glanced at her in red-faced angry appeal. My trouble was only too clear. I was stiff with terror. I was almost in tears.

  The change in Mme. Chamson was quick. From busy indifference, she went to anger.

  ‘Young man,’ she said. ‘Cover yourself. How dare you. What indecency. How dare you insult me!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help …’ I said.

  Mme. Chamson’s bosom became a bellows puffing outrage.

  ‘What manners,’ she said. ‘I am not one of your tarts. I am a respectable woman. This is what I get for helping you. What would your parents say? If my husband were here!’

  She had got my trousers in her hand. The shoe that had betrayed me fell now out of the leg to the floor.

  She bent down coolly and picked it up.

  ‘In any case,’ she said and now I saw for the first time this afternoon the strange twist of her mouth return to her, as she nodded at my now concealing towel-’that is nothing to boast about.’

  My blush had gone. I was nearly fainting. I felt the curious, brainless stupidity that goes with the state nature had put me in. A miracle saved me. I sneezed and then sneezed again; the second time with force.

  ‘What did I tell you!’ said Mme. Chamson, passing now to angry self-congratulation. She flounced out to the passage that led to the shop and coming back with a pair of trousers she threw them at me and, red in the face, said:

  ‘Try those. If they don’t fit I don’t know what you’ll do. I’ll get a shirt,’ and she went past me to the door of the room beyond saying:

  ‘You can thank your lucky stars my husband has gone fishing.’

  I heard her muttering as she opened drawers. She did not return. There was silence.

  In the airless little salon, looking out (as if it were a cell in which I was caught), on the stained smudgy grey wall of the courtyard, the silence lengthened. It began to seem that Mme. Chamson had shut herself away in her disgust and was going to have no more to do with me. I saw a chance of getting out but she had taken away my wet clothes. I pulled on the pair of trousers she had thrown; they were too long but I could tuck them in. I should look an even bigger fool if I went out in the street dressed only in these. What was Mme. Chamson doing? Was she torturing me? Fortunately my impromptu disorder had passed. I stood listening. I studied the mantelpiece where I saw what I supposed was a photograph of Mme. Chamson as a girl in the veil of her first communion. Presently I heard her voice:

  ‘Young man,’ she called harshly, ‘do you expect me to wait on you. Come and fetch your things.’

  Putting on a polite and apologetic look, I went to the inner door which led into a short passage only a yard long. She was not there.

  ‘In here,’ she said curtly.

  I pushed the next door open. This room was dim also and the first thing I saw was the end of a bed and in the corner a chair with a dark skirt on it and a stocking hanging from the arm, and on the floor a pair of shoes, one of them on its side. Then, suddenly, I saw at the end of the bed a pair of bare feet. I looked at the toes; how had they got there? And then I saw: without a stitch of clothing on her, Mme. Chamson—but could this naked body be she? –was lying on the bed, her chin propped on her hand, her lips parted as they always were when she came in on the point of laughing to the office, but now with no sound coming from them; her eyes, generally wide open, were now half-closed, watching me with the stillness of some large white cat. I looked away and then I saw two other large brown eyes gazing at me, two other faces: her breasts. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a naked woman, and it astonished me to see the rise of a haunch, the slope of her belly and the black hair like a moustache beneath it. Mme. Chamson’s face was always strongly made up with some almost orange colour, and it astonished me to see how white her body was from the neck down, but not the white of statues, but some sallow colour of white and shadow, marked at the waist by the tightness of the clothes she had taken off. I had thought of her as old, but she was not; her body was young and idle.

  The sight of her transfixed me. It did not stir me. I simply stood there gaping. My heart seemed to have stopped. I wanted to rush from the room, but I could not. She was so very near. My horror must have been on my face but she seemed not to notice that, but simply stared at me. There was a small movement of her lips and I dreaded that she was going to laugh; but she did not; slowly she closed her lips and said at last between her teeth in a voice low and mocking:

  ‘Is this the first time you have seen a woman?’

  And after she said this, a sad look came into her face. I could not answer.

  She lay on her back and put out her hand and smiled fully.

  ‘Well?’ she said. And she moved her hips.

  ‘I,’ I began, but I could not go on. All the fantasies of my walks about Paris as I practised French, rushed into my head. This was the secret of all those open windows of Paris, of the vulture-like head of Sacré Coeur looking down on it. In a room like this, with a wardrobe in the corner and with clothes thrown on a chair was enacted—what? Everything-but, above all, to my panicking mind, the crimes I read about in the newspapers. I was desperate as her hand went out.

  ‘You have never seen a woman before?’ she said again.

  I moved a little and out of reach of her hand I said, fiercely:

  ‘Yes, I have.’ I was amazed at myself.

  ‘Ah!’ she said and when I did not answer, she laughed: ‘Where was that? Who was she?’

  It was her laughter, so dreaded by me, that released something in me. I said something terrible. The talk of the morgue at the bar, jumped into my head.

  I said coldly: ‘She was dead. In London.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Mme. Chamson sitting up and pulling at the coverlet, but it was caught and she could only cover her feet.

  It was her turn to be frightened. Across my brain newspaper headlines were tapping out.

  ‘She
was murdered,’ I said. I hesitated. I was playing for time. Then it came out.

  ‘She was strangled.’

  ‘Oh no!’ she said and she pulled the coverlet violently up with both hands, until she had got some of it to her breast.

  I saw her,’ I said. ‘On her bed.’

  ‘You saw her? How did you see her?’ she said. ‘Where was this?’

  Suddenly the story sprang out of me, it unrolled as I spoke.

  ‘It was in London,’ I said. ‘In our street. The woman was a neighbour of ours, we knew her well. She used to pass our window every morning on her way up from the bank.’

  ‘She was robbed!’ said Mme. Chamson. Her mouth buckled with horror.

  I saw I had caught her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She kept a shop.’

  ‘Oh my God, my God,’ said Mme. Chamson looking at the door behind me, then anxiously round the room.

  ‘It was a sweet shop,’ I said, ‘where we bought our papers too.’

  ‘Killed in her shop,’ groaned Mme. Chamson. ‘Where was her husband?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘in her bedroom at the back. Her husband was out at work all day and this man must have been watching for him to go. Well, we knew he did. He was the laundry man. He used to go in there twice a week. She’d been carrying on with him. She was lying there with her head on one side and a scarf twisted round her neck’

  Mme. Chamson dropped the coverlet and hid her face in her hands; then she lowered them and said suspiciously:

  ‘But how did you see her like this?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it happened like this. My little sister had been whining after breakfast and wouldn’t eat anything and Mother said, “That kid will drive me out of my mind. Go up to Mrs. Blake’s”—that was her name—”and get her a bar of chocolate, milk chocolate, no nuts, she only spits them out.” And Mother said, “You may as well tell her we don’t want any papers after Friday because we’re going to Brighton. Wait, I haven’t finished yet-here take this money and pay the bill. Don’t forget that, you forgot last year and the papers were littering up my hall. We owe for a month.” ‘