The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  Mme. Chamson nodded at this detail. She had forgotten she was naked. She was the shopkeeper and she glanced again at the door as if listening for some customer to come in.

  ‘I went up to the shop and there was no one there when I got in …’

  ‘A woman alone!’ said Mme. Chamson.

  ‘So I called, “Mrs. Blake,” but there was no answer. I went to the inner door and called up a small flight of stairs, “Mrs. Blake”–Mother had been on at me as I said, about paying the bill. So I went up.’

  ‘You went up?’ said Mme. Chamson, shocked.

  ‘I’d often been up there with Mother, once when she was ill. We knew the family. Well-there she was. As I said, lying on the bed, naked, strangled, dead.’

  Mme. Chamson gazed at me. She looked me slowly up and down from my hair, then studied my face and then down my body to my feet. I had come barefooted into the room. And then she looked at my bare arms, until she came to my hands. She gazed at these as if she had never seen hands before. I rubbed them on my trousers, for she confused me.

  ‘Is this true?’ she accused me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I opened the door and there …’

  ‘How old were you?’

  I hadn’t thought of that but I quickly decided. ‘Twelve,’ I said.

  Mme. Chamson gave a deep sigh. She had been sitting taut, holding her breath. It was a sigh in which I could detect just a twinge of disappointment. I felt my story had lost its hold.

  ‘I ran home,’ I said quickly, ‘and said to my mother, “Someone has killed Mrs. Blake.” Mother did not believe me. She couldn’t realize it. I had to tell her again and again. “Go and see for yourself,” I said.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Mme. Chamson. ‘You were only a child.’

  ‘We rang the police,’ I said.

  At the word ‘police’ Mme. Chamson groaned peacefully.

  ‘There is a woman at the laundry,’ she said, ‘who was in the hospital with eight stitches in her head. She had been struck with an iron. But that was her husband. The police did nothing. But what does my husband do? He stands in the Louvre all day. Then he goes fishing, like this evening. Anyone,’ she said vehemently to me, ‘could break in here.’

  She was looking through me into some imagined scene and it was a long time before she came out of it. Then she saw her own bare shoulder and pouting she said, slowly:

  ‘Is it true you were only twelve?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She studied me for a long time.

  ‘You poor boy,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’

  And she put her hand to my arm and let her hand slide down it gently to my wrist; then she put out her other hand to my other arm and took that hand too, as the coverlet slipped a little from her. She looked at my hands and lowered her head. The she looked up slyly at me.

  ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said indignantly, pulling back my hands, but she held on to them. My story vanished from my head.

  ‘It is a bad memory,’ she said. She looked to me, once more, as she had looked when I had first come with her into her salon soaking wet-a soft, ordinary, decent woman. My blood began to throb.

  ‘You must forget about it,’ she said. And then, after a long pause, she pulled me to her. I was done for, lying on the bed.

  ‘Ah,’ she laughed, pulling at my trousers. ‘The diver’s come up again. Forget. Forget.’

  And then there was no more laughter. Once in the height of our struggle I caught sight of her eyes; the pupils had disappeared and there were only the blind whites and she cried out: ‘Kill me. Kill me,’ from her twisted mouth.

  Afterwards we lay talking. She asked if it was true I was going to be a writer and when I said, ‘Yes,’ she said:

  ‘You want talent for that. Stay where you are. It’s a good firm. Claudel has been there for twelve years. And now, get up. My little husband will be back.’

  She got off the bed. Quickly she gave me a complete suit belonging to one of her customers, a grey one, the jacket rather tight.

  ‘It suits you,’ she said. ‘Get a grey one next time.’

  I was looking at myself in a mirror when her husband came in, carrying his fishing rod and basket. He did not seem surprised. She picked up my sodden clothes and rushed angrily at him:

  ‘Look at these. Soaked. That fool Claudel let this boy fall in the river. He brought him here.’

  Her husband simply stared.

  ‘And where have you been? Leaving me alone like this,’ she carried on. ‘Anyone could break in. This boy saw a woman strangled in her bed in London. She had a shop. Isn’t that it? A man came in and murdered her. What d’you say to that?’

  Her husband stepped back and looked with appeal at me.

  ‘Did you catch anything?’ she said to him, still accusing.

  ‘No,’ said her husband.

  ‘Well, not like me’ she said, mocking me. ‘I caught this one.’

  ‘Will you have a drop of something?’ said her husband.

  ‘No, he won’t,’ said Mme. Chamson. ‘He’d better go straight home to bed.’

  So we shook hands. M. Chamson let me out through the shop door while Mme. Chamson called down the passage to me, ‘Bring the suit back tomorrow. It belongs to a customer.’

  Everything was changed for me after this. At the office I was a hero.

  ‘Is it true that you saw a murder?’ the office boys said.

  And when Mme. Chamson came along and I gave her back the suit, she said: ‘Ah, here he is – my fish.’

  And then boldly: ‘When are you coming to collect your things?’

  And then she went over to whisper to Claudel and ran out.

  ‘You know what she said just now,’ said Claudel to me, looking very shrewd: She said “I am afraid of that young Englishman. Have you seen his hands?” ‘

  Did You Invite Me?

  Rachel first met Gilbert at David and Sarah’s, or it. may have been at Richard and Phoebe’s-she could not remember-but she did remember that he stood like a touchy exclamation mark and talked in a shot-gun manner about his dog. His talk jumped so that she got confused; the dog was his wife’s dog but was he talking about his dog or his wife? He blinked very fast when he talked of either. Then she remembered what David (or maybe Richard) had told her. His wife was dead. Rachel had a dog, too, but Gilbert was not interested.

  The bond between all of them was that they owned small, white stuccoed houses, not quite alike-hers alone, for example, had Gothic churchy windows which, she felt, gave her point-on different sides of the park. Another bond was that they had reached middle life and said nothing about it, except that Gilbert sharply pretended to be younger than the rest of them in order to remind them they had arrived at that time when one year passes into the next unnoticed, leaving among the dregs an insinuation that they had not done what they intended. When this thought struck them they would all – if they had the time – look out of their sedate windows at the park, the tame and once princely oasis where the trees looked womanish on the island in the lake or marched in grave married processions along the avenues in the late summer, or in the winter were starkly widowed. They could watch the weekend crowds or the solitary walkers on the public grass, see the duck flying over in the evenings, hear the keeper’s whistle and his shout, ‘All Out’ when the gates of the park closed an hour after sunset; and at night, hearing the animals at the zoo, they could send out silent cries of their own upon the place and evoke their ghosts.

  But not Gilbert. His cry would be a howl and audible, a joint howl of himself and this dog he talked about. Rachel had never seen a man so howling naked. ‘Something must be done about him,’ she thought every time she met him. Two years ago, Sonia, his famous and chancy wife had died—’on the stage’, the headlines in the London newspapers said, which was nearly true –and his eyes were red-rimmed as if she had died yesterday, his angry face was raw with drink or the unjust marks of guilt and grief. He was a tall man,
all bones, and even his wrists coming out of a jacket that was too short in the sleeve, seemed to be crying. He had also the look of a man who had decided not to buy another suit in his life, to let cloth go on gleaming with its private malice. It was well known—for he boasted of it himself—that his wife had been much older than he, that they quarrelled continually and that he still adored her.

  Rachel had been naked too, in her time when, six or seven years before, she had divorced her husband. Gilbert is ‘in the middle of it’, she thought. She had been ‘through it’ and had ‘come out of it’, and was not hurt or lonely any more and had crowded her life with public troubles. She was married to a newspaper column.

  ‘Something really must be done about him,’ she said at last out loud to David and Sarah, as she tried to follow Gilbert’s conversation that was full of traps and false exit lines. For his part, he sniffed when he spoke to them of Rachel.

  ‘Very attractive woman. Very boring. All women are boring. Sonia was a terrible bore sometimes, carrying on, silly cow. What of it? You may have remarked it: I’m a bore. I must go. Thank you, Sarah and David, for inviting me and offering me your friendship. You did invite me, didn’t you? You did? I’m glad. I have no friends. The friends Sonia and I invited to the house were hers not mine. Old codgers. I must go home and feed her dog.’

  They watched him go off stiffly, a forty-year-old.

  An outsider he was, of course, because of loss. One feels the east wind-she knew that. But it was clear-as she decided to add him to her worries-that he must always have been that. He behaved mechanically, click, click, click, like a puppet or an orphan, homelessness being his vanity. This came out when David had asked Gilbert about his father and mother in her presence. From David’s glances at his wife Rachel knew they had heard what he said many times before. Out came his shot, the long lashes of his childish eyes blinking fast.

  ‘Never met the people.’ He was showing contempt for a wound. He was born in Singapore, he said. One gathered the birth had no connection with either father or mother. She tried to be intelligent about the city.

  ‘Never saw the place,’ he said. The father became a prisoner of the Japanese; the mother took him to India. Rachel tried to be intelligent about India.

  ‘Don’t remember it,’ he said. ‘The old girl’ – his mother – sent him home to schools and holiday schools. He spent his boyhood in camps and dormitories, his army life in Nissen huts. He was twenty when he really ‘met’ his parents. At the sight of him they separated for good.

  No further answers. Life had been doled out to him like spoonfuls of medicine, one at a time; he returned the compliment by doing the same and then erected silences like packs of cards, watching people wait for them to fall down.

  How, Rachel asked, did the raw young man come to be married to Sonia, an actress at the top of the tree, fifteen years older than he? ‘The old girl knew her,’ he said; she was his mother’s friend. Rachel worried away at it. She saw, correctly, a dramatic woman with a clever mouth, a surrogate mother-but a mother astute in acting the part among her scores of grand and famous friends. Rachel had one or two famous friends too, but he snubbed her with his automatic phrase:

  ‘Never met him.’

  Or

  ‘Never met her.’

  And then Rachel, again correctly, saw him standing in the doorway of Sonia’s drawing-room or bringing drinks perhaps to the crowd, like an uncouth son; those wrists were the wrists of a growing boy who silently jeered at the guests. She heard Sonia dressing him down for his Nissen hut language and his bad manners – which, however, she encouraged. This was her third marriage and it had to be original. That was the heart of the Gilbert problem; Sonia had invented him; he had no innate right to be what he appeared to be.

  So Rachel, who happened to be writing an article on broken homes, asked him to come round and have a drink. He walked across the park from his house to hers. At the door he spoke his usual phrase:

  ‘Thank you for inviting me. You did invite me, didn’t you? Well, I thank you. We live on opposite sides of the park. Very convenient. Not too near.’

  He came in.

  ‘Your house is white and your dog is white,’ he said.

  Rachel owned a dog. A very white fox terrier came barking at him on a high, glassy note, showing a ratter’s teeth. Rachel was wearing a long pale blue dress from her throat to the tips of her shoes and led him into the sitting-room. He sank into a soft silky sofa with his knees together and politely inspected her as an interesting collection of bones.

  ‘Shall I ever get up from this?’ he said patting the sofa. ‘Silly question. Yes I shall, of course. I have come, shortly I shall go.’ He was mocking someone’s manners. Perhaps hers. The fox terrier which had followed him into the small and sunny room sniffed long at Gilbert’s shoes and his trouser legs and stiffened when he stroked its head. The dog growled.

  ‘Pretty head,’ he said. ‘I like dogs’ heads.’ He was staring at Rachel’s head. Her hair was smooth, neat and fair.

  ‘I remarked his feet on the hall floor, tick, tick tick. Your hall must be tiled. Mine is carpeted.’

  ‘Don’t be so aggressive, Sam,’ said Rachel gravely to the dog.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Gilbert. ‘He can smell, Tom, Sonia’s bull terrier. That’s who you can smell isn’t it? He can smell an enemy.’

  ‘Sam is a problem,’ she said. ‘Everyone in the street hates you, Sam, don’t they? When you get out in the garden you bark and bark, people open their windows and shout at you. You chase cats, you killed the Gregory boy’s rabbit and bit the Jackson child. You drive the doctor mad. He throws flower pots at you.’

  ‘Stop nagging the poor animal,’ said Gilbert. And to the dog he said: ‘Good for you. Be a nuisance. Be yourself. Everyone needs an enemy. Absolutely.’

  And he said to himself: ‘She hasn’t forgiven her husband.’ In her long dress she had the composure of the completely smoothed over person who might well have nothing on underneath. Gilbert appreciated this, but she became prudish and argumentative.

  ‘Why do you say “absolutely”,’ she said, seeing a distracting point for discussion here. ‘Isn’t that relative?’

  ‘No,’ said Gilbert with enjoyment. He loved a row. ‘I’ve got an enemy at my office. Nasty little creepy fellow. He wants my job. He watches me. There’s a new job going-promotion – and he thinks I want it. So he watches. He sits on the other side of the room and is peeing himself with anxiety every time I move. Peeing himself, yes. If I leave the room he goes to the door to see if I’m going to the director’s office. If I do he sweats. He makes an excuse to go to the director to see if he can find out what we’ve been talking about. When I am working on a scheme he comes over to look at it. If I’m working out costs he stares with agony at the lay-out and the figures. “Is that Jameson’s?” He can’t contain himself. “No, I’m doing my income tax,” I tell him. He’s very shocked at my doing that in office hours and goes away relieved. He’ll report that to the director. Then a suspicion strikes him when he is half-way back to his desk and he turns round and comes over again panting. He doesn’t believe me. “I’m turning inches into centimetres,” I say. He still doesn’t believe me. Poor silly bugger.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Wasn’t that rather cruel?’ she said. ‘Why centimetres?’

  ‘Why not? He wants the French job. Boring little man. Boring office. Yes.’

  Gilbert constructed one of his long silences. Rachel saw skyscrapers, pagodas, the Eiffel Tower and little men creeping up them like ants. After a while Gilbert went on and the vision collapsed:

  ‘He was the only one who came from the office to Sonia’s funeral. He brought his wife-never met her before – and she cried. The only person who did. Yes. He’d never missed a show Sonia was in.’

  ‘So he isn’t an enemy. Doesn’t that prove my point,’ she said solemnly. Gilbert ignored this.

  ‘They’d never met poor Sonia,’ he said. And he blinked very fa
st.

  ‘I never met your wife either, you know,’ said Rachel earnestly. She hoped he would describe her; but he described her doctors, the lawyers that assemble after death.

  ‘What a farce,’ he said.

  He said: ‘She had a stroke in the theatre. Her words came out backwards. I wrote to her two husbands. Only one replied. The theatre sent her to hospital in an ambulance-the damn fools. If you go to hospital you die of pneumonia, bloody hospital won’t give you enough pillows, you lie flat and you can’t get your breath. What a farce. Her brother came and talked, one of those fat men. Never liked the fellow.’

  She said how terrible it must have been.

  ‘Did she recover her speech? They sometimes do.’

  ‘Asked,’ he said, ‘for the dog. Called it god.’

  He got up suddenly from the sofa.

  ‘There! I have got up. I am standing on my feet. I am a bore,’ he said. ‘shall go.’

  As he left the room the terrier came sniffing at his heels.

  ‘Country dogs. Good ratters. Ought to be on a farm.’

  She plunged into a confidence to make him stay longer.

  ‘He used to be a country dog. My husband bought him for me when we lived in the country. I know’ (she luxuriated in a worry) ‘how important environment is to animals and I was going to let him stay-but when you are living alone in a city like London – well there are a lot of burglaries here.’

  ‘Why did you divorce your husband?’ he asked as he opened the front door. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. Bad manners. I apologise. I was rude. Sonia was always on to me about that.’