The Camberwell Beauty

by V. S. Pritchett

  But the old man knew that what he needed was not a house.

  Our Wife

  I Agree that my wife is a noise and a nuisance, especially in a seaport and sailing place like Southampton. Even her little eyes long for trouble. People come down to sail at the weekend, clumping about in gum boots and sweaters, and they hear Molly’s voice and ridicule by the quay: ‘Stupid yachting people! Look at him. He’s missed the mooring twice. They can’t even sail.’

  In the restaurant-it is called The Ship – it is ten to one she will be shouting, and then she’ll stop dead. ‘Why does everyone stare?’ she says.

  ‘I expect it is because your conversation is more interesting than theirs,’ I say.

  And Trevor, who is with us, of course, and who always repeats her last phrase or mine, slaps his eager knee and says, ‘Yes, more interesting.’

  ‘After all, you were talking about my first wife,’ I say. Another slap from Trevor, who grins and says, ‘Your first wife!’

  Molly is as noisy as a guttersnipe. Or as Jack (I remember) once said, ‘As noisy as a blowlamp, but pretty.’ Jack was her first husband.

  The noise is what has attracted us all to her. We have loved it. She has opinions about everything. She loves an argument. Anything will do. In the old days, I remember, she started a row about whether Jack and I were the same height. He was, in fact, exactly the same height as myself – six feet one and a half inches. She wouldn’t have it. About height she is a fanatic. She is under five feet high, and one of her boasts is that her father was the shortest captain in the Royal Navy. I can see her getting up on a chair in the sitting-room to peer at the pencil marks we had made on the wall. Standing on the chair, she was the same height as ourselves. This wonder silenced her, but when I helped her down she was arguing again. Our ruler was wrong and so was the tape measure – the taunts shot up at us like a boy’s pellets. Jack and I stood looking like a pair of fools who had outgrown our strength, while she went on to say that most of the weights and measures used in shops were fraudulent.

  ‘They probably are,’ Jack said.

  ‘There you are,’ she jeered at me.

  ‘Jack’s right,’ I said.

  She gaped at us. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘You’ve fixed it between you.’

  Those were happy days.

  That memory of Jack and me standing against the wall ten years ago takes me to something else-what he said in a pub in the little place on the Kent coast where they then lived. She was sitting on a bar stool between two men who were arguing with her about sailing-her father, the Captain, had been a tartar about boat behaviour when she was a child, and she hated sailing more than anything—and Jack and I heard her say to one of them, ‘You want cooling down’, and she put her hand out for the ice bucket. If she had been tall enough, she would have reached it and emptied it over their heads.

  Jack was ill, as he often was in those days. In the lazy, detached, speculative voice of the very sick, he said, ‘See that? Two of them. Molly is a girl who needs two husbands at a time.’

  He had seen something I had never noticed, and he said this with a little malice. He was either warning or defining me-or even arranging for the succession.

  I am a construction engineer and I was working near their village on a new dock for tankers that were being built in this marsh country. I was a widower living in lodgings, without much to do in my spare time except play about with my boat. All those attacks on people who sailed were really attacks on me. It was one of the bonds between us – her hatred of my boat. She and Jack lived in an old house in the village that had become a hell of trucks and bulldozers on the way to the dock. I got to know Jack and Molly when a big tree was blown down in a gale in their garden and made a large gash in a brick wall. I talked to them and very soon I was offering to clear up the mess. Molly’s husband was not strong enough. He was hacking at the tree with a weak man’s fury, and was soon exhausted. I got a machine from the dock, and soon they were watching me work. I am a practical man. I’m good at things like that. The noise of the machine drowned her opinion of what I was doing. All she could do was to shake her brown hair.

  In the following evenings, I rebuilt the wall and she stood arguing that it was ‘only a theory’ that plumb lines hang straight. After that job was done I was captured. It was an old house, and soon I was mending doors, unstopping drains, relagging pipes, putting in washers, repairing their car. I even painted a door bright blue after she and Jack quarrelled about the colours. And all the time she was arguing about how our dock would pollute the river, destroy the countryside, and drive away the bird life.

  ‘Think of the tankers bringing oil for your car,’ I’d say.

  Then she would turn on Jack’s doctors, on hospitals, and then on Jack and me. Men were always up to something. ‘You can’t deny it,’ she would say. ‘Look at Jack. Look at you. It’s guilt.’

  I don’t know what she meant by ‘guilt’ and I don’t think Jack did, either, but it made us feel more interesting. She’d get on to ‘guilt’ and say Jack was oversexed, or turn about and say he was undersexed. Or that he threw money away. Or never spent a penny. Or was shut up in himself. Or perpetually running after other women. She wore her hair short and had the habit of giving a nervous sniff in the middle of her sentences-an original and wistful sound in the general clatter which attracted me-and her face would go very red, while her mouth went sputtering gaily away like a little motor-bike. Jack listened to her, blinking busily as if he were taking notes. After a tirade, he’d get up, give a nod, and say quietly, ‘She’s an old character.’ And he would go off, leaving me with her. I would often get up to go with him but she would stop me.

  ‘Stay here. He’s going to sit on the seawall. Leave him alone. It may be a poem.’

  For Jack was a poet; here was the fascination for me. In my trade I’d never run across a poet. Goodness knows how they lived – he read for publishers, I think – but every so often he would go up to his room or sit on the seawall and, as if he were some industrious hen, he would (as I once said) lay a poem. Molly was angry with me when I said that. She allowed no one to make jokes about his poems except herself.

  I wish I had not made this joke, for in a few months his health got very bad. He collapsed. It was I who took him to hospital. I thought he simply had an ulcer. He sat up in bed with a tube in his mouth and I tried to cheer him up.

  ‘You must not make me laugh,’ he said. It will tear the stitches.’

  In a few days he came home, walked down the village street, and took a glass of whisky when he got back, and that night he died.

  The first thing Molly said to me was indignant. ‘He borrowed five pounds from me this morning,’ she said.

  Then she became exalted and tender. It was wonderful that he left the hospital the day before that nurse who was so good to him was leaving. She couldn’t bear the matron. No one could.’

  Then her grief overcame her. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she wept. ‘I can’t believe he isn’t upstairs now.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ I said. I’ve never felt like this before.’

  I loved Jack. I loved her. I had, I felt, been married to both of them.

  ‘The lock on the wardrobe door has gone again,’ she suddenly said, angrily weeping and accusing me.

  I put my arm round her shoulders. She had become motionless and heavy as lead with grief, and she shook my arm off.

  ‘I’ll go and look at it,’ I said. ‘Leave it to me.’

  For a poor man, Jack had occasional reckless fits. He hankered after expensive antiques. This wardrobe I knew well, for I had three or four times tried to repair the lock for them. Owing to the weight of the doors, it was often going wrong. It was a huge oaken piece brought over from France by Huguenots – so Molly swore – in the seventeenth century and it stood in their bedroom. It was the first of Jack’s purchases and she and he had a monumental row about it. She had been going to send it back to the shop, but Jack saved it in a very clever way; he wrote a p
oem about it. This made it sacred in her eyes. After this, he became a secret furniture buyer and had to store the stuff out of her sight, and once or twice I collected it for him.

  ‘So that is what you and Jack were up to,’ she said after he died. She admired our shadiness. To punish me-and Jack, too – she sold the lot, but not the wardrobe.

  The furniture episode became another bond between us, especially because of the toings and froings of the sale, during the time of her grief. Her grief recalled mine when my wife had died, and we often talked about it. She would gaze and nod and talk quietly. She became, except for the tiny sniff, a soundless person. Slowly her grief passed. After a year, my job at the dock came to an end. I was to be moved to the London office and I started packing.

  Molly’s character suddenly returned to her when she saw my clothes stacked on the table in my lodgings. It’s a good thing!’ she said. ‘It will get you away from that idiotic boat.’

  My transfer to London was a victory for her opinion. She glittered with victory.

  ‘I’ll take you out in it,’ I said, ‘for a last sail.’

  I was astonished, even moved, by her reply. ‘All right!’ she said defiantly, but I could see that, despite her victory, her lip was trembling. I could see that she did not want me to leave, and I didn’t want to leave her. I knew that when we were out on the water and I was, perhaps, coming about and making her duck the boom, I would be able to say what I could not say to her on land. We set off, but soon it began to blow, the sails rapped out, and the wind carried away everything she said. She was indignant and frightened. When we got ashore, she said, ‘You’re a masochist, like Jack. It is all guilt.’

  I’m going to sell her,’ I said, looking down at the boat from the quay wall. While we were out and I was putting in a reef, I had asked her to marry me.

  ‘When you sell it,’ she said.

  I sold it.

  Unluckily for her, we hadn’t been married for three months when the firm moved me from London back to Southampton. There was the sea again. There were those detested, lovely white tents dotted over the water.

  ‘All yachtsmen are liars,’ she said when she saw them, accusing me of arranging my transfer. I paid no attention to her; in fact, the trouble we had moving the furniture to our house took her mind off it.

  Our house at Southampton was small. I wanted to put the wardrobe – she called it the armoire– on the ground floor, but she said it must go into the bedroom. To get it up there I had to take out a tall window and put a hoist in from an attic. The thing weighed a ton. It took two days and three men to get it into the bedroom. It had been Jack’s first extravagance and Molly was very proud of the difficulty it caused. She stood in the garden shouting at the men and came peering at it, to see they did not damage it. In fact, the lock did scrape the brickwork when the thing was halfway in.

  The scrape on the brickwork must have weakened the lock, or perhaps the damp summer affected the doors in some way, for they did not easily close. In the winter, there would be a sudden click and one door would swing forward. I put it right, and then, after a malicious lull, the wardrobe-the armoire I should say-would come open again. Sometimes I worked on the lock; sometimes I wedged and re-wedged the feet, blaming the slope of the floor.

  In the end, I succeeded, and for a long time the thing was quiet. But one night when I was making love to Molly the door came groaning open like a hound.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Molly pushing me away.

  I paused in my efforts. It’s only Jack,’ I said. It’s haunted.’

  Now, why on earth I should have said such an appalling thing, and at such a moment, I cannot think. If there is one thing we all know, it is that you should never make a joke – if you call that a joke – when you are making love. I would have given anything to take the words back. Perhaps it was a sign that I was beginning to want help, as Jack had done. Hadn’t he said she was a woman who needed two husbands?

  The effect on Molly was surprising. She sat up, put on the light, and looking excitedly at the door, she laughed. ‘“Haunted”—that’s very perceptive of you,’ she said, admiring me.

  I was shocked by her laugh and pushed her down again. (But, to be frank, love was a fitful thing with Molly. Now that we were married, she said I bullied her into it.) She got free of my arms, put on the light once more, gave herself a little shake like a dog, and gazed in a rapture of importance. It’s weird,’ she said. It could be haunted. Jack always said nothing is forgotten.’

  Molly loved to sit up arguing in the middle of the night when I was exhausted. She said that all things were permeated by the people who had touched them. Now I made my second mistake. I said the armoire was probably alive with the hands of Huguenots. This idea annoyed her.

  It’s very funny about you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were a jealous man. Or are you trying to change the subject?’

  ‘Jack! Huguenots! All of you! Listen to this! I want help!’ I cried to myself.

  We were still arguing at three o’clock, when she changed round and said, I’m glad you’re not a jealous man. That means a lot to me.’

  I was carried away by this compliment and the softness of her voice. Only exhaustion could have put me off my guard.

  Working in Southampton, I could see from my office window the sloping funnels of liners, the cranes dipping towards them, and, beyond that, the water. As I have said, there was always a sail or two in sight, and on weekends there were scores of them. I had sometimes to go to the boatyards and there I would look with longing at some craft with beautiful lines on the stocks outside the sheds. The wings of the angry gulls and their quarrelling voices made me think of Molly with love, and it was while I was gazing in this weak mood at a beautiful, dark-blue thirty-foot sloop one afternoon that a man climbed out of her. He was a tall, lazy-voiced fellow, with a tired face, very slim and fair.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ I said.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said.

  ‘Cigarette?’ I said.

  ‘Cigarette? Thanks,’ he said. ‘I am selling her.’

  ‘Selling her?’ I said.

  He nodded. I nodded. An interesting fellow-quiet, a listener. We walked round the boat and had a look inside.

  ‘Frankly,’ he said. ‘I can’t afford her. I’ve got to give her up. I’ve just bought an Aston-Martin. I can’t run both.’

  Speed was what he liked, he said. He liked to move. He gave a lick to his lip; he was a man like myself, a man giving up one thing for another. I sighed at our singular unity.

  ‘We might do a deal-if I can persuade my wife,’ I said. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘your wife.’

  His name was Trevor. I asked him to come up to the house later and have a drink. ‘But not a word,’ I said.

  Trevor was an understanding man.

  ‘Who is this man you’re bringing up here?’ my wife said when I told her. ‘One of your sailing friends—I know! What are you and he up to?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s given up sailing. He can’t afford it.’

  One more victory was in my wife’s small eyes. And when Trevor arrived, wearing a white pullover under his dandyish long jacket, and very narrow trousers, she looked from one to the other of us to see who was the taller. I saw her immediate interest. Without realizing it, I was at the beginning of a masterstroke. I had brought to the house a tall man who had given up boats. She was excited by the arrival of an ally.

  ‘My husband’s mad about them, quite out of his mind,’ she said to Trevor. ‘He’s thinking of them all the time. He’s always up to something, hanging around boatyards – don’t think I don’t know. He pretends he’s at the engineer’s, but it’s always a boat.’

  ‘A boat,’ said Trevor. There was a gentle, weary note in his voice, and it conveyed to her that mine was one of those infantile and tedious vices that afflict so many men and from which he was now free.

  ‘Better than chasing women,’ I said.

  ‘Women!’ she said. ‘It’s a substitute! D
on’t tell me.’

  Trevor listened to us with appreciation as we wrangled. He lived alone, and he looked with pleasure at the excitements of home life. My wife, walking up and down and clattering on, with a glass in her hand, was adding to her victories, and Trevor occasionally glanced at me with private congratulation.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened the other night!’ she cried.

  ‘We’ve got an old French armoire in our bedroom and the lock keeps going wrong. He makes out he’s repaired it, but I don’t know – it’s weird! It opens every time we get into bed. Do you know what Tom said? He said, “I bet that’s my first wife again.” ‘She gave a loud laugh. ‘Look at his face. Guilt.’

  ‘Guilt it must be,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been married before?’ said Trevor-his first original sentence. I felt gratitude to him for saying this; it created an intimacy.

  ‘Of course he has,’ said my wife. ‘He keeps quiet about it. That’s what is infuriating about him. He keeps so quiet.’

  ‘Jack was quiet,’ I said.

  ‘No need to bring up Jack,’ she said in her sacred voice.

  ‘Who was Jack?’ said Trevor.

  ‘He was my husband,’ she said, stopping with dignity. And then she turned on me. ‘Tell him about your wife’s iron boot,’ she jeered.

  ‘Iron boot!’ said Trevor. He was overjoyed by her.

  But she saw she had gone too far and calmed a little. ‘Not actually an iron boot,’ she said, and when she laughed her eyebrows were like a pair of wings. ‘Her skates. He took her roller-skating – roller-skating, my dear! – and one came off and she fell over and he got engaged. Poor Tom.’

  Then Trevor uttered his next original sentence to me: ‘Why don’t you mend the lock?’

  ‘He’s always mending it—or says he is,’ she said. ‘He’s useless with his hands.’

  ‘It’s a French thing, very heavy, eighteenth century,’ I said.

  ‘Seventeenth,’ she said. ‘The Huguenots brought it over.’