The Camberwell Beauty Read online

  The Camberwell Beauty

  By

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Contents

  1 The Camberwell Beauty

  2 The Diver

  3 Did You Invite Me?

  4 The Rescue

  5 The Marvellous Girl

  6 The Spree

  7 Our Wife

  8 The Last Throw

  9 The Lady From Guatemala

  Note

  Some of these stories have been published in The New Yorker, Nova, Good Housekeeping, Winter's Tales, Playboy, Penguin Modern Stories, and Encounter

  The Camberwell Beauty

  August's? On the Bath Road? Twice-Five August—of course I knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him-her name was Price. She’s dead. He went out of business years ago. He’s probably dead too. I was in the trade only three or four years but I soon knew every antique dealer in the South of England. I used to go to all the sales. Name another. Naseley of Close Place? Jades, Asiatics, never touched India; Alsop of Ramsey? Ephemera. Marbright, High Street, Boxley? Georgian silver. Fox? Are you referring to Fox of Denton or Fox of Camden—William Morris, art nouveau-or the Fox Brothers in the Portobello Road, the eldest stuttered? They had an uncle in Brighton who went mad looking for old Waterford. Hindmith? No, he was just a copier. Ah now, Pliny! He was a very different cup of tea: Caughley ware. (Coalport took it over in 1821.) I am speaking of specialities; furniture is the bread and butter of the trade. It keeps a man going while his mind is on his speciality and within that speciality there is one object he broods on from one year to the next, most of his life; the thing a man would commit murder to get his hands on if he had the nerve, but I have never heard of a dealer who had; theft perhaps. A stagnant lot. But if he does get hold of that thing he will never let it go or certainly not to a customer – dealers only really like dealing among themselves – but every other dealer in the trade knows he’s got it. So they sit in their shops reading the catalogues and watching one another. Fox broods on something Alsop has. Alsop has his eye on Pliny and Pliny puts a hand to one of his big red ears when he hears the name of August. At the heart of the trade is lust but a lust that is a dream paralysed by itself. So paralysed that the only release, the only hope, as everyone knows, is disaster; a bankruptcy, a divorce, a court case, a burglary, trouble with the police, a death. Perhaps then the grip on some piece of treasure will weaken and fall into the watcher’s hands and even if it goes elsewhere he will go on dreaming about it.

  What was it that Pliny, Gentleman Pliny, wanted of a man like August who was not much better than a country junk dealer? When I opened up in London I thought it was a particular Staffordshire figure, but Pliny was far above that. These figures fetch very little though one or two are hard to find: The Burning of Cranmer, for example. Very few were made; it never sold and the firm dropped it. I was young and eager and one day when a collector, a scholarly man, as dry as a stick, came to my shop and told me he had a complete collection except for this piece, I said in my innocent way: ‘You’ve come to the right man. I’m fairly certain I can get it for you—at a price.’ This was a lie; but I was astonished to see the old man look at me with contempt, then light up like a fire and when he left, look back furtively at me; he had betrayed his lust.

  You rarely see an antique shop standing on its own. There are usually three or four together watching one another: I asked the advice of the man next door who ran a small boatyard on the canal in his spare time and he said, ‘Try Pliny down the Green: he knows everyone.’ I went ‘over the water’, to Pliny; he was closed but I did find him at last in a sale-room. Pliny was marking his catalogue and waiting for the next lot to come up and he said to me in a scornful way, slapping a young man down, ‘August’s got it.’ I saw him wink at the man next to him as I left.

  I had bought myself a fast red car that annoyed the older dealers and I drove down the other side of Newbury on the Bath Road. August’s was one of four little shops opposite the Lion Hotel on the main road at the end of the town where the country begins and there I got my first lesson. The place was closed. I went across to the bar of the hotel and August was there, a fat man of sixty in wide trousers and a drip to his nose who was paying for drinks from a bunch of dirty notes in his jacket pocket and dropping them on the floor. He was drunk and very offended when I picked a couple up and gave them to him. He’d just come back from Newbury races. I humoured him but he kept rolling about and turning his back to me half the time and so I blurted out:

  ‘I’ve just been over at the shop. You’ve got some Staffordshire I hear.’

  He stood still and looked me up and down and the beer swelled in him.

  ‘Who may you be?’ he said with all the pomposity of drink. I told him. I said right out, ‘Staffordshire. Cranmer’s Burning.’ His face went dead and the colour of liver.

  ‘So is London,’ he said and turned away to the bar.

  ‘I’m told you might have it. I’ve got a collector,’ I said.

  ‘Give this lad a glass of water,’ said August to the barmaid. ‘He’s on fire.’

  There is nothing more to say about the evening or the many other visits I made to August except that it has a moral to it and that I had to help August over to his shop where an enormous woman much taller than he in a black dress and a little girl of fourteen or so were at the door waiting for him. The girl looked frightened and ran a few yards from the door as August and his woman collided belly to belly.

  ‘Come back,’ called the woman.

  The child crept back. And to me the woman said, ‘We’re closed,’ and having got the two inside, shut the door in my face.

  The moral is this: if The Burning of Cranmer was August’s treasure, it was hopeless to try and get it before he had time to guess what mine was. It was clear to him I was too new to the trade to have one. And, in fact, I don’t think he had the piece. Years later, I found my collector had left his collection complete to a private museum in Leicester when he died. He had obtained what he craved, a small immortality in being memorable for his relation to a minor work of art.

  I know what happened at August’s that night. In time his woman, Mrs. Price, bellowed it to me, for her confidences could be heard down the street. August flopped on his bed and while he was sleeping off the drink she got the bundles of notes out of his pockets and counted them. She always did this after his racing days. If he had lost she woke him up and shouted at him; if he had made a profit she kept quiet and hid it under her clothes in a chest of drawers. I went down from London again and again but August was not there.

  Most of the time these shops are closed. You rattle the door handle; no reply. Look through the window and each object inside stands gleaming with something like a smile of malice, especially on plates and glass; the furniture states placidly that it has been in better houses than you will ever have, the silver speaks of vanished servants. It speaks of the dead hands that have touched it; even the dust is the dust of families that have gone. In the shabby places-and August’s was shabby-the dealer is like a toadstool that has grown out of the debris. There was only one attractive object in August’s shop-as I say-he went in for ivories and on a table at the back was a set of white and red chessmen set out on a board partly concealed by a screen. I was tapping my feet impatiently looking through the window when I was astonished to see two of the chessmen had moved; then I saw a hand, a long thin work-reddened hand appear from behind the screen and move one of the pieces back. Life in the place! I rattled the door handle again and the child came from behind the screen. She had a head loaded with heavy black hair to her shoulders and a white heart-shaped face and wore a skimpy dress with small pink flowers on it. She was so thin that she looked as if she would blow away in frig
ht out of the place, but instead, pausing on tiptoe, she swallowed with appetite; her sharp eyes had seen my red car outside the place. She looked back cautiously at the inner door of the shop and then ran to unlock the shop door. I went in.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I said. 'Playing chess?’

  ‘I’m teaching my children,’ she said, putting up her chin like a child of five. ‘Do you want to buy something?’

  At once Mrs. Price was there shouting:

  ‘Isabel. I told you not to open the door. Go back into the room.’

  Mrs. Price went to the chessboard and put the pieces back in their places.

  ‘She’s a child,’ said Mrs. Price, accusing me.

  And when she said this Mrs. Price blew herself out to a larger size and then her sullen face went blank and babyish as if she had travelled out of herself for a beautiful moment. Then her brows levelled and she became sullen again.

  ‘Mr. August’s out,’ she said.

  ‘It is about a piece of Staffordshire,’ I said. ‘He mentioned it to me. When will he be in?’

  ‘He’s in and out. No good asking. He doesn’t know himself.’

  ‘I’ll try again.’

  ‘If you like.’

  There was nothing to be got out of Mrs. Price.

  In my opinion, the antique trade is not one for a woman, unless she is on her own. Give a woman a shop and she wants to sell something; even that little girl at August’s wanted to sell. It’s instinct. It’s an excitement. Mrs. Price—August’s woman—was living with a man exactly like the others in the trade: he hated customers and hated parting with anything. By middle age these women have dead blank faces, they look with resentment and indifference at what is choking their shops; their eyes go smaller and smaller as the chances of getting rid of it became rarer and rarer and they are defeated. Kept out of the deals their husbands have among themselves, they see even their natural love of intrigue frustrated. This was the case of Mrs. Price who must have been handsome in a big-boned way when she was young, but who had swollen into a drudge. What allured the men did not allure her at all. It is a trade that feeds illusions. If you go after Georgian silver you catch the illusion, while you are bidding, that you are related to the rich families who owned it. You acquire imaginary ancestors. Or, like Pliny with a piece of Meissen he was said to keep hidden somewhere – you drift into German history and become a secret curator of the Victoria and Albert museum—a place he often visited. August’s lust for ‘the ivories’ gave to his horse-racing mind a private oriental side; he dreamed of rajahs, sultans, harems and lavish gamblers which, in a man as vulgar as he was, came out, in sad reality, as a taste for country girls and the company of bookies. Illusions lead to furtiveness in every-day life and to sudden temptations; the trade is close to larceny, to situations where you don’t ask where something has come from, especially for a man like August whose dreams had landed him in low company. He had started at the bottom and very early he ‘received’ and got twelve months for it. This frightened him. He took up with Mrs. Price and though he resented it she had made a fairly honest man of him. August was to be her work of art.

  But he did not make an honest woman of her. No one disapproved of this except herself. Her very size, growing year by year, was an assertion of virtue. Everyone took her side in her public quarrels with him. And as if to make herself more respectable, she had taken in her sister’s little girl when the sister died; the mother had been in Music Hall. Mrs. Price petted and prinked the little thing. When August became a failure as a work of art, Mrs. Price turned to the child. Even August was charmed by her when she jumped on his knee and danced about showing him her new clothes. A little actress, as everyone said, exquisite.

  It took me a long time to give up the belief that August had the Granmer piece-and as I know now, he hadn’t got it; but at last I did see I was wasting my time and settled in to the routine of the business. I sometimes saw August at country sales and at one outside Marlborough something ridiculous happened. It was a big sale and went on till late in the afternoon and he had been drinking. After lunch the auctioneer had put up a china cabinet and the bidding was strong. Some outsider was bidding against the dealers, a thing that made them close their faces with moral indignation; the instinctive hatred of customers united them. Drink always stirred August morally; he was a rather despised figure and he was, I suppose, determined to speak for all. He entered the bidding. Up went the price: 50,5,60,5,70,5,80,5,90. The outsiders were a young couple with a dog.

  ‘Ninety, ninety,’ called the auctioneer.

  August could not stand it. ‘Twice-Five,’ he shouted.

  There is not much full-throated laughter at sales; it is usually shoppish and dusty. But the crowd in this room looked round at August and shouted with a laughter that burst the gloom of trade. He was put out for a second and then saw his excitement had made him famous. The laughter went on; the wonder had for a whole minute stopped the sale. ‘Twice-five!’ He was slapped on the back. At sixty-four the man who had never had a nickname had been christened. He looked around him. I saw a smile cross his face and double the pomposity that beer had put into him and he redoubled it that evening at the nearest pub. I went off to my car and Alsop of Ramsey, the ephemera man who had picked up some Victorian programmes, followed me and said out of the side of his mouth:

  ‘More trouble tonight at August’s.’

  And then to change the subject and speaking for every dealer south of the Trent, he offered serious news.

  ‘Pliny’s mother’s dead –Pliny of the Green.’

  The voice had all the shifty meaning of the trade. I was too simple to grasp the force of this confidence. It surprised me in the following weeks to hear people repeat the news: ‘Pliny’s mother’s dead’ in so many voices, from the loving memory and deepest sympathy manner as much suited to old clothes, old furniture and human beings indiscriminately, to the flat statement that an event of business importance had occurred in my eventless trade. I was in it for the money and so, I suppose, were all the rest—how else could they live?—but I seemed to be surrounded by a dreamy freemasonry, who thought of it in a different secretive way.

  On a wet morning the following spring I was passing through Salisbury on market day and stopped in the square to see if there was anything worth picking up at the stalls there. It was mostly junk but I did find a pretty Victorian teapot-no mark, I agree-with a chip in the spout for a few shillings because the fever of the trade never quite leaves one even on dull days. (I sold the pot five years later for £8 when the prices started to go mad.) I went into one of the pubs in the square, I forget its name, and I was surprised to see Marbright and Alsop there and, sitting near the window, Mrs. Price. August was getting drinks at the bar. Alsop said to me:

  ‘Pliny’s here. I passed him a minute ago.’

  Marbright said: ‘He was standing in Woolworth’s doorway. I asked him to come and have one, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s hit him hard his mother going,’ Marbright said. ‘What’s he doing here? Queen Mary’s dead.’

  It was an old joke that Gentleman Pliny had never been the same since the old Queen had come to his shop some time back – everyone knew what she was for picking up things. He only opened on Sundays now and a wealthy crowd came there in their big cars—a new trend as Alsop said. August brought the drinks and stood near, for Mrs. Price spread herself on the bench and never left much room for anyone else to sit down. He looked restless and glum.

  ‘Where will Pliny be without his mother,’ Mrs. Price moaned into her glass and, putting it down, glowered at August. She had been drinking a good deal.

  August ignored her and said, sneering:

  ‘He kept her locked up.’

  There is always a lot of talking about ‘locking up’ in the trade; people’s minds go to their keys.

  ‘It was kindness,’ Mrs. Price said, ‘after the burglars got in at Sampson’s, three men in a van loading it up in broad daylight. Any woman of her age would b
e frightened.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with the burglary,’ said August, always sensitive when crime was mentioned. ‘She was getting soft in the head. He caught her giving his stuff away when she was left on her own. She was past it.’

  Mrs. Price was a woman who didn’t like to be contradicted.

  ‘He’s a gentleman,’ said Mrs. Price, accusing August. ‘He was good to his mother. He took her out every Sunday night of his life. She liked a glass of stout on Sundays.’

  This was true, though Mrs. Price had not been to London for years and had never seen this event; but all agreed. We live on myths.

  ‘It was her kidneys,’ moaned Mrs. Price. One outsize woman was mourning another, seeing a fate.

  ‘I suppose that’s why he didn’t get married, looking after her,’ said Marbright.

  ‘Pliny! Get married! Don’t make me laugh,’ said August with a defiant recklessness that seemed to surprise even himself. ‘The last Saturday in every month like a clock striking he was round the pubs in Brixton with old Lal Drake.’

  And now, as if frightened by what he said, he swanked his way out of the side door of the pub on his way to the Gents.

  We lowered our eyes. There are myths, but there are facts. They all knew—even I had heard—that what August said was true, but it was not a thing a sensible man would say in front of Mrs. Price. And – mind you – Pliny standing a few doors down the street. But Mrs. Price stayed calm among the thoughts in her mind,

  ‘That’s a lie,’ she said peacefully as we thought, though she was eyeing the door waiting for August to come back.

  ‘I knew his father,’ said Alsop.

  We were soon laughing about the ancient Pliny, the Bermondsey boy who began with a barrow shouting ‘Old Iron’ in the streets, a man who never drank, never had a bank account-didn’t trust banks-who belted his son while his mother ‘educated him up’—she was a tall woman and the boy grew up like her, tall with a long arching nose and those big red ears that looked as though his parents had pulled him now this way now that in their fight over him. She had been a housekeeper in a big house and she had made a son who looked like an old family butler, Cockney to the bone, but almost a gentleman. Except, as Alsop said, his way of blowing his nose like a foghorn on the Thames, but sharp as his father. Marbright said you could see the father’s life in the store at the back of the shop; it was piled high with what had made the father’s money, every kind of old-fashioned stuff.