The Camberwell Beauty Read online

  Pliny married! That made me grin. The only women in his life I had ever heard of were his mother and the gossip about Lai Drake. Perhaps he had made an honest woman of her. I went back for one last look at the chessmen and, sure enough, as the tobacconist’s wife had hinted someone had been left in charge, for I saw a figure pass through the inner door of the shop. The watcher was watched. Almost at once I heard the tap and roll of a kettle drum, I put my ear to the letter box and distinctly heard a boy’s voice shouting orders. Children! All the drumming I had heard on Saturday had come from Pliny’s–a whole family drumming. Think of Pliny married to a widow with kids; he had not had time to get his own. I took back what I had thought of him and Lai Drake. I went off for an hour to inspect a house that was being sold on Camberwell Green, and stopped once more at Pliny’s on the way back. On the chance of catching him. I went to the window: standing in the middle of the shop was Isabel.

  Her shining black hair went to her shoulders. She was wearing a red dress with a schoolgirlish white collar to it. If I had not known her by her heart-shaped face and her full childish lips, I would have known her by her tiptoe way of standing like an actress just about to sing a song or give a dance when she comes forward on the stage. She looked at me daringly. It was the way, I remembered, she had looked at everyone. She did not know me. I went to the door and tipped the handle. It did not open. I saw her watching the handle move. I went on rattling. She straightened and shook her head, pushing back her hair. She did not go away. She was amused by my efforts. I went back to the window of the shop and asked to come in. She could not hear, of course. My mouth was opening and shutting foolishly. That amused her even more. I pointed to something in the window, signalling that I was interested in it. She shook her head again. I tried pointing to other things: a cabinet, an embroidered firescreen, a jar three feet high. At each one she shook her head. It was like a guessing game. I was smiling, even laughing, to persuade her. I put my hands to my chest and pretended to beg like a dog. She laughed at this and looked behind, as if calling to someone. If Pliny wasn’t there, his wife might be, or the children. I pointed upwards and made a movement of my hands, imitating someone turning a key in a lock. I was signalling, ‘Go and get the key from Mrs. Pliny,’ and I stepped back and looked up at a window above the shop. When I did this Isabel was frightened; she went away shouting to someone. And that was the end of it; she did not come back.

  I went away thinking, Well, that is a strange thing!

  What ideas people put into your head and you build fancies yourself-that woman in the bar at Steepleton telling me Isabel had run away and I imagining her running in those poor evening shoes I’d once seen, in the rain down the Bath Road, when what was more natural in a trade where they all live with their hands in one another’s pockets—Pliny had married, and they had taken the girl on at the shop. It was a comfort to think of. I hadn’t realized how much I had worried about what would happen to a naïve girl like Isabel when the break up came. Alone in the world! How silly. I thought, one of these Sundays I’ll go up there and hear the whole story. And I did.

  There was no one there except Pliny and his rich Sunday customers. I even went into the store at the back, looked everywhere. No sign of Isabel. The only female was a woman in a shabby black dress and not wearing a hat who was talking to a man who was testing the door of a wardrobe, making it squeak, while the woman looked on without interest, in the manner of a dealer’s wife; obviously the new Mrs. Pliny. She turned to make way for another couple who were waiting to look at it. I nearly knocked over a stack of cane chairs as I got past.

  If there was no sign of Isabel, the sight of Pliny shocked me. He had been a dead man, permanently dead as wood, even clumsy in his big servile bones, though shrewd. Now he had come to life in the strangest, excited way, much older to look at, thinner and frantic as he looked about him this way and that. He seemed to be possessed by a demon. He talked loudly to people in the shop and was suspicious when he was not talking. He was frightened, abrupt, rude. Pliny married! Marriage had wrecked him or he was making too much money; he looked like a man expecting to be robbed. He recognized me at once. I had felt him watching me from the steps going down to the store. As I came back to the steps to speak to him he spoke to me first, distinctly in a loud voice:

  ‘I don’t want any of August’s men here, see?’

  I went red in the face.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘You heard me,’ he said. ‘You know what he got.’

  Wells of Hungerford was standing near, pretending not to listen. Pliny was telling the trade that I was in with August – publicly accusing me of being a fence. I controlled my temper.

  ‘August doesn’t interest me,’ I said. ‘I’m in property. Marsh, Help and Hitchcock. I sold his place, the whole street.’

  And I walked past him looking at a few things as I left.

  I was in a passion. The dirty swine-all right when his mother kept an eye on him, the poor old woman, but now—he’d gone mad. And that poor girl! I went to the tobacconist for the Sunday paper in a dream, put down my money and took it without a word and was almost out of the door when the wife called out:

  ‘Did you find him? Did you get what you wanted?’ A friendly London voice. I tapped the side of my head.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ the wife said.

  ‘Well, he has to watch everything now. Marrying a young girl like that, it stands to reason,’ said the wife in a melancholy voice.

  ‘Wears him out, at his age,’ suggested the tobacconist.

  ‘Stop the dirty talk, Alfred,’ said the wife.

  ‘You mean he married the girl? I said. ‘Who’s the big woman without a hat–in the store?’

  ‘What big woman is that?’ asked the tobacconist’s wife. ‘He’s married to the girl. Who else do you think—there’s no one else.’

  The wife’s face went as blank as a tombstone in the sly London way.

  ‘She’s done well for herself,’ said the tobacconist. ‘Keeps her locked up like his mother, wasn’t I right?’

  ‘He worships her,’ said the woman.

  I went home to my flat. I was nauseated. The thought of Isabel in bed with that dressed up servant, with his wet eyes, his big raw ears and his breath smelling of onions! Innocent? No, as the woman said, ‘She has done well for herself.’ Happy with him too. I remembered her pretty face laughing in the shop. What else could you expect, after August and Mrs. Price.

  The anger I felt with Pliny grew to a rage but by the time I was in my own flat Pliny vanished from the picture in my mind. I was filled with passion for the girl. The fever of the trade had come alive in me; Pliny had got something I wanted. I could think of nothing but her, just as I remember the look August gave Pliny when the girl asked if the jug was Meissen. I could see her holding the jug at arm’s length, laughing at the old man’s face under the lip. And I could see that Pliny was not mad; what was making him frantic was possessing the girl.

  I kept away from Pliny’s. I tried to drive the vision out of my mind, but I could not forget it. I became cunning. Whenever my job allowed it – and even when it didn’t – I started passing the time of day with any dealer I had known, picked up news of the sales, studied catalogues, tried to find out which ones Pliny would go to. She might be with him. I actually went to Newbury but he was not there. Bath he couldn’t miss and, sure enough, he was there and she wasn’t. It was ten in the morning and the sale had just started. I ran off and got into my car. I drove as fast as I could the hundred miles back to London and cursed the lunchtime traffic. I got to Pliny’s shop and rang the bell. Once, then several long rings. At once the drum started beating and went on as if troops were marching. People passing in the street paused to listen too. I stood back from the window and I saw a movement at a curtain upstairs. The drumming was still going on and when I bent to listen at the letter box I could hear the sound become deafening and often very near and then there was a blast from the bugle. It was a m
isty day south of the river and for some reason or other I was fingering the grey window and started writing her name, I S A B … hopelessly, but hoping that perhaps she might come near enough to see. The drumming stopped. I waited and waited and then I saw an extraordinary sight; Isabel on her head and a side drum on its straps hanging from her shoulders and the drum sticks in her hand. She was standing upright like a boy playing soldiers, her chin up and puzzling at the sight of the letters BASI on the window. When she saw me she was confused. She immediately gave two or three taps to the drum and then bent almost double with laughter. Then she put on a straight face and played the game of pointing to one thing after another in the shop. Every time I shook my head, until at last I pointed to her. This pleased her. Then I shouted through the letter box: ‘I want to come in.’

  ‘Come in,’ she said. Tt’s open.’

  The door had been open all the time; I had not thought of trying it. I went inside.

  ‘I thought you were locked in.’

  She did not answer but wagged her head from side to side.

  ‘Sometimes I lock myself in,’ she said. ‘There are bad people about, August’s men.’

  She said this with great importance, but her face became ugly as she said it. She took off the helmet and put down the drum.

  ‘So I beat the drum when Mr. Pliny is away,’ she said. She called him Mr. Pliny.

  ‘What good does that do?’

  ‘It is so quiet when Mr. Pliny is away. I don’t do it when he’s here. It frightens August’s men away.’

  ‘It’s as good as telling them you are alone here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I came. I heard the drum and the bugle.’

  ‘Did you?’ she said eagerly. ‘Was it loud?’

  ‘Very loud.’

  She gave a deep sigh of delight.

  ‘You see!’ she said, nodding her head complacently.

  ‘Who taught you to blow the bugle?’ I said.

  ‘My mother did,’ she said. ‘She did it on the stage. Mr. Pliny—you know when Mr. Pliny fetched me in his motor-car—I forgot it. He had to go back and get it. I was too frightened.’

  ‘Isab …’I said.

  She blushed. She remembered.

  ‘I might be one of August’s men,’ I said.

  ‘No you’re not. I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Mr. Pliny’s away for the day but that doesn’t matter. I am in charge. Is there something you were looking for?’

  The child was gone when she put the drum aside. She became serious and practical: Mrs. Pliny! I was confused by my mistake in not knowing the door was open and she busied herself about the shop. She knew what she was doing and I felt very foolish.

  ‘Is there something special?’ she said. ‘Look around.’ She had become a confident woman. I no longer felt there was anything strange about her. I drifted to look at the chessmen and I could not pretend to myself that they interested me, but I did ask her the price. She said she would look it up and went to a desk where Pliny kept his papers and after going through some lists of figures which were all in code she named the sum. It was enormous –something like £275 and I said, ‘What!’ in astonishment. She put the list back on the desk and said, firmly:

  ‘My husband paid £260 for it last Sunday. It was carved by Dubois. There are only two more like it. It was the last thing he did in 1785.’

  (I found out afterwards this was nonsense.)

  She said this in Pliny’s voice; it was exactly the sort of casual sentence he would have used. She looked expression-lessly and not at all surprised when I said, ‘Valuable,’ and moved away.

  I meant, of course, that she was valuable and in fact her mystery having gone, she seemed conscious of being valuable and important herself, the queen aud owner of everything in the shop, efficiently in charge of her husband’s things. The cabinet in the corner, she said, in an offhand way, as I went to look at it, had been sold to an Australian. ‘We are waiting for the packers.’ We! Not to feel less knowing than she was, I looked around for some small thing to buy from her. There were several small things, like a cup and saucer, a little china tray, a christening mug. I picked things up and put them down listlessly and, from being indifferent, she became eager and watched me. The important, serious expression she had had vanished, she became childish suddenly and anxious: she was eager to sell something. I found a little china figure on a shelf.

  ‘How much is this?’ I said. It was Dresden; the real thing. She took it and looked at the label. I knew it was far beyond my purse and I asked her the price in the bored hopeless voice one puts on.

  ‘I’ll have to look it up,’ she said.

  She went to the desk again and looked very calculating and thoughtful and then said, as if naming an enormous sum:

  ‘Two pounds.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ I said.

  She looked sad as I put it back on the shelf and she went back to the desk. Then she said:

  ‘I tell you what I’ll do. It’s got a defect. You can have it for thirty-five shillings.’

  I picked it up again. There was no defect in it. I could feel the huge wave of temptation that comes to one in the trade, the sense of the incredible chance, the lust that makes one shudder first and then breaks over one so that one is possessed, though even at that last moment, one plays at delay in a breathless pause, now one is certain of one’s desire.

  I said: ‘I’ll give you thirty bob for it.’ Young Mrs. Pliny raised her head and her brown eyes became brilliant with naive joy.

  All right,’ she said.

  The sight of her wrapping the figure, packing it in a box and taking the money so entranced me, that I didn’t realize what she was doing or what I had done. I wasn’t thinking of the figure at all. I was thinking of her. We shook hands. Hers were cold and she waved from the shop door when I left. And when I got to the end of the street and found myself holding the box I wondered why I had bought it. I didn’t want it. I had felt the thrill of the thief and I was so ashamed that I once or twice thought of dropping it into a litter box. I even thought of going back and returning it to her and saying to her: ‘I didn’t want it. It was a joke. I wanted you. Why did you marry an awful old man like Pliny?’ And those stories of Pliny going off once a month in the old days, in his mother’s time, to Lai Drake that old whore in Brixton, came back to me. I didn’t even unpack the figure but put it on the mantelpiece in my room, then on the top shelf of a cupboard which I rarely used. I didn’t want to see it. And when in the next months – or even years – I happened to see it, I remembered her talking about the bad people, August’s men.

  But, though I kept away from Pliny’s on Sundays, I could not resist going back to the street and eventually to the shop – just for the sight of her.

  And after several misses I did see her in the shop. It was locked. When I saw her she stared at me with fear and made no signals and quickly disappeared-I suppose into the room at the back. I crossed the main road and looked at the upper part of the house. She was upstairs, standing at a window. So I went back across the street and tried to signal, but of course she could only see my mouth moving. I was obsessed by the way I had cheated her. My visits were a siege for the door was never opened now. I did see her once through the window and this time I had taken the box and offered it to her in dumb show. That did have an effect. I saw she was looking very pale, her eyes ringed and tired and whether she saw I was remorseful or not I couldn’t tell, but she made a rebuking yet defiant face. Another day I went and she looked terrified. She pointed and pointed to the door but as I eagerly stepped towards it she shook her head and raised a hand to forbid me. I did not understand until, soon, I saw Pliny walking about the shop. I moved off. People in the neighbourhood must often have seen me standing there and the tobacconist I went to gave me a look that suggested he knew what was going on.

  Then, on one of my vigils, I saw a doctor go to the side door down the Goods Entrance and feared she was ill—but the butcher told me it was Pliny. His wife, they said, had been nurs
ing him. He ought to convalesce somewhere. A nice place by the sea. But he won’t. It would do his wife good. The young girl has worn herself out looking after him. Shut up all day with him. And the tobacconist said what his wife had said a long time back. ‘Like his poor mother. He kept her locked in too. Sunday evening’s the only time she’s out. It’s all wrong.’

  I got sick of myself. I didn’t notice the time I was wasting for one day passed like a smear of grey into another and I wished I could drag myself away from the district, especially now Pliny was always there. At last one Saturday I fought hard against a habit so useless and I had the courage to drive past the place for once and did not park my car up the street. I drove on, taking side streets (which I knew, nevertheless, would lead me back), but I made a mistake with the one-ways and got on the main Brixton road and was heading north to freedom from myself.

  It was astonishing to be free. It was seven o’clock in the evening and to celebrate I went into a big pub where they had singers on Saturday nights; it was already filling up with people. How normal, how cheerful they were, a crowd of them, drinking, shouting and talking; the human race! I got a drink and chose a quiet place in a corner and I was taking my first mouthful of the beer, saying to myself: ‘Here’s to yourself, my boy,’ as though I had just met myself as I used to be. And then, with the glass still at my lips, I saw in a crowd at the other end of the bar Pliny, with his back half-turned. I recognized him by his jug-handle ears, his white hair and the stoop of a tall man. He was not in his dressy clothes but in a shabby suit that made him seem disguised. He was listening to a woman who had a large handbag and had bright blonde hair and a big red mouth who was telling him a joke and she banged him in the stomach with her bag and laughed. Someone near me said: Laps on the job early this evening.’ Lai Drake. All the old stories about Pliny and his woman came back to me and how old Castle of Westbury said that Pliny’s mother had told him, when she was saying what a good son he was to her, that the one and only time he had been with a woman he had come home and told her and put his head in her laps and cried ‘like a child’ and promised on the Bible he’d never do such a thing again. Castle swore this was true.