The Transit of Venus (16 page)

Over and over, the distant dog leaped for the stick. In the shade of syringa, a man with a cap had set up a camp stool and easel and was selecting paints. These onlookers might think them any pair of lovers in a parked car.

It had not occurred to Paul that Caro's influence might increase with her submission. Or that she would remain intelligent. When she leaned her head back to look at him, he was aware of her judgment persevering like a pulse—even forming the most tender, if least magical, part of love. He put a hand to her face, his own fingers trembling with a small, convulsive evidence of unfeigned life.

He said, "Beautiful"—having learned this new, quixotic word.

He traced the outline of her mouth with his finger, and her lips smiled under his touch. He said, "Shall we walk a bit?"

They got out of the car. Caro retrieved her canvas bag. Brief lack of contact was a sharp division from which they reunited. By the roadside, where grass was fine as moss, the earth interred chalk rubble, scraps of pottery, and human bones.

Paul walked with his arm round Caro's waist and now called her repeatedly by name: two syllables like prohibited, pent-up endearments.

A notice hung on the back of the door: "The Management is not responsible for loss of valuables." ,

"So it's no use blaming them," Paul said.

Over the washstand there was another notice, splashed and faded: "It is regretted that hot water cannot be provided in the rooms." A streak of late light clipped one cardboard corner.

" H o w did you know such a place?" She was looking up at flowered wallpaper and a moulding of undusted acanthus. Beneath her head the pillow protruded from its cover, striped and soiled.

"Under quite different circumstances."

Caro remembered a deserted little bar downstairs, stale-smelling; a row of filmed bottles, bleared tumblers. On a counter, a veal-and-ham pie, bisected, pink, and larded—its centered egg blatant as a child's picture of sunset. She said, "The scene of the crime."

"What are you saying?"

"I was thinking about Avebury. Though crime is irrelevant to Avebury. Everything human is insignificant there"—lifting back her hair, resettling her head on his arm—"even human sacrifice."

"Things are the same now as then, only overlaid with hypocrisy."

Certitude returned to Paul, and some scorn for a world in which he had, so easily, his way. The girl lay by his side, part of the general acquiescence. He stroked her heavy hair and said, "I have never suffered greatly."

For luck or exorcism she touched his hand to the maple veneer of the awful bedstead. "Then you still have something to fear."

"I mean, when there has been tragedy or risk, I have not felt enough. Whatever enough means." He was not warning her, just telling the truth. "If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it. Perhaps even now I've had more good life than they can take from me."

By "you" Paul meant himself. "They" were undefined. Caro said nothing. By now she would have given up her life for him, but repudiated his wish to be indemnified, by arithmetical advantages, against experience. "Got away with it," he had said, as if life itself were a felony, a shiftiness exposed like stained ticking on a rented bed. As if, for all his authority, he were a fugitive. His father had perhaps renounced existence; but had not given it the slip.

She would have told him, "You can't have this without catastrophe," but was silent out of fear of loss—reminded how nothing creates such untruth as the wish to please or to be spared something.

Paul got up and dressed. From the bed Caro watched, languid as a patient emerging from ether, in pain and swirled by slow impressions that would scarcely focus; while the wakeful world, personified in Paul, went about its business. Suspension of will in this experience might almost have brought new innocence, had it not itself been so deeply willed. There was the offering and inflicting: a brief excuse for the limitless tenderness no man would otherwise indulge.

From ignorance she had gone, in one hour, to this superiority of common knowledge.

When Paul sat in a shabby chair to pull on his shoes, she at last rose and went to him, and knelt for his embrace.

Paul drew her body between his knees. Pressure of sleeves and trousers on her bare skin urged on Caroline Bell another sensation, from infancy, when her father would lean over her cot to take up the scarcely clad child in hard omnipotent arms of serge or flannel that smelt of the city and the great world. A particular memory, inapposite, of her father in evening dress on his way to some ceremony, wearing medals of war that swung from bright ribbons as he bent to kiss his elder daughter. And she was the child reaching up to a smell of tobacco and cologne and the dark male friction of the coat, while medals dangled like coins of small denominations.

The transformations of her twenty years were no more amazing or irreversible than the new change, within a single day, of solitary girl into a woman kneeling naked on a threadbare carpet at her lover's feet. The embrace, the room, a bar of light on the ceiling, a vacant luggage-rack in a corner could have been part of seedy insignificance the world over; or might hold the very source of meaning, like the kiss, or flagellation, in the silent background of a masterpiece.

"Caro," Paul said, "you'll catch cold." He was clothed and sat presiding, but could scarcely bear the renewed power it gave her, this kneeling at his feet. "You'll catch cold, my dear." The pale sun had gone to the ceiling, a thin draft came in at every gimcrack. Paul pushed back her tangled hair to discover the white skin at the margin where summer had not reached. "Maiden no more." Tears had formed at the corners of her eyes, but were not of the kind that fall or need be noticed.

A stained mug had held cocoa, there was a browning scrap of apple on a saucer, there were heavy, unaligned shoes on the floor, a shirt on a chair. The room's dark curtains and stern fixtures were not livened by mere litter and the smell of food. The books hardly helped, having nothing to do with the room: books of passage. It was a phase of Ted Tice's work that interested him less than what had gone before and was soon to come, and the books knew it. He was uncharacteristically cold here, and lay on the bed dressed and wearing socks. At night he had a heavy quilt. It was a joke to the family: "But it's a fine September for Edinburgh, not a day under forty degrees." Ted and Margaret had done this joke to death, as people do who hesitate to move on to the next phase.

The family were all out to Sunday tea, except Margaret, who stayed in to paint or to practise the piano.

Margaret must practise. Or might be avoiding some Donald or Willie—for Margaret, fair and stately, was the natural quarry of her father's students. Or had some reason, greater than her many accomplishments, for remaining at home. The piano was in a downstairs room at the back of the house, where she also painted. But in the Sunday suspension you heard all the notes, and even the hesitations of turned pages—of Schumann, Cesar Franck. Willies and Duncans would have turned music for her by the hour, or, if young men were not turning music these days, would have walked her through cold daylight streets to eat a brittle chop in the smoky din of a students' hole. Any number of them hankered after the broad white brow and tender mouth of Margaret and were anxious to make some sort of showing for her sake. "She is a princess," said her mother, who was a Fabian socialist.

Ted Tice released the book he was supposed to read, and lay with one arm under his head, his other hand holding a letter. The book splayed awkwardly on the plaid blanket and, when, he sighed, it sighed too and overbalanced to the floor. Below, the piano paused to inquire politely into the thud. The pause deepened. When the music was taken up again it was the music of songs as they might be played in a nightclub by a gifted pianist down on his, or her, luck. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and all the rest.

I went to Avebury more or less as planned. It's more a symbol than a
place—an expression of the inevitable. You once said that life didn't
have to be credible, or fair. And that seemed clear enough at Avebury
Circle.

Then last week I was in London overnight. The interview was with
a man called Leadbetter, and the job begins next month. I get four
pounds a week—it would have been three but for passing the test. This
Leadbetter was spruce, diminutive, in his celluloid cubicle. A sort of
miniature model of a man, a ship in a bottle. Our talk was like that too

—a whittled-down representation of human discourse. When I questioned one of the conditions, Leadbetter told me I was a perfectionist,
as if that meant sinner.

In the evening I went to
Richard the Second.
In front of us was a
mountain of a man—the least movement and he blotted out half the
English court.

"These Foolish Things" was followed by "My Romance." The songs were being played with too much style and attention. No longer a pleasant diversion, it was more like a lavishing, the utter waste of something inestimable.

I try to imagine you in your northern limbo waiting to leave for France.

Ted, don't lose your precious time on me. There is no future I believe
in as I do in yours, and no one else whose ambition ever seemed so clear
a form of good.

"In front of us." Ted Tice was so sure, and so wished to be unconvinced, of the other presence in that phrase that he lost the capacity to judge—like a man who stares too long at a distant shape and cannot be sure if it moves or is still.

It isn't a matter of more time. Don't be disappointed in me. I wish you
so well—only, am helpless to make your happiness. If by happiness is
meant a sort of vigorous peace of mind, then I hope—against all morality—it can be conferred on you with no suffering on your part or even
effort. (This may be the sense in which perfectionism, in my case, is
linked to sin.)

Downstairs, Margaret was playing "I'm in the Mood for Love"; was playing her last card. And Edmund Tice, in the cold room with his arm beneath his head and a letter beside him, grieved for her as much as for anybody.

Caroline Bell's body was not white but nutritiously pale, like pastry or a loaf, even having the slight flaws—tiny tag of a mole on neck or breast, scar on the knee from a childhood fall—that might have formed in a process such as baking. When she raised herself on an elbow or lay with outspread arms, the space of her belly was a lap, the paired curve of shoulders was matched to an imminent embrace. This could not be guessed until she was naked: until then, sensation itself was clothed.

She was wearing nothing but a small round watch. "Soon they'll be home."

Even Grace was they, that afternoon in September. Even Peverel was home.

In Paul Ivory's room, at the top of the Thrales' house, the bedstead was brass, the discarded, trailing counterpane a swag of white crochet. It was the room of the high incongruous window, whose panes of sun fell flat on a pure wall. On the white bed, Paul and Caro arranged head to shoulder, chin to temple, thigh to thigh, ingeniously.

" N o one will come up here anyway. It being Sunday, I being hard at work, you being out."

"Where am I exactly?"

"On the road near Romsey, enjoying the walk." Paul kicked an entanglement of patient white crochet. "Oh Caro, how lucky this is." Sufficiency was like deliverance: he had been suffocating and now breathed freely. He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other, reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.

Paul said, "I have locked the door."

In the brass rods and finials behind her head, Caro's fingers were vaguely grappled, like those of a woman dreaming. Her arm, which people thought strong, revealed an underside soft as an infant's and scarcely grooved in the elbow. Her other hand slipped through and through Paul Ivory's hair with all possible tenderness. In his mind he could see it happening, his fairness falling through her fingers in the white room. He told himself, This is real at any rate. And could feel her think the same.

He reached for the covering, drew it up to her chin. Then slowly down. They laughed: the unveiling of a monument. In the wall there was the window of blue sky, green leaves on a bough of elm.

Once, an angular little plane passed slowly over, the silver-paper sort that might have taken children for joy-rides between the wars: a toy plane that had whirred in a grassy peacetime field while a man in overalls lunged at the propellor and shouted
"CONTACT."

They were as much part of that aerial brightness as of the locked, earthly, domestic room.

"What if your sister hadn't gone to the concert." Paul having learned the story of Grace and Christian at the Albert Hall.

"Our destiny, as well as theirs."

He had called it luck, but now she spoke of destiny. As if she said to him, You must choose. It was the way of women to require choices, sortings, and proofs; and then to attribute blame. The Judgment of Paul.