The Transit of Venus (18 page)

But she remained distinct, integral, contemptuous, in her place opposite. He added, "Night brings, among other things, counsel."

From the syntax it was apparent he had said this before.

The sky was settling either into a rose-ripe composure of summer evening or into an arc of monstrous contusions, depending how you looked at it. They were crossing a maze of tracks near the river, and there was a fine view of St. Paul's. Caro was on her feet, reaching up to the rack for her bag.

He said, "For pity's sake," as he had said at the station, and lifted the bag down for her. They were standing, balancing, a few inches from each other and she had her hands by her sides. Her lips were lightly drawn back so that the lower teeth showed, and in that instant she might have been considered cruel as he.

She looked in his face. "I have already made love today."

He staggered to keep his feet as the train belted for home, then rocked on his toes, in control. He was taller than she by about five inches. "I'm aware of the terms. All the same, let's see if we can't offer you something short of martyrdom." He glanced round the compartment. "All set?"

He was first on the platform. Following, she saw his quick sleeve raised: "Taxi." And got into his dark cab while he was still giving the address.

M
v dear Caro—

There are sixty thousand students in Paris, most of them in the
corridor outside this room. Last week, however, the building was deserted for Easter and calm as a monastery. My window looks on a
courtyard full of flowering trees—hawthorn, a Judas tree, and, very
near, a big lilac coming out in purple pyramids. There is a fountain and

—concealed—a thrush. During the holiday I drove with two French
colleagues to the mines near Lille, where we went down a pit. The
coal-face straight from Dante, worked by boys of sixteen or so, mostly
North Africans who spoke no French. Worse than this were the hovels
they went back to afterwards, ten to a filthy hut. Having uselessly
petitioned the Ministere du Travail on behalf of these people, my two
friends are helping them form a union. We returned to Paris by way
of the First World War cemeteries of Vimy and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and a quarter of a million graves.

I work. I think of you. These are not alternating propositions—I
think of you always. Since writing you last, I've been to a show of
drawings by Leonardo, a one-man industrial revolution. Have seen a
good play,
Le Diable et le Bon Dieu,
as well as Jean Vilar and Gerard
Philipe in
Le Cid,
a judo championship, and Senator Kefauver on
television. Kefauver dismaying enough, God knows, but I am regarded
as his champion here, there being so much facile and uninformed
anti-Americanism among my colleagues. I dislike unanimity (or solidarity as it's perniciously called), and anyway the mindless Soviet and
China worship bores me—particularly in this land of
en principe.

The man I came here to work with continues to impress me, humanly
and professionally. It is true he's made mistakes, in part because he has
done so much. Those who undertake less can be more circumspect.

(And those who attempt nothing—whether of the soul or the intellect

—are safest, and of course most critical, of all. It's easy enough to
denounce—all you need is ill will.) What an atrocious, sustained effort
is required, I find, to learn or do anything thoroughly—especially if it's
what you love. A vocation is a source of difficulty, not ease. To do is
difficult enough. To be, more difficult still. Both to do and be demand
an effort at superhumanity. Well, why not? Anything is preferable to
the safe side of the line.

The students are early potatoes, forced too hard, the pace terrific.

They come here at eighteen from the lycees, and after one year take
the equivalent of B.A. All are "serious" and
engages.
(I'm thoroughly
sick of that word.) The place is plastered with Marxist literature, and
one in four are Party members. Yet they spend their nights playing
brutal practical jokes on the freshmen and yell like fourth-formers when
meals are late. Fairly frightening on the premises, they are touchingly
young and earnest when seen on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where
they pass what free time they can manage. They make me feel both
sedate and gauche.

The new French government is identical with the one before, and
will fall as quickly. Will we end up with Europe going fascist again,

"defended" by a German army with American commanders and
American weapons, itching to cross the Elbe? (When you consider how
real the Soviet menace is, it's remarkable that the countering dementia
on our side can almost make you disbelieve in it.) One bright spot has
been the death of de Lattre, raising some faint hope of a settlement in
Indo-China. His funeral was a monstrous exhibition of militarism—

schools closed, vast processions with Eisenhower, Montgomery, the
cabinet, bands, choirs, clergy, troops, the lot. Lying in state at the Arc
de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Les Invalides. A thoroughly Prussian performance.

If Leonardo had hit on the steam engine, Napoleon would have
dropped the atomic bomb, and to clamorous French applause.

Among the students, as with my colleagues here, there is often a
background of poverty. There's no charade around this as in our countries—no dissembling by the poor, no fantasy of brotherhood on the
part of the affluent. I remember the university people who used to come
round Ancoats in my childhood, adopting our speech and clothes to
show a kindred spirit—a sentimental condescension that does damn all
for poverty. Membership in the proletariat doesn't come that cheap.

What did it do for us, their guilt-edged security or the moral outrage
they exchanged on their way home to their employed parents—and to
their hot water and their books and music and savings-accounts, none
of which they had immediate intention of sharing? What were their
overalls to me, who'd have given anything to see my mother in a decent
dress? In themselves, rags confer morality no more than they do disgrace.

The poor don't want solidarity with their lot, they want it changed.

(During the Depression, Ted Tice's father had taken him, a boy of nine, to hear a politician speak. Father and son stood in the crowd at the back of a grim hall, and to the child's questions the father returned his habitual response: " D o n ' t talk wet." The speaker was a young Liberal with yellow hair, a lawyer from the district, standing for the first time. He considered himself one of the poor, but even the boy knew that this young man's parents had paid his education at the law—whereas the rest, lad and lass alike, were in the mill or at the works or on the docks at twelve or fourteen. If they'd luck enough to find the work. This youth was said to have a wage of three pound ten a week clear, and only one dependent, a paralysed aunt. All the rest was for himself. It was hard to imagine what he did with such a sum.

He was in earnest, he wished to change their lives.

A man standing at the side of the hall called out, " O n e wick of thi wages'd change a life here in this hall, if tha'd but give it." And the candidate's fair face flushed: "That's not the answer." And the heckler shouted back, "It'll do to go on wi', whilst tha't thinking up a better one.")

Ted Tice got up and went to his flowering window. He sat down again at his table and looked at what he had just written: "They want change." Even more than change, they want revenge. Men can make up soon enough with enemies who slaughtered them in battle; but never with the brethren who humiliated them in cold blood. They take reprisal on their own shame—that is what makes all hatreds, in war or class, or in love. And I too want revenge.

On a new page he continued:

You will have seen the rumpus about the telescope. The
Observer
piece
reached me only today. Old Thrale will never forgive himself for
letting me in the house. But I remember vividly the moment when he
did, and am grateful.

I seek relief from my pro-American role by attacking the United
States ferociously to the pleasantest friend I have made here, a young
American physicist whose main occupation is finding girls. We spend
evenings together when he is not flat to the bawds. Through him I've
met a dear little
etudiante,
a tall ballerina from the New York City
Ballet, and a young curatress who is helping mount a vast exhibition
of Mexican art and is very strong on pre-Columbian sexual motifs.

Ted was divided between the urge to show Caro, and the likelihood of her seeing through this. Reading over the last lines he crossed out "dear" and "young," and eliminated the ballerina. He rewrote the page, and went on:

Another of the Americans here was married yesterday, and I was in on
the wedding, a prosaic little ceremony in a side-chapel of the American
cathedral. The priest sounded as if he hadn't been paid. Afterwards, the
champagne was enough to swim in, and I earned the extremely good
dinner by listening to a woman telling me all about her citrus ranch and
cottage at Monterey. The more annoying as there was, along the table,
an interesting couple—a man called Vail, who subsidizes various cultural enterprises in America, and his wife. He looked like Orson Welles
(though not as Citizen Kane). His wife, thinner than any model and
very tall, was beautiful—a gaunt face with circular eyes. These two
were enclosed in some unhappiness that, because of their intelligence
and looks, engaged one's interest. It had never occurred to me before
that unhappiness could be interesting in itself; God knows fay own is
not, to me. And I suppose this is the sort of thing novelists have to care
about.

The man Vail also concerns himself with humanitarian and political
causes, and surprised me, in the brief talk we did have, by having
noticed the row about the telescope. (I should say that I thought well
of him
before
this.) He had just come from Tunisia, which, like all the
Arab world, seems to be going up in smoke. We had barely begun to
talk when a dowager from Pasadena broke in to say that the world must
surely improve now, as young people are all so
travelled.
Vail said,

"That's not travel, it's dislocation."

Speaking of weddings, I saw that Paul Ivory's took place. I also saw
that his play opened in London. I wonder which will run longest.

Ted put the pages together, then added: "I nearly resent these things I have described, because they are life without you. Caro, it is so long. If I could only see you." And signed his name.

Posting a letter to Caroline Bell was an instant of hope and contact, and anticlimax. Ted Tice went down scuffed and noisy stairs, and out into the street. Having dispatched the letter, he kept walking as quickly as the crowds would allow, so that good spirits would not drain from him along with the warmth of his room.

It was dusk, there were students in the cafes. Other young people, unable to pay for so much as a coffee, stood on the footpath in groups and talked fast without laughter. Ted thought, It is grim and marvellous by turns, and I may never find out why; but at least it isn't raw or facile or paltry or sententious or dull. And the absence of self-delusion in itself is liberty.

The moment of exhilaration evaporated. It is degrading to fix passionate feeling on another being in the certain knowledge there can be no answering thought. As he walked, Ted Tice turned up the collar of his jacket. He had come out, as usual, without a coat.