The Transit of Venus (25 page)

When Christian telephoned, Caro said, "I have some annual leave. Accruing."

At lunchtime Caro took out a loan at the bank, using her pension as security. She drew a salary advance, and bought escudos. When she got back to the office Valda told her, "A man called."

Expectation of Christian made Caro aloof even to Valda. But when she took up the written message she found that Ted Tice was in town for the day.

In the eve. ing Ted drove her to the airport. He had a small secondhand car that became silent on the smallest rise. In the car he asked, "Do you have money for this?"

"I dug some up." Planes were loud and low in the sky. Along the side of the road there were electric advertisements for soft drinks and boot polish. In the changing lights, Ted's profile shone green, then red and blue.

"Because if you need anything, ever, you need only tell me."

"Edmund Le Gentil."

"My fear is, you will never need anything that I can provide."

He neither wished to impute high motives to his anxiety for her nor to underrate a selflessness inseparable from love. He had seen how people grew cruel with telling themselves of their own compassion: nothing made you harder than that. He said, "Caro, when will you let me deliver you from these awful people?"

She could scarcely bear it, that Grace might be included.

Ted Tice was observing suffering that had nothing to do with Dora. Caro's flesh was no longer luminous. Her body had grown so slender it was impossible to imagine the strength that must still be there. These changes gave him no hope, for in her misery she belonged as much, or more, to another man.

He never ceased to marvel at the waste. On each side, so much high feeling, and none of it transferable.

He said, "Today is my thirtieth birthday. If I'm not young soon, I never shall be." He was saying he would accept any terms. "Also today the final decision was made to put that telescope in Sussex."

At the departure gate he kissed her. It was the first time he had ever embraced her and seemed hardly to matter, her substance being neutralized by grief. In his arms her body was light and dispassionate as a dress.

A bus that left Lisbon at daylight brought Caro through foreign fields to a provincial city. Countryside gave way to new residential blocks and to streets busy with morning. Pavements were being hosed, shutters flung up or apart. The sun was not yet warm, the mild air still free of fumes. Along every curb, parked cars, like pack animals, waited to start. The most prosaic shop-window was exotic; a display of kitchenware, installed in coloured tiers, was a pagan altar.

The block of flats in Rua das Flores was called The Chisholm and might have been at Hammersmith. Dora lay on a twin bed, a sodden bundle. One averted one's eyes from the empty bed alongside, as from an open coffin.

"I gave him everything, that's why he hates me. Everyone has always hated me. You hate me too. Why have I gone on. Why. But this is the end now, at last." You could certainly hear her through the wall.

Caro came and went to the kitchen, the bathroom, bringing aspirins and tea, and a brioche she had bought across the road.

Dora's face was a skull, the eye sockets crimson: a boiled wooden doll from an exhibit, the first doll ever made in colonial Australia.

Sometimes she thrashed, at times was inert. Once she gave a scream like a flash of lightning. "I will be better dead."

"As if I could eat," she said, when Caro brought the tray. "Did you get this from the place across the road?"

When she had the tea she sat up against a soaked pillow and at every question thumped her head from side to side. Her dark hair hung down in mad long tangles. "Everything gone. I have nothing.

Can't you grasp that?" She would tolerate no denial. "I'm telling you, there's nothing, it has all gone. You can ask Ernesto Prata.

Who is," she added on another shriek of tears, "the best man in the province." Her head banged sideways on the pillow, as against a wall.

Caro changed the pillowslip. She made scrambled eggs. In the kitchen, leaned her forehead against a cabinet of pink Formica.

"Don't worry," Dora called from the bedroom. "I won't bother you for long."

Later that morning Caro telephoned Mrs. Pomfret, who said she would be round at tea-time. Dora put on a silk dress and lay on the living-room sofa, a brown bag of sweets at her side. "You'll be all right once I'm gone."

Caro stood out on a narrow balcony. In the foreground, television aerials were Chinese calligraphy, were a fretwork of masts and rigging in an ancient port. Beyond the brick apartments and the bungalows, a glade was green in the wasted morning. To the right of the golf course, an old garden glowed like civilization. In the orchards, almond trees remote as happy memories. She thought how she had betrayed Ted Tice's secret to Paul Ivory, and that Paul had later said to her, "What a good turn you did me, telling me that." There was nothing here to hinder her from thinking the worst of herself.

"Can you imagine for one single moment what it means to look for work at my age?"

Caro came inside. "I work."

"You're young." Dora's head was vehement again. "Can't you realize I have no one."

"I too am alone."

"You have friends."

"You have Mrs. Pomfret, here."

Dora said, "It's funny how I always manage to attract the one or two. Who take to me. I don't know why." She allowed Caro to draw the comb through her hair. "What I would have done without Glad Pomfret I don't know. The only one." Glad Pomfret had come round within an hour of the Major's departure, although it was her Bridge day. "I've never had anyone to do that for me. It doesn't seem much to you, but." Glad Pomfret had known from the first what he was, but hesitated to interfere.

Glad's own husband had been a handful himself, but was dead.

"Cancer of the heart."

"I've never heard of that."

"The right ventricle. He was a big man," said Dora, "but at the end shrivelled to nothing."

Caro could clearly see Sid Pomfret on a hospital bed, a swag of deflated rubber. Dora had an ability to bring deliquescence before your eyes.

"They opened him up but he was riddled. In no time he was gone." Dora sighed. "Those are the lucky ones."

Caro said, "Mrs. Pomfret is bringing a Miss Morphew."

"I don't trust Gwen Morphew." Dora bent her head so that Caro could make the coil at the nape. "That's Glad's paid companion."

Ernesto Prata, Glad Pomfret, Gwen Morphew, they were like the cast of a play. On the other hand, the Major had become, simply, he. "He took the antiques, the pieces. He even took the wireless.

If you could have seen his face. The cruelty of him. The cruelty."

"Dora, don't cry any more. Your poor eyes."

But Dora was hooting for the cruelty. "I'd put nothing past him.

Nothing. I'm lucky to be alive."

Caro sat with her arms about Dora, and for two pins would have resumed long past pleadings: Please Dora, oh Dora don't. In any embrace, Dora would apply her stranglehold. Caro, whatever her frailty, was now irrevocably cast as the strong one who overcame without effort; Dora would be the victim, and pitifully weak. There was no reversal of roles in this, only a change of tactics. They had made the exchange in mid-air, as two mountaineers pass between them, at the critical instant, the rope that hoists them to the ledge.

''This awful place. So alone. If only we could get back to Sydney," Dora was howling, "where we were all so happy." Tranquillity recollected in emotion. After a while she said, "At least Grace had the sense to keep half." It was Dora's only reference to the sisters' loss in the debacle: Grace was respected for her foresight, Caro had been the fool. "Grace is so happy, so fortunate. Christian is reliable, someone to turn to. I've never had anyone to turn to.

Not one."

In making a fool of Caro over the transfer of the money, Fate had aligned itself on the side of avarice and calculation. Fate had teamed up with the Major, Christian, and Clive Leadbetter, and the righteous had been forsaken. Caro had to wonder at it, the unfairness.

Mrs. Pomfret came at four, in a large dress of turquoise wool with matching turban. There was a cameo among folds. Miss Morphew was lean, slate-coloured, and had a slight tremor.

"Ernesto Prata is my own man," Glad Pomfret said; meaning lawyer. "And the best in the region." Mrs. Pomfret preferred a straight chair because of fused vertebrae. Caro brought more tea and the remains of the brioche, along with some macaroons found in a tin. A quartet of white doves, released from a garden, wheeled outside the windows. Dora observed that pigeons were said to carry viral hepatitis.

Caro asked, "Is there work here for Dora while this is being settled?"

Mrs. Pomfret pursed, pessimistic. "It is a pity she never picked up the language. Even though circumstances are different, I have picked it up." She uttered the expressions for good morning, good evening. "It is not all that hard to pick up." Portuguese might have been viral hepatitis, or some object by the wayside for anyone's casual lifting. Mrs. P. settled turquoise folds. "Even Miss Morphew has picked it up."

Looking aggrieved in a new way, Dora said from the sofa, "I read somewhere you couldn't learn a new language after thirty. Not properly."

Mrs. Pomfret told Caro, "Naturally, Dora does not hope for a career like yours."

Caro struck out hopelessly: "I am an ill-paid clerk, in a dull office."

Mrs. Pomfret's smile was sadness itself. "That seems, you see, a lot to her."

Dora moaned in realization. Miss Morphew was leaning for another macaroon.

"Dora was unwise," Mrs. Pomfret adjudged, "in signing over to him." They had all taken up the he and him, out of deference to Dora. To so much as name Bruce Ingot would have been a declaration of treason. "A woman should never make over capital. Not even to her nearest and dearest."

Miss Morphew said, "Dora was too trusting."

Dora whimpered. "He won me over."

It was hard to imagine the Major in wooing mood. One suspected he had never courted anything, except disaster.

Dora wailed, "Forget me. I am determined to trouble no one."

Miss Morphew helped Caro take away the dishes. In the kitchen, she ran the tap and said, without looking in Caro's direction, "Prata is in with the Major. Try Salgado in Rua do Bomjardim."

When Dora got her settlement she stayed on in the Algarve throughout the winter. "I long to leave this awful place, as you can imagine," she wrote to Caro, "and these unspeakable people.

Thank heaven England still stands for something. But might as well get the winter out of it here, as I will never see it again. Also, it is advisable to stick it out till spring, since I do not trust Manoel Salgado." Later she wrote that she had reached breaking-point with regard to Glad Pomfret. The main thing was that Caro should continue perfectly happy.

Christian said, "I was sure something would be worked out."

Mr. Leadbetter, meeting Caro in the corridor, reminded her that his door was always open. f

One Sunday afternoon Nicholas Cartledge telephoned Caroline Bell. "Am I never to see you again?"

"No."

"I've tried you a number of times."

"I was in Portugal last month."

"Lucky you."

On winter evenings and weekends, Caroline Bell walked through the city alone, in labyrinthine suburbs to the north or south. From these expeditions—which never lacked an expectation, scarcely sane, of coming face to face with Paul Ivory—she would return home, perhaps wet, always cold. And, removing her shoes, stand in the kitchen trying to warm herself by the stove.

Repayment of the bank loan had done away with heat for the winter. She understood how people had burned fine furniture during winters of the war. She understood why men spoke to her in the streets. She understood many acts of destruction and survival formerly incomprehensible.

She stood in the kitchen and thought, What a cold country.

Caro lay in her frozen bed and stared at the skylight, which was a sheet of clotted ice. She lay in darkness or in moonlight, remembering how, one evening of the previous year, she had come in from work to find Paul sitting at her table writing; and that he had got up and embraced her and asked, "How does it strike you, to find a light on and someone waiting for you?" He had put his mouth to her hair and said, "I have wished that Tertia did not exist." Now it was Caro whom, for his convenience, he wished away.

Love had not been innocent. It was strange that suffering should seem so.

Her mind shifted uselessly on silence, ravening as much to give as to receive. A sense of waste made incredulous tension in eyes and breasts and stomach. Her mind shifted on silence, like a ship on the disc of ocean that represents the globe.

Caro, on her knees, said, "Christ." Possibilities of mercy were remote. God was powerless, only Paul could extend mercy. God had nothing to propose but a relinquishing that amounted to her own disintegration.

Or there was death, which made no commotion but from time to time broke the silence with a bronze reverberation.

On the child Caro, Dora Bell had inculcated a moral obligation to find the world abominable and to speak readily of doing away with oneself in protest. This corruption was now reconsidered by Caro the woman as, possibly, a cheap rendering of sacred truth. For Dora, death had been a recurrent, ostentatious reminder of existence. For Caro, a single death, unadvertised, would suffice.