The Transit of Venus (26 page)

Like Paul, to whom there were other resemblances, death had its own key and awaited Caro's return at evening. Its unpresentable spectre must be socially got round when there were visitors—

whose dull, rational, living exchanges seemed the manifestations of a normality grotesquely uninformed, piteous as the flowered wallpaper in a gutted building or the piano intact in a blitzed and roofless room.

There was the afternoon, the Sunday afternoon when Cartledge telephoned: "Lucky you."

Callousness was of course immeasurable. Caro herself had walked with Paul in a graveyard and joked about suicides. She lay on her unconsecrated bed and wondered, "Did I come here to die?"

Caroline Bell watched the room dwindle in the early dark. The skylight made a gash of paler grey.

I had a dream that I was lying on a long slope, and a great stone, greater than the stones at Avebury, rolled down at me. I saw it coming and could not rise, but was not afraid. When it got close, I turned my face to it as if to a pillow, as if to rest at last.

A pathos as bad as if it were someone else's death. Confuses the issue. No issue, died without issue. Once, for two weeks, thought I was to bear Paul's child, and feared to tell him. The deed of death has no hypothetical existence—or, having its hypothesis in everyone, must be enacted to achieve meaning. Then meaning is total, as for nothing else.

A phenomenon known as the Black Drop.

It is no less than logical. There are dying conditions as well as living conditions. Venus can blot out the sun.

Don't remember coming out here in the hall. So terribly hot.

Was it impossible then? No longer like someone else's death, now it is like my own. No more thoughts, thing itself, itself. Darkness what darkness, and I have not even.

Returning from work one evening, Caroline Bell found a letter from Major Ingot. Taking it upstairs she put it on the table while she lit the gas for her dinner, then sat down to read it. She kept her coat on because of cold.

The Major asked that a compromise be arranged. Otherwise, prospects were dim for keeping body and soul together. "I don't have your advantages," the Major wrote. And "Day after day, it was a tongue-lashing or the waterworks. Or both, like as not. Cry, you've never seen anything to equal it. You'd not believe, you can't imagine. She was all for dying one day, disappearing the next, till I'd half a mind to take her up on it, and no error." In extremity, the Major's social pretensions had dissolved, or perhaps he believed the unaffected idiom might touch Caro. The Major could not know his timing was badly off.

Caro gave the letter to Christian, who told her he would soon settle the Major's hash. He said, "I am going to drop a word through the embassy. After all, there are some benefits in having access to official channels."

When the spring came, Dora took a cruise to Capetown with a new friend, Meg Shentall, whom she had met in the Algarve in a tearoom called The Lusitania.

In a park without flower-beds or streams, on undulations of November leaves, Caro was walking alone. Branches fissured a white sky, the bark on ancient trees was corded like sinews of a strong old man. On a free afternoon given in recompense for late office hours, Caro had come there without purpose, scarcely noticing the intervening streets crossed in her mute private delirium. Inside the park, lack of intention struck her wretchedly and she grew physically uneasy, ears aching from cold, feet slipping on dun leaves. The smell of earth was decayed, eternal. Flat colours offended, a dreariness full blown: Nature caught in an act of erasure.

She stood on the path, shoulders narrowed and hands up to protect her frigid ears; still and watching. And might have been taken for a woman aghast at some cruel spectacle. But the single person approaching was reading a letter and had not yet seen her.

That Paul and Caro should meet in such a way, by accident, might appear the calculated act of a fate that preyed on helpless lives.

What would in retrospect be made reasonable—since they had occasionally met by chance when they were lovers, and the park was familiar territory—at that instant amazed with predestination. In this they were both egotistical and humble—the two of them facing each other on the ceremonious avenue, the leaves shifting and drifting on the ground or inertly falling; the senile bark, the pinched white light.

Paul came on, of a colour with the pale scene—hair, light coat, trouser legs. Caro lowered her hands from her bare head, but he had already seen her in that attitude and took it to refer to himself, her gesture of apparent terror. Paul was coming from a protracted lunch at a hotel overlooking the park. The document he held was a contract, in which magic formulas—"hereinafter referred to as,"

or "payable in United States dollars"—assured his safety. Through these defences Caro broke like whiteness or darkness, elemental.

He saw two things distinct on her face: that, having perpetually conjured the sight of him in fancy, she could not be sure this was he and almost thought herself deranged; and that she feared to exasperate him with this meeting that was none of her doing—that he might say to her, Am I never to be free of you? Her very silence was the speechless dread of displeasing. As a man might imagine a clothed woman naked, so in that moment Paul saw Caro nearly unfleshed, her disclosed pulses tremulous as the cranium of a new-born child. Her fear, or rapture, pierced him with unusual shame, as if the encounter exposed him in a colossal lie; as if this meeting itself were truth.

Observing them, one would have thought it planned—the way they stood facing, the man with the paper rolled in his hand, the woman waiting. You would certainly have imagined a meeting, rather than the farewell of which they were trying to be worthy.

They could have sat on a bench, or on the damp leaves pitched up here and there in burial mounds. Had they sat, however, would have touched; and some reticence, you could scarcely call it honour, deterred Paul from this. He held the contract, clenched and now forgotten—though unclenched, later, it might again become imperative—and made a slight gesture. And perhaps spoke, saying

"Caro." While she looked from the daunting stature of her agony.

They were converging from extremes, two opposing commanders who meet while their forces slaughter, not to make peace but to exchange a high, knowing, egoistic sadness before resuming battle: two minutes' silence, their brief armistice.

At a distance, a woman in a raincoat stooped to let a dog off a red leash—a lean white dog blotched with black, who soon bounded up to them and stood gasping and with legs wide, awaiting orders. Even this dog, to whom the deathly park was paradise, stared, noting what was not usual. Though the dog pranced from side to side, they were not drawn. The dog then barked a bit, reproving all who are not kind to animals. And the owner called,

"Split! Split!" Paul and Caro were moving slowly along the path, while the dog scampered round their circumspection, circling it like a quarry before losing interest and loping off to be releashed.

They were two persons who conduct themselves well in some outrage; who rise above.

Trees moved past them in procession. Standing by elaborate though open gates, Caroline Bell had her hands in the pockets of her coat and, as far as she willed anything, wished to stay in the park, which had become a core of endurance now and her enclosure. Standing, she was again conscious of sore ears, although her body had otherwise dissolved to a rise and fall of breath and blood.

It was simplest to stand, and be free of explanations.

The dog had found a dead rat, or mole, and was snuffling.

Leaving the park, Paul walked the length of the Mall, then took a cab home. In his hallway he put the contract down, with its creased guarantees, on a table and hung his coat on a stand. The living-room was pallid as the cold sky—walls, carpet, and chairs all of the bleached condition called neutral. Two small Sisleys, hooded by strip-lights explicit as price-tags, were drained of colour as if left out in the rain. In this ashen room, Paul's wife sat on a window-seat, looking out through what might, or might not, have been a glaze of tears.

"Tertia," he said—quite gently for anyone, let alone Paul.

In her room Caroline Bell would fall into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read; like an old woman ruminating on the long, long past. She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.

Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. This risk had come up before.

(At the age of nineteen, Caro—travelling in Spain as a nursemaid

—had spent a week at Granada with the young and antiquated English family who employed her. A wide balcony ran the length of their hotel near the Alhambra, looking out to the Sierra Nevada.

Directly below this terrace there was a steep drop to the town on the valley floor. On crystal mornings and ripe afternoons the hotel guests would sit out on long chairs in the white presence of the mountains, and ask for rugs to be brought to them, or cups of tea on trays. They would turn pages of books from the hotel's library

—where titles and authors, long forgotten in their own countries, clung on in exile. The sanatorium atmosphere was not dispelled by the proximity of Moorish monuments and gardens of perfect roses.

It was as if you had died and gone to heaven.

At dinner in the Edwardian dining-room—where Caro's employer sometimes noted, on his starched, projecting cuff, the years of wines or names of dishes, or might scribble his suite number on the broached bottle of sherry—there was a trio that played, in an alcove, so discreetly than even gipsy selections turned demure.

Each evening, between the entree and the
pastel,
this trio of piano, violin, and cello would go sadly, softly through
Adelaide, Caprice
Viennois,
and Schumann's
Arabeske;
resuming, with the coffee, with a selection from
The Land of Smiles.
And a handful of guests would, quite as mournfully, applaud.

Caro's chair was placed so that she faced the cellist—a woman of thirty or so with white skin that, contrasting at throat and wrists with black crepe, suggested the pallor of torso beneath a dress volumi-nous as a nun's. This woman was passing visibly from Madonna youth to dedicated spinsterhood in calm renunciation. Once in a while her dark eyes would meet Caro's with melancholy, recognizing tenderness, as if to affirm a bond. As if to state: You and I will make no part of that enervating and degrading struggle.

Each evening the cellist's gentle confidence in Caroline Bell's willingness to waive her claim on destiny cast its pall. Later, in her hotel room, the girl would stare in the mirror to discover why she had been picked out as a kindred soul. In some moods, a dispiriting response raised the prospect of solitary, chaste, ineffectual decades.

At other times a vital, coloured image in the mirror obliterated the cellist's pale acquiescence and the threat of the waxen body in its dark shroud.)

Very early one spring morning the phone rang at Christian Thrale's bedside, and he learned that his father had suffered a minor stroke. With perfect composure his mother gave details, while Grace raised herself on her elbow and a wakeful child called from the adjoining room. Christian said, "I'll catch the eight-twenty."

Sefton Thrale lay in a hospital bed at Winchester, his firm expression withered, his carved jaw an unshaven jowl, his breath a laboured sigh. At the foot of the bed his wife stood listening to a doctor: "There is some slight impairment." As if he were a damaged object in a shop, his value now reduced. There was a rail at the edge of his bed like a small wicket gate. He saw the white ceiling, white counterpane; on a table, a red tincture of anemone.

Charmian came and put her hand on his: "You are going to be well." His eyes made some effort, a frightened child trying to be brave. The bluster of existence had ebbed, and he could have been signalling that it had all been an imposture anyway. She said,

"Christian will soon be here." He knew who this was, but the name struck him as an odd choice. He remembered them all indistinctly

—a blur of Christian, Grace, Tertia, and many others, of whom his wife was the accredited representative. All of them so fortunate, compared with this.

The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

When he next woke, Christian was there. Sefton Thrale remembered this had been promised, and was reassured by his own ability to make the recollection. He said, "I knew you . . . " and finished, on a long exhalation, " . . . were coming." Christian, however, understood his father to say, "I knew you would come," and was moved.

His wife stood at the foot of the bed, and gently touched the outline of his feet, then covered them with a blanket.