The Transit of Venus (29 page)

Christian furthermore believed that there was an English way of regarding works of art (and in that he was perfectly correct). He would not have said this, but felt it. Phrases such as "The Rokeby Venus," "The Portland Vase," "The Elgin Marbles" held, for him, more than passing proprietary meaning. They summarized a proper custody and appeared to state a desirable case.

He did not much care for private collections unless magnitude had rendered them impersonal. Although happiest, or safest, in the great museums, he would once in a while take in, as he put it, a loan exhibition; but this happened rarely. When—declining the catalogue—he entered the carpeted rooms of a private gallery on a Saturday of bitter cold, he was departing from habit in the way that had, at the Albert Hall eight years earlier, brought Grace into his orbit and altered a number of lives. Once again it was a case of weekend work, the sight of a poster, and himself alone. Today, the very poster had been headed "Retrospective." A shade of all this was passing through his mind when he saw Caro, whose sudden materialization was consequently both startling and inevitable.

Caro had kept her red coat on indoors, and was standing with her cold hands locked inside the sleeves. Her hair hung on her shoulders in indecorous black streaks and coils, her lips were painted scarlet. She was leaning her weight back on one foot like a dancer in position, and behind her was a big man who might, in his stabil-ity, have been her partner. (For some time after the event, Christian's recollection would work on the image of Caro standing that way, with the man Vail at her back ready to raise her aloft.) In the painting before them the heads of two women appeared, aflame, facing one another but not aligned.

"There it is, then," Adam Vail was saying at that moment. He had lent the picture, which belonged to him.

From the other end of the room, Christian observed them. He himself remained transfixed, poised by their immobility. When they both moved, Christian was released and moved too, in their direction.

Adam Vail leaned forward to stare at the picture. "I think they've chipped the frame." He reached in a top pocket for his glasses.

There was gesso where there should have been gold. Vail put his forefinger to it, and an attendant at once came over.

"Not to touch the exhibits, if you don't mind, sir." When Vail stood back, he went on, "Sorry, but that's the way accidents appens."

When Christian saw them alone again and smiling, he went up.

As he did so he felt himself at a disadvantage. He usually saw Caro in his own house where he was—not to put too fine a point on it

—in the driver's seat. This day, before he so much as spoke, he had a sense of intrusion or irrelevance. He wondered if this were simply due to the act of accosting; and did not think to attribute it to Caro's power on that morning of her beauty.

In an effort to establish dominion, he kissed Caro—which was not quite necessary and which he felt she saw through.

That the man with her was American did not provide the customary advantage either. Vail would not talk loudly or instruc-tively or about himself, or make ungainly gestures, even when provoked. This composure of speech and hands warned Christian against any customary staking out of his conversational position: Vail's honesty would have transparency in return, at whatever cost to the respondent. Altogether a need arose to extend oneself that crossed Christian's awakened retrospect with a memory of Caro years ago, when she had compelled him to rise to one of her occasions: a summer afternoon, actually, when he had brought yellow flowers to Grace.

By now the three of them were turned towards the painting, and Christian was soon absorbed, as was his way, beyond the ordinary.

Caro was about to speak when he said—and it was somehow against his better judgment—"You will never, of course, get me to like that series." They had not, of course, tried to. After a moment he continued, "This example does have considerable authority."

He knew he said "authority" because the American brought the word to mind. There were other Americans in the gallery, raising dogmatic voices, wheeling and slicing with unconfident hands, features contorted with reckless vehemence. But not this one, who did not even accept Christian as an antagonist. Christian now recalled having heard the name of Adam Vail; and felt a quick, unworthy distress, as if Caro had outwitted him. He remembered a magazine article in which Vail, asked if he considered himself a mystery man, replied, "No more so than anyone else."

The introduction to the exhibition catalogue had been written by a leading—or major, or brilliant—critic. Caro read out a sentence and asked, "What does it mean?"

Vail looked over her shoulder. "They come to think they've had something to do with painting the pictures."

The three of them wandered round the rooms, more or less together. Christian gave no more opinions, but tried out a series of bombastic thoughts: So that's how the land lies, the way the wind blows. He had seen how Vail looked over Caro's shoulder, his body not quite touching hers: grey wool divided from red by a vibration.

After a while Christian said he must be off, and left them; giving Caro another blunt, incommensurate kiss.

He walked home perplexed by a sensation, sharp yet heavy, close to disappointment. Possibly he had imagined Caro cut out for some denouement that would vindicate, or redeem, the cautious order of his own existence—a culmination, even tragic, that only she seemed fitted to enact. Or perhaps he had wished, for the greater common good, to see her sink into vapid domesticity like other women, sink into it as housewives sink exhaust-edly into arm-chairs at evening. He detested the idea that she and Vail were lovers, but less for the imagined carnality than because Vail was personable, resolute, and rich. The satisfaction to Christian in withholding compassion from Caro had sprung directly from her need, her poverty. There was no power whatever now in letting Caro jolly well fend for herself. And he allowed himself, like a luxury, the honest thought: I might have helped her.

At home, Christian sat in his usual chair. And his little boy clambered over him as though he were a playground fixture.

One day in May Caroline Bell asked, and received, an extra hour for lunch. When she returned to the office she learned in the corridor from Mr. Bostock that Valda had refused to prepare tea or procure sandwiches at lunchtime or ever again.

Entering Mr. Leadbetter's office, Caro was asked to close the door. Leadbetter put down his ball-point, signifying the personal.

Had in truth taken up the plastic pen in order to make the gesture of setting it aside. He folded his hands. "Perhaps you can enlighten me, Miss Bell." His enlaced fingers parted, then closed, as if to play cat's-cradle. "Miss Fenchurch has some grievance?"

"She does not like to serve food. It is an imposition."

"And is that not somewhat absurd? The purveying of—ah—

victuals being an accepted part of her functions?"

"By whom is it accepted?"

"By every woman here except Miss Fenchurch and, I now take it, yourself. Had there been a wider sense of unfitness, the girls would have expressed it generally."

"Most people have to have unfitness pointed out to them. At first there is usually only one person who does that."

Mr. Leadbetter had, as he was to put it to his wife that evening, seldom been so vexed. "And do you not find this a paltry and selfish attitude? The men in this office are, after all, forgoing the lunch hour altogether, remaining at their desks for extra duty. The girls are merely asked—required—to help them discharge onerous extra tasks."

"The men do nothing that lowers their self-esteem. On the contrary, staying at their desks exalts it."

"I see that you are highly defensive." Not raised to such figures of speech, Clive Leadbetter had hit on them in recent years. Sometimes he said "highly defensive," sometimes "highly aggressive"—

it amounted to the same thing. Similarly, would accuse: "Aren't you a little too positive?" or "Rather too negative?"—propositions, interchangeable and unanswerable, that had never failed to confound. He could not imagine what people meant when they said the language was in decline.

Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude."

Leadbetter's unlaced fingers came down on the blotter with a synchronized slap. "Miss Bell, do you really not find this incident utterly grotesque?"

"I know that any adherence to a principle can be called grotesque, and even made to appear so. At least for a time."

"You call it a principle. A tempest in a teacup."

"Mr. Bostock said, in a teapot."

He was now at white heat: molten Leadbetter. (To his wife that evening he would say, "I don't even mind insults, but will not tolerate verbal abuse.") "Miss Bell, since you yourself find our ways so unsatisfactory, perhaps you should seriously consider returning to—ah—New Zealand."

In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity.

"In fact I have come to give you my resignation."

His mouth opened and closed: like a horse with carney. "And may I inquire the motive?"

"I am going to be married."

Then he hated her, for her liberty and her looks and her happiness, and that remark about the teapot. The Gatling jammed: words would not so much as sputter. However, since even she could only be delivered by male intervention, he eventually smiled and made his last attack. "I had already assumed something of the kind."

Grace Thrale was on her way out of Harrods through the rug department, which had the space and solemnity of a cathedral.

Aisles had been devised among the spaced stanchions of the building, and thick rolled strips of carpet stood or lay like the fallen drums of columns in a temple. Wilton was piled on Axminster, forming floral platforms. And Grace was smiling, though not at these.

"Grace." Ted Tice caught up with her in a Moroccan transept.

"Been lodging a complaint?"

She stopped, and stopped smiling. "Ted."

"How are your boys?"

She smiled again. "Rowdy." They walked, and halted. "Are you in town for a bit?"

"Only the day. I needed some things for my new place. I manage for myself." His collar was wrinkled, his shirt front showed the ogival mark of an inexpert iron. He held up his package. "And I just bought a pair of binoculars."

"So you sometimes look at the earth."

"Only in concert halls." Ted was cheerful: She will tell Caro we met. "I phoned Caro, but no reply."

Grace had never seen him so confident, or unsuspecting. He might be thinking time was on his side. She had pondered it all in a moment, while they talked of her children, and knew she would speak. "Ted, do you have a minute? Let's sit down." His expression at once stilled in apprehension, with the sense for bad news one develops from infancy. Grace sat on an upturned drum of ruby wool. Nearby, a rose-red parody of Persia was flung down by a salesman, though not for prayer.

"Ted." She had never used his name so much. "She is writing you today."

In that instant Grace somewhat resembled Caro, as always when matters grew serious. Ted could see it, the turn of head and the clasped hands. If he put his fingers to the nape, he would find the cord there, prominent as Caro's. He said, "She is getting married/'

"Do sit down." A hostess receiving.

"I prefer to stand." A Victorian hero on the carpet, or carpets.

A salesman paused, and tweaked a nine-by-twelve.

"Thank you we're just looking." Staring at one another, Grace and Ted created a tension not easily absorbed into rugs.

He did not so much as ask, Who.

"His name is Adam Vail, an American." Grace obtained a respite describing Vail, as if in the process she hoped to put Ted Tice at his ease. She rambled, "He is kind, and interesting. He is very strong, I mean his character." This pierced Ted; but in fact Grace was making an instinctive contrast with her own husband.

Ted said, "I have met him." He thought, I am behaving well, but in fact it has not yet touched me.

Grace babbled, "Fortyish, very nice, they will be in England quite often."

Ted Tice's face was youthful for the last time, as is said to happen in death. "When will it be?"

"Well, very soon, two or three weeks. You have to have, they have to have papers. Not being British, you see. You—they—go to Caxton Hall. Where foreigners are married. Dora has to get back, she's in Malta with her friend Dot Cleaver. Then there's a daughter, there is Adam's daughter, coming from New York, she is fourteen. Fifteen." Grace was getting to an end of details and would soon be starkly left with a man's anguish.

A salesman brushed by, with a customer. "We have it in celadon or kumquat. Or can order in mandarin." This pair was engrossed, a happy couple.

Caro would have known what to say: not the right thing, but the truth. Caro would have spoken truly or kept a true silence. In accepting to be the sweet one of the sisters, tame and tractable, Grace had by no means intended to cast herself away. She had enjoyed being sweet, and being thought sweet, but had believed she held in reserve an untapped bounty of more difficult humanity; which was not now forthcoming. Ted's suffering was not obscure to her—indeed, her imagination occasionally played out such matters in some Austro-Hungarian empire of the heart. But she could rouse no true instinct with which to feel his pain or comfort him.