The Transit of Venus (30 page)

And was suddenly afraid that sweet people might have little imagination.

On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation from habit as an interruption that might bring chaos.

Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.

In the evenings, putting away dishes or silver, this still golden Grace could sigh herself, mentally, into a squat housewife with a dowager's hump.

She offered, "If you liked, we could go up and have tea." There was a place upstairs where women sat among their packages and were asked, Milk or lemon.

"Grace, my dear, you were running when we met. Let me go on down with you." Ted Tice saw—but it was incidental to his state of mind—that Grace Thrale, who had been his timid ally, had changed allegiance and thrown him over for the prize of Vail. He would get out from this broadloom solemnity, these sarcastic rugs and mechanical inquiries from the staff. Grace stood up, and they moved on into Lamps, heading for the stairs. Behind them, the salesman yawned: "Or there's always goat."

Ted was aware of a blue velvet suit—no, only the collar was velvet, the rest speckled wool, a suit all to do with Grace's life and customs, like the gothic indictment of the iron on his own shirt. He acknowledged her body, twice convulsed by childbirth and reas-sembled, shapely as a suit, heroically normal. He likewise would maintain motion and equilibrium, though ripped asunder; and had kindly said, "My dear."

On the ground floor they passed stacked bolts of the materials women never wore now—georgette, heavy crepe, pongee. There was a serious, dry smell of stuff that must be measured, cut, and sewn. A man in black expertly placed lengths thumb to thumb:

"Three and a half yards, madam?" A high voice asked, "And where are Remnants?"

Grace went ahead through a series of heavy glass doors. Shoppers coming and going handed the doors back and forth in the formal motions of their dance: "Kyou," "Kyou." Outside, a cold afternoon showed the season merely by reluctance to darken. A stout doorman wearing war ribbons cryptically signalled taxis; a trio of street musicians in ancient serge bawled about Tipperary while a fourth held out a khaki cap weighted by a single, central half-crown.

Grace said, "I can't bear these singers. Let's walk a bit." They moved together along the shop-windows, where mannequins in print frocks raised orange arms against tropical settings, in ecstatic, vital contrast to the waxen matrons lifelessly passing.

"I'm certain I'm delaying you, Grace."

Grace could not bear his good manners or the thought that this man in his crisis indulged her as a dying officer might joke to a rattled subordinate on a battlefield. She leaned against a glassed tableau of beach wear and looked in his face, trying to make up for years of willful insipidity in an instant.

"As this has come about, won't it be better for you? Now there's no false hope. It will be awful at first, but—" Grace's handbag slid to her elbow on its strap and she grasped her own jacket by both lapels as urgently as she might have clutched at Ted's. A consciousness of Dora flickered. Let me not sound like Dora, I'm sure you'll be very happy. She said, "Now you are free."

The cicatrice of stitching on her gloves was an imprint on his brain. Earrings of pearl stared, white-eyed as fish. There was a streak of flowered scarf, inane, and the collar blue. Grief had a painter's eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.

Ted thought, I was really better off inside the shop. I was pretty numb in there. After all, the claustrophobic building had provided shelter of a kind, with its avenues resembling city planning, its racks and trays overflowing with daily life, its suburbs named Millinery and Haberdashery in memory of childhood. In the open street Ted Tice was grappled, and experienced bodily lightness of a sort that accompanies physical peril. He would get through these moments as a duty in preparation for the next phase, the realization that was to take him over and maul him.

Whatever might have been thought an hour before as he was buying binoculars, or some few minutes past, no one glancing at him now would have called him a young man.

He took one of Grace's gloved hands and placed it against his own jacket, where it did finally and diffidently clasp his lapel. Earrings hammered, silk daisies panicked on the scarf. At her back a silver plastic palm tree was jagged as forked lightning.

44 What I have done has been for hope of her. What I do now will be for lack of her." He let Grace's hand drop, and the bag fell again to her wrist. "Do you call it freedom?"

"That may not always be true.'' Grace was thinking that a woman would not have prejudiced the future with such a proclamation.

They walked back to the corner, where the shoppers bandied the doors back and forth. The singers were on to "Danny Boy" now, the half-crown solitary in the cap, the pennies expertly shaken under the lining. It was Christian who had told Grace about this trick.

They crossed to the entrance of the Underground. There was vibration in the road, a subterranean breath from the pit-head. A red-fleshed woman was peddling little wads of heather to people dashing up and down the steps, but did not approach these two who stood silent. Grace thought, I suppose you'd get to know when it was hopeless.

In the rush of tunnelled air they turned to stare at one another.

A look two persons might exchange who, having carried an immense weight to some forlorn halt, now set it down and meet each other's eyes. Grace had come as far as she could; Ted would go down alone.

The photograph showed a substantial jaw, hound-dog eyes; the face expressionless, as if the intrusion merely tested or strengthened endurance. An accompanying paragraph referred to a previous marriage and a daughter. A big man with an overcoat bundled on, standing in a bleak portico.

At his side Caro was a novice at public life. Not dressed in wedding clothes, she had nonetheless unmistakably just been married. Where the picture was cut off, the backs of their hands met

—her right hand, his left, not clasped but transmitting the private message for all the world to see.

"There's one here too." Tertia knew what Paul was staring at, and raised her own page slightly to show an indistinct image. There was a heading, and below the photograph a caption said, "The couple is shown leaving the edifice." In Paul's newspaper Caro was an Australian typist; in Tenia's, a senior official. It was also stated that the couple had met while working on a humanitarian enterprise initiated by the British government.

"So that awful sister got those girls fixed up. Dora or Flora, I saw her once at the Thrales. You have to hand it to her. She brought them to London and launched them."

Paul said, "They're not the Gunning sisters, you know." Though seeing them for a moment just that way—eighteenth-century beauties in pastel silk with upswept hair and translucent glances, taking London by storm, being the Rage. In Tertia's newspaper Caro's eyes were lowered, she was a grey blur that did not even carry flowers. The man was large, an un-English physiognomy, big head, heavy, impassive. Caro was now endorsed, valuable: an obscure work newly attributed to a master.

Tertia exchanged newspapers with Paul. "Flora-Dora pulled it off." To see how much Paul minded.

"I rather like to think of Caroline Bell with billions."

"No one ever said the Vail man had billions."

"Where does the money come from anyway?"

"Catfood."

"It says here, bauxite. Whatever that is." Paul elaborated: "Pent-houses papered with Picassos, yachts, private planes, limousines."

"Bodyguards," said Tertia. And "Lovers."

Paul folded the paper to read it—neatly, like a clerk in a train.

"At any rate the astrologer didn't get her."

"What does 'at any rate' mean?" Tertia turned pages with her brutal gesture. Upstairs, a child wept, laughed, spoke, then mum-bled, acting out the ages of man.

Tertia suddenly said, "Nick Cartledge. Who used to stay with us." She could have been protesting at last.

"What about him?"

"He's dead."

"What of?"

"Liver complaint."

"Well—he certainly worked for it."

Tertia put the paper down. Nicholas Gerald Wakelin Cartledge.

For her, it was an untimely death. She said, "The old roue," trying to shrug off mortality itself; but sat there changing into a woman who knew the dead.

After a time Paul said, "That word means, broken on the wheel."

Dora told Dot Cleaver, "He is no Phoebus Apollo. As you can see." Dora would say Phoebus Apollo, or Pallas Athene, or Venus de Milo, distinguishing these immortals, by full title, from the terrestrial Glad or Trish. "It is an awful picture of them both, oh simply awful. And the snaps are no better." She showed. "I'd had a nasty knock from the car door, you can see the pain in my eyes."

Dora had moved that day into Caro's vacated flat, which was filled with flowers. "They will be in Italy by now."

Dot Cleaver said, "When I first went to Rome, I did everything.

Everything. I took the guide-book, I did everything. Well, that's over with, now I just please myself. You absorb more of a place that way."

Dora gave a sigh that influenced the entire room. She observed, after a time, that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

"A cup of your nice tea?" Dot Cleaver arched her brows, body, and wrist, grasping a china handle that was itself a mark of interrogation. "Then they go to New York."

"Oh yes, they have everything they want there, all their interests, books, plays, music."

Dot Cleaver had recently attended an enthralling recital, but could not recall the programme. "In any case, they'll be over to see you in no time."

"Why should they bother. I don't blame them." Dora's ambition now was to be cast off. That was to be the culmination of her long alienation, the vindication of her overmastering belief in enmity, ingratitude, and whole congeries of wrongs. She had already told Caro, "Don't feel you have to see me." Her process of testing, now finely honed, was never at rest. Provocation had become the basis of her relations with the world.

Caro had said to Grace, "She is curious to see how many cheeks we still have left to turn."

He tore out the page, folded it, tore again along the fold. Then trimmed the picture and paragraph with scissors. These methodical actions seemed to have been leading somewhere, and when he had completed them Ted could scarcely believe he was left with a photograph of Caroline Bell's wedding. The accompanying legend, though conventionally phrased, was not quite comprehensible—as if written in uncials, or Cyrillic.

He stared into the dim little picture for some familiar thing that might give him a claim on her. But her clothes were new, uncharacteristic with occasion. In her left hand, a small object, certainly not a prayerbook and most probably a purse. The photograph banished him completely, declining association: an extra cruelty, when her possessions had always enchanted him—a green silk belt, a notebook covered in blue cloth, a white dish in which she kept oranges.

In the photograph she turned away, forsaking all others.

The clipping lay on his desk, larger now that the superfluous, constricting tissue had been trimmed away. The whole room could not confine it or contain the injury. Ted Tice put his right hand on it, and hung his head—aware, like an onlooker, that this bowed posture required, for its own caption, a dated phrase: "He went under." A grown man with lowered head is a foolish sight, and scarcely a man.

There was no one to whom he need excuse himself. Obligation was the first detail erased by grief.

He thought he would go out and tire himself with walking. Or would get drunk, like a disappointed man in a story. But looked, without moving, at his sweater and cap and a striped scarf—outward things whose reasonableness he would not believe in again.

So Caroline Bell lived in a house in New York City and took the name of Vail. From the top of the house, which was in a row of short buildings faced with purplish stone, there was a view of the sky. To the south, a range of skyscrapers obstructed the late sun as surely as the mountains of the Taygetus bring early dark down to Sparta. The rooms were not numerous but relatively large, because dividing walls had here and there been removed. In this house Adam Vail had been born.

There were many objects over which Caroline Vail could never wish for, or assert, jurisdiction. Chairs, books, pictures, a screen from China, a leather folder fraying on a desk, a jade saucer, a convenient, ugly little light beside a bed—every thing was habitual except Caro herself. She had contributed four boxes of books, a chipped plate from Palermo, and an angel painted on Andalusian board. From time to time she would look at these memorials, or at her clothes in cupboards and drawers, in order to believe.