The Transit of Venus (31 page)

A photograph at the time would have shown her more hesitant than formerly. The process of acquiring equanimity had brought its own disruptions, and some sacrifice.

Caro received letters on her marriage from several men: "He's a lucky man, dear Caro, who gets you"; "I hope he realizes his good fortune." There was an element of relief at not having had to assume the privilege themselves. Her own release at leaving an entire nation to its devices was, if not commendable, also natural.

In straight streets Mrs. Vail attempted to make the city over in the image of other towns, to discover its sources of continuity and solace, its places of refuge and glory. When this proved impossible, observed freakishness, fads, and obscure forms of endurance; as well as flagrant forms of self-assertion and conformity. Where morality was concerned, fashion was indiscriminate, giving the same weight to whim as to conviction. A ceaseless milling of persons was unnatural, ludicrous, determined as the acceleration of an old movie. There was anonymity and extreme loneliness, but little reverie and no peace. Apartments were cabins in the great liners docked along the streets.

The city posed its conditions like a test: those apt in its energies became initiates; the rest must fail, depart, or squander irrelevant strength.

In modern buildings opposite the Vail house, all ground floors were doctors' offices. In the early mornings ageing men and women would arrive without breakfast to ring these doorbells. Otherwise there was little passage of humanity on the short block, and few children. Signs of life were often associated with death or extremity: in the night, fire engines and ambulances could be heard on nearby avenues, and the revolving lantern of a police car circled private rooms with mistrustful light; convoys of trucks trundled, purposeful as if provisioning an advancing army. In winter, the tires of cars spun shrieking in filthy snowdrifts, and derelicts fitted themselves to icy crannies of the immense and all but continuous buildings.

The panorama was splendid, the detail grim. Glossiness created, or eased, a lack of contact. When summer came, plane trees obscured the view from Caro's windows, and seclusion was complete.

In the first weeks Caro would lie on her bed or stretch on a sofa, reading or merely still. The house was hushed with her stillness, which was not languor but renewal. Meanwhile, Adam Vail went swiftly through the rooms and hallways of long association, and nimbly up and down the stairs of all his life. Habits of home gave agility to his body that was heavy in repose or love.

The house had a light smell of plants and polish, and oils used to preserve books or furniture. In the beginning Caroline Vail noticed this smell, which she could not afterwards rediscover. In her stepdaughter's room there was a scent of calamine lotion, there were creams for adolescent complexions, there were tablets for pain; there were comic books, two guitars, and recordings of Italian opera. There were books to do with animals in far countries—

Ethiopia, Kenya. These belonged to dark Josie who, at the time of Caro's arrival in the city, had gone to Africa on safari with the family of a schoolfriend, Myra.

Adam said, "Myra is bad news."

Fitted into the frame ofjosie's mirror there were photographs of mother and child.

Adam's sister, Una, came to lunch. Una was handsome, with an air of fashionable disbelief. She smoked her cigarettes half-through and, as she put them out, rattled a golden chain on her wrist. Her laugh, which began on a loud peal, was also abruptly extinguished, incomplete. She looked at Caro with open interest that might have been kind.

Una was having an affair with a bureaucrat. She told Caro, "My friend is a diplomat"—diplomat being a term, like architect, whose disgrace had not yet caught up with it. That evening when her lover asked her, "How's the bride?" she dropped into a chair and crossed her legs: "Well." After a time she said, "This is no case of the second Mrs. de Winter." Eventually she lit a cigarette. "Bride's okay. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark horse. Late twenties, maybe thirty.

By no means a dope. Talks, laughs, shows British teeth." As Hansi went on with a crossword puzzle Una put out her fresh cigarette and added, "Intolerant."

"Intolerant of what?"

"People like me." Reaching in her handbag, Una said, "Loves Adam." She brought out a tiny enamel box. On the table at her side there were similar boxes, arranged in rows.

Hansi mixed drinks and gave one to Una. She made a slight motion in his direction with the glass, and in her other hand held up the box. "Brought me a present." She handed it to him. "Adam must have told her." She drank from her glass, then took the box back from Hansi. She set it on the table with the others and said,

"Cute."

"Ask me something," said Adam Vail. In the night they would waken and make love. "You never have questions."

"Now I have to learn what doesn't come through questions."

One afternoon, when she lay on a sofa reading, he came and took her in his arms. "Don't go into a decline."

"It's an ascent."

He got up then and moved about the room, rattling objects, slamming drawers, crackling a newspaper. His wife went on reading, regretting that so considerate a man should be driven to this and mildly surprised at how little restraint he was showing. He need only wait and she would give him perfect happiness. It was for this her energies were gathering, and for other proper purposes.

Una was going abroad for the summer. Una, who had been divorced, said she could have a great summer at last: "For eight years I was nailed to the cross of East Hampton." Una jangled a new bracelet. Her handsome face had a costly sheen, she wore what the ancient Romans called summer jewellery. Soon, from the Medi-terranean, she and Hansi sent a postcard of pink bungalows on a beach.

Adam said, "It's a place for millionaires at the end of their tether."

"Why should millionaires always be at the end of their tether?"

"They're the ones who can afford to be." He touched her face.

"You look fine, yourself."

"The beginning of my tether."

Caro took Adam's arm in the street and stood to look. A show of professionalism in machines and buildings was reproduced, with less success, in persons: existence had been turned over to the experts. "We"—she meant, people from elsewhere—"will always be amateurs compared with this."

Adam said, "Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love."

Adam Vail linked his wife's fingers with his own. "Hence also a compulsion to account for ourselves. As I at this moment."

"But if Americans themselves say these things."

"Just don't you go agreeing with any of it, that's all." Vail laughed. "Oh Caro, we are much worse, and perhaps better, than you so far secretly think."

Adam was taking Caro to see a friend who lived at 149th Street.

When they came home, Caro said, "Why should anyone stand it?"

Una, who was back from Sardinia, told her: "The American Negro is overadjusted to his problem."

Adam said, "But not for much longer."

One September evening Caroline Vail sat by a window with a book of poetry.

Adam asked, "Won't you say aloud what you're reading?"

She began, and spoke some lines in a voice high, thin, and unfamiliar:

"Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border;
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is—that we two passed. "

She laid the book down without keeping the place, and turned her face away. "Sad," she said. "That's why I'm crying."

Adam stroked her head, her shoulders. When he put his arms round her, her body could scarcely be seen. "Who knows why she is crying. Who knows why Caroline is really crying."

In the autumn Grace wrote that Paul Ivory had a tremendous success with a play called
The One Flesh.
She also reported, more diffidently, that Ted Tice had married the daughter of a scientist.

Soon there was a letter from Ted with the same information, and a new address. He hoped Caro and Margaret might one day meet.

He wrote, "Here, among the young, we have a clinging to one's times that is like a substitute for patriotism: a pledge of immaturity.

For anything in the way of enlightenment, you need people who do not have contemporaries."

When Ted wrote "the young," Caro lost her own claim on youth.

Speaking of enlightenment, Ted went on, the great telescope had been inaugurated at its site in the south of England, with a ceremony attended by the Queen. Owing to a complete absence of visibility, Royalty had managed to command nothing but a show of vapours.

Dora wrote that Gwen Morphew had mysteriously come into money, and had left Glad Pomfret high and dry. It was best to expect ingratitude, then nothing surprised you. Dora, whom Caro could now provide with a house near Dot Cleaver's, wrote of domestic difficulties. She did not wish to be a worry to Caro in her happiness, and it would all work out somehow. One thing she had learned, and the hard way, was to trouble no one.

"It is almost true," Caro said, "that she is not a worry to me in my happiness."

Caro took her stepdaughter to a recital by a great guitarist. Walking home, the girl said, "It was okay. What I could hear of it."

"Next week we'll have better seats."

She took Josie to the ballet, and Josie said, "Myra's at the double-header." She meant that Caro could count herself favoured.

If Caro did, it was not for that reason.

Adam Vail made a trip to Chile and Peru. "Next time you will be with me."

Una told Caro, "Adam is obsessed. You must have realized that.

He is obsessed by people's sufferings. It is something you will have to face."

"I have faced those who do not care at all." She did not see why Una should instruct, who had not succeeded.

One day, however, Una said, "I think it's great," and crumpled a Kleenex.

Caro lay in a hospital bed after a miscarriage, and Adam Vail flew home from Lima. When Caro closed her eyes, darkness restored her to private existence. Someone said, "Now I have to hurt you."

The pain was an extension of experience, so new and astonishing as to have intellectual interest. In the dark it might be Paul leaning over her: "Now I have to hurt you." Like other suffering, the apartness of infirmity was either unreality or full reality at last. Once she had stood apart in a hot corridor and contemplated her own death.

In the dark her thoughts were redistributed, through displacement of hope.

Adam said, "There are two of us to bear it."

"It wasn't this I meant to share."

When Caro was better, Josie told her, "I was ambivalent anyway.

I felt very threatened." Confidence in her own simplicity could inspire cruelty scarcely credible. She was often angry, and when crossed would lower her head and weep: "I am being put in a position." Her great weapon was her weakness, the massive deterrent to which all deferred. There was the dread that Josie too would take up death as her lethal instrument. "I am so afraid," she would say; putting the fear of God into all of them.

Caro said, "If she wouldn't try so much to classify her emotions."

"Are you asking that she renounce her American birthright?"

Adam said, "She will grow up, grow older."

Caro recalled childhood hopes centred on Dora's seventieth birthday. "We have to bring her round before that."

Only Una would occasionally repulse Josie's attacks, and was unafraid of the girl's tears. Una remarked, "Bite something often enough, kiddo, and it bites right back."

Una told Caro, "You get the message."

"Even those messages she is unaware of sending."

Josie had the eyes noticeable in troubled young women, eyes that are sidelong even when direct. She had the inanition that announces self-engrossment. She was already setting up an apparatus of blame, in apprehension of failure.

To Caro, Josie would state the obvious: "You're not my mother." To be sure of the hurt, she would have liked to see the blood.

"For one thing, I'm not old enough."

Caro told Una, "Josie's belief in her innocence is her warrant for doing harm."

Una said, "Like America."

Alone together, Myra and Josie mocked Caroline Vail—her voice, manner, and opinions, her habit of touching her hair. Josie told Myra, "She can't have children."

"That's why she's trying to take you over. Well, tell her she can cut that right out."

Caro could feel the wish she be cut right out. From far off she could sense Josie Vail thinking of her with resentment; as she might, even now, feel Ted Tice think of her with love.

Myra told Josie, "Can't you see the way they're using you?" If Myra had anything to do with it, Josie would never believe she herself might be an object of affection.

All this was plain as if Josie had reported it: the rehearsed unkindness, the direct and sidelong glance, the doubleness of phrase made all apparent. When Myra was present, Josie must prove herself:

"How can you talk such shit, Caro?" In Myra's absence, the girl was loyally abusive, in order to have something to report.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

Myra's eyes were downward, lank hair concealed her cheeks.

Myra was for the present strong, because consuming another's life.

Caro would wonder what particular
Benbow
had taken Myra to the bottom.

Adam said, "She mistakes suspicion for insight."

Caroline Vail found herself unsuitably immune to the judgment of Josie. She only wished to restrain the girl in her worst assaults, knowing that, if you wrong someone enough, you cannot bear to be with them.

In secret Caro dwelt on the release from emotional obligation, and could see how indifference might become seductive. What Josie took for exposure on Caro's part had been an offering of trust