The Transit of Venus (33 page)

Someone came to the open window and threw a cigarette butt accurately into a dark pond in the garden. There was the flicker, the sizzle, and a small protest from insects or a frog.

The old physicist stood by the window, hitching his belt. Recalling a night of war when he had done fire-watching on the roof of the Savoy. The black river reflected, red and white, the flames and searchlights, the earth rocked and shuddered with the impact and recoil of armoury. And a burning plane twirled down from the sky, shedding its pilot, who plunged in his separate fire. The plane exploded in fragments before reaching earth, but the blazing man plummeted to the river, which—as if he had been a cigarette butt

—sizzled him out forever.

The old man remembered how, at the end of that night, he had not returned home but had gone to the flat of his mistress, a learned woman with a pile of yellowed hair. Now long since dead. She had saved him some of her ration, but he could not eat. He had sat on the bed with his face in his hands and said,

"The sound of it. I can still hear it." In fact he had experienced worse—and, as a young officer crawling with lice and through mud, had attacked the Hindenburg Line. But at daybreak sat on a bed and wept. "I can see it." The fiery squib. "I can hear it."

The doused flesh.

Ted Tice wrote to Caroline Vail that he would pass through New York on his way to Pasadena, where he was to spend some weeks.

Caro replied, By all means come to lunch. And on the morning of his arrival went out to buy flowers.

It was a day in December, cold and very clear. Ted got out of the taxi at a corner and walked the last few blocks. On Caro's street, the houses were at first all the same, expensively uniform—black or gilt numbers over the entrance, panels of etched glass either side of the door. Doors were mostly black, too, with a prosperous gloss; one or two had been painted red. The last terrace was less regular, and when Ted came to Caro's house it was to him lively and graceful—a vivacious child between stodgy parents. This was a sorcery he could never get the truth of—whether the house was really distinctive, or if it was only for him it held incomparable charm.

He stood on the top step, more unnerved than he had been years before when he waited in the rain at Peverel. He thought, Now it will never get easier, only more piercing. Through a glass strip, saw a polished floor, mirror, white wall; a small picture of playing cards and a wine carafe. This time the newspaper on the table was explicit as the still life. An umbrella-stand of blue-and-white china was a monument. To come and go at will, forever, across this threshold was not simply a happiness denied him but held so large a meaning that it seemed scarcely permissible to anyone.

The enchantment would have been childlike, had it not been part of a man's forlorn obsession.

He rang, expectant as if something were to be decided—when all decisions had long since been made.

A rush of footsteps on stairs, and Caro, who had never in life before run to meet him, pulled open the door and was smiling. She was tall, high-coloured, strong, and beautiful. Her wide face was wider and sweeter. A current of warm air came out from the hallway. Ted stepped forward, and they embraced. Caro put her arms about him, her body rested on his in pure friendship. "Oh Ted, you look splendid."

It was true. The groove on his forehead, the streak in his eye were attaining distinction; the groove bisected, now, by a horizontal crease.

He came in and took off his muffler. "I had a lot to look forward to today."

The house was filled with light to its remotest interior. At the solstice the sun entered not only frontally but also, through a rear window, obliquely.

A girl with lank hair came out from a room and stood to look, as a domestic animal might saunter out to size up a visitor. Not as Caroline Bell had once stood on a stairway, presiding over his life.

Ted saw Caro's happiness, she had achieved it and glowed with it. That was why she had run to meet him—she could be generous to him, as to all the world. He said, "Excuse me," and blew his nose. The warm indoor air was making his eyes glitter.

Afterwards, Adam Vail said, "I like him. He looks like a slashed self-portrait by van Gogh."

At the end of that winter, Adam and Caro flew to London. There were whole days of sleet, the balance of payments was urgently off, and two new books had been published on Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Tall buildings were rising, flimsy but all-powerful.

Dora made scene after scene. She had saved these up, like treats.

The remaining good in Dora wanted the two sisters to go on and live. The other, prevailing Dora detested their escape and had been balked of the hope that they would say of life, the three of them together, "How terrible."

Dora told them, "I never ask God for anything. But I do say thank you. There was a quadriplegic on the telly the other night and I thought, Well I must be grateful for something."

"Dora, we're here to see you."

"There are fifty-two weeks in the year. You come for two of them."

There was something practised about these pat speeches, their readiness, their conciseness, the fixed, accompanying look that had been polished before a mirror, that touched Caro's soul with despair. She longed to provide Dora with the famous and elusive peace.

Adam told Caro, "Peace is no good. She is terribly bored."

"But her days are filled with drama. She is always having it out with Dot or Daph." It was like a message in Morse.

"She is one," said Vail, "for whom the Death of Sardanapalus would be insufficiently eventful."

Caro took Dora down to Kew. Dora said, "You loved camellias.

Then."

Caro wanted to deny camellias, as if they had been a trap.

Ashamed of this, she would have liked to explain: she wished to share her peace of mind, not to offer it up as a sacrifice.

Kew did not meet the case. Dora now wished to go to New Zealand, where she had a friend at Palmerston North. "Trish Bootle wants me." It was another of Dora's sunderings. "I'm wanted there."

Adam said he would get her passage on the best ship.

"Anything to be rid of me."

"We'll take a return ticket."

Dora told Dot Cleaver, "It's his easy solution, of writing a cheque."

Informed of the situation by Grace, Christian said, "Vail was a fool ever to get mixed up in it." But Christian was in fact content that Adam should take on Dora. It seemed something—like Lend-Lease, or the Marshall Plan—that an American should do. He told Grace, "I carried the burden long enough."

Christian was thinking about age these days, and fearing to be saddled with the decrepitude of others. Dora was heading for fifty.

Her legs were slightly bowed, she was losing her figure and her looks. Every few weeks, her hair was streaked with grey. His mother was becoming what he termed a worry, alone in her old house with only a daily woman and a red cat named Hotspurr. She would be better off in a home. Christian said this to Caro, who replied, "She has a home. You mean an institution/'

Commemorating some long past show of preference, Christian told himself that, in Grace, he had made the right choice. He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.

11 was not until a summer of the nineteen-sixties that something terrible, or at any rate highly regrettable, happened to Christian Thrale. This came about while Grace was at Peverel with the children—which will suggest the nature of the occurrence. Grace had hardly been gone long enough to be properly, let alone acutely, missed; and certainly not long enough for Christian to have telephoned, for he was frugal in these matters.

It was early evening on a Tuesday, and Christian was standing at his office window observing the bloom of silky light extending in reconcilement over London: looking at forests of leaves spread like open hands, and white colonnades and porticoes, and roads that shone like rivers. In the park could be seen a streak of turf, a dab of water, the blue tilting steeples of delphinium. The evening bore the cachet of a huge success magnificently consummated after many botched attempts.

Christian was enjoying not only the manageable rapture of sun-down but the novelty of his own high pleasure in it. He had merely glanced out, not expecting anything but weather. Though traffic rumbled, the mnemonic light had a quality of silence—yet seemed no simple fact of nature, for one scarcely felt such a radiance could exist without such a city to encompass. There was human engagement in it, as at some momentous passage of human greeting, or leave-taking, with the world.

Christian, moreover, was aware of himself looking: a sandy man of more than average height and intelligence—yet always keeping at hand the bolt hole of the average; the yardstick, rather, by which departures and excesses might be measured.

A door opened at his back. He did not turn, being pleased to be discovered in the act of survey and reflection: a sandy man with narrow shoulders who had retained perspective. In childhood Christian had, like many children, defined himself as sensitive. Like many adults, he had made no reassessment in the light of later promptings. In office affairs he frequently cautioned, "If we lose our humanity we are done for/' Although at other times he had said, "We have to draw the line somewhere/' and "It's not for me to say."

A crisis had blown up, and what luck, Thrale, you are still here.

A meeting was being called, since cables must be sent that evening.

What luck, as Talbot-Sims had just gone down in the lift.

Christian could not feel What luck, thinking of Talbot-Sims spurt-ing for home, for dear life, flying free across London in what he visualized as an open car, although Talbot-Sims was known to travel exclusively by Tube. Drooped over the willow pattern of his blotter, Christian assembled papers, and assumed with reluctance the willing expression he normally wore with ease.

Christian Thrale was now rising in his profession. Those peering into the oven of his career would report, "Christian is rising," as if he were a cake or loaf of bread. They did not say, "He will go far," which would have suggested temperament, but from time to time remarked his gradual ascent: "Christian has risen."

The conference room looked towards the park. Only the room did so, the men present being focused on a table, on papers, on one another; on themselves. They stared into the glossy grain of that table as if into a tank. Revived by a fresh draught of importance, they rustled, they murmured, they struck matches and matched watches; because there was a delay. The first rank of the stenogra-phers having got clear, having somehow packed themselves along with Talbot-Sims into that escape hatch of the downward lift—and the doyenne, Miss Ratchitt, being home today bilious—they were waiting for a girl to take the minutes.

This was an aggravation when every moment was precious.

It was like the delphiniums, when she came. For this emergency she had been called back from the ladies' room, where she was preparing to go home—perhaps, who knows, to go out. In those preparations she had literally let down her hair, which was yellow like ripe corn; and had been given no time to redress it. Merely combed back, it fell over her slim blue shoulders and streaked down her spine. And even the worst man there, of whom there were several, yearned for it. Christian could not recall having seen her before in the zones of encounter, lift or corridor. But perhaps with the hair down it was different.

When she came, it was like the delphiniums.

She sat in a heavy chair—that no one, to put it mildly, pulled out for her. Never having pulled it out for Ratchitt, the contrast would in any case have exposed them. Behind the arras of his expression, Christian Thrale watched, entranced. The movements, shy, deliberate, with which she laid her lined notebook on the table and folded it, and restrained an extra pencil from rolling. The elbow poised on the table, the head inclined long-lashed to the page, evoking the schoolgirl she had lately been.

Around the tank the flickering intensified before falling ceremoniously away. It was a ritual moment, as if the soloist flung back coattails over the piano bench or fixed the protective pad between Stradivarius and jowl. Gentlemen, shall we begin. I need not stress that these proceedings take place in the utmost confidence, I trust that was made clear also to Miss— I'm afraid I don't know your—

Cordelia Ware.

Miss Ware. Very good. The cabinet will conclude its delibera-tions within the hour and we are informed that.

It fell forward, the flag of hair. An arm came up to pass it uselessly back over the shoulder. A page hastily turned. A gazelle in the room. China in the bull shop. Everything frail and fair, cheek, ear, wrist, and the earnest curve blue from waist to shoulder.

In view of the events of the past week the significance of such a decision can hardly be overestimated, the far-reaching consequences. Would you make a heading of this, Miss— I'm afraid I don't recall your— Gentlemen, time is not on our side.

She was taking the minutes. The minutes flew, it was she who took them. Every moment was precious and time not on our side.