The Transit of Venus (42 page)

Christian came home and kissed her. "I have spoken to those people about that yipping dog."

"You haven't."

"Certainly. You can't go sleepless forever. They have agreed to keep the animal indoors."

She wished he had not said the animal.

He thumped his briefcase onto the hall table. "And I actually used the word yip."

In her dream, Christian had been weeping.

Grace got up in the night and went downstairs. She took
Wuther-ing Heights
from a shelf and stood by the windows in the moonlight, keeping the ceaseless watch of her passion. She had no right to utter the name of Angus Dance, or to give him an endearment even in thought—never having done these things in life. She might as well have called on Heathcliff, or Aeneas. The book, an old edition, weighed in her hand. She knew she would not read it; but wondered if you might open at any page and find truth, like the Bible.

She passed her other hand down her body, and thought her small feet irresistibly beautiful as they showed beneath her nightgown.

In the morning Christian said, "Perhaps we need a new mat-tress."

When the marguerites began to fester, Grace put them in the garbage. The card, still attached, said, "With homage," and had an ink line through the surname. She swirled water in the vase and remembered: "I didn't laugh at his off-colour joke."

Christian was worried, but said, "You certainly don't have to take insults to further my career." To forestall her thoughts. After a moment he asked, "What was the joke anyway?"

"I couldn't for the life of me work it out." They both burst out laughing. No reply could have pleased him more. Perfect, sheltered Grace. Once, during a holiday on Corsica, he had turned her face away from the spectacle, as he called it, of a fistfight.

Late that day she met Angus Dance in the street. She had bought narcissus to replace the daisies, and stood holding them downwards in her hand. She could think of nothing to say that would equal the magical silent discourse of her reverie.

He said, "Are you all right?"

"I haven't been sleeping properly." She might as well have said, I love you. "Except with pills."

"What are you taking?" For a moment authority passed back to him.

They then spoke of his heavy cold. And she would bring Rupert in for a checkup at the end of the month. Despite sleeplessness, her skin glowed like his own.

He said, "Do you have time for a coffee?"

So Grace Thrale sat at a Formica table and Angus Dance hung his flannel jacket on a peg. He wore a pale woollen waistcoat knitted by his mother. His hair in itself was enough to attract attention: his Northern Light, his blaze of midnight sun. They scarcely spoke, though leaning forward from a delicate readiness, until the girl came to take their order. Both his accent and an oddly aspirated R were more pronounced. Grace thought her own speech indistinct, and made an effort to talk out.

"I have been wondering how you were." All things considered, the boldest remark she had ever made. She was surprised by her definite voice, her firm hand efficiently taking sugar, when the whole of Creation, the very texture of the firmament, was wrought, receptive, cream-coloured, like his sweater.

He said he ought to go to Burnham-on-Crouch to see about his boat, which was up on the slips for scraping and red lead. Some recaulking was also needed. "I don't feel up to it, somehow." The commonplaces, the withholdings, were a realization in themselves.

Her scented flowers stood between them in a tumbler of water, pent within a green string.

Grace asked, "What is your boat called?"

"She's called
Elissa.
" He made room for the milk. "I'm not much of a sailor—the genuine ones are fanatical. I took it up after a bad experience. I suppose it was a means of motion when everything was standing still."

"Was it when your marriage broke up?"

"No. This was a later repudiation." He smiled. "I don't know that any of this can be very interesting. Such usual griefs."

"To me they are not usual." She could not imagine Christian, for whom acceptance was imperative, recounting his rebuffs, or acknowledging "my griefs." Even in the entrancement of the coffee-shop the threat came over her that Christian was in this the more infirm, the more defenceless; and that Angus Dance was fortified by reversals and by his refusal to dissimulate. She recalled his simple commitment to Rupert, how he had said, "I promise." Such fear-lessness could not be required of Christian.

When she made contrasts with Christian it was not just the disloyalty but that Christian always seemed to gain.

Doctor Dance offered buns. "I had a grand time at your party.

I should have called to say so."

Grace thought of the scuttling of the
Tirpitz,
and the chiefs commemorative flowers, a soaked wreath on swirling waters. Lest we forget. "It seems so long ago."

"I've not seen you since."

It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misun-derstood.

He went on, "Yet we are so close."

She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.

Grace was seated at the piano. She turned a sheet of music, but did not play. Rupert came and stood beside her. "What is it?"

"It's Scarlatti."

He had meant, What's wrong.

Like a lover, he stood near enough to suggest she should embrace him. With her right arm she drew him against her side. Her left hand rested on the keys. She leaned her head to his upper arm. It was like an Edwardian photograph. She said, "I do love you, Rupey." This was the last child with whom she could get away with such a thing—and only then because his illness had given them an extension during which a lot might be overlooked. They both knew it. Emulating her mood, the boy became pensive, languid; and at the same time remained omnipotent.

She said again, "I do." To get him to say it back. She thought, So now it has come round: / am trying to draw strength from
them.

She thought the word "adulteress," and it was archaic as being stoned to death—a bigoted word, like Negress or Jewess or seam-stress or poetess; but precise.

Her left hand sounded notes in the bass: sombre, separate, instructed. The room received them dispassionately. There was a click of her ring on ivory. She rocked the boy a little with her arm, and could feel the plaster armouring his X-rayed ribs. She took her hand from the piano and put both arms about him, her fingers locked over his side, her breast and brow turned to his body. This was less like a photograph.

He said, "What's up, Mum?" Moving his imprisoned arm, he put his own hand to the treble and struck a discordant series of keys, stressing and repeating vehement high notes. She released him, but he jarred a few last perplexed, excited sounds. And stood, still touching her, swayed between childhood and sensuality.

Christian came in with papers in his hand. "What's this, a duet?"

The boy sauntered off and switched on the telly. The news flickered over jagged devastations—Beirut or Belfast, the Bronx or Bombay.

Christian said, "Grace, I must speak to you."

Rupert yelled, "It's a programme on Pompeii."

Grace sat with Christian on a sofa that was rarely used because of the velvet. He told her, "Something momentous has occurred."

In her mind, Grace Thrale swooned.

"I have been given Africa."

He might have been Alexander, or Antony. The younger Scipio.

Grace stared whitely, and he added, "South of the Sahara."

She was looking through such tears as would never rise for Angus Dance, who could not need, or evoke, pity for impercipience or self-exposure. She wept for Christian, insulated in the nonconduct-ing vainglory of his days, and might then have told him all, out of sheer fidelity to the meaning of things. She said, "My darling."

"There's nothing in the world to cry about." Christian touched her face, pleased. "I can assure you." Perfect Grace. He unrolled the departmental chart in his hand. A small box at the top of the page littered into larger boxes underneath, fathering endless enclosures of self-esteem. He pointed—here, and here. "Talbot-Sims will only be Acting. But for me it's the real thing." As he leaned to show the pedigree, there was a sparse, greying place on top of his sandy head. He said, "My youth was against me," brushing a speck from the flawless page. "But in the end they waived seniority." The chart started to curl at the edges, struggling to rescroll.

"It will make a whopping difference in the pension."

Grace wondered if their severance from each other's thoughts and purposes had at any time appeared so conclusive to him; if ever she herself had so grossly disregarded. She wondered whether, during summer separations, or the time she went to Guernsey, he had perhaps loved, or slept with—the one need not preclude the other—someone else. It was hard to imagine him sufficiently head-strong for it, now he did not have the self-reliance to read a book.

If he had loved another woman, Grace, of all people, would understand it. Magnanimity shaped a sad and vast perspective. Or it was merely a plea for leniency in her own case.

Christian put his arm around her, stooping from heights where officials waved seniority. "I'm afraid we'll have to call off the Costa Brava. But when I've got things in hand I'll take you somewhere quiet." His mind ranged, like the news, over ravaged nations, seeking a possibility. All was pandemonium—Portugal, Palestine, Tibet: called off, one after one. Elation weirdly faltered in his throat, as on a sob; but recklessly resumed: "So you brought me luck, telling the old bastard off about his joke."

Angus Dance came into the brick passage as the rain began. He started to run; at the same moment that Grace Thrale, entering from the opposite end, ran, too, under the rain.

Had it been possible to observe their meeting from above or alongside, like a sequence on film, they would have been seen at first precipitate, heads lowered against weather; then slowed in realization; and finally arrested. The arrestation being itself some peak of impetus, a consummation. They were then facing, about a yard apart, and rain was falling on Dance's hair and, like gauze, on Grace's coat of calamine blue. Ignored, the heavy rain was a cosmic attestation, more conclusive than an embrace.

Anyone seeing them would have said lovers.

Rain was silvering Dance's eyelids. He had taken hold of himself by the coat lapel. His expression was disarmed, pure with crisis.

"This is what I meant about being close."

"Yes."

"Shall we get to shelter?" As if they had not already got to shelter.

Sloshing along the narrow tunnel, he took her arm at last. By not embracing they had earned some such indulgence. They then stood under an awning at the exit of a supermarket; and he said, proving her more right than she had ever been about anything, "You know that I love you." It was the response she had not been able to compel from her own child.

She would not even brush the water from her hair or coat; and perhaps need never consider her appearance again. After moments during which the rain continued and they were nudged by shopping bags, she said, "It makes me happy." She thought she would tell the simple truth, now that she was indomitable. Opposite, there was the new hotel that took groups. Dance said, "It would be a place to talk."

"We can cross when it lets up." Her self-possession surprised, as in the tea shop.

He hesitated; and decided. "Yes. I'll have to telephone about the appointments."

She did not urge him to keep them. Nor did he ask if she was due in the Crescent. When the sky lightened, they crossed.

As they came into the hotel, the man at the desk put down the phone, saying "Christ." A heap of baggage—suitcases, golf bags, holdalls in nylon plaid—was piled by the foot of the stairs. In the lounge, which was one floor up, they might already have been at an airport, waiting to depart. Pylons of the building were thinly encased in plastic wood, with little counters around them for ashtrays and drinks. The sofas were hard and bright, yet far from cheerful. Slack curtains were tawdry with metallic threads, and on one wall there was a tessellated decoration of a cornucopia greenly disgorging.

As they entered, a group of women in pantsuits got up to leave.

An old man with an airline bag said, near tears, "But they only had it in beige."

Grace Thrale sat by a window, and Angus Dance went to telephone. Had it not been for him, how easily she might have fitted in here. The enclosure, nearly empty, enjoined subservience—was blank with the wrath, bewilderment, and touching faith of its usual aggregations. It was no use now trying this on Grace, who scarcely saw and was past condescending. With detachment that was another face of passion, she wondered in what circumstances she would leave this place and if she would ever go home. Abandoned by her, the house in the Crescent was worse than derelict, the life in it extinct: the roast attaining room temperature on the kitchen counter, an unfinished note to Caro announcing Christian's promotion, a rock album that was a surprise for Hugh; and
Within the Tides
unopened on the bedside table. All suspended, silent, enigmatical

—slight things that might have dressed the cabins of the
Mary Celeste
or embellished a programme on Pompeii: trifles made portentous by rejection.

She got up and spread the two damp coats on a nearby seat, to deter. She stood at a concrete embrasure looking at the rain, and knew he had come back.

He sat beside her on hard red plastic and said, "There's nothing to be afraid of." He touched his fingers to hers, as once at the hospital. "I am going away." You could see the colour ebbing down through clear, lit levels of his skin. "I have been offered a position at Leeds."

She sat with the air of supremacy, the triumphant bearing summoned for a different outcome. When she did not speak, he went on, "You must not think I would ever try to damage your life." Her life, which she stood ready to relinquish: whose emblems she had been coolly dispersing, as she might have picked off the dead heads of flowers.