The Transit of Venus (49 page)

Christian told Grace, "I can't get excited because Elphinstone slept with somebody at Downing Street."

Grace returned to the living-room carrying the newspaper. She sat on the sofa at Caro's side. "I meant to show you this."

There was a photograph of scientists leaving a government conference. Flanked by politicians, Ted Tice looked straight ahead. He had the private, civilized face one sees on the interpreter between two grimacing heads of state.

"You see that he'll be in Sweden while you're there." Grace read out that Professor Tice would present a paper on the controversial theme. Grace had an advantage here, having learned, from her sons, about black holes, red shift, the Big Bang. "I daresay you knew."

"I haven't called Ted this time."

Grace watched while Caro handled the tassel of a cushion. She said, "So much happens in your life."

"It happens only to me. Your life has meaning for others." Caro had never seen Grace shrug before. She went on, "How can a life be motiveless when others depend on it?"

Grace smiled. "Abnegation as statement." Neither of them had forgotten the nursing home, the television screen; how Charmian Thrale had said, "They are already dead," of those who had lost track of their own absurdity. Grace suddenly asked> "Did you love Paul Ivory?"

"Yes."

"I suppose it ended badly."

"Yes."

"You must have been very unhappy."

"I died; and Adam resurrected me." Intending to say this lightly, Caro gave in to deadly earnest. They were throwing caution to the winds, as their only outlet for violent feeling.

"I saw you once in the street together. The way you kept apart, not to be seen touching." Grace said, "I wish I'd known. Or helped. But you did not—could not depend on me for your stabil-ity."

"What help, for that matter, was I to you?"

"Oh—by then I was presumed stabilized." Same smile, neither bitter nor complacent.

Caro said, "Can I help you now?"

"No."

They sat, inclined towards each other, and exchanged some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs. Grace got up and went to the piano, as to a haven. Then turned and looked at Caro. "At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations." What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.

Caro said, "I don't know that suspense ever ends." The suspense of life itself, then the expectation of death. Valda had once said,

"There's the waiting." By suspense, women meant the desire to love, be loved: great expectations. "Even small expectations are part of the larger uncertainty—waiting for an arrival, a phone call, a letter."

Grace said, "A letter is the worst."

Grace stood by the piano, facing Caro. Had she turned away, Caro would have got up to embrace her, would have said, "Darling," like a lover. As it was, they remained in place, looking at one another.

Grace said, "Is there someone, now, whom you love?" When Caro did not answer, she went on, "Because you seem more handsome to me now than you ever were."

"I was remembering," Caro said, "that you were generous even as a child." Not something that occurs by accident.

Grace stood by the piano, listening.

Caro said, "If Ted calls." The corners of her lips were not quite civilized. It seemed she might not speak again. High feeling was ultrasonic, audible. "If Ted Tice rings up, I don't want him to know 111 be in Sweden. Or to see him there."

Grace had not foreseen her sister could develop such a mouth.

But was thinking of the letter—instant, full, unflawed by delay—

that could never now arrive. Or of the letter paid by particular suffering—a slow, inward bleeding of hope and humiliation—that likewise could not exist. There might be eventual word, by then unawaited, noncommittal; a fleeting touch on the wound. Meantime, she had learned to shrug.

Grace had discovered that men prefer not to go through with things. When the opposite occurred, it made history: Something you'll remember always.

She said, "Women have to go through with things. Birth, for instance, or hopeless love. Men can evade forever."

There were exceptions—Ted Tice, or her own son. It would be dreadful if Rupert were to lay down his life, as Ted had done.

Dreadful, and not unlikely.

Light came through long windows, there was scent from stock in a vase. Two women were silent, one seated, one standing. While a man slept, like a baby, in an adjoining room.

He asked at the desk. She had gone out. The hotel lobby was overwarm with a noon of endless summer, and flamed up here and there in lit vitrines displaying silver jewellery and curved objects in glass or wood. Ted sat down in a leather chair, holding but not reading a magazine: a detective commanding the approaches. Couples on their way to elevators glanced at this angular, watchful man; at his high forehead and blemished eye.

A heavy tourist in American seersucker stumbled shortsightedly on Ted Tice's feet. A woman came out of a phone booth, smiling.

A slim boy was pulled past by two leashed poodles.

Ted went back to the desk, wrote a message, wrote her name.

The concierge remarked on the exceptional weather, regretting the drought. Ted said, "In London this morning it was raining."

The concierge had seen this man's lean face in a newspaper, in connection with a university ceremony. The reference to drought was his polite, encoded tribute. Later that week he was to tell his family, "He was in the hotel on Tuesday. Large as life."

Edmund Tice was approaching the peak of his career.

Ted went outside on to the quay and looked at the harbour: the small ships, the Finland boat, a row of ferries offering excursions on lakes or canals. Large sky, clear light. He could not properly recall Caro's appearance, having too much remembered it. He stood at the edge of the waterfront, passing the last moments of thirty years.

Yesterday Grace had said on the phone, "So little time is left to tell the truth."

He stood in the sun, bleaching like all north Europe. The Swedish earth was blowing like fine sand: a world passing on the wind, seeping away, pulverizing. In the countryside, birches were leaning to the ground, dying in shallow soil. Only the sea stayed sceptical, an arctic blue: the same salt and tarry smells, the scavenging gulls.

It was said the drought would alter topography forever. This was untrue: the earth would reassert itself within a year.

When he returned to the hotel, Caro was at the desk asking for her key. Holding out her hand to receive his message.

He stood at a little distance, watching this dark stranger. Who would turn and be fully known at last.

He was handing her into the boat, which was open, with rows of wooden seats, like a small bus. All varnished inside, and the varnish sticky with salt and sun. Scarcely a dozen passengers, but twice that number of circular lifebelts painted with the name of the boat, the umlaut picked out in red.

Caro said, "Though you wouldn't drown in a canal."

"It's the sea, really. A waterway of the sea." There was a sign, in three languages: the ferry made a tour of the canals twice daily, as long as the weather lasted.

She had said, "Let's go out." Had walked out on the quay where there were no enclosing walls, no doors, curtains, or beds. She had stood exposed in the sunlight and said, "We can take the boat."

They boarded a ship that would not turn back at their bidding.

These were her last decisions. Setting this boat in motion, she became inactive.

She sat on a slatted bench and tied a scarf on her hair, the same bright scarf that Christian had admired one week ago. At her side Ted Tice was watching her movements which seemed, even to her, to have special accuracy and meaning: gestures in dream. It was she who filled his eyes, and not the sea.

A man in uniform threw his cigarette in the ocean, and spat. With that signal, the engines started up. There was white churning of water, and a barefoot boy released the rope by which they had all been tethered. At the very last, a pair of tourists ran up with a child and were taken aboard with some clamour—shouts, leaps, gasps, and a bit of clanking. An English family, the man girlish, the woman like a man, the child a cherub: choosing places in the sun, they were pink, self-conscious, but laughing for this rightful outcome to their moment of urgency and rescue. At the outset, a happy ending.

The boat sailed, leaving behind a palace, an opera house, a museum, a fortress; bridges, turrets, prisons, spires. A city fully equipped. Activity ceased to be interruption, and made part of the flow. They were moving in the light of a past or other world. The scene, too, in its humane dimensions, was experienced, discoloured, flawed, lacking the modern gloss. Or it was they who lacked the modern retina that gives precision to old scenes and makes them, like the coloured reproductions of great paintings, sharper, brighter, less resplendent than their originals.

The ferry rocked in the wash of a small steamer. The child squealed in delight at this new emergency, having learned that all dangers are surmounted. Ted and Caro were flung against each other, and did not part.

He said, "I was thinking, before you came, that I hardly knew what you look like. I'd lost the image with picturing it." He had stood in the hotel lobby, and she had turned: a look greater than recognition.

Caro said, "I have never been so glad to see any human face."

Staring now at the grooves and shadows of his face with great curiosity, as one consciousness might seek another in the moment before death or battle: the crisis of existence so closely shared, indivisible. The self supreme, yet helpless.

The boat was slowly turning into a passage of the sea, calm and narrow, where ivy covered a low embankment and trees sloped towards water. Gliding by, they could see smooth lawns among the trees, and square white houses. Fair men and women walked in dry gardens and looked at the boat, shading their eyes. A youth sat in a cane chair, holding an open book. Caro took off her watch—her own watch, a woman's watch on a small gold strip. Laying it on her lap, she reached her fingers down to the water. Ted took up the watch. It was a way of holding her, the little circlet warm as if alive.

When she withdrew her hand from the sea, he dried it and held it in his own.

"Until now I never touched you."

"No."

Ted Tice said, "Will you say you love me?"

"With all my heart."

The man looked at the trees lolling in white water. These trees were in his eyes, in streaks, in tears. "It is hard to imagine any stroke that could take that from me."

She said, "My dear."

"My dear." He was trying her endearment on his tongue, an act of love. "I was never with you on the water before." Making the elements bear witness.

He put his hand to her hair, and the scarf slithered back. When the colours fell from her head, it seemed some resilience left her.

Having been serene, obedient, she now grew solemn and obscure.

He could see her pondering, in a moment, the coming hours and years that were closed to her, unknowable. Only he could know, having prepared for this always. He had been so long creating this moment that it could not be new to either of them.

In the gliding boat he was watching brightness slip away. He said,

"Trust me." He proposed his love to her as wisdom, even genius.

As if he knew, and she did not.

The passengers saw the Royal Canal, as they had wished to do, but also saw these two who represented love. Pale woman, with her dark hair blown. A man's tender arm along the back of the seat, his other hand clasping hers. The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at—loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

They were passing close to shore where an old ship lay in dry-dock, a wooden vessel raised, after centuries, from the ocean floor: figurehead, decks, sterncastle. Built of oak and pine, named for a king; carried to the bottom by her bronze overload of cannon; grappled back to earth as a plaything. The child stood on a seat to look, and was told the story of planks and sea-chests, pewter dishes and coins of gold or silver marked with a crown. And was confirmed once more in a belief of survival.

The boat sailed through a broader waterway. Caro told Paul Ivory's story. It was as Paul had said: One day you will love someone else and tell my story.

Years ago, sitting on a wall, she herself had assured a callow boy, Things come round so strangely.

She asked him, "Have you ever met again the German you helped in the war?" It was the first time she had referred to this.

"Many times."

"And have never identified yourself?"

"No. Nor of course has he recognized me—even with this eye."

Ted said, "He is so confident, alert, assertive, and I observe him from our common, unshared secret. Like God. It gives authority I would not forgo. In spite of all his wakefulness, he sleeps, and I watch him."

"Was this what you felt towards me, then, with Paul?"