The Transit of Venus (11 page)

The letter was signed "D." Dora had difficulty with signatures, as with salutations.

A mechanical tone, already absent-minded, raised the possibility that Dora might have been unfeeling towards them always. Grace feared that Caro might point this out. There was also a swift, indecent consciousness of the fleshly change that Dora would, amazingly, be the first of them to undergo.

"We must cable." But they remained there together in a synthe-sis of confused remembrance. Grace would have liked to think something universal, but could only arrive at the outskirts of feeling. Caro might have been seeing Grace herself, in a pinafore, hauling by its spokes a little sky-blue chair.

They would have given each other a rare embrace.

"Not interrupting, I trust." Sefton Thrale saw the two women standing rapt in the sunlight and holding up their letter.

They separated, not ready to tell.

"I have Tertia with me."

He had Tertia with him, the daughter of a lord. So sleekly pretty, so fair and tall that she seemed an advertisement for something very costly. She had driven a car from the castle, and her hair was bound with a strip of pink silk that passed behind her ears. Her eyes were light blue—shining with what at a distance passed for sheer delight, and perhaps in childhood had truly been. Up close, however, the clarity was stinging, and neither gave nor received a good impression. Nothing about her appeared to have been humanly touched.

Circumstances had made Grace responsible here. She closed Dora's letter into its envelope and came forward, too polite to seem in charge. They murmured, you-do. Tertia offered fingertips in a gesture not so much exhausted as reserving strength for something more worth while.

"Has Paul come?" Three young women sat down while Sefton Thrale went on a favourite errand—to seek news of Paul Ivory, who must today arrive at last.

Having shaken hands, Tertia touched her bodice, her hair: an animal fastidiously expunging traces of contact. She was aware of intercepting, without rupturing, a current of high feeling—the sisters, in their private preoccupation, being not quite accessible to her aloofness. Like Christian Thrale before her, she found them insufficiently conscious of their disadvantage, and would have liked to bring it home to them. She perceived that, while Grace might eventually be set straight in this fashion, Caro would be a tougher proposition.

Tertia Drage plucked a leaf from her dress and flung it emphatically in the empty grate. It was something they were to notice again in Tertia—that she handled objects or pushed doors with punitive abruptness, seeing no reason to indulge an uncompliant world. The occasional human anger felt against inanimate things that tumble or resist was in her case perpetual.

No. Tertia would not have sherry. Thank ypu. She had come in the car they could see through the open window. Caro got up to look. It was a low, open Bentley from before the war, a model sought by collectors. Dark green; slim and beautiful as Tertia.

"What a marvellous car." Caro pushed the paned window farther, and stood looking at the car. Circular lamps, set over the mud-guards, were glassily unlit like Tertia's eyes.

Tertia said, "Nineteen thirty-seven. And in showroom condition."

A half-grown cat came in over the window-sill. Caro sat again, taking the cat in her lap. Grace held Dora's blue letter. They could not recall whose turn it was to speak. The Professor came back, saying "I now have decisive information," but Tertia gave no sign of life. Outside the window, the car was kinder because suggestive of fluency and eventual animation.

Paul Ivory was motoring down from London, and should soon arrive. ("Motoring down" was the Professor's choice of phrase.) Ivory's car would swoop up alongside Tertia's, which would almost certainly put it in the shade or the wrong.

"I can't wait," said Tertia, meaning only that she would not. "I dislike reunions." She would assert "I don't like animals," or children, or the ocean, or the spring, confident that her distaste must have importance. Any contrary opinion must be, as she implied, falsely sentimental. Even so, she could not manage to put these two sisters in the wrong or shade. They were actually waiting for her to be gone so they might resume.

Caro recrossed her legs with care. In the sleeping catkin, weight slipped from end to end, as in a bean-bag. The true weight was in the blue envelope on Grace's lap. As to Tertia, Caroline Bell wondered what
Benbow
had capsized her into this showroom condition.

Grace thought that Tertia would soon say she hated cats.

"I can turn the car right there," Tertia said. "Can't I." Her observations were unsmiling, without doubt or delicacy. They were quoits that fell with tingling, accurate thud around a post. She looked at the room, saying "Good-bye." To Caro she remarked,

"Cats hate me."

When Tertia had gone out with Sefton Thrale, Caro said, "Over-joyed at your happiness. What about something like that?" The only happiness Dora had in fact endorsed was their own.

"We can write it out. I'll cycle down and send it." Tertia's manner had infected them with flatness, and they would never embrace now over Dora's letter. Outside, the car rolled backwards to a herbaceous border, where it crouched to spring. Petrol was exhaled on candytuft. Then Tertia dashed away, scattering small stones.

When they had written out the cable, the second car came, short, closed, dark red. They could see the man with light hair at the wheel, and Ted Tice coming out from the side of the house to help him park. Grace said, "So many things are happening at once. It's a pity they could not be more spread out." Giving, childlike, the measure of their secluded, innocent, yet expectant lives. Ted disappeared from their view, but they could hear him call, "Left" and

"Right" and "Mind out." The young man in the car moved his elbow from the open sill and took the wheel in both hands. He wore a dark, high-necked jersey. His hair fell over his forehead like a schoolboy's.

Wheels turned this way, that way, and off-screen Ted called

"Hold it," like a film director. Grace asked Caro, "D'you want anything when I'm in the village?" but they were watching the red car coming to its halt. The engine stopped, and a young man got out: tall, graceful, and well dressed in a way that was unfamiliar to them.

Paul Ivory was the first Englishman they knew to dress, as everyone dressed later, in a dark-blue jersey like a fisherman's, and to wear light cotton trousers and canvas shoes.

Then came the moment in which Ted was most to blame, since it was he who stopped and looked, and lowered his hand. Whatever spontaneous antipathy announced itself between these two, Paul at least came on, introducing himself and making things possible.

Even as his candid glance went over Ted Tice, sizing up and decid-ing. They did shake hands, but Ted stood impassive while Paul Ivory heaved a leather suitcase from the car and slammed a door.

He might easily have moved away, for the Professor had come out of the house and was saying he could not be more delighted; but instead remained there, awkward and removed, as if dozing in the activity of arrival and determined that Paul Ivory should shine by contrast.

It was a show of instinct so pronounced that Grace half-turned from the window, waiting for Caro to interpret.

Caro was thinking that, in England, class distrust might destroy even the best, by distracting their energies. She was watching with some large feeling, less than love, in which approval and exasperation merged to a pang that Ted Tice should supply, in a little scene of varnished attitudes and systematic exchanges, the indispensable humanity. She was used by now to his providing strokes of comprehension that were strong experiences in themselves; but on this occasion he stood on gravel with his hands dangling, and had no apparent consciousness of Caro or anyone else. While she observed, and wondered what impulse worked on him.

Paul Ivory looked at the low window where the young women, standing, were almost at his level. He smiled out of a handsome, fair, and fortunate face, acknowledging pleasant surprise with such controlled openness that no surprise remained. And the sisters smiled back in the serious way they had for such moments. Only Charmian Thrale, at an open door, made a contrast between this auspicious arrival and the way in which Ted Tice had been washed up out of a storm; remembering how Caro had looked down that morning from the staircase, and gone away.

W h e n Paul Ivory walked in espadrilles on the paths and passages of Peverel, the sound inaugurated, softly, the modern era. As did his cotton jerseys—some blue, some black—and trousers of pale poplin. The modern era, like the weather, was making these possible. Paul had brought the sun, and his luck, with him. Early on warm mornings, the girls pressed flowered dresses in a room by the kitchen where an ironing-table was covered by a worn blanket and there was an old stone sink. Ted Tice's fair-isle pullover and sea-green cardigan in cable stitch had been put away, perhaps forever.

Mrs. Charmian Thrale told Paul Ivory, "I recall you as a perfect child. The only child ever to captivate my father." It was her way of saying, What a charming and indeed blessed young person; and of sketching, most delicately, her own desolate childhood. Paul took praise well, unembarrassed, diffidently pleased. It was not usual at that period to see a young man frankly enjoying the fact of youth and taking justified pleasure in his own health and good looks. In his early and deserved distinction, he made the future seem less formless.

Paul's play would be produced in London in the autumn. In preparation he received telephone calls and registered envelopes.

There were mornings when he must not be interrupted, because of adding or rewriting. The play was called
Friend of Caesar,
and had been announced in the press as presenting a contemporary family as an analogy of political power. Paul himself read this out with a smile. A celebrated actor had agreed to play the leading role.

Paul Ivory was a man of promise in a literal sense: circumstances had made a solemn undertaking to see Paul prosper. His play would be widely and justly praised. Provincial towns and foreign cities would clamour for it, and a famous director would make a successful film. The radiant pre-eminence of Paul's engagement with events was far more bridal than his prospective betrothal to Tertia Drage.

In its subtlety and confidence Paul's physical beauty, like his character, suggested technique. As some fine portrait might be underpainted dark" where it showed light, or light where dark, so might Paul Ivory be subliminally cold where warm, warm where cold—the tones overlapping to create, ingeniously, a strong yet fluid delineation. Similarly, his limbs might seem the instruments or weapons of grace rather than its simple evidence. Paul's at-tenuated fingers turned up at their tips with extreme sensitivity, as if testing a surface for heat.

Sefton Thrale told Ted Tice, "Paul will make his mark." Like praising a pretty girl to a plain one. And yet there was the sense that Paul Ivory and Ted Tice were both marked men, and symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. More irrationally, it seemed that one of them must lose if the other were to win.

Sefton Thrale had twice remarked that Tice would soon be gone, and was mindful of the actual date.

Mrs. Thrale told Paul Ivory, at his request, about the Vicar—who had an impediment of speech and had once been a Communist, but had never, like the man at Thaxted, hung the Red Flag in the church. The Professor put in, " H e is High, of course, very High,"

as if a clergyman were a piece of hung game; recommending attention to the church facade as a fine example of napped flints. And on the Sunday Paul went to church in the village, involving the household at Peverel in a religious gesture.

The two sisters, ironing blouses, watched the red car drive away.

Charmian Thrale might be noting the event from an upstairs room.

Paul cast his spell, as Ted his pall. It was undeniably affecting, the thought of this tall, victorious male kneeling down, offering and receiving. Although both Mrs. Thrale at the high window and Caro in the kitchen were aware that women are not to be trusted with emotion of the kind.

Carrying the folded clothes into the hallway, Caro found Ted at the open door.

Ted Tice said, "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers."

She did not know whose part to take but, like Sefton Thrale, recalled that Ted would soon be gone. She put the fresh blouses in a basket on the stairs and went with Ted into the garden.

He said, "In two weeks I'll be gone."

"You'll be in Edinburgh. And, soon after, in Paris." Making clear he had nothing to complain of. She herself, in a month, would go to London to work in the government office. For Caro had come out of the examination ahead of all the rest; being a marked person in her own way, which was not theirs.

There was the brief, silent imagining of new life, even to the deal tables and scarred office chairs. Ted said, "I must imagine it without you." They walked out of the flower-garden and stood under trees, looking on the valley. An entire nation lay still with Sunday and summer. A yellow field, far off, was flat and bright as a streak of paint. From distant uplands, reaped stubble pricked the eye, reliable as old tweed. On the opposite rise, a chess-piece on the chequered board, Tertia's castle notched the sky with grey crenellations.