The Transit of Venus (12 page)

Ted said, "I've no charm at the best of times, and nothing is less charming than unwanted love. But as we're parting soon I must say it, that I hope you'll think of me and let me write to you. And eventually let me love you."

The girl heard his speech out with a stoicism that made her seem the sufferer: withstanding his appeal like necessary pain, treating it with careful respect. "Of course I think of you, and will write. I like you better than anyone I've known." She moved away—a blue dress passing like haze over a backdrop of dark trees and painted fields. "As to the rest, I can't see how it would ever happen."

"From my point of view, that is very hard." For the release of a few words, he was squandering the asset of silence. It was inconceivable that he could not touch or take hold of her light-blue body that had power over all his days. The very outline of the earth, beyond her, was nothing to it. "You're as distant from me now as you'll be when we're separated. There's no happiness in this for me, our standing together here and now. But I'll think of it, later, as being close to you, and lucky."

She had clasped her arm about a tree and stood looking at him.

It seemed the very landscape gloated, and that the tree allied itself with her—impersonal, established. Or that she leaned on the tree seductively, to taunt him. The hallucination vanished, but left knowledge of a kind. There was a heavy smell of vegetation steaming in the sun: England drying out.

"Ted," she said. "Ted." Mild exasperation. "When I start this work in London, I'll be on my own for the first time. It matters to me to be at liberty now, after years of Dora."

It was a reason, certainly; if not the truest reason.

Ted had heard of Dora. "Once people establish themselves as a cause for concern, they don't give up easily." Then he feared she might refer these words to himself. "On your side there's the anxiety, on hers the claim to it. That often passes for affection, even for great love. The very fact that you did well in that test"—he meant the examination where Caro had come out ahead—"confirms your ability to accept her burden: you have a certificate now to prove it."

"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."

He said, "I know exactly."

(When Ted Tice was eleven or so, his mother told him, "It was when I went to Lacey's, after leaving the mill, and worked on the invoices. It was your uncle Tony Mott got me the chance there, seeing I was a dab at the sums. Yes, it was your uncle Tony give me my chance. Well, come Christmas Mr. Dan Lacey handed other lasses at office two pound apiece in an envelope as a present. But I got three, along of being quick at the figgers. I'd never seen the like of two pound let alone three, me wages were twelve bob a week, took off me by my dad soon as I was in the door. An I knew well enough he'd take this off me too. We was in Ellor Street then, and when I got home that night I heard right off that my cousin Lorna—tha never saw our Lome, that was Cec's only girl and died of the lungs, very month tha was born—well, that Lorna had got three pound, or three guineas it was, where she worked, though two was usual. An I was pulled both ways, I was put to it, you see, whether to show I was worth the three like Lorna or to say two and keep one to missel. An I did, I kept one back and didn't let on. It was the one time I was fly."

Ted's mother was sifting flour at the time, on a big kitchen slab that was their only table.)

Under the laden trees Ted Tice tilted back his head and saw the sky. This might have had to do with salt tears and the law of gravity.

" 'Twas your uncle Tony give me my chance." Ah Christ:
My
chance.

(Ted's mother was saying as she sifted: "Lorna favvered her dad.

She's in the family group, 'twas taken just round that time, but tha can't make her out that clear, she's at back and got her head down, poor Lome.")

Ted Tice looked at the horizon. He remembered Uncle Tony, short and pink, who lived a little better than the rest of them, knew a chap on the council, and kept a tiger cat called Moggie.

He said, "Paul Ivory is marrying that castle."

"I suppose so." They both stared out at the solid, sunlit figment of history's imagination, on its dated elevation. As a spouse it inspired some apprehension.

Ted said, "Paul Ivory has to marry a lord or, at very least, the daughter of one. It is written. Written likewise that she be rich. He has no choice, it's mandatory. Turn right for the castle."

"Even so, I don't see why Tertia should oblige him." It was unnatural to say "Tertia" where no intimacy could exist.

"Maybe she feels beleaguered in the castle." They smiled to imagine Tertia on the battlements, peering glassily from behind machicolations. "Or there is an antagonism she enjoys. Or they know the worst about each other. That can be a bond."

"Paul might change. He is still young."

"His faults aren't those of youth. He has no growth, merely automatic transmission."

The girl had not heard Ted Tice on this note before—savage as his inferiors, with a malice that blurred his virtue. Disappointment was perhaps for his sake, that he should join in the general unmasking. She moved out from the shadow of trees and started back to the house. They had not disagreed. But some carefulness would now develop on both sides—a concern not to offend or expose. It was unclear why this had come into existence.

To Ted Tice, the defeat appeared to be of his own making, as if some great duty had fallen to him and he had bungled it. An image

—of her strong will expressed in apparent passivity, while he urged an absolute need—baffled his intelligence with sheer waste. Otherwise he might have seen in it a virtual representation of the act of love.

In these warm days Tertia came and went, taking Paul Ivory here and there. Grace and Caro saw her sit at the wheel of her green car, her eyebrows raised, her pupils insensate as the bronze discs applied as eyes to ancient statues. Grace said, "I suppose she is a great prize." She had read this phrase, which was her way of declaring: They cannot be in love.

There came an interlude of calm brilliance when it was morning all day long. On one of these clear days Caro, returning from the village, met Paul Ivory, who was on foot. Seen this way, out of bounds, he was like a rider unhorsed; and she said this to him.

"My lost advantages." No one would have thought them lost, to see Paul laugh and make his graceful stride. Paul Ivory was a star: any firmament would do.

He had seen Caro from a distance and altered his course to intersect. Had observed, as he drew near, that her walk turned the progress of other women to a thump or shuffle. He would have said her delicate dark strength was virile—a sombre glow that might distinguish some young man. He remembered dark, vigorous young men who kept somewhat to themselves, yet retained this vibrancy of adventure. Then he thought how such youths often ended feebly, how quickly they grew sour or cautious, or became the foils of bitter women—their energies turned to blame or bluster, their pride morose. He had already seen that; and supposed that in the case of women such beings dwindled entirely, or at most passed some shred of their lost impetus to children.

Paul Ivory had also noted penalties of impulse. Had seen how men provide themselves, before their taste or character is formed, with wife and children—committed and condemned thereafter to the fixtures of an outgrown fancy. He was satisfied his own prospective marriage would preclude such dangers. An accusation of dispassion would not have troubled him. He was not convinced that passion was essential, or that the world had properly defined it.

The girl asked, "Shall we take the shortcut through the churchyard?"

" N o graveyard can be a shortcut." Paul opened a wicket gate.

A torn kite was lying in the grass. Caro said, "There are often children playing here."

"Children like cemeteries. No traffic, no live grown-ups, and the headstones are child-height, companionable."

Caro, who usually came that way, showed the inscriptions. Here lieth all that could die of Oliver Wade. The earthly enchantments of Tryphena Cope are here subdued. On later stones, merely the name, and the years—of birth and death—connected by a little etched hyphen representing life. Eroded tablets tilted like torn kites. On the oldest the lettering was indecipherable: inaudible last words.

Caroline Bell said, "The dead in cemeteries give the impression of having all died normally and peacefully." Paul did not reply, but she persisted, " D o you think that's why they excluded suicides from consecrated ground, to maintain the fiction?" As they passed on in silence to the road it occurred to her that, since he was a believer, she had possibly offended. Paul's expression smoothly allowed her to think so. There was something cold in him that might wait to be given a chance.

Paul wished perhaps to punish her—for her being remarkable now, and for any impending ordinariness. All that was remarkable, if you boiled it down, was that she gave belief of a kind. You might not accept it but she gave it—being a believer in her own way, which was not his.

He said, "You emanate so much resolve, and all of it unfocused."

"I don't think you know me well enough to say that."

Paul laughed. "I can say it, then, when I know you better?"

Passers-by looked harder than was necessary, for these two made a couple whose fates could not be predicted with confidence. Having the world regard them as a pair made a fact of it.

"They're surprised to see you with someone at your side," Paul said. "You're so much alone." They had reached a turn where the castle confronted them across summer meadows. Everything else appeared to waver in the heat, but not the castle. "I see you alone in the garden at night. I look down and see you there alone."

In the transparent morning he created a moment of night silence: Caro unaware in the garden, and Paul watching. From his hidden elevation he created fragrant darkness round them both.

"To me it seems I'm not enough alone."

"Is that intended for now?— For me?"

"Of course not."

The castle was obdurate, the only detail not executed by Turner.

In the valley a line of osiers flinched at the least breath of air.

"Women have capacity for solitude, but don't want it. Men want and need it, but the flesh soon makes fools of them." It was Paul Ivory's habit to suppose that girls knew more than they let on.

Taking the castle for her model, Caro would not be disconcerted.

They were on the hillside path, near the place where she had sat in the dark with Ted Tice and talked of loyalty. Although no treachery was involved, she would not have wanted Ted to see her pausing there with Paul Ivory. Although she walked on in her straight way, inwardly she stooped and was vulnerable.

Paul halted by the low wall, as if he knew of her scruples and meant to flout them. " D o you send him about his business too?"

He brushed the wall lightly with his hand, and sat there. "You know I mean Tice."

Caro sat beside him. Her soul seemed a cold, separate thing, while her body was weightless, humid, its contours exposed and scarcely natural. It was hard to say which was unworthy of the other.

She observed Paul Ivory's appearance as if it were an event that might develop before one's eyes. He had the face of the future, skilled in perceiving what the world wants. When he said, "You know I mean," there was a clouding of his looks with something coarse that made her its accomplice. It was no more than she deeply expected of him, yet his tapping of that vein of expectation made complicity between them. When he said, "You know I mean Tice,"

she understood, also, that Ted's love was a stimulus to Paul and the cause of their sitting together on the wall.

The man was turned towards her, awaiting some kind of victory.

He would have her believe that any or all suspicion was warranted and confirmed.

She was certain he was about to touch her—touch her breast or shoulder, put his face to hers—and already experienced the imagined contact with purifying intensity. At the same time she was fixed, subjected, fatalistic. And sat, fingers clasped, no sign of agitation, with the immemorial stillness of women at such moments.

Paul stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. "Shall we go on, then?" Paul stood; while Caro looked up recomposing her flesh and blood. And Paul smiled, having had his victory.

Caro entered the house alone, and stood in the hall. There was a mirror on one wall, and she had lately taken to watching herself.

Even when looking at a plain wall these days she might be picturing herself, if not with accuracy. Now her likeness was dark with the change from sunlight to shadow, or because her vision dimmed from momentary faintness. At a distance a door opened, and Professor Sefton Thrale called, "Charmian?" And Caroline Bell could not know why that simple fact should bring her close to tears.

It was a state of mind. Or it was because she had stood long ago in a darkened room, a little girl of six years old, and looked in a long mirror cool as water. And, a door opening, had heard her father's voice call "Marian?"—which was her mother's name. That was all there was in it, that was the evocation: a small spasm of memory that could never elucidate itself.

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