The Transit of Venus (13 page)

Paul Ivory had been accepted by Tertia Drage. When this was known, the Thrales gave a dinner for the lord of the castle, inviting also a pair of neighbours known to have sufficient property in Kenya. The large locked drawing-room at Peverel was aired and reclaimed by help hired from the village. The opening of the room for such a purpose did not so much terminate its period of closing as make clear it was now a shrine.

Longer than broad, the room had Corinthian pilasters and a pale fireplace at each end. Windows went from floor to ceiling, draped with orange silk brought long ago from Swatow by a relation in Butterfield and Swire. The handsome curtains, though shredding now and dusty, might be drawn to conceal panes in need of reglazing. Two chandeliers had been carefully cleaned; but a third, in a basket in the attic, was a hailstorm of dismantled crystals.

By daylight, patches of damp made an atlas of the walls.

Ted Tice, who was handy at such things, repaired an extra leaf belonging to an oval table. The panel, which had warped while out of use in the war, was laid on trestles, where Ted could work at it; and the village help, unconvinced of his standing in the house, despised Ted for his proficiency. There was an elderly hired couple who supervised—the husband tall but with distorted stance, as if he had once been seized and wrung; the wife buttressed by flesh and corset, an emplacement withstanding attack. This pair, the Mullions, were now retired from long service in some mighty house; but were glad, as they said, to give satisfaction from time to time. Service and satisfaction, their strong preoccupations, had neither unnerved them nor made them approachable.

Mrs. Mullion, in black, told Ted Tice: "The young do not understand the meaning of service." Because she had heard him sing

"Southerly, southerly" in the drawing-room, yet did not believe he was a guest. Mrs. Mullion also disliked and feared Ted's accent, or rather the absence of any attempt on his part to flaunt or disguise it.

It was plain, however, that this hired couple went in awe of Paul Ivory, who neither sang nor repaired furniture and scarcely greeted them.

Ted was at the final stage of his repair of the table, which involved a touch of varnish and the fitting of a small brass hook.

When Mrs. Mullion spoke of the meaning of service, he was working near an open window and might not have heard.

(Once—it was when Ted was ten and had his tonsils taken out, which was done at home—his mother had sat down on his bed and told him about the service and the satisfaction. "Thi father said he'd not do it again, go in service. Nor would he. We did it that one time, when we was first married and went as couple to the Truscotts at Ponderhurst. Being afeard of not finding work, and thi father still with the cough then from getting gassed in the war. Truscotts brought cook and maid with them when they come down, and driver, but were wanting a couple to look to the place when they were up in town whilst Parlyment was sitting. Well, pay wasn't much but there was keep as well, and the work not heavy.

"We'd been there six weeks it must have been when Mr. Truscott

—Sir Eric as he is now—come to thi father and said as we were giving satisfaction and should look to stay on. But seeing we were a couple newly wed he should make clear that he and Mrs.

T., wanting their quiet in the country, preferred we have no children. I wasn't there when he said it, but thi father called out to me and I came. And he says to Mr. Truscott, 'Say it again'—like that, right out, so you could see what was coming. Tell 'er,' he says.

Well then your father gave it him good and proper.4 We're leaving here today,' he says—us that hadn't penny to our name nor mortal place to lay our head. And Truscott says, all red and fit to brast,

'You'll go without the reference then.' And thi father says, 'My reference from thee is, I wouldn't stand thi bloody lip. What's it o'

yourn if we'd a ruck o' kids, or none?' And then he says what he shouldn't about Truscott and Mrs. T.—she wasn't a bad sort really, only gormless. Well, Truscott made to walk off, but thi father told him, 'I'm going to newspapers with this and they can print it, how a minister o' the crown talks to an Englishman these times.' And from being red Truscott goes white as this sheet and says, Tice, I'm sure we can settle this peaceable,' or peaceably. He'd the wind up right and proper. 'Let's sit down and talk sensible, I may not have explained missel. And have been lately under a strain.' Him that ne'er did hand's turn except to blether. Well, upshot was he give us fifty pound and we left next morning. We could live six month then, at a pinch, on fifty pound and keep oursel decent. There was the reference too, They have given every satisfaction. But thi dad said, Never again.

"A bit later on he told it all to Mr. Beardsley, yon parson at Southport who stuck up for the working folk, and the idea was he might still go to papers with it for it riled him yet. But Mr. Beardsley told him No, because we'd took the fifty pound. So that was an end of it. And now Truscott's Sir Eric and has his picture with Prince of Wales.")

As to the hired couple at Peverel, the Mullions, Ted Tice learned afterwards that they had lost their grandson in an accident some weeks before. If you knew enough, antipathy would rarely be conclusive.

Caroline Bell took out a dark dress, bought abroad, which alone of her clothes created the effect that might in some future time, or very soon, be entirely hers. She hung the dress up in her room, where she could see it, like bunting for a festival. She had scarcely worn it, and liked to think how she had bought it with a pile of pastel-coloured banknotes on her last morning in France. Dora had subsequently gone to pieces over the price.

When the time came she took the dress down from its hook, and it slipped into her arms like a victim. She had drawn back her heavy hair and coiled it; and could see, in the mirror, how this became her.

Caro went downstairs in the early evening wearing her dark dress, holding the silk belt of it in her hand. She was ironing the belt in the room near the kitchen when Tertia came in carrying a mass of flowers.

"These must go in deep water." Tertia laid the flowers on a slab by the stone sink. She had a rustling, sweeping dress of silver. It was as if a salt gale had blown in; yet Tertia was only standing still and watching Caro iron, while the flowers lay on their cenotaph ready to die.

Caro set the iron on its rest and held up the belt—her head back, her arm raised, and the belt suspended. Being human, she could not help herself. She knew she had sometimes left her mark, but on this occasion had a taste to see the fact acknowledged.

"And what," Tertia asked at last, "are you going to put on tonight?"

Caro continued to hold up the belt—to one side, like an abstracted snake-charmer, so she could look Tertia in the face. It was a pity there was no one else to see Caro then in her beautiful dress, her throat and arm bare, her delicate raised hand, and her dark eyes fixed on their object. In this way for some moments she compelled Tertia Drage to admire.

And from the garden Paul Ivory called, "Caro." It was the first time he had spoken her name.

There was a pause, in which sounds could be heard from the adjacent kitchen. Releasing Tertia from the spell, Caro lowered the belt and fitted it with slow care about her own waist. She then carried a heavy vase to the sink and turned the tap. These modest actions commanded attention, and Tertia was not the first to see in Caro's most commonplace movements rehearsals for life and death.

When the flowers were in the vase Caro looked again at Tertia and said, "In deep water." And laughed, and dried her hands and walked away.

That evening they were celebrating Tertia's betrothal to Paul Ivory.

Sefton Thrale showed the view over the valley in the dying light before bringing his guests indoors. The lately opened drawing-room was not quite willing to harbour life: a neglected room can no more be rallied for an emergency than an overgrown garden. It went without saying that there were bowls of roses, soft lamplight and, in each grate, a small fire burning. However, as the entering voices rang, the room retreated. It was an old room, unpractised in raw new sounds of struck matches and the ice in tumblers.

It appeared that Tenia's mother was a survivor of the
Titanic—

eclipsing Grace and Caro with their obscure, inglorious
Benbow
and its ineffectual displacement of Australian waters. Tertia's mother remembered being lowered to a lifeboat in her seventh year, and saved. Surviving to become a brawny chestnut mare, she had conceived and borne five daughters but no male heir.

There was the glacial flow of Tertia's moire on the carpet as she sailed away from her mother, a pinnace from the flagship.

How much time had been taken to prepare that evening's version of Tertia Drage—the sleek hair and molded silver dress, the smooth armpit, gleaming necklace and little pointed shoes; the enamel matching on her fingertips and concealed toes. Yet Tertia was indifferent, scornful, as if decked out in these trinkets and gauzes quite against her inclination. You might nearly believe in her neutrality, against all the evidence. Tertia had dis-sociated herself from human weakness: when she touched her dress with near-derision, mere life in others was made to seem commotion.

Yet she had begun the evening with a sharp defeat.

Tertia's mother said, "She spoils every dinner party she attends."

Fond and proud. Crushing a billowing blue sofa, Lady Drage now became a creature too heavy for its element, a cormorant on the waves. An extra guest she had brought took his place on the hearth, where flakes of fire sprang up behind him. A tall, reddish man about forty, he cleared his throat with assurance but spoke little. He had a signet ring, old gold, smooth as a knuckle; and wore a Brigade of Guards tie.

Some talk of costs, and taxation, was a formality with which such evenings must now be opened.

Caro asked Ted Tice, " D o English people always speak of money?"

"Mainly the rich ones."

Mr. Collins from Kenya, seated in a leather chair, knew a joke about Australia, or Orstrylia; which he said was from the recent war, giving the setting as Tobruk, but which in fact went back to the Great War and the campaign in the Dardanelles. The story was as follows: A wounded soldier asks an Australian nurse at his bedside, "Was I brought here to die?" and " N o , " she answers, "yes-terdie."

That was the joke. Caroline and Grace Bell were familiar with this story, which was often told to them when they were introduced.

Ted Tice had not heard it before. It could be seen that tears came to his scratched eye as they did to the other, flawless one.

Mrs. Charmian Thrale gently touched a collar of pearls. Whiter than pearl, her throat might never have been exposed to light.

(In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Charmian Playfair, volunteering as a nurse's aide, was assigned to ambulance duty at Victoria Station where casualties were arriving on hospital trains.

The loaded ambulance trundled back through dark streets carrying its racks of blanketed men—who, from their spotless newspaper anonymity of "the wounded," were suddenly incarnate as moaning, silent, or plucky inhabitants of rent, individual flesh. Enclosed with these spectres in swaying gloom, a nineteen-year-old girl put her hand to her soft throat. Yet moved as best she could, to supply water or answer questions, among the grey blankets and the red, rusty, or blackened bandages. There was a boy of her own age to whose whisper she had to bend, her face nearly touching his: "So cold. Cold. My feet are so cold." And, almost capably, the girl answered, "I'll fix that"; turning to adjust the blanket, and discovering he had no feet.)

Around Mrs. Charmian Thrale these impressions passed in ritual rather than confusion: the simultaneous preoccupation of girls with love and dresses, the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion; an imbalance of hope and memory, a savage tangle of history. These welling together in a flow of time that only some godlike grammar—some unknown, aoristic tense—might describe and reconcile.

Mrs. Thrale shifted roses to make room for an ashtray. Her back did not touch the sofa.

Tertia's chestnut
mere
was saying, "Not Kenya, no never alas, but we of course were in Egypt when my husband was—oh picturesque I grant you, who can deny, Luxor, Karnak, but the beggars and what can one do. Nobody is more tender-hearted actually—to a fault my family always tell me—but it would not be a kindness, indeed dangerous to. Isn't that so, Guy?"

Her husband mechanically gave his endorsement. He sat between the women, a panel that had warped for lack of use. He had long since become the views he had never contested: perjured acquiescence registered in an inward shrivelling of lip and chin. Yet he suddenly said, starting from sleep, "In Egypt she suffered from the sun." And did look about, if not intently. "Pigmentation, that's the word. Parents had no sense, forced her outdoors as a girl, did a lot of harm." The remonstrance an echo of a time when he had imagined that his wife, of all people, needed his protection. Yet, between the fire and the ice, she had survived.

The dreaming dog, Grasper, twitched on the hearth, where the tall man in the Brigade tie stood impassive, lighting his cigarette.

He had been introduced as Captain Cartledge.

The young people had drifted to the other end of the room, where they were grouped together, all standing. Their elders smiled to see this—someone at least was having a good time; which, it was hoped, would counter their own dullness. The galaxy of lovely young women, and, in Paul, one desirable young man.

Caroline Bell did not quite look young, bearing her new beauty like a difference of generation.

It was churlish of Ted Tice simply to stand there. It had somehow been agreed, on both sides, that he should not be one of them.

"In my usual way," said Tertia Drage, "I lost the car keys." My usual way, she would say, or my inimitable way, just like me—to connote distinction, even fame. If Tertia did it, it must matter.

Ted stood taciturn, the underdog; and yet prevailed. While Tertia, topdog, had suffered a defeat this evening and might again do so.