The Transit of Venus (15 page)

Shortly after this he married a well-to-do and bossy girl, produced two sons, and disappeared into Derbyshire, apparently forever—his name once in a while providing a condescending footnote or obvious joke for writers on literary matters between the wars.

Joining, or rejoining, the army in 1939—a paradox noted only by himself—he was posted to Malaya, where in due course he was captured by the conquering Japanese. In Singapore, shared his prison hut with a statistician, a lanky officer of the 18th Division with whom he also divided a daily task of digging graves for comrades felled by malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, beriberi, gan-grene, and the malnutrition of interminable rice. Clandestine radio kept the captives sporadically in touch with similar prisons throughout the East, and by this means the tall statistician, Ivory's companion, compiled slow lists of surviving, missing, and dead—keeping the records in cipher and burying them nightly in the earth; and training Rex Ivory as his accomplice.

In the third year, the statistician dug a last and longer grave, and bequeathed his archive and its maintenance to Rex Ivory. In the fourth year, when a liberating British fleet reached Singapore, the records were conclusively disinterred, and the scarecrow of Captain Ivory, the sole person equipped to decode them, was ordered to take fast ship for Colombo. From a devastated dock at Singapore he was piped aboard in his rags while the ship's company stood to attention on deck. The coded rolls crooked in his starved and scrawny arm were the only coherent record of the death of a British army.

Clothed and fed, Ivory was sent below to the paymaster.

"Disbursement to be made solely on submission of previous pay-slip."

"I was taken prisoner in Johore at 1500 hours on the afternoon of 8 February 1942 and have been in Changi Camp until this morning."

The paymaster got up from his metal desk and opened a combina-tion lock on double doors. A bulkhead safe was seen to be entirely fitted with packets of banknotes in infinite coloured order, like bricks in a pastel facade.

"Help yourself."

From Colombo, Rex Ivory was flown to England where, after reporting himself at the War Office as ordered, he arranged to take the late, and at that time only, train for Derbyshire. His family were by now aware of his resurrection. As if he were some normal returning tripper, he preferred not to come empty-handed, and at the London station tried to buy a very small box of blanched chocolates displayed in isolation in a case.

The girl said, "The coupons. The coupons please." She pronounced it kewpongs, and was not a girl at all but a dour grey woman, for all the girls were gone to the war.

"What coupons?"

She looked in his face. Her alarmed fingers crimped on the tiny box as she then more slowly stared. "Where the devil have you been?"

Ivory said, "I was in a Japanese prison. Three years and seven months."

"Lose me job I will." She put the box into his hands.

These undivulged incidents, of paymaster and chocolates, were the peaks of Rex Ivory's return, although his story was soon one of the items of victory, for the newspapers took it up and he became

"the poet Rex Ivory" in publications where an indefinite article had formerly done for him well, and rarely, enough. A
Selected Poems
went into print on coarse, flecked wartime paper, and there were no more witticisms about ivory towers. He read that he had been correct in spurning the First World War, and prescient in endorsing the Second; and he pondered the new idea that he had shown acumen. The BBC brought electrical equipment into the Dukeries in a van and a camera followed the well-known and prescient poet Rex Ivory as he walked away between flowering borders with a pair of Sealyhams borrowed from a neighbour. Despite his unrehearsed analogy between the British mental asylum and the Japanese camp, the interview was a success; because, when people have made up their minds to admire, wild horses will not get them to admit boredom.

Ivory's wife was amazed, and greatly pleased. And was pleased to amaze the great, and right, people with a distinction hitherto unsuspected by them or by her. To take social advantage of the surprise, she bought a house in London shortly after the war, when prices were lower than they were ever to be again. And Rex Ivory remained in Derbyshire, an all but invisible lode of authenticity.

There was one thing. In his jungle prison Rex Ivory had, as before, composed poetry—which he memorized there, since any scrap of paper was conserved for the coded casualty lists. An eminent publisher stood ready to sacrifice a portion of hoarded postwar paper to the awaited volume. None of this was unpredictable. What had not been expected was that the verses from the Malayan death camp, when transcribed, would be found to celebrate, exclusively and inexorably, the streams and hedgerows of Derbyshire.

There were other heroes by then, and other manuscripts. Public interest in Rex Ivory was waning, the paper shortage intensifying.

At a top-level meeting held on a wet Saturday morning at the publishing house, it was felt that certain of the poems—in particular, one concerning a lapwing—invited critical derision. Availing themselves of an Act-of-God clause, the publishers withdrew from the contract. And
The Half Reap'd Field
appeared, like earlier volumes, under an obscure imprint at the author's expense.

Ivory's two sons had grown into tall young men by attending the right schools, singing the right hymns, and making the right turns.

"Quite right," Ivory said, when his wife recounted the directions taken during his years abroad. "Ah. Quite right." There was no reason to think there could be irony in it. Gavin, his elder son, was going into merchant banking. Right again. The younger, Paul, was still at the university. Born at the right times, they had escaped war by inches. In his family, Rex Ivory was a bereaved person, having lost familiarity. They had no idea of making good the loss, but would do the right thing and keep him company—at first all together and later by turns—until he grew accustomed to his solitary condition. That much at least was due to him: he had earned it by his interesting and advantageous behaviour in the camp.

Their best hope was that America would take him up. There had been an inquiry from Texas about his papers, and a questionnaire from Ann Arbor as to working methods. In addition, he had been interrogated by a visiting professor named Wadding, who was on his way to Scotland to establish the identity of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" and the words of the song she sang. (An essay on these researches was later published in a scholarly journal under the title,

"Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?") Ivory's wife felt that this American interest, which had flagged, might be stimulated.

Rex Ivory objected to nothing. Yet you could not feel he was passive.

"Unless it is passive resistance," Paul said to his mother.

"Your father has never been communicative."

By the time Ivory put on the requisite weight and a civilian suit, the wife and sons had drifted upstream to town. Ivory had visits from a few old friends who had shared footnotes with him in the past along with the indefinite article. There was no petrol to be had, and one friend, who had testified on Ivory's behalf at the 1917

court-martial, came a great distance by bicycle; another rode up on horseback in the rain, wearing a velours beret. There was no heating fuel either, and Ivory was always cold. Of this he did make mention. It was said—not of course alleging any fault—that his blood must have thinned in the jungle. There were times when his wife came close to saying, "Rex dear, we are all cold."

When his father was dying, Paul came from Oxford with three changes of trains. Lying mostly silent, suffering this or that to be done for him, watching with his mute blend of detachment and attention, Rex Ivory seemed much as usual; as if dying had been long familiar to him. Paul sat at the bedside—for they were taking turns with him again—and knew he would never care enough to understand his father's mystery. There was something there, but it did not engage the interest. If the putative American biographer one day explained it, it would be a defeat for Paul, even cheating

—like looking up the solution to an exasperating puzzle.

"Never seen death yet, Dickie? Now is your time to learn. "

Paul had not heard his father say these words before, but knew them for quotation and not, as his mother supposed, a deathbed confusion of names. A line from a ballad by an imperial poet about an old adventurer who had seen life and was breathing his last in the presence of a milksop son. Paul could not accuse himself and was not even sure, despite circumstantial evidence, that his father had seen life: events had imposed themselves on Rex Ivory, and could scarcel, be called adventures. There had always been the absence of initiative—even the pacifism in the trenches might, if examined, turn to abnegation and withdrawal. Effort, quietly huge, had been expended in renunciation, as if human existence were some monumental jar of Marmite.

Thus the poet Rex Ivory, assessed by his younger son, shrivelled; and, at no great age, pined away and died.

A. small flat road brought Paul and Caro, in the bloom of their youth, suddenly among the megaliths. Paul stopped the car. Caro unlatched her door and stared. Tremendous stones stood expressionless on curved avenues of grass. England had yawned open to disclose some other land, of fundamentals.

The little churchyard slabs—child-height, companionable—

among which Caro and Paul had once sauntered became, by contrast with these huge and mighty forms, ephemeral leaflets promulgating a forgotten cause. Compared with this scene, all the rest of Creation appeared a flutter of petals and pebbles, a levity in which the most massive tree was insubstantial. The sweet village itself, through which the farthest monoliths were posted, suggested, with its few thatched and slated centuries, a frail masking of reality. Not that the dark boulders supplied, by their outlasting, any triumphant sense of durability in man's intentions. There could be no winning or even mattering here.

You would have to pit some larger reason than mere living against these rocks: it was your mortality, your very capacity to receive the wound, against their indifference.

(At an earlier season Ted Tice had said, of another landscape, "It took all your conviction, there, to believe you existed.") The ordered placing of sarsens was more inevitable than Nature: with Nature there is a chance, at least, of inadvertence. Gaps in the rows, where boulders had fallen and not been raised, seemed themselves balefully ordained, obscene as missing teeth in the smile of a tyrant.

Some stones were rounded, some columnar. That was their natural state, unhewn, untooled. Paul Ivory said, "Male and female created He them. Even these rocks."

The presence of Paul offered something like salvation, implying that the human propensity to love, which could never contradict Avebury Circle, might yet make it appear incomplete. Aware of this advantage, Paul awaited the moment when Caro's silence would be transferred back, intensified, from the place to himself. He was calm, with controlled desire and with the curiosity that is itself an aspect of desire. As yet he and she had merely guessed at each other's essence, and her show of self-sufficiency had given her some small degree of power over him—power that could only be reversed by an act of possession.

Preliminary uncertainty might be a stimulus, if the outcome was assured.

Caro had a wonderful danger to her, too, that derived not only from the circumstances but also from her refusal to manipulate them. The danger and the attraction were the same. There was, in addition, her young, resilient body, strong arms and throat, and her aversion to physical contact. Beyond the pleasure of defying his own circumstances, Paul pursued a further impulse to violate Caroline Bell's pride or her integrity.

She will not be so very different in the event, he supposed—with a mental shrug or swagger ineffectual even to himself. The thought was nothing more than a way of wounding.

He knew she would turn back to him glad of human greeting: Paul Ivory would be a solace by contrast with the unearthly field of monuments. And when at last she did turn, he repeated,

"Look at me," and with infinite naturalness drew her against him and kissed her throat and cheek, and her mouth. There was a shock of sympathy not quite open to mockery. Her body strained both towards his own, and away; her breathing rippled in his arms, on his tongue. In these moments, if he chose, he might feel her change forever; might verify a crisis in which women confide their strength to men, like trust—so readily, if not unconditionally.

Beyond the girl's tilted head, Paul Ivory could see two or three people moving among the boulders, and a dog leaping for a thrown stick. But the coloured scene was detained, suspended, unable to keep pace with their own dual rush of life.

Caro's canvas satchel slid out from the open door of the car and lay in a small hollow of grass. She felt it go with absurd finality, a prized possession slipping away on an open sea. Within the awkward space of the car, arms, shoulders, and breasts agreed perfectly.