The Transit of Venus (17 page)

Caro said, "I never liked afternoons, till this."

In a corner there was a wardrobe so heavy you thought at once of men who had heaved it up the stairs fifty or sixty years ago, grunting and putting their backs into it. Over a chest of walnut drawers, there was a blurred photograph inscribed in ink with the date 1915. Even a mildewed snapshot of an English cottage, if it was labelled 1915, was smirched and spattered with a brown consciousness of the trenches. Even in a room of love. Beneath the picture, Paul's brush and comb were set out, along with a pigskin pouch and a bottle of French cologne: all blond on a lace mat. The band of his discarded watch rose in two brief arcs, ready for his wrist. Most objects of the kind were so solemn you nearly smiled, but Paul's possessions had their owner's electricity.

Paul said, "We should be somewhere in the sun."

"The sun is here."

He meant her to think of a simplified shore with palm trees or Italian pines. But she did not believe in this film set, which she stared at before closing her eyes. His urge to move on made an end, or denied a beginning. From her now prodigious knowledge, she could have assured him that what he sought was found.

"Well," she said, "it's here. The sun." She would have liked merely to have it recognized.

Paul preferred what he discovered for himself. "I had in mind real warmth. Heat, sand, the sea." He placed their hands together

—young, smooth, and beautifully clean, with such superior fingers.

"Lemon groves, vineyards, white walls." Taunting her with lack.

A test of wills, when everything might have had an easy virtuos-ity. "Why are you unkind?"

Women are born, he thought, with that question on their lips.

And amused himself a moment searching for its male counterpart

—I hope in time you'll forgive me. He said,
"A la guerre comme a
la guerre."

"What war is there between us?" she wondered. Yet wondered too at how poor, in French, his accent was.

"No, it's all right. If you like it here." He laughed, and gave up the excursion for her sake. Like realization, his glance followed her outstretched arm and raised knee. He put his lips to her breast.

It was in that moment they heard the car. Not the rumble of a Hillman or Wolsey or the bronchial change of gear with which a van might mount the hill, but a swift, decided sound, a sound in showroom condition that made its way intently, playing on the house from far off, then on the wall and open window, like a raking beam of light.

It was then, in their primordial attitude, they heard the car.

Caro's head relapsed on the white pillow. Paul sprang.

"If she should come in," he said. "If she should come upstairs and find the door locked." Tertia was she, that day and after. Paul was already in his shirt, and held a tie; having snatched up, for this occasion, more formal clothes than usual. On the gravel, wheels were scattering stones. The castle itself had come to find them.

The machine stopped more conclusively than any engine ever.

"Paul."

A steel door slammed. "Paul."

There had never been such final sounds, such pauses, ultimatums, and high-pitched unquestioning calls. And Caroline Bell lay still.

Paul was at the window now. He was leaning out, laconic. "Good God." He was smiling and leaning and making room for his casual elbows. "Anything up?" There was the hard intimacy of tone, the naturalness with which he did not use her name. If he had even added so much as "Tertia."

Tertia Drage came right below the window: a pink dress, an upraised face. Perhaps she had not expected Paul to appear at once, but showed no surprise and, despite the standing down there, no sense of disadvantage. Any more than Paul did—standing easy in, merely, the shirt and tie; and, as far as Tertia was concerned, fully dressed.

Seeing them now, an onlooker might have judged them well suited.

"It's a glorious afternoon." Tertia said so without fervour. There was a strip of pink silk round her head, a leather driving glove on her right hand. "We should make use of it."

"What's the plan then?" They were at one in their competitive refusal to expose themselves by any show of spontaneity. Both were secretive, though not private persons, whose undercurrent of sarcasm allowed disavowal of any inadvertent sincerity. With Tertia, the archly antagonistic mood was already habitual.

She raised her derisory hand. "You know the possibilities as well as I." The sound of the motor had been a truer voice than hers, and more responsive.

Out of sight below the window Paul Ivory's bare feet had crossed themselves, negligent as his folded arms. Small fair hairs curled on his naked thighs. "Nothing too arduous," he said, or was saying, when from the fixing of Tertia's limbs he knew that Caro stood beside him.

He knew that Caro had come up behind him and was by his side at the window. Her bare shoulder, perfectly aloof, touched his own. He did not turn, but, as if he himself were Tertia Drage, saw Caro standing naked beside him at that high window and looking down; looking down on the two of them. It was he and Tertia, and Caroline Bell looking down on them. Caro's hand rested on the sill.

She was wearing nothing but a small round watch.

Moments passed, or did not pass. Tertia stood impassive. Only that her arm stayed raised, her gloved fist clenched and extended like a falconer's. She was looking straight up at Paul; not staring but looking hard and fast at him only. She said, "It's up to you."

"I'll come down."

For perhaps the first time they met each other's eyes.

At the window Caro did not move. Paul withdrew and took up the rest of his clothes. His departure exposed completely the upper part of her body. Flesh-coloured light was striking her shoulder and making reddish streaks in heavy hair that fell over the collar-bone.

Below, Tertia was walking round the car and opening the door. She got in, leaving the driver's seat free. In the room above, the bed creaked as Paul pulled on his canvas shoes. With no more than normal haste he took his own watch from the top of the bureau, glancing at it as he strapped it on. He might have been late for an appointment.

A door all but closed. Stairs thudded to Paul Ivory's quick feet.

He appeared on the path below the bedroom window, and dropped his jacket into the car.

"You want me to drive."

"If you please."

Their voices were neither lowered nor lifted: you might have said, level. And Tertia was roughly pulling off her glove. There was the prompt roar of the car. As if someone swung on a propellor yelling
"CONTACT."

Captain Nicholas Cartledge was waiting for a train. His tweeds were the colour and texture of fine sand. Beige and granular, he stood on an asphalted branch-line platform in a blaze of Sunday-afternoon tedium. The railway dollop of bitumen virtually an-nihilated an entire sweet countryside. Even the radiant day could raise colour only where rust had overflowed on cement, and in a stain of slack dahlias round a signpost. Nicholas Cartledge was impassive, neither patient nor impatient, occasionally leaving his small cloth bag on the asphalt, in order to stroll the length of the platform and return. Once a cuff flicked up, white, to compare time with the station clock; but he drew no apparent conclusion from a discrepancy. If someone had remarked on the boredom, he would have said, "It doesn't bother me."

He saw that the local taxi, an old green Humber that could be phoned for, had stopped at the station steps, and that Caroline Bell was getting out of it. With the slightest vibration of surprise he went down to help her and, before she had recognized him, was leaning in to pay the driver. She stood on the pavement holding out to him in the palm of her hand an assortment of half-crowns and sixpences.

Cartledge said, "For pity's sake," and picked up her bag, no larger than his own, and a light raincoat. Relieving her of these things, he suggested expropriation.

He and she went up the wooden steps, and the pieces of luggage stood side by side. The dahlias limply circled the signpost, like sluggish water round a drain. Cartledge said, "Headed for London, I take it," and did not seem to wonder. He had an authority associated with imperviousness. Caro had scarcely spoken, and might not have remembered his name. She was decorously dressed, and showed—or betrayed, as the saying goes—no emotion whatever.

Yet he might have said her appearance was wild, not only because that summarized an evident situation but because of an emanation of helpless shock.

She refused a cigarette, and did not want to sit down. They walked along the glittering platform, and back. Pale socks showed above his supple shoes. You could not say they walked together, or that he made any effort to close the distance she left between them. An elderly couple in black sat on a bench and watched with a perspicacity whetted by Sunday doldrums: "There's some story there." Inclined to side with Cartledge—who was the man, after all, and had those excellent clothes, one of the old school with his light hair and his expensive face, lean and polished. "A real old rake,"

the wife said, as Cartledge passed again where she herself sat motionless under a toque of rayon violets. " O r roue," she added, to reinforce. But soon resumed about her own Sunday: "Well Fred it was a long time afore you talked me into visiting Maude, and it'll be longer next time."

Standing by their baggage, which provided a destination, Captain Cartledge shook ash. "It was clear you would come to grief in that place." He did not expect an answer, but after a while turned to look—at her head, her breasts. She watched him do this with dispassion that was, as he saw, a variant of whatever trouble she was in.

Eventually he did say, "If I can help."

She might have been smiling at the irony. "To grief, as you say."

"There's nothing worse," he agreed, identifying the form of it.

"You could not have come to a more sympathetic auditor." She had not in fact come to him, but his assurance would have required an onslaught to disrupt it. When the train drew in he threw down his cigarette and lifted their two bags. She walked ahead into an empty compartment, where she sat by the window, pallid and peculiar, for the old couple to remark on for the last time, as they passed, "More there than meets the eye."

"This will help." He spilled a few drops of it with the starting up of the train. She saw the initials N G W C in the silver. He dried the overflow from his fingers with a white handkerchief while she drank, then poured a very little for himself. The handkerchief had the same initials coiled in a corner. He said, "Take your time." He sat back opposite her, politely arranging his tailored legs not to touch, placing an elbow on the ledge of the little window. "There is plenty of time."

He did not mean there was time for existence to resume but that she would come to accept what must now occur. There was the silver and the linen, the granular tweed, and the dirty rim of the window. She had clasped her hands in her lap, a becalmed attitude she and her sister both adopted under stress; and held his gaze, unthinking, unblinking. Hills and dales wobbled past the window.

A factory momentarily obliterated the view, and was swiftly withdrawn like the wrong slide on a projector. There was a damp, metallic smell in the compartment, an ancient reek of upholstery, a whiff from a nearby lavatory, and the more immediate taste of brandy.

He said, "I am at your disposal," but she would not be deceived, or scarcely heard. As to her silence, he would have said, "It does not bother me." He pondered whether it might have been the wall-eyed boy, before remembering that Ted Tice had already left

—for Glasgow, Edinburgh, or possibly Paris. The fact of Paul Ivory was a shade more interesting, if only for caste reasons.

There were stations of rusted dahlias, from which the sun succes-sively withdrew. In field after field, the hops were strung up. Somewhere near the front of the train the old couple dozed; and once the wife asked, between snoozes, "What do you think that word comes from—roue?" saying it rooey and getting no reply.

Caro's hair touched the window-frame. She did not close her eyes. Cartledge said, "It has not harmed your looks, you know."

She asked, " H o w much longer?" And his cuff went up. Then,

"At what station do we arrive?" Not calling him Nick, as he had said to.

"You were intending to go—where?"

"There's a place in Gloucester Road where they take Australians."

"My dear, you make them sound like paroled convicts."

"We send friends there. Failing that, another of the kind in Cromwell Road."

"You'll be much better off in North Audley Street. Where I take Australians." He offered her the flask again, the sun glinting on it as on a gun-barrel. "I assume, by the way," he said, "that you left the inevitable note on the pincushion—some convincing and quite fictitious explanation?"

They swayed along among diminishing hops and burgeoning kitchen gardens. Two men in adjacent green back yards reached to each other companionably across a wall; or could have been grappling. The sky was falling redly on the land now, and a hillside loomed like a haunch of beef. Captain Cartledge shook cigarettes from an ordinary pack, though somewhere there would be an ini-tialled silver case to match the flask. He said, "On Sunday nights they always leave something out for me. Soup, chicken. My couple, I mean."

So there was a couple, leaving a cold supper ready for the Captain, giving a good rub to tarnished initials. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Captain, my Captain. Couple, my Couple.

Captained, coupled. There would be sheets, pillowcases, linen initials coiled to spring.

The Captain in his shadowed corner was cool above the white blaze of collar and cuffs—apt streaks like markings of a racehorse.

He had not, as he might have put it, so much as laid a finger on her.

He said, "Better at any rate than a dark night of the soul in the Gloucester Road." "At any rate" put the thing in perspective.

There was beaded sweat at her hairline. If she blacked out or went to pieces he would have bitten off more than he could chew.