The Transit of Venus (2 page)

"Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly,
Blow the wind south o'er the bonny blue sea. "

Then he put his fist to his mouth and thought, and stared as if he would only slowly believe.

The room with double doors was as cold as the passage.

Chairs of ugly comfort, a rigid, delicate sofa, books elderly rather than old, more flowers. The wind shuddering in a frozen chimney, the storm a waterfall on the bay window. Ted Tice sat in one of the elephantine, shabby chairs and rested his head on the stale extra piece of plush; rapt with newness and impending newness. The room would have been a study at one time, or a morning-room—the expression "morning-room" belonging to the same vague literary category as upper servant. Somewhere there was a larger room, blatantly unheatable, closed up for the duration. The wartime phrase came readily, even in peace; even as you wondered, the duration of what.

In the fireplace, below the vacant grate, there was a row of aligned fragments, five or six of them, of toasted bread smeared with a dark paste and dusted with ashes.

He was used to cold and sat as much at his ease as if the room had been warm. He could not physically show such unconcern in the presence of others because the full-grown version of his body was not quite familiar to him; but was easy in his mind, swift and unhurried. From all indications, his body had expected some other inhabitant. He supposed the two would be reconciled in time—as he would know, in time, that the smeared toast was there to poison mice, and that Tom was the cat.

A book beside his chair was closed on a pencil that marked a place. He took it up and read the spine:
"Zanoni.
A Novel By The Right Honourable Lord Lytton." Such a book might well have appeared on the shelves of such a room. That it should be out, open, and read was more improbable.

For an instant he thought it was the same girl who now came in, the girl from the stairs. The reason for this was that they were sisters, although the present one was fair, and shorter.

She said, "I am Grace Bell."

The young man stood and again gave his hand and name. She had a very good new woollen dress, colour of roses. They both knew

—it was impossible not to—that he saw her beautiful. But both, because of youth, feigned ignorance of this or any other beauty.

"You've been left in here a long time."

"I didn't realize." Though no fault on his part was involved.

"The lights have gone out. I was sent to bring you."

He had been sitting there in the dark because of the storm.

"It's this way." She spoke in brief announcements. Assurance showed she had been pretty since childhood. "What a lovely little girl"; and then: "Grace is turning into—turning out—quite a beauty." Beauty had turned inward, outward. There had also been classes in deportment.

He admired her ability to walk smoothly with him at her heels.

She was not at all plump but gave a soft impression, yielding. The dress was a rarity to him—the cloth, the cut. It was the first time Ted Tice had noticed the way a dress was made, though he had winced often enough for a brave showing in the clothes of the poor.

The rose-red dress had come from Canada by surface mail, having been posted by the son of this household, a government official to whom Grace Bell was engaged. He was bringing another dress to her when he returned to Britain from the Ottawa conference, and after that they would be married.

A little curled chrysanthemum of a dog was in heaven at her approach. "Grasper, Grasper." The dog jumped up and down, speechless. Someone was shaking a bell. Grace was opening a door.

And the lights went up by themselves, as on a stage.

Y o u could see the two sisters had passed through some un-equivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them. It was the gravity with which they sat, ate, talked and, you could practically say, laughed.

It was whatever they exchanged, not looking at one another but making a pair. It was their eyes resting on you, or on the wall or table, weighing up the situation from a distance of events and feelings: their eyes, which had the same darkness if not the same distinction.

Because they were alike in feature, the contrast in colouring was remarkable. It was not only that one was dark and one fair, but that the one called Caro should have hair so very black, so straight, heavy and Oriental in coarse texture. Grace was for this reason seen to be fairer than she was—as she was judged the lighter, the easier, for the strength of Caro. People exaggerated the fairness, to make things neat: dark she, fair she.

Wearing a cardigan that had perhaps been blue, Caro was pouring water from a jug. You deferred to her future beauty, taking it on trust. In looks, Caro was as yet unfinished, lacking some revelation that might simply be her own awareness; unlike Grace, who was completed if not complete. Grace was smiling and handing corned beef and potatoes, innocently rehearsing a time when the meat and vegetables would be hers indeed. Ted Tice saw then that on her left hand she wore a ring set with diamonds. But had been loyal to Caro before he noticed this.

Caro did not necessarily belong here: Caro would decide at which table she belonged. She was young to have grasped the need for this. Her other discovery of consequence was also not original: that the truth has a life of its own. It was perhaps in such directions that her energies had flowed, leaving her looks to follow as they might.

What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy—between man as he might be, and as he was.

She would impose her crude belief—that there could be heroism, excellence—on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.

Some of this might be read in her appearance. Having not yet begun to act, she could indulge a theory. At the same time, her lips were parted, tender, impressible, as they might have been in sleep.

They had not yet addressed each other at table, the girls and the young man. He, with impenetrable simplicity, was listening to the old astronomer at the head of the table, the eminent scientist. Your eminence: a jutting crag on which a collar and tie, and spectacles, had been accurately placed. Together, the youth and the old man were to read the world's horoscope. Engrossed in listening, as was only suitable, Ted Tice. nevertheless quickly learned that the two girls were from Australia, that Caro was staying here while awaiting a government job in London, and that the son at the Ottawa conference had the name of Christian.

Despite angina, the father had fast, definite gestures—taking up his water-glass with a sort of efficiency and setting it down with a hard little snap. Pressing a napkin quickly to his sculpted mouth, not to waste time. Snap snap, snap snap snap. He might have been at a desk rather than a dining-table. He talked with abrupt velocity, also, and had already reached the end of the world.

"Your generation will be the one to feel it. Some form of social structure existed until now. Say what you like about it. Now we're at the end of all that. You'll be the ones to bear the brunt."

With rapid satisfaction he pointed out, to Ted and the girls, their almost culpable bad luck. In the same way, arrivals at a rainy resort will be told, "We've had fine weather until today."

"There has been global order of a kind. Say what you like."

That of course they could not do.

When Sefton Thrale said the word "global" you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcrop-pings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.

Professor Thrale did not much care for the fact that Grace came from Australia. Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip. And no fabled property of so many thousand acres or square miles, no lucky dip, attached itself to Grace. On the contrary, Grace came encumbered with a sister; and even with a half-sister, happily absent on holiday at Gibraltar. Sefton Thrale would explain, "Christian has got himself engaged"—implying naive bungling—"to an Australian girl/' And with emphatic goodwill might add that Grace was a fine young woman and that he himself was delighted, "Actually."

The storm had drawn off for a breather. By daylight Ted Tice's face was seen speckled and flaked, artless as the face reflected in the salty mirror of a seaside kiosk in summer. His forehead was divided by a slight vertical groove. He had an injury to one eye—a brother had done it when they were children, playing in the yard with a stick: a light streak like the scratch of a fingernail on new paint.

"Mustard, Mr. Tice?" Professor Thrale was thinking it was downright fashionable these days to be a poor boy from a grimy town, a clever boy who got himself—the phrase implying contriv-ance this time—to a great university and made his impression there.

Such persons went forward quickly, having nothing to relinquish; and might well attach themselves, as in this case, to new aspects of astronomy developed from radar techniques of the last war. It all hung together. Sefton Thrale recalled a paper, like a twinge of his illness, on which Ted Tice's precocious achievement was set out against all the odds; where willfulness was not disproved by aberrant undertakings—studies of radiation in postwar Japan, and an intention of spending the coming winter in Paris at work with a controversial physicist.

Sefton Thrale said to himself that Ted Tice would wind up in America: "That is where he will wind up"—a young man's ambition envisaged as a great winch on which abilities might be deftly and profitably coiled.

"The vegetables," said Mrs. Thrale, "are from our garden."

Over the braised celery Sefton Thrale indulged a rather reckless distaste for Ted Tice's clothes, curls, and accent, and for the fault in his eye. Tice's future ascendancy could not, like Caro's beauty, be taken on faith: some sign was needed as to whether he would win or fail—both possibilities being manifestly strong in him. Even if he were at last to carry all before him, it was hard to imagine him properly illustrious in age, like the Professor himself. It was hard to foresee that a name like Tice might carry weight, or that a streaked eye could become a distinction.

In fact Edmund Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years.

Sefton Thrale's own important work had been accomplished in youth, before the Great War. Later on he became a public figure by writing a small, lucid book that bridged, or claimed to bridge, a gulf or gap. He had stood with his unbudging foot on the fire-guard and his hand in his pocket, and talked of the future; and had kept this up so long and so publicly that persons of all kinds now recognized him at sight in the Sunday papers—"Still going strong, eh, you have to hand it to him." Unwieldy old geezer in a blazer of black-and-white vertical stripes. The blazer—pulled down at one side by his hand jammed in the pocket, gripping the presumed pipe

—gave the effect of a sagging, half-timbered house.

He used outworn idiom: "Lombard Street to a china orange,"

"All round China to get to Charing Cross"; "The Old Lady"—even

—"of Threadneedle Street": phrases outdated before his time, which he cultivated and kept going if not alive. Still spoke of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.

It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.

In the main Professor Thrale was allowed to hold forth, as now, in quick orations that supposed no disagreement. But, if challenged, lost his sure grip on pipe and future. A cloud of confused indignation would then rise from him, like dust from an old book whose covers have been banged together for cleaning. In private matters he had not been clever and had dis-sipated his wife's fortune, like his own potential, in naive invest-ments. A knighthood, now forthcoming, had been long delayed.

But his name was public, and weighed in a public and political affair such as siting a telescope.

Ted Tice took mustard. It came out that he had been on holiday these past two weeks, walking in the West Country. He had an interest, furthermore, in prehistoric monuments, and had spent the solstice at an excavation near Avebury Circle. It was not difficult to imagine lofty stones as his companions.

Mrs. Thrale said they sometimes received, at Peverel, vibrations from the missile base near Stonehenge. Though considerately fired away from the monument, the rockets were not without local danger. A window had once shattered in a guest's bedroom, luckily causing no injury.