The Transit of Venus (23 page)

"What a funny place to meet." Ted seemed larger than before, and more adroit. His hair, already receding from his forehead, still stood up in thick ginger curls. The vertical groove was deeper on his brow. He dropped his newspaper on a spare chair and sat down.

When he looked about him it was as if to foresee an end to such a room and its women; as if he knew of drawing-board plans to storm this citadel. It became plain that the lofty room would soon be divided into two floors, the tearoom becoming a cafeteria with self-service. This had not been clear until Ted arrived and took in the situation at a glance.

Sometimes, in such a place, Edmund Tice would think of gentle-folk in rainy towns and damp parsonages. Would imagine families restrained and civil, their gardens, their domestic pets with literary names; the glazed bookcases with volumes of Sir Lewis Morris or Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall;
The Light of Asia,
an embossed school prize in mock leather. He would know that to die out is different from mere dying; killed off different from killed. Something—memory, belief—was to die that had not died before, or at any rate half so quickly; exterminated by those who had the approved, knowing attitudes, though perhaps no greater virtue. He was to play his part in this destruction and, like others, would mourn when all was safely dead.

Ted came to London regularly to see Caro. "I enjoyed walking through these grey streets knowing it was to see you." A simplicity requiring no reply. "Tell me what you've done all day."

"Listened to people's grievances." Caro made room for a platter of coloured cakes and meringues like spiralled shells. "Not that the grievance isn't real."

"That's the trouble with grievance. It's usually justified." When Ted had ordered tea, he asked, "Is there anything there you could care about?"

"Not really." And not in the way you intend.

"Does no one ever leave the place?"

"The men, never. The women, only to get married."

"Unless you marry me, I'd frankly prefer you stay in the deathly hole." He thought she would be exasperated, or smile; but she would not receive the remark, and it remained between them. He went straight on, with a consciousness of fatal timing: "My own work is not like that. It's necessary to me, and lucky. Yet you are as necessary to my life as knowledge is to my work, and I've not been lucky in this, and God knows I will never be truly whole or fortunate without you."

"People can't be possessed like information."

She was not combative, or even agitated. She was calm from some great resource of joy, achieved and anticipated, that could only be love.

The discovery was like violence in the pink, trivial, and fairly harmless room that had known no greater upheaval, until now, than a crash of flowered crockery.

He saw that it could not be new. But she had grown careless, and did not trouble to dissemble. Today, she had the assurance of an acrobat, rising to her adventure in grace and wasted courage. So it was all explained. Her hands and hair explained themselves, her forearm sloping back into a sleeve became the soft wrist of a woman in love: all of this desired and handled and awaited by someone, offered to someone. Ted dwelt on it with sickening defencelessness, a revulsion.

He was certain—and yet afraid of an obsessive mistake—as to her lover's identity.

She said, "You make me unkind." Sorry for him and unsmiling, she nevertheless sat there with that other life flowing through her, making her cheek rosy and his pale. He watched the glow of her flesh where it disappeared into her clothes and thought that her body, which was unknown to him, was already changing.

When she looked at her watch he said uncontrollably, "Don't go."

"I'm a bit late already."

Like a detective he noted callousness, the lover's indifference to the unbeloved. And there is nothing I can do to alter or stop any of it. She can destroy me and there is nothing I can do. I can't prevent her from sleeping with her lover this night, or from loving it and him.

The incapacity was unfairly shameful to him, like sexual impotence, and was bound up with some immense, contingent humiliation—perhaps the helplessness of all humanity to foretell or shield themselves from chaos.

When they parted he got a cab to Liverpool Street, where he waited an hour for his train, unable to read or to telephone a friend he had promised to call. The roof of the station made a sky of leaded grime, its girders and fittings insoluble. On the platforms, people milled like refugees. Ted Tice revolved and revolved the same impressions, while the same slogans intersected them from billboards. The refusal of time to pass was stupefying, and he recorded, with no detachment, the multiplication of moments in that hour.

Squalor intensified, the waiting passengers appeared to age, nothing and nobody was kind or young, or ever had been. From his dirty bench he watched them as they scurried or loitered, characters from Realism without self-doubt or remorse, and with no sensations worthy of his tears.

Climbing at last on board his train, Ted Tice wished all loving at an end if this was a sample.

"Hullo." From a habit that characterizes nurtured love, or resentment, Paul seldom now used Caro's name. "The car's round the corner."

Coming through grey streets, Caro had forgotten Ted Tice; and in her mind already told Paul, I am so happy to see you.

Back that day from a fortnight in Italy, Paul was sunburned. Men and women passing glanced at him for his expensive, imported health, and at them both for the pair they made. This had been the case when they first walked together, on a country road. Paul's presence, unlike Ted's, caused people to forget rather than recall themselves. In addition, Paul, who had a new play called
Equinox,
was sometimes recognized by strangers.

When they were in the car, Paul took her wrist a moment.

Caro asked, "How was Rome?"

"Baroque." A grim drizzle misted the windshield. "This morning I was sitting in sunshine on the Pincio."

"A shame to leave." She would have said, I am so happy to see you.

He smiled, "What a stately mood you're in." Paul drove carefully, stopping to let a trio of schoolboys cross. The children tipped their caps to Caro, as they had been taught. Paul said, "They think you're Queen Mary."

"Surely I wouldn't be in front with the chauffeur."

"Now listen, you must be sweet to me because today, within an hour of my return, I had an unexpected approach." He said a name and, when Caro showed ignorance, went on in irritation, "The only important director to come forward in the last ten years."

"Come forward" intimidated with its sense of owning up:

"Would anyone answering to the description please come forward?" "Unless someone comes forward, the entire school must remain after class." As if this important man—whom Caro now identified from press reports—were somehow willing to take the blame.

By the time Paul had told his story, they had reached Covent Garden and left the car. In an hour or two, in his own house, he would tell it all again to Tertia; who, having married a man of pledged renown, would receive it as part of her due.

They went up Caro's stairs. Paul now had a key of his own.

Turning it in the lock, he said, "It's now you must be sweet to me."

But was clearly invincible this evening, and distracted by tributes paid. It was useless to attempt reversal, to propose one's own mood to Paul—who so hated to feel himself under direction that he sometimes could not tolerate the mere recommendation of a book; or was angered if Caro, by looking her best, should seem to compel his interest. The lightest claim on his affinities might be repudiated with savage energy, like a threat, when he was in that beleaguered frame of mind.

Striking out in this way, he might also, on occasion, accidentally wound himself.

Caro lay dressed on the bed, and Paul sat beside her, preoc-cupied. His hand rotated on her breast, but from force of kindly habit, absently fondling a domestic pet. On the coverlet her own hand lay open, upturned, extended to a fortune-teller.

She watched him with love that was like a loss of consciousness.

Paul was thinking of the play he might write for the man who had unexpectedly come forward. "It's hard to surprise anybody now. I don't mean it in a cheap sense. The lack of surprise that develops with age, in individuals, has now occurred in an entire population.

I suppose it began with the First World War. Why should you or I, for instance, be surprised at anything by now?"

"You could still be surprised at the person who does it. Someone you know well might still surprise you with an action that was monstrous, or noble."

"Even then, love or hate can take the edge off it." This evening Paul was impartial, even clinical, regarding hate and love. The world, in being sweet to him, had met his desires for that day, and his present energies were channelled in such a way that sexual gratification itself was sublimation. "The ability to surprise is a form of independence. And proprietary feeling can be so strong that it will not concede such a revelation."

Caro said, with no strategy of surprise, "Ted and I were talking about possessiveness. I had tea with Ted Tice."

Paul made no answer. But an hour later remarked, "It is hard to be interested in Tice." Perhaps Ted Tice had never left his mind.

He got up and said, "I hate this part. Socks and shirts. Leaving."

"Going home."

"You can save some man from this," he said, "by not marrying him." Being quick with the socks and shirts, he hummed with intention—a machine switched on if not yet in operation. He sat again on the bed beside her. "Do you know that Russians always sit down for a moment before departure?"

"That's the only time you sit down."

"My God. Complaining like the classic mistress." He knew she would never hold out against the suggestion that she might begin to get on his nerves. He had no wish that she should be secure in his love; and might have held it was recurring loss that bound them.

"But I am the classic mistress."

He held both her hands. This gave an impression of restraining her from doing harm. "Don't be censorious. You look like a schoolteacher."

"The Classics mistress." They both laughed, but then she said,

"What will happen to us?"

"Who can tell?"

This produced resentful fear—as if a trusted surgeon suddenly came out with "Now it's up to Nature," or "We're in the hands of the Lord." As Paul had pledged eminence to Tertia, so he had promised mastery to Caro; and, now that he finally exerted it, must not recant.

His marriage vow that evening was the stronger.

Caro's timing was fatally insistent as Ted's: "There must be an end somewhere to deception. Ultimately there must be the truth."

"And do you think the human need to deceive is not also part of truth?"

"Of reality, not truth."

Paul said, "We need a theologian and a semanticist to settle that." He smiled, still holding her hands. "I'm glad they're not here." And went on, most reasonably, "These days you want all the cards on the table. You had that enigmatic charm before, capable of anything."

"It was this I was capable of." Love had become her greatest, or sole, distinction. "Not all capacity is adverse, like 'capable of murder.' "

He released her hands, with a show of resignation: restraints were useless, she might commit violence in any case. "I mean, you used to amaze me."

"How shall I amaze you now?" Since she was obliged to keep his existence at a certain pitch.

He laughed. "Tell me something interesting about Tice."

A silence that was also a faltering made the moment interesting.

To the woman, the hiatus was a sensation remembered. One summer, helping in the garden at Peverel, she had picked up a dead rat, or rabbit, on a spade: a weight differently inanimate from that which had never had life.

"Well?" He did not so much want disclosure as to intrude on whatever virtue she privately retained. Which might be nothing more than the sacred custody of someone else's sin.

"Well then, Scheherazade?" Paul flung down his jacket and lay again at Caro's side. And she told him how Edmund Tice had spared the German scientist who was his enemy.

•

Paul Ivory wrote to his mother:

My dear Monica,

How wise you are to stay on in Barbados. We have had four (patriots
might claim five) fine days since you left. The summer being now over,
England has little to look forward to, ever. Actually, I like this season,
whiteish stubble in fields and the woods beginning to go rusty. From
which you'll gather I've been in the country, staying a few days with
Gavin and Elise. My sister-in-law continues to take over—while Gavin
is speaking she explains,
ad alta voce,
what he really means. It is like a
film with subtitles.

This in fact gave me the germ of a play—the eclipse of a man who
takes up with a woman of character, even of genius (patently not Elise,
but you get the idea). I might call it "The One Flesh." In consequence
I've been pondering such phantasmata as Messieurs Recamier, de Stael,
de Sevigne, and Mr. Humphry Ward. What do you think? Of course
I don't know what it would demonstrate—probably nothing more than
that, on any terms, marriage is hell.

Your informant, or informer, was accurate in thinking she saw me
at the opening of the Pinero revival. A bad play: I had been told it could
not be overlooked, but think it should have been. Afterwards there was
a party, at which the prime minister briefly appeared, looking very ill:
the Sea-Green Corruptible. Your friend was also correct in reporting
that I have been seen with the same woman on a number of recent, and
less recent, occasions. I should have thought this constancy would
reassure rather than disturb you. As Lord Byron wrote—though not,
I think, to his mother—"I have not had a whore this half-year, confining
myself to the strictest adultery."