The Transit of Venus (24 page)

Your loving son

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Caro stood by the windows of Paul's bedroom while Paul, at the fireplace, fiddled, not nervously, with an obelisk of rose-veined marble.

Tertia Ivory was pregnant.

Tertia was at the castle: gravid Tertia in her fastness. Hold fast, the race is to the swift. Somewhere beyond Paul Ivory's city room a landscape shimmered, the castle swelling on its impregnable an-cestral rise.

Paul said, "You knew the probabilities at the outset." To exclude love was to fortify himself. He owed this much to his legitimate descendants.

To discover how passion could debilitate, you need only look at Caro.

She said, "I didn't realize you would take so much. Or that I would give it." Both these statements were false. Her mouth turned clumsy with incomprehension, with comprehension. Her body, motionless, expressed an unlovely struggle.

"Isn't that your temperament, though?" Disengaging, if not quite blaming: a doctor who ascribes to emotional causes the mal-ady he has failed to treat. "I know it is hard." Paul was lenient, indulging the offence of love.

"Hard?" She might never have heard this sour word.

Paul had told himself he would have to go through a bad time with her, and had certainly taken into account her point of view.

He dreaded the bad time as one dreads process, not outcome. His mother had once said to him, "The truly terrible things are those one cannot alter, to which one is indefinitely committed." (She might have said "endlessly," though that was not her style.) Paul's present suffering was not of that doomed kind. He could foresee an end to Caro.

Paul's bedroom had long been completely furnished—rugs spread, chairs stationed, pictures hung, and curtains parted on a pot of white, clothy flowers at one window. Everything was maintained in perfect order—although, by an oversight, the flowers sometimes shed gold particles of dust. On the dressing-table, silver fittings were aligned—brushes and hand-mirrors of outdated, even antiquated, kind, each embellished with a crest. In the closet there would be Tertia's clothes, which now, for a while, she would not wear. These objects were pfecise, and glittered; or became blurred; or altogether ceased to exist, while the man and woman stood there.

Paul remained by the fireplace in expectation of Caro's outburst.

He did not like to be kept waiting. The coming storm would set him at liberty: what she was to say of him, to him, would put her in the everlasting wrong. His escape was assured by the degrading violence of her pending emotion.

"Now I'm off," she said.

He helped her on with her jacket. His conventional, unblessed touch was the true dismissal. Composure in others always thwarted him, and hers at that moment denied him the offence of a scene.

That he had loved Caro more, and far more, than he had cared for anyone else gave her stature: she was either unique or an inaugura-tor. Paul resented this historic position she had established for herself in the momentum of his life, and because of it would have liked to see her broken.

She glanced at the room, not to be seen looking for the last time.

Nothing testified to her presence. Her eyes rested on Paul with a darker questioning than he had ever endured; and he turned away, not to be tempted to some acknowledgment he himself might fear.

They went downstairs in single file, both of them recalling the earlier scene on the landing; Paul imagining his own huge hand, the whip hand, a shadow on the wall. Seeing also, in his mind, her dun raincoat and the folds of scarlet parted at her breast. It was from this time onward that the image would recur to him—vivid enough at that moment to make him almost doubt that Caro's present face looked out from a dim mirror in the hall, a face the colour of nakedness: the new Caro he had created, to whom he was now putting the finishing touches.

Her mouth was a wound that might never heal. Merely by standing at her side he could yet hope to provoke the storm of tears that would formally release him, like a dissolution of vows. He had never seen her cry, except for joy.

And in perfect obedience to his wishes, as to a law of Nature, Caroline Bell made a primitive gesture of bereavement, and spoke his name. And wept aloud without so much as covering her face.

"I am more sorry than I can say," Mrs. Pomfret's letter began,

"to be the bearer of bad news, or tidings. But feel you would want to know."

The Major had left, or abandoned, Dora. And, since he now declared himself insolvent, was providing no support. Dora was remaining in the Algarve flat to establish possession, but was otherwise without funds. It seemed that Dora's capital had unfortunately been transferred to the Major's name at an early stage of the marriage, and was quite irretrievable in the view of Mr. Prata, far and away the best lawyer of the province.

"Her main concern is that you should continue happy and not be bothered by this. You know, even better than I, her fierce pride.

But her state is pitiful and I told her flatly I would write to you as above. Without wishing to worry you unduly, I obviously have a duty to let you know that she has spoken, and more than once, of taking her life."

Caro telephoned Christian at his office, because Grace was expecting her second child. When she had read him the letter, Christian was silent awhile before saying, "This could have been foreseen."

Caro the culprit. "Is there anything to be done through the embassy?"

"I have made it a firm policy not to mix the official and the personal. Not to abuse, that is, my position." It was Caro's turn for silence. Christian soon resumed, "I'm sure you see that." In his admonishing formality he might easily have added, "Caroline."

An obscene absence of decency caused childhood panic, as if a lavatory door-handle would not turn. "You have nothing to suggest?"

"I scarcely see how I can intervene at this stage. Without knowing more."

In the space now constructed for the utterance, Caro said, "Then I will go."

That exacted, Christian became cordial with relief. "It does seem best, if you can swing it. What a shambles. I'll talk to Grace tonight and call you back first thing."

That evening he told Grace, "Your sister is more trouble than a barrel-load of monkeys." And added, "I mean Dora."

Grace was shivering. "What will she do, without money?"

"Get a job, like millions of other women. Take her mind off herself for a change. It could be the making of her."

But the making of Dora had occurred long since.

"She would not be good in an office."

Christian now came out with it. "If it hadn't been for the damfool nonsense of handing over your own money to her, this wouldn't arise." Grace sat shuddering, and Christian got up and loped about the room. Tall men with thin shoulders begin to stoop compara-tively early. "Handing it over. On a platter. Just like that." He picked up and flung down a coloured magazine, by way of illustration. "I always thought it insane."

"Caro gave up everything."

"That was daft enough, but her business. It's involving you in it that I resent."

Grace had drawn her legs beneath her on the sofa and looked thoroughly misshapen. "That's unjust. I'm as much"—she nearly said "to blame"—"in it as she. It was Caro made me keep half."

"Very magnanimous, since the entire thing was her idea."

"No."

"Allow me to refresh your memory. You particularly told me."

Christian dropped into a chair. His voice was hoarse with what had been rehearsed for years. "Besides, it's just like her. She has this notion of herself."

"What notion?" As if she did not know.

"Of being different. Or better. Sees herself making large gestures." Derisory whirl of hand and arm. Christian might have respected the characteristic in a person of acknowledged standing; but who was Caro—an Australian who had worked in a shop—to be high-minded? "Rank egotism." Unsure what this use of the word

"rank" conveyed, he added, "Delusions of grandeur."

"There must be worse delusions than that." Grace did not have the vocabulary for argument and was only aware, confusedly, that there was general dislike of any person with a sense of destiny—

even when destiny was little more than a show of preferences. The Thrales stared at their cream-coloured rug, their brocade chairs, and the Staffordshire figure of Dick Turpin, from all of which enchantment had unaccountably seeped away. "How can Caro get leave from the office?"

"She must have some holiday saved up."

"Only a few days. And she was going to France."

, "I'm sorry, but Caro will just have to learn she can't do everything."

"What about money? How will she pay the fare? Her salary is almost nothing. And then there's Dora."

Christian came and sat beside her in a chair. "Listen, Grace. You are making me out a Scrooge. A Whatnot Legree. I tell you we will do what we can when the situation is clear. Or clarified. I simply refuse to commit myself in advance, blindfold, to another of Caro's"—the word he was groping for was "harebrained"—"wild schemes. On the phone she obviously took the fare in her stride—

after all, it isn't much. And it's amazing what someone like Caro often manages to salt away over the years—we'd probably be surprised. The thing is, you and I have responsibilities. We have children, which neither Caro nor Dora does."

"We are choosing to have children, for our own satisfaction.

Caro has been landed with Dora, and no satisfaction." It was an answer Caro herself might have made. "Besides, Caro will have children herself one day."

The assumption was disturbing. Christian had supposed Caro might one day marry (he recalled the unappetizing Tice, who had behaved shabbily over the telescope), but had not got as far as children. In his alarm Christian could not know it was Grace's last stand, and was ready to waver from surprise and fright. But in that moment Grace gave in, gave up, on an outburst of weak, womanly, and obliging tears. "Oh Chris, Dora will be so awful. Poor Caro."

At once he had his arms about her, and there was no need to do more. "Poor little Grace." Eventually he said, "You know I'm fond of Caro." Grace wiped her eyes, while meaning flowed slowly back, like a stain, into the cream rug; twill cushions miraculously rein-flated; and a pair of Spode plates, mounted on a wall, renewed their encircling spell.

Grace said, "I suppose Dora will come back to England."

Christian would not announce it yet, but was determined that when Dora returned to London she should be sheltered by Caro.

It was only logical, two working girls, a saving in rent, and so forth.

He was as unshakably and righteously resolved on this as if it had been a moral cause or high ideal. It would have surprised him to think he was avenging himself for the spectre of Caro's fecund marriage.

After dinner, Christian sat reading in his habitual chair, his feet propped on a cushioned stool. This was his custom in the evening

—not quite recreation but an interval between working days. And in fact, in that position, shafts tipped in air, he somewhat resembled an unharnessed cart or dray. Grace, who was leaning against sofa cushions—holding a book that seemed, fetchingly, too heavy for her—suddenly began again to cry. Christian came and sat by her.

"Please don't say things like that to me, please don't."

"Like what, for heaven's sake?"

She clutched the book and sobbed without control. "Like allow me to refresh your memory."

In the morning the administrative officer, Mr. Leadbetter, told Caro, "I fear I must deny your request for compassionate leave."

It was among Mr. Leadbetter's functions to guard the department's slender store of compassion. Caro was silent. "I see, Miss Bell, that you have made your submission"—he took up a yellow paper—"as a matter of urgency." He read over a paragraph or two of the application. "I am of course sorry that your sister, or half-sister rather, has domestic difficulties. But if we made one exception we would naturally be in no position to hold the line on similar cases."

Leadbetter's unwindowed cubicle was like an enlarged elevator

—one of those that in a hospital accommodates stretcher cases, or, in a museum, transports statuary. In this case, the space was occupied mainly by a metal desk, and Leadbetter appeared as the desk's attendant or custodian: Going Down? He held the document, a yellow targe at his breast. His hair was prematurely grey with anticipation of his pension.

"I am sure you see that?"

Caro's silences were giving annoyance in these days.

"The arrangement is intended for emergencies—ill health, say, of parents or a spouse. Or, of course, decease."

Although she had Mrs. Pomfret's letter in her handbag, it would have been cheating to bring up Dora's everlasting death.

"Besides, Miss Bell, you do have annual leave accruing." Leadbetter consulted another paper. "Allow me to refresh your memory. One week has in fact accrued. I suggest you ask your supervisor whether you can be released for one week's leave at short notice."

Now he had disposed of her, and without broaching the small, costly and heavily rationed fund of official compassion, he grew, like Christian, quite solicitous. "I trust you will be able to settle matters to your satisfaction."