The Transit of Venus (34 page)

Christian remembered lines:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

The verse ended, "O that I were young again, and held her in my arms." He remembered that, too. If you learned the stuff young, you never lost it. You're as old as you feel. I feel old. Another page flickered, the wrist arching anxiously. The same gesture casting back the hair. Time was on her side. She wore a round watch, inexpensive, with a band of black ribbon—grosgrain, they called it in the ads. She was sinking him, he was listing like a ship. O Christ, it is the Inchcape Rock. This is ridiculous, and how very unjust.

Years of happy marriage decidedly not foundering in any such rut or reef as is here implied. Spain this year and the Swan's tour in '63.

It is true the office. But not to the extent this girl's effect appears to insinuate.

So Christian tacked, zigzagging on a course of yellow hair and blue flowers. His shipmates might have been bound to the mast, their ears stopped with wax. They seethed, they droned. They plied the ropes. They knew the ropes. As to the humanitarian aspect, deep concern will be voiced. However, this will be done confiden-tially in order not to exacerbate an already delicate. They were at the stage of leaning back, ties askew. A sensible precaution, Bicker-staff. A good point, Barger. Pertinacity commended as at school—

with Christian, on this occasion, not among the bright boys.

There was no following her when at last she was sent away to type in some room where lights were now switched on and cleaners would have to be excluded. The contents of the wastepaper basket would be burned. On dune and headland sinks the fire. The cap-tains melted away, the kingpins departed.

Roaming a grey corridor, Christian was accosted by a bleached colleague, Armand Elphinstone by name. Christian had sometimes told Grace, "I don't hit it off with Elphinstone." Adding, "I daresay it's my fault."

Elphinstone churned loose change in the pockets of unpressed trousers. He shrugged shoulders tweedy with dandruff, pin-striped by fallen hairs.

"And why, may I ask, are we always disorganized. We had no preparation. That meeting could have been called at least an hour earlier. I must say. I don't know how we can look the standing committee in the face." In Elphinstone's pockets invisible sixpences percussed, with a bunch of keys forming the brass. He looked away.

"And sending that girl in half-dressed."

So he too. Even the blanched Armand.

There was no use hanging about. Elphinstone had rather spoiled things.

The following day there was something else. Christian's own secretary was leaving for her summer holiday.

"And what have they got in mind for me?" As he asked her this, he knew.

"They're giving you a girl from the pool. I'll show her the main things. A Miss Waring. Or Ware. Of course there'll be chaos by the time I get back."

The first day, she had on a dress of worn brown velvet, her hair smoothly coiled. Christian was a man of few words all morning, thumping down this or that for three copies: this has priority, do that in draft. He could only keep it up till lunchtime. By afternoon he was wanting to sound her and needing her good opinion. She sat taking his dictation, and he could hardly believe he had her there at his tender mercy: he felt tender rather than merciful. When she closed her book he said, "I hope you weren't kept too late the other evening."

She lifted her eyes, blank.

He felt he had given himself away. "The evening of the cabinet announcement."

"I missed the train. We live at Dulwich." Hesitant, as if she trespassed on lis interest by so much as a reply. "One of the girls let me stay at her place."

"You did not have to cancel anything, I hope."

"It was my father's birthday."

What lives we give them, Christian reflected—not without gratification. He could recognize a pleasure in displacing her father, with whom he must necessarily stand—one was aware of such things—in rival status. Her eyes were so clear, upward, almost circular, washed like grey glass. He saw she wished to please him: I hope to give satisfaction sir. Her voice, like her dress, was doe-skin, an excellent thing in woman. The father had called this child Cordelia.

When he heard her typing he made a pretext to stand awhile by her desk. There was something nearly sexual in this, like the relation of tenor to accompanist, she seated and subsidiary, he standing and commanding. She faintly sweetly smelt of talcum or shampoo.

Her fingers, grubby from carbon, unnerved by his proximity, turned six copies to scrub at an error. A
Style Manual
—what style could there conceivably be in all this?—was open to instructions of inane and infinite tedium. I have the honour to be, sir, Your Excellency's humble and obedient. On the surface of the desk there was a dusting of molted rubber over the clawings and droppings of a score of previous, vanished secretary-birds.

Excellence and honour. With less satisfaction, he wondered, Why do they put up with this?

He all but placed his hand on her brown velvet shoulder. Could very nearly feel the smooth life curve into his palm—and at that instant would have let her off, wished her safe from all his harm, while she was so anxiously, innocently bent to her rubbishy task.

"That one is of prime importance," he said. "The rest can wait."

From his room he heard her storming the keys, the rip of the roller, arpeggios of sentences, the andante of an indented passage.

A distraught exclamation for a false note. It was curious that a machine could reproduce the anxiety of the person operating it.

The imagined globe of her velours shoulder stayed, palpable, in his hand still .cupped to its contour.

Evening rose like dawn. The city inhaled it like a breath of immense relief. A wave of excitement lifted Christian from desk to window—where the metropolis once more lay helpless and expectant under a dusk phenomenal as an eclipse. A cautious man would have looked through special glasses, or through a hole cut in cardboard. With the naked eye, Christian gazed. He was one who could still see the sky. Who knew his Yeats. His Freud.

Not for nothing were these names prefaced by the possessive pronoun.

He was tempted to ask her outright to go to dinner with him. But no, not outright, and not the first evening. Let a decent interval elapse, and hope the weather would hold. There was prodigality in this—they had so little time. In thought he said "they"—and could not think unjustified this newly possessive pronoun.

The following day was hot. The city opened all its windows as Christian rode to work in his car. Down to tower'd Camelot. As if by assignation, she wore the dress of the cornflowers—was it?—and her hair down. He had heard that girls were ironing their hair that year, in order to wear it long and flat, but did not think that would apply to her. It would not be possible to do this oneself—perhaps their mothers did it for them. He tried to picture the little kitchen at Dulwich, neat as a new pin, the mother shapeless in flowered apron, and she with her head laid on the ironing board. It was like an execution.

It was a simple matter to detain her after work. There was no difficulty in manufacturing a crisis—most crises in that place being manufactured ones—by retarding some memorandum into the afternoon. When she came back at two from her hasty sandwich (he assumed the sandwich, noted the haste), he struck. At six they were alone, he attentively reading over, she pounding. He got up, went to the gents' to spruce. He ran water, ran a comb, ran a critical eye.

Smiled into a square of quicksilver that was cracked from side to side. Walking back along the inert grey arteries, he could hear the machine still racing, like a heart.

He had plumped for the magisterial assertion: "I am going to drive you home." Had of course hoped she wouldn't look quite so bowled over. "Let's face it"—with this interpolation Christian habitually reproved a widespread tendency to shirk—"we're going to be another half-hour here, at least. Might as well"—foregone conclusion—"have a bite of dinner somewhere, then I'll drive you."

He thought he detected slight equivocation—he would not call it suspicion—mingling with her astonishment. She must be pleased, however, even thrilled. A girl who passed her days turning carbons would welcome any diversion. Your Excellency's humble and obedient.

Not that he regarded himself as any diversion.

"You are kind," she said, without causing him a qualm.

She was in the car at his side. They were crossing a river, the river, after Chablis and Dover sole. It was by no means dark.

Ahead, the smooth common was an innocence of late cricket balls and unleashed terriers and elderly couples safely benched. (The hanky-panky would come later, with nightfall.) The trees, though; he had never felt it before—such trees, like clouds, like screens, like great bouquets. She was doing this: first cornflowers, now trees.

Light-winged Dryad, beechen green, Rima the bird-girl that was her type, the constant nymph what was her name Tess of the—no, not that: Tessa. All this at Clapham.

He would have liked to stop the car, there and then, just to look at the trees, and would have taken her in his arms almost incidentally. But the decent interval must elapse. She had said so little, everything correct and nothing foolish. She was quite still, and looked at the evening and the trees, her head tipped towards the seat-back though not reclining. They drove on, along suburban avenues for which he felt the kindliness one summons for a boy-hood friend who has not prospered.

"You turn left at the college/'

He turned.

"It's along here on the right. This one."

He had been confident of a row of demoralized asters, three front steps, a porch of frosted glass glumly bulging from brick. And could not have been more irritated if she had deliberately deceived him.

Not that the house was grand: a pretty house, white but eighteenth-century, banked with fuchsia along a brief crescent of raked gravel.

But it was a house, precisely, of the sort he and Grace had looked at and decided they could not afford.

Every window was lit. It was like a party house described in a novel: "ablaze." (Christian himself preferred to switch lights off when not in use.) Or it was a ship, festive and stately with all her canvas up and pennants fluttering. On the ground floor a silk curtain belled through French windows, like a spinnaker.

He pulled up at the door. The car turned shabby in the glow from the house. He remembered plastic toys on the back seat.

"You'll come in." She was almost social on her own territory.

"I'll be getting back. It's late." He was being rude, but the house was a menace. He could feel the father's eye on him, see himself blinking in the lights, shown up as if at a police station. I must warn you that anything you say will be.

Even so, heard himself announce, "Another time." And boldly leaned across her lap to manage the door, laying his hand over her own ineffectual grip as if sealing a contract.

"Up and push," he said. Then, "Give it a good bang."

A Scots terrier scrambled down the steps to her, all muzzle and paws and sprout of tail. He heard her say, "Here, Hoots. Here, Hootsie," in a kind of ecstasy.

He withdrew to town in confusion. He had been prepared for his role, genial but restrained, master of the situation in the modest house of the begonias and new-pin kitchen; helping them over their natural diffidence. Had even been ready for a possible Socialist brother whose surly challenges could be gracefully debunked. But distinctly not prepared for the equalizing properties of Lowestoft, Regency, bound editions, a faded but valuable Samarkand; and, perhaps, attributed-to-Hoppner over the original fireplace.

He disliked, moreover, the sensation of the narrow squeak.

He could not help associating his present impetuosity with his first encounter with Grace. Was there not, in fact, a recognized condition called the Cophetua Complex? Or had he made that up?

Reaching home, he put in a call to Grace. This, which should have been a help, was not. A neighbour had dropped in, it was too late to bring the boys to the phone, just one second I have to turn something off. Jeremy had been sceptical about the authentic Round Table, which they had paid to see that morning, and Hugh had sulked.

"Anything going on at the office?"

"This dust-up in Africa's got us jumping. Then there's always the secretary of state. And we're short-handed as usual. They've given me a temporary."

"Miss Mellish got away, then?"

"There'll be chaos by the time she gets back."

He put the phone down and took off his shoes. Blinds were down, to protect the fading chintz. On the closed piano, Grace's music lay folded. He could see the House of Ware, its white sails crowding. The girl bending, the doorway lit like a stage. Her face and hands active with love as she reached to the dog scrabbling at her ankles, her knees. He could hear her speaking, in her voice of an articulate doe; he could feel the very burr in the animal's coarse coat. He could scarcely wait for tomorrow.

Next morning Christian stowed the toys away in the trunk of the car. The weather was holding, the decent interval elapsing. A Friday sense of near-abandon enlivened the department, as if something other than an English weekend lay ahead. There was a lull, even in Africa, where crocodiles idled on sluggish waters between walls of motionless bamboos.

The sight of Cordelia Ware in pink printed flowers dispelled the defeat of Dulwich, exorcising the spectre of Detective-Inspector Father.

Only Elphinstone had a cold. Elphinstone was flying to an important conference in Brussels that evening, and was concerned about effects of cabin pressure on the ears.

Christian stood by Elphinstone's desk. "All set?"

Elphinstone coughed. At first phlegmlessly, like faulty ignition, the engine turning over and over till it caught. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket in a flurry of lint.

Christian turned away and looked at two framed photographs hung beside the map on the wall: Elphinstone's grandfather in diplomatic dress; and a weeding party of British residents once organized by Elphinstone at the English cemetery on Capri.