The Transit of Venus (35 page)

The map was so old that India was pink.

At last Elphinstone replied. "I have no problem." He said the word "problem" with sardonic emphasis to make clear he knew it for an Americanism.

"You know I'm on call tomorrow." Christian was duty officer for the weekend. "If anything blows up."

Elphinstone was all sympathy. "You're not having much of a summer. I must say. Losing your weekend/' He raised the clotted handkerchief to his face and looked at Christian over it, like a bandit. "And working late."

Christian took his eyes off the trowels, grins, and brandished dandelions of the English cemetery, and stared Elphinstone down.

"Not to worry."

When Christian went out, Elphinstone hawked once more into his handkerchief, and spread it to dry on the window-sill.

In innocence of this, in all innocence, Cordelia Ware glanced up from her scruffy papers as Christian came through—her look a refreshing contrast to Elphinstone's. Christian sat at his desk signing papers and vengefully slinging them into boxes. He felt rage, and some triumph. Elphinstone's eyes above the bandanna had been something to see. An incompetent, an intolerable fool imposed on us, let's face it, because his grandfather negotiated a disastrous treaty in 1908. God, if the public only knew.

The afternoon wore on, wore out. Steadily relieved of the ballast of early departures, the entire floor became airy, buoyant. Miss Ware—Cordelia—brought him the incoming. The lull persisted, extending over continents, taking the wind out of Africa's sails. The official boom swung ineffectually to and fro in the global Doldrums.

There were copies for information, and the text of a ministerial speech which would not now be delivered owing to altered circumstances. There were papers marked PUS, for the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, on which action was neither contemplated nor required. There was a postcard of the rocks at Etretat from Miss Mellish: Hope all goes well.

"Mellish is in Monet country."

"She sent me one too." She handed it to him. The same rocks: I forgot to mention, just leave the filing for my return.

They stood, each holding a card, ticket-of-leave, with time running out.

He could not be mistaken in this stillness. The phone rang.

It was an opposite number in a parallel department. "Look here, Thrale. We're not getting the picture on the Brussels meeting."

"What more do you want? We're sending one of our best people."

"No reflection on your nest, old boy. Merely a matter of communication." The word "communication" was given the arch inflection Elphinstone had conferred on "problem."

Grimacing to the girl, Christian waved the receiver in a show of exasperation. He had never committed improprieties with Miss Mellish. He was in a fever for the day to end, or begin. The voice twanged on, irresistibly drawn to jargon but unwilling to take the blame.

With impatient ball-point Christian scored, on the blotter, the outline of the colored postcard, his
carnet de bal.

All at once she was saying, "If there's nothing more," and holding her handbag. She had a scarlet cardigan over her arm and was mouthing Good-bye, Mr. Thrale. It had never occurred to him that she would of her own accord leave promptly. Before he could get the phone down she was gone; and in the corridor nowhere to be seen.

He lost his head completely and strode out to stop the lift.

Only Elphinstone was poised between the lift doors, ready to plunge. Elphinstone grinned at Christian over his shoulder, and raised his fingers in a Victory sign. He might have been making a parachute jump. As he disappeared his hand went to his heart, fumbling for the rip cord.

Back in his office, Christian stood at the window where it had all begun. He was unsure of what he had intended, but definitely not this prospect of brooding through a failed evening. On a last clan-gour of filing cabinets and desk drawers, the office fell silent. All across London, girls were gliding in and out of cars, and younger men were leaning over saying, "Up and push." Couples were lifting trays and calling, "You bring the ice," and the garden furniture from Harrods was outdoors at last.

Only Christian stood disconsolate by his office casement.

Had it not been for the crimson sweater, he might not have spotted her. She was crossing the street below, walking slow and heading for the park. Or, it could be, for the Underground—but one does not walk that way toward a train, lifting one's head to the sky and hitching one's woolly casually over a shoulder. She had slim legs and little flat shoes; and, like all her movements, her walk was charming.

He left the web, he left the loom. In three paces was at his desk slamming drawers and snatching pen and spectacles. He retained enough presence of mind to grab up an envelope of weekend documents as a prop.

When, in the street, he had her in view, he held back in imaginary relish of the sweetness of it. Stalking her, he knew an assurance of happiness such as he had seldom felt as an adult and which was incompatible with childhood. Christian had been in love as a lad, then as a young man ready to take a wife. But not as now when, quite out of any context, representing no forces other than those beyond his control, he watched Cordelia Ware in a frenzy of tenderness, confused between worship and condescension.

He overtook her as she was turning into the park. And was the soul of amiable surprise: No Dulwich? She explained, the evening was so beautiful, and the park. They passed through the gateway together. They were drifting past banks of iridescent flowers and among cornelian trees. They crossed a bridge and sat on a bench alone. The office envelope, whose wadded warm sensation had grown repugnantly alive in Christian's hand, was stationed on his other side like an overzealous accomplice.

Here there was a vast repose, the earth all grass and the sky all heaven; although waterfowl were squabbling over the flung crusts and a newspaper was carried past with an atrocious headline. Somewhere overhead, Elphinstone was safely airborne, swallowing hard to protect his ears and taking an extra mint from the proffered dish to be on the safe side.

She sat straight, not in a gym-class way, with her fingers inter-twined on her crossed knee. And, with the evening on her hair and her pale skin, was all light. She was looking at him, grave and listening. Like the Muse: patient, but accessible only to those acting in good faith.

"Will you dine with me?" It was his most humble speech to her yet.

Pink flowers rose on her printed breast. "If that is all right," she said.

He did not know how to treat that appeal to his authority, and let it pass. Anything now seemed possible. The whole world, like the weekend, lay before them. He had not forgotten how she had once spent the night in town with a friend. Even at the time he had filed that info for possible future use.

"Won't they expect you at home?"

"I'll telephone."

He did not wish to learn what she would say. To hell with Inspectre Father. They would sit between grass and sky while the light lasted, and later he would take her to dinner at a little place off Duke of York Street where one went on red-letter days.

He had cashed a cheque that morning.

The limitless expansion of likelihood shed new tolerance on every mortal thing: the subdued honkings of human enterprise that reached them from the road, the screech of an intemperate fowl almost at their feet, the couple on the nearby grass whose undulations beneath a spread mackintosh were like some lewd wink in their own direction; the iron dukes and stone admirals fixed atop pedestals and columns. All were appropriate to this earth, even the Guardsmen in their vermilion Mao jackets and Afro busbies, and the distant reticulation of a rising skyscraper against whose erection Christian had lately signed a petition.

Christian was removed from pettiness, as one is only by immeasurable happiness or grief. His preoccupation with importance had unfitted him for greatness: he was a man of vicarious consequence only; but in those moments understood the large hearts of heroes.

In this mood the evening passed. Christian took Cordelia's arm at the first green light and did not release it until they reached the restaurant. Over dinner he talked of Spain, where she had never been—"Let's face it, Madrid
is
the Prado"—and the Hebrides, where she had. He discovered that the house at Dulwich had belonged to her grandfather, and that she had three brothers, and an uncle deafened by too much quinine during a decade in Bengal. In addition to the Scottie there was a fringed cat called Ruffles.

All this—the Grecos, the Cuillins, the uncle, and the ruffled cat

—paraded glittering through space in one narrow room.

They walked back toward the car through the broad streets and capacious squares laid out in narrower times. Scarcely a vehicle passed them. Not a soul ascended the steps of the right clubs or issued from the little petuniaed porticoes of the great corporations.

You could hear a footfall, or peal of laughter, all the length of that noble and unearthly promenade.

Christian unlocked the car door for her, and stood holding it but blocking her entry.

"I must see you."

"I know," she said.

He let go of the door, which lurched slowly open like a shutter on a derelict house. Into the back seat, from which that morning he had put away childish things, he hurled his envelope of bogus papers. He drew Cordelia Ware into his arms.

They—they—had almost three weeks before Miss Mellish returned. As luck would have it, luck held. The weather also. Africa continued quiescent, Cordelia's parents left for the Dordogne, and Grace felt the extra fortnight would do the boys a world of good.

Even Elphinstone, though back from Brussels, was having extensive work done on his teeth.

Christian Thrale took Cordelia Ware by her perfect little elbow in vacant evening streets, and drew her to him on park benches. He leaned his cheek on her smooth coiled head, and took her golden tresses—there was no other word for them—

loose in incredulous hands. She in turn slipped her arms about his neck, or lifted his palm to her face and kissed it. In his Hillman Minx they crossed and recrossed the Rubicon at Battersea Bridge.
Iacta alea est.
They sat, as he had dreamed of doing, beneath the elegiac trees.

As far as Christian was concerned, these delicious proceedings left, quite literally, something to be desired. While the virginal aspect of this girl had first attracted him, Time, gentlemen, was not on our side—what with Grace consulting timetables and Miss Mellish pushing the boat out from the Normandy beachhead.

She said, "I am happy just being with you." Her hand along his arm in one of her precise and fragile gestures. "You cannot decently complain of that."

He laughed. "Then indecently I complain." It would be unusual if she turned out to be—girls these days were not. At least, not by the time one met up with them.

It is hard to say which of her attitudes most delighted him, the intently curved, or slimly upright. Or which of her movements, chaste and extravagant as those of a ballerina. She had this way of looking—you would not have said "trustful" exactly, but "believing." She applied to one's judgment. She put simple questions with genuine inquiry, as if wishing to discover how the world turned.

The look, the appeals, the inquiries had the effect of assigning responsibility. Christian enjoyed being the framer of constitutions, the dispenser of unalterable law.

"Your Socratic Method," he told her, taking her upturned face between his hands and smiling down from the stature she conferred. She did not ask what this was, but maintained undeflected her unfathomable openness. It was hard to see how a look could be both level and uplifted.

Never in any circumstances did she use his name, his Christian name. His remarking on this led to a small misunderstanding. "I thought," she said, "you would not like that in the office."

He had assumed as a matter of course she would not use it there.

Some things went without saying.

One day she asked him, "Do you mind the deception?"

He said, "Somewhat to my surprise, no." He could not leave himself there, and went on, "I just don't want people's feelings to get hurt."

He did not mean hers.

It was not until the end of the final week that he had, as the old saying goes, his way with her. The Thrales lived in a crescent of Victorian dwellings that had once been ivory, robust, slightly irregular, like a mouthful of sturdy teeth; but were now pared, drilled, recapped, and made uniform. It was here that, locking doors and drawing curtains, Christian finally lay down in his matri-monial bed with Cordelia Ware.

The question of beds, indeed, could not be gracefully resolved.

It was either the children's, or his own. She made, in this regard, one of her inquiries: "Do you mind it?"

"Not in the least." He added, "This is my side anyway."

It was curious how abandon begot precaution. It was that very evening he began to make himself clear. "I shall never forget this.

Any of it." Surely she could not, to employ her own phrase, decently complain of that. He told her, "I shall be wildly jealous of the man you marry. I hate him already."

She lay looking at the ceiling, eyes wide as if she could not close them. After a while she asked, "How shall we go on now?"

"My dear, I don't know." After all, he was not an oracle. She was looking up, scanning the heavens. "We'll have to play it by ear."

He delivered this Americanism with the Elphinstone intonation.

The following day he telephoned to Peverel. Grace had been to Winchester and seen Jane Austen's grave. "I wish you had been here, Chris."

"The only one I like is
Pride and Prejudice. "

"I mean here this summer. It will never be so beautiful again."

Their days apart, and nights, their divided pleasures pained him.

Grace was speaking of the Close, the roses, the labyrinth of streams, and the meadows beyond the school. She said that, from Peverel, the view over the valley this morning was, in a word, splendour.

He broke in: "I can't hang on forever. This is costing the earth."