The Transit of Venus (43 page)

He said, "As if I would seek to injure you."

As if she would not have gone up with him to a room in this place and made love, if he had wished it.

He was making an honest woman of her. She deserved no credit from the beneficiaries, having already thrown them over. Love would be concealed, like unworthiness, from them, from him.

When she had coveted his standards, she had naively imagined them compatible with her passion. It was another self-revelation—

that she should have assumed virtue could be had so quickly, and by such an easy access as love. It was hard to tell, in all this, where her innocence left off and guilt began.

Scrutinizing Angus Dance's drained face and darkened eyes, his mouth not quite controlled, Grace Thrale was a navigator who seeks land in a horizon deceitful with vapours. Eventually she asked, repeating her long lesson, "Is this a promotion?"

"An advancement, yes."

Such conquerors, with their spoils, their cities and continents—

Leeds, Africa. Advancing, progressing, all on the move: a means of motion. Only Grace was stationary, becalmed.

"In that way, also, it's necessary. I can't go on doing the present job forever."

Only Grace might go on doing forever. Might look up Leeds in the phone book, like Dorset. Realization was a low, protracted keening in her soul. Here at last was her own shipwreck—a foundering beyond her parents' capsized ferry. She might have howled, but said instead what she had heard in plays: "Of course there would have been no future to this."

Colour came back on his cheeks like blood into contusions. He got up quickly and, as if they were in a private room, stood by the concrete window. Then leaned against a column, facing her, his arms spread along the ridge meant for ashtrays, his durable body making a better architecture, a telamon. "A man should have past and present as well as future." He moved his hand emphatically, and a dish of peanuts spilled in silence. It was a gesture that laid waste, as though a fragment of the column disintegrated. "Do you not think I see it constantly, the dying who've not lived? It is what we are being, not what we are to be. Rather, they are the same thing."

"I know that." Even her children were already staked on the future—their aptitudes for science or languages, what did they want to be, to be; they had never been sincerely asked what they would be now. She said, "Even those who have truly lived will die. It is hard to say which is the greater irony." Such discoveries were owed to him. She rose to his occasion, and no doubt would soon sink back, incurious.

He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine

—well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your complete-ness—love, children, beauty, troops of friends—how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"

They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast—sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."

He came back to the sofa and replaced his hand on hers—a contact as essential and external as the print of fingers on X-rays.

"It was like Paolo and Francesca."

She would h#ve to look it up when she got home. But stared at his hand on hers and thought, without mockery, Scarcely Latin lovers. .

He said, "It's true we could not have stood the lies."

The first lie was Grace drawing off her dress, her head shrouded in black, her muffled voice saying,
"Scharnhorst. "
She said, "In my married life I never so much as exchanged an unchaste kiss, until with you on my birthday."

He smiled. Perfect, sheltered Grace. "There is so little laughter in illicit love. Whatever the theme, there must always be the sensation of laughing at someone else's expense."

Grace had last laughed with Christian over Sir Manfred's joke.

She said, "I am serious." The kiss, the lie, the laughter—nothing would be serious again by that measurement. "I am serious," she said, as he smiled from his greater experience and lesser insight; from his contrasting virtue, since she was the one willing to do harm. He looked in her face with the wrong solicitude. Grace would not be called upon to testify. She remembered how, on tumultuous Corsica, her head had been turned away.

"In a new place," she supposed, "you will get over this."

"I still dream about a girl I knew when I was eighteen." He would not conform with her platitudes, he would not perceive her truth. He would dream of Grace, in Leeds. He said, "Memories cool to different temperatures at different speeds." He glanced about, at the figured rug and tinselled curtains, the column splintered into peanuts, the drab cornucopia: "What an awful place."

And his condemnation was the prelude to farewell.

Grace Thrale said, "It is the world."

"I've said many things to you in thought, but they were never hopeless as this. Nor did they take place in any material world." He then corrected himself. "Of course there has been desire," dismissing this extravagance. His accent intruded, and he allowed time for speech to recover itself, mastering language like tears. "What I mean is, in thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality, in the flesh. Even desire has less to do with the flesh than good-bye."

His face had never appeared less contemporary. Was one of those early photographs, individual with suffering and conscience.

"So I am to lose you." She might have been farewelling a guest: Dored it, dored it. Dored you.

He said, "I cannot do any more," and withdrew his refractive touch and passed his hand through his bright hair as in some ordinary bafflement. He got up again and took his coat from the chair, and stood over her. All these actions, being performed very rapidly, reminded that he was expert in contending with pain. "I'll drop you. I'm taking a taxi." His reversion to daily phrases was deathly. It was ultimate proof that men were strong, or weak.

They stood up facing, as if opposed. And onlookers were relieved to see them normal.

"I'll stay on here a few minutes." She could not contemplate the taxi in which he resolutely would not embrace her. She clasped her hands before her in the composed gesture with which she sometimes enfolded desperation. Raising her head to his departure, she was a wayside child who salutes a speeding car on a country road.

When Grace came down into the street, the rain had stopped and the darkness arrived. Men and women were coming from their work, exhausted or exhilarated, all pale. And the wet road shone with headlamps, brighter than the clear black sky with stars. Engines, voices, footsteps, and a transistor or two created their geo-physical tremor of a world in motion. This show of resumption urged her, gratuitously, towards the victors—to Jeremy, whose eye needed bathing with boric acid, and Hugh's bent for mathematics, and Rupert's unexpected interest in Yeats, and Christian's saying

"This is the best lamb in years." All of that must riot in triumph over her, as she would find out soon enough. They would laugh last, with the innocent, appalling laughter of their rightful claim and licit love.

With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth.

Paul Ivory was writing to his mother:

My dear Monica,

It would be a great pity if you were to sell the Barbados place without a clear idea of settling elsewhere. Boring it may be, I don't doubt it, but all the world is now a costly shambles ruled by the tax laws. Frankly, I don't see you in Ireland, nor do I think you would be amused by their latest rerun of the Battle of the Boyne.

My play continues to prosper, though the notices were exclusively poor. It must mean the nation has taken me to its heart. Perhaps it is this boa-constrictor embrace that prevents me getting on with new work. I fritter away a lot of time at present, and have even been to the zoo—though that in fact was because Felix hopes to make a film there, and wants me to finance it. I suppose I shall—everyone else's son is making a film, why not mine?

The only other thing I recall doing lately was a party at Manfred Mills's new house. Victoria Square always was a hard little place, and now there is a concrete ellipse in the middle of it, like a prehistoric mound or as if some immovable monstrosity had been cemented over out of decency. Tertia would not come, I took Felix. Manfred's son—

Felix's age but dreadfully earnest, with a Blue for cross-country running

—met us on the stairs and said with determination "You must enjoy yourselves." Of such, I always imagine, is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Upstairs, an odd mixture—too many suburbanites discussing trains, and a flock of civil servants who hung around Manfred, obsequious and expectant, like queers around a rich old widow. Pliant to his every opinion. In other words, a thoroughly conventional crowd—except for a pianist so shy he could only meet celebrities, an R.C. priest who was actually unmarried, and a Soviet dancer who had not yet defected.

Manfred, for the occasion, had had his sideburns frizzed and hung himself with chains. Madeline had wisely contracted pneumonia and never appeared.

Among the permaflex officials was Christian Thrale, now a caricature of a bureaucrat. With him, everything is a palace bulletin. When I asked after his wife, who used to be rather pleasant, he said with pointed delicacy, "Grace is unwell today." I cannot describe the pomposity. He had come with his sister-in-law—a woman I once knew well, now some years widowed and not seen in ages. She was here briefly from New York, staying with the Thrales. Still handsome—in contrast at least to the assemblage of commuters and tax inspectors—though teetering precariously on the verge of distinction, a pitfall women cannot be sufficiently warned against. As a girl, she already displayed this dangerous tendency.

The encounter moved me to a page or two today. I should like to do something with it, though not just another round-up party in the Proustian manner. Not only has that vein been worked to death but I'm not yet venerable enough for the last volume of Proust. Nor, of course, was Proust. He wasn't much older than I when he wrote that party. He fudged it. He was good at the future as well as the past.

I think you're wise to accept the Washington invitation, since we may shortly have a new government and someone else's relatives installed at the embassy. If you do get to the USA as planned, you might send me any press notices you see on the film of
Act of God,
which will be opening about that time. My agent holds them until they're all in, and I can't rely on friends to send them unless they are highly unfavourable.

Felix asks that I thank you for the birthday cheque. You must forgive him for not writing himself, and indulge him as you do Your loving son

Caro said, "Paul Ivory was at a party I went to this week/' She was lunching with Ted Tice.

"Paul must be showing through a bit by now."

"He looks amazingly the same."

"I daresay he has a portrait of himself festering in a cupboard."

Caro thought how Paul had stayed smooth, his smile now rare and less intense. He was sparing himself, like an ageing dancer; and reserved the right to be, on occasion, the one who was bored.

She said, "His son was there. Very tall, very thin." An emaciated cavalier: long fair drooping hair, an elegance of nose and brow, a refinement of structure. Eyes more truly blank than Tertia's. Perhaps simple, in a selfish way; but breeding can look deceptively like intelligence. Wearing a white lawn blouse embroidered in coloured flowers, with cuff's of frilled lace; the shirt belled over jeans snug as a saltimbanque's. His feet were bare. You might have said, What beauty. Instead, Caro introduced herself. Monosyllables were planted like bollards, closing every avenue. The boy had not forgotten what to say: he had chosen a part with no lines. He was cool and, except for the wrists, unruffled. One talked as if to a child,

"What's your name, where do you go to school?" His name was Felix, and he was to go somewhere—no doubt Oxford, or doubtless Cambridge—in the autumn. When someone else came up he disappeared instantly, having somehow stuck it out till then. A woman said, "I just know he's going to be a surgeon, he has those wonderful fingers with curved tips."

Caro had not noticed that the boy had Paul's hands. When Paul came over to her she looked at his fingertips, the evidence of love.

Paul said, "Let's move away from that priest and his ecumenical smirking."