The Transit of Venus (46 page)

"He said, 'We've orders to get clear of this section. But if you'll come back up the road a bit you can be in at the kill.'

"All the way up the road I was thinking, What if he wakes? I had only what you might call practical thoughts, no other realization, no hesitation. Then I thought, I can say I never got down to the bank. If Victor calls out, turns up, he can't know I was there. It was as if I'd forgotten the passer-by. So I made conversation with the constable and he at least was charmed. When we got up the rise to where I'd left the car, there was an exchange of signals, and a police car went slowly down the road to confirm it was clear. After some minutes, a small explosion, some smoke among the trees, and soon the sound of the water. It was over so quickly, in a moment—at first a flow, then gushing, and then, just as they had said, the rising of a crest at the narrow squeeze of the river, where it passed from our sight. The crest there reached to the top of the willows, and afterwards the trees hung down in the stream like wet hair, so that everything below was visible, even the little ledge where Victor had slept. And where now there was nothing to be seen."

At the window the gauze curtain filled and soared, released in a natural sway. A high wind was blowing before the storm. This was nothing more than an attempt to give the occasion its due. Paul went on speaking. In any pause the gale could be heard, and, far off, long rolls of thunder.

"Speech and behaviour came with unearthly ease. I was seeing and hearing myself, looking on at the event. While Victor was dying in the Kennet. We had to wait for the other constable to come back up the road with the police car. It seemed a long time

—perhaps it was twenty minutes—but when the car appeared there was nothing new to report and the two men stood and talked idly in the road, waiting for an all-clear from the engineers. Finally there was a whistle, someone walked down towards us with a green flag, and a car or two came through. I'd already decided to return to the inn and go through an hour or so of seeming to wait, just in case.

In case. My constable was heading that way, so I gave him a lift.

All cheerful as could be. When we got up near the site of the exploded dike we stopped so he could have a word with the men there. And someone said, 'There's a chap been stuck here because of all this, and needs a lift to the station.' And it was the walker from the river." Paul said, "By then, most of an hour had gone by.

"He came over to the car, and he saw it was me. He knew nothing. Yet saw it in me, on me. He stood by the car, and saw into me. I felt his sight in me, and I feel it yet." Paul's hand across his eyes. "That was the only moment when the police—the two policemen—hesitated. For a second they felt something was wrong, and of course it was him they suspected, not me. They both glanced at him, fixing his appearance in their minds. Then it was over, the man got in the back seat and we drove on, my constable chattering all the way. They say it takes three to make a joke—one to tell it, one to understand it, and one to miss it. Perhaps it's that way with many things. That's how it was in the car—me, and him; and the policeman oblivious.

"The reaction was beginning to get me, the effort to drive was colossal. My hands. One said to oneself that one must do it—as if it were duty, or heroism. The man in the car had been on a walking tour of the West Country. He was beginning work again that day.

He'd stopped off there to see Avebury Circle, God damn him to hell, and now he had to catch his train. He'd left his luggage at the station. All this came out because the constable questioned him a bit, sensing something uneasy in that car and not knowing why."

Paul said, "I got back to the inn," and drank. In his glass, as he held it, the barometer remained at steady.

Caro saw, after so many years, the unclean counter, the bleary bottles, the landlord. The room. The bed. The blood shed twice.

"When I was at the inn, the storm came on. That afternoon I was back in London, driving through the worst rain I've ever seen.

Nothing came out about Victor until evening. His body must have beeh washed under the bridge downstream, and somehow got trapped there. When the storm hit, it carried the bridge away and the body was found in the debris. So it was never connected to the flooding farther up the river. His employer, the man Howard, didn't wake till the storm came on, and had no idea what time Victor went out. There were only the two of them in the house, and Howard had been sleeping off a binge. It was assumed Victor had been on the bridge when it gave way in the storm—it was a place where he often crossed, on the way to shop in the village or to go to a garage. At the inn they might've linked him to me, but the last thing the landlord there would have wanted was to invite the police into his affairs. Godfrey Locker was still in hospital with massive concussion—he stayed there for weeks, and when he did get out he was facing a manslaughter charge. He never got right again after the accident, and within two years he was dead. That part I learned later on, bit by bit, from the Mullions."

Paul said, "It couldn't have gone better if God had planned it."

He put his glass on the floor. "Except for the one man. Who would see it in the papers but could be sure of nothing." He got up and went to the table, poured himself another drink. "Except that he was sure." He looked Caro over, weighing her response as if it was her very body. "Many people—most people, perhaps—have done something shady, even criminal, but they still genuinely live within society. What I'm telling you is a different order. After that, one's life within society is an imposture." Paul sat again, holding his glass.

"And that, to me, was fascinating, even thrilling."

Sometimes the curtains parted, exposing a dark rapid sky. The room was now nearly lightless.

"There was the terror of course, the horror even. But there was also elation—a sense of deceiving, and thus controlling, all mankind, of defying natural laws. A state of being strengthened, omnipotent, some mad analogy with what heroes must feel who've risked their lives to defy the state, and survived. All the mysteries had ranged themselves on my side. I lived with superfluous energies then—I began to rework my play and, with this reality in me, it was far better. It was then too I determined to marry Tertia. We didn't pretend love. She knew my duality of tastes. Each of us had something the other wanted—she wanted to retain social advantages but to break out of the mausoleum into something more amusing or bizarre, or perhaps into a new world that would give full rein to her capacity for boredom. And I wanted not just access to, but a safe place within, the fortress of rank. As you see, we both wanted everything several ways."

"Have you— Does Tertia know?"

"No. But one of the attractions of Tertia, for me, was that, if I had told her, she would not have been surprised. It would have been about what she expected." Paul leaned back, tapped a cushion over and over with his fingertips. "Sometimes I could hardly be sure I hadn't told her—she was so entirely convinced of the worst in me."

Perhaps they know the worst about each other: that can be a bond.

"After Victor's death I wanted more than ever to secure myself in the castle. It was a safeguard, the last place anyone would look for a suspect. In the castle, believe me, they look after their own.

It was enough to have seen the way the police fixed on the wrong chap, that morning in my car—the way their eyes lit on the one that looked and spoke the part, and had nothing but his innocence to back him." Paul ceased tapping, and stared at Caro. "But you must have heard some of that at least, from him."

"From him?"

"From Tice."

Water was beating, pouring on the windows. Caro said aloud,

"Oh God." She heard her voice cry out above the storm, "God.

God."

"It was Tice on the bank. Of course it was Tice. You knew it was Tice." An accusation.

"Oh no."

"He must have told you. He had every incentive to tell you."

Paul might have suspected some trick.

Caro pressed her hands together. "No."

Feeling streamed through the room like the high wind, like a banner. The woman was still, but it was as if she writhed.

"That was the first change in the luck. The only one, then.

Driving down to Peverel that day, weeks later, when it was all behind me, and finding Tice there. The first sign that God's sense of humour might extend to me too. Tice standing by the car glaring at me with that cut-up eye, the whole scene re-enacted. I knew I should refer to it right off, our seeing one another at the river, if I was to put it over on him. And I could not. He waited and, because I couldn't mention it, was doubly certain. Christ Almighty, how I hated being in that house with him, sleeping under the same roof. Sharing a bathroom with my nemesis. Everything else had gone right but this one item, which showed there were other factors I couldn't control." Paul looked at Caro's pressed hands. "Then there was you."

He got up and closed the window against the rain. His rising and walking created a new stage. There was alarm for what he would next violate.

Caroline Vail felt an almost physical barrier to recognizing the role of Ted Tice. She, who had spoken to Paul of ignorance, must assess the ignorance in which she had passed passionate years of life.

All pride and presumption, the exaltation of her own beliefs, the wish to be humane, the struggle to do well, were reduced to this: a middle-aged woman wringing her hands and calling on God.

She had wanted knowledge, but not to know this. Knowledge had become a fearful current in which a man might drown.

Paul Ivory was handling the curtain, stretching his arm to the unfamiliar window.

Caro had a revulsion to the presence of Paul in Adam Vail's house.

Recrossing the room, Paul said, "Well?"

"I am thinking how Adam would have hated this."

"I understood he went in for sinners. Or was it only outlaws?"

Even now, in Paul, a flick of self.

"He condemned all forms of violence." A prim epitaph for a defunct clergyman, when in fact the feelings roused in her were animal: these chairs and tables withdrew from Paul, as did the furniture of this woman's memory. Paul had become everything shoddy, derelict; the torn kite unstuck from the sky. He could reduce, reduce, until there was nothing but the equipment of a dubious inn.

And this man's very possessions, for her, had once been radiant.

Paul sat. Drummed with fingers that were stalks or stems: evidence of love. A few months past, in Victoria Square, Caro's eyes had lingered on these hands. She had played, that evening, at being an old woman, knowing, complacent, reconciled. All her beneficent vanity now shrivelled to this.

She said, "Was it for revenge, then, on Ted—that you took up with me?"

"There was that in it, naturally. That I should carry you off while he stood once more impotently watching. Jealousy is in any case an expression of impotence, and his was compounded by the other frustration. There was the vengeance for his having shown up again in that fated way. And a turning of tables on Tertia, too, who had taken to parading her lovers in my face. Just then there was a chap in the Guards who used to spend weekends at the castle, he's dead now, dead long since. There was risk in both these things—in maddening Tice and antagonizing Tertia. And I liked the risk."

"Yes."

"You remember that. Experience was insipid without some risk or deception. With you, that changed. Because I had never expected that degree of attachment, to man or woman. That you could arouse it gave you influence, and created one more reason to throw you over that afternoon when Tertia found us in bed—

when I could see my entire construction falling apart."

It was hard to see how Godfrey Locker could have been more brutal.

"That afternoon when we drove off, when we left you at the window, Tertia made me stop the car in the road. We went into the fields and she made me take her there on the ground. Setting her seal on me."

So each of them had gone, that day, from one partner to another.

A chap in the Guards, he's dead now, dead long since.

"After that, I regained control. I worked on my play and it went well. Because of the heightened state I was in, every day was a revelation in what I could handle—I never worked so fast again, or so well." Paul remained interesting to himself. "They're right to keep parrotting that it's my best play, I never had so much feeling to put into anything else. I wanted to fix the Lockers in the world's mind. I know it sounds grotesque, but I wanted the play to be a memorial to—"

He was about to say "Felix."

Quick gesture of erasure. "A monument to Victor. I hadn't loved him, or anybody, then, but I began to see him clearly—poor little rat that never had a chance. He didn't haunt me, and the experience itself was receding, as was the scratched eye of Ted Tice. Victor had died painlessly, without waking, as I'd wished it. Unless you began to wonder about the gushing and roaring, and the choking terror.

The only haunting was done, once in a while, by Godfrey Locker.

I never lost the fear of him, even after the Mullions told me he was dead. Sometimes even now I half-believe he's still alive, and have to calculate that he'd be ninety. He's one of those who can't die.

Like Hitler.

"So it all went right. I knew the play was good, and there was the public success and money and the castle. When you turned up again, I was astonished how I wanted you, because I'd felt no lack.

I thought it would soon wear out, but it worked the other way.

Sometimes I couldn't stand to be away from you, everything else was insufficient. After the first year I began to wonder about divorc-ing Tertia and living with you. That brought its own reaction, since there was your remoteness from the underside of my nature. In that respect your love was disabling, as if you were forcing me to feel shame. When I had other strength, through work or some winning streak, I wanted to use it against you, to show I could withdraw, because otherwise I foresaw I would tell you everything. I'd tell you about Victor's death and put not only my safety but my very nature in your hands."