The Transit of Venus (48 page)

With perfect self-possession, Charmian Thrale laughed.

On screen, a plump man with white sideburns was introduced as the godfather of the Rex Ivory boom. On sabbatical from the United States, Professor Wadding was enjoying the deserved success of his brilliant critical biography, a copy of which was now held up to public view:
Abnegation as Statement: Symbol and Sacrament in
the Achievement of Rex Ivory.
Already a modern classic. Doctor Wadding had suspended his groundbreaking work on the Lake Poets so that Rex Ivory might benefit from critical elucidation.

Professor Wadding explained that he had by no means set Wordsworth aside: "Have no fear of that." But recalled that, during his visit to Britain in 1946, he had met and interviewed Rex Ivory. He had written to the poet on an impulse, and received a most gracious answer inviting him to Derbyshire. "To think now,"

he said, "that I hesitated."

"Cold feet, Doctor Wadding?"

Professor Wadding explained that the expression "cold feet"

derived from the occasion on whid* the Emperor Henry IV

stood waiting in the snow at Canossa for Pope Gregory VII, in 1077. In his own case, hesitation had been due, rather, to doubts over the injection of the personal factor into the critical-creative dialogue.

"And you have never wavered, Doctor Wadding, in your critical assessment?"

Grace said, "They keep calling him Doctor."

Charmian Thrale said, "Like Doctor Goebbels."

Professor Wadding maintained that Rex Ivory had given cognitive meaning to an ethics of renunciation. He would classify Rex Ivory as aristocratic, patrician, prestigious, and arguably the most major poet of his generation.

Caro said, "His suit can't really be that colour."

Wadding's spectacles glinted. "My task, as I see it, is to adum-brate the sources of his entelechy."

A publisher was introduced, and described as the most painful moment of his entire professional career a postwar Saturday morning on which his firm had discovered that paper was lacking for an intended edition of
The Half-Reap'd Field.
"It is not too much to say that, as a firm, we were heartbroken." Thank-fully, they now had the privilege of bringing out Doctor Wadding's brilliant work.

A boy wearing a band round his forehead recounted Rex Ivory's rise as a poet of the antiwar movement. He felt that Rex's message to the young might be summarized as, "Keep the Faith, Baby."

That phrase, Professor Wadding explained, was an invocation of the Christ Child. He would be interested to know what contemporary role might be assigned to a poet such as Wordsworth.

The boy shrugged. "To me, he's a name on a sweatshirt." He said, "Rex comes on like he's laid-back. He's a very laid-back guy.

And this I like."

The speakers looked out at the unseen audience to gauge the effects of their calculations.

"As if," said Grace, "they are watching us, rather than we them."

Footage was replayed of the BBC's postwar interview in the Dukeries—the Sealyhams and flowered borders, a dim library, Rex Ivory's thin face, sparse hair, pale lashes. His elevated fingertips pressing tobacco in a pipe, eyes blinking at each tap: a synchronized toy. After the fictitious colours of the introduction, the black and white looked like truth.

Caro said, "Sepia would be even better."

The old film flickered, blinking like the poet. Ivory had a light, meticulous voice from another century. Though responding politely, volunteered no information. The first influence he recalled was a leather-bound copy of
Sohrab and Rustum,
given him by a beloved aunt for his seventh birthday: "I can still recite the entire work—by heart, as the fine saying goes."

The questioner hastily interposed, "So, had it not been for the accident of your aunt's generosity—"

"Generosity is not something that happens by accident."

The interviewer smiled, but hoped to get even. "Our most eminent critic has said that only the literature that changes society will last. I take it you reject that view?"

"As to lasting," said Rex Ivory, "that is any man's guess."

"Of course. But the critic in question has maintained that our century is uniquely receptive to the moral persuasion of literature.

And has charged you with a failure, as he puts it, to perceive this as an obligation."

Ivory's pale lashes drooped. He might have been asleep, or in some predicament. At last he said, "I was in the trenches, you see.

And he was not."

Colour flowed back like violence. Doctor Wadding interjected,

"I believe I can elucidate here." Grace turned off the sound and said, "Surely they will bring Paul into it."

Mrs. Thrale remarked, "Paul Ivory's son has been very ill."

"Christian heard he is holding his own amazingly."

At that moment, Paul was introduced. Grace restored the sound.

Paul's appearance was now beginning to separate, like an un-wholesome substance. Eyes, mouth, and expression were no longer quite complementary: a composite portrait of a suspect or fugitive.

Thinner, older, no less charming, he did these public things with greatest ease.

"My father was a pure spirit, an innocent. He had old-fashioned virtues—self-sacrifice, self-effacement, charity, civility. Fidelity to unfashionable ideals. I am not like that myself, but I had—and have

—enormous respect for him and for his work."

Caro, too, might have been sleeping. The jar of Marmite on the table. We're hungry enough here, too.

Adam Vail had said, "They will put the great mysteries to service."

Paul gracefully turned aside an allusion to his own work: "After all, we're here to celebrate my father." Invited to assess Rex Ivory's literary standing, he was both open and judicious: "Perhaps he was not a great poet. But he was a true poet."

Charmian Thrale looked at the screen with extreme politeness.

On the reappearance of Professor Wadding, she asked that it be extinguished.

Helped back to her room, she sat in the flowered chair. She said,

"Rex was the only one left alive. It was the others who looked dead." And closed her eyes.

Christian was standing in the hallway when Grace and Caro returned. He was surprised to think that of these two women, who were both beautiful, one was his wife.

"Ready for tea," he said, "by the look of you."

Grace went to the kitchen, and could be heard filling the kettle.

Caro stood in the hall. She had a bright scarf on her head, peacock colours, and put up her hand to draw it off. Below her lifted arm, the soft dress clung; and Christian, thinking of a cat's supple side, could imagine placing his hand there.

"Well, Caro, you keep yourself trim. I must say."

So I'm at the stage of You keep yourself trim. She was loosening the silk scarf.

"What colour would you call it, that dress?"

"Burnt Sienna."

"Haven't heard that one since I was a nipper with a paintbox."

Christian, like his father before him, had taken certain expressions in protective custody.

Caro completed the gesture with the scarf. Her heavy hair tumbled about her shoulders. There was scarcely any grey. Christian wondered, Is it dyed? There was a novel—the name would come to him—in which a youthful love, encountered in age, revealed her white hair. The idea that Caro's hair might now be dyed shocked Christian, as it seemed to him, no less. He stared.

Caro said, "It is natural, as yet."

She went into the living-room and, walking to the empty fireplace, leaned an elbow on the mantel. An oval mirror Grace had bought at Bath reproduced her fatigue. Make her laugh at that.

The kettle shrieked in the kitchen, and was silenced. These days one was always switching on or off.

Christian fell into a chair, which gave an upholstered sigh.

Grace came in with tea on a tray. There were small sandwiches, a cake. The three of them sat—Caro and Christian facing each other, and Grace between. There was warm light at the windows and in the bronze of Caro's dress.

"Well, this is very comfy." Christian approved the domestic scene as a reliable substitute for happiness. The women said, of his mother, what he would wish to hear; and he responded, "The place is first-rate. Absolutely first-rate."

Caro said, "Your mother has great fortitude." The obituary phrase consigned Charmian Thrale to the earth: After a long life borne with much fortitude.

When Grace described the television programme, Christian said,

"Good Lord, Rex Ivory. He gave me
The Golden Treasury
when I turned ten. National monument now, is he?—Could I have a sandwich?—Well, that does make me feel old."

Grace handed a plate.

"What's in them?"

"Watercress."

"A wee bit fibrous for me, I'm afraid."

"The others are fish-paste."

Christian helped himself. "Good old fish-paste." He brushed at crumbs. "I've still got it somewhere,
The Golden Treasury.
" When Grace got up to fetch hot water, he said, "I'll take my second cup in the study."

He went into the adjoining room, where weekend work lay on his desk. There was always something new from Africa. Through open double doors the two women saw, or watched, him unfold a newspaper and stretch himself in an easy chair.

From her place on the sofa, Caro looked on while Grace took Christian his tea. Grace's chin was no longer quite defined, nor her waist. Beneath the clasp of a necklace, her nape was slightly humped. Caro was seeing her sister more tenderly than she had ever done: childhood closeness had always seemed suspended, as though it might resume. In childhood memories, Grace was always kind. Caro thought it rare that a child should be kind.

The dichotomy between them might have stood for more: they had exercised so little influence on each other's lives, and exchanged few confidences. It was not even clear now, as formerly, that Grace was satisfied with chintz and china—with Christian saying "A wee bit fibrous," or hoisting his trousers at evening and announcing, "Must get my eight hours." It was not quite certain Grace had remained a spectator. Those who had seen her as Caro's alter ego might have missed the point.

Grace had presumably passed through an experience that could only be love; or had some inward revelation. Paul Ivory had said,

"A state of mind can overtake you like an event."

In Caroline Vail's own life and thought, Ted Tice had become supreme. Consciousness of Ted Tice was the event that pervaded her waking and sleeping life. His greatest strength had been his secret; his very truth enclosed his mystery.

Caro had been dwelling on memory, and on possibilities remote as memories. For the first time, had dreams in which she and Ted met as lovers, in a vivid, unfamiliar land. She would lie awake and think how little, even of kindness, she had ever given him; would remember light, flat, callous words, worthy of Paul Ivory. Ted had shown her her own image, and she had said, "I don't recall that dress."

She thought how she could go to him, and yet would not. She imagined her arrival, his happiness. His streaked eye, his joy.

She pictured Margaret Tice in her golden beauty. Caro looked into her own mirror, clothed or naked, aware of pathos. Aware of women before her who had done the same. Her body was a dress, now for years unworn, unshown; unknown.

She knew his illusion might fall away. Yet it w^s terrible that she might go to him, and would not.

Caro had walked in the streets and thought about Ted Tice. She had sat to her work and feared to die without seeing him again. One day she had written on the page where she was working: "If he came now, I would do whatever he asked."

If Ted were to die, the world would be a room where no one looked at her.

She had no more control over these fantasies than she had had over the bodily changes of adolescence. She tried to see how it had come about, and only knew she had been seeking some extreme.

That extreme might be the force, pure and terrible, of a man's attested strength of will. It was as if Ted Tice had created this event in her through the cosmic power of love.

She was helpless to change, though not to act.

Caro said to Grace, "I'm considering a trip to Australia."

"Any particular reason?"

"I find I remember it more these days. That seems to create a reason to go there." She said, "Would you come with me?"

Grace asked, "For a few weeks, would it be?"

They were speaking in lowered voices. Christian, if he heard the sound, would assume they were discussing ailments and be reassured by their subjection.

Caro said, "I'd like to see what I was incapable of seeing then."

Of all she had been blind to, at least that much might be retrieved.

Grace relived, in an instant, certain summer nights—walking through a dark house, every door and window wide for air. An entire city turned, expectant, towards the sea. She said, "To see the Pacific again."

"Do you remember, when we were little, Mother would sit out in a cane chair on the lawn at dusk, while we played?" Caro was stroking, as if maternally, the sleeve of her own bronze dress.

"There was a trellis of climbing roses, a row of hollyhocks, the lemon tree, and the swing. Mother would sit out on summer evenings in a garden chair, and watch us." She meant, Watch over us.

Grace said, "That was Dora."

Grace got up and went into the next room. She asked Christian,

"Did you call me?"

"I was only yawning."

As she turned away, he said, "You can take the paper, there's nothing in it."

Several times, in the mornings or evenings, Grace had put aside what she was doing and turned to her husband. She had left the dishes in the sink and gone upstairs to find him. Once he was using his electric razor, and could not hear her; another time, his Water-Pik.

Christian was glad to be rid of the newspaper, in which there was a letter, on treaties, signed simply "Elphinstone." For Elphinstone, who had received a peerage in the honours list of a departing prime minister, now wrote frequently on public matters. At the time of the peerage, Christian had swallowed his pride and telephoned to congratulate. Greeted kindly enough by Mrs.—or Lady—E., he had heard a background voice say, "For God's sake don't put me on."