The Transit of Venus (50 page)

"I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. But not advantage, or authority."

"I've been thinking, these past weeks, of the summer when we met. I remember whole days, whole conversations. Or am invent-ing them."

"Sefton Thrale, the telescope." The past that Ted Tice, for a lifetime, had inhabited alone. They were trying to discover what had led to this, and never would. They were briefly innocent as any pair of lovers. "Now they are speaking of telescopes of many metres, and of platforms in space."

"It might be a way of discarding the earth, out of pique."

"Because we couldn't make it work, you mean?"

"Because it was too good and great for us."

The ferry was beginning to turn, in order to take them back. It made a wide, gradual arc, the slow water fanning in its wake. They had taken long to come out, but would return quickly. Once the curve was completed there was the nervous change, the engines stronger and louder. The passengers, too, had had enough of loving-kindness, and were overheated besides. The child ran rashly from side to side of the boat, as if he would tip it up, and called out in a precise little voice insistent questions about the bottom of the sea.

"Josie will be waiting at the hotel." It was again as if Caro went out a door and boarded a boat. She asked, "How far must you go?"

"About eighty kilometres. They're sending a car to fetch me."

That evening and the following day, a university was to celebrate Ted Tice's achievement. "I have to speak there tomorrow afternoon. Then they all go on, these people, to Rome and Sicily, where there is a conference." He said, "I will do what you choose, and go wherever you are."

Caro watched the child. Josie's baby, held that day in her arms, would presently stride about a deck and have questions no one could answer. She did not look at Ted but at the child and at the world to which they were returning.

"They would manage without me," he said, "if I died." He did not mean the conference, but the world. "Why not if I live?"

She did not know whether strength would be to accept or deny.

Ted said, "I'm afraid to leave you, to lose you." He looked down her profile, as once when they had sat in a country bus. Same line of coarse hair, deeper hollows of dark eyes. In a summer dress, her breast was the realization of desire. "You won't run away. When I call you in the morning, you'll be there."

Don't die, don't disappear.

"Yes."

"In any case I'd find you."

The windows of her room gave on the water. Woven through curtains of coarse linen, the early light was tinted, rose as the flesh that webs a finger or circles an ear.

For the last time, Caroline Vail lay in a bed alone.

"Have you slept?"

She was lying back on pillows, holding the telephone. "I kept waking, to think of this. To think of you."

"It's new for me, to imagine that."

In their speech they were already joined.

Ted said, "I haven't slept."

The curtain had a design of scrolled tendrils and flowers like stars. From the quay below, exhaust of an early bus, the whistle from a boat, the wheeling, heeling cries of sea-birds. Dim light illuminated a woman in bed.

He said, "I am happier than I have ever been."

She could see herself in a mirror, turned on her side. Slight groove between the breasts, hair streaking a pillow. Pale silk, white shoulders, everything one's heart could desire.

She loved and desired herself, as if she were Edmund Tice. As if this were a self from which she too must part forever.

He said, "I am happier than I have ever been."

"That might be enough. That is fullfilment." Where the mirrored door of a wardrobe hung open, she saw herself reflected. She said, "Some of that will last."

"If you left, I'd find you." He asked, "With this possibility, shall I live out my time like others, wondering and withering and numbering my dead? Congratulating myself on my close escape from life?" He said, "I will soon be with you."

When she got up she held aside the curtain, and looked at the street and the harbour. She thought how she had been a child beside the sea, and then a woman in high rooms like rooms in dreams, and tangled gardens. She thought of continents and cities, men and women, words, the beloved. Josie's child. As if she listed every graceful moment of her life, to offer in extenuation.

"I said I'd find you."

In the airport, a total absence of morning, climate, and substance.

There was white light, thin air, and a sign that said "Departures."

"I'd have been gone, but for the strike." She was leaning on the check-in counter. She put her hand in his. "There's a strike at the other end."

"I thank God and the trade-union movement."

"Modern love."

In front of them a man was saying, "You will find I am listed VIP."

A uniformed girl moved her pencil down a row of names. "Are you VIP first, second, or third category?"

"You will discover I am not an unimportant person."

Caro was next in line. Ted Tice prevented a porter from taking her baggage. "Come away from here and talk to me."

They sat in plastic chairs. There was a sign that said "Passengers in Transit." Ted touched her face. "In one hour there's a flight for Rome." He made it so simple, words of one syllable. "If you take it, I'll join you there by evening." He was swift, unhurried, indestructible. "I'll stay and give my talk this afternoon. With the charter plane I can be in Rome this evening."

"Ted." She began to cry like a child. "Ted, what can change for us?"

"Something has changed."

Like a child, she stopped crying from curiosity or dread.

"I have telephoned Margaret. I've told her."

It was as when, on the boat, brightness fell from her hair. She said, "The misery," and leaned against his arm. She left off weeping, in deference to another's tears. As if told of a battle, joined far off, in which many must die.

Ted was exercising great kindness: she must be helped through this. Despite himself, his strength blazed like rejoicing. It was hard to believe so much misfortune must attach to it. He had his arm round her, his hand resting on her breast. He thought how she had been proud and decided, and would be again. And that she was here leaning and weeping, and loving him best.

They were natural and supernatural, in that blank place, like amorous figures from mythology.

When she sat up, she wiped her eyes and said, "My love."

He stroked back her hair. He said, "I'll go and get the ticket,"

and his own mouth trembled on prosaic words. He took out paper and a pencil, and wrote the name of a hotel in Rome. They exchanged the name, and already saw the south.

Beyond the departure gate there was an arrangement like a door frame where passengers were searched—for gold, perhaps, or guns. Handbags were set on a moving counter, and slid out through a little chute.

Caro remembered the barrier where she had last said good-bye to Edmund Tice. She had stood with a crowd on a shifting stair and raised her hand, and he had watched her go. There was an earlier farewell, when he had told her, "I will accept any terms," and she had stood remote, not knowing it for a rehearsal.

The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: "Does this machine spoil pearls?"

They became competitive as to what might be spoiled: "Will it affect my pacemaker?" "What about radiation?" At the little chute, a man in tweeds leaped to save a tumbling carton.

"Got the crown jewels in there?"

"It's a rather lovely tea-service, actually."

They were claiming, clutching, harbouring: departure was doing this. There was one man, heavy, pale, familiar, who wore American seersucker and used a leather bag as a battering ram. He did not greet Caro, and might have been myopic. This was the doctor from New York who had proposed she wear glasses.

Paul that day in the hot street saying, "Caro?" Paul in her own doorway saying, "Caro, good-bye."

She could recall farewells on ocean liners. The lunch on board, which Dora did not enjoy. Streamers, handkerchiefs, the world before a war. The great shape passing through the Heads on its leisurely way to heaven.

"Your flight," they said. All the while she was looking back, in case Ted should be there. "Your flight is boarding."

On the plane she was shown to a seat by the window. Beyond the runway you could see a grove of spruces, dark, reclusive, genuine. On the airfield the technicians were gesturing with hands and flags. Their blond hair and blue clothes were blown in the slip-stream. They wore devices to shield their ears from the roar.

The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging into the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air—like the intake of humanity's breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.