The Transit of Venus (21 page)

He was at his most sincere acknowledging displeasure, and his voice, when free of affectation, had a mature colour, resonant, almost beautiful. The clarity of his eyes, which threatened to become prismatic as Tertia's, was retinged by natural resentment.

"That is of course because one is keeping up the public pretence at the same time. I daresay there's nothing new in it." Even the last remark had no sneer. Paul set his foot on the pile of rugs, close to Caro's hand, and went on:

"For aught I know, all husbands are like me;
And every one I talk with of his wife

Is but a well-dissembler of his woes,

As I am. Would I knew it, for the rareness

Afflicts me now."

He sat with Caro on the rugs again. "Can you wonder that play is never performed these days?"

Beside the chill drama of Paul's marriage, played out in its interesting setting of worldly success, Caro's wound must blanch to a light stroke of experience that it would be tiresome to display. Caro would be instructed, not questioned; would be addressed, with knowing interpolations: "That alas is the way it goes"; "Something we must rectify." Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his life to the person most excluded from it

—in order to readmit her to the intimacy though not the life.

He lifted his hand to take hers. Then appeared to think better of it: a small indecision within a greater. "There is an interesting collusion in it, I suppose. Deceiving one another, she and I agree to deceive, on another level, a larger public."

"And does that appeal to you?"

"I've always had a taste for the play within the play." He smiled.

"I have an idea. Let's go to Spain tomorrow."

"And send that man a postcard."

"Which one?"

"Both."

His laughter pealed up and down, like the phone bell. Twine stitches harshly imprinted themselves in Caro's elbow as she propped herself on the carpets.

"I have kept loving you." Through all the interesting things that have happened to me. "And you love me."

"Yes."

"Honesty's the best policy."

"That's a contemptible expression. Like 'crime doesn't pay.' "

The same vexed tightening of Paul's eyelids. "Now we're to have a discourse on rhetoric, are we?"

Caro got to her feet, unhearing; her remoteness not intended to teach him any lesson. She took her umbrella from a corner, and walked out of the room.

The first flight of stairs, down which she quickly and lightly went, was too narrow for him to pass her. When he caught her up at the landing he did put his hand to hers. "Of course I shan't let you go."

He said this with leniency, coaxing a child out of its caprice; but his hand was hot and uncertain, as he realized only in touching her.

The steep little stairs rose above them, a white cliff-face that might or might not be rescaled.

"Let me leave here."

"Look, you wanted this, didn't you—coming to the theatre, then here?"

"That doesn't mean I don't have better in me."

"You've gone through enough doors for today."

"Let me go. This isn't how I want to be. Let me go on with my life. Or be at least as I was. Instead of what I've been all these months, since I knew you."

Vicious enough in themselves, the last words did not come out scathingly but as they might have been uttered by a person long cut off from speech and human society, who now ineptly articulated blunt realities. In Paul, however, they produced new tension; and the dim electric glow from above, like stage moonlight, showed his face bleached—scarcely male, scarcely young.

He said, "You look on me as a weakness in yourself."

"All my weakness is distilled in you."

Caro had the effect of interrupting the flow of Paul's will, so that his aspect slackened, in the way of all beings, even animals, who have lost conviction. A countering result was that Caro herself felt closest to Paul at such moments, and least surprised she should love him.

The climax of the sequence was that Paul, with an instinct for the fluctuations of resistance, once again embraced her, putting his arms inside her open coat as if entering her protection. Her umbrella fell to the bare boards with a tactless clatter. She did not raise her arms to him.

Paul said, "How cold. How cold you are."

They stood in this way, without change except for movements of Paul's hands on Caro's body—slight undulations on which the light played cloudily. Withdrawing, she said, "Why should you want this?" Her back to the downward stairs. The unfurnished ring to the voice, words bare as floorboards.

"I don't know." A contagion of honesty, the best policy. "It's the proof of everything I disbelieve."

She would have said, "Yet you believe in God," but could not implicate God in so much bungling.

Paul Ivory rested his palm against the wall beside her head, propping himself there to await her surrender. On the pure wall, the shadow of shapely fingers was huge: he had the upper hand.

The light was turning his figure supple yet metallic, the colour of pewter. It is not often that Venus passes before, and occults, so bright a star.

He made a little distance between them so he might watch her yielding.

He had opened her dress, and the exposed streak of flesh within outdoor clothes was oddly shocking. There was the loosed raincoat and red unbuttoned bodice, then the secret slit of white. Unlike many images of Caroline Bell he later sought to preserve, this one did fix itself in Paul Ivory's memory: the stark wall, the stairs up and down, her red dress; and the flare of her breast which she left gravely revealed, like a confession.

Y o u asked me about Paul Ivory's play. I saw it only last month. I was impressed, and perhaps surprised by his ease in handling the working-class milieu. I think you might be suspicious of it—some of the effects spurious, and a pat, clever ending that was nevertheless breathtaking.

It looks as if it will run forever, so you may see it when you get back from France.

Caro stopped writing, and read the passage over. How sincere, judicious. How much easier it is to sound genuine when being derogatory.

Caro sat at her office desk remembering Paul Ivory's play and how, for an instant at the end of the final act, the audience had remained silent after its ordeal. Here and there in the theatre a click or tick, a slight crackle such as one hears at pptteries among baked wares cooling from the furnace. And then the fracturing applause.

Good that you can go to the Rome conference before returning here

—I saw something about it in the papers. In Rome I remember a palace designed on a nobleman's horoscope—that is to say, decorated with representations of planets and pagan gods. Mere astrology, but perhaps you'll manage to see it all the same.

It was thus assured that Ted Tice would pass his happiest hour in Rome in frescoed rooms on the bank of the Tiber.

There will scarcely be time to write again before you get back to England. Thank you for asking me to dinner, that will be lovely. Until one month, then, from today.

Caroline Bell posted this letter on her way home at noon. Saturday was a half-day at her office, and she stopped to buy food to provide lunch for Paul. She was living at that time in a top-floor furnished flat, rented from an office friend who had been posted abroad. It was near the Covent Garden market, in a building otherwise let to printers and publishers.

Noon came like glory into the narrow sooty brick of Maiden Lane, and expanded with architectural intention at the market.

The city rose to the sun's occasion. And Caroline Bell was grateful for a bodily lightness never felt before, which she knew to be her youth. She walked with paper bags in her arms, smiling to think of her lost youth, discovered at the ripe and adult age of twenty-two.

Paul was in her doorway. He waited for her to come up to him, then leaned down from the step to embrace her. With the paper bags and a bunch of red flowers she made quite a bundle. "Why is this woman smiling?"

"I was thinking about adulthood, and adultery."

"Funny, I was thinking about adultery myself. Have you got the key?"

She gave it. They went up linoleum stairs, past doorways sealed with weekend finality. In an old building like this, dust settled quickly, and the unlocking of these small businesses each Monday was a mere deferral, each time surprising, of eventual, ordained oblivion.

Paul said, "Saturday afternoon in England is a rehearsal for the end of the world."

When they paused on a landing to breathe, he said, "These have been the best weeks of my life."

The flat was a large room with windows along one side and a blotched skylight at the far end. One wall was entirely covered by books on warped shelves, and the uneven floor was obscured by a big blue rug, nearly ragged, in which traces of reddish design could still be discerned, like industrial gases in a twilit sky or bloodstains inexpertly removed. A downward sag of ceiling, shelves, and floor was reproduced in a slump of studio couch that stood against the books and was covered by a new blue counterpane. There was a fine old table, scarred, and two chairs. The only picture was Caro's angel from Seville, on a wall near the kitchen door.

Everything was worn, or worn-out, even the smirched sky. The books supplied humanity, as they are supposed to do. Otherwise you might have said dingy^ or dreary.

Paul sat on the fresh counterpane, his hands poised on his knees.

Caro called from the kitchen, "Are you hungry?"

"I shall be."

She switched off the derelict stove and came back and stood beside him. He was turned towards the wall, looking at the books.

"Very much a library, isn't it—Larousse, set of Grove, what's this, Bartlett."

"That's the reference shelf."

"While we provide the erotica." He drew her down on the sofa, so that she knelt while he lay. "This is our shelf, this sofa. This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere."

"It's the name of a symphony, the Erotica."

"Here's something I want." The book was so heavy he had to sit up again and draw it out with both hands. He flopped it open on their laps, powdering the bedcover with reddish dust. "Unob-tainable now. I can use it in what I'm working on." It was an edition of old plays.

"Well, you could borrow it, I suppose. I suppose you could."

Caro lifted it off her knees and wandered about the room. She pulled curtains across, put the vase of anemones on the table. She took off her clothes.

He said, "To keep, I mean."

"It isn't mine, you see." Caroline Bell laced her hands together on the crown of her head. Her extended torso became both commanding and vulnerable.

Paul thumped the book to the floor at the bedside and lay down, watching. And in the veiled light, with an antique density of books behind him, might have done for a Victorian illustration: young body relapsed on blue and red, white-shirted arm dangling towards a fallen book.
Childe Harold, The Death of Chatterton.
Caro said as much.

"Thanks. Now come here."

She came to the bed and lay by him. Paul said, "To think this waits for me, day and night." He took locks of her coarse hair and spread them in dark rays round her head. "Hair like a horse."

She said, "My love. My lover."

"Do you remember, the first time, near Avebury, I told you I'd never felt deeply. Or enough. I want to tell you now, this is the most I ever felt for anything or anyone, what I feel for you."

She touched his face. That day at Avebury she had touched his hand to the veneer bedstead; and he had said, "Whatever enough means."

Paul sometimes still thought she looked foreign—by which he meant she never quite belonged to him. He said, "Possession is nine points of the law." But this was much later, when he lay looking at the dusty room and thinking that youth was a help, because these particular moments, of languor, and underclothes on chairs, would otherwise seem a portent of deeper weakness. The flowers, now, were flat, red, garish.

He said, "I was sleeping."

"And I was watching you." She might have meant, watching over; but that did not occur to Paul, who showed his slight facial tension of displeasure or alarm.

He said, "Unnerving to be watched in sleep. That's the way men lose everything—their hair, or their heads, or worse." He would not tell how he himself had watched Caro's sleep, on the night she had first come to his new house. Watched her breath and her slight movements of dream, and skin so transparent that he might imagine the innards shaping her and the small, complex reproductive organs with their ability to change the world. As the sun came up he had watched over this phenomenon—sufficient in its beauty, so that you might hardly believe reason and articulation and human wakefulness need be added; let alone the capacity for mating.

He would not tell this and further increase her strength.

He reached his hand down to the floor beside the bed. "I can take it, then?"

She knew it was the book.