The Transit of Venus (45 page)

After a time he said, "It perhaps surprises you I should care this much for anyone."

It was not love that was new in him, but responsibility.

Words embellished a state of waiting. In sallow light, Paul's face was a mask of the most delicate and supple leather, or of lemon-coloured silk: features drained not so much by inward feeling as by outward show. Public appearances and innumerable photographs had exhausted the store of verisimilitude, leaving just this. Each exploitation had drawn off its portion, until only a film of expression remained.

He said, "What's become terrible is not the guilt, which I scarcely feel, even now. But the sense of retribution."

She thought he meant, because of her. He was looking at her in the half-light that showed only a chair, a form. She might have been a crone, or Helen of Troy. She said, "Many people might feel that.

It's implicit in the very question, Why me? The sense of being singled out for such punishment."

"You know it's nothing usual like that." Paul could still create complicity. "But I have never been sure how much you knew."

He put down his glass, and waited. At last Caro said, "What have you come to tell me?"

Paul sat on the sofa, his hands lightly clasped between his knees.

He would now speak with the voice, natural and so nearly beautiful, that he reserved for truth. In this voice, he said, "I let a man die."

He kept his eyes on Caroline Vail's face. It was her glance that fell, into darkness.

"I was twenty-five years old. It was just before you and I met, that summer at Peverel." He might have been making conversation. "I say I let him die, but in fact I killed him. I thought you possibly knew." It was this he had come to say.

"I saw—I knew there was something—" She would have added,

"of the kind," but murder has no kindred.

"From things you said, figures of speech, sometimes your look, I supposed you knew. Though you could not possibly know all of it." Paul's eyes were alive in the kidskin mask with new, exposed prominence, as though lashes and brows had singed away in his stare. The woman was looking back at him with a moral effort.

"You may remember"—the conventional phrases struck absurdity: there should be a separate language for havoc. "At Peverel there was an old couple who used to help with dinners, serve and clear away, that sort of thing."

Caro said, "They were hired for Grace's wedding. And were there the night, the night the Thrales celebrated your engagement to Tertia."

"They were called Mullion. They used to come to the castle as extra help when there were weekend parties. They had a grandson who sometimes pitched in—to bring the cars around, take people to the station, fetch and carry. That's how I met him, the grandson, at the castle, a couple of years before I knew you. I went out in the garden after dinner, and he was hanging about." Paul made the grimace, unremembered in many years, of tightening his eyelids.

"I should say, I had seen him in the garden and for that reason went out. His name was Victor."

I see you at night, I look down and see you in the garden alone.

"His name was Victor Locker. The Mullions' daughter had married back into the same seamy side of London life her parents had been trying to deny all their lives. She married a brute called Godfrey Locker with a big blunt head and tiny little eye, sharp teeth, like the profile of a whale; and she had—or developed—a temperament to match his own. I don't know what he really did, he was one of those who get along with odd jobs but always have something shady on the back burner. He'd been on the docks and at Smithfield, and he'd driven a van for a while. There were four children, and they all got hell. The father's name, as I said, was Godfrey, and they didn't call him Dad, they called him God. That is the truth."

"Was this where your play began—
Friend of Caesar ?"

"Yes. After I took up with Victor, I used to go there, go home with him. They lived at Kennington, in a scene of devastation.

Victor used to say his father's profession was interior devastator.

The children were terrified of the father, of his hands and his boots and his savage grin. The mother was a cow and a shrew and a drunk.

Victor was the eldest—he was sixteen when I met him—though there had been a girl still older who had the sense to run away and disappear. And that's where I spent my free time after I took up with Victor, with the Lockers at Kennington." Paul said, "I mean, of course, that Victor was my lover."

"Yes."

"The father was careful with me. He had his plans and didn't want to scare me off. Watched me with his serrated grin, as if to say, You'll get yours. The grandparents, the Mullions, weren't much themselves, but a good cut above Godfrey Locker. They wanted to do something for the boy, Victor. All they could think up was cutting him in on the odd jobs at country houses—which at least got him out of Kennington occasionally, but was leading to other trouble because he started to pinch things and to think about doing an inside job with a gang of his peers. Then there were the opportunities on the side with me and my kind." Paul drank, and wiped his mouth roughly in an evocation of Godfrey Locker. "You did realize that, didn't you? About me?"

"Yes."

"My father was the first to see it. He was the first, with his deathbed quotation. Can we shut that machine off for a bit?"

Caro got up and switched off the air conditioner. She opened the window, holding the curtain aside. The street was empty, the litter fixed on its surface as if forever; the trees were living things that sensed a storm.

"As time goes on one gives oneself away, often deliberately. You can usually tell us, for instance, by our mockery of homosexuals."

Paul almost smiled. He watched her return to the chair, sit down.

"You take it coolly."

"What else is there to do?"

"By which you mean you've used up all the emotion you had for me." Paul said this with no sign of regret, the acknowledgment leading at once to egotism. "It is terrible that even telling you this, talking this way, scarcely shifts my mind from Felix. By now these things don't greatly matter." A perplexed animal movement of the head. "Through those weekend meetings at the castle Victor got a job, if you can call it that, driving and doing odds and ends for a bachelor with a country place near Marlborough. Between Marlborough and Avebury. He was a set designer, very fashionable then. His name was Howard. You get the picture. He had a flat in London and spent weekends in the country. And, for the brief period during which Victor struck me as essential, I went down there too, at weekends, and stayed at a seedy hotel nearby, hanging about waiting for Victor's time off. I never knew if Victor's employer was aware he was sharing him or not. There was no believing what Victor told you in that or any other line."

"You stayed at that inn. Where we went together."

In very different circumstances, I assure you.

"Yes."

There had been his satisfaction, then, in deceiving Tertia at the moment of betrothal. Caro, then, had been the one in the know.

Now there was her ignorance of the greater, inner deception: that Paul had possessed her in the place—the room, the bed—of his lover. Her ignorance of his deepest pleasure.

I always had a taste for the play within the play.

"Nor did I ever know if Godfrey Locker and his son blackmailed the decorator. When they started on me it was in a small way. I was already giving Victor money of course, and this just seemed a bit more. A familiar enough story; and my only indication of youthful innocence, you might say, was to fall into it. Or it was self-confidence—I was used to winning, and to the idea that / was using
them.

When it began to build up, I could still manage the money, but I could see where it was leading. Victor had got hold of a magazine at his employer's flat and caught on I had a success coming—there was an interview about preparations for the first play, and a photograph of me with Tertia. On the one hand, there was all that, and on the other there was the smash-up, the Lockers, blackmail, scandal, the possibility of a prison sentence. The more I got what I wanted from the world, the greater the power of the Lockers." Paul said, "Until now, I never spent such hours and days as those."

Caro had stood in a freezing kitchen and wished to die.

"It seemed incredible I couldn't get the better of them with the weapons I had—superior intelligence, good connections. Victor had—not intelligence, but a quickness. The children of brutes develop that early, trying to keep one step ahead of horror. He was clever, for instance, about my play—knew exactly what was wanted when I needed help with speech or responses. There were no ideas in him, just this astuteness. But he put an immoderate value on his intelligence, because of the set he'd come from. Offspring of brutes have that in common with the children of affluence—they have no context for assessing their limitations.

"Well— Then something happened in my favour. Godfrey Locker was driving a lorry again for a spell, and he was in a smash on the Great North Road. He broke an arm and a hip, and a head injury kept him in a coma nearly a week. I'd skipped a weekend or two down at Marlborough—at Avebury—but now I went down on the Friday, thinking I might get Victor to settle for a sum while his father was out of the running. In the evening, when he had time off to eat, he came over to the pub as usual, but I met him out on the road. I was nervous by then about the Lockers' methods and I thought they might be setting up evidence with the landlord—who by his looks could've been part of the Locker dynasty himself. We sat in the car and Victor laughed, as they say, in my face at the idea he'd let me off the hook. 'You're in my future. A fortune-teller told me.' He was great on fortune-tellers. 'You're my pension plan,' he said, and leaned back grinning. I'd taken him up for his looks, and now he only reminded me of his father."

"What were his looks?"

"Fair, light eyes. It was convenient—people took us for brothers as long as he didn't open his mouth. As I say, that night, to me, he looked like his father. He leaned back and laughed—'I'm on a winning streak,' he said, 'now that God's on the blink.' He was nearly hysterical with excitement—rapture—over the old man's accident, which was a legitimate, if incomplete, satisfaction to the entire family.

"We arranged to meet in the morning at a place on the river where we'd sometimes gone when Victor had to be up all night.

Victor would be up late driving home from some party, then he'd put the car away and walk down to meet me, without sleeping, after the sun was up. He would cross a bridge downstream, and walk back to meet me. There was a bend of the river where we used to go, just below a road, with an overhang of trees. The river was so narrow there, hardly a creek, and from the road above you wouldn't know it existed, let alone that there was the shelf of bank under the willows. Even Victor liked it." Paul said, with his prominent stare, "I say, even Victor liked it, because he was afraid of water, and felt safe that there was almost no river there—a trickle over stones, and swaths of bent reeds. He was afraid because he couldn't swim, like most of the poor of his generation, but out of pride he pretended that a fortune-teller at a funfair had told him he'd die by drowning.

"I found this out—the fear of water—because I'd once taken him to the Riviera for a few days, thinking he'd be pleased. Instead, there was this terror of the sea, and the humiliation of having to admit he couldn't swim."

Heat, sand, the sea. Lemon groves, vineyards, white walls.

"After I'd seen him that night, I went back to the inn. I only slept towards dawn, and when I woke it was already past the time for me to meet him at the river. When I got there I left the car at a curve of the road, as I'd always done, and walked the last stretch. I climbed down the bank, and found Victor under the trees, asleep.

He'd been up all night, and he slept like the dead at any time." Paul said, "He looked beautiful again to me then, and I wished he would die.

"I stood awhile beside him, wishing he'd never wake up. I had no idea of injuring him, I just wished him to cease existing while he was still beautiful and hadn't been caught. And as I stood there a man came past on the other side of the stream, a few yards away.

No one had ever come by there before, there was no access and no path, just a narrow swatch of grass beside the river-bed. He paused under the trees and looked at us, at me. I've said I'd no thought then of harming Victor, but he saw enough on my face to make him pause."

Paul waited for Caro to speak. When she was silent, he resumed.

"We looked at each other across the few yards of stones and water, and I gave him a nod and smile. I was used to convincing people by my appearance, and I hated him for not being taken in. He saw at any rate that Victor was only sleeping—he openly watched to establish that—and after a minute he walked on upstream. What else could he do? His passing unnerved me, though, and I began to be afraid of Victor's waking up and looking like his father again.

There was something awful about the brilliant morning and my looking on, wakeful, at his sleep. And after a while, the apprehension of his waking, and of the transformation, got too much for me, and I went away and left him sleeping like the dead."

Another movement of Paul's head, the turning aside with which a patient might bear the probing of a wound.

"When I got near the top of the bank, there was a policeman in uniform about to come down. I had some confused flash of an idea that the man passing had alerted the police, and I was ready to deny whatever I had not in any case done. He looked like a stage policeman—ageless, decent, responsible. Before I could say a word he started in to tell me that they were clearing people off that stretch of the river in order to flood it. There was a great storm coming in from the West, and they were expecting a dike to break a quarter of a mile upstream from where we stood. A farmer had dammed up a tributary stream to make a pond the year before, and it wasn't holding. They'd brought a pair of engineers to open it under control before the deluge came on, so it wouldn't flood the village farther down. This was the only spot, where we stood, at which they expected a rush of high water—it being so narrow there. 'She'll fill up right here,' he said, 'but the rest'll be child's play.' He had a colleague stationed farther downstream, and they were putting barriers on the road. 'Nobody else down there,' he said, 'was there.' I didn't even have to say No. He took a good look over the edge, up and downstream, and of course the only thing he couldn't see was Victor.