The Transit of Venus (47 page)

Lightning was a mad grin in the room, thunder a shudder over all the earth.

"Once again, something happened. One night you told me about Tice's crime, and it took him out of my life at a stroke, because now he could never raise the question of Victor without exposing himself. If his own secret came out, who'd ever employ him again, in his line of work? I wasn't such a fool as to think he'd kept quiet about me out of fear. One thing about vice is that it gives you a nose

—and an eye and an ear—for virtue. How could I work if I'd only had my own character to go by? The very fact that there was a complex morality in it from Tice's point of view was a further guarantee of security." Paul paused, recovering the narrative from which he had digressed. He said, "You loved me enough, then, to accept anything I'd done, even murder."

"Yes."

"But I knew, since you'd told Tice's story, you'd ultimately tell mine. If I told you about Victor, one day you'd love someone else enough to confide in him."

"So I was doubly punished for that." If it had not been for the incontrovertible fact of Adam Vail, her life might decompose, obscenely, in her mind's eye.

"It was an entirely female thing to do. A timely warning. By then Tertia had caught on to your continued presence in my life, which displeased her most particularly. The length of the association, also, no doubt suggested I might leave her. She wanted the child, to set her stamp on me once more. I was glad enough to have it resolved, in a way—because I knew I couldn't go through with it: love, revelation, metamorphosis." He said this last word sardonically, but meant it. "I'd also taken up again with a boy, in a desultory way, part of the move away from you. The boy was called Valentine—

his mother had been a fan of silent movies. He was passed on to me by an actor who appeared in my first two plays. That's how I came by him—a fox-faced little thing called Valentine."

"I remember him." A bubbling radiator, and the boy eating grapes.

"God knows where he is now."

I was glad enough to have it resolved. God knows where he is now. Caro's crossed bare legs were slipping off one another in a confluence of sweat and skin lotion and the dankness created by the storm. Sweat ran, breath rose and fell. In a cotton dress, the animal flutter of a heart.

"It is tempting, now, to plead my youth. But in any case I'm not pleading. And the capacity for excitement in such an experience was not something I expected, even then, to outgrow."

There were those who enlisted Death on their side, as stimulus or instrument: Paul, Dora, Charlotte Vail.

"The compulsion to tell was something quite arbitrary, alien, that came on me with Felix's trouble. That is something you can't foretell—that a state of mind will overtake you like an event. The confessory mood has an urgency not necessarily related to repent-ance—it may be a wish to implicate others. Ideally, one should confess to one's worst enemy, I suppose, since only he can truly give absolution. That would be Tice, in the present case." Paul said,

"Otherwise, there is the sense of being weakened. Just as I felt empowered by Victor's death, the act of imparting it, now, to you, is a loss of strength, indecent as the crime." There was this overwhelming self in Paul, that his very sins were impressive to him. At that moment he felt nothing for Caro, who had received his necessary admission as she had once received his love, making no use of the authority it gave.

Paul said, "What I can't believe is that Tice never spoke of it to you. Seeing you turn to me—and with that weapon to his hand. It's inconceivable. Anyone else would have told."

"Yes. No." Adam Vail might not.

"As it is, his silence makes him supreme. Silence tends to do that anyway, and this is an extreme case. A dated nobility"—Paul could still surprise with the precision of a word—"you might read of but can't believe in. I'd forgotten it was supposed to exist."

It was Tice on the bank, of course it was Tice. Caro could not assimilate Ted's role, or a terror of it. A dreaded circumstance, still to be resolved, on which the mind could scarcely bear to touch. Yet what could injure Edmund Tice, who was now supreme?

Unless it was herself she feared for. Knowledge had not finished with her yet.

"Barely credible," Paul said. "The self-command."

"Which leads to sovereign power."

He looked with some curiosity. "His ascendancy has come twenty years too late." He got up, took his jacket from the chair.

"By now his own offence is very like virtue. That happens to any humane action, if you wait long enough. My trespasses, on the other hand, are only compounded with time and concealment."

Speaking of himself at length had revived Paul's conviction of an importance from which Ted Tice must not detract. Exhausting his theme, he renewed his energies.

Until this day they might have imagined that, left alone in a room, they would embrace out of fateful continuity, as in a play, or fall in with some other dramatic suggestion. But such imitations had become unthinkable; and no truth would rise, in words, that had not already been outdone. Deprived of inarticulate possibilities

—of weeping, or making love—neither knew how to conclude.

Drawing on his jacket, Paul was suggesting they reclaim their social selves. "You're to be in England in September?" His tone was ready
ta
disavow what had taken place. His stare would dissolve the listening woman in the chair.

"On my way to Sweden."

"As of now," he said, "I cannot see ahead." He doubted he would wish to see Caro again in all his life. "You'll be staying with your sister?" It was remarkable how he could recover and clothe himself, in a jacket and normality, even now.

Caro saw him to the door. Following the storm, a sickly warmth; a humid sun pearling a film of gasoline on the steaming street.

Rain-water swirled in sluggish gutters, redepositing rubbish. As much as might be hoped for on a day when none could look for cleansing or refreshment, and in a place that seemed, itself, a sullen challenge to the elements.

"Caro, good-bye."

Paul took the subway at Seventy-seventh Street. In the train the hot air was substantial, the stench tangible. Streaked and scrawled, the walls gave way to rubber flooring that had been intermittently savaged. Shaped seats of a defaced plastic, hard as iron, confronted one another in long penitential rows. Underfoot, cigarette butts, smeared wrappings, the sports page crumpled on the rictus of a wealthy athlete. A beer can rolled from side to rocking side, the train careening, shrieking, racketing. Unable to reach a strap, Paul was supported on the denim flanks of three unsmiling girls. At the level of his eyes there were ranged the coloured imperatives of advertising: "Come to Where the Flavor Is," "Give to the College of Your Choice."

Everyone is thinking, a bit of danger. One of these sullen, standing men might present his own imperatives, Give me the bag, the wallet, the watch. Everyone has a bad complexion, acne, a rash; or a worn, unsupple skin, as if they had been down here too long.

Pouches of bad air below the eyes. In this place, as in any hell, none has the advantage: briefcases give neither pathos nor immunity; a jewelled ornament is a target.

At Eighty-sixth Street, a withered woman in red flowers pushed aboard with surprising force. The doors closed, but the train remained stationary: an endurance test during which no one so much as sighed. A boy and girl, Puerto Rican, clung to a stained pole and shifted gum to kiss. Into the foul air, a loudspeaker gave out sound that was a shower of molten sparks from a blow torch. When the train started up, there was no murmur of surprise or relief. These might have been the founders of a new race that disdained expression and was indifferent to cruelty or compassion, or their own dis-ease. If, here among them, Paul fell dead on the dirty floor, he would be no more than an obstacle to the exit. Similarly, no value was attached to his remaining, though sickened, on his feet.

A boy with frizzed head, like a small tree, got up from his seat: his arm a branch that reached, through interlacing limbs, to touch Paul's shoulder.

"Have a seat, Pop." This boy, being mortal, grinned around the car. He could not help his better nature, or his worse. And had not ceased to crack a double-jointed thumb.

Paul slid into place. Aware of an unaccountable exception, but incapable of thanks.

In her house, Caroline Vail was opening the letter, in purple ink and an unfamiliar hand, from Ireland.

"Without wishing to disturb your peaceful existence, I feel you will want to know of Dora's trouble, or plight. . . . "

Grace said, "She loses the sense of time."

Grace and Caro were driving, in Grace's little car, to visit Charmian Thrale. Christian had had his way, and his mother was in a place, for old people, called Oak Dene, or Forest Manor, or Park View.

"One moment she remembers the boys' birthdays, everything.

The next, she imagines Chris and I are newly married." The car turned in between brick gateposts. "They say it's circulation."

Parched grass was dying, in the dry, exceptional September.

The directress of the institution was something more than capable. Tall, grey, reticent, she maintained a sensible distance and would not accept Caroline Vail's affinity, even by a glance. If you once got into that, there'd be no end to it. Caro was a sister again, walking with Grace down a tiled corridor: they were two women doing womanly things. It was a relief, occasionally, to appear conventional, blameless; even to the cool eye of a grey headmistress

—in this case, of a finishing school.

These two had walked by the salt sea after school. Now it was mortality that expanded, an immensity, at their side.

Grace said, "You'd think they'd find some way to disguise that disinfectant."

Charmian Thrale was in a section reserved for ambulatory residents. The floor matron was brittle, corseted, a wooden barque enclosed in an iron hull. She said it meant everything to have visitors. They were shown to a tiny bedroom where Charmian sat in a chintz chair, hands extended on arm-rests. Her hair was white and scant, her huge eyes scarcely blue; her body fleshless, a mere coat-hanger for cotton sleeves and shoulders, the neck a wire hook for the dandelion head.

The window gave onto a vegetable patch tended by the active inmates. There was a hard, ugly plant in a pot on the inside sill. The mirrored door of a wardrobe hung open. On the bedside table, a wedding photograph of Grace and Christian. Beside bottles of pills, there was a small stick, tipped with soiled cotton, of the kind used to clean out ears. On the bed, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles lay beside a book.

Grace kissed her mother-in-law, and said, "Here's Caro." There was the temptation to raise one's voice. "Caro's on her way to Sweden, to see her stepdaughter."

Charmian Thrale said, "I loved my stepmother dearly. It is cruel that stepmothers should be stigmatized."

Grace said, "The same goes for mothers-in-law." And the old woman touched her cheek with a variegated hand.

The matron shouted, "Been making ourselves pretty." Charmian looked with polite amusement, or terrible cynicism. Her curved cotton back touched the chair. She would never, herself, have chosen a dress of conflicting colours. Her face had been powdered by somebody, even rouged. In the wardrobe mirror Caro and Grace were reflected—smiling, still blessed. Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.

"She must see her telly show at eleven, she's quite set on it." The matron beamed. Charmian Thrale was an intractable infant who had at last taken an encouraging turn.

The old woman said with calm lucidity, "It is a programme on a poet, Rex Ivory. I met him several times, and Sefton knew him well."

"Think of that." The matron could not recall who was Poet Laureate now that John Masefield had passed away.

When the matron went out Charmian Thrale said, "When you are old, you are presumed to be a sage or an imbecile. Nothing is permitted in between."

Caro said, "Life is all a bit like that."

Helped to her feet, Charmian Thrale was a fragile construction that might crumple, ashes whose tended flicker must not ignite for fear of finality. Grace and Caro supported her into the corridor.

Through an open door an ancient voice, high-pitched, cried out,

"No, please, oh no." In a wheelchair a man like driftwood put his fingertips together and reedily sang:

"Two German officers crossed the Rhine,
Parlay-voo,

To kiss the women and drink the wine,

Parlay-voo. "

In an inner room, where empty chairs sat in judgment, a television set was in a frenzy. Grace expertly turned a dial. Bars of colour moved horizontally, voices snapped on and off. An announcer in a toupee grinned and gave the time. Coloured dots scampered. To the music of Delius, a sweet countryside was revealed in tropical shades; and off-screen a voice said, reverentially, "Derbyshire."

A young man with a glottal stop felt that the programme about to be shown had particular interest in view of the current Rex Ivory revival. A trained solemnity, together with horn-rimmed glasses, suggested special courses in cultural presentation. Photographs were reproduced on the screen—a purple baby, a schoolboy, a youth in military uniform, a middle-aged wraith in a cardigan; and, close up, the title page of a book. Viewers would recall that a copy of this slim volume dated 1915 and inscribed by the author had recently fetched a high sum at auction.