Ted's mother was sifting flour at the time, on a big kitchen slab that was their only table.)
Under the laden trees Ted Tice tilted back his head and saw the sky. This might have had to do with salt tears and the law of gravity.
" 'Twas your uncle Tony give me my chance." Ah Christ: My chance.
(Ted's mother was saying as she sifted: "Lorna favvered her dad.
She's in the family group, 'twas taken just round that time, but tha can't make her out that clear, she's at back and got her head down, poor Lome.")
Ted Tice looked at the horizon. He remembered Uncle Tony, short and pink, who lived a little better than the rest of them, knew a chap on the council, and kept a tiger cat called Moggie.
He said, "Paul Ivory is marrying that castle."
"I suppose so." They both stared out at the solid, sunlit figment of history's imagination, on its dated elevation. As a spouse it inspired some apprehension.
Ted said, "Paul Ivory has to marry a lord or, at very least, the daughter of one. It is written. Written likewise that she be rich. He has no choice, it's mandatory. Turn right for the castle."
"Even so, I don't see why Tertia should oblige him." It was unnatural to say "Tertia" where no intimacy could exist.
"Maybe she feels beleaguered in the castle." They smiled to imagine Tertia on the battlements, peering glassily from behind machicolations. "Or there is an antagonism she enjoys. Or they know the worst about each other. That can be a bond."
"Paul might change. He is still young."
"His faults aren't those of youth. He has no growth, merely automatic transmission."
The girl had not heard Ted Tice on this note before—savage as his inferiors, with a malice that blurred his virtue. Disappointment was perhaps for his sake, that he should join in the general unmasking. She moved out from the shadow of trees and started back to the house. They had not disagreed. But some carefulness would now develop on both sides—a concern not to offend or expose. It was unclear why this had come into existence.
To Ted Tice, the defeat appeared to be of his own making, as if some great duty had fallen to him and he had bungled it. An image
—of her strong will expressed in apparent passivity, while he urged an absolute need—baffled his intelligence with sheer waste. Otherwise he might have seen in it a virtual representation of the act of love.
In these warm days Tertia came and went, taking Paul Ivory here and there. Grace and Caro saw her sit at the wheel of her green car, her eyebrows raised, her pupils insensate as the bronze discs applied as eyes to ancient statues. Grace said, "I suppose she is a great prize." She had read this phrase, which was her way of declaring: They cannot be in love.
There came an interlude of calm brilliance when it was morning all day long. On one of these clear days Caro, returning from the village, met Paul Ivory, who was on foot. Seen this way, out of bounds, he was like a rider unhorsed; and she said this to him.
"My lost advantages." No one would have thought them lost, to see Paul laugh and make his graceful stride. Paul Ivory was a star: any firmament would do.
He had seen Caro from a distance and altered his course to intersect. Had observed, as he drew near, that her walk turned the progress of other women to a thump or shuffle. He would have said her delicate dark strength was virile—a sombre glow that might distinguish some young man. He remembered dark, vigorous young men who kept somewhat to themselves, yet retained this vibrancy of adventure. Then he thought how such youths often ended feebly, how quickly they grew sour or cautious, or became the foils of bitter women—their energies turned to blame or bluster, their pride morose. He had already seen that; and supposed that in the case of women such beings dwindled entirely, or at most passed some shred of their lost impetus to children.
Paul Ivory had also noted penalties of impulse. Had seen how men provide themselves, before their taste or character is formed, with wife and children—committed and condemned thereafter to the fixtures of an outgrown fancy. He was satisfied his own prospective marriage would preclude such dangers. An accusation of dispassion would not have troubled him. He was not convinced that passion was essential, or that the world had properly defined it.
The girl asked, "Shall we take the shortcut through the churchyard?"
" N o graveyard can be a shortcut." Paul opened a wicket gate.
A torn kite was lying in the grass. Caro said, "There are often children playing here."
"Children like cemeteries. No traffic, no live grown-ups, and the headstones are child-height, companionable."
Caro, who usually came that way, showed the inscriptions. Here lieth all that could die of Oliver Wade. The earthly enchantments of Tryphena Cope are here subdued. On later stones, merely the name, and the years—of birth and death—connected by a little etched hyphen representing life. Eroded tablets tilted like torn kites. On the oldest the lettering was indecipherable: inaudible last words.
Caroline Bell said, "The dead in cemeteries give the impression of having all died normally and peacefully." Paul did not reply, but she persisted, " D o you think that's why they excluded suicides from consecrated ground, to maintain the fiction?" As they passed on in silence to the road it occurred to her that, since he was a believer, she had possibly offended. Paul's expression smoothly allowed her to think so. There was something cold in him that might wait to be given a chance.
Paul wished perhaps to punish her—for her being remarkable now, and for any impending ordinariness. All that was remarkable, if you boiled it down, was that she gave belief of a kind. You might not accept it but she gave it—being a believer in her own way, which was not his.
He said, "You emanate so much resolve, and all of it unfocused."
"I don't think you know me well enough to say that."
Paul laughed. "I can say it, then, when I know you better?"
Passers-by looked harder than was necessary, for these two made a couple whose fates could not be predicted with confidence. Having the world regard them as a pair made a fact of it.
"They're surprised to see you with someone at your side," Paul said. "You're so much alone." They had reached a turn where the castle confronted them across summer meadows. Everything else appeared to waver in the heat, but not the castle. "I see you alone in the garden at night. I look down and see you there alone."
In the transparent morning he created a moment of night silence: Caro unaware in the garden, and Paul watching. From his hidden elevation he created fragrant darkness round them both.
"To me it seems I'm not enough alone."
"Is that intended for now?— For me?"
"Of course not."
The castle was obdurate, the only detail not executed by Turner.
In the valley a line of osiers flinched at the least breath of air.
"Women have capacity for solitude, but don't want it. Men want and need it, but the flesh soon makes fools of them." It was Paul Ivory's habit to suppose that girls knew more than they let on.
Taking the castle for her model, Caro would not be disconcerted.
They were on the hillside path, near the place where she had sat in the dark with Ted Tice and talked of loyalty. Although no treachery was involved, she would not have wanted Ted to see her pausing there with Paul Ivory. Although she walked on in her straight way, inwardly she stooped and was vulnerable.
Paul halted by the low wall, as if he knew of her scruples and meant to flout them. " D o you send him about his business too?"
He brushed the wall lightly with his hand, and sat there. "You know I mean Tice."
Caro sat beside him. Her soul seemed a cold, separate thing, while her body was weightless, humid, its contours exposed and scarcely natural. It was hard to say which was unworthy of the other.
She observed Paul Ivory's appearance as if it were an event that might develop before one's eyes. He had the face of the future, skilled in perceiving what the world wants. When he said, "You know I mean," there was a clouding of his
looks with something coarse that made her its accomplice. It was no more than she deeply expected of him, yet his tapping of that vein of expectation made complicity between them. When he said, "You know I mean Tice,"
she understood, also, that Ted's love was a stimulus to Paul and the cause of their sitting together on the wall.
The man was turned towards her, awaiting some kind of victory.
He would have her believe that any or all suspicion was warranted and confirmed.
She was certain he was about to touch her—touch her breast or shoulder, put his face to hers—and already experienced the imagined contact with purifying intensity. At the same time she was fixed, subjected, fatalistic. And sat, fingers clasped, no sign of agitation, with the immemorial stillness of women at such moments.
Paul stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. "Shall we go on, then?" Paul stood; while Caro looked up recomposing her flesh and blood. And Paul smiled, having had his victory.
Caro entered the house alone, and stood in the hall. There was a mirror on one wall, and she had lately taken to watching herself.
Even when looking at a plain wall these days she might be picturing herself, if not with accuracy. Now her likeness was dark with the change from sunlight to shadow, or because her vision dimmed from momentary faintness. At a distance a door opened, and Professor Sefton Thrale called, "Charmian?" And Caroline Bell could not know why that simple fact should bring her close to tears.
It was a state of mind. Or it was because she had stood long ago in a darkened room, a little girl of six years old, and looked in a long mirror cool as water. And, a door opening, had heard her father's voice call "Marian?"—which was her mother's name. That was all there was in it, that was the evocation: a small spasm of memory that could never elucidate itself.
/
Paul Ivory had been accepted by Tertia Drage. When this was known, the Thrales gave a dinner for the lord of the castle, inviting also a pair of neighbours known to have sufficient property in Kenya. The large locked drawing-room at Peverel was aired and reclaimed by help hired from the village. The opening of the room for such a purpose did not so much terminate its period of closing as make clear it was now a shrine.
Longer than broad, the room had Corinthian pilasters and a pale fireplace at each end. Windows went from floor to ceiling, draped with orange silk brought long ago from Swatow by a relation in Butterfield and Swire. The handsome curtains, though shredding now and dusty, might be drawn to conceal panes in need of reglazing. Two chandeliers had been carefully cleaned; but a third, in a basket in the attic, was a hailstorm of dismantled crystals.
By daylight, patches of damp made an atlas of the walls.
Ted Tice, who was handy at such things, repaired an extra leaf belonging to an oval table. The panel, which had warped while out of use in the war, was laid on trestles, where Ted could work at it; and the village help, unconvinced of his standing in the house, despised Ted for his proficiency. There was an elderly hired couple who supervised—the husband tall but with distorted stance, as if he had once been seized and wrung; the wife buttressed by flesh and corset, an emplacement withstanding attack. This pair, the Mullions, were now retired from long service in some mighty house; but were glad, as they said, to give satisfaction from time to time. Service and satisfaction, their strong preoccupations, had neither unnerved them nor made them approachable.
Mrs. Mullion, in black, told Ted Tice: "The young do not understand the meaning of service." Because she had heard him sing
"Southerly, southerly" in the drawing-room, yet did not believe he was a guest. Mrs. Mullion also disliked and feared Ted's accent, or rather the absence of any attempt on his part to flaunt or disguise it.
It was plain, however, that this hired couple went in awe of Paul Ivory, who neither sang nor repaired furniture and scarcely greeted them.
Ted was at the final stage of his repair of the table, which involved a touch of varnish and the fitting of a small brass hook.
When Mrs. Mullion spoke of the meaning of service, he was working near an open window and might not have heard.
(Once—it was when Ted was ten and had his tonsils taken out, which was done at home—his mother had sat down on his bed and told him about the service and the satisfaction. "Thi father said he'd not do it again, go in service. Nor would he. We did it that one time, when we was first married and went as couple to the Truscotts at Ponderhurst. Being afeard of not finding work, and thi father still with the cough then from getting gassed in the war. Truscotts brought cook and maid with them when they come down, and driver, but were wanting a couple to look to the place when they were up in town whilst Parlyment was sitting. Well, pay wasn't much but there was keep as well, and the work not heavy.
"We'd been there six weeks it must have been when Mr. Truscott
—Sir Eric as he is now—come to thi father and said as we were giving satisfaction and should look to stay on. But seeing we were a couple newly wed he should make clear that he and Mrs.
T., wanting their quiet in the country, preferred we have no children. I wasn't there when he said it, but thi father called out to me and I came. And he says to Mr. Truscott, 'Say it again'—like that, right out, so you could see what was coming. Tell 'er,' he says.
Well then your father gave it him good and proper.4 We're leaving here today,' he says—us that hadn't penny to our name nor mortal place to lay our head. And Truscott says, all red and fit to brast,
'You'll go without the reference then.' And thi father says, 'My reference from thee is, I wouldn't stand thi bloody lip. What's it o'
yourn if we'd a ruck o' kids, or none?' And then he says what he shouldn't about Truscott and Mrs. T.—she wasn't a bad sort really, only gormless. Well, Truscott made to walk off, but thi father told him, 'I'm going to newspapers with this and they can print it, how a minister o' the crown talks to an Englishman these times.' And from being red Truscott goes white as this sheet and says, Tice, I'm sure we can settle this peaceable,' or peaceably. He'd the wind up right and proper. 'Let's sit down and talk sensible, I may not have explained missel. And have been lately under a strain.' Him that ne'er did hand's turn except to blether. Well, upshot was he give us fifty pound and we left next morning. We could live six month then, at a pinch, on fifty pound and keep oursel decent. There was the reference too, They have given every satisfaction. But thi dad said, Never again.
"A bit later on he told it all to Mr. Beardsley, yon parson at Southport who stuck up for the working folk, and the idea was he might still go to papers with it for it riled him yet. But Mr. Beardsley told him No, because we'd took the fifty pound. So that was an end of it. And now Truscott's Sir Eric and has his picture with Prince of Wales.")
As to the hired couple at Peverel, the Mullions, Ted Tice learned afterwards that they had lost their grandson in an accident some weeks before. If you knew enough, antipathy would rarely be conclusive.
Caroline Bell took out a dark dress, bought abroad, which alone of her clothes created the effect that might in some future time, or very soon, be entirely hers. She hung the dress up in her room, where she could see it, like bunting for a festival. She had scarcely worn it, and liked to think how she had bought it with a pile of pastel-coloured banknotes on her last morning in France. Dora had subsequently gone to pieces over the price.
When the time came she took the dress down from its hook, and it slipped into her arms like a victim. She had drawn back her heavy hair and coiled it; and could see, in the mirror, how this became her.
Caro went downstairs in the early evening wearing her dark dress, holding the silk belt of it in her hand. She was ironing the belt in the room near the kitchen when Tertia came in carrying a mass of flowers.
"These must go in deep water." Tertia laid the flowers on a slab by the stone sink. She had a rustling, sweeping dress of silver. It was as if a salt gale had blown in; yet Tertia was only standing still and watching Caro iron, while the flowers lay on their cenotaph ready to
die.
Caro set the iron on its rest and held up the belt—her head back, her arm raised, and the belt suspended. Being human, she could not help herself. She knew she had sometimes left her mark, but on this occasion had a taste to see the fact acknowledged.
"And what," Tertia asked at last, "are you going to put on tonight?"
Caro continued to hold up the belt—to one side, like an abstracted snake-charmer, so she could look Tertia in the face. It was a pity there was no one else to see Caro then in her beautiful dress, her throat and arm bare, her delicate raised hand, and her dark eyes fixed on their object. In this way for some moments she compelled Tertia Drage to admire.
And from the garden Paul Ivory called, "Caro." It was the first time he had spoken her name.
There was a pause, in which sounds could be heard from the adjacent kitchen. Releasing Tertia from the spell, Caro lowered the belt and fitted it with slow care about her own waist. She then carried a heavy vase to the sink and turned the tap. These modest actions commanded attention, and Tertia was not the first to see in Caro's most commonplace movements rehearsals for life and death.
When the flowers were in the vase Caro looked again at Tertia and said, "In deep water." And laughed, and dried her hands and walked away.
That evening they were celebrating Tertia's betrothal to Paul Ivory.
Sefton Thrale showed the view over the valley in the dying light before bringing his guests indoors. The lately opened drawing-room was not quite willing to harbour life: a neglected room can no more be rallied for an emergency than an overgrown garden. It went without saying that there were bowls of roses, soft lamplight and, in each grate, a small fire burning. However, as the entering voices rang, the room retreated. It was an old room, unpractised in raw new sounds of struck matches and the ice in tumblers.
It appeared that Tenia's mother was a survivor of the Titanic—
eclipsing Grace and Caro with their obscure, inglorious Benbow and its ineffectual displacement of Australian waters. Tertia's mother remembered being lowered to a lifeboat in her seventh year, and saved. Surviving to become a brawny chestnut mare, she had conceived and borne five daughters but no male heir.
The Transit of Venus Page 9
