"As this has come about, won't it be better for you? Now there's no false hope. It will be awful at first, but—" Grace's handbag slid to her elbow on its strap and she grasped her own jacket by both lapels as urgently as she might have clutched at Ted's. A consciousness of Dora flickered. Let me not sound like Dora, I'm sure you'll be very happy. She said, "Now you are free."
The cicatrice of stitching on her gloves was an imprint on his brain. Earrings of pearl stared, white-eyed as fish. There was a streak of flowered scarf, inane, and the collar blue. Grief had a painter's eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.
Ted thought, I was really better off inside the shop. I was pretty numb in there. After all, the claustrophobic building had provided shelter of a kind, with its avenues resembling city planning, its racks and trays overflowing with daily life, its suburbs named Millinery and Haberdashery in memory of childhood. In the open street Ted Tice was grappled, and experienced bodily lightness of a sort that accompanies physical peril. He would get through these moments as a duty in preparation for the next phase, the realization that was to take him over and maul him.
Whatever might have been thought an hour before as he was buying binoculars, or some few minutes past, no one glancing at him now would have called him a young man.
He took one of Grace's gloved hands and placed it against his own jacket, where it did finally and diffidently clasp his lapel. Earrings hammered, silk daisies panicked on the scarf. At her back a silver plastic palm tree was jagged as forked lightning.
44 What I have done has been for hope of her. What I do now will be for lack of her." He let Grace's hand drop, and the bag fell again to her wrist. "Do you call it freedom?"
"That may not always be true.'' Grace was thinking that a woman would not have prejudiced the future with such a proclamation.
They walked back to the corner, where the shoppers bandied the doors back and forth. The singers were on to "Danny Boy" now, the half-crown solitary in the cap, the pennies expertly shaken under the lining. It was Christian who had told Grace about this trick.
They crossed to the entrance of the Underground. There was vibration in the road, a subterranean breath from the pit-head. A red-fleshed woman was peddling little wads of heather to people dashing up and down the steps, but did not approach these two who stood silent. Grace thought, I suppose you'd get to know when it was hopeless.
In the rush of tunnelled air they turned to stare at one another.
A look two persons might exchange who, having carried an immense weight to some forlorn halt, now set it down and meet each other's eyes. Grace had come as far as she could; Ted would go down alone.
The photograph showed a substantial jaw, hound-dog eyes; the face expressionless, as if the intrusion merely tested or strengthened endurance. An accompanying paragraph referred to a previous marriage and a daughter. A big man with an overcoat bundled on, standing in a bleak portico.
At his side Caro was a novice at public life. Not dressed in wedding clothes, she had nonetheless unmistakably just been married. Where the picture was cut off, the backs of their hands met
—her right hand, his left, not clasped but transmitting the private message for all the world to see.
"There's one here too." Tertia knew what Paul was staring at, and raised her own page slightly to show an indistinct image. There was a heading, and below the photograph a caption said, "The couple is shown leaving the edifice." In Paul's newspaper Caro was an Australian typist; in Tenia's, a senior official. It was also stated that the couple had met while working on a humanitarian enterprise initiated by the British government.
"So that awful sister got those girls fixed up. Dora or Flora, I saw her once at the Thrales. You have to hand it to her. She brought them to London and launched them."
Paul said, "They're not the Gunning sisters, you know." Though seeing them for a moment just that way—eighteenth-century beauties in pastel silk with upswept hair and translucent glances, taking London by storm, being the Rage. In Tertia's newspaper Caro's eyes were lowered, she was a grey blur that did not even carry flowers. The man was large, an un-English physiognomy, big head, heavy, impassive. Caro was now endorsed, valuable: an obscure work newly attributed to a master.
Tertia exchanged newspapers with Paul. "Flora-Dora pulled it off." To see how much Paul minded.
"I rather like to think of Caroline Bell with billions."
"No one ever said the Vail man had billions."
"Where does the money come from anyway?"
"Catfood."
"It says here, bauxite. Whatever that is." Paul elaborated: "Pent-houses papered with Picassos, yachts, private planes, limousines."
"Bodyguards," said Tertia. And "Lovers."
Paul folded the paper to read it—neatly, like a clerk in a train.
"At any rate the astrologer didn't get her."
"What does 'at any rate' mean?" Tertia turned pages with her brutal gesture. Upstairs, a child wept, laughed, spoke, then mum-bled, acting out the ages of man.
Tertia suddenly said, "Nick Cartledge. Who used to stay with us." She could have been protesting at last.
"What about him?"
"He's dead."
"What of?"
"Liver complaint."
"Well—he certainly worked for it."
Tertia put the paper down. Nicholas Gerald Wakelin Cartledge.
For her, it was an untimely death. She said, "The old roue," trying to shrug off mortality itself; but sat there changing into a woman who knew the dead.
After a time Paul said, "That word means, broken on the wheel."
Dora told Dot Cleaver, "He is no Phoebus Apollo. As you can see." Dora would say Phoebus Apollo, or Pallas Athene, or Venus de Milo, distinguishing these immortals, by full title, from the terrestrial Glad or Trish. "It is an awful picture of them both, oh simply awful. And the snaps are no better." She showed. "I'd had a nasty knock from the car door, you can see the pain in my eyes."
Dora had moved that day into Caro's vacated flat, which was filled with flowers. "They will be in Italy by now."
Dot Cleaver said, "When I first went to Rome, I did everything.
Everything. I took the guide-book, I did everything. Well, that's over with, now I just please myself. You absorb more of a place that way."
Dora gave a sigh that influenced the entire room. She observed, after a time, that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
"A cup of your nice tea?" Dot Cleaver arched her brows, body, and wrist, grasping a china handle that was itself a mark of interrogation. "Then they go to New York."
"Oh yes, they have everything they want there, all their interests, books, plays, music."
Dot Cleaver had recently attended an enthralling recital, but could not recall the programme. "In any case, they'll be over to see you in no time."
"Why should they bother. I don't blame them." Dora's ambition now was to be cast off. That was to be the culmination of her long alienation, the vindication of her overmastering belief in enmity, ingratitude, and whole congeries of wrongs. She had already told Caro, "Don't feel you have to see me." Her process of testing, now finely honed, was never at rest. Provocation had become the basis of her relations with the world.
Caro had said to Grace, "She is curious to see how many cheeks we still have left to turn."
He tore out the page, folded it, tore again along the fold. Then trimmed the picture and paragraph with scissors. These methodical actions seemed to have been leading somewhere, and when he had completed them Ted could scarcely believe he was left with a photograph of Caroline Bell's wedding. The accompanying legend, though conventionally phrased, was not quite comprehensible—as if written in uncials, or Cyrillic.
He stared into the dim little picture for some familiar thing that might give him a claim on her. But her clothes were new, uncharacteristic with occasion. In her left hand, a small object, certainly not a prayerbook and most probably a purse. The photograph banis
hed him completely, declining association: an extra cruelty, when her possessions had always enchanted him—a green silk belt, a notebook covered in blue cloth, a white dish in which she kept oranges.
In the photograph she turned away, forsaking all others.
The clipping lay on his desk, larger now that the superfluous, constricting tissue had been trimmed away. The whole room could not confine it or contain the injury. Ted Tice put his right hand on it, and hung his head—aware, like an onlooker, that this bowed posture required, for its own caption, a dated phrase: "He went under." A grown man with lowered head is a foolish sight, and scarcely a man.
There was no one to whom he need excuse himself. Obligation was the first detail erased by grief.
He thought he would go out and tire himself with walking. Or would get drunk, like a disappointed man in a story. But looked, without moving, at his sweater and cap and a striped scarf—outward things whose reasonableness he would not believe in again.
So Caroline Bell lived in a house in New York City and took the name of Vail. From the top of the house, which was in a row of short buildings faced with purplish stone, there was a view of the sky. To the south, a range of skyscrapers obstructed the late sun as surely as the mountains of the Taygetus bring early dark down to Sparta. The rooms were not numerous but relatively large, because dividing walls had here and there been removed. In this house Adam Vail had been born.
There were many objects over which Caroline Vail could never wish for, or assert, jurisdiction. Chairs, books, pictures, a screen from China, a leather folder fraying on a desk, a jade saucer, a convenient, ugly little light beside a bed—every thing was habitual except Caro herself. She had contributed four boxes of books, a chipped plate from Palermo, and an angel painted on Andalusian board. From time to time she would look at these memorials, or at her clothes in cupboards and drawers, in order to believe.
A photograph at the time would have shown her more hesitant than formerly. The process of acquiring equanimity had brought its own disruptions, and some sacrifice.
Caro received letters on her marriage from several men: "He's a lucky man, dear Caro, who gets you"; "I hope he realizes his good fortune." There was an element of relief at not having had to assume the privilege themselves. Her own release at leaving an entire nation to its devices was, if not commendable, also natural.
In straight streets Mrs. Vail attempted to make the city over in the image of other towns, to discover its sources of continuity and solace, its places of refuge and glory. When this proved impossible, observed freakishness, fads, and obscure forms of endurance; as well as flagrant forms of self-assertion and conformity. Where morality was concerned, fashion was indiscriminate, giving the same weight to whim as to conviction. A ceaseless milling of persons was unnatural, ludicrous, determined as the acceleration of an old movie. There was anonymity and extreme loneliness, but little reverie and no peace. Apartments were cabins in the great liners docked along the streets.
The city posed its conditions like a test: those apt in its energies became initiates; the rest must fail, depart, or squander irrelevant strength.
In modern buildings opposite the Vail house, all ground floors were doctors' offices. In the early mornings ageing men and women would arrive without breakfast to ring these doorbells. Otherwise there was little passage of humanity on the short block, and few children. Signs of life were often associated with death or extremity: in the night, fire engines and ambulances could be heard on nearby avenues, and the revolving lantern of a police car circled private rooms with mistrustful light; convoys of trucks trundled, purposeful as if provisioning an advancing army. In winter, the tires of cars spun shrieking in filthy snowdrifts, and derelicts fitted themselves to icy crannies of the immense and all but continuous buildings.
The panorama was splendid, the detail grim. Glossiness created, or eased, a lack of contact. When summer came, plane trees obscured the view from Caro's windows, and seclusion was complete.
In the first weeks Caro would lie on her bed or stretch on a sofa, reading or merely still. The house was hushed with her stillness, which was not languor but renewal. Meanwhile, Adam Vail went swiftly through the rooms and hallways of long association, and nimbly up and down the stairs of all his life. Habits of home gave agility to his body that was heavy in repose or love.
The house had a light smell of plants and polish, and oils used to preserve books or furniture. In the beginning Caroline Vail noticed this smell, which she could not afterwards rediscover. In her stepdaughter's room there was a scent of calamine lotion, there were creams for adolescent complexions, there were tablets for pain; there were comic books, two guitars, and recordings of Italian opera. There were books to do with animals in far countries—
Ethiopia, Kenya. These belonged to dark Josie who, at the time of Caro's arrival in the city, had gone to Africa on safari with the family of a schoolfriend, Myra.
Adam said, "Myra is bad news."
Fitted into the frame ofjosie's mirror there were photographs of mother and child.
Adam's sister, Una, came to lunch. Una was handsome, with an air of fashionable disbelief. She smoked her cigarettes half-through and, as she put them out, rattled a golden chain on her wrist. Her laugh, which began on a loud peal, was also abruptly extinguished, incomplete. She looked at Caro with open interest that might have been kind.
Una was having an affair with a bureaucrat. She told Caro, "My friend is a diplomat"—diplomat being a term, like architect, whose disgrace had not yet caught up with it. That evening when her lover asked her, "How's the bride?" she dropped into a chair and crossed her legs: "Well." After a time she said, "This is no case of the second Mrs. de Winter." Eventually she lit a cigarette. "Bride's okay. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark horse. Late twenties, maybe thirty.
By no means a dope. Talks, laughs, shows British teeth." As Hansi went on with a crossword puzzle Una put out her fresh cigarette and added, "Intolerant."
"Intolerant of what?"
"People like me." Reaching in her handbag, Una said, "Loves Adam." She brought out a tiny enamel box. On the table at her side there were similar boxes, arranged in rows.
Hansi mixed drinks and gave one to Una. She made a slight motion in his direction with the glass, and in her other hand held up the box. "Brought me a present." She handed it to him. "Adam must have told her." She drank from her glass, then took the box back from Hansi. She set it on the table with the others and said,
"Cute."
"Ask me something," said Adam Vail. In the night they would waken and make love. "You never have questions."
"Now I have to learn what doesn't come through questions."
One afternoon, when she lay on a sofa reading, he came and took her in his arms. "Don't go into a decline."
"It's an ascent."
He got up then and moved about the room, rattling objects, slamming drawers, crackling a newspaper. His wife went on reading, regretting that so considerate a man should be driven to this and mildly surprised at how little restraint he was showing. He need only wait and she would give him perfect happiness. It was for this her energies were gathering, and for other proper purposes.
Una was going abroad for the summer. Una, who had been divorced, said she could have a great summer at last: "For eight years I was nailed to the cross of East Hampton." Una jangled a new bracelet. Her handsome face had a costly sheen, she wore what the ancient Romans called summer jewellery. Soon, from the Medi-terranean, she and Hansi sent a postcard of pink bungalows on a beach.
Adam said, "It's a place for millionaires at the end of their tether."
"Why should millionaires always be at the end of their tether?"
"They're the ones who can afford to be." He touched her face.
"You look fine, yourself."
"The beginning of my tether."
Caro took Adam's arm in the street and stood to look. A show of professionalism in machines and buildings was reproduced, with less success, in pers
ons: existence had been turned over to the experts. "We"—she meant, people from elsewhere—"will always be amateurs compared with this."
Adam said, "Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love."
Adam Vail linked his wife's fingers with his own. "Hence also a compulsion to account for ourselves. As I at this moment."
"But if Americans themselves say these things."
"Just don't you go agreeing with any of it, that's all." Vail laughed. "Oh Caro, we are much worse, and perhaps better, than you so far secretly think."
Adam was taking Caro to see a friend who lived at 149th Street.
When they came home, Caro said, "Why should anyone stand it?"
Una, who was back from Sardinia, told her: "The American Negro is overadjusted to his problem."
Adam said, "But not for much longer."
One September evening Caroline Vail sat by a window with a book of poetry.
Adam asked, "Won't you say aloud what you're reading?"
She began, and spoke some lines in a voice high, thin, and unfamiliar:
"Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border; And much have they faced there, first and last, Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is—that we two passed. "
She laid the book down without keeping the place, and turned her face away. "Sad," she said. "That's why I'm crying."
Adam stroked her head, her shoulders. When he put his arms round her, her body could scarcely be seen. "Who knows why she is crying. Who knows why Caroline is really crying."
In the autumn Grace wrote that Paul Ivory had a tremendous success with a play called The One Flesh. She also reported, more diffidently, that Ted Tice had married the daughter of a scientist.
The Transit of Venus Page 22
