The head of Christian's department had a Common Market face.
He put his drink down on the Chopin and said, "I don't really know you well enough to tell you this story." Grace watched the room rippling in mirrbred waters: such slow movement, such pastels; and, again, herself—upholstered, decorated, insured, and, for the first time, utterly alone. A big woman in violet leaned against the mantel, purpling the view. Christian's chief said, "Now comes the bawdy part." Grace listened abstractedly to the end of the joke.
When she did not smile, Sir Manfred was displeased; and looked at her white flesh as if to say, You started it. He took up his drink and moved off toward the bookcase: "I'm a voracious reader." He had left a circular stain on a nocturne.
She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dairymples.
And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.
"Grace, I've got the info for you on the Tirpitz."
It was their oldest friend, whom she at once wished dead.
"Don't say I ever let you down. A promise is a promise. Twelfth of November forty-four."
Grace folded her hands before her. Sunk.
"Capsized at her moorings. We'd disabled her with midget subs the year before, but the RAF gave her the coo de grass in forty-four.
Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, up in the Norwegian fjords, don't ask me to pronounce the place, it's one of those names with dots over the top of it."
Angus Dance was back to back with them, well within earshot.
"Damfool Germans brought her well within our range, you see.
Always be relied on for the stupid thing. Utterly gormless. Well, does that take care of everything?"
"I'm grateful, Ernie."
Ernie spoke no German but could do a good accent at parties.
"Effer at your serffice." He clicked his heels.
Angus Dance was fetching an ashtray for the Dalrymple girl. He had said, "They sank." For Grace and Ernie, it was "We sank"—
even the schoolgirl Grace had attacked the great battleship Tirpitz with all her ringletted might. Angus Dance was out of it, free from guilt or glory. For him, Ernie and Grace might as well have rioted on Mafeking night.
Grace revolved a cold glass between her palms. Ernie ran a proprietary finger along the black waist of the piano, in the same way Christian had done with the rim of her dress. "She took a thousand men to the bottom with her."
Sir Manfred was disengaging himself from a questioner. "I don't recall the figures offhand. Why don't you call up my secretary?"
A pencil was brought out, and paper.
"Miss Ware. No, not Waring, Ware. Cordelia Ware. She's a bit of a battleaxe, but she knows the statistics backwards." Sir Manfred added a telephone number, and lumbered towards Grace. "So sorry, I've got to run."
People were kissing her, one after the other: "Dored it, dored it. Simply dored it." Angus Dance left on a wave of departures, shaking hands.
When it was over, they brought the Spode out from a safe place.
Someone had broken a goblet of cut crystal.
Jeremy remarked, "You did say smash."
Two calico cats were let out meowing from the upstairs bathroom, but would not touch leftovers. Jeremy and Hugh put the chest back between the windows. Rupert, who was not allowed to lift, helped Christian count empty bottles. "I liked Doctor Dance the best."
I too.
Christian half-turned his head to where Grace stood, and lightly winked. "So we have a crush on Doctor Dance, do we?" He had assembled the bottles in a box. "I liked him myself."
Later still, winding his bedside clock, Christian asked, "Why on earth was Ernie babbling on like that about the Tirpitz ? Or was it the Scharnhorst ?"
Grace was drawing the black dress over her head. "I think it was the Scharnhorst."
He could have called next day to thank for the party but did not, although the phone rang all morning and Christian's chief sent flowers.
"It was a success, then," announced Jeremy, who was becoming worldly.
Grace was turning over the mail.
Christian said, "I don't know when I've seen a finer bunch of marguerites."
Grace Thrale was now embarked on the well-known stages of love: the primary stage being simple, if infinite, longing. She might, in a single morning, see a dozen Dances in the streets.
Then, high-strung to an impossible phone bell, whose electric drill reverberated in her soul, she constructed myths and legends from a doorway kiss. That was the secondary phase. Ter-tiary was the belief that all significance was of her own deranged contriving, and any reciprocity on the part of Angus Dance a fantasy. She had no revelation to make to him. He had even seen her best dress.
If he knew, he would make some joke about her time of life.
Even the kindest man could enjoy a savage laugh on that theme.
The trouble was, the very abundance of her feelings sufficed for mutuality. So much loving-kindness also made it appear moral.
The phrases mixed and alternated. If he came on Sunday, to the art show, she would know.
Grace lay awake, then slept uneasily.
Christian said, "You're up so early these days."
"It's that dog next door, barking at daybreak."
Rupert cackled. "Like a rooster."
"If that persists," said Christian, "I shall speak firmly to the owner."
Rupert said, "It was that fatal and perfidious bark." He spilled his breakfast laughing.
By now, Mrs. Thrale had committed adultery in her heart many times.
On the Sunday, Christian took the boys to a horse show. Christian knew quite a bit about horses—their dimensions and markings and matings, their agilities. The boys, too, could adroitly use words like roan, skewbald, and gelding.
"We should be back by six."
Grace said, "I might look in at the art show."
When they had gone out she made up her face with care. She put on a heavy blue coat that was old but became her. It was a raw day, almost lightless; heavy clouds suggested snow. In a shop-window she saw herself clasping her scarf together—hurrying, aglow.
A woman at the door charged her lOp. The floor of dirty wooden boards was uneven, and scrunched as she walked in. She was almost alone in the hall but could not bring herself to look about for Angus Dance. A fat man in a mackintosh stepped back to get perspective and collided: "Sorry." There were two or three elderly couples who had nothing else to do, and a dejected girl who was perhaps one of the exhibitors. The paint was in many cases green and red, in whorls; or had been applied thinly in angular greys. She knew he would not come.
When she left the place it was getting dark and there was sleet. She did not want to go home; it was as if her humiliation must be disclosed there. She shrank from home as from extra punishment—as a child, mauled by playmates, might fear parental scolding for torn clothes. But stumbled along with no other possibility. Pain rose up from her thorax, and descended like sleet behind her eyes. It was scarcely credible there should be no one to comfort her.
She thought, My mortification. And for the first time realized that the word meant death.
Alone at home, she went into the bathroom and leaned both hands on the sink, pondering. This anguish must be centred on some object other than Angus Dance. Such passion could scarcely have to do with him—the red-haired Doctor Dance of flesh and blood and three months' acquaintance—but must be fixed on a vision. This mirror, in its turn, showed her intent, exposed, breathing heavily. She had never seen herself so real, so rare.
She had just taken off her coat when they came in from the horse show, speaking in a practised manner of chestnuts and bays. Christian had been jostled in the Underground: "Perhaps I'm not suited to the mass society."
Grace said, "Perhaps we are the mass s
ociety."
Monday was Mrs. Thrale's day for the hairdresser. She said,
"Mario, I have some grey hairs," and put her hand to her brow.
"Here."
He took her head between his hands, under a light, as if it were a skull held norma frontalis. Alas, poor Grace. After a while he said,
"It is not a case for dyeing."
He released her. "You are not ready to dye."
"No."
"Being fair, you can wait a bit."
Grace sat in a plastic chair and he said, "It is worse for the dark ladies."
When she was settled under the dryer with Vogue and The Gulag Archipelago, the immemorial pathos of the place struck at her. There was hardly a young woman present, except the shampoo girl whose hipless jeans and prominent pectoral arch made Grace Thrale's soft flesh appear historic. Grace looked down at her own round little arms, stared at them as into a portrait by an Old Master. She thought of her body, which had never been truly slim, and showed a white mesh from bearing children, and now must passively await decay and mutilation. Her hands, clasped over a magazine picture of a bronze man on a beach, instinctively assumed an attitude of resignation. She read, "The Aga Khan in a rare moment of relaxa-tion." But perceived herself in that instant entering into a huge suspense, lonely and universal.
That night Grace dreamed her own death.
The following morning she made an excuse to telephone the hospital.
"Doctor Dance has been out with a heavy cold."
She said it was not important, and hung up. The bad cold arous-ing scorn, she said aloud, "I would have got there," meaning to the art show; which was perfectly true. She went upstairs and made the beds, and thought in derision: Scotsmen are scarcely Latin lovers.
Equilibrium did not last. On her way downstairs there was the same thoracic pain, a colossal suffering, grandiose, of a scale and distinction to which she, Grace Thrale of London W8 7EF, hardly seemed entitled. She sat in the kitchen and thought, I am over-wrought; and perhaps am mad. Oh God, I must break myself of this.
Break, break, break. You said smash. A crush.
It occurred to her, in her isolation, that books might have helped.
It was the first time she had reckoned with the fact she did not read, that neither she nor Christian read—and here was the true discovery, for she had relied on him to maintain a literary household.
They had dozens of books, on shelves that took up half a wall; not to speak of the Penguins. And would send to the library regularly for the latest. She had the Iris Murdoch in the house, as well as the Solzhenitsyn. Voracious readers. But a state of receptiveness in which another's torment might reach into her own soul, through which her infatuation might be defined and celebrated—there was none of that. Christian confidently presented himself as a man of letters: "I'm rereading Conrad this winter." But Within the Tides had lain on his night table since December.
Christian came home and kissed her. "I have spoken to those people about that yipping dog."
"You haven't."
"Certainly. You can't go sleepless forever. They have agreed to keep the animal indoors."
She wished he had not said the animal.
He thumped his briefcase onto the hall table. "And I actually used the word yip."
In her dream, Christian had been weeping.
Grace got up in the night and went downstairs. She took Wuther-ing Heights from a shelf and stood by the windows in the moonlight, keeping the ceaseless watch of her passion. She had no right to utter the name of Angus Dance, or to give him an endearment even in thought—never having done these things in life. She might as well have called on Heathcliff, or Aeneas. The book, an old edition, weighed in her hand. She knew she would not read it; but wondered if you might open at any page and find truth, like the Bible.
She passed her other hand down her body, and thought her small feet irresistibly beautiful as they showed beneath her nightgown.
In the morning Christian said, "Perhaps we need a new mat-tress."
When the marguerites began to fester, Grace put them in the garbage. The card, still attached, said, "With homage," and had an ink line through the surname. She swirled water in the vase and remembered: "I didn't laugh at his off-colour joke."
Christian was worried, but said, "You certainly don't have to take insults to further my career." To forestall her thoughts. After a moment he asked, "What was the joke anyway?"
"I couldn't for the life of me work it out." They both burst out laughing. No reply could have pleased him more. Perfect, sheltered Grace. Once, during a holiday on Corsica, he had turned her face away from the spectacle, as he called it, of a fistfight.
Late that day she met Angus Dance in the street. She had bought narcissus to replace the daisies, and stood holding them downwards in her hand. She could think of nothing to say that would equal the magical silent discourse of her reverie.
He said, "Are you all right?"
"I haven't been sleeping properly." She might as well have said, I love you. "Except with pills."
"What are you taking?" For a moment authority passed back to him.
They then spoke of his heavy cold. And she would bring Rupert in for a checkup at the end of the month. Despite sleeplessness, her skin glowed like his own.
He said, "Do you have time for a coffee?"
So Grace Thrale sat at a Formica table and Angus Dance hung his flannel jacket on a peg. He wore a pale woollen waistcoat knitted by his mother. His hair in itself was enough to attract attention: his Northern Light, his blaze of midnight sun. They scarcely spoke, though leaning forward from a delicate readiness, until the girl came to take their order. Both his accent and an oddly aspirated R were more pronounced. Grace thought her own speech indistinct, and made an effort to talk out.
"I have been wondering how you were." All things considered, the boldest remark she had ever made. She was surprised by her definite voice, her firm hand efficiently taking sugar, when the whole of Creation, the very texture of the firmament, was wrought, receptive, cream-coloured, like his sweater.
He said he ought to go to Burnham-on-Crouch to see about his boat, which was up on the slips for scraping and red lead. Some recaulking was also needed. "I don't feel up to it, somehow." The commonplaces, the withholdings, were a realization in themselves.
Her scented flowers stood between them in a tumbler of water, pent within a green string.
Grace asked, "What is your boat called?"
"She's called Elissa. " He made room for the milk. "I'm not much of a sailor—the genuine ones are fanatical. I took it up after a bad experience. I suppose it was a means of motion when everything was standing still."
"Was it when your marriage broke up?"
"No. This was a later repudiation." He smiled. "I don't know that any of this can be very interesting. Such usual griefs."
"To me they are not usual." She could not imagine Christian, for whom acceptance was imperative, recounting his rebuffs, or acknowledging "my griefs." Even in the entrancement of the coffee-shop the threat came over her that Christian was in this the more infirm, the more defenceless; and that Angus Dance was fortified by reversals and by his refusal to dissimulate. She recalled his simple commitment to Rupert, how he had said, "I promise." Such fear-lessness could not be required of Christian.
When she made contrasts with Christian it was not just the disloyalty but that Christian always seemed to gain.
Doctor Dance offered buns. "I had a grand time at your party.
I should have called to say so."
Grace thought of the scuttling of the Tirpitz, and the chiefs commemorative flowers, a soaked wreath on swirling waters. Lest we forget. "It seems so long ago."
"I've not seen you since."
It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misun-derstood.
He went on, "Yet we are so close."
She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly
be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.
Grace was seated at the piano. She turned a sheet of music, but did not play. Rupert came and stood beside her. "What is it?"
"It's Scarlatti."
He had meant, What's wrong.
Like a lover, he stood near enough to suggest she should embrace him. With her right arm she drew him against her side. Her left hand rested on the keys. She leaned her head to his upper arm. It was like an Edwardian photograph. She said, "I do love you, Rupey." This was the last child with whom she could get away with such a thing—and only then because his illness had given them an extension during which a lot might be overlooked. They both knew it. Emulating her mood, the boy became pensive, languid; and at the same time remained omnipotent.
She said again, "I do." To get him to say it back. She thought, So now it has come round: / am trying to draw strength from them.
She thought the word "adulteress," and it was archaic as being stoned to death—a bigoted word, like Negress or Jewess or seam-stress or poetess; but precise.
Her left hand sounded notes in the bass: sombre, separate, instructed. The room received them dispassionately. There was a click of her ring on ivory. She rocked the boy a little with her arm, and could feel the plaster armouring his X-rayed ribs. She took her hand from the piano and put both arms about him, her fingers locked over his side, her breast and brow turned to his body. This was less like a photograph.
The Transit of Venus Page 30
