The Transit of Venus (10 page)

"Obviously you must, if it's like that."

He had made it sound incontrovertible, but when he now began,

"You see," and hesitated, she thought he might be indeterminate like everyone else. He resumed, "The only purpose of it would be to bring the press in and make a scandal. It wouldn't stop it, but would draw attention." He said, "So there's the matter of disloyalty, and the usual question of where loyalty lies."

From a change of pitch Caro might have expected an outburst, and was the more surprised when he asked, "Do you remember you read out the sign today—
Great Expectations ,
?" His saying "Do you remember" put the morning back in time, a distant innocence.

"At the picture-house."

"Yes. Do you remember how, on the first page of that book, the boy helps the escaped convict?" More like interrogation than recall.

"He doesn't befriend him, though. He does it out of fear." It was natural enough to be sitting on a wall in the dark talking about a book.

"Fear can take other forms than helpfulness, and in that instance it's remembered as compassion." Ted Tice's fingertips rested on the stone wall, to poise his body for some new advance.

"In the war, I helped a prisoner get away. A German. It was in Wales, where I spent a couple of years at a school when I was sent on from that place you saw today. A few miles inland from us there was a camp for prisoners of war, and we heard that an officer—a general, of course, the story went—had got out. There was a long stiff walk to the coast that I took sometimes, when I was let, to be alone and see the sea. The sea had a sort of prohibition on it at the time, the beaches forbidden and the barbed wire piled in hoops and the gun emplacements thick as bath-houses. The ocean beyond looked like freedom. You couldn't think it led to Ireland or America—it was infinity, like the firmament. The open sea. I was sixteen, wanting solitude more than anything and miserable enough when I got it—except on those walks to the coast. And having only the school in my present and the army in my future. We were hardly ever allowed out on our own, yet in a year or two would be in battle, possibly dead. In fact, eighteen months later I was sent for the radar training, at the very end of the war.

"Anyway, I used to walk from the school out to the coast and stand up on the last hills and look at the sea awhile, and turn and come back again the ten miles or so to the school. Merely to have looked at something expansive was a taste of liberty. I loved the country, too, which was bare—just rough grass and bushes rocking in the everlasting wind. Worn-out colours that kept to a periphery

—as if there might be a core to existence, and here one drew closer.

Or, to put it the other way round, that place was so obscure that it took all your conviction to believe it, or you, existed. The weather was always foul, but I didn't mind. Even that gave a sense of exposure, of space after confinement.

"There was a particular curve of cliffs, it was like walking round a turn of the earth. And this one time there was a man sitting in a cleft of the rocks, looking. Not staring. So silent and unsurprised, he might have been waiting for me. I knew right off it was the German. As if I'd been waiting for him too. So the two of us, looking. He'd got a coat from somewhere but was half frozen. He'd been out on the hills nearly a week and was utterly beat, exhausted, and starving. The face had sort of drawn off from the eyes, you should have seen the hands."

Ted Tice said, "He was conclusive proof that war was real.

"Well, that's almost all of it. I gave him my sandwich, and pullover. And a flask of awful stuff we called beef tea. The police themselves would have done much the same. It's the not turning him in that makes the public outrage, but I didn't even think of turning him in."

It differed from every other secret Caroline Bell had known, in having no darkness. Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exercise of principle would always require more from her than from persons nurtured in it, for she had learned it by application of will. Caro would never do the right thing without knowing it, as some could. Now there was this secret of Ted's, streaked with difficult humanity: something immediate yet scarcely touching the self, noble but not virtuous. Something it would be presumptuous either to judge or condone.

She was silent, then reverted to the logic of the story. "Did he get away?"

"Yes. He knew the way down to the sea, whatever he was expecting there, only he had got too weak to try it till I showed up.

A few days later the word got round that he'd somehow been taken off by his own lot. We never knew how. But after the war the press got hold of it as a notable case of our stupidity—that was the headline. Because they'd found out he was a scientist with the missile installations, which was why his own crowd were so keen to get him back. That wasn't realized when he was captured, because he was in uniform and had military rank—he'd got caught during a freakish journey in a destroyer, going back to Peene-miinde on the Baltic. It was only discovered when he cut loose from the prison. Then, because of the rocket raids it ultimately came out that we'd let him slip through our fingers." Ted said, "One goes on saying we and our. It was I who let him slip through our fingers.

So, after it came out who he was, I had the rocket raids to think about too."

"Where is he now?"

"In America. He makes their weapons now, and ours. The story of his escape is part of his public legend, almost admirable as presented in the magazines. I do not figure in it—perhaps the recollection would be incompatible with the life of power. Having been at someone else's mercy suggests that mercy may matter. I've sometimes thought it would be a difficult case to prosecute now—

mine, I mean." Ted Tice's voice smiled briefly in the dark. "I see pictures of him from time to time. Quite unrecognizable, as if he's wearing a mask now, and the real face was the one I saw. The face we all might have in extremity."

Caro did put her hand out to him. He took it in his own, accepting mere kindness.

"I'm not trying to make a justification. It's the first time I've told this and I'm doing it badly. I'm no good at telling stories. I knew at the time he might be anything, one of the worst, and there was even the idea that in his own eyes he would be winning. Not that I thought it out then. At the time I had to act and that was the form action took—the permanent form, since whatever is wrong with it I wouldn't imagine doing differently. By now I mostly forget about it. If I remember, it can seem important, or irrelevant—depending on my state of mind. You cannot only give alms to the harmless.

Anyway, the complications came in right away, with the concealment, which creates its own treasons. Even if you would not particularly want to divulge an experience, you should feel able to. I didn't know the sort of person I might have confided in, I had few friends of any kind. And couldn't be sure of understanding the thing myself, let alone telling it right. Also, naturally, I didn't look forward to the hullabaloo if it became a public matter. So it stayed hidden, till this. I would tell it now if I chose, but it serves no purpose."

Caro said, "Anyone would think such an action rightful in a book

—like the child and the convict, as you said. Yet most would censure it in life."

"I was too old, don't you see, to be credited with a good impulse.

Sixteen's too old for holy innocence."

The child Caro had not so much as waved to those behind the wire, let alone extended mercy.

Ted said, "A conscious act of independent humanity is what society can least afford. If they once let that in, there'd be no end to it. If he and I had been in battle, I would have killed him, having accepted society's standards. As it was, I was left to apply my own.

Well, I'm not putting myself up. I just had too many advantages to use them. Again, the complications come later. One's best instincts are no more reliable than the law and no more consistent. If you live essentially within society there are times when you'd prefer to depend on the social formula—and you discover you've somewhat spoiled that possibility. You've disqualified yourself from judging others by those rules."

"You mean you might have a good reason, one day, to turn someone else in, but have forfeited the right."

"Precisely." Eventually he went on, "All this comes back to old Thrale. I'm probably going to let the old bloke in for it over the telescope, but the righteousness of my position repels me. At least this time it can't be said I hold all the cards, or any of them."

"You have the truth."

Ted Tice laughed. "Freely assuming such a handicap ought to be convincing in itself." He turned in the dark and clasped the girl's hand again, his touch uncertain, deductive, entirely personal, like the contact of the blind. He asked, as he had asked that morning,

"Caro, what are you thinking?"

"About the German. I wonder what he thought, and how it was between the two of you."

"Yes. Excess of elementals, like being unable to draw breath in a high wind. At another level, familiar small sensations—resentment, for instance, at this having happened to me rather than to a confirmed patriot who would handle it conventionally without a qualm. A degrading sense, too, of youth and limitations. Then there was the new possibility that nothing mattered, not even this, though it had taken the event to make that clear. On his side—who knows? No show of natural emotions, no sympathy or excitement, even fear in the usual sense. We had no words in common, but surely I'd have recognized any wish to share."

"Was this why you chose the sort of work you do?"

"Who knows?"

"You might meet him again someday. Things come round so strangely."

"I've thought that too. I've thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books. Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing."

There was something conclusive in this that soon made it necessary to rise and walk on. His story had created a closeness that was human rather than sexual, a crisis of common knowledge too solemn for desire. At the sight of the man and boy among the frozen rocks, love had removed itself to a respectful distance, where it lay in wait for tomorrow.

-i

"Please excuse an oddly worded and badly written letter. I have torn a thumbnail, and this is the result/'

Caro and Grace reached the postscript at the same moment. They were standing in the living-room of Peverel at noon, Grace holding the letter and Caro looking over her shoulder. Dora was going to be married.

Never having entertained the possibility, they were unprepared for the ease of rescue. Or for the realization that it could have happened earlier, and in time. Their shoulders touched in comfort of a kind, having so much to take in and being so greatly unburdened. Henceforth they might be spared something.

"Let's see the first page again." They shuffled the sheets to where it said, "Dear G and C."

Beth Lomax, the well-off widow from the Victoria League, had proved gratuitously rude soon after reaching Gibraltar.

Having herself proposed the visit, had begun to treat Dora as an encumbrance. For once Dora had spoken out: Beth Lomax had heard a few home truths, and high time. Dora had then gone into town to book passage back to England. And in the shipping office, which was notoriously inefficient, had waited on a leather settee with a man who was lodging a complaint. Both, it turned out, had been pushed just that bit too far. They had gone out together to find a cup of tea, having neither booked nor complained. (As it happened, Major Ingot's trunks turned up next day at Algeciras, which struck them both as a good omen.) Since then they had been seeing something of one another, and discovering mutual interests.

Caro read with wonder: "We share the same tastes, and think alike."

"You are both grown now," Dora wrote, "and no longer need me." There was reproof in it as well as irony. The wedding would be in the Algarve, where the Major lived, or resided. Major Ingot

—Bruce—was taking over the arrangements. "I have never had anyone to do things for me before, and am enjoying the luxury."

The bridal pair would then travel to England, but only to pack belongings, as the Major was setting up in the Algarve where he had retired into import-export.

"Dora in Portugal," said Grace. It sounded historic.

"Oh Grace, thank God."

It was as close as they had ever come to assessing the damage.

Again they leaned to look. Dora would be often in England, as Major Ingot—Bruce—had his buyers to look up. After all, it wasn't as if she was going to disappear. She need not say, she said, that she loved them. It did not matter about her, they were all that mattered.

"I have never asked anything from anybody, and don't mean to start now." The dress would be ivory crepe, day-length, with a short jacket; the hat, beige. There was a word they could not read, which might have been stephanotis. The Major was fixing up about photos and Dora would bring any that were half-way decent; but had never taken a good picture. It would be a relief to get away from this heat, worse than anything in Australia. Just be happy.