The Transit of Venus (27 page)

In the succeeding days and weeks, the old man, as he had now conclusively become, revived considerably, made progress with the therapy, and began to distinguish among the nurses—which ones he liked, which had it in for him. When the doctors came he had small witticisms, and some complaints. Like a ball lobbed to a great height, he made his few last diminishing bounces.

In compensation for, or extension of, his own feebleness, he noted signs of ageing in Christian—hunch of shoulders, first crescent of paunch; and a gesture Christian had developed of passing his hand up over his face and brow, as if casting off a web. Sefton Thrale did not know why these details should give him satisfaction, but observed them with listless self-indulgence and made no effort to overlook or find them touching. The doctors had said that whatever he enjoyed was good for him.

By Whitsun he was able to write an occasional note to friends.

His handwriting, which had always been minuscule, enlarged with this ultimate flourish of reality. He did not ponder his errors, or think tolerantly of his enemies: to admit qualities in his opponents would be, by now, to recognize the wrong he had done them.

He was allowed to go home in the summer, and at Peverel a nurse was engaged for the nights. It was she who found him dead one morning in September, when he had seemed over the worst.

Obituaries were not as extensive as they might have been, but there was a distinguished funeral, and people travelled by rail from London to attend. The service, like a good connection, waited for the train. There was music, there were flowers. The congregation stood, knelt, and sang. And a diminutive young minister commanded a fair measure of attention with a text from Galatians, as well as the inevitable Corinthians. During other parts of the service the chancel arch was seen to be late Norman, an early example in England, and it was noted that a dry-cleaning ticket still attached itself to the coat of an usher.

Tertia's mother, some years a widow, sat in the middle of a forward pew: the grey turret of her tulle hat itself like the lantern of some solemn abbey or cathedral.

"Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world/' With this text, the life of a scientist was ingeniously eulogized, while Grace Thrale dreamily recalled the childhood bondage of bushfires, drought, the Murrumbidgee in flood, and the Southerly blowing cool over Sydney after a blazing day. She held her mother-in-law's gloved hand, knowing that Charmian Thrale allowed her to do this out of civility, so as not to seem ungrateful, but that it could seem condescending, or even a way of showing that the balance had tipped at last. Grace thought leniently of Sefton Thrale, who had been as kind to her as it was in his power to be.

Lately she had seen her little boy—her second son, Hugh—take up the old man's stick as he sat feebly in his chair; and whirl it, swing it, toss it, in innocent mockery. A pang was perhaps more for herself, or for mankind, than for Sefton Thrale, who was abruptly gone.

Now with his love, now in his colde grave.

At the end of the pew, pressed against a clustered pier, Caro had set herself to remembering Robert Browning:

There's a great text in Galatians,

Once you trip on it, entails

Twenty-nine distinct damnations,

One sure, if another fails.

These damnations were distinctly given as adultery, fornication, lasciviousness, and the like, all of which she had practised. It was a curious, almost idle thought that she was so great a sinner. Perdi-tion weighed as nothing beside the laceration of departed love.

Beside that, an old man's death was a mere distraction. She leaned her cheek on frigid sandstone, as she had once, in childhood, leaned in egotistic desolation on a majolica plaque, not knowing change was at hand.

"There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory."

The congregation stood for the last time, and Sefton Thrale was over the worst for good: his mortality mitigating all, at least for a while. Poor old man. Ted Tice's strictures now seemed too exigent.

Death could so easily put the living, however rightful, in the wrong.

Christian's back was the back of a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. In commendable control, he was also seen to be so by commendable effort: already, in bearing and breathing, no longer a son.

Professor Thrale left a larger estate than anyone had foreseen.

Although his widow had the use of Peverel for her lifetime and an adequate income, virtually everything went to Christian, who in this way became quite well-to-do. Explaining the will to Grace, he said, "I feel we should keep it to ourselves." He meant the legal content, but could have been understood more explicitly.

G i r l s were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed, or in sheer nylon to which an old cardigan had been added for warmth, girls were pushing back bedclothes and groping for slippers. They were tying the cords of dressing-gowns and pulling pins from their hair, they were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. Those who shared were nudging each other out of the way and saying, "And it's only Tuesday." Those who lived alone were moaning and switching on radio or television. Some said prayers; one sang.

It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present, or future.

It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun. The weekends washing hair and underwear, and going in despondent pairs to the pictures. For some, who could not have done otherwise, it was their fate, decreed by Mum, Dad, and a lack of funds or gumption. Others had come from the ends of the earth to do it—had arrived from Auckland or Karachi or Jo'burg, having saved for years to do just this, having wrung or cajoled the where-withal out of tear-stained parents. Not all were very young, but all, or nearly all, wished for a new dress, a boyfriend, and eventual domesticity. No two, however, were identical: which was the victory of nature over conditioning, advertising, and the behavioural sciences—no triumph, but an achievement against the odds.

Among the awakening women, that New Year, was Caroline Bell.

Caro had passed another examination and moved to another flat, where there were high ceilings, and draughts at long windows.

Learning the address, Christian had remarked, "I didn't know there was anything cheap round there."

"It's over a shop," Caro told him, by way of reassurance.

For the first time she had a table and two chairs of her own, and a gold-coloured rug from India.

In the morning she was closing one of the windows, had drawn it down and was leaning both hands on the hasps. On the inside sill there was a sprinkling of soot and flaked white paint. A branch of quince blossom, brought by Ted Tice the week before, was propped in a glass vase. Caro was standing at her second-floor window in a green dressing-gown and thinking of the women, of whom she was one—the women, waking yet dormant, who were getting up all over London.

Across the street a man on the curb looked up at her; looked up in the same swift, focusing way that she looked down. He appeared to have arrived at a destination, and might have been a figure in a spy story keeping watch on a fateful house: a wide, tall, motionless man in a dark-blue coat, who held a black stick and stood with feet apart and his bare dark head raised, confident that the house, or the world, would yield to siege.

She leaned, he looked. From her arched figure to his inexorable one was no great distance, and their eyes now met as they might have done in a room. There was momentary, complex stillness until, with a show of normality, Caro lifted her hands and dissolved the spell.

He slightly bowed, as if he came from a graceful nation, France or Italy. They resumed their motions of interruption, crossing roads or rooms. Caro's bare feet on the yellow carpet, Caro's thin fingers yanking a dress from a hanger; the man's wide hand raised for a cab.

All the girls of London shuddered, waiting for the bus. Some had knitted themselves unbecoming brown Balaclavas, with worse mittens to match. Some held a boiled egg, still hot, in their glove—

which warmed the hand, and could be eaten cold at lunch time in the ladies' room. At that hour all London was ashudder, waiting for the bus.

At Caro's office that day there was a deputation from South America. Four exiles had come to plead for their imprisoned comrades: Let a governmental message be sent, merely a message, proposing mercy. Pleading of this kind was not unusual when executions were to take place in other lands. What would be unusual would be if the message were dispatched.

On this occasion there were the four applicants, or supplicants, and a man from the United States who had taken up their cause.

Only these five, and Caro, were punctual in the meeting-room.

Northern winter overlaid the summer faces of the four exiles like sallow illness; featureless with it, they were the more submitted to present extremity. Later on they might become distinct with elo-quence, but for the present remained an amalgam, a team. Their clothes were too light, and too light-coloured, and too American, to do them any good here. Only the man from New York was well dressed, having a dark-blue coat open over a good flannel suit.

It was the man from the curb in Mount Street.

He crossed the room to drop his coat and stick on a spare chair.

He said to Caro, "Let's hope this is a good omen." Again he had an easy grace, though not from a graceful nation.

Eight men were to be hanged. Or shot, that was not clear. Two officials had now entered the room with their air of punctilious humanity that portended refusal. To be perfectly frank we do not feel that intervention by Her Majesty's Government would be useful. And must also take account of the long and singularly close cooperation between our two nations.

The American said that was precisely why. He was the spokes-man, a public man who had founded something—perhaps a founda-tion, or it was an orchestra, or a museum, or all of these. He had lived for a time in the Latin country in question and had recently been advised, officially, not to return there.

Attention was paid him here because he was wealthy and did not come from a gimcrack country like the other petitioners—or the auditors themselves. For these reasons consideration was shown him, although it was made plain he had not the authority. When he described certain tortures, the two officials became disconcerted, withdrawn, fascinated, as if he were discussing in public the act of love. His four companions were growing discernible, their faces retinged by feeling: old sepia photographs whose unnatural flush had been externally applied. One was chopped and stocky. Another, exhausted and elderly—leaning forward to rock his body as if in pain. The third had high-coloured Andean features, and shabby teeth outclassed by a gold bicuspid. The fourth, who was tall and personable, had ginger, kinky hair and the dense freckles of a freakish pigmentation. His compatriots would turn to this fourth man, making him a leader.

This freckled man had large properties—orchards, pastures. In his case, a possibility of self-interest comforted his official hearers by introducing an element of the rational. Ted Tice had once pointed out that an independent act of humanity is what society can least afford.

The distinction of these men was that they entreated on behalf of others. It was this that gave them an authority the authorities would never have. The one who bent forward had a huge tie-clip, shiny, dragging on a flowered tie; and fingered this lucky charm.

He had a pencil, like an unlit cigarette, between his lips; and a cataractal rheum on both eyes, like an old dog.

Caro knew there was no question of it. She had heard that yesterday: It is quite out of the question, let ourselves in for, no end to it if we once, interference in the internal affairs of, do more harm than good. There had also been a call to Washington, eliciting the reply, ''Counterproductive."