The Transit of Venus (41 page)

"So he's a doctor is he. He has a lovely face."

When Christian praised the seedcake, Grace said, "I got it from that nice woman at the corner."

Every spring the Thrales gave a party—drinks and little things to eat. They called this decorous event "our smash." Grace went over her question in silence: I would like to invite that young doctor. We might ask Rupert's doctor, who lives practically next door. What about asking that Doctor Dance, who was super with Rupert?

To the question as ultimately phrased, Christian responded,

"Good idea." He had it in mind to ask someone very senior from his department, and supposed a doctor would mix.

Grace telephoned the hospital. Dance knew her voice: "Hello."

He did not say Mrs. Thrale, and had never done so. He wrote the date of the party, and six to eight. "Is it a special occasion?"

"It's my birthday. Not that we tell people."

She had a new dress that displayed her breasts. Christian said,

"Isn't it a bit bare?" He traced the outline of black silk with his fingers on her flesh. "Happy birthday, Grace darling."

Although they had a couple from Jamaica to do the drinks, it was Grace who opened the door to Angus Dance. Before entering, he bent and kissed her cheek, murmuring "Birthday." He gave her a little packet, which was later found to contain lavender water.

Grace trembled under the astonishing kiss, from which she turned away with the male impress of jacket indelible on her silk and female arms. When Christian came over from the foot of the stairs, discarding his party face for the serious theme of Rupert, she moved back into the curve of the piano, where Dance soon joined her.

"Who plays?"

"I do." For once she did not add, "My sole accomplishment."

He leaned to look at stacked music. She had put the Chopin on top to impress. She saw him turn the sheets with deliberate, large hands; she watched his almost spiritual face. Authority had passed from him in this amateur setting, and his youth was a blow, a disappointment. Authority had in fact passed to her. She presided, a matron, over her household, her associates, her charming children: mistress of the situation.

She did not know how to address him now that he was disestablished. At the hospital the nurses had called him Doctor, as women with a family will call their own husbands Father—or Daddy.

They spoke about the community centre, and Grace told him the art show would open on Sunday. Dance said, "I might look in."

Rupert appeared with Dance's whisky, and other guests were introduced. In an oval mirror they had bought at Bath she saw the room, tame with floral charm and carpeted, like England, wall to wall in green. And herself, in this field of flowers—practically indis-tinguishable from cushions and curtains, and from ornaments that, lacking temperament, caused no unrest. In the mirror she could see, rather than hear, her husband saying "Let's face it," and watch her eldest son, Jeremy, blond and beloved, behaving beautifully. She saw the rings on her fingers, and a bracelet that was insured. Look as she might, she could not see Angus Dance in that mirror (he had been taken to the dining-room for a slice of the ham), and knew she never would.

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 society."

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.