The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  A bald general had practised putts on the underfelt, while a prime minister, not to be outdone, had painted a picture of his own.

  The crowd had not realized. They had been thinking the house long past its serious phase. And wanted to know, how was the table placed, and what about Montgomery.

  "Yes, they were here." The dove-coloured guide had laid her rod on a table and was showing with her hands, like an artist. "All the architects of the invasion." As if war, too, were some stately edifice. She had removed her glasses and, with a small red impress each side of the nose, was a bird delicately marked. She was happy to please with her important information—the general's putts, the statesman's placed easel. And was glad, also, for the family in their great possession.

  The tour shifted along to another loop of cord. A notice once more asked, or kindly requested, that they do or refrain from doing; and went on to say that the library was lined with books to within ten feet of the ceiling (which itself depicted the story—

  pastel, concave, and none too decent—of Deianira and Hercules).

  Far below, the carpet was figured in pale colours like reflections.

  On polished tables photographs stood at angles, in silver frames, and were signed. You could see, time and again, the great R after the name.

  "Queen Alexandra, Princess Pat." The crowd picked them out, expert certainly in this. They prowled among chiffoniers and cre-denzas, and no one had the heart to deny. The dead and executed, the Russian and Prussian princes, struck no pity or terror: it was part of their privileged destiny, all one with the magnificence, the tiaras, the stars and garters, and long ropes of pearl.

  A man in herringbone said, "That's the bleeder." Heads turned sharply, but were soon nodding for the affliction of the little doomed Tsarevich.

  "Note the unusual group of the generations. And the Duke of Kent shortly before he was killed by Cecil Beaton." There was no lack of appreciation. A woman in paisley print was asked, most reasonably, not to touch.

  "Indeed it is the very same house," said Ted Tice. Where there was a sign, THIS WAY, they went downstairs together.

  From outside, the house was seen to be sculpted. There was no imagining ribs, beams, architraves, or stages of laborious construction. Virginia creeper reached the flaking windows of the room where generals had charted death; and a great wistaria strangled columns in a silent portico. The house prepared for mouldering as for another phase of life.

  Ted Tice sat with Caro on the lawn. The girl hugged her knees and said, "The creators of such a house should themselves be beautiful."

  "Probably the house was as much as they could manage in the way of beauty." The ginger man lay back on turf, arms beneath his head, and recited in his regional voice:

  "That they,

  Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day. "

  Caro's dress moulded a blue kneecap. "Do you suppose anyone anywhere is longing, or rearing the evidence now?"

  "If so, they'd best keep it dark, or they'll cop hell." By now, longing itself might be an admission of failure. Ted said, "Beauty is the forbidden word of our age, as Sex was to the Victorians. But without the same power to reassert itself." He might have been echoing Sefton Thrale: You'll be the ones to bear the brunt.

  Ted Tice sat with Caro on the lawn. A silence can easily fall between those who do not consider themselves a topic. And in any case the air was filled with the blunt sounds and green smells of the pruning and cropping. England was being cut back to the roots for its own good; that is the way you build character. The gardeners in grey shirts moved to put a stop to growth, or to hold it in check.

  Green fell in every form, and was carried off in baskets.

  "They are cutting down the very colour." Caroline Bell leaned forward and smiled to see her long belief justified. "The green we only knew about from books."

  "Grey Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest, And, behold, for repayment,

  September comes in with the wind of the West And the Spring in her raiment. "

  You might recite it in Elocution Class, but could hardly have it in English poetry. It was as if the poet had deliberately taken the losing, and Australian, side. He had grasped the nettle. But a nettle grasped remains a nettle, and grasping it an unnatural act. What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature and in lawns of emerald velours, or in flowers that could only be grown in Australia when the drought broke and with top-dressing. Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.

  Little girls sang, sing-song:

  "Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)."

  Involving themselves in a journey of ten thousand miles. For a punishment you might, after school, write one hundred times: Self reverence, self knowledge, self-control: These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

  The little girls licked nibs of tin and fingered pigtails, preparing for sovereign power.

  History was the folding coloured view of the Coronation that had been tacked on the classroom wall—the scene in the Abbey, with the names printed beneath. The Duke of Connaught, the Earl of Athlone, the slender King in ermine. Dora bought a coronation mug at Woolworth's: Long May They Reign. That was History, all of a piece with the Black Prince and the Wars of the Roses. Grace and Caro had been allowed to stay up one summer night to hear the Abdication crackle over the short-wave. Something you'll remember always.

  Australian History, given once a week only, was easily contained in a small book, dun-coloured as the scenes described. Presided over at its briefly pristine birth by Captain Cook (gold-laced, white-wigged, and back to back in the illustrations with Sir Joseph Banks), Australia's history soon terminated in unsuccess. Was engulfed in a dark stench of nameless prisoners whose only apparent activity was to have built, for their own incarceration, the stone gaols, now empty monuments that little girls might tour for Sunday outings: These are the cells for solitary confinement, here is where they.

  Australian History dwindled into the expeditions of doomed explorers, journeys without revelation or encounter endured by fleshless men whose portraits already gloomed, beforehand, with a wasted, unlucky look—the eyes fiercely shining from sockets that were already bone.

  That was the shrivelled chronicle—meagre, shameful, uninspired; swiftly passed over by teachers impatient to return to the service at the Abbey. The burden of a slatternly continent was too heavy for any child to shift. History itself proceeded, gorgeous, spiritualized, without a downward glance at Australia. Greater than Nature, inevitable as the language of morning prayers: O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.

  Sentiments of a magnitude to which only a very affected, bold or departing Australian might aspire.

  In the true, and northern, hemisphere, beyond the Equator that equalized nothing, even bath-water wound out in the opposite direction. Perhaps even the records gyrating on the gramophone.

  Australians could only pretend to be part of all that and hope no one would spot the truth.

  Once in a while, or all the time, there was the sense of something The Transit of Venus

  33

  supreme and obvious waiting to be announced. Like the day the boys at the junction were tormenting the swaggie and a man from nowhere told them, "E's a yooming being."

  When fiery December sets foot in the forest. . .

  They were living in a house with a tower and a view of the Heads. They had embroidered chairs, crystal dishes that chimed when flicked with a fingernail, and a fragment of oak from Nelson's flagship in a small velvet box. At school Caro was up to the Spanish Armada and the sad heart of Ruth, when the ferry called the Benbow turned over in Sydney
harbour and hideously sank. Grace was on a blue chair in the kindergarten and still had Miss McLeod, who had come out after the Great War and would be superannuated at Christmas.

  Miss McLeod played the organ for the school at morning prayers.

  "Hush'd was the Evening Hymn/' "For All the Saints," and, in season, "Once in Royal David's City." Everyone was C of E or something like it, except Myfanwy Burns and the Cohen girl. Religion was the baby in the manger, the boy with the slingshot, the coat of many colours.

  Caro and Grace knew what had happened to them was drastic.

  They could tell by flattering new attentions that had nothing to do with incredulous, persistent loss. They were slow to give up hope of miraculous reversal, and each morning woke disbelieving to the weather of death. It would have been hard to have weather appropriate or consoling, but this heat did not seem neutral.

  Full fathom five thy father lies. Mrs. Horniman in the house with the English lawn said there was nothing she would not do. And on Christmas Day they sweltered beside the Hornimans' celluloid tree while a bushfire broke out over at Clontarf. Grace got a threepen-ny-bit in the plum pudding, but afternoon grew awful. The children were forbidden to swim because of the turkey, and Athol Horniman hit Caro with a cricket ball.

  A few days later Dora told them, "It is 1939."

  Dora struck them both as unfamiliar. They scarcely recognized her from before, when she had been part of a family of five. The present Dora seemed not to have shared in the life before the Benbow. There was only one thing—a memory, not yet defined as such, of Dora shrieking beyond a closed door and Father saying,

  "Look what a daughter."

  It was hard to think where Dora might have been, for instance, on mornings of the great past when Grace and Caro were driven into town for new school clothes. Father dropped them off, the mother and two girls, in the important haze where metallic smells of town flowed along with the cars, sluggish between narrow ranks of buildings. A toast-rack tram, discoloured yellow, rocked them on wooden benches glossed with human passage. There were office girls with rolled hair and sailor hats of felt or straw; but there was no Dora, surely. The men sat in the open compartments at each end of the tram, their heavy waistcoats unbuttoned in the heat; flinging tobacco butts on slatted floors and leaning out to spit. In the rain, a canvas blind drew down for them on a rod. In the inside compartment Grace stood between her mother's knees and Caro swayed against an assortment of standing thighs. One and two halves, like the fare; and no Dora.

  Dora's own mother had died when she was born, as happened in stories. Dora was twenty-one, but had given up Teachers' College.

  Where they got down from the tram there were windows brilliant with coloured gloves and handbags and silk shoes, and shopping arcades lit like rainbows. The women passing along Pitt Street or Castlereagh had cooler faces and wore hats of violets or rose-buds, with little veils. Kegs of ale were nonetheless drawn on drays right past the best shops by pairs or teams of Clydesdales: chestnut necks straining in collars of sweated leather, great hooves under ruffs of streaked horsehair. And the driver collarless, frayed waistcoat open, no jacket, with his leather face and stained mop of horsehair moustache. Manure underfoot, and a bruised smell of dropped cabbage trodden by blinkered ponies harnessed to vegetable carts. Along the curb, barrows of Jaffas and Navels, or Tas-manian apples. All this, raffish and rural, at the fashionable conjunc-tion of Market and Castlereagh streets.

  At the same corner they would come upon the spectres dreaded by Caro and by Grace; and, from the looking and the looking away, by all who passed there. Apparitions of the terrible kind were dispersed throughout the city and might be expected at any shopping centre of the suburbs. For a dead and atrocious certainty they awaited you at this particular and affluent corner, which for that reason seemed not to be a street at all, but a pit or arena.

  Some of them stood, including those with only the one leg. The legless would be on the ground, against shop-windows. The blinded would have a sign, to that effect, around the neck—perhaps adding SUVLA or GALLIPOLI. Similarly, on the placard GASSED that hung beside pinned medals, might appear the further information, YPRES or ARRAS. Or the sign might say MESOPOTAMIA, quite simply, as you might write HELL.

  They took up separate places, perhaps having a dog with them or a child, or a gaunt woman silently holding out the cap. More usually, each alone. Who or what they had singly been, however, was sunk in the delved sameness of the eyes. Nothing more could be done to them, but their unsurpassable worst would be sustained forever and ever. Stillness was on the eyes even of the blind, closed on God knew what last sighting.

  What music they made, and how they sang, that ghastly orchestra in lopped and shiny serge, with unstrung fiddles and wheezing concertinas and the rusted mouth-organ grasped in the remaining and inexpert hand; the voices out of tune with everything but pitched extremity. How cruelly they wracked, for Depression pennies, an unwilling audience with their excruciating songs—"The Rose of No Man's Land," and "The Roses of Picardy," and "The Rose of Tralee," and "Oh My, I don't want to die, I want to go home." The war of the roses, roses, and smile, smile, smile.

  ''Ighty-tiddly-ighty,

  Carry me back to Blighty,

  Blighty is the place for me!"

  Even children—children who had not yet experienced virtue and might be ruthless in tormenting playfellows—were struck adult in pity: the Great War being deeply known to them, learned before memory, as infants know the macabre from dreams. Nothing would have truly surprised them, not if they had been explicitly told of the exploded horses, exploded men, the decomposing gestures of the dead, the trench-foot, trench-mouth, the starshells, the terror. The bully of a sergeant-major howling about clay piping to those as good as dead, the visiting statesman jocose behind the lines. They knew about Wipers and Plug Street and the Line. They had found it all out somehow from the speechless instruction at street corners and the songs of the roses and "Inky Pinky Parlay-VoO." Uncovered it in defiance of the brittle brown wreaths at cenotaphs, two minutes' silence, and the pools of remembrance where beer bottles lolled, and the monuments to war's sweetest symbols—the soldier, bronze rifle rested, supporting his decorously felled comrade, the marshal cleanly victorious on his flawless mare.

  How long they were, how immensely long: the four years that would go on forever.

  On Anzac or Armistice Day, Grace and Caroline Bell had been let through the crowd to watch thin-faced men walk in rows, in the decent suit if they had one, pin-stripe, with scraps of braid aligned in small rainbows on the breast, the poppy of red paper in the lapel, the sprig of rosemary. Being little children, Caroline and Grace Bell had been brought to the front of the crowd to see this, as having the greater need.

  In the wringing of their hearts, knowledge had entered. Knowledge stood formidable and helpless in their small rib-cages as, glancing aside, they dropped tuppence in the extended cap, or ground the rosemary to death between their fingers for the smell.

  The house to which they now moved with Dora was smaller, with camellia trees on the lawn but too many hydrangeas. At the back it was buffalo grass and spiked shrubs, and a rockery hewn from the sandstone slope. Indoors, the responsive crystal, the splinter of the true cross from H.M.S. Victory had become museum pieces, relics of another life. At each side of their own brief horizontal, the long streets dropped to the sea. They might almost, had they known it, have been at Rio or Valparaiso. Night followed night, nights of oceanic silence not even broken now by the screams of bandicoots in traps on the Hornimans' English lawn.

  In the slit of two headlands the Pacific rolled, a blue toy between paws. The scalloped harbour was itself a country, familiar as the archipelago a child governs among the rocks: it hardly seemed the open sea could offer more. Yet, passing into that slit Pacific, ocean liners took the fortunate to England. You went to the Quay to see them off, the Broadhursts or Fifields. There was lunch on board, which Dora did not enjoy because of a small fishbone caught in her
throat. Sirens were blown, and kisses; streamers and tempers snapped. And the Strathaird, or Orion, was hugely away. You could be home in time to see her go through the Heads, and Caro could read out the name on the stern or bow. Even Dora was subdued at witnessing so incontrovertible an escape.

  Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.

  Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did not generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.

  There was the harbour, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else.

  Any more private joy—in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost—sa-voured of revelation and was uncountenanced; even in wistaria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory. Though it could hardly be right to relish where Dora was aggrieved, the girls put their smooth faces to gardenias, inhaling December for a lifetime.

  Inland was the Bush, the very name a scorched and sapless blur.

  Inland was a drought, a parched unvisited mystery, a forlorn horizon strung on a strand of slack barbed wire. Dora would not drive farther than Gosford, and none of them had ever seen an Abo. At Easter, the Whittles took them to Bulli Pass, where the radiator boiled over and they all stood by the side of the road after rolling up stones to the rear tires. Getting out to push, plump Mr. Whittle reminded of a growing infant whose first impulse is to trundle the perambulator in which he has been wheeled. Returning home, Dora sat in an unaccustomed chair and said, "You will not get me to do that again."