The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  There was the glacial flow of Tertia's moire on the carpet as she sailed away from her mother, a pinnace from the flagship.

  How much time had been taken to prepare that evening's version of Tertia Drage—the sleek hair and molded silver dress, the smooth armpit, gleaming necklace and little pointed shoes; the enamel matching on her fingertips and concealed toes. Yet Tertia was indifferent, scornful, as if decked out in these trinkets and gauzes quite against her inclination. You might nearly believe in her neutrality, against all the evidence. Tertia had dis-sociated herself from human weakness: when she touched her dress with near-derision, mere life in others was made to seem commotion.

  Yet she had begun the evening with a sharp defeat.

  Tertia's mother said, "She spoils every dinner party she attends."

  Fond and proud. Crushing a billowing blue sofa, Lady Drage now became a creature too heavy for its element, a cormorant on the waves. An extra guest she had brought took his place on the hearth, where flakes of fire sprang up behind him. A tall, reddish man about forty, he cleared his throat with assurance but spoke little. He had a signet ring, old gold, smooth as a knuckle; and wore a Brigade of Guards tie.

  Some talk of costs, and taxation, was a formality with which such evenings must now be opened.

  Caro asked Ted Tice, " D o English people always speak of money?"

  "Mainly the rich ones."

  Mr. Collins from Kenya, seated in a leather chair, knew a joke about Australia, or Orstrylia; which he said was from the recent war, giving the setting as Tobruk, but which in fact went back to the Great War and the campaign in the Dardanelles. The story was as follows: A wounded soldier asks an Australian nurse at his bedside, "Was I brought here to die?" and " N o , " she answers, "yes-terdie."

  That was the joke. Caroline and Grace Bell were familiar with this story, which was often told to them when they were introduced.

  Ted Tice had not heard it before. It could be seen that tears came to his scratched eye as they did to the other, flawless one.

  Mrs. Charmian Thrale gently touched a collar of pearls. Whiter than pearl, her throat might never have been exposed to light.

  (In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Charmian Playfair, volunteering as a nurse's aide, was assigned to ambulance duty at Victoria Station where casualties were arriving on hospital trains.

  The loaded ambulance trundled back through dark streets carrying its racks of blanketed men—who, from their spotless newspaper anonymity of "the wounded," were suddenly incarnate as moaning, silent, or plucky inhabitants of rent, individual flesh. Enclosed with these spectres in swaying gloom, a nineteen-year-old girl put her hand to her soft throat. Yet moved as best she could, to supply water or answer questions, among the grey blankets and the red, rusty, or blackened bandages. There was a boy of her own age to whose whisper she had to bend, her face nearly touching his: "So cold. Cold. My feet are so cold." And, almost capably, the girl answered, "I'll fix that"; turning to adjust the blanket, and discovering he had no feet.)

  Around Mrs. Charmian Thrale these impressions passed in ritual rather than confusion: the simultaneous preoccupation of girls with love and dresses, the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion; an imbalance of hope and memory, a savage tangle of history. These welling together in a flow of time that only some godlike grammar—some unknown, aoristic tense—might describe and reconcile.

  Mrs. Thrale shifted roses to make room for an ashtray. Her back did not touch the sofa.

  Tertia's chestnut mere was saying, "Not Kenya, no never alas, but we of course were in Egypt when my husband was—oh picturesque I grant you, who can deny, Luxor, Karnak, but the beggars and what can one do. Nobody is more tender-hearted actually—to a fault my family always tell me—but it would not be a kindness, indeed dangerous to. Isn't that so, Guy?"

  Her husband mechanically gave his endorsement. He sat between the women, a panel that had warped for lack of use. He had long since become the views he had never contested: perjured acquiescence registered in an inward shrivelling of lip and chin. Yet he suddenly said, starting from sleep, "In Egypt she suffered from the sun." And did look about, if not intently. "Pigmentation, that's the word. Parents had no sense, forced her outdoors as a girl, did a lot of harm." The remonstrance an echo of a time when he had imagined that his wife, of all people, needed his protection. Yet, between the fire and the ice, she had survived.

  The dreaming dog, Grasper, twitched on the hearth, where the tall man in the Brigade tie stood impassive, lighting his cigarette.

  He had been introduced as Captain Cartledge.

  The young people had drifted to the other end of the room, where they were grouped together, all standing. Their elders smiled to see this—someone at least was having a good time; which, it was hoped, would counter their own dullness. The galaxy of lovely young women, and, in Paul, one desirable young man.

  Caroline Bell did not quite look young, bearing her new beauty like a difference of generation.

  It was churlish of Ted Tice simply to stand there. It had somehow been agreed, on both sides, that he should not be one of them.

  "In my usual way," said Tertia Drage, "I lost the car keys." My usual way, she would say, or my inimitable way, just like me—to connote distinction, even fame. If Tertia did it, it must matter.

  Ted stood taciturn, the underdog; and yet prevailed. While Tertia, topdog, had suffered a defeat this evening and might again do so.

  Ted had repaired the table in time, despite last-minute anxiety from Sefton Thrale about the hammering. Linen, silver, and flowers were deployed and candles placed, the table solemn as a dignitary lying in state. In its elaborate discretion, the table was their cue, a setting for behaviour.

  Tertia told Ted, "I suppose you are a whizz at carpentry, that sort of thing."

  "That's right."

  "Lucky you. Runs in families, I expect."

  "As in the Holy Family." This was Caro. And the man with the Brigade tie looked out from the elderly end of the room.

  Paul smiled. "Saint Caro, Protectress of Carpenters." He was on her side, a side differentiated from Ted Tice's, or even from his own. Ted perhaps chose to have no side that evening, preferring no one should join him. He was not even guilty of showing that he judged. They were ranged so that Paul and Tertia, betrothed, faced the others, but in the talk Paul would sometimes cross over to Caro.

  It could not be said this was brave, yet it involved a certain risk.

  Tertia now said, "All of you together in one house." As if this were absurd of them. "Like castaways on an island."

  "Or a country house party," Grace remarked, "where a murder has been committed and all the genteel people are suspects."

  It was agreed that Grace could never be a suspect. Ted Tice stood silent. Ruling Grace out made the rest of them appear more capable of violence. Grac£ was separate, not only in her mildness but in having fixed her affections. She had been claimed, and appeared as one of them for a last time and incompletely. For Grace, there had already been public avowals and secret disclosures, and the letters from Ottawa beginning Dearest. In someone's view, she had attained excellence.

  These conditions might now have equally applied to Tertia—yet did not, although no marriage could seem more inevitable than hers. It was notable that Tertia never laid public claim to Paul by touching or by the other proprietary little exhibitions through which lovers show themselves complacent or insecure. On this night of their betrothal, Tertia forbore to link herself in any way with Paul and, standing at his side, conveyed a peculiarly hard detachment in what should have been the sweeter outline of her body. There was something in it of the disdain she showed for her carefully chosen clothes.

  Paul now said to Caro, "Where did you get that dress?"—

  bluntly, and, it would seem, not praising.

  It was then that Captain Cartledge joined them—making clear, by brusquely leaving the hearth and crossing the room, that he had been
waiting the chance. Joined Caro, in fact, since he said at once,

  "Yes, the dress is beautiful"—exposing, by his compliment, Paul's withheld praise. A horseman, Captain Cartledge had ridden over to the castle from a friend's house nearby, not expecting to stay.

  Hence, he remarked, the wrong clothes, the tie. He had the complexion, lightly webbed, of outdoor living and indoor drinking, and was a high, handsome man who might have been cruel. There was boldness, or purity of a kind, in his walking up to Caro with the word "beautiful," which cut across their youthful feints and begrudgings with its single stroke of experience, making even Paul Ivory appear unformed.

  Tertia in her silver cataphract could not be pleased. Nor could Ted Tice, though it would have taken more than the aversion to bind them. Tertia exchanged with Cartledge the same cold recognition she offered Paul. And Ted Tice saw that these two had, perhaps that very day, been lovers.

  At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.

  At table Captain Cartledge sat by Caro. Mahogany glowed like marble, the very flowers shone like glass or silver; everything was something other than its lustrous self, and the table a catafalque no longer. It was inconceivable that a dark countryside lay draped outside the copper curtains.

  "You've searched each other's souls, then." This was Captain Cartledge on the intimacy of young people in a house together.

  Caro said that soul-searching was at an end. Ted Tice would leave, tomorrow, for Edinburgh; from Thursday, Paul Ivory was to be some days in London, and, on that day also, Grace would choose, in Winchester, material for her wedding-dress. She pointed them out around the table like strangers; while Tertia, opposite, cleaned her plate with her same disdain.

  "And you?" As if the rest were immaterial.

  "I?" Making known that she chose to be immaterial, too, to him.

  "I'm going over to see Avebury Circle for a couple of days." She said that Ted Tice had written out for her, for Thursday, the changes of trains.

  The Captain said, "The prehistoric monument," while the table listened without knowing why. "It is prehistoric," he repeated, as if this narrowed it down precisely. And, having done training on the Salisbury Plain, went on at once about Stonehenge.

  Suddenly, down the table, Paul Ivory spoke; lifting his eyes to Caro's and giving the slight, ironic smile with which people excuse themselves for remembering poetry or prose: "The heathen temple, do you mean?"

  And Caro, unsmiling, both slow and instant in reply: "Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the D'Urbervilles."

  Going back in the car Tertia said, "That elder Bell girl has a neck like a man's."

  Tertia's mother was thinking that the middle classes kept their silver far too clean.

  W hen Paul drove past the station and turned into the main road, Caro said nothing. Having gathered himself for an effort of persuasion, he took his time before addressing new circumstances.

  In these moments the girl's stillness was such as to create, paradoxi-cally, a bodily alteration.

  "You knew I wasn't going to London?"

  She nodded.

  "Wasn't going to drop you off at your train?" He would not have exchanged for anything the suspense generated by her short nods.

  "And you knew why. When did you realize these things?"

  "The night of the dinner."

  "You always know everything, then?"

  She said, "I am inexperienced."

  "Something we must rectify."

  He was creating an exchange he might have had with Tertia.

  Caro wondered if he did this to women, made them talk in such a way, in such a voice, with the double meanings that diminished meaning, stretching the tension-wire between man and woman to a taut, purposeless antagonism. His banter gave an unearthly feeling that you were not hearing his true voice, and that it might not even exist.

  She said, "Don't let's speak like this."

  "It's how I talk."

  "You might like a change." His present object, surely, being just that.

  "You will never sound like Tertia, if that's what you mean."

  She waited, fearing his disloyalty, or his loyalty. Paul went on,

  " O r look like her, either. You must have noticed Tenia's eyes." He brought the car nearly to a halt on the empty road. "Look at me."

  The moment took them further, as if serious discussion had occurred or some harm been done. He had not yet touched her, and the certainty he would do so gave speech a finality: the last words of their dispassionate selves. "When women have eyes like hers, it's usually impossible to tell if they're crying." Paul might be accustomed to a likelihood of women's tears. "In Tertia's case, however, one may rest assured."

  "You chose Tertia."

  "I'm not here to account for myself." In this there was already the quick, overbearing petulance of the celebrated: Paul drawing on his future fame. However, he continued with no transition, "She was exactly the same at fifteen when I first set eyes on her, the most unphysical person I'd ever seen."

  "Is that an attraction?"

  "Let's leave Tertia out of it for the moment."

  They turned at a signpost, leaving Tertia out of it. "We're heading for Avebury, if that's what you still intend."

  "Yes. I want to see it." She wanted to see Avebury because Ted Tice had described it to her. She leaned her head to the air of the window, leaving Ted out of it.

  They drove over a surprising countryside like a delta or reclaimed shore, low and scarcely sloping beneath a sky of high massed cloud. Caro said, "For this moment it is not like England.

  More like the centre of America."

  "I'd like to live awhile in America, and use it the way their writers have used us. English writers can't manage American talk, they just write in their own prejudices. The English have a terrible ear for any speech except their own anyway, and as regards Americans we're all stone-deaf here—deaf, that is, to everything but the easiest awful tourist. That's why an articulate American gets told in England that he doesn't talk like an American: because he's spoiling the game."

  He could not have found a better way of reaching her than by making sense. And, since there were infinite possibilities to Paul Ivory's utmost candour, could even have had this in mind. For Paul, sincerity was something to fall back on when other methods flagged.

  He said, "A lot of people in England pass their time collecting negative evidence on almost any theme. Old Thrale is archetypal."

  It was more unexpected than his betrayal of Tertia, for Paul was throwing over not only the Professor's adulation but his own winning ways. It was also remarkable how this repudiation turned Sefton Thrale's sycophancy to pathos.

  "What does it mean, then? That you detest them all?" She meant Tertia, Thrale. But he took it to be the nation—or preferred it so, the public breach of faith being more presentable than a private one.

  "I loathe the undernourishment of this country, the grievance, the censoriousness, the reluctance to try anything else. The going through to the bitter end with all the wrong things." Paul's face no more expressed loathing at that moment than Caro's expressed love; yet those were their prevailing passions. The car kept its even pace, a swift capsule giving form to their energies.

  Paul said, "You know my father was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp." Assuming Caro's awareness of this fact, Paul Ivory was quite forgetful of her own father's death by drowning. "When he came back in 1945 he had a jar of beef extract with him, a three-ounce jar of Marmite with a rusted top and the label off, that he had gone into prison with and kept iritact for four years. Prisoners do preserve talismans, of course, but this might have saved a life for a few days, or kept a fugitive on the go for a week. Except that the idiot farce of preserving it—of withholding it, in fact—had counted for more. Well, that is England in all its bloodiness."

  A child waved to them at a crossing. Paul waved back.

  "The day after he go
t home he produced this jar of Marmite with the rusted top. Plonked it down on the lunch-table and told us in his graveyard voice it hadn't been touched in three years and so-and-so many months of starvation in the camp, and had been with him at every meal. Not bombastic, of course, the off-handedness being part of the larger vacancy. It was one of those occasions you can't rise to because you don't accept the rules. I couldn't stand it

  —the devotion to Marmite, the reverential baffled silence round the table. And I told him, 'Then its hour has struck, for God knows we're hungry enough here too.' And I unscrewed the bloody thing and dug my spoon into it there and then, to desanctify the Marmite cult before it took hold of me too and embalmed me."

  They entered a lane where the heavy overhang of trees was a closing of curtains. Paul said, "Well, speak to me. Or is that a damned Marmite look on your face too?"

  Caro said, "I think your story brutal and Oedipal, if that gives me a Marmite look." Summoning real courage for a heavy risk.

  "Why should you mock anybody's endurance or their means of survival? You, who've never faced death or even danger?"

  Paul lifted his hands from the wheel in a show of hopelessness.

  But when they drove out from the screen of trees he said, "I might add, it tasted foul. I'm lucky to be alive." And they laughed, and gladly forgot all about Paul's father.

  When Paul Ivory's father turned conscientious objector as a young officer in the trenches late in 1917, he had already published a volume of verse that, according to its pale paper cover, astonished by a lyrical precocity—astonished, presumably, because at nineteen he was considered old enough to leave the world but not to have ideas about it. Following a court-martial, and two years of detention that included an enforced stay in a mental asylum, he produced a second collection of poems, of the same lyric form and pastoral theme. And this was, in a public sense, his undoing. Lyricism had gone out with the war; peace had brought in belligerence. That a doomed subaltern had celebrated, under fire, the glories of his native Derbyshire had been affecting and commendable; that an adult survivor in civilian dress should stick, through extreme, violent, and controversial experiences, to the identical rambles and brambles was absurd. Rex Ivory was seen to have no sense of his era or his opportunities; to be, even more obtusely, unaware of new movements in contemporary criticism. And his second book, like his several subsequent collections, was received with curt contempt.