The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  "This will help." He spilled a few drops of it with the starting up of the train. She saw the initials N G W C in the silver. He dried the overflow from his fingers with a white handkerchief while she drank, then poured a very little for himself. The handkerchief had the same initials coiled in a corner. He said, "Take your time." He sat back opposite her, politely arranging his tailored legs not to touch, placing an elbow on the ledge of the little window. "There is plenty of time."

  He did not mean there was time for existence to resume but that she would come to accept what must now occur. There was the silver and the linen, the granular tweed, and the dirty rim of the window. She had clasped her hands in her lap, a becalmed attitude she and her sister both adopted under stress; and held his gaze, unthinking, unblinking. Hills and dales wobbled past the window.

  A factory momentarily obliterated the view, and was swiftly withdrawn like the wrong slide on a projector. There was a damp, metallic smell in the compartment, an ancient reek of upholstery, a whiff from a nearby lavatory, and the more immediate taste of brandy.

  He said, "I am at your disposal," but she would not be deceived, or scarcely heard. As to her silence, he would have said, "It does not bother me." He pondered whether it might have been the wall-eyed boy, before remembering that Ted Tice had already left

  —for Glasgow, Edinburgh, or possibly Paris. The fact of Paul Ivory was a shade more interesting, if only for caste reasons.

  There were stations of rusted dahlias, from which the sun succes-sively withdrew. In field after field, the hops were strung up. Somewhere near the front of the train the old couple dozed; and once the wife asked, between snoozes, "What do you think that word comes from—roue?" saying it rooey and getting no reply.

  Caro's hair touched the window-frame. She did not close her eyes. Cartledge said, "It has not harmed your looks, you know."

  She asked, " H o w much longer?" And his cuff went up. Then,

  "At what station do we arrive?" Not calling him Nick, as he had said to.

  "You were intending to go—where?"

  "There's a place in Gloucester Road where they take Australians."

  "My dear, you make them sound like paroled convicts."

  "We send friends there. Failing that, another of the kind in Cromwell Road."

  "You'll be much better off in North Audley Street. Where I take Australians." He offered her the flask again, the sun glinting on it as on a gun-barrel. "I assume, by the way," he said, "that you left the inevitable note on the pincushion—some convincing and quite fictitious explanation?"

  They swayed along among diminishing hops and burgeoning kitchen gardens. Two men in adjacent green back yards reached to each other companionably across a wall; or could have been grappling. The sky was falling redly on the land now, and a hillside loomed like a haunch of beef. Captain Cartledge shook cigarettes from an ordinary pack, though somewhere there would be an ini-tialled silver case to match the flask. He said, "On Sunday nights they always leave something out for me. Soup, chicken. My couple, I mean."

  So there was a couple, leaving a cold supper ready for the Captain, giving a good rub to tarnished initials. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Captain, my Captain. Couple, my Couple.

  Captained, coupled. There would be sheets, pillowcases, linen initials coiled to spring.

  The Captain in his shadowed corner was cool above the white blaze of collar and cuffs—apt streaks like markings of a racehorse.

  He had not, as he might have put it, so much as laid a finger on her.

  He said, "Better at any rate than a dark night of the soul in the Gloucester Road." "At any rate" put the thing in perspective.

  There was beaded sweat at her hairline. If she blacked out or went to pieces he would have bitten off more than he could chew.

  But she remained distinct, integral, contemptuous, in her place opposite. He added, "Night brings, among other things, counsel."

  From the syntax it was apparent he had said this before.

  The sky was settling either into a rose-ripe composure of summer evening or into an arc of monstrous contusions, depending how you looked at it. They were crossing a maze of tracks near the river, and there was a fine view of St. Paul's. Caro was on her feet, reaching up to the rack for her bag.

  He said, "For pity's sake," as he had said at the station, and lifted the bag down for her. They were standing, balancing, a few inches from each other and she had her hands by her sides. Her lips were lightly drawn back so that the lower teeth showed, and in that instant she might have been considered cruel as he.

  She looked in his face. "I have already made love today."

  He staggered to keep his feet as the train belted for home, then rocked on his toes, in control. He was taller than she by about five inches. "I'm aware of the terms. All the same, let's see if we can't offer you something short of martyrdom." He glanced round the compartment. "All set?"

  He was first on the platform. Following, she saw his quick sleeve raised: "Taxi." And got into his dark cab while he was still giving the address.

  Part II

  THE CONTACTS

  M v dear Caro—

  There are sixty thousand students in Paris, most of them in the corridor outside this room. Last week, however, the building was deserted for Easter and calm as a monastery. My window looks on a courtyard full of flowering trees—hawthorn, a Judas tree, and, very near, a big lilac coming out in purple pyramids. There is a fountain and

  —concealed—a thrush. During the holiday I drove with two French colleagues to the mines near Lille, where we went down a pit. The coal-face straight from Dante, worked by boys of sixteen or so, mostly North Africans who spoke no French. Worse than this were the hovels they went back to afterwards, ten to a filthy hut. Having uselessly petitioned the Ministere du Travail on behalf of these people, my two friends are helping them form a union. We returned to Paris by way of the First World War cemeteries of Vimy and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and a quarter of a million graves.

  I work. I think of you. These are not alternating propositions—I think of you always. Since writing you last, I've been to a show of drawings by Leonardo, a one-man industrial revolution. Have seen a good play, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, as well as Jean Vilar and Gerard Philipe in Le Cid, a judo championship, and Senator Kefauver on television. Kefauver dismaying enough, God knows, but I am regarded as his champion here, there being so much facile and uninformed anti-Americanism among my colleagues. I dislike unanimity (or solidarity as it's perniciously called), and anyway the mindless Soviet and China worship bores me—particularly in this land of en principe.

  The man I came here to work with continues to impress me, humanly and professionally. It is true he's made mistakes, in part because he has done so much. Those who undertake less can be more circumspect.

  (And those who attempt nothing—whether of the soul or the intellect

  —are safest, and of course most critical, of all. It's easy enough to denounce—all you need is ill will.) What an atrocious, sustained effort is required, I find, to learn or do anything thoroughly—especially if it's what you love. A vocation is a source of difficulty, not ease. To do is difficult enough. To be, more difficult still. Both to do and be demand an effort at superhumanity. Well, why not? Anything is preferable to the safe side of the line.

  The students are early potatoes, forced too hard, the pace terrific.

  They come here at eighteen from the lycees, and after one year take the equivalent of B.A. All are "serious" and engages. (I'm thoroughly sick of that word.) The place is plastered with Marxist literature, and one in four are Party members. Yet they spend their nights playing brutal practical jokes on the freshmen and yell like fourth-formers when meals are late. Fairly frightening on the premises, they are touchingly young and earnest when seen on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where they pass what free time they can manage. They make me feel both sedate and gauche.

  The new French government is identical with the one before, an
d will fall as quickly. Will we end up with Europe going fascist again,

  "defended" by a German army with American commanders and American weapons, itching to cross the Elbe? (When you consider how real the Soviet menace is, it's remarkable that the countering dementia on our side can almost make you disbelieve in it.) One bright spot has been the death of de Lattre, raising some faint hope of a settlement in Indo-China. His funeral was a monstrous exhibition of militarism—

  schools closed, vast processions with Eisenhower, Montgomery, the cabinet, bands, choirs, clergy, troops, the lot. Lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Les Invalides. A thoroughly Prussian performance.

  If Leonardo had hit on the steam engine, Napoleon would have dropped the atomic bomb, and to clamorous French applause.

  Among the students, as with my colleagues here, there is often a background of poverty. There's no charade around this as in our countries—no dissembling by the poor, no fantasy of brotherhood on the part of the affluent. I remember the university people who used to come round Ancoats in my childhood, adopting our speech and clothes to show a kindred spirit—a sentimental condescension that does damn all for poverty. Membership in the proletariat doesn't come that cheap.

  What did it do for us, their guilt-edged security or the moral outrage they exchanged on their way home to their employed parents—and to their hot water and their books and music and savings-accounts, none of which they had immediate intention of sharing? What were their overalls to me, who'd have given anything to see my mother in a decent dress? In themselves, rags confer morality no more than they do disgrace.

  The poor don't want solidarity with their lot, they want it changed.

  (During the Depression, Ted Tice's father had taken him, a boy of nine, to hear a politician speak. Father and son stood in the crowd at the back of a grim hall, and to the child's questions the father returned his habitual response: " D o n ' t talk wet." The speaker was a young Liberal with yellow hair, a lawyer from the district, standing for the first time. He considered himself one of the poor, but even the boy knew that this young man's parents had paid his education at the law—whereas the rest, lad and lass alike, were in the mill or at the works or on the docks at twelve or fourteen. If they'd luck enough to find the work. This youth was said to have a wage of three pound ten a week clear, and only one dependent, a paralysed aunt. All the rest was for himself. It was hard to imagine what he did with such a sum.

  He was in earnest, he wished to change their lives.

  A man standing at the side of the hall called out, " O n e wick of thi wages'd change a life here in this hall, if tha'd but give it." And the candidate's fair face flushed: "That's not the answer." And the heckler shouted back, "It'll do to go on wi', whilst tha't thinking up a better one.")

  Ted Tice got up and went to his flowering window. He sat down again at his table and looked at what he had just written: "They want change." Even more than change, they want revenge. Men can make up soon enough with enemies who slaughtered them in battle; but never with the brethren who humiliated them in cold blood. They take reprisal on their own shame—that is what makes all hatreds, in war or class, or in love. And I too want revenge.

  On a new page he continued:

  You will have seen the rumpus about the telescope. The Observer piece reached me only today. Old Thrale will never forgive himself for letting me in the house. But I remember vividly the moment when he did, and am grateful.

  I seek relief from my pro-American role by attacking the United States ferociously to the pleasantest friend I have made here, a young American physicist whose main occupation is finding girls. We spend evenings together when he is not flat to the bawds. Through him I've met a dear little etudiante, a tall ballerina from the New York City Ballet, and a young curatress who is helping mount a vast exhibition of Mexican art and is very strong on pre-Columbian sexual motifs.

  Ted was divided between the urge to show Caro, and the likelihood of her seeing through this. Reading over the last lines he crossed out "dear" and "young," and eliminated the ballerina. He rewrote the page, and went on:

  Another of the Americans here was married yesterday, and I was in on the wedding, a prosaic little ceremony in a side-chapel of the American cathedral. The priest sounded as if he hadn't been paid. Afterwards, the champagne was enough to swim in, and I earned the extremely good dinner by listening to a woman telling me all about her citrus ranch and cottage at Monterey. The more annoying as there was, along the table, an interesting couple—a man called Vail, who subsidizes various cultural enterprises in America, and his wife. He looked like Orson Welles (though not as Citizen Kane). His wife, thinner than any model and very tall, was beautiful—a gaunt face with circular eyes. These two were enclosed in some unhappiness that, because of their intelligence and looks, engaged one's interest. It had never occurred to me before that unhappiness could be interesting in itself; God knows fay own is not, to me. And I suppose this is the sort of thing novelists have to care about.

  The man Vail also concerns himself with humanitarian and political causes, and surprised me, in the brief talk we did have, by having noticed the row about the telescope. (I should say that I thought well of him before this.) He had just come from Tunisia, which, like all the Arab world, seems to be going up in smoke. We had barely begun to talk when a dowager from Pasadena broke in to say that the world must surely improve now, as young people are all so travelled. Vail said,

  "That's not travel, it's dislocation."

  Speaking of weddings, I saw that Paul Ivory's took place. I also saw that his play opened in London. I wonder which will run longest.

  Ted put the pages together, then added: "I nearly resent these things I have described, because they are life without you. Caro, it is so long. If I could only see you." And signed his name.

  Posting a letter to Caroline Bell was an instant of hope and contact, and anticlimax. Ted Tice went down scuffed and noisy stairs, and out into the street. Having dispatched the letter, he kept walking as quickly as the crowds would allow, so that good spirits would not drain from him along with the warmth of his room.

  It was dusk, there were students in the cafes. Other young people, unable to pay for so much as a coffee, stood on the footpath in groups and talked fast without laughter. Ted thought, It is grim and marvellous by turns, and I may never find out why; but at least it isn't raw or facile or paltry or sententious or dull. And the absence of self-delusion in itself is liberty.

  The moment of exhilaration evaporated. It is degrading to fix passionate feeling on another being in the certain knowledge there can be no answering thought. As he walked, Ted Tice turned up the collar of his jacket. He had come out, as usual, without a coat.

  One of the men he had accompanied to the mines, a Breton going for the agregation, drew away from a group on the pavement and walked with him. Ted thought how his American friend would have asked a question, " H a d a good day?" something of the kindly kind. Americans might be the only people left who asked how one felt—still imagining one might know, or tell; or assuming an un-troublesome, affirmative lie, some show of a willful unripeness like their own. After posting his letter to Caroline Bell, Ted was glad of the paired reticence with the Breton in the street: a companion-ship that broached his isolation but not his solitude.

  When they reached the entrance of Tice's building, a group of students pushed past them, laughing and shouting. The Breton said,

  "It's melancholy, all this high spirits." The two men leaned against a wall that was dirty in the way that only institutions of learning can be dirty, with the pressure of too many soiled hands and hips and bottoms propped there in argument or love. Beyond them, the long street slowly flowed in human clusters, taut or flexible; active with opinion, suffering and lust. The Breton touched Ted lightly on the shoulder. "Just remember, my dear, that women grow old. See you."

  Ted had another letter to write, which he had not meant to begin that evening—but did, being unable to work.<
br />
  Very good to have your letter and your news. Yes, I do have a photograph—since arriving here I've spent most of my time and a fair proportion of my funds being photographed. I don't know what it is about me, everyone wants my picture, and in four or five copies too: the police, the university, the Comit£ d'Accueil. For you, herewith, one copy only, in which I look like the kind of person I disliked most at Cambridge.

  Since you are really coming over—good news—I'll try to get tickets for the May festival. They're giving Berg's Wozzeck and Stravinsky's Oedi-pus Rex. There will be plenty of ballet—the New York people, and the Marquis de Cuevas. Certainly you should see Golovine. As to tennis, everyone thinks the big match will be Sedgman-Drobny, will that be all right? I agree about what is happening at home—Attlee can count on my vote again next time.

  I must finish a paper, so forgive a note only. We'll talk in May. It will be fine to see you. Let me know time of arrival. Yours.

  A t t h e time when Grace and Caroline Bell got their first employment—at Harrods and the bookshop—they had made over most of their small capital to Dora. By undertaking to raise them, Dora had incapacitated herself for earning a livelihood, and it seemed right that recompense be made. That was Caro's reasoning, at least, and all of Caro's capital went to Dora in the new arrangement, for Caro might soon expect to have some semblance of a career. Grace, whose employment at Harrods lacked even that degree of promise, had retained half her assets at Caro's suggestion. Explained to Dora, the plan ignited high passion. She wanted nothing, had never asked anything from anyone, had walked to save so much as a bus fare, and the one thing she would never give up to a living soul was her independence. "I will be dependent on no one, I ask nothing."