The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  Caroline Bell watched the room dwindle in the early dark. The skylight made a gash of paler grey.

  I had a dream that I was lying on a long slope, and a great stone, greater than the stones at Avebury, rolled down at me. I saw it coming and could not rise, but was not afraid. When it got close, I turned my face to it as if to a pillow, as if to rest at last.

  A pathos as bad as if it were someone else's death. Confuses the issue. No issue, died without issue. Once, for two weeks, thought I was to bear Paul's child, and feared to tell him. The deed of death has no hypothetical existence—or, having its hypothesis in everyone, must be enacted to achieve meaning. Then meaning is total, as for nothing else.

  A phenomenon known as the Black Drop.

  It is no less than logical. There are dying conditions as well as living conditions. Venus can blot out the sun.

  Don't remember coming out here in the hall. So terribly hot.

  Was it impossible then? No longer like someone else's death, now it is like my own. No more thoughts, thing itself, itself. Darkness what darkness, and I have not even.

  Returning from work one evening, Caroline Bell found a letter from Major Ingot. Taking it upstairs she put it on the table while she lit the gas for her dinner, then sat down to read it. She kept her coat on because of cold.

  The Major asked that a compromise be arranged. Otherwise, prospects were dim for keeping body and soul together. "I don't have your advantages," the Major wrote. And "Day after day, it was a tongue-lashing or the waterworks. Or both, like as not. Cry, you've never seen anything to equal it. You'd not believe, you can't imagine. She was all for dying one day, disappearing the next, till I'd half a mind to take her up on it, and no error." In extremity, the Major's social pretensions had dissolved, or perhaps he believed the unaffected idiom might touch Caro. The Major could not know his timing was badly off.

  Caro gave the letter to Christian, who told her he would soon settle the Major's hash. He said, "I am going to drop a word through the embassy. After all, there are some benefits in having access to official channels."

  When the spring came, Dora took a cruise to Capetown with a new friend, Meg Shentall, whom she had met in the Algarve in a tearoom called The Lusitania.

  In a park without flower-beds or streams, on undulations of November leaves, Caro was walking alone. Branches fissured a white sky, the bark on ancient trees was corded like sinews of a strong old man. On a free afternoon given in recompense for late office hours, Caro had come there without purpose, scarcely noticing the intervening streets crossed in her mute private delirium. Inside the park, lack of intention struck her wretchedly and she grew physically uneasy, ears aching from cold, feet slipping on dun leaves. The smell of earth was decayed, eternal. Flat colours offended, a dreariness full blown: Nature caught in an act of erasure.

  She stood on the path, shoulders narrowed and hands up to protect her frigid ears; still and watching. And might have been taken for a woman aghast at some cruel spectacle. But the single person approaching was reading a letter and had not yet seen her.

  That Paul and Caro should meet in such a way, by accident, might appear the calculated act of a fate that preyed on helpless lives.

  What would in retrospect be made reasonable—since they had occasionally met by chance when they were lovers, and the park was familiar territory—at that instant amazed with predestination. In this they were both egotistical and humble—the two of them facing each other on the ceremonious avenue, the leaves shifting and drifting on the ground or inertly falling; the senile bark, the pinched white light.

  Paul came on, of a colour with the pale scene—hair, light coat, trouser legs. Caro lowered her hands from her bare head, but he had already seen her in that attitude and took it to refer to himself, her gesture of apparent terror. Paul was coming from a protracted lunch at a hotel overlooking the park. The document he held was a contract, in which magic formulas—"hereinafter referred to as,"

  or "payable in United States dollars"—assured his safety. Through these defences Caro broke like whiteness or darkness, elemental.

  He saw two things distinct on her face: that, having perpetually conjured the sight of him in fancy, she could not be sure this was he and almost thought herself deranged; and that she feared to exasperate him with this meeting that was none of her doing—that he might say to her, Am I never to be free of you? Her very silence was the speechless dread of displeasing. As a man might imagine a clothed woman naked, so in that moment Paul saw Caro nearly unfleshed, her disclosed pulses tremulous as the cranium of a new-born child. Her fear, or rapture, pierced him with unusual shame, as if the encounter exposed him in a colossal lie; as if this meeting itself were truth.

  Observing them, one would have thought it planned—the way they stood facing, the man with the paper rolled in his hand, the woman waiting. You would certainly have imagined a meeting, rather than the farewell of which they were trying to be worthy.

  They could have sat on a bench, or on the damp leaves pitched up here and there in burial mounds. Had they sat, however, would have touched; and some reticence, you could scarcely call it honour, deterred Paul from this. He held the contract, clenched and now forgotten—though unclenched, later, it might again become imperative—and made a slight gesture. And perhaps spoke, saying

  "Caro." While she looked from the daunting stature of her agony.

  They were converging from extremes, two opposing commanders who meet while their forces slaughter, not to make peace but to exchange a high, knowing, egoistic sadness before resuming battle: two minutes' silence, their brief armistice.

  At a distance, a woman in a raincoat stooped to let a dog off a red leash—a lean white dog blotched with black, who soon bounded up to them and stood gasping and with legs wide, awaiting orders. Even this dog, to whom the deathly park was paradise, stared, noting what was not usual. Though the dog pranced from side to side, they were not drawn. The dog then barked a bit, reproving all who are not kind to animals. And the owner called,

  "Split! Split!" Paul and Caro were moving slowly along the path, while the dog scampered round their circumspection, circling it like a quarry before losing interest and loping off to be releashed.

  They were two persons who conduct themselves well in some outrage; who rise above.

  Trees moved past them in procession. Standing by elaborate though open gates, Caroline Bell had her hands in the pockets of her coat and, as far as she willed anything, wished to stay in the park, which had become a core of endurance now and her enclosure. Standing, she was again conscious of sore ears, although her body had otherwise dissolved to a rise and fall of breath and blood.

  It was simplest to stand, and be free of explanations.

  The dog had found a dead rat, or mole, and was snuffling.

  Leaving the park, Paul walked the length of the Mall, then took a cab home. In his hallway he put the contract down, with its creased guarantees, on a table and hung his coat on a stand. The living-room was pallid as the cold sky—walls, carpet, and chairs all of the bleached condition called neutral. Two small Sisleys, hooded by strip-lights explicit as price-tags, were drained of colour as if left out in the rain. In this ashen room, Paul's wife sat on a window-seat, looking out through what might, or might not, have been a glaze of tears.

  "Tertia," he said—quite gently for anyone, let alone Paul.

  In her room Caroline Bell would fall into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read; like an old woman ruminating on the long, long past. She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.

  Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance mi
ght appear enough of an achievement. This risk had come up before.

  (At the age of nineteen, Caro—travelling in Spain as a nursemaid

  —had spent a week at Granada with the young and antiquated English family who employed her. A wide balcony ran the length of their hotel near the Alhambra, looking out to the Sierra Nevada.

  Directly below this terrace there was a steep drop to the town on the valley floor. On crystal mornings and ripe afternoons the hotel guests would sit out on long chairs in the white presence of the mountains, and ask for rugs to be brought to them, or cups of tea on trays. They would turn pages of books from the hotel's library

  —where titles and authors, long forgotten in their own countries, clung on in exile. The sanatorium atmosphere was not dispelled by the proximity of Moorish monuments and gardens of perfect roses.

  It was as if you had died and gone to heaven.

  At dinner in the Edwardian dining-room—where Caro's employer sometimes noted, on his starched, projecting cuff, the years of wines or names of dishes, or might scribble his suite number on the broached bottle of sherry—there was a trio that played, in an alcove, so discreetly than even gipsy selections turned demure.

  Each evening, between the entree and the pastel, this trio of piano, violin, and cello would go sadly, softly through Adelaide, Caprice Viennois, and Schumann's Arabeske; resuming, with the coffee, with a selection from The Land of Smiles. And a handful of guests would, quite as mournfully, applaud.

  Caro's chair was placed so that she faced the cellist—a woman of thirty or so with white skin that, contrasting at throat and wrists with black crepe, suggested the pallor of torso beneath a dress volumi-nous as a nun's. This woman was passing visibly from Madonna youth to dedicated spinsterhood in calm renunciation. Once in a while her dark eyes would meet Caro's with melancholy, recognizing tenderness, as if to affirm a bond. As if to state: You and I will make no part of that enervating and degrading struggle.

  Each evening the cellist's gentle confidence in Caroline Bell's willingness to waive her claim on destiny cast its pall. Later, in her hotel room, the girl would stare in the mirror to discover why she had been picked out as a kindred soul. In some moods, a dispiriting response raised the prospect of solitary, chaste, ineffectual decades.

  At other times a vital, coloured image in the mirror obliterated the cellist's pale acquiescence and the threat of the waxen body in its dark shroud.)

  Very early one spring morning the phone rang at Christian Thrale's bedside, and he learned that his father had suffered a minor stroke. With perfect composure his mother gave details, while Grace raised herself on her elbow and a wakeful child called from the adjoining room. Christian said, "I'll catch the eight-twenty."

  Sefton Thrale lay in a hospital bed at Winchester, his firm expression withered, his carved jaw an unshaven jowl, his breath a laboured sigh. At the foot of the bed his wife stood listening to a doctor: "There is some slight impairment." As if he were a damaged object in a shop, his value now reduced. There was a rail at the edge of his bed like a small wicket gate. He saw the white ceiling, white counterpane; on a table, a red tincture of anemone.

  Charmian came and put her hand on his: "You are going to be well." His eyes made some effort, a frightened child trying to be brave. The bluster of existence had ebbed, and he could have been signalling that it had all been an imposture anyway. She said,

  "Christian will soon be here." He knew who this was, but the name struck him as an odd choice. He remembered them all indistinctly

  —a blur of Christian, Grace, Tertia, and many others, of whom his wife was the accredited representative. All of them so fortunate, compared with this.

  The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

  When he next woke, Christian was there. Sefton Thrale remembered this had been promised, and was reassured by his own ability to make the recollection. He said, "I knew you . . . " and finished, on a long exhalation, " . . . were coming." Christian, however, understood his father to say, "I knew you would come," and was moved.

  His wife stood at the foot of the bed, and gently touched the outline of his feet, then covered them with a blanket.

  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.

  Part III

  THE NEW WORLD

  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.