The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  Among the awakening women, that New Year, was Caroline Bell.

  Caro had passed another examination and moved to another flat, where there were high ceilings, and draughts at long windows.

  Learning the address, Christian had remarked, "I didn't know there was anything cheap round there."

  "It's over a shop," Caro told him, by way of reassurance.

  For the first time she had a table and two chairs of her own, and a gold-coloured rug from India.

  In the morning she was closing one of the windows, had drawn it down and was leaning both hands on the hasps. On the inside sill there was a sprinkling of soot and flaked white paint. A branch of quince blossom, brought by Ted Tice the week before, was propped in a glass vase. Caro was standing at her second-floor window in a green dressing-gown and thinking of the women, of whom she was one—the women, waking yet dormant, who were getting up all over London.

  Across the street a man on the curb looked up at her; looked up in the same swift, focusing way that she looked down. He appeared to have arrived at a destination, and might have been a figure in a spy story keeping watch on a fateful house: a wide, tall, motionless man in a dark-blue coat, who held a black stick and stood with feet apart and his bare dark head raised, confident that the house, or the world, would yield to siege.

  She leaned, he looked. From her arched figure to his inexorable one was no great distance, and their eyes now met as they might have done in a room. There was momentary, complex stillness until, with a show of normality, Caro lifted her hands and dissolved the spell.

  He slightly bowed, as if he came from a graceful nation, France or Italy. They resumed their motions of interruption, crossing roads or rooms. Caro's bare feet on the yellow carpet, Caro's thin fingers yanking a dress from a hanger; the man's wide hand raised for a cab.

  All the girls of London shuddered, waiting for the bus. Some had knitted themselves unbecoming brown Balaclavas, with worse mittens to match. Some held a boiled egg, still hot, in their glove—

  which warmed the hand, and could be eaten cold at lunch time in the ladies' room. At that hour all London was ashudder, waiting for the bus.

  At Caro's office that day there was a deputation from South America. Four exiles had come to plead for their imprisoned comrades: Let a governmental message be sent, merely a message, proposing mercy. Pleading of this kind was not unusual when executions were to take place in other lands. What would be unusual would be if the message were dispatched.

  On this occasion there were the four applicants, or supplicants, and a man from the United States who had taken up their cause.

  Only these five, and Caro, were punctual in the meeting-room.

  Northern winter overlaid the summer faces of the four exiles like sallow illness; featureless with it, they were the more submitted to present extremity. Later on they might become distinct with elo-quence, but for the present remained an amalgam, a team. Their clothes were too light, and too light-coloured, and too American, to do them any good here. Only the man from New York was well dressed, having a dark-blue coat open over a good flannel suit.

  It was the man from the curb in Mount Street.

  He crossed the room to drop his coat and stick on a spare chair.

  He said to Caro, "Let's hope this is a good omen." Again he had an easy grace, though not from a graceful nation.

  Eight men were to be hanged. Or shot, that was not clear. Two officials had now entered the room with their air of punctilious humanity that portended refusal. To be perfectly frank we do not feel that intervention by Her Majesty's Government would be useful. And must also take account of the long and singularly close cooperation between our two nations.

  The American said that was precisely why. He was the spokes-man, a public man who had founded something—perhaps a founda-tion, or it was an orchestra, or a museum, or all of these. He had lived for a time in the Latin country in question and had recently been advised, officially, not to return there.

  Attention was paid him here because he was wealthy and did not come from a gimcrack country like the other petitioners—or the auditors themselves. For these reasons consideration was shown him, although it was made plain he had not the authority. When he described certain tortures, the two officials became disconcerted, withdrawn, fascinated, as if he were discussing in public the act of love. His four companions were growing discernible, their faces retinged by feeling: old sepia photographs whose unnatural flush had been externally applied. One was chopped and stocky. Another, exhausted and elderly—leaning forward to rock his body as if in pain. The third had high-coloured Andean features, and shabby teeth outclassed by a gold bicuspid. The fourth, who was tall and personable, had ginger, kinky hair and the dense freckles of a freakish pigmentation. His compatriots would turn to this fourth man, making him a leader.

  This freckled man had large properties—orchards, pastures. In his case, a possibility of self-interest comforted his official hearers by introducing an element of the rational. Ted Tice had once pointed out that an independent act of humanity is what society can least afford.

  The distinction of these men was that they entreated on behalf of others. It was this that gave them an authority the authorities would never have. The one who bent forward had a huge tie-clip, shiny, dragging on a flowered tie; and fingered this lucky charm.

  He had a pencil, like an unlit cigarette, between his lips; and a cataractal rheum on both eyes, like an old dog.

  Caro knew there was no question of it. She had heard that yesterday: It is quite out of the question, let ourselves in for, no end to it if we once, interference in the internal affairs of, do more harm than good. There had also been a call to Washington, eliciting the reply, ''Counterproductive."

  4'Any loss of life is always to be regretted. If only we were in a position to assist. I do not mind telling you I feel for your situation very very. Speaking on a strictly personal. I am bound to point out, however, that under existing conditions charges of physical abuse cannot of course be verified."

  "Even if we produce a man with no balls?"

  "Mr. Vail, you will not convince me by losing your temper."

  The American sat at his ease. "You are right to reprove me. And I am right to be angry."

  He made present something more than speaker and listener; something more than mere men.

  What if the families of the condemned were to make a personal appeal?

  Unfortunately we do not feel that would make the slightest.

  It was rumoured that the pope?

  That is, obviously, an option of which His Holiness may choose to avail himself. We have received no indication to that effect. We did hear that the United Nations secretary-general was considering intercession.

  "Surely you are being humorous."

  A silence, truthful and juridical, conveyed that sentence was pronounced. You will be taken from this court to a place of execution. The leaning Latin man sat back in his chair, as if reviving from a faint or fit; the impression of a convulsion reinforced by a dry white fleck at each corner of the mouth, and by the pencil lodged between his teeth. The stocky petitioner had his face in the light, pockmarks and capillaries visible. All four were expressionless in the irresistible silence. And the morning had gone by.

  The four exiles were leaving for some other last, hopeless ren-dezvous. Their reality intensified with defeat, dividing them conclusively from the two figmental officials who had received them.

  Pocked perforations and gilt tie-clips were invested with some grandeur, or stood at least for a preferable exposure.

  Escorting them out, an official would confide in a lowered voice,

  "I myself wish to God," and so on. And then in the men's room wash his hands and dry them on a paper towel.

  The man from New York was detained by a senior official. "But I'm certain there was an arrangement about lunch."

  "A misunderstanding then."

  Consternation was real this time. The lunch had been with
a member of the cabinet.

  "If you would just wait while I ring up. Please." The supplicants had not pleaded for the lives of their martyrs with such abandon.

  No, unfortunately he was late for another engagement, and left.

  Papers must be locked in a red portfolio, and Caro stayed for this.

  It was also assumed she would, from a housewifely instinct in fact minimal in her, set the room to rights. She stood leaning on the conference table with damp hands, and, but for ineradicable mistrust of Dora's antics, might have sobbed aloud. Incrimination and disgrace were growing on her, in that place, like old-maidishness; it was like sexual frustration to be always yearning for some spasm of decency that in this context could never occur. That one's thoughts should as much as follow four unprepossessing men into a cold street was a breach of contract here, as if a soldier in battle conjured to himself the harmless private affections of those in the opposing lines. There were rules of combat in which the victory went to those who could emerge with no pang of realization.

  "Forgot this." His stick.

  He let the heavy door click at his back, and there they were in the attitudes of the early morning. He had walked a distance before missing the stick, and brought cold fresh air with him. Though touching her fingers to her face, Caro was scarcely abashed, the morning's episode being more shameful than tears.

  The wide man sat on the edge of the table, and the cold came out from his good clothes. His broad hands waited on his thighs.

  "Can we go out somewhere?"

  They were crossing the flapping and shrieking of a street. The restaurant was upstairs, there was a pub downstairs. It was a place that was always full because tourists came to see the government eating. You're in luck, sir, there's been a cancellation. He might have been accustomed to luck of the kind. They sat by a window in a thin film of sunlight and Caro thought, Now he will let me down. Now he will say, Oh I see their side of it too.

  He said, "Shits, aren't they." And handed the menu, which was a typed slip. All the room was men, except for Caro.

  "When will they die?" She meant the prisoners.

  "In a month or two."

  She said, "Almost the worst was the panic about the lunch."

  "Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said,

  "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."

  "They might at least think how soon, historically, these things recoil. My colleagues today, for instance."

  "The British temperament in particular has never been one of speculation. In extremity, Archimedes went on with his theorem, but Drake went on playing bowls."

  She said, "Some men—or many—are both Archimedes and the soldier who slays him."

  He took the menu from her. He was something over forty. A vein corded the back of his hand. There was his watch, a cuff of striped shirting, the grey flannel sleeve. He watched her following these details, which she considered as carefully as if they had dressed an arm projecting from fallen masonry: clues to the undisclosed.

  His name was Adam Vail. "What is your name?" he asked. "I know your address." Saying 'Wdress" in the American way.

  The two officials of the morning had inevitably entered, and were eating whitebait.

  Vail said, "They will make you the culprit, about the lunch." You could see them doing it already, above the heaps of tiny fish. Not wishing to believe in any moral mastery, they were relieved to attribute something salacious. From the whitebait perspective, Vail's arms around the table rim appeared to offer an embrace, into which Caro leaned.

  These two men would be saying she slept with him, and might write that in a file to relieve their feelings. From knowledge of the imagined intimacy laid on them, he and she faintly smiled, and grew intimate.

  At a hotel whose chimney-pots could be seen from Caro's window, Adam Vail had two large sombre rooms with heavy curtains.

  In the sitting-room there were cut hyacinths in a thick round glass pot on a low table, beside a sofa like a brocade Zeppelin. Letters had been stacked on a desk, along with catalogues of paintings in glossy colours and a pile of unopened packages.

  Between the windows there was a picture in an elaborate frame.

  "A dealer hopes it will grow on me. You're the first to notice it, everyone else has taken it for hotel furnishings. I'm not sure if you get a good mark or not." He stood by a table where there were bottles and glasses set out on a tray, and watched Caro move through the expensive shadows of the room. Saw her sleeve, of some dark-reddish colour, burn in lamplight, and the strand of chain on her neck. At her window and in her office he had twice seen her solitary, habitual, but not resigned. His thought re-enacted an instant when he had looked up at a window, his glance drawn by a branch of blossom in a vase.

  She had no unoccupied zone of objective feeling. He supposed men might find irritating or formidable her air of awaiting some solemn event that could not possibly be their own approach.

  He said, "It has no suspense." Watching her, he was thinking how, in some great pictures, every particle of the light is usual, daily, and at the same time a miracle: which is no more than the precise truth. He said, "Some paintings transmit the suspense of life itself." He thought most men would hardly dare to touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief.

  He poured liquor into glasses and talked about the picture.

  Parted on speech, his lips were dissimilar: the lower, jutting and conclusive; the upper, thin, delicate, and considerate to the point of weakness. Which was certainly better than the other way round.

  Caro Bell sat on ballooning damask and held a glass of vodka, and the man Vail sat at her side. Their feet were outstretched towards the flowers and the low table in shoes of identical fine brown leather. To think they could both have excellent shoes.

  "What are you laughing at?"

  "At the democracy of shoes." The lamp was burning velvet creases in her sleeve and lap. Through a doorway a low light showed slippers aligned on a white mat. There would be a sheet folded neatly back, a good dressing-gown ready on the counterpane, new books beside a bed: all this a form of freedom, since he made it so. Even when he rolled his body round to bring out a handkerchief or produce cigarettes, it was an un-English roll suggesting fresh energies, opinions, sights, affinities, a landscape.

  There was a time-change to him, a resetting of a mental watch.

  Everything else was this time yesterday.

  Soon he and she would go downstairs to dinner, like guests in a country house. He said that on Sunday they might take a drive, if she was free. "A spin, I suppose you'd say. Can I handle the wrong side of these roads?"

  "You can. And no one's said spin for years." Except, possibly, Sefton Thrale. She agreed she would love to see the Fens. It was long since Caro had loved a prospect.

  The glass bottom of the bowl of flowers had been set over a telegram that lay on the table. Through bevelled water the print rose up, unevenly magnified: "EXECUtion INEVItable," like a lesson in elocution. Adam Vail said, "Small letters grow larger when seen through a vessel filled with water. Seneca points that out.

  It was an early concept in optics." He said, "Seneca is full of good things." He grasped the rim of the vase and shifted it, and the letters relapsed into insignificance: ineffectual insects that had terrified beneath a microscope.

  On Vail's bureau at the hotel there was a photograph of an adolescent girl: "My daughter
." Father and daughter resembled, but did not get along. "Josie blames me for her mother's death.

  Blame generally shifts around a bit with age, at least I have to hope so." In a wallet there was a photograph of a thin woman in a jersey and trousers. "My wife killed herself." He said, "My wife took her life," like a rhyme.

  "Do you blame yourself?"

  "She had often said it, that she would. She'd had every kind of treatment. Eventually it becomes hard to know how to handle it."

  Like Dora: I can always die, always die.

  Caro said, "There is the damage on both sides."

  He asked, "Have you been close to someone like that?"

  Once he said it was possibly reported that they saw each other.

  "But I will make sure no harm comes to you."

  "Who would watch us?"

  "My countrymen and yours. Because a man with no axe to grind is a revolutionary nowadays."

  "You only hold them to their proclaimed principles."

  "That is what modern revolution means."

  "The first morning, in the street, you were like a figure in a spy story."

  "They will turn it all into a spy story, if they can."

  She asked, "Why do you need that stick?"

  "I got the habit of carrying it in rough places." He handed it to her and the weight was surprising, like an opinion out of character.

  He took it back and pressed the catch to show the blade.

  So this man of peace went armed with a sword.