The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  Soon there was a letter from Ted with the same information, and a new address. He hoped Caro and Margaret might one day meet.

  He wrote, "Here, among the young, we have a clinging to one's times that is like a substitute for patriotism: a pledge of immaturity.

  For anything in the way of enlightenment, you need people who do not have contemporaries."

  When Ted wrote "the young," Caro lost her own claim on youth.

  Speaking of enlightenment, Ted went on, the great telescope had been inaugurated at its site in the south of England, with a ceremony attended by the Queen. Owing to a complete absence of visibility, Royalty had managed to command nothing but a show of vapours.

  Dora wrote that Gwen Morphew had mysteriously come into money, and had left Glad Pomfret high and dry. It was best to expect ingratitude, then nothing surprised you. Dora, whom Caro could now provide with a house near Dot Cleaver's, wrote of domestic difficulties. She did not wish to be a worry to Caro in her happiness, and it would all work out somehow. One thing she had learned, and the hard way, was to trouble no one.

  "It is almost true," Caro said, "that she is not a worry to me in my happiness."

  Caro took her stepdaughter to a recital by a great guitarist. Walking home, the girl said, "It was okay. What I could hear of it."

  "Next week we'll have better seats."

  She took Josie to the ballet, and Josie said, "Myra's at the double-header." She meant that Caro could count herself favoured.

  If Caro did, it was not for that reason.

  Adam Vail made a trip to Chile and Peru. "Next time you will be with me."

  Una told Caro, "Adam is obsessed. You must have realized that.

  He is obsessed by people's sufferings. It is something you will have to face."

  "I have faced those who do not care at all." She did not see why Una should instruct, who had not succeeded.

  One day, however, Una said, "I think it's great," and crumpled a Kleenex.

  Caro lay in a hospital bed after a miscarriage, and Adam Vail flew home from Lima. When Caro closed her eyes, darkness restored her to private existence. Someone said, "Now I have to hurt you."

  The pain was an extension of experience, so new and astonishing as to have intellectual interest. In the dark it might be Paul leaning over her: "Now I have to hurt you." Like other suffering, the apartness of infirmity was either unreality or full reality at last. Once she had stood apart in a hot corridor and contemplated her own death.

  In the dark her thoughts were redistributed, through displacement of hope.

  Adam said, "There are two of us to bear it."

  "It wasn't this I meant to share."

  When Caro was better, Josie told her, "I was ambivalent anyway.

  I felt very threatened." Confidence in her own simplicity could inspire cruelty scarcely credible. She was often angry, and when crossed would lower her head and weep: "I am being put in a position." Her great weapon was her weakness, the massive deterrent to which all deferred. There was the dread that Josie too would take up death as her lethal instrument. "I am so afraid," she would say; putting the fear of God into all of them.

  Caro said, "If she wouldn't try so much to classify her emotions."

  "Are you asking that she renounce her American birthright?"

  Adam said, "She will grow up, grow older."

  Caro recalled childhood hopes centred on Dora's seventieth birthday. "We have to bring her round before that."

  Only Una would occasionally repulse Josie's attacks, and was unafraid of the girl's tears. Una remarked, "Bite something often enough, kiddo, and it bites right back."

  Una told Caro, "You get the message."

  "Even those messages she is unaware of sending."

  Josie had the eyes noticeable in troubled young women, eyes that are sidelong even when direct. She had the inanition that announces self-engrossment. She was already setting up an apparatus of blame, in apprehension of failure.

  To Caro, Josie would state the obvious: "You're not my mother." To be sure of the hurt, she would have liked to see the blood.

  "For one thing, I'm not old enough."

  Caro told Una, "Josie's belief in her innocence is her warrant for doing harm."

  Una said, "Like America."

  Alone together, Myra and Josie mocked Caroline Vail—her voice, manner, and opinions, her habit of touching her hair. Josie told Myra, "She can't have children."

  "That's why she's trying to take you over. Well, tell her she can cut that right out."

  Caro could feel the wish she be cut right out. From far off she could sense Josie Vail thinking of her with resentment; as she might, even now, feel Ted Tice think of her with love.

  Myra told Josie, "Can't you see the way they're using you?" If Myra had anything to do with it, Josie would never believe she herself might be an object of affection.

  All this was plain as if Josie had reported it: the rehearsed unkindness, the direct and sidelong glance, the doubleness of phrase made all apparent. When Myra was present, Josie must prove herself:

  "How can you talk such shit, Caro?" In Myra's absence, the girl was loyally abusive, in order to have something to report.

  Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

  Myra's eyes were downward, lank hair concealed her cheeks.

  Myra was for the present strong, because consuming another's life.

  Caro would wonder what particular Benbow had taken Myra to the bottom.

  Adam said, "She mistakes suspicion for insight."

  Caroline Vail found herself unsuitably immune to the judgment of Josie. She only wished to restrain the girl in her worst assaults, knowing that, if you wrong someone enough, you cannot bear to be with them.

  In secret Caro dwelt on the release from emotional obligation, and could see how indifference might become seductive. What Josie took for exposure on Caro's part had been an offering of trust

  —a test the girl had failed, over and over. Trust would be offered repeatedly, but not indefinitely.

  Adam touched his wife's arm. "Perhaps you mind more than you show."

  "When you realise someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."

  "Unless you love them." Adam hoped Caro might one day almost love Josie, as she would the city—through contiguity and shared experience. He thought it would be a pity if only the lovable were loved.

  He wanted to say, "It was her mother"—having seen the child's interest in the universe turned to envy and mistrust. But felt the indelicacy, and inaccuracy, of accusing his dead wife, who would even yet come to his mind as first known, in irresistible youth and beauty.

  When young, Adam Vail had admired as intellect his first wife's plausible instinct for human flaws, and had not seen in this the portent of disaster. He, who wished above all things to be rational, had allied himself with unreason on her behalf. Out of allegiance to her, had put others unreasonably in the wrong. One cause of this was his pride, which could not admit his own defencelessness; another was the persuasive force of his wife's antipathies: single-minded in delusion, she was spared the equivocations of sanity.

  Gradually it had come about that she needed still another enemy, and only he remained to fill the role. It seemed she had intended this: all the while he imagined he was comforting or reclaiming her, she had been preparing their doom. Then began her threat of death, to command the straying attention of the world. To the utterer, the threat is an addiction that requires increasing dosage.

  Bystanders, on the other hand, are slowly immunized.

  Adam told Caro, "There is no greater tyranny than a continual state of desperation."

  He, who considered himself a man, had become, with his first wife, vulnerable as an intimidated child. She acted on him like a wasting disease: all healthy links to life were infidelities to be re-scinded. His maturity shed daily, he relapsed into a sullen stupor from which the only sporadic arousal was physical desire. In fear, he felt his will contract, grow smal
l and smaller, until it was a hard, shrivelled nut inside his breast. He had intended magnitude; and was a small hard thing in a shell.

  Within the incubus of her infirmity, she was so strong and he so weak.

  Adam Vail began to dream that he was strangling his mad and therefore guiltless wife. He dreamed, also, his own suffocation.

  Insufficiency of space and breath became a waking preoccupation: in the streets he pushed a way through crowds, unable to extend his pace or self to full dimensions.

  One day she came to the top of the stairs, and called his name.

  Her hand was dark.

  He said, "Charlotte. Charlotte."

  "I've hurt myself." There was blood from a gash.

  His horror was as much for the release, the exoneration, as for the event.

  His wife had saved him by going so far that, with all his compromises, he could not follow her. It was then he had learned the patience now apparent, and laboriously renewed his ties with life.

  Not guilty by reason of insanity, his wife was yet incapable of innocence.

  Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge.

  But was not a guarantee.

  Caro said, "We must bring Josie round." Caro had mellowed with new youth, and was content. If this could happen to her, why not to Josie? She had once told Paul Ivory that capacity need not be adverse.

  Optimism was vindicated, like prayer, when Myra's father was transferred, with all his family, to California.

  Una's lover Hansi had a suite at the Carlyle and an entertainment allowance. From time to time would fly to Delhi or Tokyo for a congress he cheerfully designated useless. He often held a book in his hand, any book, on which to prop the word puzzles he also carried. These puzzles were his only known mental exertion. Hansi would say of himself, "Old Hansi was on his uppers when God in his infinite mercy created the international conference. May this providential, improvident, and peculiarly iniquitous racket, designed to support the moral and mental degenerates of our modern world, flourish forever."

  Josie could hardly, and did not, contain herself. While Hansi sat deciphering anagrams, Josie would belabour him for his shoes, luggage, vicuna coat, and grey Mercedes, his suite at the Carlyle, and an illegal arrangement to do with free liquor. Hansi laughed, yawned, and pondered a palindrome.

  On a single occasion, Hansi broke silence. "At twenty, a man inactively ranting against social injustice is a promise; at thirty, a windbag. At age twenty-five, I, Hansi, spotted the era of the windbag approaching, and I clammed up. While, it is true, proceeding to profit from the organized international windbag industry: that idea whose hour has struck. I have my own form of ineffectuality, but I don't dress it up as morality. I decline to join those who babble about reforms for which they will never lift a finger. We are in the age of the open mouth and unlifted finger; of those who must talk faster than the world can find them out. Is not that the basis of all modern statecraft, not to speak of battalions of the socially conscious who likewise will never see action? When they excavate the new Pompeii, the intelligentsia will be discovered squatting petrified on the floor, mouths agape to denounce materialism, with their built-in cost-of-living adjustments turned to stone in their pockets. I who am in due course to die do not salute them."

  Josie said, "And what in hell is all that supposed to mean?"

  Adam told her, "Hansi fears that aimlessness and bombast go together."

  "I must correct you," said Hansi. "I do not fear but know it. No process of reform is currently acceptable that involves the sacrifice of one hour's sleep, one day's pay, or one chance to deliver yet more of one's own bluster. I assert this not as a moral statement but a factual one. Reform, my dears, is neither banners nor bombs.

  Reform is unpaid labour, is poverty, is solitude, is the composition of innumerable letters by the midnight oil and the engagement in ignominious struggles with a duplicating machine. Reform means years spent in the mastery of uncongenial and arid themes. Reform is giving up dinners, holidays, and sex in order to pore over deadly documents in a basement. Is to be isolated, ignored, insulted, and possibly run over by a government truck. Reform is concentration and endurance. Reform, my dears, or any merest particle of it, is no more wanted at that price by our modern altruists than it is by good old Hansi. My intention, like theirs, is to wrest as much money from my employers as possible, turn up my hi-fi, indulge my appetites and tastes, and sleep long and sound each night. Unlike theirs, however, my own intention is openly declared." Hansi unfolded his double crostic. "I speak generally and shall be glad to allow any proven exception."

  Josie remarked that she had never heard such shit.

  Adam told her, "It's logical. Those who continually criticize the achievement of others must achieve something of their own or become ridiculous."

  Caro said, "Still, what they achieve might be simply character."

  Always, Josie noted, thinking of herself. It was intolerable to her that anyone should distinguish themselves, even by their thoughts.

  "Certainly," said Hansi. "But persons of character tend to keep their counsel. I can confirm, and conclusively, that they are not to be found expounding on the windbag circuit. As example of said character," he told Josie, "take your own father. Who has never reproached me. I consider it most handsome."

  R e t u r n i n g from ten days in Sicily, Ted and Margaret Tice took a house handy to everything. The handiness made it possible for Ted to walk back and forth to work, and for his wife to go out to paint in a studio room she rented with another young woman, who was a musician. These days the will to paint was not strong in Margaret, as she believed she had all she wanted and must be happy. However, though departure for the studio was an effort every time, she was perfectly at peace once there and would over-stay the hour, breaking off work only when she heard the cellist climbing the stairs. She did not know what she found in that bleak, unheated room, and, while connecting its serenity to her marriage, could not discover where the connection lay. It was years before she realized that the stairs, the room, the easel, the canvas, and the tubes of zinc white stood for safety.

  In her paintings at this time, sombre forms represented the phenomena of earth, or of dreams.

  So they set up house, each within walking distance of safety.

  Ted's parents came to visit, also Margaret's. Hooks were screwed in place, bulbs were sunk into lampshades and window-boxes, and a friend spilled wine on the unrolled Piranesi that had been a wedding present. Margaret shopped, and Ted picked up the library books on his way home. "Our Ted takes marriage seriously," his mother said to Margaret, but it was rather that he had taken it up and was doing it thoroughly. He had little taste now for varnishing bookshelves or hammering things home, but was to be seen diligently at work with brush or toolbox. He too became handy, along with everything else.

  Self-sufficiency appeared complete, a training for survival on a desert island.

  Margaret's mother said, "Ted has thrown himself into domestic life. He's flung himself into it." It might have been an abyss.

  Habits were established and seemed, in a month or two, lifelong.

  Once in a while Ted Tice would take up or put down a newspaper with a gesture beyond his years.

  Passing through decreed phases, Margaret Tice was first a bride, next a young housewife, and then an expectant mother. Later, would be constrained to talk of schools, join a tennis club and a committee. Would hear herself say, as if it were some other woman,

  "I never use cornstarch" or "I clean up as I go along." She felt this happening to her like symptoms of mild illness, and did not resist.

  But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.

  On a night in the first summer of their marriage they had gone to dinner at the house of one of Ted's colleagues. For such occasions, scientists' wives were trained in self-effacement—except for those who, scientists
themselves, could put their own foot on the conversational hearth. Others, like Margaret, might provide themselves with a sweet excuse ("She paints"; "She's musical"), but must expect to be ignored.

  Ted at these gatherings was often morose, detached. Respected by his colleagues, he was only sometimes liked. In his dealings with assistants he dispensed a cool indubitable justice—where they would perhaps have preferred a more culpable, and human, partial-ity. The same objective strength was even less welcome, brooding in a living-room.

  In his work Ted had for some time been studying a faint blue object, possibly a star. He had just returned from Palomar, where the controversy of red shift had now begun. It was known that he had things to say, but did not. choose to tell them here. It was uncongenial, this notion of taking his own good time.

  The dinner was being given for a physicist who had received a celebrated prize: an elderly monolith, with bluff body and desic-cated face, who presided glumly at conferences and gave the government influential advice. His taciturn importance was implacable.

  Women attempting conversation with him heard their voices rising to a squeak: it was like scratching one's name on a historic monument. Even when seated he continued to recall some massive object. Slumped in an indigo chair, wearing a shabby grey jacket with brown leather pads at the elbows, he now resembled a ship of war gone rusty. When Margaret Tice appeared beside him, he half rose from the waves, exposing a Plimsoll line of sagging belt. Ted watched his wife: she was a slope of green in a straight chair, her eyes large with civility, her hand smooth on her knee. The old man-of-war gradually began to address her: speaking was his idea of giving attention. Accepting his monologue, Margaret was receiving what she seldom had: a man's undivided interest.

  It was a warm night, windows open to a garden. Ted was remembering light of evening, how many summers past: the table and the talk of youth; two girls, both beautiful, one a gazelle. He came back from talk of quarks and quasars, as if from sleep, to hear his wife say—it was of some book the old man had mentioned—"Yes, I first read it at a time when I was unhappy, and have gone back to it often. I still find it . . . "