The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  All this—the Grecos, the Cuillins, the uncle, and the ruffled cat

  —paraded glittering through space in one narrow room.

  They walked back toward the car through the broad streets and capacious squares laid out in narrower times. Scarcely a vehicle passed them. Not a soul ascended the steps of the right clubs or issued from the little petuniaed porticoes of the great corporations.

  You could hear a footfall, or peal of laughter, all the length of that noble and unearthly promenade.

  Christian unlocked the car door for her, and stood holding it but blocking her entry.

  "I must see you."

  "I know," she said.

  He let go of the door, which lurched slowly open like a shutter on a derelict house. Into the back seat, from which that morning he had put away childish things, he hurled his envelope of bogus papers. He drew Cordelia Ware into his arms.

  They—they—had almost three weeks before Miss Mellish returned. As luck would have it, luck held. The weather also. Africa continued quiescent, Cordelia's parents left for the Dordogne, and Grace felt the extra fortnight would do the boys a world of good.

  Even Elphinstone, though back from Brussels, was having extensive work done on his teeth.

  Christian Thrale took Cordelia Ware by her perfect little elbow in vacant evening streets, and drew her to him on park benches. He leaned his cheek on her smooth coiled head, and took her golden tresses—there was no other word for them—

  loose in incredulous hands. She in turn slipped her arms about his neck, or lifted his palm to her face and kissed it. In his Hillman Minx they crossed and recrossed the Rubicon at Battersea Bridge. Iacta alea est. They sat, as he had dreamed of doing, beneath the elegiac trees.

  As far as Christian was concerned, these delicious proceedings left, quite literally, something to be desired. While the virginal aspect of this girl had first attracted him, Time, gentlemen, was not on our side—what with Grace consulting timetables and Miss Mellish pushing the boat out from the Normandy beachhead.

  She said, "I am happy just being with you." Her hand along his arm in one of her precise and fragile gestures. "You cannot decently complain of that."

  He laughed. "Then indecently I complain." It would be unusual if she turned out to be—girls these days were not. At least, not by the time one met up with them.

  It is hard to say which of her attitudes most delighted him, the intently curved, or slimly upright. Or which of her movements, chaste and extravagant as those of a ballerina. She had this way of looking—you would not have said "trustful" exactly, but "believing." She applied to one's judgment. She put simple questions with genuine inquiry, as if wishing to discover how the world turned.

  The look, the appeals, the inquiries had the effect of assigning responsibility. Christian enjoyed being the framer of constitutions, the dispenser of unalterable law.

  "Your Socratic Method," he told her, taking her upturned face between his hands and smiling down from the stature she conferred. She did not ask what this was, but maintained undeflected her unfathomable openness. It was hard to see how a look could be both level and uplifted.

  Never in any circumstances did she use his name, his Christian name. His remarking on this led to a small misunderstanding. "I thought," she said, "you would not like that in the office."

  He had assumed as a matter of course she would not use it there.

  Some things went without saying.

  One day she asked him, "Do you mind the deception?"

  He said, "Somewhat to my surprise, no." He could not leave himself there, and went on, "I just don't want people's feelings to get hurt."

  He did not mean hers.

  It was not until the end of the final week that he had, as the old saying goes, his way with her. The Thrales lived in a crescent of Victorian dwellings that had once been ivory, robust, slightly irregular, like a mouthful of sturdy teeth; but were now pared, drilled, recapped, and made uniform. It was here that, locking doors and drawing curtains, Christian finally lay down in his matri-monial bed with Cordelia Ware.

  The question of beds, indeed, could not be gracefully resolved.

  It was either the children's, or his own. She made, in this regard, one of her inquiries: "Do you mind it?"

  "Not in the least." He added, "This is my side anyway."

  It was curious how abandon begot precaution. It was that very evening he began to make himself clear. "I shall never forget this.

  Any of it." Surely she could not, to employ her own phrase, decently complain of that. He told her, "I shall be wildly jealous of the man you marry. I hate him already."

  She lay looking at the ceiling, eyes wide as if she could not close them. After a while she asked, "How shall we go on now?"

  "My dear, I don't know." After all, he was not an oracle. She was looking up, scanning the heavens. "We'll have to play it by ear."

  He delivered this Americanism with the Elphinstone intonation.

  The following day he telephoned to Peverel. Grace had been to Winchester and seen Jane Austen's grave. "I wish you had been here, Chris."

  "The only one I like is Pride and Prejudice. "

  "I mean here this summer. It will never be so beautiful again."

  Their days apart, and nights, their divided pleasures pained him.

  Grace was speaking of the Close, the roses, the labyrinth of streams, and the meadows beyond the school. She said that, from Peverel, the view over the valley this morning was, in a word, splendour.

  He broke in: "I can't hang on forever. This is costing the earth."

  For three weeks Christian had felt himself an explorer in his native city. Not because he had taken Cordelia Ware much about, unless you count once to Chiswick, once to Greenwich, and the Wallace Collection, where they did not get upstairs. But because the visibility had cleared for him as for a smogbound pilot, disclosing roofs and spires and gardens and the congested flow of roads at thrilling and dangerous proximity; revealing birds in flight and cats walking on walls. The curves of earth and water had become landmarks not to be taken for granted. Above all, he had perceived in the human form the sweet glory of the elms and oaks of Battersea: he saw men as trees walking.

  Now, on a Monday filled with normality, a morning of wives ringing the butcher or going through trouser pockets before sending to the cleaner, Christian travelled on^e again by Underground.

  And Miss Mellish was in early, sorting the backlog and murmuring,

  "I don't know I'm sure."

  "We managed." Loyally. "And not badly, considering."

  Miss Mellish, who had been unlucky with the fruits de mer and whose back had gone out at Chateau Gaillard, was forbearing.

  "She's willing. Which is saying a lot these days."

  Christian agreed. "Of course it's not like having you."

  "That's experience, Mr. Thrale. I was just as green as that girl myself, in the beginning. The very same. We all have to begin somewhere."

  Christian could have cried out for the pain of it.

  Later they brought him a form to fill out, on the performance of Cordelia Ware. He wrote that she was willing; that she could take responsibility; and that her work looked neat on the page.

  Grace came home, carrying a heavy suitcase and a crock of lavender honey. The two boys were empty-handed. Jeremy switched on jazz; Hugh rampaged through the house: "Where's Bimbo? I can't find Bimbo."

  "Bimbo's in the trunk of the car."

  All things were being brought to light, set to rights. Except Cordelia Ware. Limitless vertiginous space was contracting to a decent acreage. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  Cordelia Ware was back in the pool.

  Christian's situation had abruptly become a predicament. To feel for his isolation in it, one must realize that Cordelia Ware had been the only unpremeditated episode of Christian's existence since Grace Bell. Any other precipitate action having been sanctioned and demanded by the social order and—even when carried
out single-handed—performed in mighty concert. In the Cordelia Ware undertaking he had ventured out on his own. It was a muta-tion as of fish to land. And Christian, gasping on the bleak shingle, knew himself a creature of the ocean and the shoal.

  It w^s the point at which, in an old book, the protagonist might awake to find it all a dream.

  In his solitude he said, "I blame myself." An accusation that seldom rings entirely true. If Christian placed blame elsewhere, then it was, curiously enough, on literature. He blamed—but that was not the word—the promptings and colourings of language, that put sights in his eyes and sentiments in his heart. He felt himself importuned by echoes that preceded utterance, betrayed by meta-phors and exaltations that, acquired young, could never be eradicated.

  Literature was a good servant but a bad master.

  In the pool, Cordelia Ware sat straight at her long-carriage Underwood. Budgetary figures were being prepared: the machines hurtled violently from point to tabulated point like shuttles in a textile factory. She no longer bent intently to the page and, relieved of that anxiety, had grown proficient. The supervisor told her,

  "There you are. The experience has done you good."

  The supervisor, who had had a nasty moment with brakes at an intersection, wore a neck-brace of foam rubber. She explained:

  "Whiplash."

  There was no window. Cordelia looked at the wall where a window might have been.

  Most of this Christian somehow and reluctantly knew. His time was not his own. Africa was tuning up: unpromising sounds rose from roofs of corrugated iron, and even from the Plexiglas civic centres, where it had been hoped that air-conditioning would lead to compromise.

  Christian contrived to meet Cordelia Ware at lunchtime during the second week, in a pub rather far from the office. Although he was prompt, she was already there when he came; and if she had had the sense she was born with would not have looked so hang-dog. The weather had changed. The very mornings were now crepuscular. Everywhere there were signals of autumn, even of winter—dark afternoons, spirals of petals and blown leaves, and the miners threatening strike.

  Christian put the newspaper in his raincoat pocket and sat beside Cordelia Ware. "The whole world," he cautioned her, "is going up in smoke." If only this would give her a sense of proportion. If only the tinderbox condition of the globe would obscure, minimize, or even make irrelevant his own dilemma.

  "It will be a bitter winter," he announced; and she looked, looked. "If the miners go out." He could not say whether that stare was steadfast or implacable—neither being entirely desirable. "No one can deny, of course, that a miner's life is intolerable." If we lose our humanity.

  She said, "People are on their side. There is that." Tepid shan-dies were handed over the counter, and he paid. "I mean, they are heroes. What with the risk arid the pit. We all know it is frightful.

  In an office there is not even that."

  He did not like this. "Aren't you dramatizing?"

  She leaned back against the Edwardian effect of quilted plastic leather, her head frankly reclining. A young man at the bar looked at her white throat. Christian put his hand on her knee, beneath the table. Forgive me, Cordelia; and you have some cause. Her eyes at once met his: No cause. He did not understand his own irresolution

  —wanting now this, now that. Still less could he see why vacillation should at present seem his only virtue.

  In books and films The Girl brought matters to a head. We must not meet again, this is Good-bye, Mr. Christian. Like most banality, the formula was now seen to originate in fundamentals. Cordelia Ware was evidently not about to avail herself of her unbearable and commendable prerogative.

  She took up a parched sandwich whose lifting corners bared a scaled sardine. She left the tough crusts with the half-gherkin on her plate. When they went out the man at the bar looked at her openly, tenderly, ignoring Christian's claim or seeing through it.

  In the street Christian said, "You had an admirer in there." He did not mean himself.

  "Yes."

  Having drawn the man to her attention, he was displeased to find she had seen him. In no time obviously she will take up with someone else. You iron your hair, you nickname God's creatures, go thy ways.

  In the taxi she sat straight in a corner with her fingers laced on her knee. So many fingers—there must have been the right number, but it seemed a veritable lattice of fingers, fingers. Beside her, the window was pitted with sudden rain. The cab darkened. She was almost facing him from her corner, her hair the only bright thing and her eyes the colour of rain.

  The window clouded like a spoiled mirror. Christian said, "My word, it's close." He was wondering how to make his necessary separate exit from the cab in the sudden downfall; or downpour.

  He was wondering if after all he did not love this incomparable girl.

  When she got back to the pool, the supervisor was saying,

  "There are not enough long carriages to go round." They might have been preparing for a state procession. Scrolls of lined paper were distributed like proclamations. "If you roll it in reverse it goes flat."

  Cordelia Ware sat at her long-carriage Underwood with head bowed, as if saying Grace.

  Christian, coming out of a discreetly later lift, looked about with upward head, a hound that had lost the scent. From the region of the pool, there came the sound of typewriters ticking in measured desperation: last messages from the bridge. He remembered her bitter speech: the risk and the pit.

  "Back to the salt mines." It was Elphinstone, himself late from a root-canal job. They loitered. The news was ominous. Could not have come at a worse time either, what with Barger still on Myko-nos and Talbot-Sims on Acromycin. Elphinstone had the latest about the secretary of state.

  "Dropped a brick and lost his marbles. The Emperor Augustus, what?" Reaching the end of a corridor, they wheeled and walked slowly back, like a palace guard. "I happened to have the opportunity, as you know, of observing him at close quarters." Elphinstone had once briefly sat in the front seat of a car in which cabinet members were rear passengers. "There is, quite frankly, no discretion. None whatever."

  They were at Christian's door. Yet Elphinstone detained, Elphinstone deplored. "Take it from me, Thrale. I cannot claim to have achieved much in my life. I must say. But whatever I have achieved has been by observing the rules. We cannot be too"—he began to say "careful," but substituted "scrupulous."

  Whether these words were intended for Christian was debatable.

  And the debate engaged him throughout that afternoon. Culpabil-ity unfelt for Grace or Cordelia was, in regard to the office, deeply stirred. And what of the rising cake of Christian Thrale? Perhaps Armand meant well—and, as an old friend, had spoken in time. Or was worse to follow?—Christian called into a room quiet with authority, a door closing, a chief saying, "Your private life, Thrale, is of course your own business," and meaning of course it was not.

  And they cross 'd themselves for fear,

  All the knights at Camelot.

  But he was letting imagination run away with him. Run, in fact, riot.

  His offence had been so brief, to bring down this fearful retribution. It was absurd, really, if one could not have a little true love without lifelong consequences.

  Reasonable speculations commuted madly, repudiated at the frontiers of belief. The most innocuous appointment became a summons to social and professional doom. He completed the day's tasks with attention wrackingly divided. Hanging like a dead weight from a strap in the Underground, he thought, This cannot go on. I am behaving like—well, like Raskolnikov.

  The risk and the pit. That evening he was distraught, though he did not show it, throughout a benefit performance for which Grace, had bought expensive tickets months beforehand.

  Next morning there was an appalling development. Cordelia Ware appeared in his office. She stood in the entry—he later fancied she had leaned against the door-frame, but this grotesque embellishment merely reflected the dread
the incident inspired.

  Through a stroke of immense good fortune, Miss Mellish was not in sight. Christian got up from his desk—and it seemed that year he was ever sinking down or rising up at that desk, as at some anchorage or place of prayer. "Cordelia," he said, coming over to prevent her approach. "I cannot possibly. This is not the place for.

  The last thing either of us wants is."

  It was hideous. From her expression she might have done anything: wailed, wept, made havoc of his draft report. He took her elbow—the sensation charged with almost clinical impersonality, as if she had been a patient in a hospital—and steered her for departure. Her very submissiveness alarmed. He was talking, talking.

  "We mustn't lose our. Let things get out of. This serves no useful.

  Cordelia do be." She had not said a word.

  She went. The terrible receded, with laboured breaths, into the highly regrettable. A time and place for everything. She does not know her place. The position had already been filled.

  The woman was clearly neurotic. From the outset there had been that unresolved fixation on the father. All things considered he could congratulate himself on a narrow squeak. There was no telling what she might or might not. It would be dreadful if—but that was out of the question. Only in plays. Ophelia. The awful appari-tion in his doorway was in retrospect suggestive of a mad scene.

  Everything in disarray. The trees shredding, the shrubbery tousled with rain. The sails of Dulwich furled and the wind whistling in the shrouds. It was time to call a halt, there and then. With some difficulty, Christian arranged to meet Cordelia Ware after work. He telephoned Grace, blaming Africa. Rising at six from the launching pad of his desk, he could only remind himself, like a child, that at this time tomorrow it would all be over.

  To make a long story short—which was the way Christian put it to himself in later years, in the synopsis of remembrance—he made himself clear, once and for all. There was nothing for it but the clean break. It was, as he told her, the hardest thing he had ever had to do. I blame myself. If I have hurt you, Cordelia. IF, she said; and in such a voice. If, as I say, I have hurt you. He had never seen anyone cry in a restaurant before—not even at another table. It was bizarre to think he had originally been attracted by her reserve.