The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  "Shall I carry that stuff down?"

  "Thanks, I can manage."

  Ted went to turn the bath on, then walked through the bathroom into his study. A congenial gloom of curtains closed, of table, chair and pencils in abeyance; the desk an altar on which paper offerings had been laid for his safe return. It was an archaeological instant, he could tell how the room was without him: the moment of living entry into a tomb.

  He had got into his head a phrase of piped-in music from the plane and began to hum as he stood over his letters, his loosened tie dangling forward. The mail was divided into professional and private, there was also a pile with circulars, clippings, appeals, and a folded magazine marked in red. Long expected, the death of Vendler was still a blow. There was no telling who would win in a wretched little struggle that must now take place for that position, or how the work would meantime be carried on.

  Ted remembered he had liked Vendler the man, and was conscious that this came as an afterthought. He would write the widow with particular kindness, to clear himself of any taint, or suspicion, of heartlessness.

  It was not Vendler who had died.

  Dies in America. Suddenly at his home after an active career marked by and culminating in, considered aloof, nevertheless loyal friends such as, recently awarded, travelled, resided, founded, collected. Married twice: first, and then to the former . . . One daughter from his first union.

  Had suffered a stroke. Dead and gone, at one stroke. Peacefully.

  Adam Vail lay at peace on a bed, his sword-stick at rest, or impotent, in a closet.

  The scientist Vendler was alive, reprieved: still useful and lik-able. It was to Caroline Vail that Edmund Tice would write with particular kindness.

  And the former Caroline Bell, where was she now? Where did one write, to express shock and sympathy? The shock real enough, he could scarcely focus on words or objects. A glass paperweight rose and fell, pounding with the dim room and the darkened self in the mirror on the open bathroom door. Ted Tice had never fainted in his life, but now supported himself with his palms on the desk.

  The bath was full and had started overflowing into a chromium outlet below the taps. He went and turned it off and, in relieving that minor emergency, felt some easing in himself. When the churning and gushing stopped there was a subsiding, also, of the flow and overflow of realization. The mirror showed, merely, a glaze of feelings, not all of them shameful or shameless: he had never found a mirror, or words in the mind, to reflect the power or pain of his obsession.

  He returned to his study and replaced the clipping as it had been.

  He would be seen to have changed: his mood of the morning could not be re-created, they had seen the last of that. He should not be known to have touched the table in the meantime. The morning had been a mood of premature rejoicing—hours in which he had forgotten Caro, and been free.

  His hands were trembling terribly. He had often thought his love might be madness.

  When he had bathed and dressed he went downstairs and into the garden. The tea-tray was on a table in the shade. His wife came out of the house with a ginger cat in her arms and stood in the sun, awaiting her cue. The grass was slightly overgrown, the flowers so delicately blurred in tangled colours you might have thought they'd been let go wild. It was the sort of garden Margaret loved; she planned it all. Ted had often praised it, except for one wall, where she had planted small bushes, each of them different. Once he had said, "That's too calculated. It looks dispassionate." She thought it a strange criticism for such a man to make.

  She had an excellent carriage, which made her tall. She was always the same, calm, distinguished; innocent, except insofar as the hurt had made her otherwise. Her hair was very light, and shone in fine little curls in the sun. Eyes large and blue, not unquestioning.

  As she came forward she put her face to the cat's fur, offering the caress her husband might decline.

  She shifted the cat in her arms, since it seemed to expect something more. Ted stood in the shade, by the table. They were quiet, facing each other: not united, not opposed.

  He said, "If you knew your beauty."

  Even the cat listened. Margaret said, "If I did, what then?"

  "You'd set the world swinging."

  They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.

  W h e n Rupert Thrale was thirteen and had trouble with his back, his mother took him to a new hospital across the river. After the X-rays had been studied, it was again Grace Thrale who sat beside him in a waiting room while he turned pages of a book on marsupials and tested a loose green rubber tile with the toe of his school boot. When, at the name of Thrale, they got up together to be shown to a doctor's empty office, they walked with arms touching. And, as they sat alone beside a desk, Grace leaned forward out of her anxiety and kissed the boy; and the door opened.

  The man who came in saw the mother bending forward, her arm extended on a chair back, her throat curved in helpless solicitude, her lips on her son's hair which palely mingled with her own. In the next instant she turned and looked. And Rupert, getting to his feet, disowned her caress.

  What Grace Thrale saw was a solid man of about thirty in Nor-dic colours—high-complexioned, blue-eyed, bright-haired, and dressed in white—standing at an open door.

  The tableau was brief; but even the boy remembered it.

  The three of them sat at the desk, and the young doctor said,

  "Don't worry." He put a row of photographs up on a metal rack and lit them: the notched segments, the costal arcs, the grey knuckled frame of a bare existence with its deathly omen. "These are what we call the dorsal vertebrae." He pointed with a pencil. And Grace Thrale looked at her son's mortality—all the respiring tissue blazed away, all that was mobile or slept, could resent or relish. It was as if she stared at an ossified remnant in a child's grave.

  There was to be a corrective operation—which was delicate, infrequently performed, and involved a rod of stainless steel. It did not affect growth. "You'll be better than new, I promise." The Doctor addressed himself in this way to the boy, without heartiness, in a low clear voice and slight Scots accent, including the mother by a filament of experience that was almost tender. His face, in its revealing colour and kindness, might in another era have been beautiful. His hair glowed, gold enough to be red.

  When they were leaving, he told Grace she should make an appointment to come with her husband. "We should talk it over with the surgeon."

  Christian Thrale was about his country's business, conferring at Dar es Salaam. Grace would come alone on Thursday.

  At the door there was a projecting sign: Angus Dance, M.D.

  On Thursday he lit the photographs and showed with the pencil.

  He said it was tricky but would be all right. They had the best man in London to do the job. Grace Thrale sat side by side with Angus Dance to look at the plates, and, handling one of them, left a tremulous print of humid fingers. When the surgeon arrived, Dance got up and stood in the sun by the window, w.here he was white and gold, a seraph, a streak of flame.

  Grace told him her husband was coming home, to be present for the operation.

  "You'll be seeing my colleague. I'll be on leave that week." He saw she was disturbed. "Just for a few days." When the surgeon left them, Dance sat to fill out his portion of a form. He told her he was going to his parents' house, near Inverness.

  "What's Inverness like these days?"

  "Oh—like everywhere—full of Japanese." Reading over the form, he said, "We're neighbours. I see you're in the Crescent. I live around the corner, in the place that's painted blue."

  They agreed they did not like the shade. Grace said she often walked past the building, taking the shortcut through the brick passage—which, originally reserved for pedestrians, was now abused. She knew he said conventional things to calm her; and was calmed by his humane intention.

  The Doctor said, "Rupert will run me down there one day on his bike and I'll be a cot case." He ga
ve her back the form and touched her sleeve. "You'll be anxious. But there is no need."

  The operation went so well that Christian Thrale was back at Dar es Salaam in a matter of days. The boy would be in hospital a month or so. Grace came every morning and afternoon, bringing comic books, a jigsaw, clean pyjamas. There was a cafeteria where she had lunch.

  "How was Inverness?"

  Doctor Dance was carrying a tray. "The gateway to the Orient.

  I'm glad Rupert's doing so well." His upright body gave a broad impression, both forcible and grave. He had short muscular arms, on which the hair would be red.

  They sat down together and Grace conveyed Christian's gratitude all the way from Tanzania, even bringing out a letter. Relief gushed from her in forms of praise: the nurses were so kind, the surgeon, the therapist from Karachi. Sister Hubbard was a saint, and Rupert would be spoiled beyond repair. She then said, "Well

  —why should you hear this in your time off."

  Her light hair was sculpted down from a central parting and fell in wings over her ears. Once in a while she would touch it, a ring glinting on her raised hand. Her nails were of a housewifely length, unvarnished. "What about your journey?"

  He said he always took the train. His parents lived an isolated life, but now had the telly. The house, which was in the Black Isle, was always cold, not only from heatlessness but from austerity.

  "They like it bare. Predictably enough, my sister and I tend to clutter." There was only one picture in the house: "A framed photograph of the Tirpitz, which was sunk the day I was born. Or at least the news came that forenoon that they had sunk it." His sister was also a doctor, and lived in Edinburgh.

  Grace pictured the old crofters in the stark house uttering mono-syllables like aye and wee and yon; the maiden sister, a ruddy, tweedy pediatrician called, in all likelihood, Jean. "They must miss the two of you."

  "My father still does consultant work. He's an engineer. Then, I run up fairly regularly. And Colette is going to them for Easter.

  It's really harder for her, since she's married, with a family."

  That evening Grace asked at a dinner party, "Does anyone remember what year we sank the Tirpitz ?"

  It happened that Grace Thrale and Doctor Dance spoke every day. There were the X-rays to light up and look at—each of these tinged with the bloom of deliverance; there was Rupert's bedside, there were the corridors and the cafeteria. Once they stayed ten minutes talking on a stair. They soon dispatched the neighbour-hood topics—the abused brick passage, the hideous new hotel nearby that took groups—and Grace found out that Angus Dance was divorced from a student marriage, voted Liberal, had spent a year in Colombia on an exchange programme, and kept a small sailing boat at Burnham-on-Crouch. He had done prison visiting at Wormwood Scrubs, but now lacked the time. One day he had a book on his desk, about the Brontes.

  Mentioning his marriage, he said, "Young people aren't doing that so much now." Younger than she, he already considered himself an elder.

  Grace told him how her parents had died in the wreck of an Australian ferry when she was a child. Next—so it seemed, as she came to relate it—there had been Christian. Recounting these things, she felt her story was undeveloped, without event.

  Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth.

  The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.

  This vacancy might have affected growth. Compared with his variousness, she was fixed, terrestrial; land-locked, in contrast to his open sea.

  These exchanges with Doctor Dance were Grace Thrale's first conversations. With Caro, there had been inarticulate union: the childhood silence on a Sydney beach. With Christian there was the office, there were the three boys, there were the patterns and crises of domestic days. She had not often said, "I believe," "I feel"; nor had felt the lack. Now beliefs and feelings grew delightful to her, and multiplied. Between visits to the hospital she rehearsed them.

  She held imaginary discourse with Angus Dance, phantasmal exchanges in which Grace was not ashamed to shine. There was a compulsion to divulge, to explain herself, to tell the simple truth.

  The times when she actually sat by him and looked at X-ray plates generated a mutual kindliness that was the very proof of human perfectibility. After these occasions there was consciousness of exertion—a good strain such as the body might feel from healthful, unaccustomed action.

  One day, passing a paper from hand to hand, their fingers touched; and that was all.

  "I suppose," said Grace Thrale, "that Angus was always a Scots name."

  "It's a version of Aeneas."

  She could not recall what Aeneas had done, and thought it better not to ask.

  He was changing her. She wished more than anything to match his different level of goodness—his sensibility that was precise as an instrument, yet with a natural accuracy; his good humour that was a form of generosity; his slight and proper melancholy. It was virtue she most desired from him, as if it were an honour he could confer.

  He could make an honest woman of her.

  The bare facts of Grace Thrale's love, if enumerated, would have appeared familiar, pitiful, and—to some—even comical. Of this, she herself was conscious. It was the sweetness that was unaccountable.

  Because the condition struck her as inborn, she raked her experience for precedent. She dwelt on a man she had known long ago in London, before her marriage—a moody schoolteacher who often broke appointments or came late, and over whom she had suffered throughout a cold summer. Only the year before, she had heard he was now a headmaster in Dorset, and had looked up his name in the telephone directory. He provided no prologue to Angus Dance. In contrast to the schoolteacher, on the other hand, Christian had appeared a model of consideration, a responsible lover whose punctuality had from the start prefigured matrimony.

  Angus Dance had no precursor.

  Grace put the end of a pen between her lips. Hugh, her middle son, said, "Why do you look that way?"

  "I'm thinking what to tell Daddy."

  At night she was alone with Angus Dance when she lay down solitary in the dark with her arm half-clasped about her body. She thought that Christian would soon return from Dar es Salaam. The knowledge that he would at once make love to her brought mere acceptance.

  The week after Rupert came home from hospital, Mrs. Thrale ran into Doctor Dance in the street. They met at a site of road repairs, and could hardly hear each other for the electric drill.

  Grace stared at his clear, hectic skin and tawny head, his noonday colours, while concrete particles exploded and the pavement thrilled. Consciousness shivered also, on some inward Richter scale.

  "Let's get out of this." Dance went through a motion of taking her elbow but did not in fact do so. They were both going to the cake shop, and agreed that the woman there was grumpy but the croissants good. When they crossed at the corner Grace said, "We all miss you." She heard this speech turn coy with trepidation, and a little tic started up in her cheek. He smiled.

  "Now, that's going too far." But added, "I miss you all too."

  Saying "all" both made it possible and detracted: a pact, scrupulously observed.

  In the shop Grace had to wait for the seedcake. Angus Dance shook hands. "Doctors are always overdue somewhere. I hope we meet again."

  When he had gone out, the grim woman behind the counter said,

  "So he's a doctor is he. He has a lovely face."

  When Christian praised the seedcake, Grace said, "I got it from that nice woman at the corner."

  Every spring the Thrales gave a party—drinks and little things to eat. They called this decorous event "our smash." Grace went over her question in silence: I would like to invite that young doctor. We might ask Rupert's doctor, who lives practically next door. What about asking that Doctor Dance, who was super with Rupert?


  To the question as ultimately phrased, Christian responded,

  "Good idea." He had it in mind to ask someone very senior from his department, and supposed a doctor would mix.

  Grace telephoned the hospital. Dance knew her voice: "Hello."

  He did not say Mrs. Thrale, and had never done so. He wrote the date of the party, and six to eight. "Is it a special occasion?"

  "It's my birthday. Not that we tell people."

  She had a new dress that displayed her breasts. Christian said,

  "Isn't it a bit bare?" He traced the outline of black silk with his fingers on her flesh. "Happy birthday, Grace darling."

  Although they had a couple from Jamaica to do the drinks, it was Grace who opened the door to Angus Dance. Before entering, he bent and kissed her cheek, murmuring "Birthday." He gave her a little packet, which was later found to contain lavender water.

  Grace trembled under the astonishing kiss, from which she turned away with the male impress of jacket indelible on her silk and female arms. When Christian came over from the foot of the stairs, discarding his party face for the serious theme of Rupert, she moved back into the curve of the piano, where Dance soon joined her.

  "Who plays?"

  "I do." For once she did not add, "My sole accomplishment."

  He leaned to look at stacked music. She had put the Chopin on top to impress. She saw him turn the sheets with deliberate, large hands; she watched his almost spiritual face. Authority had passed from him in this amateur setting, and his youth was a blow, a disappointment. Authority had in fact passed to her. She presided, a matron, over her household, her associates, her charming children: mistress of the situation.

  She did not know how to address him now that he was disestablished. At the hospital the nurses had called him Doctor, as women with a family will call their own husbands Father—or Daddy.

  They spoke about the community centre, and Grace told him the art show would open on Sunday. Dance said, "I might look in."

  Rupert appeared with Dance's whisky, and other guests were introduced. In an oval mirror they had bought at Bath she saw the room, tame with floral charm and carpeted, like England, wall to wall in green. And herself, in this field of flowers—practically indis-tinguishable from cushions and curtains, and from ornaments that, lacking temperament, caused no unrest. In the mirror she could see, rather than hear, her husband saying "Let's face it," and watch her eldest son, Jeremy, blond and beloved, behaving beautifully. She saw the rings on her fingers, and a bracelet that was insured. Look as she might, she could not see Angus Dance in that mirror (he had been taken to the dining-room for a slice of the ham), and knew she never would.