The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  He said, "What's up, Mum?" Moving his imprisoned arm, he put his own hand to the treble and struck a discordant series of keys, stressing and repeating vehement high notes. She released him, but he jarred a few last perplexed, excited sounds. And stood, still touching her, swayed between childhood and sensuality.

  Christian came in with papers in his hand. "What's this, a duet?"

  The boy sauntered off and switched on the telly. The news flickered over jagged devastations—Beirut or Belfast, the Bronx or Bombay.

  Christian said, "Grace, I must speak to you."

  Rupert yelled, "It's a programme on Pompeii."

  Grace sat with Christian on a sofa that was rarely used because of the velvet. He told her, "Something momentous has occurred."

  In her mind, Grace Thrale swooned.

  "I have been given Africa."

  He might have been Alexander, or Antony. The younger Scipio.

  Grace stared whitely, and he added, "South of the Sahara."

  She was looking through such tears as would never rise for Angus Dance, who could not need, or evoke, pity for impercipience or self-exposure. She wept for Christian, insulated in the nonconduct-ing vainglory of his days, and might then have told him all, out of sheer fidelity to the meaning of things. She said, "My darling."

  "There's nothing in the world to cry about." Christian touched her face, pleased. "I can assure you." Perfect Grace. He unrolled the departmental chart in his hand. A small box at the top of the page littered into larger boxes underneath, fathering endless enclosures of self-esteem. He pointed—here, and here. "Talbot-Sims will only be Acting. But for me it's the real thing." As he leaned to show the pedigree, there was a sparse, greying place on top of his sandy head. He said, "My youth was against me," brushing a speck from the flawless page. "But in the end they waived seniority." The chart started to curl at the edges, struggling to rescroll.

  "It will make a whopping difference in the pension."

  Grace wondered if their severance from each other's thoughts and purposes had at any time appeared so conclusive to him; if ever she herself had so grossly disregarded. She wondered whether, during summer separations, or the time she went to Guernsey, he had perhaps loved, or slept with—the one need not preclude the other—someone else. It was hard to imagine him sufficiently head-strong for it, now he did not have the self-reliance to read a book.

  If he had loved another woman, Grace, of all people, would understand it. Magnanimity shaped a sad and vast perspective. Or it was merely a plea for leniency in her own case.

  Christian put his arm around her, stooping from heights where officials waved seniority. "I'm afraid we'll have to call off the Costa Brava. But when I've got things in hand I'll take you somewhere quiet." His mind ranged, like the news, over ravaged nations, seeking a possibility. All was pandemonium—Portugal, Palestine, Tibet: called off, one after one. Elation weirdly faltered in his throat, as on a sob; but recklessly resumed: "So you brought me luck, telling the old bastard off about his joke."

  Angus Dance came into the brick passage as the rain began. He started to run; at the same moment that Grace Thrale, entering from the opposite end, ran, too, under the rain.

  Had it been possible to observe their meeting from above or alongside, like a sequence on film, they would have been seen at first precipitate, heads lowered against weather; then slowed in realization; and finally arrested. The arrestation being itself some peak of impetus, a consummation. They were then facing, about a yard apart, and rain was falling on Dance's hair and, like gauze, on Grace's coat of calamine blue. Ignored, the heavy rain was a cosmic attestation, more conclusive than an embrace.

  Anyone seeing them would have said lovers.

  Rain was silvering Dance's eyelids. He had taken hold of himself by the coat lapel. His expression was disarmed, pure with crisis.

  "This is what I meant about being close."

  "Yes."

  "Shall we get to shelter?" As if they had not already got to shelter.

  Sloshing along the narrow tunnel, he took her arm at last. By not embracing they had earned some such indulgence. They then stood under an awning at the exit of a supermarket; and he said, proving her more right than she had ever been about anything, "You know that I love you." It was the response she had not been able to compel from her own child.

  She would not even brush the water from her hair or coat; and perhaps need never consider her appearance again. After moments during which the rain continued and they were nudged by shopping bags, she said, "It makes me happy." She thought she would tell the simple truth, now that she was indomitable. Opposite, there was the new hotel that took groups. Dance said, "It would be a place to talk."

  "We can cross when it lets up." Her self-possession surprised, as in the tea shop.

  He hesitated; and decided. "Yes. I'll have to telephone about the appointments."

  She did not urge him to keep them. Nor did he ask if she was due in the Crescent. When the sky lightened, they crossed.

  As they came into the hotel, the man at the desk put down the phone, saying "Christ." A heap of baggage—suitcases, golf bags, holdalls in nylon plaid—was piled by the foot of the stairs. In the lounge, which was one floor up, they might already have been at an airport, waiting to depart. Pylons of the building were thinly encased in plastic wood, with little counters around them for ashtrays and drinks. The sofas were hard and bright, yet far from cheerful. Slack curtains were tawdry with metallic threads, and on one wall there was a tessellated decoration of a cornucopia greenly disgorging.

  As they entered, a group of women in pantsuits got up to leave.

  An old man with an airline bag said, near tears, "But they only had it in beige."

  Grace Thrale sat by a window, and Angus Dance went to telephone. Had it not been for him, how easily she might have fitted in here. The enclosure, nearly empty, enjoined subservience—was blank with the wrath, bewilderment, and touching faith of its usual aggregations. It was no use now trying this on Grace, who scarcely saw and was past condescending. With detachment that was another face of passion, she wondered in what circumstances she would leave this place and if she would ever go home. Abandoned by her, the house in the Crescent was worse than derelict, the life in it extinct: the roast attaining room temperature on the kitchen counter, an unfinished note to Caro announcing Christian's promotion, a rock album that was a surprise for Hugh; and Within the Tides unopened on the bedside table. All suspended, silent, enigmatical

  —slight things that might have dressed the cabins of the Mary Celeste or embellished a programme on Pompeii: trifles made portentous by rejection.

  She got up and spread the two damp coats on a nearby seat, to deter. She stood at a concrete embrasure looking at the rain, and knew he had come back.

  He sat beside her on hard red plastic and said, "There's nothing to be afraid of." He touched his fingers to hers, as once at the hospital. "I am going away." You could see the colour ebbing down through clear, lit levels of his skin. "I have been offered a position at Leeds."

  She sat with the air of supremacy, the triumphant bearing summoned for a different outcome. When she did not speak, he went on, "You must not think I would ever try to damage your life." Her life, which she stood ready to relinquish: whose emblems she had been coolly dispersing, as she might have picked off the dead heads of flowers.

  He said, "As if I would seek to injure you."

  As if she would not have gone up with him to a room in this place and made love, if he had wished it.

  He was making an honest woman of her. She deserved no credit from the beneficiaries, having already thrown them over. Love would be concealed, like unworthiness, from them, from him.

  When she had coveted his standards, she had naively imagined them compatible with her passion. It was another self-revelation—

  that she should have assumed virtue could be had so quickly, and by such an easy access as love. It was hard to tell, in all this, where her innocence lef
t off and guilt began.

  Scrutinizing Angus Dance's drained face and darkened eyes, his mouth not quite controlled, Grace Thrale was a navigator who seeks land in a horizon deceitful with vapours. Eventually she asked, repeating her long lesson, "Is this a promotion?"

  "An advancement, yes."

  Such conquerors, with their spoils, their cities and continents—

  Leeds, Africa. Advancing, progressing, all on the move: a means of motion. Only Grace was stationary, becalmed.

  "In that way, also, it's necessary. I can't go on doing the present job forever."

  Only Grace might go on doing forever. Might look up Leeds in the phone book, like Dorset. Realization was a low, protracted keening in her soul. Here at last was her own shipwreck—a foundering beyond her parents' capsized ferry. She might have howled, but said instead what she had heard in plays: "Of course there would have been no future to this."

  Colour came back on his cheeks like blood into contusions. He got up quickly and, as if they were in a private room, stood by the concrete window. Then leaned against a column, facing her, his arms spread along the ridge meant for ashtrays, his durable body making a better architecture, a telamon. "A man should have past and present as well as future." He moved his hand emphatically, and a dish of peanuts spilled in silence. It was a gesture that laid waste, as though a fragment of the column disintegrated. "Do you not think I see it constantly, the dying who've not lived? It is what we are being, not what we are to be. Rather, they are the same thing."

  "I know that." Even her children were already staked on the future—their aptitudes for science or languages, what did they want to be, to be; they had never been sincerely asked what they would be now. She said, "Even those who have truly lived will die. It is hard to say which is the greater irony." Such discoveries were owed to him. She rose to his occasion, and no doubt would soon sink back, incurious.

  He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine

  —well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your complete-ness—love, children, beauty, troops of friends—how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"

  They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast—sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."

  He came back to the sofa and replaced his hand on hers—a contact as essential and external as the print of fingers on X-rays.

  "It was like Paolo and Francesca."

  She would h#ve to look it up when she got home. But stared at his hand on hers and thought, without mockery, Scarcely Latin lovers. .

  He said, "It's true we could not have stood the lies."

  The first lie was Grace drawing off her dress, her head shrouded in black, her muffled voice saying, "Scharnhorst. " She said, "In my married life I never so much as exchanged an unchaste kiss, until with you on my birthday."

  He smiled. Perfect, sheltered Grace. "There is so little laughter in illicit love. Whatever the theme, there must always be the sensation of laughing at someone else's expense."

  Grace had last laughed with Christian over Sir Manfred's joke.

  She said, "I am serious." The kiss, the lie, the laughter—nothing would be serious again by that measurement. "I am serious," she said, as he smiled from his greater experience and lesser insight; from his contrasting virtue, since she was the one willing to do harm. He looked in her face with the wrong solicitude. Grace would not be called upon to testify. She remembered how, on tumultuous Corsica, her head had been turned away.

  "In a new place," she supposed, "you will get over this."

  "I still dream about a girl I knew when I was eighteen." He would not conform with her platitudes, he would not perceive her truth. He would dream of Grace, in Leeds. He said, "Memories cool to different temperatures at different speeds." He glanced about, at the figured rug and tinselled curtains, the column splintered into peanuts, the drab cornucopia: "What an awful place."

  And his condemnation was the prelude to farewell.

  Grace Thrale said, "It is the world."

  "I've said many things to you in thought, but they were never hopeless as this. Nor did they take place in any material world." He then corrected himself. "Of course there has been desire," dismissing this extravagance. His accent intruded, and he allowed time for speech to recover itself, mastering language like tears. "What I mean is, in thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality, in the flesh. Even desire has less to do with the flesh than good-bye."

  His face had never appeared less contemporary. Was one of those early photographs, individual with suffering and conscience.

  "So I am to lose you." She might have been farewelling a guest: Dored it, dored it. Dored you.

  He said, "I cannot do any more," and withdrew his refractive touch and passed his hand through his bright hair as in some ordinary bafflement. He got up again and took his coat from the chair, and stood over her. All these actions, being performed very rapidly, reminded that he was expert in contending with pain. "I'll drop you. I'm taking a taxi." His reversion to daily phrases was deathly. It was ultimate proof that men were strong, or weak.

  They stood up facing, as if opposed. And onlookers were relieved to see them normal.

  "I'll stay on here a few minutes." She could not contemplate the taxi in which he resolutely would not embrace her. She clasped her hands before her in the composed gesture with which she sometimes enfolded desperation. Raising her head to his departure, she was a wayside child who salutes a speeding car on a country road.

  When Grace came down into the street, the rain had stopped and the darkness arrived. Men and women were coming from their work, exhausted or exhilarated, all pale. And the wet road shone with headlamps, brighter than the clear black sky with stars. Engines, voices, footsteps, and a transistor or two created their geo-physical tremor of a world in motion. This show of resumption urged her, gratuitously, towards the victors—to Jeremy, whose eye needed bathing with boric acid, and Hugh's bent for mathematics, and Rupert's unexpected interest in Yeats, and Christian's saying

  "This is the best lamb in years." All of that must riot in triumph over her, as she would find out soon enough. They would laugh last, with the innocent, appalling laughter of their rightful claim and licit love.

  With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth.

  Paul Ivory was writing to his mother:

  My dear Monica,

  It would be a great pity if you were to sell the Barbados place without a clear idea of settling elsewhere. Boring it may be, I don't doubt it, but all the world is now a costly shambles ruled by the tax laws. Frankly, I don't see you in Ireland, nor do I think you would be amused by their latest rerun of the Battle of the Boyne.

  My play continues to prosper, though the notices were exclusively poor. It must mean the nation has taken me to its heart. Perhaps it is this boa-constrictor embrace that prevents me getting on with new work. I fritter away a lot of time at present, and have even been to the zoo—though that in fact was because Felix hopes to make a film there, and wants me to finance it. I suppose I shall—everyone else's son is making a film, why not mine?

  The only other thing I reca
ll doing lately was a party at Manfred Mills's new house. Victoria Square always was a hard little place, and now there is a concrete ellipse in the middle of it, like a prehistoric mound or as if some immovable monstrosity had been cemented over out of decency. Tertia would not come, I took Felix. Manfred's son—

  Felix's age but dreadfully earnest, with a Blue for cross-country running

  —met us on the stairs and said with determination "You must enjoy yourselves." Of such, I always imagine, is the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Upstairs, an odd mixture—too many suburbanites discussing trains, and a flock of civil servants who hung around Manfred, obsequious and expectant, like queers around a rich old widow. Pliant to his every opinion. In other words, a thoroughly conventional crowd—except for a pianist so shy he could only meet celebrities, an R.C. priest who was actually unmarried, and a Soviet dancer who had not yet defected.

  Manfred, for the occasion, had had his sideburns frizzed and hung himself with chains. Madeline had wisely contracted pneumonia and never appeared.

  Among the permaflex officials was Christian Thrale, now a caricature of a bureaucrat. With him, everything is a palace bulletin. When I asked after his wife, who used to be rather pleasant, he said with pointed delicacy, "Grace is unwell today." I cannot describe the pomposity. He had come with his sister-in-law—a woman I once knew well, now some years widowed and not seen in ages. She was here briefly from New York, staying with the Thrales. Still handsome—in contrast at least to the assemblage of commuters and tax inspectors—though teetering precariously on the verge of distinction, a pitfall women cannot be sufficiently warned against. As a girl, she already displayed this dangerous tendency.

  The encounter moved me to a page or two today. I should like to do something with it, though not just another round-up party in the Proustian manner. Not only has that vein been worked to death but I'm not yet venerable enough for the last volume of Proust. Nor, of course, was Proust. He wasn't much older than I when he wrote that party. He fudged it. He was good at the future as well as the past.