The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  After tea the Marchmains walked down with Rosamund to the paddock, where you took turns for the pony, and Dora went to put the Thermos in the car. Caro and Grace disappeared into the make-shift dormitory, where they sat side by side on a bed. They made little wracked gasps of an adult weeping that must presently be concealed. The huge heavy mechanism of their hearts dragged at their slight bodies.

  Grace said, "111 write."

  They washed their faces in a bathroom varicose with streaked marble. The basin was shaped like one of those shells. Even the lav had a blue pattern inside, possibly Chinese.

  Dora had found the matron and was reading the Riot Act about blankets. Marchmains were coming up the gravel. Now, authorized public tears, let grief be unconfined. Grace climbed in the car, abashed by escaping yet again. At that moment, Japs were the last thing in anyone's mind: the entire exercise appeared pointless except for the emotions to which it was giving luxurious rein.

  Caro came home in winter, with the others. The villa dissolved into gum trees even as they twisted to see it for the last time, breath steaming the cold windows of a bus that took them to the Penrith train. No one, even so, would take a chance on waving to their fellow-prisoners.

  Soon their flight to the mountains was part of the fabled past, a form of war service. Not before the Doctor had brought suit, however, for irreparable damage to his house. After all that palaver about Danty and the sunset, the old ratbag was asking a thousand quid, Mr. Marchmain reported, to fix up his caricature of a home.

  Caro returned, as if from abroad, to a city populated by American soldiers. Dora confirmed that these were boastful, and self-indulgent in ways unspecified. Girls who went with them were common.

  Caro and Grace, in school uniform, were photographed by a lanky sergeant while crossing at the Junction; and put up their hands, like the famous, to ward off intrusion. It was a pity one could not have a better class of saviour: Americans could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as Australians.

  The sisters had never seen black men before, apart from the Lascars at the Quay.

  At school, Grace was studying the Stuart kings. From newspapers they learned about Stalingrad and Rostov-on-the-Don. Dora was part of a camouflage-netting group that met on Thursdays in Delecta Avenue and was rancorous in the extreme. In the relief of home, Caro was lenient. Once in a while she pictured to herself the Doctor's house, and the high rooms that created expectation. If you could have had the rooms, without the misery.

  These picturings might be memories—unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.

  When you measured five feet tall you were eligible for extra clothing coupons. She would have undone her plaits into a pony-tail had it not been for Dora.

  One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Muni-tions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name

  —one's own for preference—and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. Set out on a classroom table, these silenced even Miss Holster. The girls leaned over, picking up this and that: Can I turn it on, how do you work it, I can't get it to go back again. No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.

  It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. Even the Lalique on Aunt Edie's sideboard, or Mum's Balibuntl, were utterly functional by contrast, serving an evident cause of adornment, performing the necessary, recognized role of an extravagance. The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials—serviceable, workaday—

  in contrast to these hard, high-coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.

  Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness. Even Dora would have to adjust her methods to contend with such imperviousness.

  Never did they dream, fingering those toys and even being, in a rather grown-up way, amused by them, that they were handling fateful signals of the future. The trinkets were assembled with collective meaning, like exhibits in a crime, or like explosives no expert could defuse. Invention was the mother of necessity. It was not long after this that the girls began to wave their unformed hips and to chant about Chattanooga and the San Fernando Valley.

  Sang, from the antipodes, about being down in Havana and down Mexico way. Down was no longer down to Kew. The power of Kew was passing like an empire.

  Now Caro and Grace Bell did not go home at once after lessons but walked along the beach below the school, getting sand in their shoes and stockings, picking up chipped shells and flinging them away. Seaweed sworled in dark, beady tangles, scalloped up by the tides, bleared by an occasional medusa. A boy or pair of boys would speak to them, boys in grey knickerbockers and striped ties. The uniforms were a guarantee: schools recognized each other like regiments.

  Grace was a flower.

  Caro's hair hung heavy on her shoulders, as no child's will do.

  The sounds and smell of ocean made speech unworthy, or required a language greater than they knew. Because Dora's intru-sions had made privacy sacrosanct, they exchanged no word on the dangerous preparations their bodies were making for an unimaginable life. And, in this respect, lingered in unusual ignorance.

  Dora was too sore and disturbing a subject for their circumspect afternoons. Besides, they were supposed to love her; and, more to the point, did so. They would have given anything to see her happy. However, the threesome was beginning to irk them. People had to step aside as Dora marched the girls, on arms inertly linked, along streets or pushed them singly through turnstiles. They lived under supervision, a life without men.

  Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.

  All women evidently longed to marry, and on leaving school held their breath, while accumulating linen and silver. There was a lot of waiting in it, and an endangering suggestion of emotion.

  Of those who were not taken, some quietly carried it off—like old Miss Fife, who came to tea with parasol and high collar, fondant silk to her calves, pointed shoes each clasped with single button: gentler than Queen Mary. There were others, unhinged, timid, or with whiskers—crushed by father, crushed by mother, or unthinkingly set aside.

  In this, Dora was hard to place.

  Caro was allowed into town on her own, on the ferry. There was the gangplank, creak of hawsers, casting off, smell of throttling engines, and the sea slapping at green encrustations on wooden piles. She heard the hooting approach of the city, tram-bells, the jarring of a great ignition. In the cabin, office girls held up little mirrors and patted powder off their curving fronts and concave laps with small reverberations at thorax or thighs. They dabbed behind the ears, then sharply closed their handbags to signal preparedness.

  This was not the groundwork for a march, three abreast, through the town; but a prelude to encounters.

  Alone in the city, Caro was lifting a frayed book in a shop. "How much is this?"

  "Fifteen and three."

  Back on the teetering pile. The table was massed like an arsenal.

  "Ah well. Let's say, ten bob."

  Seeing it that evening, Dora said, "You. have enough books now."

  Dora knew, none better, the enemy when she saw it.

  We too," said Ted Tice. "We knew about things from books."

  Caroline Bell sat on the grass with her bare arms about her knees.

  The tuff was close as stitching: seamless England. The astounding trees were Weymouth pines, through which the sun came down in hallowed strokes like light into a cathedral. Matters must soon c
ome to life for her that had only been known, like colouring, from books.

  Ted said, "Like heat, for instance. Or love."

  "The heat is intense," they had written home through the Forces Mail. Or, according to rank, "You would not half believe." The troopship, which was the old Lancashire, out of Liverpool, broke down in the Red Sea. Hearing her called "the old Lancashire, " they had expected something of the kind. Aden was a line of molten crags awaver with fumes of petroleum and colonial dejection. They passed into the Indian Ocean with no sense of release. Sunburn cream and soda water had long since run out. They sang war songs

  —stale, in 1946, with superseded poignancy—and marching songs that taunted immobility. In the evenings there was housie-housie or another sing-song; which met few requirements. Airless episodes of England continued to be performed, at Colombo, at Singapore.

  In Hong Kong, Ted Tice, who was to take ship again at once for Japan, sat in a club for officers with a lieutenant of the Royal Navy.

  The club was on a side street within walking distance of the naval dockyard, and in the evening the officers came there in pure white and gold, as if in court dress. Under slow revolutions of a ceiling fan, the aftermath of war was coming to a halt. There was a smell of starch, of lime juice and gin, mildew from canvas cushions, and, faintly from the street, the reek of China. Three fair floral women on a sofa were clearly nurses off duty, awkward as plainclothes police.

  "You know what they say." Ted's lieutenant knew a thing or two, lowering his voice. Hearing him laugh, one of the women innocently turned and laughed too, from good nature. She was about nineteen, a broad, guileless face with long nose and irregular teeth. The sleeves and bosom of her civilian dress were outgrown as a schoolgirl's tunic. Like Ted Tice's mother, who kept a news-agent's shop, she had a Manchester voice.

  (When Ted Tice first left home for the university, his mother had said to him, "Tha dustn't have to say owt about shop. If tha dustn'

  want." They had stared, like children playing to see who will blink first. Unbearable, her understanding; her lack of understanding.) The naval lieutenant, who was not all bad, had been in Japan.

  "It's an American show. You can do nothing without a permit from MacArthur." He gave an inevitable, obscene example. "They treat us worse than Japs. They're in the driver's seat now, and we're on the skids."

  On the wall there was a framed photograph of an artless king in naval dress. Even a king might be regretted now he was on the skids. Chinese servants were carrying trays, not yet apprised of change. The girl on the sofa said in her Mancunian voice, "And I say he couldn't run a pie-stall." She was speaking of the prime minister.

  The lieutenant told Ted Tice, "Unless you have a girl." Ted turned back to him. "I'm saying, don't get pushed into a lot of cultured pearls."

  Because of minesweeping, they were all day in the Inland Sea.

  The islands were irruptions, each fringed with the single file of lean trees leaning. At home, even the wildest coast had established itself with slow insistence, but these islands were fragments of a cata-clysm. Ted had never seen so red a dawn, or villages of straws. Little boats like wrapping paper flapped on alluvial waves, and a young Englishman looked down over a railing into faces stigmatized with the cartoon image of enemy.

  At the port, hulks lay about like rotting whales. There were blitzed docks and, in the harbour basin, the upturned keel of a ship capsized at launching. On the pier, the erstwhile enemy, dressed in the colour called fatigue, pulled on ropes and uttered the cries by which a ship is docked. One of the ship's officers said, "You'll be going over the hill." The slopes above the port of Kure were terraced gold and green, there were red valleys of azalea. It was early in June. "Not that way, it's the other direction." And Ted Tice pronounced, like a lesson, the name of his destination:

  "Hiroshima."

  It was like riding in state—the jeep being open, and khaki with authority. There were the bombed docks and ruined avenues of the port, and then the hillside grotto of a destroyed railway tunnel. The officer beside the driver was pointing out, "Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now." He said, "111

  fill you in as we go." Along the back of the front seat his heavy, extended arm was energized yet not quite human, like a turgid fire-hose. His name was Captain Girling.

  They were descending to a vast ground without horizon, and at first there were small unfinished houses everywhere. Unweathered timbers were being ribbed into rooms, roofs were being woven slat on smarting slat. Men and women were bearing loads, were walking planks, were strung up against a hot tin sky. The jeep slowed beside a new-laid tramline. Where rails and road diverged, a youth leaned from the tram door to spit on them, and withdrew.

  "If I could get at him," the officer said. "If only." This man was literally decorated, wearing the ribbons of many medals. He had a scar, just a line, as if a pillow had creased his sleeping cheek. This Captain Girling saw the flaw on Ted Tice's eyeball without looking into his eyes. In the back seat of the jeep they were showing, like children, what they had got—the cameras and watches and little radios with which the enemy had nearly won.

  In the past, the demolition of a city exposed contours of the earth.

  Modern cities do not allow this. The land has been levelled earlier, to make the city; then the city goes, leaving a blank. In this case, a river amazed with irrelevant naturalness. A single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presided like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter's, in some eternal city of nightmare.

  A catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God.

  It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction.

  He was used to thinking of his life—I have done this, how could I have done that—like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books—

  except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.

  Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important.

  This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.

  Whether this amounted to a loss of faith, or to the acquisition of it, was uncertain.

  It was at this period that Edmund Tice's fate became equivocal, and he ceased to make quite clear if he would win or fail.

  Captain Girling informed them that, as a result of what they now saw, war had become unthinkable: "In that way, it has been salu-tary." He was pleased to justify an extreme. "You have to stop somewhere," he said, despite the evidence.

  The rest were silent, doubting the world's stomach had sufficiently turned. On the other hand, there was the seductive, dangerous relief of contemplating Armageddon, which would absolve them from blame or effort.

  Captain Girling said, "I'll fill you in." As if at a graveside. He believed it might be twenty years, and that was a conservative estimate, before effects would be fully known. Records were being maintained, there would be an institute, studies. "Well, that is your shop, over to you." They would now see survivors—who were confined to an institution, as artifacts of special durability are housed in a museum.

  The jeep entered a corridor of finished new houses. Ted Tice heard, "You blokes are used to it." He wanted to say, "I have never. I am not a doctor." Imagination stalked ahead, aghast, among sights soon to be outdone. In front, Captain Girling was satisfied, seeing this y
oung man's knees tremble. In the present setting, the merciful were at an even worse disadvantage than usual.

  Ted Tice's manner of looking interrupted the smooth flow of acceptance, casting useless doubt on the inevitable. If he and his kind had their way, the world would be a bonny mess. So Captain Girling reflected, amid the atomic ruins.

  All along the new street, there had been posted the tokens of normality: habitation, children, the silence broken. Aligned timbers were assembling the tableaux of daily existence. And small squat women had been gathering up the concave reflectors from searchlights, which had fallen everywhere like stones in an erup-tion. Filled with water, these dishes had been placed at doorways.

  And in each of them floated, rose-red and magnified beyond your wildest dreams, a frond or single flower of azalea.

  Such families could not be considered survivors, being physically intact, and prepared to rebelieve.

  When they got down from the jeep, Captain Girling took Ted aside: "Look here. Don't make a goat of yourself." Goat signifying anything unmanly, or humane. He was only giving sound advice.

  And did not see why the bugger should laugh.

  It was the fate of those mild hills around the Thrale house to be portentous in the view of Edmund Tice. There was the low road where he walked home with Caro, the surrounding crops and grasses, and the hills large with event.

  "It was here the storm came up, the day I arrived." He was marking it all, making shrubs and hedges bear witness. Now it was dusk that was falling. He asked, "Are you cold? We'll soon be home." But thought instead that they would stop as they climbed the path and he would touch her and speak differently. In the fine evening air he walked less confidently than in the storm; alone, as yet, with what he had to offer.

  Caro could not consider the approaching house her home, though she had no other. "Do you have your own place, at the university?" If one could have privacy, all must be well.

  "I've a flat, two rooms, in a professor's house. Where they are kind, a happy family. He has been a great friend to me. Now he's moving to Edinburgh—I'm to go there for a few days, in September, before I set off for Paris." He paused, on the note of parting and departing. "In the family there are two boys—who like me.