The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  The transformations of her twenty years were no more amazing or irreversible than the new change, within a single day, of solitary girl into a woman kneeling naked on a threadbare carpet at her lover's feet. The embrace, the room, a bar of light on the ceiling, a vacant luggage-rack in a corner could have been part of seedy insignificance the world over; or might hold the very source of meaning, like the kiss, or flagellation, in the silent background of a masterpiece.

  "Caro," Paul said, "you'll catch cold." He was clothed and sat presiding, but could scarcely bear the renewed power it gave her, this kneeling at his feet. "You'll catch cold, my dear." The pale sun had gone to the ceiling, a thin draft came in at every gimcrack. Paul pushed back her tangled hair to discover the white skin at the margin where summer had not reached. "Maiden no more." Tears had formed at the corners of her eyes, but were not of the kind that fall or need be noticed.

  A stained mug had held cocoa, there was a browning scrap of apple on a saucer, there were heavy, unaligned shoes on the floor, a shirt on a chair. The room's dark curtains and stern fixtures were not livened by mere litter and the smell of food. The books hardly helped, having nothing to do with the room: books of passage. It was a phase of Ted Tice's work that interested him less than what had gone before and was soon to come, and the books knew it. He was uncharacteristically cold here, and lay on the bed dressed and wearing socks. At night he had a heavy quilt. It was a joke to the family: "But it's a fine September for Edinburgh, not a day under forty degrees." Ted and Margaret had done this joke to death, as people do who hesitate to move on to the next phase.

  The family were all out to Sunday tea, except Margaret, who stayed in to paint or to practise the piano.

  Margaret must practise. Or might be avoiding some Donald or Willie—for Margaret, fair and stately, was the natural quarry of her father's students. Or had some reason, greater than her many accomplishments, for remaining at home. The piano was in a downstairs room at the back of the house, where she also painted. But in the Sunday suspension you heard all the notes, and even the hesitations of turned pages—of Schumann, Cesar Franck. Willies and Duncans would have turned music for her by the hour, or, if young men were not turning music these days, would have walked her through cold daylight streets to eat a brittle chop in the smoky din of a students' hole. Any number of them hankered after the broad white brow and tender mouth of Margaret and were anxious to make some sort of showing for her sake. "She is a princess," said her mother, who was a Fabian socialist.

  Ted Tice released the book he was supposed to read, and lay with one arm under his head, his other hand holding a letter. The book splayed awkwardly on the plaid blanket and, when, he sighed, it sighed too and overbalanced to the floor. Below, the piano paused to inquire politely into the thud. The pause deepened. When the music was taken up again it was the music of songs as they might be played in a nightclub by a gifted pianist down on his, or her, luck. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and all the rest.

  I went to Avebury more or less as planned. It's more a symbol than a place—an expression of the inevitable. You once said that life didn't have to be credible, or fair. And that seemed clear enough at Avebury Circle.

  Then last week I was in London overnight. The interview was with a man called Leadbetter, and the job begins next month. I get four pounds a week—it would have been three but for passing the test. This Leadbetter was spruce, diminutive, in his celluloid cubicle. A sort of miniature model of a man, a ship in a bottle. Our talk was like that too

  —a whittled-down representation of human discourse. When I questioned one of the conditions, Leadbetter told me I was a perfectionist, as if that meant sinner.

  In the evening I went to Richard the Second. In front of us was a mountain of a man—the least movement and he blotted out half the English court.

  "These Foolish Things" was followed by "My Romance." The songs were being played with too much style and attention. No longer a pleasant diversion, it was more like a lavishing, the utter waste of something inestimable.

  I try to imagine you in your northern limbo waiting to leave for France.

  Ted, don't lose your precious time on me. There is no future I believe in as I do in yours, and no one else whose ambition ever seemed so clear a form of good.

  "In front of us." Ted Tice was so sure, and so wished to be unconvinced, of the other presence in that phrase that he lost the capacity to judge—like a man who stares too long at a distant shape and cannot be sure if it moves or is still.

  It isn't a matter of more time. Don't be disappointed in me. I wish you so well—only, am helpless to make your happiness. If by happiness is meant a sort of vigorous peace of mind, then I hope—against all morality—it can be conferred on you with no suffering on your part or even effort. (This may be the sense in which perfectionism, in my case, is linked to sin.)

  Downstairs, Margaret was playing "I'm in the Mood for Love"; was playing her last card. And Edmund Tice, in the cold room with his arm beneath his head and a letter beside him, grieved for her as much as for anybody.

  Caroline Bell's body was not white but nutritiously pale, like pastry or a loaf, even having the slight flaws—tiny tag of a mole on neck or breast, scar on the knee from a childhood fall—that might have formed in a process such as baking. When she raised herself on an elbow or lay with outspread arms, the space of her belly was a lap, the paired curve of shoulders was matched to an imminent embrace. This could not be guessed until she was naked: until then, sensation itself was clothed.

  She was wearing nothing but a small round watch. "Soon they'll be home."

  Even Grace was they, that afternoon in September. Even Peverel was home.

  In Paul Ivory's room, at the top of the Thrales' house, the bedstead was brass, the discarded, trailing counterpane a swag of white crochet. It was the room of the high incongruous window, whose panes of sun fell flat on a pure wall. On the white bed, Paul and Caro arranged head to shoulder, chin to temple, thigh to thigh, ingeniously.

  " N o one will come up here anyway. It being Sunday, I being hard at work, you being out."

  "Where am I exactly?"

  "On the road near Romsey, enjoying the walk." Paul kicked an entanglement of patient white crochet. "Oh Caro, how lucky this is." Sufficiency was like deliverance: he had been suffocating and now breathed freely. He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other, reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.

  Paul said, "I have locked the door."

  In the brass rods and finials behind her head, Caro's fingers were vaguely grappled, like those of a woman dreaming. Her arm, which people thought strong, revealed an underside soft as an infant's and scarcely grooved in the elbow. Her other hand slipped through and through Paul Ivory's hair with all possible tenderness. In his mind he could see it happening, his fairness falling through her fingers in the white room. He told himself, This is real at any rate. And could feel her think the same.

  He reached for the covering, drew it up to her chin. Then slowly down. They laughed: the unveiling of a monument. In the wall there was the window of blue sky, green leaves on a bough of elm.

  Once, an angular little plane passed slowly over, the silver-paper sort that might have taken children for joy-rides between the wars: a toy plane that had whirred in a grassy peacetime field while a man in overalls lunged at the propellor and shouted "CONTACT."

  They were as much part of that aerial brightness as of the locked, earthly, domestic room.

  "What if your sister hadn't gone to the concert." Paul having learned the story of Grace and Christian at the Albert Hall.

  "Our destiny, as well as theirs."

  He had called it luck, but now she spoke of destiny. As if she said to him, You must choose. It was the way of women to require choices, sortings, and proofs; and then to attri
bute blame. The Judgment of Paul.

  Caro said, "I never liked afternoons, till this."

  In a corner there was a wardrobe so heavy you thought at once of men who had heaved it up the stairs fifty or sixty years ago, grunting and putting their backs into it. Over a chest of walnut drawers, there was a blurred photograph inscribed in ink with the date 1915. Even a mildewed snapshot of an English cottage, if it was labelled 1915, was smirched and spattered with a brown consciousness of the trenches. Even in a room of love. Beneath the picture, Paul's brush and comb were set out, along with a pigskin pouch and a bottle of French cologne: all blond on a lace mat. The band of his discarded watch rose in two brief arcs, ready for his wrist. Most objects of the kind were so solemn you nearly smiled, but Paul's possessions had their owner's electricity.

  Paul said, "We should be somewhere in the sun."

  "The sun is here."

  He meant her to think of a simplified shore with palm trees or Italian pines. But she did not believe in this film set, which she stared at before closing her eyes. His urge to move on made an end, or denied a beginning. From her now prodigious knowledge, she could have assured him that what he sought was found.

  "Well," she said, "it's here. The sun." She would have liked merely to have it recognized.

  Paul preferred what he discovered for himself. "I had in mind real warmth. Heat, sand, the sea." He placed their hands together

  —young, smooth, and beautifully clean, with such superior fingers.

  "Lemon groves, vineyards, white walls." Taunting her with lack.

  A test of wills, when everything might have had an easy virtuos-ity. "Why are you unkind?"

  Women are born, he thought, with that question on their lips.

  And amused himself a moment searching for its male counterpart

  —I hope in time you'll forgive me. He said, "A la guerre comme a la guerre."

  "What war is there between us?" she wondered. Yet wondered too at how poor, in French, his accent was.

  "No, it's all right. If you like it here." He laughed, and gave up the excursion for her sake. Like realization, his glance followed her outstretched arm and raised knee. He put his lips to her breast.

  It was in that moment they heard the car. Not the rumble of a Hillman or Wolsey or the bronchial change of gear with which a van might mount the hill, but a swift, decided sound, a sound in showroom condition that made its way intently, playing on the house from far off, then on the wall and open window, like a raking beam of light.

  It was then, in their primordial attitude, they heard the car.

  Caro's head relapsed on the white pillow. Paul sprang.

  "If she should come in," he said. "If she should come upstairs and find the door locked." Tertia was she, that day and after. Paul was already in his shirt, and held a tie; having snatched up, for this occasion, more formal clothes than usual. On the gravel, wheels were scattering stones. The castle itself had come to find them.

  The machine stopped more conclusively than any engine ever.

  "Paul."

  A steel door slammed. "Paul."

  There had never been such final sounds, such pauses, ultimatums, and high-pitched unquestioning calls. And Caroline Bell lay still.

  Paul was at the window now. He was leaning out, laconic. "Good God." He was smiling and leaning and making room for his casual elbows. "Anything up?" There was the hard intimacy of tone, the naturalness with which he did not use her name. If he had even added so much as "Tertia."

  Tertia Drage came right below the window: a pink dress, an upraised face. Perhaps she had not expected Paul to appear at once, but showed no surprise and, despite the standing down there, no sense of disadvantage. Any more than Paul did—standing easy in, merely, the shirt and tie; and, as far as Tertia was concerned, fully dressed.

  Seeing them now, an onlooker might have judged them well suited.

  "It's a glorious afternoon." Tertia said so without fervour. There was a strip of pink silk round her head, a leather driving glove on her right hand. "We should make use of it."

  "What's the plan then?" They were at one in their competitive refusal to expose themselves by any show of spontaneity. Both were secretive, though not private persons, whose undercurrent of sarcasm allowed disavowal of any inadvertent sincerity. With Tertia, the archly antagonistic mood was already habitual.

  She raised her derisory hand. "You know the possibilities as well as I." The sound of the motor had been a truer voice than hers, and more responsive.

  Out of sight below the window Paul Ivory's bare feet had crossed themselves, negligent as his folded arms. Small fair hairs curled on his naked thighs. "Nothing too arduous," he said, or was saying, when from the fixing of Tertia's limbs he knew that Caro stood beside him.

  He knew that Caro had come up behind him and was by his side at the window. Her bare shoulder, perfectly aloof, touched his own. He did not turn, but, as if he himself were Tertia Drage, saw Caro standing naked beside him at that high window and looking down; looking down on the two of them. It was he and Tertia, and Caroline Bell looking down on them. Caro's hand rested on the sill.

  She was wearing nothing but a small round watch.

  Moments passed, or did not pass. Tertia stood impassive. Only that her arm stayed raised, her gloved fist clenched and extended like a falconer's. She was looking straight up at Paul; not staring but looking hard and fast at him only. She said, "It's up to you."

  "I'll come down."

  For perhaps the first time they met each other's eyes.

  At the window Caro did not move. Paul withdrew and took up the rest of his clothes. His departure exposed completely the upper part of her body. Flesh-coloured light was striking her shoulder and making reddish streaks in heavy hair that fell over the collar-bone.

  Below, Tertia was walking round the car and opening the door. She got in, leaving the driver's seat free. In the room above, the bed creaked as Paul pulled on his canvas shoes. With no more than normal haste he took his own watch from the top of the bureau, glancing at it as he strapped it on. He might have been late for an appointment.

  A door all but closed. Stairs thudded to Paul Ivory's quick feet.

  He appeared on the path below the bedroom window, and dropped his jacket into the car.

  "You want me to drive."

  "If you please."

  Their voices were neither lowered nor lifted: you might have said, level. And Tertia was roughly pulling off her glove. There was the prompt roar of the car. As if someone swung on a propellor yelling "CONTACT."

  Captain Nicholas Cartledge was waiting for a train. His tweeds were the colour and texture of fine sand. Beige and granular, he stood on an asphalted branch-line platform in a blaze of Sunday-afternoon tedium. The railway dollop of bitumen virtually an-nihilated an entire sweet countryside. Even the radiant day could raise colour only where rust had overflowed on cement, and in a stain of slack dahlias round a signpost. Nicholas Cartledge was impassive, neither patient nor impatient, occasionally leaving his small cloth bag on the asphalt, in order to stroll the length of the platform and return. Once a cuff flicked up, white, to compare time with the station clock; but he drew no apparent conclusion from a discrepancy. If someone had remarked on the boredom, he would have said, "It doesn't bother me."

  He saw that the local taxi, an old green Humber that could be phoned for, had stopped at the station steps, and that Caroline Bell was getting out of it. With the slightest vibration of surprise he went down to help her and, before she had recognized him, was leaning in to pay the driver. She stood on the pavement holding out to him in the palm of her hand an assortment of half-crowns and sixpences.

  Cartledge said, "For pity's sake," and picked up her bag, no larger than his own, and a light raincoat. Relieving her of these things, he suggested expropriation.

  He and she went up the wooden steps, and the pieces of luggage stood side by side. The dahlias limply circled the signpost, like sluggish water round a drain. Cartledge
said, "Headed for London, I take it," and did not seem to wonder. He had an authority associated with imperviousness. Caro had scarcely spoken, and might not have remembered his name. She was decorously dressed, and showed—or betrayed, as the saying goes—no emotion whatever.

  Yet he might have said her appearance was wild, not only because that summarized an evident situation but because of an emanation of helpless shock.

  She refused a cigarette, and did not want to sit down. They walked along the glittering platform, and back. Pale socks showed above his supple shoes. You could not say they walked together, or that he made any effort to close the distance she left between them. An elderly couple in black sat on a bench and watched with a perspicacity whetted by Sunday doldrums: "There's some story there." Inclined to side with Cartledge—who was the man, after all, and had those excellent clothes, one of the old school with his light hair and his expensive face, lean and polished. "A real old rake,"

  the wife said, as Cartledge passed again where she herself sat motionless under a toque of rayon violets. " O r roue," she added, to reinforce. But soon resumed about her own Sunday: "Well Fred it was a long time afore you talked me into visiting Maude, and it'll be longer next time."

  Standing by their baggage, which provided a destination, Captain Cartledge shook ash. "It was clear you would come to grief in that place." He did not expect an answer, but after a while turned to look—at her head, her breasts. She watched him do this with dispassion that was, as he saw, a variant of whatever trouble she was in.

  Eventually he did say, "If I can help."

  She might have been smiling at the irony. "To grief, as you say."

  "There's nothing worse," he agreed, identifying the form of it.

  "You could not have come to a more sympathetic auditor." She had not in fact come to him, but his assurance would have required an onslaught to disrupt it. When the train drew in he threw down his cigarette and lifted their two bags. She walked ahead into an empty compartment, where she sat by the window, pallid and peculiar, for the old couple to remark on for the last time, as they passed, "More there than meets the eye."