The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  Squalor intensified, the waiting passengers appeared to age, nothing and nobody was kind or young, or ever had been. From his dirty bench he watched them as they scurried or loitered, characters from Realism without self-doubt or remorse, and with no sensations worthy of his tears.

  Climbing at last on board his train, Ted Tice wished all loving at an end if this was a sample.

  "Hullo." From a habit that characterizes nurtured love, or resentment, Paul seldom now used Caro's name. "The car's round the corner."

  Coming through grey streets, Caro had forgotten Ted Tice; and in her mind already told Paul, I am so happy to see you.

  Back that day from a fortnight in Italy, Paul was sunburned. Men and women passing glanced at him for his expensive, imported health, and at them both for the pair they made. This had been the case when they first walked together, on a country road. Paul's presence, unlike Ted's, caused people to forget rather than recall themselves. In addition, Paul, who had a new play called Equinox, was sometimes recognized by strangers.

  When they were in the car, Paul took her wrist a moment.

  Caro asked, "How was Rome?"

  "Baroque." A grim drizzle misted the windshield. "This morning I was sitting in sunshine on the Pincio."

  "A shame to leave." She would have said, I am so happy to see you.

  He smiled, "What a stately mood you're in." Paul drove carefully, stopping to let a trio of schoolboys cross. The children tipped their caps to Caro, as they had been taught. Paul said, "They think you're Queen Mary."

  "Surely I wouldn't be in front with the chauffeur."

  "Now listen, you must be sweet to me because today, within an hour of my return, I had an unexpected approach." He said a name and, when Caro showed ignorance, went on in irritation, "The only important director to come forward in the last ten years."

  "Come forward" intimidated with its sense of owning up:

  "Would anyone answering to the description please come forward?" "Unless someone comes forward, the entire school must remain after class." As if this important man—whom Caro now identified from press reports—were somehow willing to take the blame.

  By the time Paul had told his story, they had reached Covent Garden and left the car. In an hour or two, in his own house, he would tell it all again to Tertia; who, having married a man of pledged renown, would receive it as part of her due.

  They went up Caro's stairs. Paul now had a key of his own.

  Turning it in the lock, he said, "It's now you must be sweet to me."

  But was clearly invincible this evening, and distracted by tributes paid. It was useless to attempt reversal, to propose one's own mood to Paul—who so hated to feel himself under direction that he sometimes could not tolerate the mere recommendation of a book; or was angered if Caro, by looking her best, should seem to compel his interest. The lightest claim on his affinities might be repudiated with savage energy, like a threat, when he was in that beleaguered frame of mind.

  Striking out in this way, he might also, on occasion, accidentally wound himself.

  Caro lay dressed on the bed, and Paul sat beside her, preoc-cupied. His hand rotated on her breast, but from force of kindly habit, absently fondling a domestic pet. On the coverlet her own hand lay open, upturned, extended to a fortune-teller.

  She watched him with love that was like a loss of consciousness.

  Paul was thinking of the play he might write for the man who had unexpectedly come forward. "It's hard to surprise anybody now. I don't mean it in a cheap sense. The lack of surprise that develops with age, in individuals, has now occurred in an entire population.

  I suppose it began with the First World War. Why should you or I, for instance, be surprised at anything by now?"

  "You could still be surprised at the person who does it. Someone you know well might still surprise you with an action that was monstrous, or noble."

  "Even then, love or hate can take the edge off it." This evening Paul was impartial, even clinical, regarding hate and love. The world, in being sweet to him, had met his desires for that day, and his present energies were channelled in such a way that sexual gratification itself was sublimation. "The ability to surprise is a form of independence. And proprietary feeling can be so strong that it will not concede such a revelation."

  Caro said, with no strategy of surprise, "Ted and I were talking about possessiveness. I had tea with Ted Tice."

  Paul made no answer. But an hour later remarked, "It is hard to be interested in Tice." Perhaps Ted Tice had never left his mind.

  He got up and said, "I hate this part. Socks and shirts. Leaving."

  "Going home."

  "You can save some man from this," he said, "by not marrying him." Being quick with the socks and shirts, he hummed with intention—a machine switched on if not yet in operation. He sat again on the bed beside her. "Do you know that Russians always sit down for a moment before departure?"

  "That's the only time you sit down."

  "My God. Complaining like the classic mistress." He knew she would never hold out against the suggestion that she might begin to get on his nerves. He had no wish that she should be secure in his love; and might have held it was recurring loss that bound them.

  "But I am the classic mistress."

  He held both her hands. This gave an impression of restraining her from doing harm. "Don't be censorious. You look like a schoolteacher."

  "The Classics mistress." They both laughed, but then she said,

  "What will happen to us?"

  "Who can tell?"

  This produced resentful fear—as if a trusted surgeon suddenly came out with "Now it's up to Nature," or "We're in the hands of the Lord." As Paul had pledged eminence to Tertia, so he had promised mastery to Caro; and, now that he finally exerted it, must not recant.

  His marriage vow that evening was the stronger.

  Caro's timing was fatally insistent as Ted's: "There must be an end somewhere to deception. Ultimately there must be the truth."

  "And do you think the human need to deceive is not also part of truth?"

  "Of reality, not truth."

  Paul said, "We need a theologian and a semanticist to settle that." He smiled, still holding her hands. "I'm glad they're not here." And went on, most reasonably, "These days you want all the cards on the table. You had that enigmatic charm before, capable of anything."

  "It was this I was capable of." Love had become her greatest, or sole, distinction. "Not all capacity is adverse, like 'capable of murder.' "

  He released her hands, with a show of resignation: restraints were useless, she might commit violence in any case. "I mean, you used to amaze me."

  "How shall I amaze you now?" Since she was obliged to keep his existence at a certain pitch.

  He laughed. "Tell me something interesting about Tice."

  A silence that was also a faltering made the moment interesting.

  To the woman, the hiatus was a sensation remembered. One summer, helping in the garden at Peverel, she had picked up a dead rat, or rabbit, on a spade: a weight differently inanimate from that which had never had life.

  "Well?" He did not so much want disclosure as to intrude on whatever virtue she privately retained. Which might be nothing more than the sacred custody of someone else's sin.

  "Well then, Scheherazade?" Paul flung down his jacket and lay again at Caro's side. And she told him how Edmund Tice had spared the German scientist who was his enemy.

  •

  Paul Ivory wrote to his mother:

  My dear Monica,

  How wise you are to stay on in Barbados. We have had four (patriots might claim five) fine days since you left. The summer being now over, England has little to look forward to, ever. Actually, I like this season, whiteish stubble in fields and the woods beginning to go rusty. From which you'll gather I've been in the country, staying a few days with Gavin and Elise. My sister-in-law continues to take over—while Gavin is speaking she explains, ad alta voce, what he
really means. It is like a film with subtitles.

  This in fact gave me the germ of a play—the eclipse of a man who takes up with a woman of character, even of genius (patently not Elise, but you get the idea). I might call it "The One Flesh." In consequence I've been pondering such phantasmata as Messieurs Recamier, de Stael, de Sevigne, and Mr. Humphry Ward. What do you think? Of course I don't know what it would demonstrate—probably nothing more than that, on any terms, marriage is hell.

  Your informant, or informer, was accurate in thinking she saw me at the opening of the Pinero revival. A bad play: I had been told it could not be overlooked, but think it should have been. Afterwards there was a party, at which the prime minister briefly appeared, looking very ill: the Sea-Green Corruptible. Your friend was also correct in reporting that I have been seen with the same woman on a number of recent, and less recent, occasions. I should have thought this constancy would reassure rather than disturb you. As Lord Byron wrote—though not, I think, to his mother—"I have not had a whore this half-year, confining myself to the strictest adultery."

  Your loving son

  •

  Caro stood by the windows of Paul's bedroom while Paul, at the fireplace, fiddled, not nervously, with an obelisk of rose-veined marble.

  Tertia Ivory was pregnant.

  Tertia was at the castle: gravid Tertia in her fastness. Hold fast, the race is to the swift. Somewhere beyond Paul Ivory's city room a landscape shimmered, the castle swelling on its impregnable an-cestral rise.

  Paul said, "You knew the probabilities at the outset." To exclude love was to fortify himself. He owed this much to his legitimate descendants.

  To discover how passion could debilitate, you need only look at Caro.

  She said, "I didn't realize you would take so much. Or that I would give it." Both these statements were false. Her mouth turned clumsy with incomprehension, with comprehension. Her body, motionless, expressed an unlovely struggle.

  "Isn't that your temperament, though?" Disengaging, if not quite blaming: a doctor who ascribes to emotional causes the mal-ady he has failed to treat. "I know it is hard." Paul was lenient, indulging the offence of love.

  "Hard?" She might never have heard this sour word.

  Paul had told himself he would have to go through a bad time with her, and had certainly taken into account her point of view.

  He dreaded the bad time as one dreads process, not outcome. His mother had once said to him, "The truly terrible things are those one cannot alter, to which one is indefinitely committed." (She might have said "endlessly," though that was not her style.) Paul's present suffering was not of that doomed kind. He could foresee an end to Caro.

  Paul's bedroom had long been completely furnished—rugs spread, chairs stationed, pictures hung, and curtains parted on a pot of white, clothy flowers at one window. Everything was maintained in perfect order—although, by an oversight, the flowers sometimes shed gold particles of dust. On the dressing-table, silver fittings were aligned—brushes and hand-mirrors of outdated, even antiquated, kind, each embellished with a crest. In the closet there would be Tertia's clothes, which now, for a while, she would not wear. These objects were pfecise, and glittered; or became blurred; or altogether ceased to exist, while the man and woman stood there.

  Paul remained by the fireplace in expectation of Caro's outburst.

  He did not like to be kept waiting. The coming storm would set him at liberty: what she was to say of him, to him, would put her in the everlasting wrong. His escape was assured by the degrading violence of her pending emotion.

  "Now I'm off," she said.

  He helped her on with her jacket. His conventional, unblessed touch was the true dismissal. Composure in others always thwarted him, and hers at that moment denied him the offence of a scene.

  That he had loved Caro more, and far more, than he had cared for anyone else gave her stature: she was either unique or an inaugura-tor. Paul resented this historic position she had established for herself in the momentum of his life, and because of it would have liked to see her broken.

  She glanced at the room, not to be seen looking for the last time.

  Nothing testified to her presence. Her eyes rested on Paul with a darker questioning than he had ever endured; and he turned away, not to be tempted to some acknowledgment he himself might fear.

  They went downstairs in single file, both of them recalling the earlier scene on the landing; Paul imagining his own huge hand, the whip hand, a shadow on the wall. Seeing also, in his mind, her dun raincoat and the folds of scarlet parted at her breast. It was from this time onward that the image would recur to him—vivid enough at that moment to make him almost doubt that Caro's present face looked out from a dim mirror in the hall, a face the colour of nakedness: the new Caro he had created, to whom he was now putting the finishing touches.

  Her mouth was a wound that might never heal. Merely by standing at her side he could yet hope to provoke the storm of tears that would formally release him, like a dissolution of vows. He had never seen her cry, except for joy.

  And in perfect obedience to his wishes, as to a law of Nature, Caroline Bell made a primitive gesture of bereavement, and spoke his name. And wept aloud without so much as covering her face.

  "I am more sorry than I can say," Mrs. Pomfret's letter began,

  "to be the bearer of bad news, or tidings. But feel you would want to know."

  The Major had left, or abandoned, Dora. And, since he now declared himself insolvent, was providing no support. Dora was remaining in the Algarve flat to establish possession, but was otherwise without funds. It seemed that Dora's capital had unfortunately been transferred to the Major's name at an early stage of the marriage, and was quite irretrievable in the view of Mr. Prata, far and away the best lawyer of the province.

  "Her main concern is that you should continue happy and not be bothered by this. You know, even better than I, her fierce pride.

  But her state is pitiful and I told her flatly I would write to you as above. Without wishing to worry you unduly, I obviously have a duty to let you know that she has spoken, and more than once, of taking her life."

  Caro telephoned Christian at his office, because Grace was expecting her second child. When she had read him the letter, Christian was silent awhile before saying, "This could have been foreseen."

  Caro the culprit. "Is there anything to be done through the embassy?"

  "I have made it a firm policy not to mix the official and the personal. Not to abuse, that is, my position." It was Caro's turn for silence. Christian soon resumed, "I'm sure you see that." In his admonishing formality he might easily have added, "Caroline."

  An obscene absence of decency caused childhood panic, as if a lavatory door-handle would not turn. "You have nothing to suggest?"

  "I scarcely see how I can intervene at this stage. Without knowing more."

  In the space now constructed for the utterance, Caro said, "Then I will go."

  That exacted, Christian became cordial with relief. "It does seem best, if you can swing it. What a shambles. I'll talk to Grace tonight and call you back first thing."

  That evening he told Grace, "Your sister is more trouble than a barrel-load of monkeys." And added, "I mean Dora."

  Grace was shivering. "What will she do, without money?"

  "Get a job, like millions of other women. Take her mind off herself for a change. It could be the making of her."

  But the making of Dora had occurred long since.

  "She would not be good in an office."

  Christian now came out with it. "If it hadn't been for the damfool nonsense of handing over your own money to her, this wouldn't arise." Grace sat shuddering, and Christian got up and loped about the room. Tall men with thin shoulders begin to stoop compara-tively early. "Handing it over. On a platter. Just like that." He picked up and flung down a coloured magazine, by way of illustration. "I always thought it insane."

  "Caro gave up everything."

&
nbsp; "That was daft enough, but her business. It's involving you in it that I resent."

  Grace had drawn her legs beneath her on the sofa and looked thoroughly misshapen. "That's unjust. I'm as much"—she nearly said "to blame"—"in it as she. It was Caro made me keep half."

  "Very magnanimous, since the entire thing was her idea."

  "No."

  "Allow me to refresh your memory. You particularly told me."

  Christian dropped into a chair. His voice was hoarse with what had been rehearsed for years. "Besides, it's just like her. She has this notion of herself."

  "What notion?" As if she did not know.

  "Of being different. Or better. Sees herself making large gestures." Derisory whirl of hand and arm. Christian might have respected the characteristic in a person of acknowledged standing; but who was Caro—an Australian who had worked in a shop—to be high-minded? "Rank egotism." Unsure what this use of the word

  "rank" conveyed, he added, "Delusions of grandeur."

  "There must be worse delusions than that." Grace did not have the vocabulary for argument and was only aware, confusedly, that there was general dislike of any person with a sense of destiny—

  even when destiny was little more than a show of preferences. The Thrales stared at their cream-coloured rug, their brocade chairs, and the Staffordshire figure of Dick Turpin, from all of which enchantment had unaccountably seeped away. "How can Caro get leave from the office?"

  "She must have some holiday saved up."

  "Only a few days. And she was going to France."

  , "I'm sorry, but Caro will just have to learn she can't do everything."

  "What about money? How will she pay the fare? Her salary is almost nothing. And then there's Dora."

  Christian came and sat beside her in a chair. "Listen, Grace. You are making me out a Scrooge. A Whatnot Legree. I tell you we will do what we can when the situation is clear. Or clarified. I simply refuse to commit myself in advance, blindfold, to another of Caro's"—the word he was groping for was "harebrained"—"wild schemes. On the phone she obviously took the fare in her stride—