The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

  I think you're wise to accept the Washington invitation, since we may shortly have a new government and someone else's relatives installed at the embassy. If you do get to the USA as planned, you might send me any press notices you see on the film of Act of God, which will be opening about that time. My agent holds them until they're all in, and I can't rely on friends to send them unless they are highly unfavourable.

  Felix asks that I thank you for the birthday cheque. You must forgive him for not writing himself, and indulge him as you do Your loving son

  Caro said, "Paul Ivory was at a party I went to this week/' She was lunching with Ted Tice.

  "Paul must be showing through a bit by now."

  "He looks amazingly the same."

  "I daresay he has a portrait of himself festering in a cupboard."

  Caro thought how Paul had stayed smooth, his smile now rare and less intense. He was sparing himself, like an ageing dancer; and reserved the right to be, on occasion, the one who was bored.

  She said, "His son was there. Very tall, very thin." An emaciated cavalier: long fair drooping hair, an elegance of nose and brow, a refinement of structure. Eyes more truly blank than Tertia's. Perhaps simple, in a selfish way; but breeding can look deceptively like intelligence. Wearing a white lawn blouse embroidered in coloured flowers, with cuff's of frilled lace; the shirt belled over jeans snug as a saltimbanque's. His feet were bare. You might have said, What beauty. Instead, Caro introduced herself. Monosyllables were planted like bollards, closing every avenue. The boy had not forgotten what to say: he had chosen a part with no lines. He was cool and, except for the wrists, unruffled. One talked as if to a child,

  "What's your name, where do you go to school?" His name was Felix, and he was to go somewhere—no doubt Oxford, or doubtless Cambridge—in the autumn. When someone else came up he disappeared instantly, having somehow stuck it out till then. A woman said, "I just know he's going to be a surgeon, he has those wonderful fingers with curved tips."

  Caro had not noticed that the boy had Paul's hands. When Paul came over to her she looked at his fingertips, the evidence of love.

  Paul said, "Let's move away from that priest and his ecumenical smirking."

  In the restaurant, Ted Tice was watching Caro's lowered eyelids: the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

  A platter of breaded fish was brought, and divided between them. Caroline Vail had not foreseen that she could ever meet Paul Ivory without emotion. In place of agitation there had been a sense of the long accident of life, and of Paul's claim on her memory till death.

  Ted Tice said, "Watch out for bones." He asked, "How'sjosie?"

  He sometimes liked, with Caro, to make domestic inquiries that fixed him as her familiar. And had struggled a lifetime to achieve this much intimacy at least.

  Josie, who had travelled to Sweden with a tariffs congress and remained there, was to have a baby. Caro said, "I'm going to see her there in September, after the baby's born." She said, "I wish—" and paused on the obvious. She did greatly wish; though unable to imagine Adam with his grandchild.

  She bore her loss with as much composure as the world could reasonably, or otherwise, expect of her. But in private would still make clumsy appeals, to God or to the dead, and disfigure remembrance with salt tears; while Adam, in her thought, remained always calm. She told Ted Tice, "Memory is more than one bargains for.

  I mean, if it goes on like this, this sense of past, past, past, that can turn even the happiest memories to griefs."

  Her appearance, and the impetuous manner of saying "Past, past," were so at odds with sad words that Ted nearly smiled.

  "Caro, we're not old enough for this repining."

  "Paul said the other evening that I was on the verge of distinguished old age."

  "I suppose it riled him, your being beautiful."

  Ted watched Caro take a fishbone from her mouth. On her wrist, a big heavy watch that must have been Adam VaiFs. Her lifted wrist, and her husband there on her pulse keeping track of her time.

  I have no happiest memories of her, yet the hours with her have been the best.

  Caro said, "And then one distorts memory to one's own advantage, from vanity or remorse. I do anyway. Not you—you were born truthful, and have also been trained in the truth." She thought of his work vaguely as ever, imagining a great deal of silence and exactitude.

  "Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye." He said, "Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it." Looking away as if ashamed. I cannot so much as say I've been true to her; she has never required that form of truth from me.

  Caro was wiping her fingers and thinking that it might be child-lessness that drove you back on the past. On the other hand, it was hard to envisage the future in Paul Ivory's son. She asked Ted, "Do you have a picture of your children?"

  Ted brought out his wallet. He showed a photograph of two adolescent girls and a small boy, standing with their mother. The women fair and somewhat serious, the dark boy convulsed with laughter.

  Caro said, of the children, "We were never as young as that." She held the photograph carefully by its edges. "Your wife is very lovely."

  "She is entirely lovable." They had long since ceased to marvel, politely, that Caro and Margaret had never met. When Caro handed back the picture, Ted looked at it some moments. "My son is the image of my own brother at that age."

  Caro had forgotten Ted Tice's brother, who existed only as a streak in Ted's eye. "What does your brother do?"

  "He wanted to be a farmer, and managed to put himself through agricultural college. For some years now has been farming in a profit-sharing arrangement in Yorkshire. He works terribly hard, but also contributes to farming journals and has written a respected treatise on voles. He has a taciturn wife, who works as hard as he, and a pretty daughter."

  (At the party, Paul Ivory had said to Caro, "My brother has run off with a little shopgirl." And Caro in reply: "I too have been a shopgirl. We are not necessarily diminutive."

  Paul always aroused some sarcasm. Ted's associations had a candid health.)

  "So you've both done what you wished."

  "In one sense." Ted was looking at the photograph, in which his son held an ungainly dog. "The puppy is called Phobos. Fathered by Mars." He put it away, drew out a creased snapshot, black-and-white, and showed it to her. He was curious to see how she would turn this aside.

  Against a segment of garden at Peverel, there was the image of a girl in profile, black hair hanging loose, one hand raised. Caroline Vail held the picture in her palm. A slight shiver on her expression might have been awe, or the suppression of tears. She said, "I don't remember that dress."

  She gave back the photograph. So she had been that person.

  Around the room the fantasy of existence extended to everything

  —to forks and table-legs and the striped collar of a shirt, and to the soft prickling of plush banquette against her calves.

  Ted would have been sorry to make her cry, though having tried so hard for it.

  He said, "When you come through in September, will you let me know?"

  "I promise."

  "You won't go back on it?" Like a child.

  "Of course not. I love to see you."

  A short flight of steps led up to the street. Ted watched the sway of scarlet coat at Caro's knees as she went up. Saw too her shoes that were shiny as black glass, and thought that he had never seen her feet bare.

  It was now well into the afternoon. Caro was taking the Underground. Ted went to the ticket booth with her. "Good-bye." They kissed. He watched her red coat pass the barrier, move with the Down escalator, gliding, diminishing, descending: a rush-hour Eurydice. At the last moment she looked back, knowing he would be there.

  On a hot morning of that early summer, Mrs. Vail was sitting in a doctor's office opposite her own house. She read aloud from a chart. Her dark eyes w
ere darkened and dilated. The doctor said,

  "I will give you a prescription."

  "For eyedrops?"

  "For glasses."

  She stared.

  The doctor had white hair, a sour breath. "Things catch up with you. You were always the one, weren't you, who could read the name on the boat, or the announcement on the billboard? You could decipher the fine print. Well, things catch up with you. Nature doesn't like exceptions."

  "We're not here solely to appease Nature."

  "She takes it out on exceptions. And all of a sudden, too. Us ordinary folks can tell more or less how things are likely to go on with us." The doctor handed her a slip and pushed away his prescription pad. Three months later he was to die in a plane crash on his way to an ophthalmologists' congress at Rome.

  Out in the hot street, Caro's eyes smarted. She fumbled for a handkerchief, in a handbag worthy of Dora. The ledge of the curb baffled her vision. And a man coming from a doctor's office next door spoke her name.

  "That you should be here."

  It was like Paul, on a strange continent, to be surprised at Caro's presence on her own street.

  "Is it Paul?" As if truly blind.

  He watched while she blotted tears from eyes larger and darker than remembered. He said, "My son has leukemia." Tears streamed from his own eyes without inducement.

  She stood with a finger at her chin, her eyes closed. Shock affected her like languor. "What a nightmare."

  "It's real enough. Though I've tried for a month now to wake from it." They stood, not noticing street or weather. People passed, and stared as they had always done. The city lumbered about them, soiled and exhausted.

  Paul told her how the disease had been discovered. He had brought Felix to New York because there was a doctor, a hospital, a new treatment. Tertia would arrive after the Fourth of July.

  Caro put her hand to her burning hair. "Can you come home with me?—I live across the street."

  It was Caro, now, who had the key. Turning it in the complex lock she said, "Nobody's home. I'm staying in town over the holiday, to work."

  The entrance was cooled. Surfaces were bare. On a table there was a handwritten list: "Newspaper, laundry, Gristede." In the living-room, curtains silently swelled and slackened over an air conditioner. One chair, a sofa, and a glass table were free of dust covers.

  Paul said, "Do you have anything to drink?" He had never interested himself in her circumstances, and could therefore resume as if they had parted yesterday, requiring no account of intervening life.

  She felt it too: a resumption. Or a culmination.

  Paul took off his jacket and dropped it on a chair. He walked about the shrouded room while Caro fetched a bottle and glasses.

  Distortions of her vision made it almost impossible to pour. Paul threw himself on the sofa and put his hand to his eyes, fingers upturned, white-shirted arm in air: ungainly for the first time—leg ricked up, elbow askew: a fractured modern mechanism it would be easier to replace than repair.

  When he took his hand from his face, Caro gave him the cold glass. He said, "The treatment is drastic. He's suffering most immediately from that."

  "I remember his beauty."

  "With these new drugs, there is some hope."

  She sat in her chair. "Where there's hope there is suspense."

  "The time," he said. "The time that doesn't pass." He put his glass on the floor beside the sofa, where it formed a circle of condensation. His hand dangled beside it. "And this can go on and on and on. And I must hope that it does so."

  After Adam Vail's death, Caro had repeatedly asked the time of day, and found it scarcely changed.

  "Does he know everything?"

  "Yes, and at present is more resentful than afraid." Paul said, "In some ways Felix is like Tertia."

  Caro began to see Paul more clearly: his skin hot with sleeplessness, flushed yet grey; his reddened blue eyes and cobalt eyelids; the slight disorder of collar and tie. It was bizarre that a man with his preoccupation should shave and dress and walk the streets in conventional decency, and that humanity should expect it of him.

  She took his glass and refilled it. "I'll bring something to eat."

  "No. Don't go." As if it had been his house rather than hers. He reached for her wrist, not touching it but joggling the tumbler in her hand. No contact in the gesture, merely the wish to detain. "If I hadn't met you I'd have got through today. It's being able to speak that breaks one up. Or down."

  "What can I do?"

  "Nothing. Stay here. In a little while I must go uptown to a friend of Felix's who's putting photographs in order—slides of a trip they made together. We thought he could enjoy seeing them, he can't concentrate to read."

  "Is this his girlfriend?"

  Paul said, "Felix is homosexual."

  Caro sat, with Paul extended to her scrutiny. As never when he had lain at her side.

  He said, "It's as if one had never known trouble, until this."

  He had reached fifty, but had not got away with it. She said,

  "There is the terrible ignorance, looking back. Not knowing this was in store."

  Paul said, "The rage—at fate, at God. Not merely being helpless, but in someone's—something's—power. The doctors and nurses with authority to tell you the worst, or lie to you. With authority to make mistakes. I've always detested any sense of power over me."

  He sat up, lit a cigarette and let it burn in his fingers. An onlooker might have wondered whether Paul remembered who Caro was.

  "Could I come tomorrow?"

  'Til be here all weekend, working."

  "Working?"

  "On a translation, from Spanish."

  "Oh—yes—I saw you were doing that." That he had not asked about herself, her life, her loss, gave reality, in an atmosphere of dream. It made a fact of Paul's presence—material as statistics might have been, or talk of money. He said, "Is this an ashtray?" and put out his cigarette. "Till tomorrow then."

  Caro let him out. She closed the door on the stifling day, and wondered if he would ever come back. She took the coloured plate into the kitchen and rinsed it at the sink, in a smell of wet nicotine.

  In the night she came down from her bedroom to look at crumpled cushions and ice melted in a tumbler. She went to the kitchen and saw the plate from Palermo. Years before she had sought evidence of her own presence in this house. Now Paul's very existence must be proved here. When the sun rose, Caroline Vail looked out from the top of the house at a sky of iron.

  A heavy newspaper was delivered, a note from Una, a letter from Ireland.

  Caro opened the door on a gust of heat.

  "You supposed I wouldn't come." Punctual as an actor, he appeared to re-create the rehearsed scene of yesterday. He took off his jacket and sat on the sofa. His shirt was damp on his chest and between the shoulder-blades, making his body leaner, more visible.

  "Where are you staying?" A hotel might vouch for Paul Ivory's existence.

  "At the St. Regis."

  She brought sandwiches on a plate, and a glass of whisky. Paul did not encourage kindness: he had some greater service to ask of her. He said that Felix had slept and was not in pain. Tertia had telephoned from London. Paul said, "His skin, his teeth, his hair.

  His hair lifts off in handfuls, like thatch." Paul held the glass in both hands and said, "His beautiful hair."

  After a time he said, "It perhaps surprises you I should care this much for anyone."

  It was not love that was new in him, but responsibility.

  Words embellished a state of waiting. In sallow light, Paul's face was a mask of the most delicate and supple leather, or of lemon-coloured silk: features drained not so much by inward feeling as by outward show. Public appearances and innumerable photographs had exhausted the store of verisimilitude, leaving just this. Each exploitation had drawn off its portion, until only a film of expression remained.

  He said, "What's become terrible is not the guilt, which I scarcely
feel, even now. But the sense of retribution."

  She thought he meant, because of her. He was looking at her in the half-light that showed only a chair, a form. She might have been a crone, or Helen of Troy. She said, "Many people might feel that.

  It's implicit in the very question, Why me? The sense of being singled out for such punishment."

  "You know it's nothing usual like that." Paul could still create complicity. "But I have never been sure how much you knew."

  He put down his glass, and waited. At last Caro said, "What have you come to tell me?"

  Paul sat on the sofa, his hands lightly clasped between his knees.

  He would now speak with the voice, natural and so nearly beautiful, that he reserved for truth. In this voice, he said, "I let a man die."

  He kept his eyes on Caroline Vail's face. It was her glance that fell, into darkness.

  "I was twenty-five years old. It was just before you and I met, that summer at Peverel." He might have been making conversation. "I say I let him die, but in fact I killed him. I thought you possibly knew." It was this he had come to say.

  "I saw—I knew there was something—" She would have added,

  "of the kind," but murder has no kindred.

  "From things you said, figures of speech, sometimes your look, I supposed you knew. Though you could not possibly know all of it." Paul's eyes were alive in the kidskin mask with new, exposed prominence, as though lashes and brows had singed away in his stare. The woman was looking back at him with a moral effort.

  "You may remember"—the conventional phrases struck absurdity: there should be a separate language for havoc. "At Peverel there was an old couple who used to help with dinners, serve and clear away, that sort of thing."

  Caro said, "They were hired for Grace's wedding. And were there the night, the night the Thrales celebrated your engagement to Tertia."

  "They were called Mullion. They used to come to the castle as extra help when there were weekend parties. They had a grandson who sometimes pitched in—to bring the cars around, take people to the station, fetch and carry. That's how I met him, the grandson, at the castle, a couple of years before I knew you. I went out in the garden after dinner, and he was hanging about." Paul made the grimace, unremembered in many years, of tightening his eyelids.