The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Author:Shirley Hazzard [Hazzard, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Sisters, Australians
ISBN: 9780140107470
Publisher: Virago
Published: 1980-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Was it impossible then? No longer like someone else's death, now it is like my own. No more thoughts, thing itself, itself. Darkness what darkness, and I have not even.

Returning from work one evening, Caroline Bell found a letter from Major Ingot. Taking it upstairs she put it on the table while she lit the gas for her dinner, then sat down to read it. She kept her coat on because of cold.

The Major asked that a compromise be arranged. Otherwise, prospects were dim for keeping body and soul together. "I don't have your advantages," the Major wrote. And "Day after day, it was a tongue-lashing or the waterworks. Or both, like as not. Cry, you've never seen anything to equal it. You'd not believe, you can't imagine. She was all for dying one day, disappearing the next, till I'd half a mind to take her up on it, and no error." In extremity, the Major's social pretensions had dissolved, or perhaps he believed the unaffected idiom might touch Caro. The Major could not know his timing was badly off.

Caro gave the letter to Christian, who told her he would soon settle the Major's hash. He said, "I am going to drop a word through the embassy. After all, there are some benefits in having access to official channels."

When the spring came, Dora took a cruise to Capetown with a new friend, Meg Shentall, whom she had met in the Algarve in a tearoom called The Lusitania.

In a park without flower-beds or streams, on undulations of November leaves, Caro was walking alone. Branches fissured a white sky, the bark on ancient trees was corded like sinews of a strong old man. On a free afternoon given in recompense for late office hours, Caro had come there without purpose, scarcely noticing the intervening streets crossed in her mute private delirium. Inside the park, lack of intention struck her wretchedly and she grew physically uneasy, ears aching from cold, feet slipping on dun leaves. The smell of earth was decayed, eternal. Flat colours offended, a dreariness full blown: Nature caught in an act of erasure.

She stood on the path, shoulders narrowed and hands up to protect her frigid ears; still and watching. And might have been taken for a woman aghast at some cruel spectacle. But the single person approaching was reading a letter and had not yet seen her.

That Paul and Caro should meet in such a way, by accident, might appear the calculated act of a fate that preyed on helpless lives.

What would in retrospect be made reasonable—since they had occasionally met by chance when they were lovers, and the park was familiar territory—at that instant amazed with predestination. In this they were both egotistical and humble—the two of them facing each other on the ceremonious avenue, the leaves shifting and drifting on the ground or inertly falling; the senile bark, the pinched white light.

Paul came on, of a colour with the pale scene—hair, light coat, trouser legs. Caro lowered

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