The Transit of Venus (5 page)

He meant the floral English summer, but could have been understood otherwise. In fact he was not bold enough to touch her, but made his gesture to her head. "What are you thinking?''

Caro had been watching out the window, and turned the same look of general, landscaped curiosity on him. This man was no more to her then than a callow ginger presence in a cable-stitch cardigan.

The country bus lurched over an unsprung road. The girl thought that in novels one would read that he and she were flung against each other; and how that was impossible. We can only be flung against each other if we want to be. Like rape, men say.

"I was thinking the summer is violent, rather than tame." It was her second summer of the northern kind, an abundance that overwhelmed—as did the certainty that it could be dismantled and remounted indefinitely: Nature in a mood impassive, prodigious, absolute. "Australian summer is a scorching, without a leaf to spare.

Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance."

Remembering distances of ageless desolation, she wondered if she was defining frailty. "For colours like these, you need water." But, even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green.

She looked again out the window, full face like a child, and thought that here the very fields seemed intended for pleasure. As to the multiplication and subtraction of seasons, she had of course known perfectly, beforehand, how leaves fall in deciduous England. But still been unprepared for anything extreme as autumn

—more, in its red destruction, like an act of man than of God.

They left an abbey afloat on a swell of trees, and passed through a town of overhead wires and small discouraged shops:

"Great Expectations
," said Caro, who could read the billboard at the far-off picture-house. The bus halted, and retrundled. The regularity of suburban streets had been shorn back for a highway: the new road fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch. In a blighted field a capsized merry-go-round was turning to rust; a strung-up sign had lost its introductory F, and read, in consequence,
UNFAIR.
A barn squatted by the roadside like an abandoned van. The bus plunged forward. At its roaring, a small car withdrew into a hedge: an animal bayed.

Ted said, "It used to be, in England, that you were never far from countryside. Now you are always near a town." He had begun to look with antipodean eyes, because of Caro.

"I'll be living in a city ever after." Caroline Bell was soon to start work in the government office. "I have to wait until there is the post."

He thought, She already has the jargon then—but she went on,

"Post, post. Like being tied to a stake in a field. Like a gibbet at a crossroads/'

They smiled at this moonlit image of dangling Caro: Caro would swing for it. Whatever they said mattered to him. Instead of making phrases about towns and offices they might have been asking,

"What will become of us?" or "Do you believe in God?" The girl felt a man's breath speaking on her neck. A river trailed willows at her side; a pale spire appeared, scarcely mineral. The bus plunged and bucked, determined to unseat them. We are flung against each other.

Where they got down, wrought-iron gates were folded back like written pages. Guarding this calligraphy there was a white-haired man, one arm missing and the ribbons of old battles on his chest.

"You're just in time." A notice gave hours of visiting, as if the great house beyond were a patient in hospital. The guard called after them, "Better look lively." And they laughed and did so.

Caro had taken up a song from Ted Tice and sang "Southerly, southerly" in a high voice, light and none too tuneful, as she lifted both hands to shade her eyes. For that instant at least, these two were no more than the world took them for—young, hopeful, and likely to become lovers.

"Of course we never saw any of this." It was the great house in which Ted Tice had once been a child evacuee from the blitz. "It doesn't even seem to be the same house." Resplendent indoor colours of silk and velvet and porcelain might themselves have been a prerogative of ruling classes.

Caro said, "Perhaps we took the wrong bus." They were laughing and looking out the windows. The house was all of stone.

Outside, below the broad sill, there was a mass of mock orange; there were Buddleia bushes, purple and full of bees; roses as a matter of course, and sweet peas. The clippings of ornate hedges were being gathered up by gardeners—all England being trimmed and snipped, shorter and shorter.

"Does the Rape of the Sabines mean anything to you?"

The guide was reaching up with a white rod. Her voice was also on English tip-toe, though heard by the obedient crowd. They saw the picture, hugely Italian, swirl with outraged limbs; the red lips parted on the painted cry. Caro and Ted were laughing by the windows. The Rape of the Sabines meant nothing to them.

The tour shuffled. There was a restraining loop of twisted cord and a notice:
VISITORS ARE KINDLY REQUESTED.
Emotions were roused by a cascade of painted decoration falling from an immense height. There were goddesses, there were fantastic garlands, urns and balustrades, and any amount of gold. In such a room the house was felt to be harbouring some other, too lavish nation; and barely escaped treachery.

"These walls were boarded up in the war. And are by Rubens."

The crowd became intent, not seeing the paintings now so much as the interesting and ingenious planking that had once obscured them. "The battle theme of the west wall merits special attention, if you consider the Second Front was planned in this room." Yes, it was true: commanders had sat here in battle dress and the map of France had hung, in its turn, over the boarded canvas of flung drapery and glistening flesh; and Mars in truth had covered Venus.

A bald general had practised putts on the underfelt, while a prime minister, not to be outdone, had painted a picture of his own.

The crowd had not realized. They had been thinking the house long past its serious phase. And wanted to know, how was the table placed, and what about Montgomery.

"Yes, they were here." The dove-coloured guide had laid her rod on a table and was showing with her hands, like an artist. "All the architects of the invasion." As if war, too, were some stately edifice. She had removed her glasses and, with a small red impress each side of the nose, was a bird delicately marked. She was happy to please with her important information—the general's putts, the statesman's placed easel. And was glad, also, for the family in their great possession.

The tour shifted along to another loop of cord. A notice once more asked, or kindly requested, that they do or refrain from doing; and went on to say that the library was lined with books to within ten feet of the ceiling (which itself depicted the story—

pastel, concave, and none too decent—of Deianira and Hercules).

Far below, the carpet was figured in pale colours like reflections.

On polished tables photographs stood at angles, in silver frames, and were signed. You could see, time and again, the great R after the name.

"Queen Alexandra, Princess Pat." The crowd picked them out, expert certainly in this. They prowled among chiffoniers and cre-denzas, and no one had the heart to deny. The dead and executed, the Russian and Prussian princes, struck no pity or terror: it was part of their privileged destiny, all one with the magnificence, the tiaras, the stars and garters, and long ropes of pearl.

A man in herringbone said, "That's the bleeder." Heads turned sharply, but were soon nodding for the affliction of the little doomed Tsarevich.

"Note the unusual group of the generations. And the Duke of Kent shortly before he was killed by Cecil Beaton." There was no lack of appreciation. A woman in paisley print was asked, most reasonably, not to touch.

"Indeed it is the very same house," said Ted Tice. Where there was a sign,
THIS WAY,
they went downstairs together.

From outside, the house was seen to be sculpted. There was no imagining ribs, beams, architraves, or stages of laborious construction. Virginia creeper reached the flaking windows of the room where generals had charted death; and a great wistaria strangled columns in a silent portico. The house prepared for mouldering as for another phase of life.

Ted Tice sat with Caro on the lawn. The girl hugged her knees and said, "The creators of such a house should themselves be beautiful."

"Probably the house was as much as they could manage in the way of beauty." The ginger man lay back on turf, arms beneath his head, and recited in his regional voice:

"That they,

Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day. "

Caro's dress moulded a blue kneecap. "Do you suppose anyone anywhere is longing, or rearing the evidence now?"

"If so, they'd best keep it dark, or they'll cop hell." By now, longing itself might be an admission of failure. Ted said, "Beauty is the forbidden word of our age, as Sex was to the Victorians. But without the same power to reassert itself." He might have been echoing Sefton Thrale: You'll be the ones to bear the brunt.

Ted Tice sat with Caro on the lawn. A silence can easily fall between those who do not consider themselves a topic. And in any case the air was filled with the blunt sounds and green smells of the pruning and cropping. England was being cut back to the roots for its own good; that is the way you build character. The gardeners in grey shirts moved to put a stop to growth, or to hold it in check.

Green fell in every form, and was carried off in baskets.

"They are cutting down the very colour." Caroline Bell leaned forward and smiled to see her long belief justified. "The green we only knew about from books."

"Grey Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest,
And, behold, for repayment,

September comes in with the wind of the West
And the Spring in her raiment. "

You might recite it in Elocution Class, but could hardly have it in English poetry. It was as if the poet had deliberately taken the losing, and Australian, side. He had grasped the nettle. But a nettle grasped remains a nettle, and grasping it an unnatural act. What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature and in lawns of emerald velours, or in flowers that could only be grown in Australia when the drought broke and with top-dressing. Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.

Little girls sang, sing-song:

"Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)."

Involving themselves in a journey of ten thousand miles. For a punishment you might, after school, write one hundred times:
Self reverence, self knowledge, self-control:
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

The little girls licked nibs of tin and fingered pigtails, preparing for sovereign power.

History was the folding coloured view of the Coronation that had been tacked on the classroom wall—the scene in the Abbey, with the names printed beneath. The Duke of Connaught, the Earl of Athlone, the slender King in ermine. Dora bought a coronation mug at Woolworth's: Long May They Reign. That was History, all of a piece with the Black Prince and the Wars of the Roses. Grace and Caro had been allowed to stay up one summer night to hear the Abdication crackle over the short-wave. Something you'll remember always.

Australian History, given once a week only, was easily contained in a small book, dun-coloured as the scenes described. Presided over at its briefly pristine birth by Captain Cook (gold-laced, white-wigged, and back to back in the illustrations with Sir Joseph Banks), Australia's history soon terminated in unsuccess. Was engulfed in a dark stench of nameless prisoners whose only apparent activity was to have built, for their own incarceration, the stone gaols, now empty monuments that little girls might tour for Sunday outings: These are the cells for solitary confinement, here is where they.

Australian History dwindled into the expeditions of doomed explorers, journeys without revelation or encounter endured by fleshless men whose portraits already gloomed, beforehand, with a wasted, unlucky look—the eyes fiercely shining from sockets that were already bone.

That was the shrivelled chronicle—meagre, shameful, uninspired; swiftly passed over by teachers impatient to return to the service at the Abbey. The burden of a slatternly continent was too heavy for any child to shift. History itself proceeded, gorgeous, spiritualized, without a downward glance at Australia. Greater than Nature, inevitable as the language of morning prayers: O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.