The Transit of Venus (6 page)

Sentiments of a magnitude to which only a very affected, bold or departing Australian might aspire.

In the true, and northern, hemisphere, beyond the Equator that equalized nothing, even bath-water wound out in the opposite direction. Perhaps even the records gyrating on the gramophone.

Australians could only pretend to be part of all that and hope no one would spot the truth.

Once in a while, or all the time, there was the sense of something
The Transit of Venus

33

supreme and obvious waiting to be announced. Like the day the boys at the junction were tormenting the swaggie and a man from nowhere told them, "E's a yooming being."

When fiery December sets foot in the forest. . .

They were living in a house with a tower and a view of the Heads. They had embroidered chairs, crystal dishes that chimed when flicked with a fingernail, and a fragment of oak from Nelson's flagship in a small velvet box. At school Caro was up to the Spanish Armada and the sad heart of Ruth, when the ferry called the
Benbow
turned over in Sydney harbour and hideously sank. Grace was on a blue chair in the kindergarten and still had Miss McLeod, who had come out after the Great War and would be superannuated at Christmas.

Miss McLeod played the organ for the school at morning prayers.

"Hush'd was the Evening Hymn/' "For All the Saints," and, in season, "Once in Royal David's City." Everyone was C of E or something like it, except Myfanwy Burns and the Cohen girl. Religion was the baby in the manger, the boy with the slingshot, the coat of many colours.

Caro and Grace knew what had happened to them was drastic.

They could tell by flattering new attentions that had nothing to do with incredulous, persistent loss. They were slow to give up hope of miraculous reversal, and each morning woke disbelieving to the weather of death. It would have been hard to have weather appropriate or consoling, but this heat did not seem neutral.

Full fathom five thy father lies. Mrs. Horniman in the house with the English lawn said there was nothing she would not do. And on Christmas Day they sweltered beside the Hornimans' celluloid tree while a bushfire broke out over at Clontarf. Grace got a threepen-ny-bit in the plum pudding, but afternoon grew awful. The children were forbidden to swim because of the turkey, and Athol Horniman hit Caro with a cricket ball.

A few days later Dora told them, "It is 1939."

Dora struck them both as unfamiliar. They scarcely recognized her from before, when she had been part of a family of five. The present Dora seemed not to have shared in the life before the
Benbow
. There was only one thing—a memory, not yet defined as such, of Dora shrieking beyond a closed door and Father saying,

"Look what a daughter."

It was hard to think where Dora might have been, for instance, on mornings of the great past when Grace and Caro were driven into town for new school clothes. Father dropped them off, the mother and two girls, in the important haze where metallic smells of town flowed along with the cars, sluggish between narrow ranks of buildings. A toast-rack tram, discoloured yellow, rocked them on wooden benches glossed with human passage. There were office girls with rolled hair and sailor hats of felt or straw; but there was no Dora, surely. The men sat in the open compartments at each end of the tram, their heavy waistcoats unbuttoned in the heat; flinging tobacco butts on slatted floors and leaning out to spit. In the rain, a canvas blind drew down for them on a rod. In the inside compartment Grace stood between her mother's knees and Caro swayed against an assortment of standing thighs. One and two halves, like the fare; and no Dora.

Dora's own mother had died when she was born, as happened in stories. Dora was twenty-one, but had given up Teachers' College.

Where they got down from the tram there were windows brilliant with coloured gloves and handbags and silk shoes, and shopping arcades lit like rainbows. The women passing along Pitt Street or Castlereagh had cooler faces and wore hats of violets or rose-buds, with little veils. Kegs of ale were nonetheless drawn on drays right past the best shops by pairs or teams of Clydesdales: chestnut necks straining in collars of sweated leather, great hooves under ruffs of streaked horsehair. And the driver collarless, frayed waistcoat open, no jacket, with his leather face and stained mop of horsehair moustache. Manure underfoot, and a bruised smell of dropped cabbage trodden by blinkered ponies harnessed to vegetable carts. Along the curb, barrows of Jaffas and Navels, or Tas-manian apples. All this, raffish and rural, at the fashionable conjunc-tion of Market and Castlereagh streets.

At the same corner they would come upon the spectres dreaded by Caro and by Grace; and, from the looking and the looking away, by all who passed there. Apparitions of the terrible kind were dispersed throughout the city and might be expected at any shopping centre of the suburbs. For a dead and atrocious certainty they awaited you at this particular and affluent corner, which for that reason seemed not to be a street at all, but a pit or arena.

Some of them stood, including those with only the one leg. The legless would be on the ground, against shop-windows. The blinded would have a sign, to that effect, around the neck—perhaps adding
SUVLA
or
GALLIPOLI.
Similarly, on the placard
GASSED
that hung beside pinned medals, might appear the further information,
YPRES
or
ARRAS.
Or the sign might say
MESOPOTAMIA,
quite simply, as you might write
HELL.

They took up separate places, perhaps having a dog with them or a child, or a gaunt woman silently holding out the cap. More usually, each alone. Who or what they had singly been, however, was sunk in the delved sameness of the eyes. Nothing more could be done to them, but their unsurpassable worst would be sustained forever and ever. Stillness was on the eyes even of the blind, closed on God knew what last sighting.

What music they made, and how they sang, that ghastly orchestra in lopped and shiny serge, with unstrung fiddles and wheezing concertinas and the rusted mouth-organ grasped in the remaining and inexpert hand; the voices out of tune with everything but pitched extremity. How cruelly they wracked, for Depression pennies, an unwilling audience with their excruciating songs—"The Rose of No Man's Land," and "The Roses of Picardy," and "The Rose of Tralee," and "Oh My, I don't want to die, I want to go home." The war of the roses, roses, and smile, smile, smile.

''Ighty-tiddly-ighty,

Carry me back to Blighty,

Blighty is the place for me!"

Even children—children who had not yet experienced virtue and might be ruthless in tormenting playfellows—were struck adult in pity: the Great War being deeply known to them, learned before memory, as infants know the macabre from dreams. Nothing would have truly surprised them, not if they had been explicitly told of the exploded horses, exploded men, the decomposing gestures of the dead, the trench-foot, trench-mouth, the starshells, the terror. The bully of a sergeant-major howling about clay piping to those as good as dead, the visiting statesman jocose behind the lines. They knew about Wipers and Plug Street and the Line. They had found it all out somehow from the speechless instruction at street corners and the songs of the roses and "Inky Pinky Parlay-VoO." Uncovered it in defiance of the brittle brown wreaths at cenotaphs, two minutes' silence, and the pools of remembrance where beer bottles lolled, and the monuments to war's sweetest symbols—the soldier, bronze rifle rested, supporting his decorously felled comrade, the marshal cleanly victorious on his flawless mare.

How long they were, how immensely long: the four years that would go on forever.

On Anzac or Armistice Day, Grace and Caroline Bell had been let through the crowd to watch thin-faced men walk in rows, in the decent suit if they had one, pin-stripe, with scraps of braid aligned in small rainbows on the breast, the poppy of red paper in the lapel, the sprig of rosemary. Being little children, Caroline and Grace Bell had been brought to the front of the crowd to see this, as having the greater need.

In the wringing of their hearts, knowledge had entered. Knowledge stood formidable and helpless in their small rib-cages as, glancing aside, they dropped tuppence in the extended cap, or ground the rosemary to death between their fingers for the smell.

The house to which they now moved with Dora was smaller, with camellia trees on the lawn but too many hydrangeas. At the back it was buffalo grass and spiked shrubs, and a rockery hewn from the sandstone slope. Indoors, the responsive crystal, the splinter of the true cross from H.M.S.
Victory
had become museum pieces, relics of another life. At each side of their own brief horizontal, the long streets dropped to the sea. They might almost, had they known it, have been at Rio or Valparaiso. Night followed night, nights of oceanic silence not even broken now by the screams of bandicoots in traps on the Hornimans' English lawn.

In the slit of two headlands the Pacific rolled, a blue toy between paws. The scalloped harbour was itself a country, familiar as the archipelago a child governs among the rocks: it hardly seemed the open sea could offer more. Yet, passing into that slit Pacific, ocean liners took the fortunate to England. You went to the Quay to see them off, the Broadhursts or Fifields. There was lunch on board, which Dora did not enjoy because of a small fishbone caught in her throat. Sirens were blown, and kisses; streamers and tempers snapped. And
the Strathaird,
or
Orion,
was hugely away. You could be home in time to see her go through the Heads, and Caro could read out the name on the stern or bow. Even Dora was subdued at witnessing so incontrovertible an escape.

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.

Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did not generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.

There was the harbour, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else.

Any more private joy—in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost—sa-voured of revelation and was uncountenanced; even in wistaria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory. Though it could hardly be right to relish where Dora was aggrieved, the girls put their smooth faces to gardenias, inhaling December for a lifetime.

Inland was the Bush, the very name a scorched and sapless blur.

Inland was a drought, a parched unvisited mystery, a forlorn horizon strung on a strand of slack barbed wire. Dora would not drive farther than Gosford, and none of them had ever seen an Abo. At Easter, the Whittles took them to Bulli Pass, where the radiator boiled over and they all stood by the side of the road after rolling up stones to the rear tires. Getting out to push, plump Mr. Whittle reminded of a growing infant whose first impulse is to trundle the perambulator in which he has been wheeled. Returning home, Dora sat in an unaccustomed chair and said, "You will not get me to do that again."

Like a vast inland of their own littoral, Dora was becoming an afflicted region, a source of abrupt conflagration. Compliant with her every mood, they wondered that her life should be, as she told and told them, subjugated to theirs. There was some misunderstanding here. Deep trouble was having its way with Dora, as the girls were the first to know. She might still take them into her arms

—but vehemently, as if few such embraces might be left to them, and without providing sanctuary. Dora's state was coming on them like nightfall, while they still affected to discern the shapes and colours of normal day. Keeping up emotional appearances, they were learning to appease and watch out for her. Dora's flaring responses to error might now be feared, or any kindling of her enchafed spirit. The bruises of a fall must be concealed from Dora's shrill ado, and so with other falls and bruises.

They were losing their mother a second time.

Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and that she was bound to Dora.

No one would now appear offering rescue, it was too late for that.

In growing, Caro was beginning rather than outstripping her long task. At least for the present, Caro was stronger than Grace, and was assuming Dora as moral obligation. Dora herself was strongest of all, in her power to accuse, to judge, to cause pain: in her sovereign power. Dora's skilled suspicion would reach unerringly into your soul, bring out your worst thoughts and flourish them for all to see; but never brought to light the simple good. It was as if Dora knew of your inner, rational, protesting truth, and tried to provoke you into displaying it, like treason. On the one hand, it was Dora seeking havoc, and, on the other, the sisters continually attempting to thwart or divert.

The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief—which in Caro was to last her lifetime—that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.

In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards some strength that would, in turn, disturb that equilibrium and sweep them to higher ground.