The Transit of Venus (8 page)

After two weeks of this, Dora came with Grace in the Marchmains' car, which had been converted to naphtha. Dora was at her best in the drama of reunion and had brought a magnificent hamper to supplement the dreadful meals. Caro showed off to Grace with the Marchmains' pale-pink Rosamund, her fellow exile. They had a picnic on the banks of the Nepean, Mr. Marchmain explaining about nettles and dock leaves. Sausages were cooked on sticks over a fire the Marchmains made. The fat dripped, reeking; sausage meat obtruded from split casing. Fending for yourself on a desert island would not be like this: there would be mangoes, breadfruit, milk from coconuts, and fish from the coral reef.

Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. The girls swam in the river, repelled by the saltless water and the ooze. They played Moses in the Bulrushes, with Grace in the title role but Caro as the Princess.

Across the river, the gorges began, melancholy, uninhabited. A friend of the Marchmains had once stayed up at Lapstone—for pleurisy, or so it was given out at the time. You could usually tell the real thing, though, by the hectic flush. Caro was thinking of Umbria, until yesterday a mere colour in the paintbox between Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna; and of flat Parma where the violets came from.

Caro would have liked to reveal the house, but feared Dora's reaction. Dora was not one to lie down under the news that a veranda was called a loggia, or a mural a fresco. Let alone villa for house. Any such divulging would somehow bring word of Caro's secession from Dora's rule. They walked about the corridors and looked in the oval dining-room without perceiving.

"This Montyfiori," said Mr. Marchmain, who was coarse, "appears to be a raving ratbag."

After tea the Marchmains walked down with Rosamund to the paddock, where you took turns for the pony, and Dora went to put the Thermos in the car. Caro and Grace disappeared into the make-shift dormitory, where they sat side by side on a bed. They made little wracked gasps of an adult weeping that must presently be concealed. The huge heavy mechanism of their hearts dragged at their slight bodies.

Grace said, "111 write."

They washed their faces in a bathroom varicose with streaked marble. The basin was shaped like one of those shells. Even the lav had a blue pattern inside, possibly Chinese.

Dora had found the matron and was reading the Riot Act about blankets. Marchmains were coming up the gravel. Now, authorized public tears, let grief be unconfined. Grace climbed in the car, abashed by escaping yet again. At that moment, Japs were the last thing in anyone's mind: the entire exercise appeared pointless except for the emotions to which it was giving luxurious rein.

Caro came home in winter, with the others. The villa dissolved into gum trees even as they twisted to see it for the last time, breath steaming the cold windows of a bus that took them to the Penrith train. No one, even so, would take a chance on waving to their fellow-prisoners.

Soon their flight to the mountains was part of the fabled past, a form of war service. Not before the Doctor had brought suit, however, for irreparable damage to his house. After all that palaver about Danty and the sunset, the old ratbag was asking a thousand quid, Mr. Marchmain reported, to fix up his caricature of a home.

Caro returned, as if from abroad, to a city populated by American soldiers. Dora confirmed that these were boastful, and self-indulgent in ways unspecified. Girls who went with them were common.

Caro and Grace, in school uniform, were photographed by a lanky sergeant while crossing at the Junction; and put up their hands, like the famous, to ward off intrusion. It was a pity one could not have a better class of saviour: Americans could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as Australians.

The sisters had never seen black men before, apart from the Lascars at the Quay.

At school, Grace was studying the Stuart kings. From newspapers they learned about Stalingrad and Rostov-on-the-Don. Dora was part of a camouflage-netting group that met on Thursdays in Delecta Avenue and was rancorous in the extreme. In the relief of home, Caro was lenient. Once in a while she pictured to herself the Doctor's house, and the high rooms that created expectation. If you could have had the rooms, without the misery.

These picturings might be memories—unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.

When you measured five feet tall you were eligible for extra clothing coupons. She would have undone her plaits into a pony-tail had it not been for Dora.

One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Muni-tions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name

—one's own for preference—and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. Set out on a classroom table, these silenced even Miss Holster. The girls leaned over, picking up this and that: Can I turn it on, how do you work it, I can't get it to go back again. No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: their power was conclusive, and did not appeal for praise.

It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. Even the Lalique on Aunt Edie's sideboard, or Mum's Balibuntl, were utterly functional by contrast, serving an evident cause of adornment, performing the necessary, recognized role of an extravagance. The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials—serviceable, workaday—

in contrast to these hard, high-coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition.

Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness. Even Dora would have to adjust her methods to contend with such imperviousness.

Never did they dream, fingering those toys and even being, in a rather grown-up way, amused by them, that they were handling fateful signals of the future. The trinkets were assembled with collective meaning, like exhibits in a crime, or like explosives no expert could defuse. Invention was the mother of necessity. It was not long after this that the girls began to wave their unformed hips and to chant about Chattanooga and the San Fernando Valley.

Sang, from the antipodes, about being down in Havana and down Mexico way. Down was no longer down to Kew. The power of Kew was passing like an empire.

Now Caro and Grace Bell did not go home at once after lessons but walked along the beach below the school, getting sand in their shoes and stockings, picking up chipped shells and flinging them away. Seaweed sworled in dark, beady tangles, scalloped up by the tides, bleared by an occasional medusa. A boy or pair of boys would speak to them, boys in grey knickerbockers and striped ties. The uniforms were a guarantee: schools recognized each other like regiments.

Grace was a flower.

Caro's hair hung heavy on her shoulders, as no child's will do.

The sounds and smell of ocean made speech unworthy, or required a language greater than they knew. Because Dora's intru-sions had made privacy sacrosanct, they exchanged no word on the dangerous preparations their bodies were making for an unimaginable life. And, in this respect, lingered in unusual ignorance.

Dora was too sore and disturbing a subject for their circumspect afternoons. Besides, they were supposed to love her; and, more to the point, did so. They would have given anything to see her happy. However, the threesome was beginning to irk them. People had to step aside as Dora marched the girls, on arms inertly linked, along streets or pushed them singly through turnstiles. They lived under supervision, a life without men.

Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.

All women evidently longed to marry, and on leaving school held their breath, while accumulating linen and silver. There was a lot of waiting in it, and an endangering suggestion of emotion.

Of those who were not taken, some quietly carried it off—like old Miss Fife, who came to tea with parasol and high collar, fondant silk to her calves, pointed shoes each clasped with single button: gentler than Queen Mary. There were others, unhinged, timid, or with whiskers—crushed by father, crushed by mother, or unthinkingly set aside.

In this, Dora was hard to place.

Caro was allowed into town on her own, on the ferry. There was the gangplank, creak of hawsers, casting off, smell of throttling engines, and the sea slapping at green encrustations on wooden piles. She heard the hooting approach of the city, tram-bells, the jarring of a great ignition. In the cabin, office girls held up little mirrors and patted powder off their curving fronts and concave laps with small reverberations at thorax or thighs. They dabbed behind the ears, then sharply closed their handbags to signal preparedness.

This was not the groundwork for a march, three abreast, through the town; but a prelude to encounters.

Alone in the city, Caro was lifting a frayed book in a shop. "How much is this?"

"Fifteen and three."

Back on the teetering pile. The table was massed like an arsenal.

"Ah well. Let's say, ten bob."

Seeing it that evening, Dora said, "You. have enough books now."

Dora knew, none better, the enemy when she saw it.

We too," said Ted Tice. "We knew about things from books."

Caroline Bell sat on the grass with her bare arms about her knees.

The tuff was close as stitching: seamless England. The astounding trees were Weymouth pines, through which the sun came down in hallowed strokes like light into a cathedral. Matters must soon come to life for her that had only been known, like colouring, from books.

Ted said, "Like heat, for instance. Or love."

"The heat is intense," they had written home through the Forces Mail. Or, according to rank, "You would not half believe." The troopship, which was the old
Lancashire,
out of Liverpool, broke down in the Red Sea. Hearing her called "the old
Lancashire, "
they had expected something of the kind. Aden was a line of molten crags awaver with fumes of petroleum and colonial dejection. They passed into the Indian Ocean with no sense of release. Sunburn cream and soda water had long since run out. They sang war songs

—stale, in 1946, with superseded poignancy—and marching songs that taunted immobility. In the evenings there was housie-housie or another sing-song; which met few requirements. Airless episodes of England continued to be performed, at Colombo, at Singapore.

In Hong Kong, Ted Tice, who was to take ship again at once for Japan, sat in a club for officers with a lieutenant of the Royal Navy.

The club was on a side street within walking distance of the naval dockyard, and in the evening the officers came there in pure white and gold, as if in court dress. Under slow revolutions of a ceiling fan, the aftermath of war was coming to a halt. There was a smell of starch, of lime juice and gin, mildew from canvas cushions, and, faintly from the street, the reek of China. Three fair floral women on a sofa were clearly nurses off duty, awkward as plainclothes police.

"You know what they say." Ted's lieutenant knew a thing or two, lowering his voice. Hearing him laugh, one of the women innocently turned and laughed too, from good nature. She was about nineteen, a broad, guileless face with long nose and irregular teeth. The sleeves and bosom of her civilian dress were outgrown as a schoolgirl's tunic. Like Ted Tice's mother, who kept a news-agent's shop, she had a Manchester voice.

(When Ted Tice first left home for the university, his mother had said to him, "Tha dustn't have to say owt about shop. If tha dustn'

want." They had stared, like children playing to see who will blink first. Unbearable, her understanding; her lack of understanding.) The naval lieutenant, who was not all bad, had been in Japan.

"It's an American show. You can do nothing without a permit from MacArthur." He gave an inevitable, obscene example. "They treat us worse than Japs. They're in the driver's seat now, and we're on the skids."

On the wall there was a framed photograph of an artless king in naval dress. Even a king might be regretted now he was on the skids. Chinese servants were carrying trays, not yet apprised of change. The girl on the sofa said in her Mancunian voice, "And I say he couldn't run a pie-stall." She was speaking of the prime minister.

The lieutenant told Ted Tice, "Unless you have a girl." Ted turned back to him. "I'm saying, don't get pushed into a lot of cultured pearls."

Because of minesweeping, they were all day in the Inland Sea.

The islands were irruptions, each fringed with the single file of lean trees leaning. At home, even the wildest coast had established itself with slow insistence, but these islands were fragments of a cata-clysm. Ted had never seen so red a dawn, or villages of straws. Little boats like wrapping paper flapped on alluvial waves, and a young Englishman looked down over a railing into faces stigmatized with the cartoon image of enemy.