The Transit of Venus (9 page)

At the port, hulks lay about like rotting whales. There were blitzed docks and, in the harbour basin, the upturned keel of a ship capsized at launching. On the pier, the erstwhile enemy, dressed in the colour called fatigue, pulled on ropes and uttered the cries by which a ship is docked. One of the ship's officers said, "You'll be going over the hill." The slopes above the port of Kure were terraced gold and green, there were red valleys of azalea. It was early in June. "Not that way, it's the other direction." And Ted Tice pronounced, like a lesson, the name of his destination:

"Hiroshima."

It was like riding in state—the jeep being open, and khaki with authority. There were the bombed docks and ruined avenues of the port, and then the hillside grotto of a destroyed railway tunnel. The officer beside the driver was pointing out, "Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now." He said, "111

fill you in as we go." Along the back of the front seat his heavy, extended arm was energized yet not quite human, like a turgid fire-hose. His name was Captain Girling.

They were descending to a vast ground without horizon, and at first there were small unfinished houses everywhere. Unweathered timbers were being ribbed into rooms, roofs were being woven slat on smarting slat. Men and women were bearing loads, were walking planks, were strung up against a hot tin sky. The jeep slowed beside a new-laid tramline. Where rails and road diverged, a youth leaned from the tram door to spit on them, and withdrew.

"If I could get at him," the officer said. "If only." This man was literally decorated, wearing the ribbons of many medals. He had a scar, just a line, as if a pillow had creased his sleeping cheek. This Captain Girling saw the flaw on Ted Tice's eyeball without looking into his eyes. In the back seat of the jeep they were showing, like children, what they had got—the cameras and watches and little radios with which the enemy had nearly won.

In the past, the demolition of a city exposed contours of the earth.

Modern cities do not allow this. The land has been levelled earlier, to make the city; then the city goes, leaving a blank. In this case, a river amazed with irrelevant naturalness. A single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presided like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter's, in some eternal city of nightmare.

A catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God.

It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction.

He was used to thinking of his life—I have done this, how could I have done that—like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books—

except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.

Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important.

This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.

Whether this amounted to a loss of faith, or to the acquisition of it, was uncertain.

It was at this period that Edmund Tice's fate became equivocal, and he ceased to make quite clear if he would win or fail.

Captain Girling informed them that, as a result of what they now saw, war had become unthinkable: "In that way, it has been salu-tary." He was pleased to justify an extreme. "You have to stop somewhere," he said, despite the evidence.

The rest were silent, doubting the world's stomach had sufficiently turned. On the other hand, there was the seductive, dangerous relief of contemplating Armageddon, which would absolve them from blame or effort.

Captain Girling said, "I'll fill you in." As if at a graveside. He believed it might be twenty years, and that was a conservative estimate, before effects would be fully known. Records were being maintained, there would be an institute, studies. "Well, that is your shop, over to you." They would now see survivors—who were confined to an institution, as artifacts of special durability are housed in a museum.

The jeep entered a corridor of finished new houses. Ted Tice heard, "You blokes are used to it." He wanted to say, "I have never. I am not a doctor." Imagination stalked ahead, aghast, among sights soon to be outdone. In front, Captain Girling was satisfied, seeing this young man's knees tremble. In the present setting, the merciful were at an even worse disadvantage than usual.

Ted Tice's manner of looking interrupted the smooth flow of acceptance, casting useless doubt on the inevitable. If he and his kind had their way, the world would be a bonny mess. So Captain Girling reflected, amid the atomic ruins.

All along the new street, there had been posted the tokens of normality: habitation, children, the silence broken. Aligned timbers were assembling the tableaux of daily existence. And small squat women had been gathering up the concave reflectors from searchlights, which had fallen everywhere like stones in an erup-tion. Filled with water, these dishes had been placed at doorways.

And in each of them floated, rose-red and magnified beyond your wildest dreams, a frond or single flower of azalea.

Such families could not be considered survivors, being physically intact, and prepared to rebelieve.

When they got down from the jeep, Captain Girling took Ted aside: "Look here. Don't make a goat of yourself." Goat signifying anything unmanly, or humane. He was only giving sound advice.

And did not see why the bugger should laugh.

It was the fate of those mild hills around the Thrale house to be portentous in the view of Edmund Tice. There was the low road where he walked home with Caro, the surrounding crops and grasses, and the hills large with event.

"It was here the storm came up, the day I arrived." He was marking it all, making shrubs and hedges bear witness. Now it was dusk that was falling. He asked, "Are you cold? We'll soon be home." But thought instead that they would stop as they climbed the path and he would touch her and speak differently. In the fine evening air he walked less confidently than in the storm; alone, as yet, with what he had to offer.

Caro could not consider the approaching house her home, though she had no other. "Do you have your own place, at the university?" If one could have privacy, all must be well.

"I've a flat, two rooms, in a professor's house. Where they are kind, a happy family. He has been a great friend to me. Now he's moving to Edinburgh—I'm to go there for a few days, in September, before I set off for Paris." He paused, on the note of parting and departing. "In the family there are two boys—who like me.

And a daughter, a bit older."

"Who likes you."

"Who can't decide to become a dancer or a painter."

Caro might have asked, How old. But was silent, and the wraith of daughter was soon gone from them. They stood on the country road while she turned away Ted's embrace. She herself appeared to wonder at the antipathy, and said aloud, "I don't know why."

They walked again, a new gentleness on her part conveying finality: she could afford kindliness, refusing all the rest. She remarked,

"I've been happy today." She would have gone on with him indefinitely, but would not love. There were necessities, of silence and comprehension, that she valued more than love, thinking this a choice she had made.

At the turn of the road he recorded, "It was here the rain came down"—his features smudged with twilight or from some new mood; recalling that noon when, decisively, a streak of light split earth from sky. They began to climb the country path, slowed by trailing brambles and by Ted's intention of halting.

Since his moods had come to refer to her, his watchfulness roused Caro's exasperation. As a child, Caroline Bell had abhorred Dora's ceaseless scrutiny and the sensation of being observed—while she read, played, or sewed—with possessive attention. She now said to Ted what had been left unsaid to Dora: "You must not be so interested in me."

He took her meaning at once—that was part of it too, his quickness with her thoughts. "I see it might irritate." Not promising change. In the night or in any pause she might now, if she chose, feel his consciousness of her. Through all the events and systems of her days it would persist, like the clock that is the only audible mechanism of a high-powered car.

She said that to him, about the clock, exorcising it with her laugh.

And he replied, "It's not a clock you're describing, it's a time-bomb."

"So there's a limit, then. Time-bombs must have a stop."

"Not a limit. A climax."

He supposed she had some fear of physical love. He did not invent this to save his pride, having already noticed her quick withdrawals that extended even to the eyes, and the effort—almost charitable—with which she did sometimes touch; and from time to time a turning to her younger, lighter sister as to the one who had mastered this subject or was at least at ease with its inevitability.

As Ted Tice saw, it was not a matter of conquering her objections. She herself required a kind of conquering. And he had begun with devotion. Her demands would before long be tested by experience, as principle is tested by adversity, and it might be that she would temporize; but for the present imagined herself transcendant over what she had not encountered.

She wished to rise to some solitary height. From ignorance she had an unobstructed view of knowledge—which she saw, on its elevation, stately, pale, pure as the Acropolis. It could not be said that hers was a harmless vanity: like any human wish for distinction, it could easily be denounced or mocked; and, in its present elemental form, was clearly short on pity. Yet, as pretensions go, it was by no means the worst.

Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensifi-cation of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and his foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.

A bark, a bell, a farmer calling in an animal, a baby's wail. These were the only sounds, bift they struck eternity. On the hillside below them, a door standing wide on the yellow light of a shabby hall was a declaration of peace. Compared with such forthrightness, the windows of Peverel, their now visible destination, were smudges of a veiled respectability where ardour was unknown.

Much as you might blame Sefton Thrale, something drastic had occurred to his house in an earlier time. The nineteenth century has a way of darkening.

While they walked, Caroline Bell thought of Professor Thrale—

his propoundings, tilted stance, and disavowals of his own humanity. Only the day before, he had, in his rapid and conclusive manner, exonerated completely the inventors of deadly weapons: "We merely interpret the choices of mankind." And when Caro objected

—"Aren't scientists also men, then? At the very least, responsible as their fellows?"—he had closed the discussion with his scarcely patient smile, as if to assure a child that it would understand, or not care, when it was older.

Having no vocabulary for their work, Caro could not imagine the Professor's mornings with Ted Tice, which took place, ceremoniously, behind a closed daily door. She might picture two men at a desk and the Professor making notes in his tiny writing, but could think no further.

She said, "I can never ask you about your work."

They sat on a low piece of wall, which was still warm—in a southern country there might have been a lizard. There was an odour of privet or clover, in air so open you could smell the sky.

From the geometric flake of yellow light, a man was calling, "Bessie, Bessie." Until at last a cry came back, displeased.

Ted said, "In fact no technical competence is needed to understand our disagreement, his and mine." Caro had not raised the disagreement, which was felt in the house, if not witnessed. He went straight on, "Which is simply this, that there is no site whatever in England for this kind of telescope. There isn't the visibility.

They all know it. But for politics and gain, and out of littleness, will have it here."

It seemed to her an adult matter, graver than love. "Then where should it go?"

"There are good sites in the south of Europe. But it will never be allowed to go out of the country." He explained how the Professor was studying the calculated hours of daylight, pretending to believe. While he spoke, leaf shadows lengthened on the path, turning exotic; across Caro's extended foot, a thong of shadow like a sandal. Again there came the call, "Bessie," and the impatient squawk of response. Ted said, "I may publish a dissenting view."