The Transit of Venus (7 page)

Like other children, they stopped on the way home from school to pull at socks or pick at scabs or stare up a garden path at some opalescent entry. Grace with a satchel and pale jiggling ringlets, Caro tilted to a loaded briefcase. At school both were clever, which was attributed to the maturing effects of their tragedy—just as, had they lagged, obtuseness would have been ascribed to the arresting trauma. They sought each other in the playground and were known to be aberrant, a pair.

The classrooms had rough sallow walls. The children were reading
The Merchant of Venice
under the specked reproduction of Lord Leigh ton's
Wedded,
and the watercolour of Ormiston Gorge. The classrooms were windows on the bay. Tendrils of morning glory crawled on wooden sills. It was always summer—and was afternoon more often than not, hot with smells of chalk and gym shoes and perhaps the banana uneaten in someone's satchel. Fatigued as busi-nessmen, the girls carved names into desktops in expectation of the bell.

Caro and Grace walked home uphill in raging heat. Brick houses were symmetric with red, yellow, or purple respectability: low garden walls, wide verandas, recurrent clumps of frangipani and hibiscus, of banksia and bottlebrush; perhaps a summerhouse, perhaps a flagpole. Never a sign of washing or even of people: such evidence must be sought inside, or at the back. Caro was beginning to wonder about the inside and the back, and whether every house concealed a Dora. Whether in every life there was a
Benbow
that heeled over and sank.

You felt that the walls of such houses might topple inwards, that they would crush but not reveal.

Refinement was maintained on the razor's edge of an abyss. To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity: the six-o'clock shambles outside the pubs, men struggling in vomit and broken glass; the group of wharfies on their Smoke-O, squatting round a flipped coin near the Quay and calling out in angry lust to women passing. There were raucous families who bought on the lay-by, if at all, and whose children were bruised from blows or misshapen by rickets—this subtler threat contained in terrace houses whose sombre grime was a contagion from the British Isles, a Midlands darkness. Britain had shared its squalor readily enough with far Australia, though withholding the Abbey and the Swan of Avon.

Concussed by these realities and worse, refinement shuddered and turned away.

The two girls walked home hand in hand, not so much like lovers as like an elderly couple, grave with information and responsibility.

Coming home was to a Dora of outraged quiet, of which some cause must, sooner rather than later, be explosively made known.

Or to Dora disfigured by tears from the affront of some neighbour, now marked down for life. Meaning was acoustical, ringing out, shaping inflections, filling silences. Grievance was statistical: "They only invited me once in two years," "In all that time I was there to tea exactly twice." Any crisis of classroom or playground, inadvertently disclosed, might set Dora to shrieking, "Peace! I want peace!"—the house resounding to cries of "Peace!" long after the girls were in their beds.

Dora could always die, so she said.
I CAN ALWAYS DIE,
as if this were a solution to which she might repeatedly resort. She told them that death was not the worst, as if she had had the opportunity of testing. She said she could do away with herself. Or she could disappear. Who would care, what would it matter. They flung themselves on her in terror, Dora don't die, Dora don't disappear.

No, she was adamant: It was the only way.

How often, often, she drew upon this inexhaustible reserve of her own death, regenerated over and over by the horror she inspired by showing others the very brink. It was from their ashen fear that she rose, every time, a phoenix. Each such borrowing from death gave her a new lease on life.

Not that Dora was tolerant of the afflicted or of those who had gone under. "We could all give in," she said, when told that Miss Garside the librarian had completely dropped her bundle. The maimed or blinded were a resented incursion on pity that was Dora's by right: Dora's cry for help must drown out all others. She was quite taken up with her own disappearance, which loomed the largest presence in their lives.

The girls' early legends were all of the time that Dora. The time that Dora stood up to the tax man, the time Dora took no nonsense from the minister. "For once I spoke out." Dora taking exception, umbrage, or the huff. Dora lashing out, Dora pitching into, Dora breaking down. Dora giving the dreaded news: "I had a good row." A good cry, a good row, a good set-to. Dora was, furthermore, convinced that if she pressed on kind intentions hard enough they would disclose their limitations; and in this, time after time, had proved herself right.

Dora had a vermilion dress with black buttons that she wore for housework. The child Grace was asking, "Why are you always angry in that dress?"

Dora scarcely knew how to flare. "In this dress—I'm always busy.

Not angry, busy."

Grace disbelieved.

"I don't care to be told I'm angry all the time. I certainly am not angry." Dora was very angry.

Grace trembled. "I'm sorry."

"Do you have any, do you have the slightest notion how hard I work for you. I am never done." It was true, housewives were slaves. "Then I get this flung at me, I am told I'm angry. Well let me tell you."

Grace went outside to cry.

Dora was twenty-two and had dark sloping eyes and, despite dn addiction to boiled sweets, perfect little teeth. Caro wondered when Dora would be old enough for tranquillity. Old people were serene. You simply had to be serene, for instance, at seventy. Even Dora must be, if they could only wait.

Yet Dora was daily life. Dora shopped, and paid bills out of their small inheritance; and spoke with trustees about debentures. Dora took back
The Citadel
to the lending library and returned with
The
Rains Came\
played bridge at Pymble, and had a wealthy cousin at Point Piper. Dora went to tea, and wrote thank-you notes on her blue deckle-edged. She wore a smart silk frock of the colour known as teal, and had her long dark hair waved and rolled. On prize-giving night Dora exulted over the girls' bound anthologies and the silver cup Grace won for Piano; and shed true tears for Caro's gold medal in French. It was this that set Caro to wondering about the backs of houses, and whether Dora was in some form inevitable to every household.

Supremely confusing was the Dora, all loving normality, who followed the release of the good row. At those intervals the girls became, for an evening or a day, young again. It was of course a confounding of all they knew for sure, through the certainty of suffering. But, like others in the clutch of absolute authority, they settled for the brief respite. It seemed easier to lie—to Dora, to oneself, to God—than willfully to precipitate the other Dora.

Into these hostilities came war. One year it was statesmen shrieking "Peace! Peace!" while marshalling, like Dora, for a holocaust.

The next it was Poland, the Siegfried Line, the
Graf Spee.
A family from Vienna, Jews, took the house next door, and Dora reported,

"He's an engineer, she's a children's doctor. Supposedly." Because a professional woman aroused mistrust. The two boys, Ernst without the second e and Rudolf with f, mooned on the lawn. Their father, slim and grey, pondered a row of freesias that in October had forced itself through from the far side of the earth.

The following June, the greengrocers' windows were smashed because of being Italian. Manganelli's at the Junction put out a sign:
WE ARE GREEKS.
Once again the men set sail for history, in darkness and without streamers. France fell. There was the blitz, the RAF, and Mr. Churchill. Caro's class put aside the War of the Spanish Succession to read a book about London, the buildings standing out like heroes—the Guildhall, the Mansion House—

which every night the flames consumed on the seven-o'clock news.

Dora seethed under rationing, but yearned to be where bombs were falling. She took the conflict personally, frenzied by Mr.

Churchill. It was Dora's war.

The neap tide of history had, as usual, left them high and dry.

Caro was becoming flesh. Her hands were assuming attitudes. In shoes dull with playground dust her feet were long and shapely.

The belt of her school uniform, which at the time of Dunkirk had banded a mere child, by the siege of Tobruk delineated a cotton waist. Her body showed a delicate apprehension of other change.

Caro knew the sources of the Yangtze, and words like hypotenuse.

Even Grace did homework now, sitting on the floor. Dora was knitting for the merchant marine, charging this calm activity with vociferous unrest.

Greece fell, Crete fell. There was a toppling, even of history.

One hot day Caro looked up Pearl Harbor in the atlas. Buses were soon painted in swamp colours. Air-raid shelters were constructed, and a boom, useless, across the harbour mouth. You kept a bucket of sand in the kitchen with a view to incendiary bombs.

Mr. Whittle was an air-raid warden, and the Kirkby boys were called up. The noble rhetoric of Downing Street scarcely applied to dark streets, austerity, and standing in the queue. Colonial families arrived from the East destitute, and Singapore fell, fell. Or-phans were numerous now; and the girls, in their civilian loss, no longer commanded special attention.

The school was moving to a country house, where the invading Japanese would hardly penetrate. Grace was too little to be saved by such methods, Caro would go alone. Caro would try out the fugitive state; if it came up to snuff, Grace might later be included.

Caro was installed one afternoon at the foot of the Blue Mountains. On the plain below, gum trees straggled back towards Sydney, bark was strewn like torn paper. The littlest children cried, but the parents would visit them in a fortnight if the petrol held up and the Japs did not arrive. There was also an ancient train as far as Penrith, but after that you were on your own. They knew about Penrith, a weatherboard town with telegraph poles and the sort of picture-house where you could hear the rain.

Grace waved out the car window: jealous, guilty, and safe.

It was Sunday. After sago pudding, they sang "Abide with Me,"

and Caro went out on the upstairs veranda. Fast falls the eventide.

The darkness deepened in silence more desolate for the squawk of a bird they had been shown in illustrations. Incredulous response cracked in Caroline Bell's own throat. Smells of dry ground, of eucalyptus and a small herd of cows gave the sense of time suspended, or slowed to a pace in which her own acceleration must absurdly spin to no purpose. The only tremor in dim foothills was the vapour of a train on its way up to Katoomba. It was insignificance that Dora had taught them to abhor, and if ever there was to be insignificance it was here. The measure of seclusion was that Penrith had become a goal. Caro took herself in her own tender embrace, enclosing all that was left of the known. Caro was inland.

She had crouched into the angle formed by the balustrade and one of the high supports of the veranda. Bougainvillea was trained on the uprights; and a round plaque, cool as china, impressed her cheek. There were insects in the thorny vines, there was the scuttle of some animal in the garden below. Dora would have confirmed that death is not the worst.

In a room with six beds, all subsequently cried themselves to sleep. In the morning, Caro saw that the medallion on the balcony was blue and white, and Catholic. One of the girls told her, "Miss Holster says it's a Dellarobbier."

The house was at once seen to be peculiar. There was a lot to look at. It was owned by the Doctor, who was not a doctor at all but an architect; and Italian, even if on our side. He had withdrawn to a smaller building alongside—servants' quarters was a phrase that came readily enough to them from books, or from the old stone houses built by convicts. The Doctor wore a short white cotton jacket and a little white pointed beard and, although not lame, carried a stick. According to Miss Holster, he had seen through Mussolini from the word Go.

The house had 1928 in Roman numbers on the porch; or portico.

For its construction, coloured marbles and blond travertine had spent months at sea, fireplaces and ceilings had been dismantled outside Parma, where the ham and violets came from. And whole pavements of flowered tiles uprooted and rebedded. The dining-room was said to be elliptical. All the doors, even for bathrooms, were double, with panels of painted flowers, and paired handles pleasant to waggle until they dropped off. There were velvet bell-pulls, intended for maids, that fell into disrepair from incessant tugging. There was also the day Joan Brinstead broke an inkpot on the white marble mantel in the music room and ammonia only made it worse. Miss Holster had a canopy over her bed; but could not say why lemon trees should be potted rather than in the ground.

These rooms enclosed loveliness—something memorable, true as literature. Events might take place, occasions, though not during the blight of their own occupancy. At evening the rooms shone, knowing and tender.

In a forbidden paddock below the house, a wire fence surrounded tents, tin buildings, and thirty or forty short men grotesquely military in uniforms dyed the colour of wine. The Doctor's countrymen had come to the ends of the earth to find him, for the men who dug his fields and gathered his fruit were Italian prisoners of war. At dusk they led in the cows before being themselves led behind the wire. The Doctor could be seen in the mornings moving among them, white beard, white jacket, white panama: once more the master. They learned that, like a baby, he slept in the afternoons. They had seen, or caught, one of the prisoners kissing his hand.

From the fields, or behind the wire, the prisoners waved to the schoolgirls, who never waved back. Never. It was a point of honour.