Read Online The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Shirley Hazzard
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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,
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,
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