The Transit of Venus Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wednesday he began to wish for Grace, and when the evening came was more charming to her than he had ever been to anybody in his life.

    Have we missed it?"
    Ted Tice was staring up the country road for the bus. Caroline Bell was looking round at roadside trees and tangling gardens that no Australian could take for granted. Signs of last month's storm were difficult to find: however hard you might look, the earth insisted there was nothing wrong. Tice stood ungainly, his character loose on him that day like clothes he must grow into. His question did not wake her.
    They had little to say under the heavy trees. It was when the bus trundled and they got on board that they began to speak, starting up along with the ancient snorting engine and the metal shudder of flanks and the raised voices of other passengers. The bus enclosed them like social obligation. Or it was departure that loosened their tongues, a reminder, as they wound down the valley of the River Test. Caro, though leaning back, arm extended to brace herself against the seat in front, showed no desire to be mistress of the situation. Ted Tice looked down her profile of eyelid and lip, down her blue shoulder and breast and her bare arm to where her hand grasped the rusted metal of a seat-back. Her body had a more distinct outline when she was parted from her sister.
    An hour had already passed, of this day they were to spend together. Ted Tice was glad of each additional mile, which would at least, at last, have to be retraced. Every red and noticeable farmhouse, every church or sharp right turn was a guarantee of his time with her. He said, "Are you thinking how tame it is, all this?"
    He meant the floral English summer, but could have been understood otherwise. In fact he was not bold enough to touch her, but made his gesture to her head. "What are you thinking?''
    Caro had been watching out the window, and turned the same look of general, landscaped curiosity on him. This man was no more to her then than a callow ginger presence in a cable-stitch cardigan.
    The country bus lurched over an unsprung road. The girl thought that in novels one would read that he and she were flung against each other; and how that was impossible. We can only be flung against each other if we want to be. Like rape, men say.
    "I was thinking the summer is violent, rather than tame." It was her second summer of the northern kind, an abundance that overwhelmed—as did the certainty that it could be dismantled and remounted indefinitely: Nature in a mood impassive, prodigious, absolute. "Australian summer is a scorching, without a leaf to spare.
    Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance."
    Remembering distances of ageless desolation, she wondered if she was defining frailty. "For colours like these, you need water." But, even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green.
    She looked again out the window, full face like a child, and thought that here the very fields seemed intended for pleasure. As to the multiplication and subtraction of seasons, she had of course known perfectly, beforehand, how leaves fall in deciduous England. But still been unprepared for anything extreme as autumn
    —more, in its red destruction, like an act of man than of God.
    They left an abbey afloat on a swell of trees, and passed through a town of overhead wires and small discouraged shops:
    "Great Expectations ," said Caro, who could read the billboard at the far-off picture-house. The bus halted, and retrundled. The regularity of suburban streets had been shorn back for a highway: the new road fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch. In a blighted field a capsized merry-go-round was turning to rust; a strung-up sign had lost its introductory F, and read, in consequence, UNFAIR. A barn squatted by the roadside like an abandoned