Free The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

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