Free The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard Page B

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