The Transit of Venus

  They were natural and supernatural, in that blank place, like amorous figures from mythology.

  When she sat up, she wiped her eyes and said, "My love."

  He stroked back her hair. He said, "I'll go and get the ticket,"

  and his own mouth trembled on prosaic words. He took out paper and a pencil, and wrote the name of a hotel in Rome. They exchanged the name, and already saw the south.

  Beyond the departure gate there was an arrangement like a door frame where passengers were searched—for gold, perhaps, or guns. Handbags were set on a moving counter, and slid out through a little chute.

  Caro remembered the barrier where she had last said good-bye to Edmund Tice. She had stood with a crowd on a shifting stair and raised her hand, and he had watched her go. There was an earlier farewell, when he had told her, "I will accept any terms," and she had stood remote, not knowing it for a rehearsal.

  The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: "Does this machine spoil pearls?"

  They became competitive as to what might be spoiled: "Will it affect my pacemaker?" "What about radiation?" At the little chute, a man in tweeds leaped to save a tumbling carton.

  "Got the crown jewels in there?"

  "It's a rather lovely tea-service, actually."

  They were claiming, clutching, harbouring: departure was doing this. There was one man, heavy, pale, familiar, who wore American seersucker and used a leather bag as a battering ram. He did not greet Caro, and might have been myopic. This was the doctor from New York who had proposed she wear glasses.

  Paul that day in the hot street saying, "Caro?" Paul in her own doorway saying, "Caro, good-bye."

  She could recall farewells on ocean liners. The lunch on board, which Dora did not enjoy. Streamers, handkerchiefs, the world before a war. The great shape passing through the Heads on its leisurely way to heaven.

  "Your flight," they said. All the while she was looking back, in case Ted should be there. "Your flight is boarding."

  On the plane she was shown to a seat by the window. Beyond the runway you could see a grove of spruces, dark, reclusive, genuine. On the airfield the technicians were gesturing with hands and flags. Their blond hair and blue clothes were blown in the slip-stream. They wore devices to shield their ears from the roar.

  The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging into the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air—like the intake of humanity's breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.