The Transit of Venus Read Online Free Page A

custard: you could practically feel the axe. Upright Mrs. Thrale could never be felled in the same way, at least not now.
    The young man and the girls remarked among themselves on the delayed season—"the late summer," as if it were already dead.
    They were like travellers managing an unfamiliar tongue, speaking in infinitives. Everything had the threat and promise of meaning.
    Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this.
    Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break.
    While the girls were clearing the table, the Professor led the young man to the windows, saying, "Let me show you." A rub of his dry, decisive hand on the damp glass only increased the blur, and he turned away, sulky: "Well, you cannot see it now." Not saying what new lesson would be taught on this blackboard.
    Ted Tice knew it was the road he had come.

    In the previous year Christian Thrale, who was then in his twenties, unexpectedly had an evening free from weekend work at a government office. In retrospect it seemed to have been an evening free, also, of himself. He did not often go alone to a concert or anything else of the cultural kind. On your own, you were at the mercy of your responses. Accompanied, on the other hand, you remained in control, made assertive sighs and imposed hypothetical requirements. You could also deliver your opinion, seldom quite favourable, while walking home.
    As to pleasure, he was suspicious of anything that relieved his feelings.
    The concert, on that particular evening, was furthermore too easy to get into. Yet, passing in light rain, he saw posters and bought a seat on the aisle.
    He was scarcely in place when he had to stand again to let two women into the row. He lifted the folded mackintosh, the hat, and damp umbrella he had dumped on the empty seat alongside; and the younger woman, having stood back for the elder, now sat there.
    He had noticed her large-eyed good looks at once when she glanced up saying Sorry. But as the struggling out of coats went on, and the drawing off of stubborn gloves, he lost interest.
    It was the other woman he next became aware of.
    The older woman was small and dark and wore a red felt circlet on her head, trimmed with navy ribbon. Around her shoulders there was looped a swag of sharp little furs—the mouth of one fur fastened, peglike and with needle teeth, on the paw of the other.
    In her lap a handbag was crammed squat, and she dried this with rustling paper. That she was in some way related to the girl, though not of an age to be her mother, was evident from their manner together.
    It was hard to summarize, even in guesses, even in his mind, the relation of girl to woman. Until, as the musicians started to appear and more arrivals pushed along the rows, the phrase came to him: she is in her power.
    The older woman had been coaxed for an outing, in the desperation of an interminable Sunday. That she expected nothing of the music was apparent from her turning this way and that, providing her own discordant tuning-up. "How people rig themselves out, will you just look at that one. I ask you." "They might've done the place up a bit by now. Wouldn't you think. They mean to use the war as an excuse forever." The girl sat quietly, an evasion she would not be allowed to get away with.
    "You're cheery I must say. First you tell me I'm depressed, and then you don't have a solitary word to say for yourself."
    Now that he knew the association was founded in fear, he still wondered whether they were cousins, perhaps, or aunt and niece.
    When she turned his way, the wide, high slope of the little woman's bright cheeks recalled the girl's.
    "Not a breath of air in here." She flapped the furs on her breast, and the pronged fox-face snapped up and down. "That's the way you catch things. Remind me to gargle when we get home."
    The lights lowered. Throughout the first