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Hazzard does equally well describing Paul Ivory, who becomes the undeserving object of Caro's lifelong love. "In its subtlety and confidence Paul's physical beauty, like his character, suggested technique. As some fine portrait might be underpainted dark where it showed light, or light where dark, so might Paul Ivory be subliminally cold where warm, warm where cold . . . Similarly, his limbs might seem the instruments or weapons of grace rather than its simple evidence. Paul's attenuated fingers turned up at their tips with extreme sensitivity, as if testing a surface for heat."
The fastidious Caro, who has up to now recoiled from physical contact, makes love with Paul, at once and without reserve. It was a "suspension of will," that was itself "deeply willed." The act takes place at Avebury Circle, the prehistoric site in southern England, consisting of a ceremonial circle of boulders, much like nearby Stonehenge. The similarity may offer a clue to Hazzard's literary lineage, one of several she has scattered throughout her book as moral points of reference. For Hazzard seems to be recalling the last scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, following Tess's crime of passion. Fleeing to Stonehenge, Tess lies down upon the "stone altar" as her beloved Angel kneels beside her. In the Hardy novel the altar at Stonehenge works as a potent metaphor for a woman's martyrdom and apotheosis in the name of love. Hazzard evidently means her image to do the same.
Later in her book, Hazzard pays more direct homage to Hardy. A decade after Caro's encounter at Avebury Circle, when she is married to someone else, she comes across a poem of Hardy's, and weeps:
Primaeval rocks form the road's
steep border, And much have they faced there,
first and last, Of the transitory in Earth's long
order; But what they record in colour and
cast Is—that we two passed.
The Transit of Venus is constructed like a journey. Caro's passage through life —Sydney, New York, London and Stockholm—is charted in terms of the detours she takes around her passion for Paul. When her attachment to Paul ends, she moves on to meet Ted Tice's old "desire and foreboding" in a final flight that is doomed, as are all Hazzard's voyages of love.
Only Grace stays put, confined by marriage to a lecher as priggish as any who ever appeared in 19th century English fiction. The story of her breakout is a masterly set piece. Unlike Caro, who made love among the megaliths, Grace touches hands with her physician-lover as they examine her son's X rays. Their unconsummated affair is mired in the mundane; yet, the couple perceive their encounter as grand passion. Concludes the doctor: "It was like Paolo and Francesca." Still, when Grace's children and even her appalling husband renew their claims on her, she lets her lover go.
"Grace . . . forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth."
Venus had once again completed its transit. −By Patricia Blake