The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Dora created unhappiness and that she was bound to Dora.
    No one would now appear offering rescue, it was too late for that.
    In growing, Caro was beginning rather than outstripping her long task. At least for the present, Caro was stronger than Grace, and was assuming Dora as moral obligation. Dora herself was strongest of all, in her power to accuse, to judge, to cause pain: in her sovereign power. Dora's skilled suspicion would reach unerringly into your soul, bring out your worst thoughts and flourish them for all to see; but never brought to light the simple good. It was as if Dora knew of your inner, rational, protesting truth, and tried to provoke you into displaying it, like treason. On the one hand, it was Dora seeking havoc, and, on the other, the sisters continually attempting to thwart or divert.
    The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief—which in Caro was to last her lifetime—that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
    In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards some strength that would, in turn, disturb that equilibrium and sweep them to higher ground.
    Like other children, they stopped on the way home from school to pull at socks or pick at scabs or stare up a garden path at some opalescent entry. Grace with a satchel and pale jiggling ringlets, Caro tilted to a loaded briefcase. At school both were clever, which was attributed to the maturing effects of their tragedy—just as, had they lagged, obtuseness would have been ascribed to the arresting trauma. They sought each other in the playground and were known to be aberrant, a pair.
    The classrooms had rough sallow walls. The children were reading The Merchant of Venice under the specked reproduction of Lord Leigh ton's Wedded, and the watercolour of Ormiston Gorge. The classrooms were windows on the bay. Tendrils of morning glory crawled on wooden sills. It was always summer—and was afternoon more often than not, hot with smells of chalk and gym shoes and perhaps the banana uneaten in someone's satchel. Fatigued as busi-nessmen, the girls carved names into desktops in expectation of the bell.
    Caro and Grace walked home uphill in raging heat. Brick houses were symmetric with red, yellow, or purple respectability: low garden walls, wide verandas, recurrent clumps of frangipani and hibiscus, of banksia and bottlebrush; perhaps a summerhouse, perhaps a flagpole. Never a sign of washing or even of people: such evidence must be sought inside, or at the back. Caro was beginning to wonder about the inside and the back, and whether every house concealed a Dora. Whether in every life there was a Benbow that heeled over and sank.
    You felt that the walls of such houses might topple inwards, that they would crush but not reveal.
    Refinement was maintained on the razor's edge of an abyss. To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity: the six-o'clock shambles outside the pubs, men struggling in vomit and broken glass; the group of wharfies on their Smoke-O, squatting round a flipped coin near the Quay and calling out in angry lust to women passing. There were raucous families who bought on the lay-by, if at all, and whose children were bruised from blows or misshapen by rickets—this subtler threat contained in terrace houses whose sombre grime was a contagion from the British Isles, a Midlands darkness. Britain had shared its squalor readily enough with far Australia, though withholding the Abbey and the Swan of