Authors: Gail Jones
Sixty Lights (22 page)
In London Lucy opened her eyes to emerald green and a sea of white cumulus. It was summer now, and the air was windy and warm. She could see Ellen by the pond and Mrs Minchin bending over her. Ellen's bonnet had blown backwards and jiggled at her neck, and Mrs Minchin held her own hat with one hand and with the other was reaching for the child. Their dresses heaved and slapped in the unstable air. A ribbon flew out and fell back: all was adjusting; all was transient.
Mrs Minchin will be a mother, after all.
Lucy was consoled and unconsoled. They looked beautiful together. They possessed a truly rare and solar refulgence.
JACOB WEBB WAS
sweating when Lucy opened the door. He appeared flushed and over-heated and removed his hat inelegantly, as a kind of afterthought.
“Good day,” Jacob said, bowing slightly. “I have come to take you, if I may, for sweetened ices.”
Mrs Minchin, who was standing behind Lucy, was warming to Jacob.
“Jolly excellent idea,” she loudly announced. “Ever a pleasure to partake of a gentleman's ices!”
Lucy smiled. This man before her with rosy cheeks and a shy disposition had visited unannounced three times in the past week, and at each occasion the household â Molly, Ellen and she â had greeted him more happily. Ellen came stumbling forward and Jacob swept her into his arms, whereupon she sloppily kissed him. He was a man at ease with children but uncomfortable with women.
“Ices?” he repeated, to hurry them along.
The party of four â appearing to all the world like a family â sat together at wooden benches talking of the heat and of India and of the difficulties of being foreign. Jacob Webb expressed a fervent wish also to be foreign, to be
strange
, he said. He liked, he insisted, the way Lucy and Mrs Minchin saw things more keenly and with resources of comparison and exotic
assessment. He wanted his too-English vision transformed. He wanted to see things, he added, as Lucy did, intact and evident in their stunning visibility. Lucy was flattered, pleased. She was about to respond when Ellen, who had been wriggling on her lap, leaned forward across the table and upset a glass of raspberry cordial, so that it splashed and discoloured her. Ellen let out a howl and waved her chubby arms, and every customer in Stevenson's Palace of Confections turned judgmentally to comment and look. Without hesitation, Jacob took out a handkerchief and began dabbing Ellen clean. He held her chin with his thumb and forefinger â as Lucy recalled her own father doing â as he wiped her wet face. This was the moment, the very moment, that Lucy Strange fell in love with Jacob Webb. He was tenderly intent on cleaning Ellen, who wore the puzzled sodden look of children recovering from alarm. Jacob was leaning very close, slanted to his task, and at some point he raised his gaze to Lucy's face.
“A mess,” he said, blushing.
Lucy leaned slowly forward, took his finely bearded chin between her thumb and forefinger, and kissed Jacob Webb very softly on the mouth. She could feel Ellen snuggling against her, trying to reclaim attention, and the force of Mrs Minchin's approving stare. It was a wholly perspicuous and perfect act. Jacob smiled widely. Love was this sudden clarification, this rightness of gestures and feelings. This sweet solemnity. All my images, thought Lucy, all my noticed oddities and recorded visions, recruit to this simple event, here, eating ices on a summer's day, in London, England, in 1871. She was nineteen years old and had knowledge enough to understand the veracity of her own responses and intelligence enough to be troubled by their hazardous implications. For Jacob, too, this was a moment of confirmation. He thought: I will marry this woman, I will adopt her child, I will speak to her of all I
sincerely guard, of my family, of my worries, of my peculiar childhood, and most secretly of all, of my yearning to create an artwork that summons one, just one, sure and precise memory, immediate as a photograph â
my father standing in the doorway, knocking snow from his boots, his warm breath visible as a blurry feather. He unwraps from his neck a long blue scarf and holds it at arm's length, as though it is the serpent that tempted Eve. Behind his head snowflakes churn in the whitish air and his face is bright, alive.
After the occasion of the ices and the spilled raspberry cordial, Lucy and Jacob contrived courtship outings in the evening, so that they could speak and act more freely. Together they visited Thomas at the Childish Establishment and Jacob saw there images he considered intoxicatingly profane. Oriental dancers with naked midriffs. Scenes of luscious cruelty and fantastic barbarism. Monstrosities. Titillations. He did not speak of this to Lucy, but wondered at her maturity and her intimidating worldliness. In the pavilion of wild images she was entirely at home. She accepted everything with curiosity and sincere equipoise. Her brother Thomas was a good-hearted and matter-of-fact fellow, and his wife Violet, Jacob thought, somewhat shallow and silly, but of one thing he was certain: there was no-one else in the world like Miss Lucy Strange; she was a woman of singular and remarkable intensity. She was also a woman with an exquisite collar bone, deep sensuous eyes and an allure he could barely bring himself to name.
For Lucy, being liberated into the night was a gift. Apart from amorous possibilities (of which she dreamed and speculated), she loved the sublime spell of gas-lit London. Along the streets were rhyming pools of light and shadow, since gas lamps seemed to have a very definite compass, and extended only in limited, interspersed circles. She loved moving in and out of these spots of lights, watching the
uneven flaring and waning, and listening to the whistle and buzzing sounds that ran mysteriously through the pipes. She loved too the retail stores that manufactured splendour: Moses and Son, the tailors, had massive metal chandeliers, all arabesque and curlicue, which flared prodigiously, and the butchers in Drury Lane unscrewed the burners of their gas pipes, so that light came streaming and fluttering, with lurid effect, above their displays of now unnaturally glossy meat. Women in wing-shaped dresses swept like moths between the lights, and men in top hats looked decapitated, blotted by darkness, as they moved at certain angles of casting shadow. It was a city transformed, shiny; the night itself was converted.
All this brilliance made Lucy delirious with pleasure. She took Jacob's hand and dragged him through streets, now nothing less than a gallery of spectacles. Gas-London was, she believed, its true form and character: it was artificially lovely and splendid to behold. When she peered into the future she knew that London would for ever be illuminated by gas; no other industrial technology would exceed or supplant it. In the future gas lamps would be consummate works of art, and every city, in every country, would honour its wavering flare.
Jacob considered Lucy's attraction to ignited spectacle incomprehensible. He had heard of “mooners”, people whose superficial pleasure it was to roam the streets at night, glancing into shop windows and skipping between lit spaces, but Lucy seemed more serious than that, and more bent on aesthetic extrapolations. She introduced him to the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, a dance platform with music and wine and multitudinous gas lights, a place of lewd movement and women giggling with their heads thrown backwards, glasses spilling ale, cigar smoke and jocularity, and he struggled to see what enchantment resided there. (Lucy had leaned close and whispered straight into his ear: don't worry, my love, I shall
teach you to dance â as if she had read and divined his innermost fears.)
Walking home, one evening, Lucy halted and pointed, her arm extending. On one side of the street, the gas lamps were serially ranged; on the other, was a collection of gig carriages, waiting outside the Princess Theatre for closing, their gig lamps spaced perfectly and uniformly lined.
“In the future,” pronounced Lucy, “people will understand that life is not a series of gig lamps or gas lamps symmetrically arranged; it is more encompassing, more immersing, more like an ulterior halo. Life”, she continued, sounding oracular, “is a kind of semi-transparent envelope, in which we see, in which we feel, in which we fall in love. One day someone will write this,” she added confidently, “and it will be understood as a proclamation.”
Jacob was aghast. The woman he loved, the
strange
woman, spoke in stagy speeches and entertained supernatural visions. She spoke like someone who was watching history unfold, like someone who knew beforehand of her own death, and was speaking posthumously. He suddenly recalled a tale from school. Ulysses wants to consult with the prophet Tiresias, long dead, so he must visit the entrance to Hades to summon him forth. After pouring libations of many kinds to entice the dead to return, he finally sacrifices one black and one white sheep, and then the bloodless dead sweep forward, thirsting for the liquid of life. What Ulysses had not foreseen was the appearance of his mother, Anticlea. She had died of grief during his long absence. Ulysses must fight off his own mother, and all the other shades, to keep the precious blood solely for Tiresias. It distressed Jacob to remember this obscure tale now. Unbidden, he had glimpsed Lucy in another realm. In this context of so many night-lights and revelations, he had perhaps glimpsed her own certainty of her coming death.
Lucy watched her lover Jacob Webb meditating in a shadow. She reached forward and took his hand, pulling him into a pool of light.
“You're too grave,” she said, touching a single finger to his moist open mouth.
“Let me enlighten you.”
She would take this young man into her body. She would teach him all the forms of bioluminescence. She wanted to say this, to invite him in, but felt shy, wordless. Instead, she saw in a moment-not-yet-arrived his head dip in a tender arc, cautiously, lovingly, and offer her left breast an encompassing kiss.
HER
SPECIAL THINGS
seen
and
photographs not taken
began to flash at her, disarrayed. Time was feverish. Was this, Lucy wondered, an effect of her illness? Would death be a sudden accession of vision from all the times and images she had known? It was not morbid curiosity that stopped her in the street to look up at the sky and wonder aloud such things. She looked into clouds and had a spacious, empty-headed feeling. Heaven was already entering her. She was already becoming pure space, a chamber of images.
Bashanti and her mother:
This image returns and returns: Bashanti leaning her amber cheek against her mother's black hair.
A strange woman appeared in the kitchen and was preparing food. Lucy entered to fill a jug with water, and there she was, a small figure in a white sari, behaving as if the house was her own. “Good morning,” said Lucy. But the woman said nothing: she bent her head, a minute inclination to acknowledge the memsahib's presence, but otherwise seemed barely to glance away from her task. She was frying onions and spices for the preparation of dahl; chilli, cumin and mustard-seed fragrance fizzed in the air. Lucy passed with her jug, staring at the
old woman, but realised she was being deliberately ignored.
Bashanti's mother â Isaac did not know her name â had been told many times to stay away, but came uninvited to the house to help Bashanti, to steal food (so Isaac said) and to sit in the sun with her daughter, whispering secrets.
For the first time Lucy realised that her servant was probably her age; her mother was youthful, perhaps forty, and seen together they were unmistakably mother and daughter: their faces were definite but imprecise mirrors â the same high foreheads and serious eyes, the same full mouths and pointy chins. Bashanti was taller than her mother and when they spoke she bent her head as if wanting to equalise their stature.
After her work in the kitchen Bashanti's mother went outside to sit on the back steps. She was threading flowers for
prasad
, for her holy duties. A pile of marigolds lay to her left and she was linking them in a chain that grew like a golden snake before her. Bashanti approached her mother from behind, knelt at her back, and then placed her face softly against her mother's hair. A curved brass bowl on a field of jet black. It was a gesture so simple and tender Lucy felt a sob and constriction in her throat and the revenant claim of something far, far away. She wanted to tell Bashanti of her private thoughts and memories and to chisel open the silence each was accustomed to. But it would have been such an impertinence to speak. There they were, very still, Bashanti appearing like a statue of devotion, her mother the quiet solid plinth of support, resting in a moment that was theirs alone.
Lucy understood then why Bashanti, who knew English, refused to speak it: to keep her own world intact. To keep it safe.
The night ascent:
Just before Lucy left for India, so long ago now, she had been abroad at night, in a parting outing, with Thomas and Neville. They had walked together for the first time to the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens and seen there a balloon lifting up into the sky. It was a gigantic inflation, a black-and-white striped pumpkin, rotund, ludicrous, sailing fantastically upwards. Passengers hailed down excitedly as they floated away. Uncle Neville agreed they should try it â when it's daylight, he said â but Lucy begged and implored for a night ascent. Neville at last conceded: how could he refuse his niece â soon bound for Bombay, for Isaac â any parting gift? In the end Thomas and Lucy rode upwards together; they waved to Neville as he stood below, a glass of ale in his hand, smiling happily.
The logic of forces that drives a balloon is bewildering and magical. Lucy felt the shudder of the cloth ball, straining above them, and the waywardness and contingency of their route into the sky. Noise fell away, breeze uprose, and there was only the roar, now and then, of the balloon's inspiration. When they bent to peer over the edge they saw London enflamed; the physical geography of the city had been remade by gas light, so that the main streets were rivers of light and the Thames a pitch-dark canyon, and the shopping districts were redrawn in legends of gold. “A fire map” was what the ballonist called it, and Lucy was delighted to think of London in this way: the Great Fire of London â not an abolition or destruction, but a miracle of gas. Elevation was joy: she must remember this. Overhead, the crescent moon was a meek contestant.
When they descended Thomas and Lucy were like
bubbling children. They chattered and leapt about. They embraced each other heartily. It had been, Lucy said to Neville, a true “sensation” And only later, falling asleep, hearing Neville's regular snoring close by in the next room, did Lucy remember the story of the Flying Dutchman, and thought then fleetingly, only fleetingly, of her mother, and her father, and of all the old sadness, and of distant Australia, and of all that was now everlastingly gone.