Sixty Lights Read online

  34

  ASOK PADDED PAST again, his henna beard blazing in the candle-light. He took with him a handful of dirty dishes.

  “Someone has misled or fooled you,” Isaac pronounced. “There is a fable, and there is an opera, but neither, I assure you, is in any way Indian. Someone else has taken advantage of your sweet gullibility.”

  Lucy decided to ignore this comment, which seemed contrived to hurt.

  “Tell me, then,” she said, “what I ought to know.”

  Isaac raised a glass of wine. He liked nothing better than to be consulted for his knowledge. His appearance became temporarily cheerful.

  “The story begins”, he said in a school-masterish tone, “in 1641. A Dutch sea captain, a Captain van der Decken, is sailing home to Holland from the Dutch East Indies. (Indies: perhaps this is where your misconstrual comes in.) As he rounds the Cape of Good Hope, a fierce storm arises. Dark clouds gather, his crew screams in terror, and the ship hits a rock and begins to sink. The Dutchman, furious and railing against his fate, shouts a pledge to the heavens that he will round the Cape, even if it takes until the end of time. Thereafter he is doomed to sail in a phantom ship throughout eternity, although one day each seven years he may set foot on dry land and seek redemption through a woman’s love.”

  “Is he?” Lucy asked. “Is he redeemed?”

  “I’m not really sure. In the Wagner opera, which he wrote, I think, in 1843, the whole point is that his redemption both succeeds and fails. As I understand it . . .”

  (Here Isaac sounded uncertain.)

  “One day the Dutchman, on land at last, meets another sea captain, Daland, and offers him great wealth for lodging for one night. Seeing a business opportunity, as it were, Captain Daland takes the Dutchman home, where his daughter Senta has been singing about her fantasy love for a Dutchman.”

  Lucy’s eyebrows raised.

  “You must remember, my dear, that the story is a fable. And that opera is even more unreal and fabulous.”

  “In any case,” he resumed, “Senta has known all her life that she will save the Dutchman, and has dreamed beforehand that her father will bring home a mysterious lover.”

  “And?” Lucy asked.

  “Well, of course they are betrothed, more or less immediately, and the fated match is duly accomplished. However,” – and here Isaac paused for special effect – “there is another man, Erik, who is in love with Senta. He follows her, and the Dutchman, seeing them together, believes that Senta has been unfaithful, so he leaves. Senta protests her love, but the Dutchman releases her from her vow, setting her free. As he boards his ship once again, Senta throws herself into the ocean. The ship finally sinks, and the lovers go down together in a locked embrace. And that’s it. That’s the end. Finis.”

  Lucy fiddled with her fork and looked dissatisfied.

  “Is there a light in this story?” she asked. “A special light?”

  “A light? I suppose you mean the famous red glow. The phantom ship emits an eerie red light, and some sailors superstitiously believe that the ship is still visible today during storms off the Cape. Whoever actually sights the ship, however, will die a horrible death.”

  “And is there a gondola suspended from a balloon?”

  “Goodness, no,” said Isaac emphatically. “There is no gondola. No balloon.”

  “And does Senta bear a distingushing birthmark?”

  “I have told you”, said Isaac, trying hard to sound patient, “all that I know.”

  He took a last gulp of his wine and rose abruptly.

  “I feel like a prisoner,” Lucy blurted out.

  Isaac stopped in his tracks. He looked shocked and dismayed.

  “We will discuss your grievances tomorrow,” he said in a haltering voice. “Now I bid you goodnight.”

  It was like a scene in a novel. Lucy saw how melodramatically they confronted each other. How stale their words were.

  Isaac almost rushed for the door and Lucy remained at the table. She rested her hands protectively across her controversial belly. Salty wind blew in from Arabia. The night was fierce, inclement. Yet another tale of a sacrificial woman. Of ghosts. Grand passions. Extravagant double-deaths. What am I doing here? she asked herself.

  Later that night, way past midnight, she rose and moved to the open window. The wind was rising and carried with it a distant sound of the ocean. There was a scent of rain and distant lightning, flashing. If she leaned beyond the window it might begin raining, and the rain would then wet her tired face, and she would shine against this dense Indian darkness before her.

  Now, just this humid swaddling air.

  Lucy remembered her mother lying very still on a long wicker chair, her pregnant belly huge and her skin livid. She was fanning herself, just before her death. The wave of a duck-egg blue fan, patterned with chrysanthemums: this small detail retained, held close, held in mournful embrace, so that her ever-fading mother would not completely disappear.

  Senta: the name returned. Then Lucy began to weep: who was she weeping for?

  35

  PERHAPS IT IS the opacity, not the transparency, of others that one finds compelling. Beyond the face is a funnel to hidden selves, intact qualities one doesn’t expect, the mysteries secreted in dim and blessed moments, the store of memories, unbeheld, that only a single person knows. Scraps of sure self. Fragments of undeveloped character. Wounds. Recoveries. Innermost otherness. So Lucy began at length to reconsider Isaac Newton, and to find in him a kind of emotional gravity.

  They grew at first to tolerate and then even to like each other. The agreement was that Lucy would stay in the house and bear the child, and then, when it was strong enough, together return to England under the name of Newton. This would preserve both her dignity and his, Isaac said, and no-one in the Old Country ever need know the true circumstances of paternity. In the meantime, they should “make the most of it”: he would try to know her, more openly, and she would be at liberty to leave the house and make small excursions – accompanied by himself or a by servant – into the city and to outlying areas. He offered his knobbly hand and they shook heartily, as men do, but Lucy noticed too the beginnings of a palsied tremor. The quake of mortality. The quiver of death deep inside the tendons of the body. It was the first time since the day of her arrival that he had actually touched her, and she thought of Grandpa James at the coach siding, jerkily waving.

  There were places Lucy would travel to where her own ignorance astounded her. She entered customs and buildings she knew nothing about. People around her spoke and she understood not a single word. She considered herself a crude cipher of the West, carrying her own culture as impeding knowledge. This territory she had entered was on the whole indifferent to her presence, and might well engulf or erase the speck of empire she accidentally represented. It was in the marketplace, where foreign women were never seen, that she felt most keenly her presumptuous misplacement. Local women of exceptional beauty brushed and slid alongside: she thought her own clothes a stiff and ridiculous dome against their fluent forms and loose clinging fabrics. She was, moreover, pastel to their augmented hues; she had never before felt so bleached and so encased. There were merchants standing behind pyramids of many-coloured spices who hailed her and smiled; they waved their hands like magicians over their mini-geographies, enticing the stranger to inspect and buy. Lucy instructed Bashanti to acquire a few ounces of turmeric, for no reason other than its colour, and that it was something she could confidently name. There were men in saffron robes devoted to multiform gods, and children with kohl around their eyes and small grasping hands. There were beggars with damaged limbs and whole families with fingers and faces eroded by leprosy. Lucy asked Bashanti to give them money, but her servant simply flung coins in their general direction, afraid of their touch. Flowers garlanded tiny shrines in nooks and crannies, and sewage and rubbish lay strewn beneath her feet. So many people and so prepossessed.

  Lucy would have liked to announce that she was Aust
ralian, not English, but she knew that here the distinction was probably meaningless. Her face was a white lamp in a sea of brass. She wished herself dark. She wished herself Indian, part of this throng of purposeful, myth-saturated, interconnected people. Now and then she passed another foreigner, a man, inevitably, who would nod, or touch the rim of his hat, as if exchanging secret English messages in code. Lucy had no wish to communicate with these other lamps who felt – she could tell – that they shone more brightly and more importantly than anyone else, that they dispensed white light with a civilising purpose. In her imagination she flickered in the midst of the crowd, her face appearing here and there, inconstant and impermanent, a kind of fleeting figment, in a more general and self-sufficient sea of brown. Only once did she see William Crowley’s face in the distance, half-shaded under an awning, partially averted, and her heart jolted and her pulse quickened. When he saw her and realised who she was, he turned quickly into an alley. Coward, Lucy thought. Yet she felt – she had to admit it – annoyed at her own excitation.

  For all his self-enclosure, Isaac Newton was impressed with Lucy Strange and her spirited assertions. She had no interest in the various English women’s social clubs, of bridge or badminton, of chit-chat or church talk, but befriended the servants, salaamed complete strangers, made trips to the Persian bazaar, where no foreign-born woman would dare be seen, and regarded everything with a wide-awake and intentioned gaze. He had seen her pause at a market stall just to lean over and breathe in its scent; he had seen her cry out with tears in her eyes, coming unexpectedly upon a small statue of Lakshmi, decorated with strings of yellow roses and orange marigolds. Bashanti, who understood but could not (or would not) speak English, clearly adored her, and even Asok seemed to watch her with untypical interest. She had changed the very space and dimensions of his house: everyone was conscious of her presence as if she was a human magnet pulling at their faces; everyone orientated their perceptions around her. He discovered Lucy patiently teaching Asok the game of chess, and not long after, braiding Bashanti’s long black hair, with no notion at all that a memsahib does not – should not – perform such mundane and rank-breaking acts. More than this, Isaac suspected Lucy of “native appetites”: she met the world with a distinctly impassioned sensuality.

  This image, above all: Lucy had bought kohl at the market and ringed her eyes, so that they suddenly appeared enlarged and nocturnal. Isaac had come upon her reading and her startled face lifted, and there, over-defined, were two sooty pools. Sensing she had surprised him more than he had surprised her, Lucy raised her hands in a conciliatory prayer-shape:

  “Namaste,” she said.

  Then she resumed her reading, unaware of the extent of her provocation. Australians, Isaac told himself, had no sense of decorum. Her eyes looked barbarian; her eyes looked primitive.

  Isaac Newton was a man who lived with secrets. Two, in particular. The first was that he had once been in love with Neville Brady. They became friends in Calcutta, not long after Neville first arrived, and Isaac found him charming, sensitive, good-natured and comical. He learnt early on that his companion was more or less a compulsive liar, but saw this as an extension of his love of story and his impulse to entertaining fabulation. In those early years Neville was also dissolute and philandering, so the friends fell out over his visits to nautches and prostitutes. Isaac threatened more than once to have nothing more to do with him, but always relented. He realised he was in love when Neville succumbed to simultaneous bouts of malaria and syphilis. Isaac dabbed his brow, fed him quinine and magnesia, and applied mercury ointment to sores on his penis, while Neville joked about his condition and was by turns irritable, anecdotal and deadly quiet: he performed a range of selves Isaac had never before witnessed in another man. The act of nursing was the act that enjoined them. During the illness Isaac realised what it was that he felt. That he would have been shattered, destroyed, if Neville had not recovered.

  His second secret he thought he might one day tell Lucy. He would tell her about seeing a production of The Flying Dutchman, long ago, in the city of Frankfurt, as a young traveller on his very first visit to the Continent. He was twenty-two years old – and still an Englishman – yet he wept out loud in the auditorium when Senta and the Dutchman sunk together under the waves. The music rose, there was a dramatic red light pulsing, and his heart burst open. He had to bury his face in his hands so that no-one would see his hot tears. It was the first and last time Isaac Newton had ever shamed himself thus in public. And he had waited all his life to tell someone about it.

  36

  WHAT REMADE HER world: the capture of light.

  For Lucy the photography studio was a revelation. Mr Victor Browne, a man with a bleary vague manner and large clumsy hands, practised a focused, crisp and careful art. Isaac had decided that he and Lucy should have a portrait photograph taken, before – as he so indelicately put it – her shape betrayed her, an image, he said, that would help later on and might even serve as consolation to the future child. This reasoning defeated Lucy, but she acquiesced, keen to see what she looked like halted in a lens, and keen too to see the rooms in which such portraits were produced. Victor Browne ushered them into his little world of props and false objects. There were painted screens, one a scene of the Taj Mahal, one a trompe l’oeil drawing room, another a leafy park-scape with French lamps and a curved path, and pretend objects – a marble pillar that was in fact made of painted wood, and a stuffed monkey, looking animated, on an ornate perch. There was a furled parasol for ladies to hold and a teak chair for gentlemen to sit on. Lucy spotted a pile of albumen paper and smiled to herself. The tissue of times past. The shell cracked open.

  Part of the ceiling had been removed so that the studio was open to the sky and bright. Victor fussed around, moving this or that object, shifting or settling, lowering or raising his camera stand. He was particularly concerned, he said, with shadows which appeared every day at this time, for only half an hour or so, cast by trees outside the window onto the interior wall. The shadows were like blossoms; Lucy saw them as powdery blue against the white screen of the wall. Victor’s intention was the eradication of the blossom and the production of a uniform unshadowed backdrop, against which the odd couple might be immaculately posed. He moved them to the far left of his viewing frame, just outside the reach of shadow, and there he arrested them: Isaac in the chair, stiffly serious, his hands on his knees, his knuckles polished-looking like large white beads, and Lucy standing behind and to the right, bemused and excited.

  Bad timing, pronounced Victor, referring to the shadows, from under a dark cloth. He held up a device which exploded in a muffled puff. Light flashed across the room, filling to the brim Lucy’s wide, newly photographic eyes.

  The image Victor Browne created posed Isaac Newton and Lucy Strange as a legitimately married couple in an English park. The power of the flash had removed some of Isaac’s years; he looked both younger and more solid than he appeared in real life; Lucy, on the other hand, appeared older and less substantial. Since she was superstitious it seemed plausible that the rumour was true: that the camera removed some human quotient or iota with each image it took. Later, indeed, Lucy will worry that her portraits, silver and gold and sometimes resembling icons, have filched spirit-stuff or soul-stuff in the instant of registration. Later, Lucy stared narcissistically at Victor Browne’s photograph, but found no pool of portrait beauty over which to linger and transform. She saw herself, over all, as plain and severe. She wondered if others looked at her face and saw this plain severe woman, older than her years and in a state of paranormal fade and recession. All she could think of was this: People will look at this image when I am dead; it will stand in for me, for ever, just as my mother’s austere paper cut-out – all stasis and reduction – now cruelly betokens her.

  It was her destiny, this visit.

  Lucy persuaded Isaac to let her learn the art of photography. Victor Browne would instruct her, and during the time of pregnancy she wou
ld be occupied in this not-too-unladylike fashion. Isaac was amused and interested and agreed to pay Mr Browne a small weekly sum to instruct Lucy in what he joked was a devilish art. Lucy watched the two shake hands. Isaac’s handshake was uncharacteristically firm; it seemed to belong to another man.

  Under the nocturnal shadow of the velvet drape, through the frame, and the lens, and the aperture, and the glass, that together directed her vision into this specialised seeing, Lucy discovered the machine that is a gift-boxed tribute to the eye. She looked as she never had, imagining a picture frame or a box that isolated the continuous and unceasing flux of things into clear aesthetic units, into achieved moments of observation. Where Victor sedated and mortified all that he saw – his box, thought Lucy, functioned as a seeing-eye coffin – she imagined a mobile apparatus, one that travelled everywhere with her and that discerned the capability of all things, all ordinary things, to be seen singly and remarkably. Chemicals, glass, mechanical reproduction – these combined to make Lucy feel entirely modern, a woman of the future. She loved even the sharp acidic smell of the fixing agent, that permeated the studio, omnipresently, like industrial perfume.

  Lucy’s understanding made sense of her book of Special Things Seen: somehow – was it possible? – she had always been a photographer. Lucy tried to discuss this supposition with Victor Browne, but he looked sceptical and wry.

  “This is science,” said Victor, “not prettified seeing. It is pure calculation.”

  Victor had wiry red hair and a kind tone to his voice. He was not like William, and not like Isaac, who carried their authority in forms of knowledge; instead he believed himself the fallible end of a system of strictly estimable decisions. He was the humble hand that covered the lens and sank the paper into its bath of glistening silver nitrate.

  “Do you think”, persisted Lucy, “that we shall one day, far in the future, have the means to capture in a photograph the exact colour of your hair?”