Sixty Lights Read online

  “Honoria Brady,” she announced, and proffered her unscratched hand.

  “Arthur Strange, Coach Driver.”

  Honoria realised she had not even looked at him when she boarded the coach, or at his boy assistant, now unharnessing and calming the horses.

  “Edith MacMillan, Mrs,” said the lady behind them. “And Camille, the kitten.”

  They were already a couple. They were already wed. Edith MacMillan, Mrs, their oversized cupid, paid for the honeymoon to cement her role in their happy collision.

  Arthur Strange was twenty-two years old and lived in Geelong with his beloved father and stepmother. The son of Methodist missionaries, he had been born in Shanghai, China, where his mother had died of cholera two days before his eighth birthday. In an anguished crisis of faith his father, James, had suddenly quit his vocation and moved with his only son to live in Australia. They had initially settled in Sydney, where James had taken up building jobs to support his son, before meeting a tea merchant from the Toishen district in Kwantung province, who had travelled from Hong Kong and by odd circumstances ended in a tea shop in Swanston Street. Relieved to be once again speaking Cantonese, relieved to find a community of fellow souls – since James ineluctably felt more Chinese than European – he fell into partnership with Ah Chou and eventually married his daughter, Fen. It was a new beginning. Arthur adored Fen, not least for her cooking, but also because she made his father happy. A queen of the abacus, she doubled James’s business, doted on her husband, but to their mutual disappointment was unable to bear a child. The European community considered the family absurd (strange by name, strange by nature), and the marriage was regarded as somewhat perverse; certainly it ruined Arthur’s chances with many of the local women. But he had accepted his loneliness with equanimity, and at the age of eighteen taken a position as a coach driver, which kept him so much in motion, and so unlocatable and inconspicuous, that he would not need to show the world how ungrounded he was.

  Honoria Brady was the accident he had given up hoping for.

  Because he now lived in Geelong, and she in Melbourne, their courtship took place at the Melbourne coach house, in the hour, each weekday, between the coach arriving and returning. Under arches of steel ornamented with fluttering pigeons, and in the hustle and bustle of travel, of ticket-finding and luggage-carting, Arthur and Honoria exchanged their intimacies. No place in Australia had ever been so ardent; Honoria centred her day on the coach that arrived for just her; Arthur rode not to Melbourne, but solely to Honoria. Their first kiss coincided with the blowing of a whistle; it was something they joked about for years to come.

  The impediment was her father. George Brady was a widower, embittered and mean and he worked as the manager of a bank so that he could practise his meanness daily and with professional aplomb. The pride and joy was Neville, his son in the Indian Civil Service, but he considered his wayward daughter a flirt and a flibbertigibbet. He had chosen a colleague, a decent fellow, whom he considered a suitable match, but Honoria was ungovernable and disobedient. In the end he agreed to the marriage on the condition that this Arthur chap move to live in Melbourne and take up a position, one with real prospects, in a branch of his bank. Arthur readily agreed. He would have agreed to anything. He would have scaled the volcano Krakatoa if Honoria had been the prize. He would have swum to Tasmania to capture her kiss. At the wedding, to which Mrs Edith MacMillan and her husband were invited, George Brady was shocked by Arthur Strange’s unconventional parents – he could not bring himself to acknowledge them, a Chinawoman and a Crank – but by then it was too late. Arthur and Honoria were inseparable. George resolved to make their lives a misery until grandchildren arrived.

  Edith MacMillan held herself splendidly responsible for the Strange romance. She was eccentric and wealthy, and presented the delighted newlyweds with a card containing Camille’s paw print, stamped in Indian ink, and a double sea passage to Italy so that they could honeymoon on the Continent. George Brady disapproved. He snorted into his beer and imagined shipwrecks.

  Rocked on the ocean, then, in their own marital vehicle. Transported on scalloped waters and surging currents.

  On their first night together Honoria told her lover Arthur Strange the entire plot of Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel, Jane Eyre. Her triangle-shaped face lit up as she spoke. She was impassioned, fixated; she knew whole paragraphs by heart.

  Arthur listened to the ocean wash against his new wife’s voice. Thought Rochester a fool. Doted. Made a future. Fell at last into her warm body as if he were arriving somewhere safely, bathed in a white light from who-knows-where.

  4

  “I WANT YOU to have this. It’s all I have of my first mother.”

  “It’s beautiful. Chrysanthemums. Tell me the story.”

  “The story?”

  “You know. Where it came from, how she found it.”

  Arthur looked at his hands. He had never been asked for his stories before.

  “When she first went to China,” he began very quietly, “my mother was afraid. She feared illness, the people. She feared the foreignness of it all. A woman – not a Christian convert, but some sort of medicine woman she consulted – gave her the gift of this chrysanthemum fan. This woman told her through a translator that it was a special gift, and that she must use it to cool herself if she contracted fever or met Demon Spirits. It would protect her, the woman said.”

  Arthur’s hands in his lap seemed to grow smaller.

  “I think”, he added tentatively, “that my mother believed it. In her last illness, I remember, she insisted that it be present. She was too weak with fever to raise her own hand, so my father held the fan. She thought she would recover. She smiled up at the fan. Its shadow waved slowly across her face . . . I saw her, like that, with the shadow moving . . . And what about your mother? Do you have a story?”

  Honoria paused.

  “I was really too young to remember my mother. And my father, in any case, would never speak of her. My brother Neville says he remembers the shape of her dresses. Like lampshades, he says. Like illuminated shades. He doesn’t remember her face, though he must have been five when she died . . .”

  (A lampshade. A hoop-shape around an untellable story.)

  5

  AMONG THE FORMS of her diligent revenge, Lucy took to burning small holes in Mrs Minchin’s clothes. Mrs Minchin was bewildered; she thought a moth of some kind, or even a rat, was responsible. In the evening she patched what Lucy had destroyed in the morning; the children watched her sew in the chair that had not long before been their mother’s.

  The weeks after the deaths were almost unendurable. Apart from the dreary satisfactions of tormenting Mrs Minchin, Thomas and Lucy existed in a state of effacement and disability, as though they shared an undiagnosable illness. A kind of anaesthetic quality smothered their experience; they were disengaged in each task they performed, and their feelings, such as they were, were delayed and denuded. Moreover, the children had become convinced that there were ghosts in the house, presences that seemed everywhere to call: behold me! At night they saw flitting shapes and weird transparencies. Noises like whispers filled up the darkness. Once Thomas swore he saw his father’s face – unshaven, eyes bloodshot – hovering on the surface of the hallway mirror; and Lucy dreamed that the baby that would have been their sister was crawling in the cramped, dark space beneath her bed. There was no vacancy to grief. There were instead these drastic invasions, that hung omnipresent in the air itself.

  The children were relieved when Grandpa James sent coach tickets to visit him. He had not attended the funerals because he was confined to a wheelchair; and besides, he too had this undiagnosable condition. But he had written several times, and they had several times replied, and something in their tone and their scant news told him that they would be better out of the haunted house. As the coach pulled away the children ignored Mrs Minchin’s solicitous wave. Ned, left behind, howled and howled. Mrs Minchin held him by the collar as
he strained to follow.

  When they are adults they will understand that this trip was a redemption; it saved whatever still existed after the corrosions of grief, after the dreadful threat to the children of unstill ghosts. Grandpa James had an illness that made his body tremble, but he was still pleased beyond measure that the children had come to stay.

  “It’s joy,” he declared. “I’m weeping with joy.”

  James now lived with Fen in the mining town of Ballarat. He had settled on the goldfields and opened a small general store, mostly servicing the community of Chinese diggers. He sold picks, pots and pans, clothing, canvas tents, and assorted day-to-day and mining implements. In return he was offered genuine friendship – such as he had never experienced as a missionary – and a supply of fresh vegetables, including luxurious ginger. With his second wife at his side he had believed himself blessed. But now James could not balance these gifts against the deaths of Arthur and Honoria. No calculation or figuring sufficed. He deplored his own sense of fatality and doom, his own unholy feelings of emptiness. He wanted to ask his lost God forgiveness for his survival. The children stepped down from the coach and James greeted them, weeping.

  Fen busied herself making elaborate Chinese confectionery, and invited her younger nieces and nephews, four in all, to the house to play. At first Thomas and Lucy were disconcerted by such attention – they had never before sat with so many faces around the table, or heard so much talk, some of it incomprehensible, or seen so many dishes arrayed before them; and all presided over by a woman who dressed every day in fabrics that shone like glass.

  But they came to cherish this time, in this exotic household. It was, Thomas announced, like a new beginning. They ate new food, and met new people and did wholly new things: life after death. Grandpa James patiently taught both children to play chess – they had to move the pieces for him, so that his trembles would not upset the arrangements of the board – and Fen, with equal patience, taught them bridge and mahjong. In the tiny operations of castles and tiles, of horses and playing cards, in those dwarf obsessive circuits and friendly competitions, they all found distraction.

  Among the cousins Lucy met an especial friend; she was Su-Lin, a pretty girl who was almost her age. They would curl up together under the low scented branches of the lemon tree, pretending they were twins, and sharing secrets. Su-Lin had honey-coloured skin and gold rings in her ears, and Lucy was in love with her. They agreed to marry when they were grown up, and have many, many children, but in the meantime Lucy showed her how to use the magnifying glass to burn her own name in pieces of wood. Su-Lin, in Chinese characters, appeared on the gatepost in front of the house; and James and Fen, amused, could not bring themselves to scold her. Thomas was also in love with Su-Lin: he did cartwheels to attract her attention and caught good-luck crickets for her straw cage and years later Lucy discovered that Su-Lin had also promised marriage to her brother.

  In the evenings the children wheeled their grandfather down the main street of Ballarat. He hailed complete strangers and smiled at everyone. And now that he was ill, and had lost his son, and was grievously afflicted, most people were kinder and some smiled back.

  It was a shock to learn that Uncle Neville, their mother’s only brother, was travelling all the way from India to collect them. Grandpa James said it was what their father had wanted. He had, Grandpa James insisted, written and arranged it. So when the time was near the children were moved again. Their new beginning ended. They boarded the coach to Melbourne, back to the haunted house, and to purple-faced Mrs Minchin. At the coach house, their grandfather was trembling all over; his head was shaking like a puppet and he was weeping shamelessly. The cousins were there and so was Fen. Lucy and Thomas watched their family diminish to chesspiece size, until in the distance all that was visible was an oriental garment that caught the sun’s rays and glittered, like a tube of lit glass.

  6

  THE HOUSE LOOKED closed up, but they knew Mrs Minchin was there. Although the gate was looped with its rusty chain and the curtains were drawn, they could hear the sound of Ned, frantic at their return, leaping and barking in the hallway, running back and forth, testing the limits of his closed space with manic excitement. When they knocked there was an explosion of barking and scratching, but no Mrs Minchin came hurrying to answer the door. The children stood hand in hand on their own doorstep, like characters in a fairy tale, wondering what to do.

  “Perhaps she’s died,” Lucy said hopefully.

  “Murdered, I should think. With her throat cut,” Thomas added. “And purple blood in bucketsful.”

  The boy was appalled by what he had just said. The children looked at each other, a little uncertain, and decided to consult the next-door neighbour.

  Mrs O’Connor was blind and witchy and had hairs sprouting in a tiny neat plume from a mole on her cheek. She reached out for the children in case they were imposters, but they stood apart, and were ready to run if she grabbed at them.

  “Thursday. She thinks it’s Thursday that you’re coming. She’s up at Castlemaine, visiting her sister.”

  Her narrow hands hung in the air, both in threat and supplication, willing the children to move forward and consent to be touched. They looked like dead things, suspended there, so grey and shrivelled. Lucy thought: people die in different stages, this woman first in the eyes and then in the hands; and Thomas thought: she is dead already, she is like a mummy from Egypt, artificially preserved. The children were no less afraid for being beyond her reach.

  “That poor, poor dog,” Mrs O’Connor said. “Day and night it’s been crying.”

  Thomas remembered his manners, and knew how to be formal.

  “Thank you very kindly for the information, Mrs O’Connor. Most useful. Indeed.”

  And they ran off, back to their yard, and found the small square window, just near the kitchen chimney, that they knew could be forced. Thomas hoisted his sister up so that she stood balanced barefoot upon his shoulders, then she pushed, slid in on her belly, and he heard her plop down inside, accompanied by the yelps of Ned, now maddened with joy.

  What was it in that pushing into shadows, so laden with dog-smell and must and the sour remains of foodstuffs (or was it the metallic taint of spilt blood or the emanations of ghost breath?); what was it in the simple dropping down and the dog leaping up that was still so terrifying? Lucy half expected to find Mrs Minchin dead, her neck cut open, her brown eyes staring, the sticky mess of a murder soaking their Turkish carpet. But it was not that at all. It was that she had never before been alone in their house, or seen it so closed. The stench, Lucy discovered, was of mutton and dog mess: Mrs Minchin had left a pile of bones for the dog, and a bucketful of water – purple blood in bucketsful – and locked it inside. Lucy held her nose and looked around her. In the unlit kitchen familiar objects asserted a new kind of strangeness. The curtains with their twining ivyleaf print. The erect, looming chairs. The scratched surface of the table and the doily at its centre. The milk jug appeared enormous and very solid. Lucy could see blue beads glinting on its white lacy cover. She felt she must not touch anything; these belonged to somebody else. And in the drawing room this effect of distance persisted: the armchairs, the bureau, the standing lamp with the shade that ended in a bobbled flare – these objects disturbed her with their alien quality of autonomy. She made her way to the front of the house, skirting the furniture, and when she opened the front door Ned flew out before her as though shot from a cannon. Thomas almost fell as the dog leapt at him, frenzied with recognition.

  That first evening the children lay facing each other, on their parents’ double bed. They heard the sound of corrugated iron contracting in the cool of the night, the wind from the east stirring in the wattle by the window, the chickens settling down, their querulous throaty murmurs. Ned was on the floor, unrelaxed, his bony head cocked. They were a threesome afraid. As it grew darker, Thomas and Lucy talked quietly for a while but did not go to their own rooms or light the lamps. The
y undressed in the gathering darkness and slept very early, with their thin arms and legs bound in a wreath-shape, together.

  Lucy dreamed a vague dream in which she was trapped in a confined space. There was the sound of wind blowing and a sensation of threat. She tried to use her magnifying glass to burn a hole to escape, but could not, in her anxiety, find the direction of the sun.

  Rooster-call awoke them. In the morning the children discovered that the skinny boy Harold, from a house nearby, had been hired to feed the chickens. His thin cluck-clucking awoke them at daybreak, and they thought at first, with alarm, that Mrs Minchin had returned. Thomas persuaded Harold, on pain of Chinese burns, not to tell anyone of their return – he left a welt to show the seriousness of his threat – and so began their four days together, with only Harold and the blind woman knowing, and their whole world contracting to a curtain-drawn space.

  Daytimes were easy: objects recovered their propriety, their habitual look, and the children played cards and read, or scavenged for eggs and tomatoes. Mrs O’Connor called over the fence and gave them a fruit cake. She had baked it herself, measuring the ingredients by mysterious means with her ugly mummified hands, and though the children ate it cautiously, plucking out the bitter green cherries with their fingernails and flicking them away, it served as reassuring evidence of her residual humanity. She left them alone, Mrs O’Connor did. The gift of the fruit cake was her only intervention.

  In the afternoon the children shared the wicker chair, wedged closely together, and Thomas read to Lucy from his book about railways.