Sixty Lights Read online

  10

  WHAT COUNTRY HAD they come to, with such enormous sky?

  Honoria had been seasick for much of the journey and had imagined the worst. With a damp rag over her eyes and tears in her heart, with the harrowing creak of their wooden vessel straining against the weight of the sea, the air dense with fish-stink and brine and the shouts of labouring men, her father and brother on the deck somewhere, her whole mood one of abandonment, Honoria fabricated an Australia that was the culmination of ill-omen. She imagined it grey, contained, fetid and dank. She imagined their ship churning its way towards some nauseating disaster. In the swoon of such unhappiness it was not possible to imagine otherwise.

  There had been one or two periods of brief respite, when she had left her hammock and seen the sky. Once it was so windless the ship had simply stopped: it bobbed in one place, poised and placid, and Honoria and Neville had raced around the deck whooping with pleasure. Fat sea birds settled to watch them play, their red eyes curious. For three days there existed a splendid calm; the sky was blank and benevolent; the sun shone brightly. But when the ship resumed its churning Honoria resumed her illness; she had never been so miserable.

  In the hammock in the women’s section the ladies fussed at first, but soon grew tired of this child who was always poorly and prostrate. One, an Irish girl, persisted in care; Nell bent over Honoria, broad-faced and loving, her lilting voice the gentle waves it was possible to be buoyed on; and when the child vomited salt meat, she alone stayed to clean her, and when the child woke in the night, she embraced and comforted her; so that her bending over became at length the entire shape of the ship, and the only thing, this shape, Honoria will remember of the journey. In the future, in a sleepless moment, after the birth of her first baby, Honoria will recall uncannily the taste of Jamaica ginger in her mouth; and in her dreamy state recall also the curve around her loneliness that was broad-faced Nell. It was both a composite and an indefinite recollection: a taste, a name, a durable unfolding. And it allowed Honoria to believe she had not spent her own life motherless, but had been multiply mothered. A number of women had found and held her, all of them ship-shaped. For now, however, there is this extenuated abjection and these long blindfolded days, and more than anything Honoria knows the murmur of the ocean; she hears it swell and sound when everyone else is asleep; it is her most loyal, most consistent, familiar. Sometimes there are whispered messages or hazy half-stories. And sometimes there is nothing: mere tedious repetition. Honoria’s voice is strangulated, as if it issues from a cave, so Nell sings and speaks and uses voice enough for both of them; and they coexist in this pathetic affectionate union, in the belly of the wooden ship, rocked and rolled together.

  Neville had to breach the women’s section to drag Honoria from her hammock to see it – their New Beginning country. The harbour was dazzling. The children made Chinese eyes against the Australian glare. Honoria could hardly believe that the world was after all so large and the sky so bright an immensity; she had been too long confined. She clung to her brother and watched the new world wobble and grow closer – the opal water, the prismatic light, the sight of a large shipping dock and its ramshackle buildings, all brown and noisy, sliding unevenly to greet them. It was a mythic arrival. Honoria felt Nell shift position to stand behind her, and fingertips move in her unbound hair. She felt her brother’s handclasp and her own miraculous light-heartedness. Something floated inside her; it was the New Beginning, perhaps, or just the sudden heaven – after so much illness – of solid landfall.

  The boarding house they moved into was shabby but clean. The landlady smelled of gin and entertained portly gentlemen with large moustaches. In the smallish parlour there was a pianola, warped by damp, chintz furniture featuring a pattern of rusty autumn leaves, a set of four prints displaying views of Windsor Castle, as well as a spoilt, yappy lapdog that detested children. George Brady complained – he was already learning the expatriate modes of bitterness – the heat, the foreignness, the less-than-expected remuneration, all sorts of vague subtractions he perceived or imagined – but his children prospered. In their unbitter child-hearts even the boarding house was an adventure. The children spied on their landlady undressing, tilted her castles, taunted her stupid dog, and roamed the Sydney streets in which everything, even voices, were incalculably novel and full of surprise. The blindness Honoria had been folded into during the torturous voyage unfolded like a fan to show a concertina of spectacles. And when she stood on the dock, watching the large slow ships, with their pale sails fluttering, she found it difficult to remember her own captive time. Life had started with that view of the harbour, its sunlit revelation.

  11

  ON THE THIRD day the children looked at their parents’ belongings. It was Thomas’s idea: he started opening drawers in a casual, almost desultory manner, but then he found himself peering into them, and rummaging about. He looked guilty, Lucy thought. But soon enough, she joined him.

  Their parents both seemed to have possessed large quantities of under-garments, and endless drawers filled with layers and layers of day-clothes. There were shirts, blouses, scarves, jackets and handkerchiefs. Both had boxes of hats, some of which were archaic and these days unfashionable, and among the hatboxes Thomas found one which contained odds and ends of bric-a-brac he realised must have belonged to his father: a child’s bamboo flute, stamped with the design of a red dragon, a tiny gondola, carved in onyx, a grubby set of playing cards, of which certain numbers were missing, a charm of some sort (a cross-legged oriental man, corpulent and smiling), a little notebook with jottings in a Chinese script, and a few small-denomination coins, apparently Italian. The modest specificity of these objects moved Thomas to tears; he had a sense, for the first time, of his father as a boy. He found himself touching each object in turn, as though touch alone would furnish the quality of reverence that might break open and expose their secret history. The Italian objects were all infrangibly enigmatic; but he knew a little of his father’s Chinese boyhood, and imagined him, perhaps ludicrously, in a pointy hat and baggy pyjamas, sitting in a scene rather like that on a willow-pattern plate – that magical pagoda, those cauliflower trees, that semicircular bridge – and playing this very flute. When Lucy reached for it he slapped her, not sure what instinct he enacted.

  Both children moved around their parents’ room avoiding the mirror: it might somehow incriminate them. From her mother’s dressing table Lucy took up an inlaid box, of mother-of-pearl, and opened it on the bed. She spread before her an assortment of trinkets and jewellery: rings, bracelets, a particularly lovely string of beads, but these were items she had seen and even touched before, in other more clandestine and naughty investigations. Nevertheless death had somehow condensed their meaning: they marked the body gone. These were objects that had hung from her mother’s thin bony wrists, that had encircled her fingers, that in characteristic and girlish gestures she had fiddled with and fondled as she thoughtfully spoke; and these beads of cold glass had rested in that slight blue concavity of the neck where the pulse, her pulse, had been visibly detectable. Lucy could barely bring herself to touch them. She felt as if there were knots tied in her chest. She scooped everything together in a tangled mess, and heaped it back into the inlaid box. (Mustn’t cry, she thought, with Thomas already like that, so tearful and girlie.)

  It was the wardrobe, however, that disturbed her resolve. For when Lucy opened the door she was overcome with a posthumous scent of gardenia, and at that moment, saturated with a who-knows-what betokening, stirred by something so imprecise it was not even a memory, but the latent and restless breeze of a memory, she too became tearful. She slumped into the perfumed cavity, her limbs drawn up, her face buried in the hanging folds of her mother’s dresses, winding sheets now, limp and deadly, and untied all the knots she had been tying to hold herself together. So Thomas wept for the specific, for the tangible object, the flute and the whistle and the missing breath that would animate them, and Lucy for a vague vibration in
the air, for the dusty sweetness that lingered when it should have been absent. It shocked them both, these tears so late in the peace. Thomas found handkerchiefs mono-grammed “A”, and the children wiped their faces and blew their noses. Then they were quiet for a long, long time. The room was solemn, shadowy and still. Wattle-filtered light gave everything an effaced appearance.

  The next day Lucy discovered her mother’s objects. Like her father’s they were encrypted in secret histories. At the bottom of the wardrobe, pushed back, was a further hatbox, and in this one, no different from the others, rested a few hidden-away mother-things.

  A wedding card, stamped with the paw of an animal.

  A second string of Italian beads, even more lovely.

  A diaphanous scarf, with beadwork in its fringes.

  A copy of Jane Eyre, with passages underlined.

  A bundle of letters, on writing paper textured like the surface of the ocean, from someone called Harriet.

  A list of names: Eleanor, Harriet, Lucy, Rosamund. (Lucy underlined.)

  A mourning brooch, containing a single curl of blonde hair.

  A purse of coins, apparently Italian, of small denominations.

  A satin ribbon, leaf green, with “I adore you” written along it in precise black ink. (This neatly rolled.)

  At first the appearance of her own name was like a mystical sign: it placed Lucy like a code-breaker in a system of secrets. Yet it was also, Lucy realised, estranged and useless. The hatbox was a little amnesiac circle: everything was lost and without association. Nothing summoned her mother’s face. Nothing was intelligible. Lucy will spend the rest of her life looking intently at faces. She becomes, at this very moment, one whose mission it is to unconceal. This is the moment, aged eight, Lucy becomes a photographer. And every photographic ambition will turn on the summoning of a face and the retrieval of what is languishing just beyond vision.

  Years later, in the middle of the night, in a pleat in time, Lucy wakes to find herself whispering the words: mother-of-pearl. She remembers the jewellery box and the scented wardrobe. She remembers the leaf-green ribbon and the bundle of letters. It occurs to her then that this is the light, the diffuse glimmering light, she has seen inherent in wet collodion and silver-nitrate photographic prints. The light of mother-of-pearl. It is the light one sees, half-awake, in grey early morning. It is the light that glances off faces, glimpsed in the act of lovemaking. It is the light of memory, and of the earliest petals of gardenia. It is the blurred aura, perhaps, between concealment and unconcealment.

  12

  IN THE NOVEL Jane Eyre a tree is cleft by lightning. The goddess Nature is so responsive to the movements of lovers that she sends prophesying icons to confirm the progress of their romance.

  “I know it’s preposterous,” Honoria said. “But isn’t it also wonderful?”

  She told this episode with such fervour that Arthur was enchanted. She lay in his arms and her curly hair brushed at his face. He was aware of her soft cheek, and the rise of her voice. This ocean they rode on, this amatory cradle, he imagined was their own natural authentification.

  Even then, especially then, he had wanted to tell his own story, but for some reason could not. His lightning story.

  How old had he been: six? His father was working in the centre, in Wuhan, and he and his mother were travelling by ox cart back to Hangkow, on the coast. It was in the middle of the summer, and he remembers the din of crickets issuing from the banyan and the powdery dust billowing upwards in high clouds behind them. The taste of salt lumps and green tea that his mother fed him. The sunburn upon which she had rubbed some indigenous ointment, so that his European skin was a glossy tangerine. A tiny man in a pointy hat squatted at the front of the cart, and Arthur sat behind with his mother beneath a wax paper umbrella, its small shade rocking and jerking around them. Everywhere people stood in doorways to stare. Sometimes children his own age jogged beside the cart, reaching up with pale hands, and shouting: “Devil! Devil!”

  “Just ignore them,” said his mother.

  But Arthur never could. He shouted back and joked in their own language – which his mother could not understand – and was annoyed that they teased him, calling him a foreign devil, because he was English and sunburned and rode beneath an umbrella and in a woman’s guarded embrace.

  At some point on their journey they were on a stretch of lonely road. The wind fell suddenly to nothing and the sky coloured deep purple. Arthur sensed his mother’s anxiety in the fluttering of her fan, and when he looked at her face – he sees it even now – he saw that her loose hair was standing on end, an affrighted halo, and that her features were tightened and seized with fear. His scalp was prickling and he could feel his own hair uprisen, neat as new rice. Thunder filled the air above them, sharp, aslant lightning appeared in the sky, and when their cart driver leapt up and ran away down the road, his mother began to chant:

  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;

  He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul . . .”

  Arthur was decisive. He seized his mother’s wrist and they ran together, rather stumblingly, rather blindly, into a field of dry grass. He does not really know exactly what occurred – everywhere was illuminated, mauve and alive with electricity – except that some force burnt his feet and toppled him over, and when he woke he was on his back, looking up at the sky. His entire body ached, and his sunburn felt so painful he thought perhaps he had been burned alive. Soft rain spattered and bathed his face. He felt alert and stimulated. The sky was lovely, like crystal, with the calm and translucence of the departed storm. A single bird, a crane, slid slowly overhead.

  When Arthur turned his head to look for his mother, she was lying at a short distance, her eyes closed, the hem of her long skirt slightly smouldering, and at first, in dread and ignorance, he thought that she was dead. But she stirred, and began to cry. Arthur put his arm around her, and brushed rain from her face. She was like a little girl. When she recovered her adulthood she stood, adjusted her bonnet and tugged at her bodice, as though she were preening for a Sunday outing, and then looked around for her umbrella and fan. The umbrella’s fabric had burnt away, so that it was just a radial structure of sticks, but the fan had been left behind in the ox cart, and was sodden but unspoiled. Arthur remembers that, in her absent-mindedness, his mother took up the umbrella, useless though it now was, and brought it with them.

  The ox was dead. Its large eyes were wide open and rolled back into white balls. The driver was gone. They stayed together, mother and son, in the stalled ox cart, the huge carcass yoked in a stinking death, and together they chanted:

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death,

  I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

  Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me . . .”

  The sun returned. Flies began to gather in the nostrils and eyes of the ox. Arthur and his mother lay beneath the ox cart for shade, fanned each other’s skin, and waited to be found. When another cart arrived, driven by a surprised old man, it was Arthur’s task – though by then he was barely sensible – to explain what had happened, and to bargain payment for their ride. And still his mother chanted; and still she clutched her umbrella and fluttered her chrysanthemum fan.

  13

  HE HAD WANTED for years to tell her, but now it was too late. In his maddened state of grief, in the dark, dark shadow of the valley of death, Arthur itemised all that he had not said, all that he had not given, all his repressed or stammering or incomplete endearments, all the secrets still locked away in his coach-carriage heart. He had wanted to tell Honoria about his mother. He had wanted to tell her how she appeared.

  That she had risen from fiery death, brushed herself down, adjusted her bonnet, tidied up, and then taken and held aloft a burnt-out umbrella. And Arthur had looked up and seen encircling his mother’s head a radial structure of sticks,
a Florentine halo, through which, in dazzling mauve, shone spokes of storm-swept sky.

  14

  THE TREES AT the window shivered, just as she shivered with the delectable cool of his touch. The way he unpinned her hair and spread it open with his fingertips. The initial stroke of his open hand against her breast.

  In the first two years of their marriage Honoria Strange had unlearned and relearned her body, and now, at twenty, it seemed untutored again. Yet she faced herself naked in the mirror and experienced her own existence as complete self-possession. Her breasts had inflated to bulbs and her belly was a globe; an indigo filament ran from her navel to her pubic hair, and veins she did not know existed were now apparent across her chest. She examined herself as an artist might: finding the immanent aesthetic. The curves that composed her. The tissue artfully distended. The venerable imperfections and discolourations that graded her body more solidly. Honoria felt at once real and achieved. If she doubted her future body at all it was because she did not wish the shivering to cease.

  The pregnancy had been without incident or mishap, and now Mrs Minchin had arrived, for the last weeks before the birth. At first Honoria was taken aback to see the woman’s face: it bore a wine-dark pigmentation across most of the left side, and blemished an otherwise handsome woman. In an episode of superstition she had asked Arthur whether she might now deliver a baby with a birthmark, and he told her it was a foolish and unbecoming supposition. Honoria was ashamed; for years later she thought of it and blushed at her youthful ignorance. (Nevertheless – and she could tell no-one – she had a recurrent nightmare in which she nursed a baby whose too-tiny face was disfigured by red shadow.)

  As her time approached Honoria Strange grew flagrantly lazy. She lay about the house, rather dishevelled, in a thin linen nightgown studded with girlish pink bows, and gradually befriended the wine-dark Molly Minchin. When they grew to know each other Honoria discovered that this woman was exceptional: she knew of happenings both natural and supernatural, she performed skills both ordinary and wonderfully extraordinary – midwifery, divination, communication with spirits – and had travelled to far lands and exotic locations.