Sixty Lights Page 6

  “Now, now,” she said tenderly. “Now, now; now, now.”

  Two months after the scene at the pantry Uncle Neville arrived. The children knew of him only as a name, and were confused by how little he resembled their mother. This man might have been anyone, masquerading as an uncle. He was short and dark, his face slightly toadlike and his body pot-bellied, and he was dressed in soiled-looking flannel and a drooping hat. He carried an anomalously elegant walking cane, ringed with beaten silver, and topped by a carved ivory elephant. A man with little experience of children, he spoke to them remotely, as though he was addressing a large audience, of his dear-departed sister, and their duty to love one another, of the road ahead, which was England, of New Beginnings and Destiny Abroad. He dabbed at rheumy eyes with a filthy handkerchief.

  Thomas was more than ever resolute in his plan to abscond to Brazil: “This man is a fool,” he whispered to his sister, “and not to be trusted.”

  “And he stinks,” Lucy added, clasping her wrinkled nose.

  For his part, Neville Brady was also confused. He was a man so habitually dishonest that he once sent a stolen portrait of a soldier – upright, handsome, with a handlebar moustache and an honest gaze – to his dying father, the purloined image of a man masquerading as a son. George Brady was by then so twisted to his guts by lifelong bitterness he was not particularly consoled by the fiction of his son as an army officer, at the rank of captain, a splendid fellow, it was true, but almost unrecognisable. Now Neville was not sure what feelings he was pretending. Faced with these forthright orphans, with their whispering behind cupped hands and their adamantine stares, he realised that the speech he had long rehearsed had failed to impress. He twirled his elephant cane nervously. These children had a ruined, derelict aspect. He felt a little afraid of them. And they were supervised by a woman who looked as though life had stained her as a crude advertisement for misfortune.

  Neville Brady had not settled in Australia as Honoria had. When he was a child the brilliant harbour seemed such an auspicious beckoning – he remembers himself filled up with a kind of adventurous jubilation; he remembers plunging into the dark sickroom where his sister lay, and dragging her up to the deck to see their New Beginning. The cliffs stretched to embrace the ship, the air was cool off the peaked water, workers were running along the dock, the long brown jetty grew and grew. Everything expanded. He clasped his sister’s hand and squinted his eyes so that, in his swelling excitement, he would not overflow into tears. But within a year Neville’s vision had begun to dessicate and contract; and in time he learned to resent his father’s nation-changing decision. It left them all stranded, Neville thought. It made paternal meanness increase.

  After an altercation George Brady withdrew his son from school, having decided, all things considered, it was a waste of time and money, and found him a position as an apprentice clerk at the harbourside firm of Woodruff and Blood, importers who supplied the colony with spices and cloth from the Indies, and familiar goods, chattels and foodstuffs from Home. Neville’s work consisted chiefly in itemisation, counting stacked boxes and ticking off items, composing lists, cross-checking, adding long columns of large figures. It was dull beyond belief. The warehouses were ill-lit, bearing only high small windows, but also, in a strangely physical compensation, wonderfully scented. Neville would breathe in cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, tea; he would press his face to jute sacks and dip his hands into wooden chests to rub an aroma into his palms and the tips of his fingers: Neville was a boy seeking to take into his body all the spice that was missing from his life.

  In his boy’s-own boredom he planned a straightforward escape: he would purchase – with his own money – a passage to India. He would leave his father for ever. Honoria might be persuaded to join him, or he could send for her after he had made his fortune. Neville spent five long years at Woodruff and Blood. When he emerged, blinking like an animal that had been furled in hibernation, he was eighteen, furry and deranged by ambition, and his skin carried the faintly ineradicable scent of boxed-up spice. He took his stash of secret savings – all that he had not yielded to his father – and secured his passage. As he floated out of the harbour he could see his sister’s pink dress – or did he imagine it? – in the shape of a lampshade, and felt so inexplicably bereft that he buried his head in the woolly dark privacy of his cape and, grown man that he was, wept boiling tears.

  Lucy, Neville thought, looked very like his sister, but the boy Thomas could have been any mother’s son, masquerading as a nephew. The girl’s resemblance touched him – her triangular face, her curly dark hair – but she was also precociously wilful and fierce; she brandished a magnifying glass and had a pyromaniacal stare. For want of words, he coughed.

  “Well, here we are then.”

  “Can I hold your elephant stick?” Lucy suddenly asked, bold as brass.

  Thomas glared across at his traitorous sister.

  “And would you like tea?” Mrs Minchin added.

  Thomas switched his glare to the purple woman. He was concentrated and preoccupied, formulating Brazil. In his head long-limbed monkeys swung loops on jungle vines and screeched “Gold! Gold!” There were waterfalls, panthers and quick carnivorous fish. Bronze Indians, neat and featureless, looked on contentedly. Not this grubby fellow, this phoney uncle, who was so unlike their lost mother and so outrageously unkempt.

  Over tea Neville presented Lucy with twelve violet glass bangles – six for each arm, he needlessly instructed – and to Thomas a small silver dagger, curved like the moon. Thomas instantly capitulated: a silver dagger. He had never been given so grown-up a gift, and was in a turmoil of mixed-up gratitude and distrust. Perhaps he would discuss Brazil with his uncle. Lucy had put aside the elephant stick and was sliding the twelve violet bangles up and down the length of her arms so that they chinked like twelve teaspoons against the sides of twelve teacups. From beneath her loose curly hair she smiled up at her brother. Thomas realised he had almost forgotten his sister’s smile.

  That night Thomas took the dagger with him to bed, and wondered half-awake what it must feel like to kill someone. Between the ribs, a deadly moon. (“Take that! Aargh!”) He held it up in the darkness and saw it faintly. Silver. Bronze Indians, brassy sister, this silver weapon: all his imaginings were flaring metallic. He saw himself as a hero, keeping Lucy safe in a treacherous jungle. Ned. A gun. Sailing ships. Horseback. Charging fast-motioned at the unknown future. He felt he possessed a private world, which would one day soon materialise and invite him to enter. From the kitchen floated the sounds of Uncle Neville and Mrs Minchin in friendly conversation. Thomas listened as he grew sleepy, but they spoke their own over-syllabled, long-distance language: Calcutta, Mahableshwar, Bombay, Hyderabad. While he, already journeying, prepared to dream of Brazil.

  Neville Brady was sleeping fitfully in his sister and brother-in-law’s bed, and woke in the middle of the night to see his nephew standing in the centre of the room. The boy was naked and held before him the Indian dagger he had received as a gift. For an irrational second or two Neville thought that the boy had come to murder him – his earlier antipathy had been so undisguised – but then he noticed his automatic movements and vacant eyes, the thin body tilted slightly in its state of suspension. Neville rose and led the boy gently, guiding him by the shoulders, back to his own bed, and felt in this act, however gratuitous, a first intuition of the existence of paternal tenderness. He uncurled the boy’s fingers from the silver dagger, laid it on the floor, then lowered the child into the bed and pulled up the cover, smoothing and tucking it. Then, pausing again, he watched the boy sleep. The eyes were closed now, and the eyelids flickering. The face was pressed into the pillow at an awkward angle. The room was hushed – no wind outside, no-one astir – which made audible, just barely, the small boy’s breathing.

  “Honoria is dead,” Neville Brady whispered to himself. “My sister, my lovely sister, Honoria, is dead.”

  How large the night was. A black shadow, suckin
g him in.

  18

  SHE WOULD LIE on her back in the world of scurrying alive things – slaters, ants, earwigs, grasshoppers – and she would look up at the hard enamelled blue sky, and feel the sun on her cheeks, and see it as a pink-veined coin through her closed-up eyelids, and she would listen to leaves brush and rustle, and detect the light currents of a breeze – feeling the world as a princess feels a pea – and wonder why her adorable parents had died. Against the specificity of things leaned her own vague questionings; and against these small solidities, familiar and comfortable, a larger tenuousness. The world was untrustworthy. It held in cruel secret the possibility of erasure. Death, what an odd word, Lucy thought. Death, breath, she rhymed to herself. Breath, death. Death, breath. Her body carried trapped within it a sensation of shivering; even though the air was hot Lucy seemed to exist in a chilly grief-envelope. She tried hard to remember her mother’s face, so that she might expel this unaccountable sensation, but already it was a vestige, already it was a hieroglyph. It could not be willed into vision. It could not be called, or fabricated. Instead she was met everywhere by involuntary and mostly trivial recursions. Once, having fed the chickens, her apron full of eggs, her boots plastered with grey muck, Lucy turned back to the house and caught sight of a pure white blouse, one of her favourites, flapping on the clothesline. It bounced as though it was electrically animated, the long sleeves waving. Lucy remembered her mother removing this blouse, pulling it up slowly over her head; but the garment snagged halfway, so her mother opened the buttons from the inside-out to reveal her face. Lucy had her arms held up, her girl-face peeped through its linen encasing, and she stayed like that, comically misshapen, for their mutual amusement. Just this small occasion. Just this scrap of a moment that in another time and other circumstances had no real employment as a memory. All this from the happen-stance of a fluttering blouse, while she stood there with her lap of still-warm eggs, and her filthy boots, and her child’s sad perplexion, all gathered together in a tiny tight loop of time.

  What Lucy could remember were her mother’s stories. They are now the matted fabric she clothes herself with, to try to smother her persistent shivers. Fairy stories. Childhood stories. Invented combinations. One of the stories is about a Dutchman and an Englishwoman. The Dutchman is a balloonist; he sails the world using the sky as his private ocean. Winds are his tides. Stars his companionable fishes. Night is the depthless wave that sweeps him smoothly along. When he sleeps, on turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers, and in a long wicker basket that looks like a Venetian boat, he looks upwards and spies a second black ocean. This man travels on his own unanchored dream which lists and uplifts, ripples and swoops, bucks, crests, glides luxuriantly along, all in the realm of an endlessly imponderable journey. (Lucy loved the way her mother would tell it, this crazy sailing. And she loved the embellishments: turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers.)

  The Flying Dutchman is on a quest to seek a particular woman. She grew up in an ice cave and is known for the icy-pale translucence of her skin and for the ethereal quality of her character and intelligence. She bears a strawberry birthmark on the left side of her chest – just like Lucy – and is so sensitive to the world that she uncomfortably detects a single pea tucked away beneath mattresses. The woman is imprisoned in a small room in a palace in India; but has read of the anti-gravitational Dutchman, and planned her own rescue. She composes seductive messages, which she writes along the slippery lengths of satin ribbons, ties to pigeons and balloons, and then sends skyward, knowing they will find him. Floating endearments and invitations drift on the tidal winds. Longings-to-escape festoon the sky. So when the Dutchman, all alone, roams his oceanic space, accustomed to birds and clouds and the ornamentation of stars, he now meets sinuous sentences and multicoloured enticements. He steers his strange vessel in the direction of India, and systematically hovers over each one of its hundreds of palaces. One day the ice-woman looks up and there he is: it is magical; a sky-boat! It is her vision of liberation. She hastily writes a letter and ties it to a balloon, and up it goes, her freedom, her hope. The Dutchman is so excited to have at last found his journey’s end – he has even glimpsed her pretty, shining face appearing at a starshaped window – that he leans forward a little carelessly to claim the letter, topples from his basket and plunges to the earth. The woman sees him falling, flailing and desperate, the unread letter clutched tightly in his hand. His body is crushed below her on tessellated paving stones, his bright blood channelled into diamonds and hexagons. The Venetian boat, captainless, sails slowly away. No-one knows where. And what became of the woman? Her window was bricked up as a punishment and in her isolation and darkness she eventually went insane. For a long time she held fast to the vision of the wicker boat in the sky, full of romance and possibility, full of various transportations, but by the end of her life saw only Mogul patterns of Dutch blood, glistening in the heat of Indian sunlight.

  Lucy’s mother changed the story many times, but the end, in every case, was never a happy one. The Dutchman missed his target, or found the wrong lover and was doomed to a miserable and mistaken partnership. Or a storm swept the basket to the top of Mount Ararat, and the Dutchman died there, stranded and lovelorn. Or he arrived too late, sliding on his belly through the star-window to discover the woman long dead from loss of hope. Or the Englishwoman grew old, continuously sending out messages; or she grew blind with her effort and wrote something indecipherable. In the worst version the ice-woman was so distressed by the tragedy of her unanswered ribbons that she set fire to her room, and burned down the palace around her, her face appearing one last time in a flaming star. The palace simply melted, Honoria said.

  What shall Lucy do with her inheritance of story? Now she is left with a repertoire of exasperating desire, of hokum, memory, nonsense and tall-tale, that she has siphoned into herself as a stream of chill water. These stories fill her with an amorphous dissolving feeling. Even now, in the coin-light of warm summer sunshine, with her eyes closed and her mind bent on rational summoning, she is swept away and lost. And her mother’s face is so vague it might be a wet footprint, shimmering thin as a breath, transient as a sundial shadow, poised on the very edge of complete disappearance.

  19

  LUCY WORE HER new white blouse and her new straw bonnet (topped with a posy of artificial violets), and carried on her arm her old herringbone coat; Thomas looked serious and grown-up in his best cap and stovepipe trousers and new navy serge jacket. Uncle Neville had arranged for the luggage to be sent ahead, so together they appeared as a group on a Sunday outing, all nervous expectation and dressed-up best-behaviour. The driver lifted Lucy by the waist to sit beside her brother, then Uncle Neville pulled himself up, setting the cart jolting and tilting with his awkward weight, and they perched there, all three, looking down at Mrs Minchin. To the children’s horror she began to cry; they had never seen Mrs Minchin cry before. Her face smudged over and the tears gushed, and Ned, by her side, let out a long, plaintive howl. Up to this moment the children had been restless and flushed with excitement, but now they too collapsed and Uncle Neville, with no experience of wailing children and fulsome scenes of departure, looked alarmed in his loco-parentis incompetence. He was unused to these hyperbolic displays of emotion. Honoria, he recalled, had been a fantasist: she had clearly inspired in her children these crude and exorbitant performances.

  In truth, Neville had been flattered by Arthur’s request that he adopt the children. He had never met his brother-in-law, but since his life had been so far more or less dissolute, wrong-headed and fixedly geared to failure, he was pleased to be considered from a distance as parent material. Far from resenting the inflicted responsibility, Neville now saw his own role as heroic redemptor; the family tragedy required his intervention and confirmed his authority. In time, he believed, the two children would learn to respect him. He would be reformed, upright and a model substitute.

  Neville retained a memory of Honoria he coul
d not quite dispel: when he announced at eighteen that he was going to India, she laughed out loud. After all those years of sheer waiting and spiced-up visions, after all the adolescent torment of his own workaday isolation, he expected, at the very least, mute sisterly deference. But she threw her head back theatrically and laughed out loud and only later confessed that she was truly envious: “Have an adventure,” she whispered, “have an adventure and I shall come flying over the ocean to join you.”

  Lucy and Thomas sat high on the cart and looked into the future. Their odd uncle beside them was silent and preoccupied. What they saw was all they had known sliding backwards into oblivion, and ahead, a gigantic, unknowable chaos. Lucy took Thomas’s hand and it too was clammy. Sister and brother stared resolutely straight ahead. Without turning to look, they knew that behind them everything was already coated with the alluring patina of loss. It shone as it receded, like embers in a dying fire, and held for evermore the smouldering glint of their pasts.

  20

  PORT MELBOURNE. THE departure. The exiting of a continent. The dock was bone coloured with weathering and stank of stale ocean. Wood had extraordinarily clear grain and looked more weighty than usual. The wind was salty, acute. The air held an amethyst tinge. Lucy gazed at the horizon and wondered why everyone’s face seemed fluid and much less distinct than their harbourside surroundings. Perhaps travellers before a sea journey take on certain qualities of ocean, or at least respond in some way to the restless swell of parting tides. She could see mouths opening and closing and embraces exchanged. She could see Thomas and Neville in the distance, talking together to a sailor.