Sixty Lights Page 9

  Lucy worked at the albumen factory for almost two years. This was a place she sheltered in. When she left she still retained her Australian accent and was still, after all, distinctively strange. She could not make a speech. The women embraced her, one by one, in a sorrowful ceremony, and Mrs McTierney handed her a single brown egg, as a parting gift. It was warm and lovely, equal to their silence.

  27

  CLIMBING, AS IN a dream. Climbing the steep stairs with a single candle quivering under the breath of night. There he is, her brother Thomas, sleepwalking again. She brings the light to his face and sees that he is otherworldly and implacably absent. She knows he communes with ghosts. She knows he meets in this nomadic state, this shadowy night wandering, the father and mother she herself never manages to see. She knows she is cheated, as Neville too, in his own private anguish, consulting mendacious voices and tricksy visions, is also cheated.

  28

  NEVILLE HANDED LUCY a small daguerreotype. It was in a brass and velvet case and unlocked with a miniature key. The image inside was of a good-looking young man; he faced the camera at an angle and had an honest stare, a firm jaw and an impressive black moustache.

  “Isaac Newton,” Neville said. “Named, of course, for the physicist.”

  Lucy looked again at Isaac Newton, dark-faced and phosphorescent in his glassed-in square. He was unexceptional. The portrait and its devices reduced him to a merely generic gentleman, fixed in a doleful closet of perpetual night. She closed the case and locked him up.

  In India Neville had worked with Isaac Newton. He was a decent fellow, said Neville, clean-living and seeking matrimony, and had solicited his old friend’s aid in securing a wife.

  Neville paused and waited for Lucy to respond.

  “I thought”, he went on, “that you might consider an alliance with my friend, Isaac Newton.”

  Neville could not disguise an almost pleading tone.

  “I owe him money,” he added. “You only have to meet him, Lucy, and then you could return. No obligation. No obligation at all.”

  “Return?”

  “Return from India. Back to London.”

  Lucy faced her uncle. “You want me to go to India?”

  Neville was looking old. The hair at his forehead was grey and his face was ageing, as some do, into states of fixed frown and confirmed perplexion. He shaved less frequently and was ashamed to be supported in middle-age, in such reduced circumstances, by his young niece and nephew. His neckties had begun to show evidence of carelessly dropped food. Unemployment left him smeary, unmade and dishevelled.

  “No obligation,” he meekly repeated. “Madame d’Esperance has consulted your mother . . .”

  So it is, by these small interceptions loaded with possibility, by others’ agency or possibly ignoble intentions, that destinations present themselves and lives shift direction. Sometimes this is what we are unknowingly awaiting: to be taken up by the motion of some charismatic moment, some accidental, odd, or contingent opportunity. It is like love, or desire – the swerving acceleration, the fast-motioning skid. We wait, all of us, for what enlivens and unsettles us. It took Lucy only half an hour to make up her mind: she would travel alone to India to meet this boxed version of Isaac Newton, this man who shone with unearthly light from his sealed brass compartment. Alone, thought Lucy. It was an immense idea. Thomas had no wish to chaperone his sister: he was settled at Childe’s and bent on newfangled experimentation; and Neville was too demoralised, he said, for journeys or excursions.

  Plans, shopping, the acceleration of time.

  The month before Lucy left London everything existed magnified and in a state of intensification. The promise of travel releases essences and glazes everything with Expectations. Women at the factory confided things they might not otherwise have told her, and were enjoined by the excitement of going-to-India. One of them asked her to send an embroidered shawl. Another brought along a map that had belonged to her father: it showed India encrusted with names, mountains, sinuous rivers. India was shaped like a ghost-writing planchette, pointing mysteriously at the green-painted ocean.

  As Lucy’s departure grew nearer, Thomas became anxious. He may have felt guilty about his enthralment to the Childish Establishment; in any case he began to fret about Lucy’s venture. One day he came home with a cholera belt, a portable medicine kit and an ugly hard hat framed by an insect net, and later added pamphlets on travellers’ advice for the East and a phial of yellow liquid a merchant claimed – one hundred per cent! – cured all tropical fevers. Then Thomas developed rough coughing in spasms, as his father had once developed a crimson-coloured skin. What could not be uttered was played out in these practical gifts, and in the sense of physical vulnerability when he imagined his sister gone.

  Lucy departed in early morning under a threatening sky. She waved from the high deck, astonished at her own embarking – all by herself, alone – for Bombay, India. A small group of women from the factory flapped their handkerchiefs. Neville was teary and dabbed his eyes with a stripy scarf, and Thomas was seized by a fit of sudden coughing. Lucy watched them fuss together in an instinct of mutual comfort. She saw them recede, gradually blurring into docklands and the left-behind crowd, and then, just before they became at last indistinguishable, she saw Neville’s hat blow off, an upswept dot, and Thomas run to the very dock-edge to lean over and retrieve it. At that point she wept. Lucy wept because they had, after all, made a life together: three stranded colonials wedded in a makeshift family, represented now in this triangle, growing distended and more acute, as she floated away into a story that would be hers alone.

  29

  IT IS SOMETHING peculiar, Lucy decided, about ocean travel, that one feels one has always done it. On a ship it is impossible to believe you ever had a life on land; the pitch of the deep sea, the state of being buoyed, these begin to feel like the unalterable and persistent state of being. She loved the murmurous waves and the sensation of perpetual motion. She enjoyed the tilted horizon, the smell of wet canvas and rope, the sound of sailors’ quick feet slapping at the deck, the occasional slip of a glass across an angled table, the rocking of hammocks and curtains in gravitational adjustment: the whole disquiet of ships was an unending marvel. Most of all, however, Lucy loved the night, and when they were in the middle of the ocean they might have been sailing in sky. The stars were multiplied and everywhere extensive, and sparks on the ocean appeared as sunken reflections. In her private notebook of Special Things Seen, Lucy devoted almost ten pages to the oceanic night sky. It was like a glimpse of creation expanded; it filled her with awe and an impulse to artistry. She wanted to memorise it all, to reprint water and sky as her own wavy marks on paper.

  Every night, as a kind of ritual, Lucy went to the deck after most of the passengers had retired, and watched the dark. She became familiar with constellations and tracked their slow swipe across the heavens, and liked simply the wind on her face, and being wholly alone, and the sense of pushing on a solid craft into soft-seeming darkness. When she slept it was with the rush of water in her ears, with the sense of currents parting around her, and sleep – such sound sleep – as the great, great heaviness of sea water descending.

  There is a state of grace, she wrote in her notebook, in sleeping surrounded by withheld water.

  One night, when the ship was becalmed on a plain of black, she saw silvery threads of light in a thin film on the surface of the ocean. They followed the pattern of waves and looked like fluctuating stripes, breaking, reshaping, breaking again, reshaping. A hemline in a dance. A ribbon dropped from a sky-gondola. A broken trace of moonbeam surfing the waves. Like and like and like and like: in truth it was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was of itself and radically particular.

  “Bioluminescence,” a voice somewhere said.

  When Lucy turned to look, a little startled, she found a man standing close behind her, apparently peering at the ocean over her shoulder.

  “Plankton, mostly. But undernea
th, down deep, there are fish that carry their own lights in spots on their cheeks, or in little pods dangling above their heads.”

  Bioluminescence: it was a wonderful word. It was a word that sounded as if it had travelled from the future, from a completely new knowledge, from a new dimension of scrutability.

  “Sometimes,” the stranger continued, “this shine is visible in decaying flesh or in plants; it’s chemical, you know.”

  The man introduced himself as Captain William Crowley, lately in the service of the East India Company, now working for Her Majesty. He was returning home, he said.

  It was too dark on the deck to see exactly what he looked like, but Lucy was attracted to his voice and his tall upright shape. She wanted to pretend she was blind and reach out to touch him – as Mrs O’Connor assuredly would have done – so that she would sense by contour alone the face of this man who named things in the darkness.

  “It’s a hobby,” he continued. “I’m interested in natural science. One day I hope to discover something, to have my name on a plant, or some half-invisible insect somewhere.”

  Lucy was not sure if the man was joking, but liked him immediately. Perhaps, indeed, she was seduced by him then, when he named a new light and stood obscured in shadow.

  Captain William Crowley, having imparted his information, politely said goodnight and moved away, down the deck. It was only later, much later, that Lucy realised he had not bothered to ask her name, or wanted to discover anything about her.

  They saw each other often after that, and William Crowley began to accompany Lucy on the deck at night. She learned he had been to England to deal with his older brother’s estate, and to take over guardianship of his two small nieces. They were placed in a boarding school; their mother, who was distraught, he said, and overcome by grief, he had placed in an asylum. William related these things as though he had efficiently tidied up his family; “One must be decisive”, he stated, “in matters emotional.”

  In her youthful inexperience Lucy saw no duplicity; she saw a novelistic captain, dashing and firm. When first he leaned forward to kiss her they were slipping past Africa, the ship tracing the outline of the great continent with slow fidelity to the coast, and it seemed fitting to the remote majesty of whatever lay before them that this man wanted to seal the occasion with a kiss. He slid his hand into the gaping placket of her skirt, and Lucy responded with grateful enthusiasm; she had waited for this touch, this confirmation, and for the fulfilment of the fiction she saw her life to be.

  “Thank you,” she said softly, rising from the kiss.

  Retrospectively, perhaps, she invented their relationship. Perhaps she gave him symbols he was incapable of recognising. But the first time they lay together – this she knew for sure – they were rounding the famous Cape of Good Hope and she took the turmoil of the ocean as a kind of answering sign. The ship tossed and rolled and it seemed to Lucy that the world was reforming to match her new body. Waves crashed high against the ship and swept over the decks. The sea was thunderous. The air was stinging and alive. Lucy lay beside William Crowley, looking at his flushed cheeks and his nose and his closed tired eyes, and felt wide-awake and powerful enough to alter everything around her. Beneath the rough sheets she had discovered something remarkable: she had arrived into her own body. She understood now what might move a man to sail the sky for a woman, or cause a woman to track a man to the other side of the globe.

  “Tell me more”, Lucy whispered, “about bioluminescence.”

  She brushed strands of damp hair back from his forehead.

  William rolled away.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said sleepily. “It’s science, natural science.”

  So Lucy was left alone in the tossing dark.

  “Please?” she said, sounding like a pleading child.

  But William had begun snoring, or was pretending to snore. She longed to wake him to continue their unfinished conversation.

  When they rose in the morning Lucy saw something she later read as ill-omen. On the deck a group of three gentlemen caught albatrosses with hooks and lines, pulling them screeching and crying from the open sky, and then gave them – five in all – to the assisting sailors. The sailors cut off the birds’ feet, stuffed them with bran to begin a process of drying, then created from these grisly relics small purses and pouches for tobacco. Lucy refused one when it was offered. She thought of the birds’ eerie squeals and their shocked dying eyes, glazed by betrayal.

  30

  DICKENS, GEORGE ELIOT, William Thackeray: Lucy discovered the ship’s small library. She thought for the first time about what it meant to read a novel. What process was this? What self-complication? What seance of other lives into her own imagination? Reading was this metaphysical meeting space – peculiar, specific, ardent, unusual – in which black words neatly spaced on a rectangular page persuaded her that hypothetical people were as real as she, that not diversion, but knowing, was the gift story gave her. She learnt how other people entered the adventure of being alive. She saw them move and think and make various choices. Rain fell, sun shone, journeys were undertaken. In a high window framed by billowy white curtains, a heroine blew kisses to her lover standing in shadows on the street, his face upturned to receive its inexpressible sensation; and in this moment, composed of alphabets, Lucy knew the shape of her own yearning. There were sight-lines, image tokens, between people and people, between people and objects and words on a page, that knitted the whole world in the purest geometry of connections. One simply had to notice. One had to remark.

  Lucy fell backwards onto her bunk, and let her novel fold in her lap. The grains of the oak-wood above her appeared exquisite. There were knots, flaws, parallel lines. Lucy relaxed, and sighed, and closed her tired eyes.

  Her mother’s early stories flooded back to meet her. Lucy remembered oriental fantasies of dextrous artifice, fantasies of perished lovers and singular vehicles. She remembered the ice cave and a small girl learning to read. She remembered a tone of voice and the feminine scent of gardenia. It was like something swaying just in and out of vision – like light glancing in facets off ruffled water – a glimpse of herself, very tiny, as a six-year-old girl, nestled in a curve against Honoria’s body.

  This was memory as an asterix. The glory of the glimpse. The retrieval of just enough lit knowing to see her way forward.

  “My mother used to tell me a story”, Lucy began, “about a Flying Dutchman in India. He sailed the sky in a gondola suspended by a balloon, checking all the palaces in India for a beautiful princess.”

  William looked at Lucy, threw his head back, and laughed in a loud guffaw. “The Flying Dutchman in India,” he exclaimed. “You certainly are original.”

  He could not be persuaded to explain the joke, nor did he wish to hear her mother’s story.

  The horizon was unhinging and sliding away. Lucy felt she was tilting into a kind of translucency. Her lover William Crowley could not quite see her. She was uncertain, sheer. She was the shape he entered, rocking her body, then departed too quickly, leaving the body-door ajar, leaving her feeling desolate and wide, wide open.

  31

  THE MORE LUCY knew William’s body, the more he withdrew. The more she adored him, finding the crevice to kiss, learning the curve of his shoulder, tracing the line from nipple to nipple or the small dent in his chin, the more he grew silent and generally evasive. He stopped meeting her on the deck, so that she was obliged to knock on the door of his cabin and ask to be admitted. Sometimes he simply refused outright to see her, so she stood at his door, declaring girlish love, feeling herself conspicuous and deeply humiliated. Lucy overheard two sailors speaking about her and felt that she would collapse with shame. At card games she watched him and in the dining room she contrived to sit beside him, whether or not he deigned to talk. And then, capriciously, he would sometimes seize her, or take her by the wrist into his cabin, and undress her almost brutally. To say she was confused would be to discount the certa
inty of her feelings: Lucy desired William’s presence, his caress, even his mocking laugh, more than she had desired anything before.

  At some stage they fell into a kind of negotiated truce, and met with each other, prearranged, every second night. This relieved the sexual anxiety on both sides. William was more cordial and even at times happy. Lucy told him of Isaac Newton, the shining man in the box, and how she was sailing to meet him on a paid-for passage. Her lover was relieved and assured Lucy that the match was commonsensical and sound – a good fellow, well known, this Isaac Newton. William revealed he had a wife and four children waiting for him in Bombay. His father-in-law was wealthy, he said, and he would not jeopardise his fortune, nor his fine name. Lucy absorbed this information calmly. She realised he had assumed that she wished to claim him, when what she wished for was this dissolving of all her life into concentrated sensation, this extreme propinquity, and this perspective – resting her head sideways on his thin-haired chest – in which she discovered a silver scar and saw the very pores of his skin, in which the scented crust of dried sexual fluids, and the stain of her blood on the sheets, and the imprinted shape where the weight of two bodies lay, were the details of a hidden life she wanted uncovered. Along her arm were circular bruises where he had seized her too tightly: recording these marks in her notebook allowed Lucy to understand that such a grasp, on either side, is a kind of profanity, blemishing what it holds.