by Gail Jones
Lucy envisioned him, flushed and voluble, among rows of glittering glass and cynical patrons. (“Neville will be a father, after all.”) He leaned on the bar, his dirty scarf dangling, his elbows crooked like a child at a pantomime, inventing futures. His charming smile flooded the room with a good-humoured glow, so that the other men forgave him his fatuous tales, and played along, indulging him, feeling their own hidden gentleness arouse, thinking of their own sons and daughters and their own dreamy ambitions. By the time Neville left the public house it had begun to rain. He pulled up his jacket collar and pulled down his hat and wove through the wet streets towards the Childish Establishment. Thomas saw him from the window, across the road, and waved. Neville responded and stepped forward into the path of a heavy carriage. He was struck, said Thomas, directly in the chest, and slipped in the wet street, falling backwards so that he hit his head on the pavement as he fell crushed under the wheels. Thomas had rushed outside and run to the site of the accident. The carriage driver was distraught, and chattered incoherently with shock. Uncle Neville was quiet. He lay with his face in the rain and his eyes tightly closed. He was already gone.
Thomas said: “I just sat in the rain, feeling empty, and unable to act. At last someone took my arm and guided me away. It was not like Dickens; it was base and awful and Neville looked disfigured and forlorn, the rainwater steaming with blood down his face . . .”
The skylight:
Something she loves: Lucy sleeps beneath a skylight. It is so like a photographic glass plate – a rectangle of dark possibilities within which features emerge. She wakes to see stars that have moved and the slight shifts of colour, and notices for the first time the many gradations of the dark. There is a purple stage and another where the sky has a slight coppery tinge. Then the space is reversed, becoming bone white in the mornings. In winter sometimes she woke to find a rectangle of snow held above her, a kind of magical carte-de-visite, with a message of frozen time.
One day, Lucy believes, one day in the future, people will discover how to photograph the vast night sky. They will sit behind a glass panel, and make visible these changes. They will show everyone the prodigious nature of the heavens, its positive/negative exposures, its blindings and enlightenings. Photographs of the night will convince everyone of the existence of God.
45
LUCY NOW FOUND her own culture a shock. After almost eight weeks in England, she was still thinking of India and feeling misplaced and dislocated. The radical modernity of London disturbed her – the clutter, the heavy clothes, the trams, the bells, the cash registers and the lampposts. English people seemed at once too large and too faint; they had pale faces and pale eyes and talked too much of the weather in their wet-wool clothes. The hops smell of public houses was sickening; Lucy could not pass by one without thinking mournfully of her dear Uncle Neville. These may be, she reflected, the forms that grief takes, this sense that everything is unmitigated and out of kilter. Standing on the corner of Oxford and Regent Streets she looked at the stream of people flowing by with their heads down and their coats pulled against the cold wind, and felt as they did: embattled, quashed, and by something as imprecise and irresistible as wind. Ellen was asleep in the wicker baby carriage Thomas and Violet had given her as a gift. She was too large now for its neat little newborn space. Occasionally someone peered in, and offered a compliment to the bonny baby, but more often Lucy and Ellen moved together as if in a bubble, invisibly asunder, enclosed in a depressed patch of air within the blustery currents around them.
Thomas had noticed his sister’s low spirits and offered to seek out a tonic: he recommended Dr Whittles’ – a pick-me-up, said Thomas, and highly effective. He also suggested attendance at his magic-lantern shows, so Lucy began to accompany Violet, sitting in a regular space reserved for her in the back row near the door, in case the baby became noisy. She had forgotten how odd and how exorbitant the images were – how deanimated and posed, rather like Victor Browne’s photographs. They saw adventures, romances, shows on natural history. Each commenced with the rose-tinted slide of a fairy, holding up a flowery sign saying WELCOME TO ALL! One night they saw a show on the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Lucy was dismayed at the India she saw enlarged and illuminated. A man in a British Army uniform stood at the front of the screen announcing the titles. He held up a curved sabre with each announcement.
“Savagery at Meerut!”
“Cowardly Sepoys defeated by English Bravery!”
“The Great Mutiny put down!”
“Our Soldiers Triumphant!”
“The Empire Retained!”
The last image was of the Viceroy, pompous, erect, beaming under a gold-coloured palanquin, topped by a star. The audience rose and applauded. In this vision Indians were a nation of snarling barbarians, with daggers in bared teeth and murderous attitudes, and the British a noble race, etched in classical style, uprighteous, valiant, bleached and pure. Lucy felt goose-flesh arise on her arms. She was chilled, upset.
“How ghastly,” said Violet, when the lights came on.
Lucy remonstrated with Thomas after the screening, but he said it was a popular show and nourished the National Spirit.
“I am disgusted”, Lucy said loudly, “by National Spirit.”
Thomas and Violet exchanged glances; they both looked surprised and critical. Lucy felt then the descent of an inner emptiness. Neville, she thought, would know what she meant. She experienced an acute sense of loneliness, a clouding of her self in the absence of understanding.
“Tomorrow”, said Thomas, acting jolly, “we have The Flying Dutchman!”
“Which version?” Lucy demanded.
She made some feeble excuse or other, and with her baby carriage before her swept out into the street to cease the confrontation. It had been raining and the lamps had been lit and the city of London was transformed. There was a glossy black sheen cast over everything and solid buildings stood firm above their projected duplications; it was another kind of magic lantern, another visual effect which halted Lucy Strange in her steps. The creme stone of an otherwise ugly bank building was remade as a quivery film of light. Gas lamps threw down diagonal lines of spots along the road. Huge edifices leaned into vacant mirrors. Lucy stood still in the cold, shivering uncontrollably, wrapping her woollen shawl more and more tightly. She was bound to this contradiction: between the material and its ethereal incarnation in light. She had seen these reflections a thousand times: why did they rise up now with the force of revelation?
That night Lucy dreamed she met the dead author, Charles Dickens, walking in the street. He carried a lamp, like Diogenes, and his head was bent like a detective looking for clues.
“This way,” Dickens kept saying. “Follow me. This way. I’ll show you where it is.”
He pointed with his beard, as Indians do, and had a gently persuasive manner and a comic appearance.
Ellen awoke Lucy before she discovered their destination or what they were seeking. Baby-cry rent the dream and pierced the texture of the night. Lucy rose automatically, barely awake, and gathered in her daughter. She felt Ellen’s hot convulsing body register her presence, slowly cease sobbing, and then, yet more slowly, begin to relax and settle. The sweet scent of breast milk. Her regular puffy breathing. Her sinking back, satisfied. Lucy fell asleep again immediately, the baby curved into her, a smaller true reflection of her own sleeping shape.
46
IN MID-WINTER IT was confirmed: Lucy was ill. The doctor harrumphed and made notes and fiddled absent-mindedly with his cufflinks and his oxblood tie. He had listened to her chest and found cavities where living lung should have been.
“Consumption,” the doctor announced.
He looked over his eyeglasses with an air of strict professional gravity, but sounded, Lucy thought, oddly pleased with himself for the certainty and abruptness of his diagnosis.
In truth Lucy had guessed of her condition for some time. On the ship she had coughed a gob of blood into her handkerchief
and seen – oh God – her own shining death. In an instinctive act she flung her sullied handkerchief overboard, and watched it fall into the foam wake, churn briefly and disappear. She had seen enough by now of street life in London and Bombay to know that blood-spitting was the greasy sure flag of mortality.
“Thank you,” she said to the doctor, hearing the absurdity of her remark, wondering if doctors are accustomed to these inappropriate gestures of gratitude. He made a waving movement, a kind of dismissal, then commenced a cautionary lecture. She could return to normal relations with adults, he said, but must be aware of the special susceptibility of children. Distance, he said, tapping his pipe on the desk. Distance. She must drink a pennyworth of milk each day, and rest, and stay warm, and must not indulge in exertions of either the mind or the body.
Lucy watched the doctor’s mouth move as he spoke; she judged him professionally dissociated, unconcerned. These things she instantly resolved: that Ellen must be protected from her breath; that Violet and Thomas should not be told, until it was no longer possible to conceal her condition; that she would resume, more seriously, her work of photography, securing whatever she was gifted or fated to see; that she would be brave, determinatively brave, and not consider, not for one moment, that a life abbreviated is a life diminished.
With the doctor’s confirmation of her illness Lucy was distracted for a while, then resumed her usual life. Ellen made it easy. Babies pull attention in their direction; they require fuss, organisation and sensible decisions, new clothes and new amusements for their amazing enlargement. Lucy was practical, maternal. Lucy kept calm, kept her distance. But at night she was assailed by imaginings of her own inner body. She imagined her lungs like honeycomb, fretted into unsupportable organic sculptures, lacy with their own death-dealing dissolution. She imagined air moving through the corridors of her altered anatomy, not finding the route to fuel her breath, but leaking out in a slow, suffocating exhalation. She saw, above all, a kind of city, all caves and pipelines and underground tubes, rather like the ones engineers were now creating under the streets of London – the Metropolitan, they called it – a dark new geography. Once she had stumbled upon workers emerging from a gape in the street; they had skin made of earth and looked like a fraternity of the underworld. She saw them blink and look lost. They wiped their faces with rags. Bog men. Lazarus men. Creatures of sub-London dark.
Someday – this she knew – doctors would have an apparatus to photograph the inner body. To light the dark. They would present patients with crimson images of their hearts and lungs; they would show the skeleton in all its fine ivory architecture; they would reveal the tunnelling waterways of the blood and the convolutions of the bowels. They would photograph the baby within the womb, swelling into being, furled in great expectation, waiting upon its own features in its mother’s developing fluids. They would even, Lucy imagined, photograph the brain, and these photographs would have a lyric and lambent quality: they would be like pods of loveliness, like newly discovered planets, remote, elaborate, drifting on glass plates like secrets still unbroken.
47
LUCY HAD BECOME a walker. Something in her, some restlessness or sorrow or drive forward into life, compelled her to move through this city as though she could claim its whole compass. She strode out each day pushing Ellen – propped up now because she could no longer lie with comfort in the confining carriage – and walked from their new rooms in Stepney to Stepney Green, then along Whitechapel Road to Houndsditch Junction and down to the river along Bishopsgate. Sometimes she crossed London Bridge and headed to Kennington Park, one of her favourites. In another route she simply followed without plan the sinuous curve of the Thames, crossing bridges back and forth along the way. She knew all the bridge names and landmarks, and carried in her head the shiny ribbon of the Thames-shape she had seen on maps in the British Library, its humps and bows and thinning out to the west, its bright blue arterial representation that was nothing, nothing at all, like its actual brown. Sometimes, if she had money, she took the ferry to Westminster and then began walking west and north, tracking the city through its parks: St James’s, Green, Hyde, up to Regent’s, and then the long haul uphill to Hampstead Heath. It was a secret mission: to gaze on the water-shapes of rolling hills, to see again the world made extensive and open.
Several times Lucy combined walking and a carriage ride to travel from Stepney to Kew Gardens. She stood in the glass and iron palm house and gazed at peepuls, pepper-vines, tree-plants and palms, remembering India. The pavillion looked like the product of whimsy or the emanation of a dream; its rainforest light, its population of tropical plants garnered from all points on the equator, existed in unnatural defiance of the nature around it. Lucy moved in from the cold, pushing at the heavy swing doors with the nose of the baby carriage, into the artificial warmth caught under the high glassy chamber, then she pushed out again, and felt the cold air sting her cheeks. This was allegorical knowledge: the world split into zones, the bodily registration of selves that were divided, multiplied.
Lucy had spent entire days walking in this way, returning after dark, looking hollow-eyed and exhausted, with blisters on her feet and a ragged ill look. Thomas thought privately that this walking was a mild form of madness, an incessancy, a refusal to rest, that his sister had carried over from her long ocean travels. He saw that Lucy had grown thin and bore hoops beneath her eyes that in some lights appeared like dreadful bruises. She looked woeful, he thought. She looked like a fallen woman.
It was only when Lucy began taking her camera with her on these journeys that she learned to pause, to see again and more carefully images taken and untaken. Thomas constructed a kind of wooden box at the end of the baby carriage within which she carried her photographic equipment. The camera stand lay like a pronged spear along the side of the carriage, bound against it with twine. The baby carriage now looked like a new invention, a contraption that transported infants as it caught the world on a three-pronged spear. Heads turned as Lucy passed; she might have been an inventor, an eccentric.
It was in the spring, on these walks, that Lucy met through the contemplative vision of her camera the two companions who would save her from death by loneliness. One day at Kew, she was bent beneath the dark cloth shroud of her camera when she saw through the lens a face that was unforgettable. Beyond the glass walls of the palm house rising up into the sunshine, she saw a woman strolling by herself with her eyes closed and her face tilted to the sky, as if absorbing as much morning warmth as possible. She wore a feathered bonnet and a copious gown with a brown checkered front panel. It was Mrs Minchin. The purple shape that so marked her was for Lucy the coloured shock of the past returned: she swivelled the camera on its stand and watched as Mrs Minchin, who seemed not to have changed or aged at all, slowly began walking in her direction, then halted ten feet away and stood still in an oval-shaped flowerbed of blue crocuses, as if waiting to be photographed.
Lucy could have remained hidden but instead called out.
Mrs Minchin opened her eyes and looked around rather blearily, as if her ears had deceived her.
“It’s me,” Lucy said loudly. “Lucy Strange. From Australia.”
She heard her own voice ring out into the open spaces and gardens.
Mrs Minchin stared. Then she was at once upon Lucy, and embraced her like a long-lost prodigal daughter. Ellen began to cry and Lucy bent to lift her; at this act Mrs Minchin’s eyes filled with tears and she reached forward and took the howling infant in her arms, soothing it at once with her low voice and the ample bed of her bosom.
“Now, now. Now, now.”
“Let me look at you,” Mrs Minchin said to Lucy. “So grown up. So like Honoria.”
Then she added cannily: “Are you ill?”
Mrs Minchin had left Australia not long after Neville departed with the children. She stayed on until the house was sold, spending much of her time with blind Mrs O’Connor, but feeling bereft, distressed and alone in the world. Grief, she said
, had almost destroyed her. It was like carrying a grey cloud over the heart. Like fog. Like blur. There were days when she cried for no reason, or sat staring at the wall, thinking in maddened ways of the children she didn’t have. At length she found work as a nurse on a sea passage to England and had decided to stay, returning in London to her old profession of midwifery. Mrs Minchin now lived not far from Lucy – in Spitalfields – in a small room at the back of a building above a pharmaceutical store, from which leaked, she said, odiferous vapours. Lucy tried to imagine Mrs Minchin in her stinking room, resting on a narrow bed in her chequered dress, her purple face obscured, in a mote-filled light.
Now they were together in a place of incomparable greenness and unlikely coincidence. There were planted beds of daffodils, crocuses, tulips and pansies, and Mrs Minchin kept exclaiming at their prettiness then trampling them to pick samples for Ellen to chew at and tear. She was always leaving the paths and heading off to examine the Latin names pinned to the trunks of trees.
“Prunus avium plena!” she called out. She stood under a quivery cascade of full white blossom.
“Hippocastanum!”
“Horse Chestnut,” called back Lucy. “I know that one.”
All around the park decorous couples strolled arm-in-arm along the paths and entered and left the glass buildings with a sideways swish of a broad skirt, the collapse of a parasol, the removal of a hat. Mrs Minchin was unstoppable. She hitched up her dress and waded through flowerbeds and grasses, deviating from the paths to the sources of her own pleasure and attention. Lucy watched her form and saw within it a hefty liveliness. Her girlhood feelings of antipathy instantly evaporated. Here was a woman of spirit and gumption, cutting swathes with her body in order to shout out the name of a tree. She carried Ellen resting low and secure on her hip.
The photograph Lucy took of them had from the second of its existence the redolent quality of a remembrance of things past: it framed Mrs Minchin and Ellen under a canopy of Prunus avium plena blossom, looking like a grandmother and her beloved granddaughter. The tree formed a drooping soft dome-shape around them. Fallen petals lay on their shoulders and in the fine nets of their hair. Mrs Minchin’s wine-stain face appeared as a face in deep shadow. The photograph seemed almost to convey the fragrance in the air.