Sixty Lights

by Gail Jones

  Jacob’s father lived on for three more months, dying just days before his son’s eighth birthday. He was laid out on the kitchen table, his arms folded to his chest like resting wings. Ruth and Mother hugged each other, and Jacob lay on the floor under the kitchen table, hugging his dog, Red. Grief was this stillness descending, this closing of bodies into the warmth of one another, this dull refraction of energy into few words and little movement. There was a smell of candle wax in the air and a chill mean draught. Heather scent and sheep stink flooded into the room. The fire had gone out. Jacob imagined sharp frost crystals suspended in the air.

  The morning after the death Jacob did a remarkable thing: he crept to his father’s bedside before anyone else had woken, and in the icy light of early morning, the light of brand-new death, carefully drew a picture of the corpse’s face. With a lead pencil from the bureau he worked in the most calm and concentrated way that he could. It was quite a good likeness. It was clear and noble-looking. He kept the image all his life, convinced that it had within it a faintly Christlike aspect. Christ in an icy light. Christ in deposition. Christ gone cold.

  50

  SHE WONDERED WHAT death was like. What Ellen might see.

  Fever had come upon Lucy and she had been sleeping and dreaming in the daytime, aware in her own body of the untimely derangement, conscious too of her irritation at being supine, and useless, and leaving Ellen in the care of Mrs Minchin. She realised she would begin to resent her illness, and that she would not, after all, be dignified and calm, but irascible, annoyed, a woman who fell into bed at eleven in the morning and woke three hours later still unrevived and vapid. Behind the veil of waking lay fragments of a dream about Rose, the woman from the albumen factory, beaten to death by her husband. Lucy had seen herself, once again, felled by his blow, and somehow in this dream she was both Rose and herself; somehow the taste of blood in her mouth was a fold back to the sudden irruption of violence and the blank shock of her fractured cheekbone and her cut swollen eye. Lucy could hear Mrs Minchin in the garden, talking to Ellen in the exclamatory tones adults offer to small children when showing them the world. Ellen made appreciative, high cooing sounds in response. Their voices were summery, normal. They sounded pure and joyful. She must rise, and make tea, and take Ellen into her arms. Her daughter was the instant cancellation of consumptive fever and bad dreams.

  But Lucy lay in bed a little longer, turned her pillow to its cool side, and found herself dismissing the bloody dream to think about Jacob Webb. She had permitted him to call on her – to explain his work, he said – and he had arrived yesterday, at exactly ten in the morning, his head a smoky mass behind the frosted glass on the front door to the rooms she and Ellen now shared with Mrs Minchin. Lucy had paused a few seconds before opening, because Jacob Webb was their very first visitor, and she liked the round high shadow of his head, and the mystery of his features, effaced, patiently waiting. He looked like a grey flower, bobbing, set in a field of pearly light. She wondered whether it might be possible to photograph through blurry substances, whether a lens might be frosted, whether there might be filters or membranes or yet-to-be-invented substances that would produce effects like this, of a portrait undisclosed, of someone transformed to a floral effigy, just beyond human recognition.

  When he was at last admitted Jacob Webb seemed inexplicably nervous. He wore once again his cherry-coloured waistcoat and jacket (with a pair of clean trousers, Lucy noted), but wasn’t sure where to rest his hands and shuffled his feet as if he was on the verge of leaving. This evident self-consciousness surprised Lucy, since Jacob had seemed so bold and confident when they first met on the Heath. They shook hands and she bade him sit in their best armchair, while she perched on an upright one, her manner calm. Mrs Minchin had taken Ellen out for a walk, but first warned Lucy about strange men and their “designs”.

  “Probably a bohemian,” was Mrs Minchin’s parting sentence.

  When Jacob was settled he looked around the sitting room and politely asked: “And your good husband? Mr Newton? Is he also at home?”

  Lucy had looked at her ringless hands, then met Jacob’s gaze.

  “I have never been married,” Lucy said outright. “I’m what righteous people call a fallen woman.” She had decided to be honest.

  Jacob was visibly taken aback. He blushed, averted his eyes and was silent for a moment. Lucy could hear Mrs Minchin’s Swiss clock ticking on the mantelpiece. She thought with fondness of Max and Matilda Weller. Their supernumerous timepieces, all tyrannically stilled.

  “Who is to say”, Jacob replied at last, “who among us is fallen? And who – only God decides – is truly righteous? Forgive me; I had not meant to pry.”

  Lucy watched as the young man was recessed into his own thoughts; she imagined him in the act of falling backwards into a woven text of childhood homilies and churchy injunctions. A fallen man. Perhaps he was repelled, his response a type of embarrassed good manners.

  “So there is no Isaac Newton?” Jacob persisted, sounding absurd.

  “My benefactor,” Lucy rejoined. “The patron of my photography.”

  “Ah. Just so.”

  A stalemate, Lucy thought. He wants an excuse to leave. She heard again the infuriating tick-tock and understood Mrs Weller’s sensible objection. And then he surprised her.

  “May I have the honour”, he carefully asked, “of viewing some of your photographical images? If it is not presumptuous. If it is not inconvenient.”

  He looked at her directly.

  “Since, after all, we are both artists,” he added kindly.

  So it was that they met in this way station of exceptional candour and found themselves standing, side by side, peering at Lucy’s art. Jacob put his face very close to the image, then moved back, then forward again, squinting slightly, as if it were an oil painting he was viewing, and not the flat uniform surface of a photograph.

  “Very fine,” he murmured. He was looking at a blotchy heathscape, riddled with shadow.

  “And this too. Very fine.” (A carbon-print portrait of Ellen asleep.)

  Lucy was aware of the proximity of Jacob’s body. The brush of his elbow. His slim jutting hip. Seduction, she thought, is never face to face; it is this side-by-side permission of inadvertent currents and connections. This galvanism of bodies alerted to each other. This prickling charge.

  Lying in bed, with Mrs Minchin’s and Ellen’s voices still playing in the garden, hanging there like a kind of human music, Lucy wondered what contract they had entered into. This man also knew the consoling intimacy of images and the ardour that attaches to representation. Jacob Webb was polite to the point of impersonality, yet she glimpsed in him – as indeed he may have glimpsed in her – inalienable conviction and lunatic love. She liked his fidgety hands and his abashed courtesy. The large feet shuffling in restless agitation. Most of all she liked his response to her work: he had paused, captivated. He had the remote look of someone hauled into a state of hallucination. And when he returned to her presence he spoke in soft enquiring tones, like a foreign traveller unsure, asking careful directions. After they parted, she found she missed him. Something in his tentative manner, his interiorised concentration, seemed to Lucy a familiar and comfortable thing, an unqualifiable intimation or presumption of affinity.

  She wondered again what death was like. Was it the eradication, above all, of these selves brought into being in such small unspeakable moments, the self swaying between consciousnesses. Was it a halting of the sway? A negating rest?

  Lucy turned in her bed. Perhaps something more simple: one wrestled with an angel and found oneself winning.

  51

  SHE WAS ON Hampstead Heath, resting, her eyes gently glosed against incipiently stormy weather. Something redolent in the thrashing trees in the wind – their fierce breathy noise, their implication of wavy currents – made Lucy think again of the sea voyage that had returned her to England.

  It was on this journey she had realised her life
was a tripod. Australia, England and India all held her – upheld her – on a platform of vision, seeking her own focus. These were the zones of her eye, the conditions of her salutary estrangement. On the ship Lucy had befriended a sailor, Jock. He was a dour man of sixty or so, who shared her fascination for the ocean and its curious light effects. He joined her on the deck in his small leisured moments to talk in hushed confidences of his nautical passions. Lucy told him of the systems of exposure in photography that might capture sea-pattern or cloud, and of the chemical immersion that fixes the sheen of light upon water. Everything that is seen, Lucy told him, will one day somewhere be registered. No matter how fleeting. How slight. How apparently ineluctable. Jock the sailor was unconvinced. He would show her, he claimed, something which could not be trapped. For ten days Lucy and Jock watched the sunset together. On the eleventh day it happened: the green ray. There is in the mystery of receding light a casual, curious moment in which, by some rare combination of refraction and the angle of descending beams, the sun itself flashes green for three or four seconds, just before it tips half the world into darkness. Lucy definitely saw it. It was unmistakable. Sailors everywhere across the globe call this phenomenon the green ray. The sky was ribbed with light. The sky resembled, Lucy thought, a silken sari enfolded, its colours flashing just as the moving body animated the ridges and valleys of a garment.

  In London Lucy opened her eyes to emerald green and a sea of white cumulus. It was summer now, and the air was windy and warm. She could see Ellen by the pond and Mrs Minchin bending over her. Ellen’s bonnet had blown backwards and jiggled at her neck, and Mrs Minchin held her own hat with one hand and with the other was reaching for the child. Their dresses heaved and slapped in the unstable air. A ribbon flew out and fell back: all was adjusting; all was transient.

  Mrs Minchin will be a mother, after all.

  Lucy was consoled and unconsoled. They looked beautiful together. They possessed a truly rare and solar refulgence.

  52

  JACOB WEBB WAS sweating when Lucy opened the door. He appeared flushed and over-heated and removed his hat inelegantly, as a kind of afterthought.

  “Good day,” Jacob said, bowing slightly. “I have come to take you, if I may, for sweetened ices.”

  Mrs Minchin, who was standing behind Lucy, was warming to Jacob.

  “Jolly excellent idea,” she loudly announced. “Ever a pleasure to partake of a gentleman’s ices!”

  Lucy smiled. This man before her with rosy cheeks and a shy disposition had visited unannounced three times in the past week, and at each occasion the household – Molly, Ellen and she – had greeted him more happily. Ellen came stumbling forward and Jacob swept her into his arms, whereupon she sloppily kissed him. He was a man at ease with children but uncomfortable with women.

  “Ices?” he repeated, to hurry them along.

  The party of four – appearing to all the world like a family – sat together at wooden benches talking of the heat and of India and of the difficulties of being foreign. Jacob Webb expressed a fervent wish also to be foreign, to be strange, he said. He liked, he insisted, the way Lucy and Mrs Minchin saw things more keenly and with resources of comparison and exotic assessment. He wanted his too-English vision transformed. He wanted to see things, he added, as Lucy did, intact and evident in their stunning visibility. Lucy was flattered, pleased. She was about to respond when Ellen, who had been wriggling on her lap, leaned forward across the table and upset a glass of raspberry cordial, so that it splashed and discoloured her. Ellen let out a howl and waved her chubby arms, and every customer in Stevenson’s Palace of Confections turned judgmentally to comment and look. Without hesitation, Jacob took out a handkerchief and began dabbing Ellen clean. He held her chin with his thumb and forefinger – as Lucy recalled her own father doing – as he wiped her wet face. This was the moment, the very moment, that Lucy Strange fell in love with Jacob Webb. He was tenderly intent on cleaning Ellen, who wore the puzzled sodden look of children recovering from alarm. Jacob was leaning very close, slanted to his task, and at some point he raised his gaze to Lucy’s face.

  “A mess,” he said, blushing.

  Lucy leaned slowly forward, took his finely bearded chin between her thumb and forefinger, and kissed Jacob Webb very softly on the mouth. She could feel Ellen snuggling against her, trying to reclaim attention, and the force of Mrs Minchin’s approving stare. It was a wholly perspicuous and perfect act. Jacob smiled widely. Love was this sudden clarification, this rightness of gestures and feelings. This sweet solemnity. All my images, thought Lucy, all my noticed oddities and recorded visions, recruit to this simple event, here, eating ices on a summer’s day, in London, England, in 1871. She was nineteen years old and had knowledge enough to understand the veracity of her own responses and intelligence enough to be troubled by their hazardous implications. For Jacob, too, this was a moment of confirmation. He thought: I will marry this woman, I will adopt her child, I will speak to her of all I sincerely guard, of my family, of my worries, of my peculiar childhood, and most secretly of all, of my yearning to create an artwork that summons one, just one, sure and precise memory, immediate as a photograph – my father standing in the doorway, knocking snow from his boots, his warm breath visible as a blurry feather. He unwraps from his neck a long blue scarf and holds it at arm’s length, as though it is the serpent that tempted Eve. Behind his head snowflakes churn in the whitish air and his face is bright, alive.

  After the occasion of the ices and the spilled raspberry cordial, Lucy and Jacob contrived courtship outings in the evening, so that they could speak and act more freely. Together they visited Thomas at the Childish Establishment and Jacob saw there images he considered intoxicatingly profane. Oriental dancers with naked midriffs. Scenes of luscious cruelty and fantastic barbarism. Monstrosities. Titillations. He did not speak of this to Lucy, but wondered at her maturity and her intimidating worldliness. In the pavilion of wild images she was entirely at home. She accepted everything with curiosity and sincere equipoise. Her brother Thomas was a good-hearted and matter-of-fact fellow, and his wife Violet, Jacob thought, somewhat shallow and silly, but of one thing he was certain: there was no-one else in the world like Miss Lucy Strange; she was a woman of singular and remarkable intensity. She was also a woman with an exquisite collar bone, deep sensuous eyes and an allure he could barely bring himself to name.

  For Lucy, being liberated into the night was a gift. Apart from amorous possibilities (of which she dreamed and speculated), she loved the sublime spell of gas-lit London. Along the streets were rhyming pools of light and shadow, since gas lamps seemed to have a very definite compass, and extended only in limited, interspersed circles. She loved moving in and out of these spots of lights, watching the uneven flaring and waning, and listening to the whistle and buzzing sounds that ran mysteriously through the pipes. She loved too the retail stores that manufactured splendour: Moses and Son, the tailors, had massive metal chandeliers, all arabesque and curlicue, which flared prodigiously, and the butchers in Drury Lane unscrewed the burners of their gas pipes, so that light came streaming and fluttering, with lurid effect, above their displays of now unnaturally glossy meat. Women in wing-shaped dresses swept like moths between the lights, and men in top hats looked decapitated, blotted by darkness, as they moved at certain angles of casting shadow. It was a city transformed, shiny; the night itself was converted.

  All this brilliance made Lucy delirious with pleasure. She took Jacob’s hand and dragged him through streets, now nothing less than a gallery of spectacles. Gas-London was, she believed, its true form and character: it was artificially lovely and splendid to behold. When she peered into the future she knew that London would for ever be illuminated by gas; no other industrial technology would exceed or supplant it. In the future gas lamps would be consummate works of art, and every city, in every country, would honour its wavering flare.

  Jacob considered Lucy’s attraction to ignited spectacle incomprehensible. He
had heard of “mooners”, people whose superficial pleasure it was to roam the streets at night, glancing into shop windows and skipping between lit spaces, but Lucy seemed more serious than that, and more bent on aesthetic extrapolations. She introduced him to the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, a dance platform with music and wine and multitudinous gas lights, a place of lewd movement and women giggling with their heads thrown backwards, glasses spilling ale, cigar smoke and jocularity, and he struggled to see what enchantment resided there. (Lucy had leaned close and whispered straight into his ear: don’t worry, my love, I shall teach you to dance – as if she had read and divined his innermost fears.)

  Walking home, one evening, Lucy halted and pointed, her arm extending. On one side of the street, the gas lamps were serially ranged; on the other, was a collection of gig carriages, waiting outside the Princess Theatre for closing, their gig lamps spaced perfectly and uniformly lined.

  “In the future,” pronounced Lucy, “people will understand that life is not a series of gig lamps or gas lamps symmetrically arranged; it is more encompassing, more immersing, more like an ulterior halo. Life”, she continued, sounding oracular, “is a kind of semi-transparent envelope, in which we see, in which we feel, in which we fall in love. One day someone will write this,” she added confidently, “and it will be understood as a proclamation.”

  Jacob was aghast. The woman he loved, the strange woman, spoke in stagy speeches and entertained supernatural visions. She spoke like someone who was watching history unfold, like someone who knew beforehand of her own death, and was speaking posthumously. He suddenly recalled a tale from school. Ulysses wants to consult with the prophet Tiresias, long dead, so he must visit the entrance to Hades to summon him forth. After pouring libations of many kinds to entice the dead to return, he finally sacrifices one black and one white sheep, and then the bloodless dead sweep forward, thirsting for the liquid of life. What Ulysses had not foreseen was the appearance of his mother, Anticlea. She had died of grief during his long absence. Ulysses must fight off his own mother, and all the other shades, to keep the precious blood solely for Tiresias. It distressed Jacob to remember this obscure tale now. Unbidden, he had glimpsed Lucy in another realm. In this context of so many night-lights and revelations, he had perhaps glimpsed her own certainty of her coming death.