Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  In the first store the owner tries to sell Anna an eggtimer; and in subsequent shopping she has no luck at all. True hourglasses, it seems, no longer exist. She enters a phone booth papered over with advertisements for busty prostitutes, and begins ringing antique shops, one by one. It feels a fool’s errand; yet she is anxious to placate the feathered old woman for whom the hourglass is somehow the colophon of every loss in her life. After fifteen calls Anna has almost run out of money, but one of the dealers suggests she place a request in the Antique Society newsletter. She does so with her very last coins, in a desperate measure, over the phone. When she returns to Hampstead it is late afternoon and already almost dark.

  Winston was sitting with Victoria, drinking tea. The two turned together, guiltily, like co-conspirators.

  Victoria says: The Comedy of Errors, Winston tells me, is all about identity, about hazarding loss as a premise for the possibility of redemption. That’s right, isn’t it?

  Winston simply grinned.

  And it’s about error as the condition of all identity, yes?

  Yes.

  (Jesus, thought Anna. Now she’s a literary critic.)

  We’ve been talking about our countries, too.

  She’s been telling me, said Winston, about the black people, the Aborigines.

  (Jesus, thought Anna. What could she possibly know?)

  About spirits, persists Winston. Why have you never told me?

  Anna is trying not to look exasperated.

  I couldn’t find one, she said. I couldn’t find a fucking hourglass.

  Victoria is supercilious.

  Don’t worry, you will, Ms-darling-Anna-chronos.

  They sleep secretly together, in Winston’s single bed, and Mrs Dooley is ignorant of the romance that has reshaped her establishment.

  This ephemeral wedding, claimed against an authorised marriage. It is the cramped cosy dream of spaces more expansive.

  Their couple, their star-crossing.

  They are absentmindedly happy, pretending against pretence that their parting will not happen.

  That night Winston awoke from a nightmare that set his whole body trembling.

  I dreamt my wife and son were held captive in Mr Allfrey’s red car.

  Son?

  My son James. They were pressing their faces to the glass and calling my name, but for some reason I couldn’t move my body at all. Both my legs were completely frozen. They were cold and stiff. I was trying to use my arms to drag myself forward, but still I couldn’t move. James began crying. His face distorted.

  Son, Anna is thinking. Winston has a son.

  This was not the time to ask. Yet she feels a vague, ignominious pang of jealousy. She feels excluded. And she thinks irrelevantly of the hourglass she failed to locate, its soft soft draining, its obscure symbolic claims, its empty/full, empty/full resemblance to a body. Anna stretches to enclose Winston in the compass of her arm.

  Sleep, she says. It sounds like an instruction to a child.

  But he rises away from her, turns on the bedlamp, and reaches, still trembling, for a cigarette. Anna watches as he fumbles with a box of matches.

  Let me, she offers. These things will kill you.

  In the long run, as Keynes says, we’re all dead.

  Some consolation!

  Winston turns now and looks at Anna for the first time since awakening; for her benefit he manages a wry half smile.

  I’m sorry. It upsets me. It’s pathetic, I know.

  They are moving closer. The more we say to each other, Anna is thinking, the harder it will be to part later on.

  Winston switches off the light and smokes hidden in the darkness. The shawl of night wraps them protectively, as though they have become lovers in a fairytale.

  I should have told you about James, I’m sorry. It just seemed so private.

  Yes. Private.

  But it is already forgiven. Anna is so in love with this man that even his firmest secrets, even what he will not share, have become of inestimable value to her. A spotlight of red ash tracks the route of his hand.

  Sleep, she says again, this time more tenderly.

  In Victoria’s memory it was a day towards the end of winter, just as the seasons were beginning to change. She and Jules were walking together along the quays, along the right bank. The Seine was churned up, swift, and brown. They crossed to the Île St Louis, then to the Île de la Cité, and sat on the small ironwork seats arranged in rows at the back of the Notre Dame. Daffodil and crocus bulbs were beginning to unfurl in the garden; it was reassuring to see colour in the cold grey soil. The air was brittle and fair. A few tourists were looking up, exclaiming, snapshotting gargoyles and spires. Jules was already a soldier; soon he would leave.

  It was the beginning of 1940, during the period known as the drôle de guerre, the phoney war. Although Britain and France had already declared war on Germany, there were at this stage few signs of wartime in Paris. Air raid sirens sometimes sounded their high nervous wail, filling Victoria with a kind of imprecise dread, and there was occasional anti-aircraft fire at German planes on reconnaissance. But over all it was a dull winter-time, a period of anxiety, boredom and existential inertia. Jules had been called up, but the exodus from Paris had not yet begun, nor had the rations, or the curfews, or the German soldiers in the street; nor too had the bombings, the terror, the forced wearing of yellow stars. The season was changing, lighting up, but history was veiling France — this was how Victoria thought of it — in deeper shadow.

  Jules and Victoria were having a friendly argument about painting. Beneath the dreary façade of the Notre Dame, Victoria was railing against conservatism and romanticism as the twin enemies of art.

  Beauty must be convulsive, Victoria pronounced, or not at all.

  Merde, responded Jules. Surrealists are tricksters, frauds.

  He favoured art that was still, contemplative and above all, luminous. He adored the paintings of Claude Monet; each bold pastel daub on each gorgeous waterlily was an act, he claimed, of spiritualised concentration.

  Victoria sneered: How conservative, how predictable.

  Surrealists! I hate them all, said Jules good-humouredly. He leant forward and kissed Victoria playfully on the lips.

  Jules remembers going as a child with his mother to see a Monet exhibition. He says he stood before a painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and saw only an incomprehensible haze. Hélène explained that this was a painting of the effects of steam; the obscured train at the station, hidden almost entirely by clouds of blotchy paint, was the consequence of an artist enchanted by steam.

  That was what she had said: enchanted by steam.

  The mystery, Hélène continued, is that not everything we see is altogether clear; some things present themselves as nebulous instances of the beautiful.

  Nebulous instances of the beautiful.

  Jules still remembers his mother’s words because it was an occasion of understanding. He had looked into the painting and seen the train, there at the station, heavy, formidable, heading directly towards him, even though it was barely visible as an impasto smear. He still remembers, too, exactly what his mother was wearing: she wore a tawny belted dress with a white lace collar, and shoes with sequences of buttons, covered in leather. She carried a coral pink embroidered handbag, which rested at her hip.

  Soon, said Jules, all this, all this art-talk, will be irrelevant.

  Never, my Jewels.

  This was the day, Victoria says, this day on the cusp of spring, the day before war-time eclipsed Paris with invading emergency, that Jules took her with him to see something special.

  A transparent instance, he joked, of the beautiful.

  He was both pleased and annoyed by his Anglicised nickname, but said that if Victoria would persist with it she must see the real Parisian jewels. So after their talk on the ironwork seats behind the Notre Dame, Jules led her a little further along the Île de la Cité to the Palais de Justice. There, inside its crudely for
mal, strict and ugly boundaries, they came upon the church of Sainte Chapelle. Jules led Victoria inside, first to the lower chapel, and then to the upper. The lower was lovely enough — gilded groined buttresses, rich orange columns decorated with fleur-de-lys and the towers of Castille, a statue of the Virgin, faded and thoughtful-looking, in a lapis robe — but it was the upper level which invoked the experience of entering a jewel. The upper chapel had walls entirely of stained glass, mostly in tones of azure and rose. With the light, even in winter, even just before war, it was a space of pure refracted brightness. In lancets reaching upwards were depictions of Bible stories, rendered in garnet, emerald, sapphire, gold, and they cast a flush of coloured light into the chapel chamber.

  For the King, explained Jules. For Louis the Ninth. This is his palatine chapel. It was completed in 1248 and built to house the holy relic of the Crown of Thorns.

  Victoria turned towards him; he was looking up at the ceiling, which was covered in thousands of fine gold stars.

  What? You think a Jew shouldn’t know such places?

  Victoria took his hand. He led her around the chapel, naming each of the Apostles, pointing out special details, whispering the Bible stories.

  What you see here are mostly Old Testament, he said with a smile. My stories, too.

  His face was enamelled by the heavenly tones of stained glass.

  Not as beautiful, of course, as the main Synagogue of Paris.

  Jules was still smiling.

  This place makes you happy.

  Yes, how could it not? There are no shadows, have you noticed? And there is Isaiah and the Jesse tree. A sign of God’s faithfulness. The Israelites were worshipping idols and falling into sin, but he ordained a tree of which King David was the fruit. He shall not judge according to the sight of his eyes, nor reprove according to the hearing of his ears. Book of Isaiah, chapter eleven. Out of desolation, promise.

  That was what he had said: Out of desolation, promise. Victoria still remembers, since it was an occasion of understanding.

  Coloured light shone down on them. Light from trifoils, quadrifoils, diamonds and rectangles. Victoria stretched her hand into a beam of violet, then Jules, like a medieval courtier, bent forward and kissed it.

  There are shadows, she said.

  You Surrealists, he replied, so damn literal-minded.

  Jules once argued that photography takes its power from attention to shadow, rather than the mere capture or registration of light. The placement of shadow, he claimed, is what produces the image. Shadow is no reduction but the adjective of the image. The transfer, the mysterious transfer, of ambient accentuation. Like ice whorling upwards, he said, from a skater’s bright path.

  Within a week Anna had a phone call, offering her an hourglass. It was a splendid thing, an eighteenth-century specimen from Avignon, in France. The ampoules were bulbous and firm, and of a glass which had within it traces of bubbles and imperfections; and the frame was of ornate brass fashioned with two phoenixes, one facing up and one down, curved slenderly and protectively around the phials. The stands were heavy circles of blood-veined marble, slightly chipped. Inside was not sand, but finely ground eggshells, sieved so that each grain was exactly the same size. The old man in Covent Garden who held it before her said that hourglass ‘sand’ was often difficult to manufacture: sometimes it was marble dust from the quarries of Carrara; sometimes it was lead, or tin, or even river sand; sometimes it was the black sawdust from the carving of marble tombs. In each case it had to be dried, rid of impurities and rendered in grains the same size. Often these substances were boiled in wine, skimmed, dried, then boiled again, up to nine times. The phoenix hourglass contained its original egg-shell.

  Anna took the glass, upended it, and watched grains speed through the aperture. She paid the enormous sum that Victoria had entrusted to her, and purchased the hourglass.

  On the Underground she held it in her lap, like a baby, afraid it would drop. Afraid time would break open and irretrievably spill.

  6

  Tour Eiffel, Palais Royal, Notre Dame, Jardin des Tuileries, Père Lachaise, Montmartre, Le Tour Saint Jacques: these sites existed as tokens of tour-guided knowledge, as plastic currency exchanged endlessly in the feverish acquisition of Paris.

  This was a city Victoria knew both as an Antipodean stranger (her Plan de Paris fluttering open before her) and as a dedicated Surrealist. Famous spots on the map, touristic X-marks of simplified and summarised attractions, seen already by everybody and already over-encoded, were in the end less charged than the circuitries she felt on her skin; the tiny streets of the Marais that hid sparky alliances, the ac/dc of market stalls and noisy bars. Not the blue-guided or Baedekkered monuments illuminés, but the golden colour of faces that emerged lit from any doorway, the Chinese lanterns swaying like hips in cafés, like the abdomens of women composed of rose-water light, strung there in a smile shape, to shine on lovers below. The plate-glass refractions from zinc-countered brasseries. The glint off a saxophone somewhere smoky. Light rays shot, iris to iris, in the electric moment of seduction.

  When Jules left Rue Gît le Coeur, he took Victoria’s heart with him, so she re-learned the city at night and with heartless promiscuity. Paris was a vessel of ink with all messages still merged. A well of darkness, totally fluid.

  Victoria donned a jacket of spangles, so that she wore a cover of stars, and carried her own milky-way out into the streets, strolling down boulevards, along the quays and into cafés, shining. She spoke imperfect French to perfect strangers, and seduced them with her air of abandonment and desolation. A man’s hand entered under her dress as she sat over her Pernod, and she let him explore there, his face yellow with desire. She brushed against priests and old men riding home on the Metro and blew kisses to small children and rich ladies in hats. In the tunnelled spaces along the Seine she saw the twin moons of eyeglasses slide eerily towards her, and matches flare to cigarettes protruding from half-faces, to resolve in punctuations of smouldering orange. Chestnut sellers stood over braziers that exhaled sparks in the wind, little spurts of red stars, flying upwards.

  Victoria was unafraid: she was waiting to be murdered. She sought out darkness. She chose the danger of shadows. She fucked standing up with her dress hitched around her. She thought she saw a hand drift over the river and trace a line in the sky, a kind of script of her death, a prognostication.

  (But I will be no-body’s Nadja, she thought to herself.)

  On such a night, dressed as galaxies and desperate for a kiss, Victoria, tenebrous, bereft, disconsolate, took a cab-ride to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It was almost midnight as she entered and walked along its curved paths, paths lined with hoops and sulphurous lamps and tall trembling trees, paths leading, every one, to the Bridge of Suicides. She was like the swan which floated quietly on the ornamental lakes; she was silver, a mythology, and bent on reversal. She was like a figure in a story-book, condemned to live with no heart. She made her way to the suspension bridge linking the artificial rocks with the artificial island, and looked across at the belvedere, lit from below so that its dome was a skull in the sky, and then she stepped onto the space of suspended mortality. The metal grille was surmountable and the foothold nervous. The space below was inviting; it was pure black silk. But something in her paused. Morbid romance repelled her. Wanting obliteration she did not want a death others might retell as café talk.

  So Victoria instead crossed, and mounted the rock, and sat alone beneath the high bright skull of the belvedere. The hole in her chest banged with what had been possible.

  From this elevation she could see faint trails of white paths, and lamplight in small spheres arcing away into the woods. There was water somewhere, and the sound of a waterfall, and somewhere too a white swan, a proper sign, untrespassing, cruised with its blond reflection across deep black water.

  And it was then — as though, after all, she had successfully summoned something to destroy her — that a man appeared from nowhere a
nd flung himself upon her. It was so quick that Victoria took a moment to realise she was being attacked; she was grappling with a male-shape saturated with the odour of vodka; he was pressing his thumbs at her yielding throat.

  Not like this. Not like this.

  Victoria raised her knee sharply to his testicles, with just enough force to disturb him, then taking advantage of his confusion and the dislodgment of his hands, kneed again, much harder. The man toppled sideways, groaning, and she scrambled and rose and kicked twice at his ribs, all the time imagining another murderous scenario — that she might push him, her substitute, from the Bridge of Suicides. No one would know.

  But Victoria saw her own sequins decorating the prone body. In their struggle metal stars had released from her jacket and sprinkled her assailant with stipples of light. And now he was crying, in loud sobs, and the light patterns bobbed, so that she was seized with love-of-life and an urge simply to flee. She hurled herself into the darkness, back along the narrow walkway of the Bridge of Suicides, back down into the woods and along the pale pathways, past statuary and monuments, and ornate lamps casting light poorly, and ran like a criminal who was fleeing a crime-gone-terribly-wrong. As though she were the guilty party.

  When she emerged from Parc des Buttes Chaumont Victoria had to run forever down the shadowy street — outlines flashed past her, yellow headlights stunned — before she came across a cab that would take her to safety …