Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  Rose Morrell, that is to say, was a clandestine woman. Their enormous house in Kew filled up with strange and valuable objects, but she cherished investments of a more occulted kind. The concealed. The unseen. The barely-in-existence. Secrecy enchanted her. She was drawn to dreams and varieties of inner space. She gazed into the centre of roses and composed verses about water. She kept a journal written partly in her own coded language and copied lines of other people’s poetry whose heartiness she delighted in:

  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,

  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you …

  (Her favourite: Whitman.) And she cultivated, most especially, her love for the tall thin man who stood out there in the cold in his rained-on cap and white kid gloves, the man who stamped at the ground with his feet and rubbed his freezing hands together, who blew visible currents of breath and hugged himself against the wind, and who in a repeated simple action she found entirely affecting, would lean forward to take an umbrella from the elephant’s foot stand, pop it open before her and hold it up in a steady dome — her own little baptistery, her own holy place — so that she might be sealed in his compass from the driving rain.

  The cabin of the car was pre-occupied by their sweet complicity. It was the core of something, a cushioned centre.

  When the second baby was born Herbert Morrell announced in a loud and gaudy newspaper advertisement the Auspicious Arrival of Victoria May, sister of Henry Edward, and Scion Additional of the Eminent and Ever-expanding Morrells; but his wife was more than usually elusive and quiet. Rose read in her daughter’s face the immanent presence of her lover: figments of his mouth appeared, the intimation of his nose; her body was long with his gangly and unself-conscious length, and her two tiny little hands looked like the hands of workers, like hands reddened and chafed and too much rubbed together. The baby was a reinstatement, a bundle of déjà vu. Rose rocked her and kissed gently the diamond-shaped fontanelle. She peered and itemised, thought how unMorrell. And when she awoke to attend Victoria at night — for she had dismissed the nanny from all night-time duties — when she stumbled with a flickering candle towards the beribboned and lacy cradle (hypnagogic, dazed, following a cry through the darkness), it might have been her chauffeur she was stumbling to embrace. She raised up the baby and held it against her, sexually overcome. Its scent flooded over her. Its signification.

  This Secret, Rose wrote in code in her journal, is a concentrated version of all my other secrets: ‘the palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place’ — since she could never resist quoting a line of dear Walt Whitman — ‘O unspeakable passionate love.’

  W and I were today in the Daimler together & he whispered, as he does, sweet’eart, sweet’eart, & he held our baby for the very first time. I thought he would faint away, his features were so very ghosted & so intense, but instead he lifted Victoria’s gown & blew noisily on her navel, as I had seen my own father do, in that comical way, with a blubbery blow, like an uncontrollable kiss, & then he smiled, & then he laughed, & then we laughed together, & it was a truly wonderful moment, in our dwarf house, the car, with our baby, Victoria, the palpable hieroglyph of all our impalpable combinations, of all that rests between us & by which I celebrate myself …

  We almost hit a tram, returning, we were so altogether distracted …

  It continues to rain & Victoria inflates with my milk. H wants to employ a wetnurse but I adore my own breasts & their melony roundness. Her mouth is sweetness itself. She suckles like a lover.

  Herbert Morrell was by most accounts obtuse to the obvious and seems never to have noticed Rose Morrell’s truant affections, nor the chauffeur’s overzealous and particular attentiveness. He continued braggadocio and monumental: detailing the varieties of his means of accumulating wealth, rejoicing in the peculiarities of lesser nations, and unpacking crates of impedimenta that arrived on globe-encircling ships. As he clipped cigars in the Melbourne Club, he told of his Cuban cigar clipper fashioned from the teeth of wild animals which was reputed to confer on the act of smoking obscure sexual potentialities; then he railed against the new Fisher Labor government, against miners-who-were-always-on-strike, against reprobates, Aborigines, Henry George and the IWW. He also announced his intention to purchase as soon as possible a Voisin biplane, exactly like the one magician Harry Houdini had just flown at Digger’s Rest to the wild acclamation of the Australian press. He would fly, he said, and nations would blur beneath him. He began, Houdini-like, to lust for exaggeration.

  It was in 1913 that Herbert Morrell’s family — minus the chauffeur and most of the house-staff but complete with a brand-new Voisin biplane — moved to the Western Australian goldfields in a relocation that was meant initially to last just one year. Herbert had decided to expand his large interests in gold exploration and believed — in a symptom others would later interpret as the beginnings of his paranoia — that his current managers were untrustworthy and in the service of a Jewish conspiracy. He would simply intervene and take over, and set things aright. Rose was stricken. She pleaded her case, to no avail, to remain in Melbourne, and in the end consented to follow her husband to the other side of the nation.

  I am to be carted away into the desert. W weeps in his car & is inconsolable. He says he will hang himself, but I have made him promise not to. It is one year, I tell him. One single year. Then I will return & we will re-establish our lives, & in the meantime I shall write in my secret way, & I shall not contort my heart nor allow any forgetting; in candlelight I shall think of you, in that quivering circle in the darkness, in that mystic visibility which I carry to light our child, pushing away at the swallowing shadows with the globe of my coming, taking her up, infolding her, kissing both of you at once … Think of this, my love, kissing both of you at once.

  (ii)

  In a photograph of the Morrell household posed a week before their departure Herbert Morrell has already acquired — as though he paid cash for it — the look of a man with a serious mission. He is seated solidly with his legs astride and hands on his knees, his enormous belly appears upholstered like a horsehair couch, and his face has that imperturbable and resolute look common in fact to the faces of all men with thick black moustaches and granite stares. Standing behind him is his extraordinarily beautiful wife, famously hour-glassed and dressed in a white satin gown and puffy hat of tulle. She rests one hand on the back of Herbert’s chair and the other dangles casually a dainty parasol. Her look is melancholy and completely remote; her eyes are a light anaesthetic surface. In the foreground, seated, are the children Henry and Victoria, clothed in identical sailor suits of no known navy, and at the side, flanking like wings, stand two neat rows of house staff, all impersonalised in black uniforms with white starched bibs. At the very back of the scene, depleted by distance, there is a chauffeur in livery. Leaf shadows speckle his face like smallpox. He is leaning on the round shiny fender of a polished-up Daimler.

  The magnesium flash has penetrated the grey Melbourne air: faces are pearly and brightened, caught in an instant of false flashlight, and everyone, even the children, has achieved the requisite immobility, posed stock-still and unblinking — mortified, one might say — for the man with his head beneath the cloth and his single time-stopping, imperative, Medusan, glass eye.

  Pose, the cloth commanded. And they all posed, inexpressively.

  In this only known photograph of Victoria’s whole family, so preternaturally lit and deadly still, the father is already absorbing all the life around him; his substance subtracts from everyone else, presence condenses to where he is, his aura is unmistakably totalitarian.

  Rose, by contrast, looks almost lifeless; her hourglass is emptying. She has less than one year to live and her eyes seem to know it.

  It is a photograph tinted by ruinous premonition.

  (iii)

  This Melbourne, this mother, this lover-chauffeur, will be lost to Victoria. It is packed away in a dark-room, with no images emerging. She will carry to
her grave only a generic and eerily incomplete entrance hall, a cinematic compilation of columns, chairs and a chequered floor, together with the simple phrase flame tree drifting inexplicably within it. There will be no resolution to the mystery of these words. Victoria will greet her death still waiting for meaning as a bride awaits her lover.

  Her first complete memory is governed by the will of her father. She is there, in the Voisin, squeezed onto her father’s lap and rising steeply: it must have been an occasion only months after Rose’s death. The Voisin was a biplane constructed of struts and boxes, with an engine and propeller behind and a steering wheel at the front, and as it ascended the wing fabrics tensed and relaxed, like the inhalations and exhalations of an ingenious automaton. It vibrated and heaved and was exceedingly noisy, and it seemed even to a three-year-old child too frail to buoy and carry their breakable bodies. Victoria could see wings above and wings below, stretched and translucent. She could feel her father’s thighs move up and down as he worked the pedals. She loved the shape of his bracketing arms around her, his mechanical excitement, his voice distorted by speed. And as she rose up carefully to look over the side — feeling such a force of wind against her face that her bonnet blew off into the sky — she gazed down upon the earth and saw it sliding away. It was vermilion in the late light and pocked with mine-shafts, and little men — prospectors — left their labours to wave. Ahead and below the shape of wings skimmed over the ground and Victoria understood that this was their own projected shadow, their in human shape cast over an altered geography. She was thrilled and terrified. She peed in her under-pants. As they lowered to the intersection that served as a runway, the black wing shadows grew to meet them, larger and larger.

  Had the Voisin been able to fly higher than its meagre fifty feet and stay in the air a little longer than its mere ten minutes, Victoria would have seen not the outskirts but the centre of this town, this town gold-rushed into the desert and left there booming. In panorama it was a kind of anti-Melbourne, indecorous and hotch-potch, infernally heat-blasted, and also rendered mirage-like by suspensions of smoke and red dust. Solidity and dissolution were oddly combined. It both drifted and settled, wavered and fixed. Poppet heads poked up everywhere indicating major shafts; then there were boilers, chimney stacks, crushers and furnaces, as well as timber yards, tailing dumps, workers’ shacks, and hotels. Not to mention condensers, cyanide plants, brothels and churches; railways, electric trams, horses and carts. Over everything, too, hung a prodigious din, since this was reputedly the noisiest town in Australia. There were already four hundred stampers and fifty crushing mills, and the sound of numerous air-compressors continually throbbed. Moreover each mine marked its own particular timetable — with a large degree of asynchronous variance — by systems of whistles, hoots, blasts and sirens.

  The town was rip-roaring and uproarious, a greedy myth made visible. Its magnitude was as imprecise as it was megaphonic, and it would take something larger than a Voisin to chart its dimensions.

  Victoria cannot locate the moment, or indeed even the year, when she realised that beneath the ostensible town lay an entire underground. She thinks that perhaps she saw a map of the Midas mine or overheard her father’s all-time and favourite analogy — that travelling to the bottom of the main shaft was to make a journey in darkness and upside down, as it were, three times the height of the Eiffel Tower. On the mine map the underground was a safe-looking geometry, an upended skyscraper of neat chambers and levels; but as men were lowered hundreds of feet into the stinking ever-darkness, with the frail paisleys of candle-flame as protective illumination, they carried those verticals and horizontals inscribed in their brains; they were all superstitious; they all sought to trick mapless death. Down there existed a magnification of every man’s shadow; terrible shapes slid like assassins along the walls of the tunnels. Anamorphic non-humans, hints of negation. Down there geometry was their hope of retrieval. Sometimes miners waited for the cage to stop at their level to find that it had missed its mark by almost two or three feet, so that they had to leap or climb towards it with a shaft of nothing below them.

  The space of terror did not appear on longitudinal sections. Nor the caved-in sites of accident or entombment.

  As a small girl Victoria had no details at all; the underground was a mysterious, generalised configuration, something to do with descent. She had heard vaguely of catastrophe, and knew that her mother was somewhere buried. She had seen widows buying lengths of black sateen and blue men doubled over coughing up gobs of red blood; and she had felt the earth shift and shudder as something exploded or collapsed. When as a young woman she learned of the leap towards the cage — that appalling gap, that cruel mismeasure — she felt her own heart leap, hoisted on their fear. But for now she was mostly unknowing and unafraid. The underground was a riddle she was considering, strange as the world from a Voisin and the black cross of its wing-shadow slipping like a symbol over the earth.

  After the death of his famously lovely wife, Herbert Morrell postponed his return to Melbourne and became megalomaniacally intent on gaining more gold. Dividends obsessed him. Apart from his tin mine in Cornwall and his rubber plantation in Ceylon, apart from his shares in railways, steel production and the building of sea-going ships, the goldfields seemed to offer the prospect of truly world-dominating wealth. Herbert Morrell acquired a controlling interest in the Midas mine (and lesser shares in the Croesus, the Perseverance and the Lake View and Star), and felt for the first time the direct thrill of owning the labour of others. He governed timbermen, drillers, boilermen, blacksmiths, carpenters, millmen, miners, platmen, pitmen, tracemen, engine drivers, masons, feeders, tool sharpeners and battery men. He rested his fat cigar on his belly, copying the caricatures of himself beginning to appear in the Weekly Miner, and tried to calculate, with finicky pleasure, exactly how many workers he possessed. He theorised and imagined his own capitalistic enhancement, and saw himself unoriginally as a kind of European monarch, with his subjects arranged in a reverent pyramid, midget-sized beneath him.

  Herbert Morrell opened and spread out the mine map for his son’s perusal.

  The Eiffel Tower, he said, is 985 feet high; this mine is 2,954 feet deep. The Tower produces nothing; it is a foolish French experiment, a white elephant, a stupid joke, a mere decoration, but this mine produces wealth, employment and national stability, and contributes daily to the Australian Gross National Product.

  Whenever Herbert spoke of the underground he experienced an ever-so-slight sensation of choking, and remembered the workers who donned zinc-coloured, ill-fitting, macrocephalic suits, and then descended, looking hideous, to test the underground air. In a nightmare one of them came stumbling out of a dark tunnel towards him, whispering the word ventilation in a stertorous accusation.

  So Herbert studied the Midas mine map for its unclaustrophobic simplicity. He ran his ring-studded finger down the length of the main shaft, trying to impress his son Henry with the full magnitude of his investment. Henry Morrell picked at his nose and asked not a single question. The boy was a buffoon: Herbert cuffed his head. Then he hit again, and harder, until Henry flew sideways, toppled and fell. A wail rang out, and a sobbing gurgle. Blood appeared on the child’s cracked upper lip.

  Herbert Morrell examined his gold-nugget cuff-links, made in the current conspicuous fashion, and wished that his daughter Victoria was a boy.

  (iv)

  In the first year after Rose’s death the children lived in perplexion. In that rowdy rude town with its subterranean rumours, they were tiny and unknown. In the streets, Nurse Tilly held their hands very tightly and they could feel her anxieties bloom around them like a summer storm. Tilly could not believe the boldness of the women and the men: they hailed her familiarly and talked to the children. She held her charges in the deep itchy clefts of her gown, and bruised them with the intensity of her fear of kidnap. Tilly cried at night, missing her home.

  My Melbourne, she would say, claiming the whole city.
I hate it here, she confided. I hate this noisy place.

  A sneer, a sullen sneer, and a look crumpled by complaint. She flung her face into her pillow, operatically extravagant, and called on the children to witness the genuineness of her misery and prostration.

  Henry and Victoria felt somehow that they should cry too, but the form of their loss was more imprecise than homesickness. When they wept it was for nothing that Tilly described, for nothing as locatable as a certain shady street in Fitzroy, or a house with pickets and a mulberry tree, or the slimy green Yarra, or the aqueous city cold. But Melbourne came to signify whatever it was that had gone: it sounded like a bell as they said it, Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne; it echoed with emptiness. Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne. It was a word that gaped in the middle, leaving something tender exposed.

  Motherless, Henry Edward grew mean and morose, and was almost wholly inactive, but for the sport of pinching and biting his younger sister, and his habit of stabbing at mice and lizards with his antique swords. But Victoria, aviatrix, seer of vermilion dimensions, unfolded as a fantasist. Like a new-improved Voisin she flew about the house — her arms outstretched, her voice a ratchetty racket — and landed unladylike on couches of red velvet plush and chaises of preposterous and artificed elongation. She accompanied her own dramatics on the walnut organ and lit its curly candelabra when no one was looking. The house and everything in it furnished her own flighty imaginings. Secret rooms inside Victoria opened up like a screen — like their Japanese screen with its panels of pearl-shell herons, treading carefully, one knee raised, in a black lacquer lake — a screen she could fold away again if a stickybeak like Henry Edward, or a cry-baby like Nurse Tilly, or a bossy-boots like the housekeeper Mrs Bossy Boots Murphy, ever dared to ask. Victoria’s special place was in the curtain folds near the decapitated giraffe where she retreated to commune privately with invisible friends.