Sixty Lights (11 page)

Lucy found work at last in an albumen factory. Albumen, she discovered, was the substance used in the manufacture of photographic paper, and it was obtained, quite simply, from the white of eggs. When she first applied for the position, she met a woman with a huge bosom – a Mrs McTierney – who tested her ability to crack open eggs. Lucy was given six eggs and instructed to part them cleanly, as if she were performing an operation on a living being. She was fastidious and quick: she passed the test. Mrs McTierney said that usually girls were nervous when she watched, and often wrecked or spilled at least one or two. She fingered the ruffles of her blouse and looked at Lucy sternly.

“I'm never nervous,” Lucy heard herself declare. “It's not in my nature.”

It was true. She suddenly knew it. She was never nervous.

At work Lucy sat at a long bench with twenty-three other women (two-dozen-hard-eggs, they joked), each with a mountain of stacked eggs at their side and a kind of trough between them. Together the women spent the day separating yolks and whites, whites and yolks, so that the viscous shiny liquid filled a pool before them. They had vigilantly to check for blood or yolk in the white, and to watch, necessarily, for shell and rottenness. Egg odour entered their skin and hair, and sticky matter stained their work aprons and pinafores; but otherwise the job was easy and even meditative. Sometimes the women worked silently, cracking eggs side by side, each enclosed in her own sealed and uncracked thoughts; more often, however, they chattered together. Once a week each contributed a farthing to hire a reader, who sat alongside them, reading aloud from serials, or newspapers, or collections of short stories. Words circulated in the air like a new kind of energy, in waves and particles, focused and diffuse, showing and obscuring what might exist in the world. Lucy loved the timbre of the reader's voice and her habit of clicking her teeth with her tongue at her own points of concern in the narrative.

Mrs McTierney supervised, strolling slowly, her hen-like bosom swelling before her.

The workers were now-and-then rotated to different tasks, so that Lucy had also the job of whisking the albumen in drums to a high bubbly froth, or tipping the liquid into storage for fermentation. Most of all she liked to work with the paper. A single sheet was dipped and floated in albumen solution, then hung up to dry. Lastly it was rolled and sorted into piles of first- or second-grade paper. Everything about this process of labour stank, but it had about it the pre-industrial gratification of completion, of an entire act of manufacture, seen
through to the packages neatly addressed and sent away to photographers.

Years later Lucy found herself using the albumen paper that she and her co-workers may have produced. It was a moment of such profound memory retrieval that with it came the sour smell of fermented albumen and recalled to her the faces of all the women she had loved. She held the paper to the light to discover its grade and to inspect it for streaks or tiny cracks; she rubbed it between her fingertips and assessed the quality of the surface and gloss, checking to see if it was single or double-dipped, and knew at that moment that honourable work returns itself in these stray unguessable circuits; some random experience of labour returns as good tidings; some object sent into the world, blank, potential, arrives as the fortunate component of wholly new meanings.

Years later, too, Lucy flicked through her diary of
Special Things Seen
, and saw that on her first day at work in the albumen factory she had left at four o'clock in the afternoon, and recorded that the sky was the colour of a sheet of photographic paper, drenched in wet egg-white, a bright screen, gleaming lightly as it hung to dry.

“
STRANGE
,”
SHE SAID
to Thomas, “how fiction predicts.”

In
Great Expectations
there is an episode in which Pip, having newly come into his fortune, goes to a tailor to have a fine suit fitted. A boy there, Trabb's boy, treats him with insolence, sweeping the floor by banging the broom at every corner, scowling, getting in the way, physically dissenting from and mocking the hero's changed circumstances. Lucy thought of this episode when she began work at the albumen factory, except that her own situation was a kind of reversal. The women at the factory knew that she could read and write and were alerted every time she opened her mouth – with that peculiar cross-planetary accent of hers – that she was not one of them and was lodged for some reason in the wrong class and work. At first they knocked or slapped her with relaxed and easy malice as they passed, and one deliberately flicked an egg from the top of her pile, so that it smashed across her shoes and she was obliged to apologise to Mrs McTierney and waste time cleaning up. They joked about her name: “she's a strange one,” they said, and excluded her from their friendly conversation.

All this altered when one day a fierce man came to the factory. He was large and ill-kempt, with a shock of orange hair. He stood at the doorway demanding to see one of the workers,
Rose; he hollered her name and emanated a threatening presence. Rose was a small woman, no more than five feet tall, who was cowered and abused by her much larger husband. Mrs McTierney was at the back of the room and stood her ground, asking the man immediately to leave, but Lucy, acting on impulse, moved forward at once to meet and confront him. She saw his face strewn with whiskers and his irrational glare.

“This is ungentlemanly, sir,” she boldly declared – speaking in a voice that sounded stage-hall and melodramatic – “you must leave. Now.”

The man was dumbfounded for a second: he simply stared. He had wild black eyes and alcoholic breath. Then he swung his arm in a wide arc and using tremendous force struck Lucy across the face with the back of his hand. She fell heavily, taking with her a nearby stack of eggs and detonating at least twenty in a messy explosion. The floor was blazoned with yellow and white commingled, and Lucy lay on her side, stunned and stinging, with the sharp taste of blood flooding into her mouth. Pain overtook her stagey illusion.

The man then turned on his heel and left, and Rose, standing half-hidden, fell away into a faint.

After that the women's behaviour carried an air of propitiation. They were considerate, kind and included Lucy in their talk. They forgave her accent and gathered her into a quiet receptive embrace in which she experienced deliberate tenderness and everyday solidarity. From these women Lucy at last learned about female knowledge: she learned about miscarriages, recipes, home remedies and local gossip; she learned about the delectable and frightening otherness of men, about the arbitrariness of love and the glorious delirium of passion. All this from her foolish bravery and her face battered, leaking blood, lying sideways in a thin pool of broken eggs, which resembled so many smashed-up and still-glistening lights.

Three months later, Rose was murdered by her violent husband. The details were not at all theatrical. He broke her head with an ale bottle, confident in his brutal, annihilating authority. The women asked Lucy – “bein' that she was educated an' all” – to give a little speech about Rose's passing. It was a ritual of the workplace. A system of formal mourning. Lucy stood at the head of the troughs of collected white and spoke of the pain of being hit and the fellowship of women. She told them of her parents' deaths, and how something holy attaches to grief. She said there is a glow to love: she had actually seen it. It is like the entire sun coming to rest in the belly of a kneeling sheep. It is like a glint from the beads of an Italian necklace that hung at her mother's throat. It is like two lovers flashing mirrors through space and time. Some of the women wept. There was a chorus of muffled sobbing behind Lucy's words and throughout the hall a warm atmosphere of shared distress. Lucy said, last of all, that this glow defeats the fist that swings cruelly to strike a face and the poison that creeps up into mothers' wombs. It is a miraculous light, a light that carries the amazement of seeing a falling star plunge at night into the ocean. Lucy fell silent. She was not sure she believed it. She was a fourteen-year-old girl describing life, in an egg-filled factory hall to a group of weeping women. But the blessedness of the moment – even then she knew it – was in its simple saying, in finding the right words.

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.

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.

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.