Sixty Lights (6 page)

When Arthur turned his head to look for his mother, she was lying at a short distance, her eyes closed, the hem of her long skirt slightly smouldering, and at first, in dread and ignorance, he thought that she was dead. But she stirred, and began to cry. Arthur put his arm around her, and brushed rain from her face. She was like a little girl. When she recovered her adulthood she stood, adjusted her bonnet and tugged at her bodice, as though she were preening for a Sunday outing, and then looked around for her umbrella and fan. The umbrella's fabric had burnt away, so that it was just a radial structure of sticks, but the fan had been left behind in the ox cart, and was sodden but unspoiled. Arthur remembers that, in her absent-mindedness, his mother took up the umbrella, useless though it now was, and brought it with them.

The ox was dead. Its large eyes were wide open and rolled back into white balls. The driver was gone. They stayed together, mother and son, in the stalled ox cart, the huge carcass yoked in a stinking death, and together they chanted:

The sun returned. Flies began to gather in the nostrils and eyes of the ox. Arthur and his mother lay beneath the ox cart for shade, fanned each other's skin, and waited to be found. When another cart arrived, driven by a surprised old man, it was Arthur's task – though by then he was barely sensible – to explain what had happened, and to bargain payment for their ride. And still his mother chanted; and still she clutched her umbrella and fluttered her chrysanthemum fan.

HE HAD WANTED
for years to tell her, but now it was too late. In his maddened state of grief, in the dark, dark shadow of the valley of death, Arthur itemised all that he had not said, all that he had not given, all his repressed or stammering or incomplete endearments, all the secrets still locked away in his coach-carriage heart. He had wanted to tell Honoria about his mother. He had wanted to tell her how she appeared.

That she had risen from fiery death, brushed herself down, adjusted her bonnet, tidied up, and then taken and held aloft a burnt-out umbrella. And Arthur had looked up and seen encircling his mother's head a radial structure of sticks, a Florentine halo, through which, in dazzling mauve, shone spokes of storm-swept sky.

THE TREES AT
the window shivered, just as she shivered with the delectable cool of his touch. The way he unpinned her hair and spread it open with his fingertips. The initial stroke of his open hand against her breast.

In the first two years of their marriage Honoria Strange had unlearned and relearned her body, and now, at twenty, it seemed untutored again. Yet she faced herself naked in the mirror and experienced her own existence as complete self-possession. Her breasts had inflated to bulbs and her belly was a globe; an indigo filament ran from her navel to her pubic hair, and veins she did not know existed were now apparent across her chest. She examined herself as an artist might: finding the immanent aesthetic. The curves that composed her. The tissue artfully distended. The venerable imperfections and discolourations that graded her body more solidly. Honoria felt at once real and achieved. If she doubted her future body at all it was because she did not wish the shivering to cease.

The pregnancy had been without incident or mishap, and now Mrs Minchin had arrived, for the last weeks before the birth. At first Honoria was taken aback to see the woman's face: it bore a wine-dark pigmentation across most of the left side, and blemished an otherwise handsome woman. In an episode of superstition she had asked Arthur whether she
might now deliver a baby with a birthmark, and he told her it was a foolish and unbecoming supposition. Honoria was ashamed; for years later she thought of it and blushed at her youthful ignorance. (Nevertheless – and she could tell no-one – she had a recurrent nightmare in which she nursed a baby whose too-tiny face was disfigured by red shadow.)

As her time approached Honoria Strange grew flagrantly lazy. She lay about the house, rather dishevelled, in a thin linen nightgown studded with girlish pink bows, and gradually befriended the wine-dark Molly Minchin. When they grew to know each other Honoria discovered that this woman was exceptional: she knew of happenings both natural and supernatural, she performed skills both ordinary and wonderfully extraordinary – midwifery, divination, communication with spirits – and had travelled to far lands and exotic locations.

Molly had been one of a family of six children raised in Southern India, where she had grown boldly accustomed to her own conspicuousness. Sometimes people retreated, even fled, when they saw her face; sometimes she was garlanded with marigolds and jasmine and touched by the brown fingers of reverent strangers. In both cases the little memsahib was always stared at. She grew to know her own visibility and importance in the world; she was confident and sure in a way that her two younger sisters, both pretty and blonde-haired, would never experience. As a child, Molly explained, she reasoned that since the god Krishna was blue, why shouldn't she be whitish from the neck down and rose-coloured on top? Frederick Minchin, a sea captain, saw at once the complex nature of Molly's specificity, not just that she was bi-coloured, but in many ways exemplary. Their marriage was spent in the Far East, on the ocean, sexually vigorous and wholly companionable, until Frederick was one night washed into the darkness by a freak storm off the island of Java. A widow at
thirty-five, Molly had suffered four miscarriages during their life together: her main regret, she said, was the washing-away of the children.

Molly Minchin told Honoria Strange a series of fabulous tales – of a Dutch balloonist who floated above Madras in a gondola-shaped basket, only to fall out, spectacularly, when he leaned to catch a letter he had dropped; of a woman named Minnie who married a Musilman in Lucknow and was so beloved of her husband that he ordered the sacrifice of white peacocks on the occasion of her death; of a fierce goddess who wore human skulls around her neck as adornment, and was depicted in temples with her tongue out, dripping blood; of elephant madness and wild lion hunts, of palaces and palanquins, of vast Persian monuments. The little wooden house in Melbourne filled with unreal treasures and eastern exaggerations. Molly supplied the enlarged imaginary to match Honoria's pregnant expansiveness. In return Honoria Strange told the widow Molly Minchin the entire plot, in detail, of the novel
Jane Eyre.

Honoria was intuitively convinced she would deliver a girl, and wrote out a series of names on a piece of paper. Molly underlined Lucy, so
Lucy
it was, and they were both surprised when a boy arrived, yowling and angry, its face oriental, to contest their presumption. Arthur was overjoyed: he named the baby Thomas in honour of his paternal grandfather, whose sermons, full of excitable and authoritarian righteousness, he still clearly recalled.

This is what Honoria remembers: Molly examined the body of the baby and found it was without birthmark or distinguishing sign. So with charcoal she drew a round flaw on the right side of Thomas's cheek: this was necessary, Molly said, to protect the unmarked child from the evil eye that sees and
destroys what is too pure and too beautiful. Honoria thought the charcoal mark looked like a burn, as though the baby's skin had been scorched with a magnifying glass. When Lucy was born, two years later, she carried a strawberry birthmark on the left side of her chest: Molly said this was perfect. The girl-child must be physically marked on the left, and her relation to the forces of benevolence and malevolence was vouched safe and secure. Honoria was relieved that this face, this at-last-come-daughter, was not besmirched as her son had been. When she rose at night to feed, her daughter's face was the beckoning lamp she moved through darkness to embrace. A taste in her own mouth, mysteriously, of Jamaican ginger. A vague envisioning. The envelope of a breathing space from elsewhere and long ago.

She remembers, too, that on the joyous birth day of her daughter, Arthur gave her a string of beads he had saved for years from the time of their honeymoon in Florence. She was surprised at this little ordination from the past. They were lovely beads, pearly and intricate and threaded with glinting spirals of bronze. When he placed them at her neck, fumbling with the clasp, the cold of the glass made her suddenly shiver. How she loved his hands there, at the nape of her neck, and the sexual intimation of so delicate, so fluttering, a touch.

WHAT WAS IT
like, Lucy wondered, to be Mrs O'Connor? what must it mean to live alone, in continuous black, where the whole world is adjusted to an idiom of anxiety, to the keen mnemonic placement of heavy objects, to the intractable logic of shapes and surfaces, to a strict attunement to decipherable and indecipherable sound? And where, worst of all, what is lost is the engendering image of the face. As a child she imagined it more simply: an unawakening.

“It's really not that bad,” declared Mrs O'Connor. “I have my cooking and my piano. I have my knitting. I have my friends who stop and chat, and once a week someone from the church comes over to read. It's far too easy”, she added, “to overestimate seeing.”

She was seated – enthroned, it seemed – in a lozenge of sunlight. She was preserved in a shape she could never know.

Mrs O'Connor felt the rim of a cup as she guided her teapot spout forward to pour.

“What I love”, she added, “is very loud birds. We have so many in this country, filling the sky.”

After this Lucy heard loud birds singing all week. A single sentence had reorganised the presences of the world. A single sentence. Just one.

Lucy visited Mrs O'Connor when she was bored with
Thomas and could no longer bear the stupefying misery of their house. The old woman welcomed her company and fed her cupcakes and tea; she patted Ned, who wagged his tail and nuzzled warmly at her lap. At length, on sufferance, Lucy consented to be touched. Mrs O'Connor drew near and ran her fingers slowly across Lucy's features, beginning with the forehead, feeling gently the cavities of the eyes with her thumbs, noting the shape of the nose, the outline of the lips, the contour and curve and declension of the chin, and assessing over all the girl-presence before her.

“Your face is a triangle,” she said. “And you have very soft skin. I was spotty when I was a young woman and could see. Am I spotty now?”

“Yes, very spotty.”

Lucy, without hesitating, had told the truth.

Mrs O'Connor laughed: they liked each other.

The old woman wore circular black spectacles, thick as ale-bottle ends, so that her blindness was private and could not be gazed on. Her house was rather dirty – with spidery corners and drifting fluff – but in other ways it was like the house of a sighted person: there were the usual decorations, white place mats, china ornaments, a line of ugly toby jugs; and there were prints on the wall – one of a fox hunt (the men conventionally erect, the hounds poised and alert and snobbishly sniffing the air), and another of a vase of mixed flowers settled behind a bowl of assorted fruits (all tinted rather luridly to celebrate the doubled variety). Lucy stared at these prints and reflected that not seeing them was no terrible deprivation: some things should be seen – faces in particular – some things perhaps could be consigned, without loss, to blindness. She had the primitive intuition of an order of imagery, a personal scheme in which one might select and abolish, and in which clear-sightedness was committed to merit and exultation. Lucy
closed her eyes to enter Mrs O'Connor's true house. She stretched out her arms against the world destroyed and was surprised that there was no completely obliterating black, but penumbral gradations and hazy rays. She opened, then closed her eyes, opened again, closed again. Some fundamental mystery inhered in the blinking of worlds: iris in, iris out.

Sometimes they played a game of chess together. Mrs O'Connor always won. She remembered the board with such precision that interruptions did not distract her and conversation did not trouble the visionary chessboard in her head. Lucy watched her long spindly fingers – what Thomas called, with a puckered look, her Mummy hands – reach carefully towards the board, locate a chess piece, and then feel and record its minute carved features. She was a decisive player, but acted slowly. Lucy told her about Fen and the glittering dress, about her trembling grandfather, James, who also played chess, and about the Chinese cousins. Mrs O'Connor told Lucy about her grown-up twin daughters, Flora and Dora, who now lived far away, in the West, and about how in dreams she would see herself flying over the desert to meet them. She was sighted in dreams, although she saw only what she had seen before she was blind, so that Flora and Dora remained eternally infant, two or three years old, and the location of her dreams was always her last visible landscape. “But the desert light”, she said, “is absolutely scintillating.”

“Scintillating?” Lucy had never heard the word before.

“All blinking and bright. Even the stones seem to shine.”

Lucy pondered her knowledge: that asleep this woman saw. And not just anything, but the
scintillating
desert. When she told Thomas that afternoon he did not believe a word.

But Thomas too thought about it, many years later. Is it possible to summon as an after-image on the surface of the
retina some image-memory that has lain, pristine and packed away, unglimpsed since early adulthood? As an old man he wants to will this, to dream resurrections, as blind Mrs O'Connor did. To recover his dead sister's face, drifting over the surface of a desert.

MARRIAGE IS AN
obtuse and stubborn state. Sometimes couples live in the most intimate and consistent proximity, day after day, year after year, but know almost nothing significant of each other. A catalogue of shared experiences is dissolved in clouds of unknowing; there are vast selves undiscovered, and vast secret lonelinesses.