Sixty Lights (7 page)

Honoria and Arthur loved but did not know each other. In a stiff white collar, gabardine suit and new leather shoes, Arthur had married a woman dressed in a fountain of ivory gauze, whom he had met six months earlier, accidentally, as it were, climbing from an overturned coach with a kitten. It was fated, he thought, but it was also precarious. From the beginning he feared the possibility of annulment, that he would bore or infuriate her, that she would discover in him a vacancy, that she would leave, or die. His marriage was characterised by a quality of amorous panic.

Less than a year after their wedding Arthur discovered among Honoria's possessions a leaf-green ribbon on which was printed, in an exceptionally neat hand, the single sentence, “I adore you”. He was consumed by misery, believing not that Honoria was unfaithful, but that she had a previous lover. Yet although the idea shaded every encounter and conversation, he was never able to ask her to confirm or deny. Something
– it may simply have been the banality of his own humiliation – inhibited Arthur; he lived the years of his marriage with this object dangling, a parodic Damocles' sword, soft and prettily fluttering, above all the presents he lived in and the futures he projected. Then there was all that he was not able to tell – the miracle-of-the-lightning, the delirious hunt in Florence, the fact that he missed, excessively, his work as a coach driver (all that jolting motion, the mutable fleeing world, the small children waving and leaping and running dangerously alongside, the wind, the horses, the stewed tea in cooling flasks). His appointment at the bank had been a kind of spiritual death.

And then, more secretly, there was his errant body. On his ninth birthday, his first in Australia, Arthur looked at his body and saw that it was covered in a rash. He was coloured bright crimson, from top to toe, marked out in marbled flushes and crepey textures. His father suffered awful and unnecessary fears on his behalf. They consulted the most expensive physician in Sydney – a Doctor Roland, a man of hairy nostrils, hawk nose, a fat mole on his left eyelid – how clearly Arthur remembers the details of his face – but for all these caricaturing features, a man astute and gentle. Dr Roland examined the boy carefully, asked many and various impertinent questions, and then pronounced him to be suffering a mental condition. The trauma of grief, he said, had a symbolic birthday-association. Moreover the new country, the upheaval, the general upset of re-establishment . . . He peered over his spectacles with a mildly tut-tutting air, implying the redundancy of fuss or worry. James was dumbfounded, but agreed to no medication, and within a week the rash had disappeared. It returned again on Arthur's tenth birthday, and on the eleventh and twelfth. On the thirteenth it was faint, and by the fourteenth this mysterious and exhibitionist
unhappiness that wrote itself on skin, radiant as a sin, was at last exhausted. Arthur was never able to tell his wife Honoria. How could he have explained this beacon body, that signalled to the world his boyhood guilt and distress? Even as a man he found himself scrutinising his skin each birthday, peering under his arms, lifting his scrotum, examining his back – twisted around, in the bedroom mirror – troubled yearly by the threat of recurrence or discovery. He had a nightmare, retained from nine years old, in which his body permanently changed colour. This handsome adult, Arthur Strange, carried a vision of himself – derived from childhood memories of Chinese mosaics in which chubby-faced demons, extraordinarily ugly, tumbled out-of-control in dragon-swirling clouds – a vision in which he saw himself as a monster, in garish magenta.

From the beginning Honoria had wanted Arthur to talk more about himself, but he never did. She suspected that her coach-driver lover was not as one-tracked as he appeared, but suffered the usual trackless ambiguities and occasional upheavals. In any case he would sometimes begin to say something, and then halt, and close off, locking away his secrets in some clandestine compartment. Her head was full of all the whispering, only just unintelligible, he might one day have told her.

What Honoria could not tell Arthur was that the world, since Italy, had been terribly disappointing. Her reading had established great expectations: books led her to believe that adventure was everywhere to be had, that catastrophes, coincidences and conjugal excitations abounded, that lives were melodramatically enhanced and symbolically underwritten. After their metaphoric beginning – this man sliding on his belly into her carriage, the whole coach stalled to allow the generation of romance – their lives had become rather literal and prosaic. Honoria stayed at home, in the wooden
cottage, minding the two children, while Arthur worked at the bank. They could afford no servants, travel or entertainment: the excursion to Italy seemed now a kind of novelistic conclusion. (In Honoria's imagination she is fixed in a pony-trap, looking backwards at an ever-receding Florentine duomo. Ribbons from her bonnet strike softly at her rain-damp face.)

In the coach she had been another Jane Eyre, full of self-righteous destiny and bound-for-glory; but now she thought, with ridiculous intensity, of the locked-away madwoman. She was assailed by an indistinct sense of imprisonment and remembered almost daily the character who chose immolation. How could she tell Arthur that he had confined and immobilised her?

Neither could Honoria tell Arthur about the force of her desire. He was a modest man, rather embarrassed by his body – she had once seen him scrutinise it with an almost trance-like engagement – but her sense of arousal and interest seemed more or less perpetual. She would have made love every night because she was always ready; and she knew too that there is a secret history of marriage, its true, ineffable, voluptuous history, which consists solely in the unrecordable reverberations of embrace. Arthur did not know that he was handsome, or that his body was beautiful. When they fell apart, panting, she would look across at him and see that his sweat-soaked chest was rising and rosy. That he was ashine. That he was her beacon.

SHE TURNED THE
key in the door and knew that something was wrong.

Mrs Minchin returned to the house to discover the children ensconced and mutinous as ever. Lucy was delinquent, Thomas sullen. She was at a loss to know how she might win them over. Even the gentle dog, Ned, now growled when she approached.

Her own grief had deposited her on a kind of ghost ship, somewhere. She felt she was invisibly drifting, unmoored, directionless, caught up in a blue foggy vision in which all shapes were unreliable, and her own existence a rumour. She felt herself to be without will or substance; she was in no state to nurture someone else's children. After her initial busyness had subsided, there was just blank mourning, and desolation.

It would be another eleven years before she saw Lucy again, but then they would love each other, and would at last confide.

For now, however, Molly Minchin faced the thankless task of managing two unhappy orphans until their uncle arrived. The days were long and tedious. The children refused to go to school and spent their time in the laneway or behind the hen-house, playing with the skinny boy, Harold, disappearing for hours, getting up to mischief and God-only-knows. Once she discovered them lighting fires with a magnifying glass, and
realised with a pang of mingled anger and sadness that Lucy had for some time been systematically destroying her clothes. She punished the child, who would not apologise, by locking her away in the cupboard-sized pantry, but Lucy became so hysterically distraught, banging with her fists at the splintery door, screeching like a harpy, that Thomas, without permission, intervened to release her. The girl flew in a rage from the pantry, shouting “Ugly! Ugly!”, before, aghast at her own infuriated cruelty, she burst into tears and ran sobbing from the room. After that the widow-midwife did not even try to befriend them: the children hated her.

Molly Minchin, whose birthmark granted her, for better or worse, an irresistible visibility, found companionship at last with Mrs O'Connor for whom, in the formal democracy of blindness, her face was merely another felt shape. The old woman touched her tenderly, and praised the formation of her nose; her hands, thought Molly, were a benediction. She was reminded of certain holy men of her Indian childhood: this aura of release and self-sufficiency. Only to Mrs O'Connor could she speak of her recent past, of her love for Honoria Strange and the botched-up birthing, of the disfigured baby and the bucketful of blood that soaked through the bed-sheets and spread on to the floor. She told of her guilt about Arthur; how she had guessed his intention, but had not known how to save him; how she had discovered him – his eyes fixed open, his mouth afroth, his body petrified in a belly-ache shape and looking wretchedly reduced – and how, for the second time, she had tidied up death. Finally she told Mrs O'Connor about her peculiar state, that she felt she was drifting, blown by a heavy sigh. The old woman said nothing, but held her hands. She was silent for a long time; perhaps she had fallen asleep. And then Mrs O'Connor unexpectedly stirred.

“Now, now,” she said tenderly. “Now, now; now, now.”

Two months after the scene at the pantry Uncle Neville arrived. The children knew of him only as a name, and were confused by how little he resembled their mother. This man might have been anyone, masquerading as an uncle. He was short and dark, his face slightly toadlike and his body pot-bellied, and he was dressed in soiled-looking flannel and a drooping hat. He carried an anomalously elegant walking cane, ringed with beaten silver, and topped by a carved ivory elephant. A man with little experience of children, he spoke to them remotely, as though he was addressing a large audience, of his dear-departed sister, and their duty to love one another, of the road ahead, which was England, of New Beginnings and Destiny Abroad. He dabbed at rheumy eyes with a filthy handkerchief.

Thomas was more than ever resolute in his plan to abscond to Brazil: “This man is a fool,” he whispered to his sister, “and not to be trusted.”

“And he stinks,” Lucy added, clasping her wrinkled nose.

For his part, Neville Brady was also confused. He was a man so habitually dishonest that he once sent a stolen portrait of a soldier – upright, handsome, with a handlebar moustache and an honest gaze – to his dying father, the purloined image of a man masquerading as a son. George Brady was by then so twisted to his guts by lifelong bitterness he was not particularly consoled by the fiction of his son as an army officer, at the rank of captain, a splendid fellow, it was true, but almost unrecognisable. Now Neville was not sure what feelings he was pretending. Faced with these forthright orphans, with their whispering behind cupped hands and their adamantine stares, he realised that the speech he had long rehearsed had failed to impress. He twirled his elephant cane nervously. These children had a ruined, derelict aspect. He felt a little afraid of them. And they were supervised by a woman who looked as
though life had stained her as a crude advertisement for misfortune.

Neville Brady had not settled in Australia as Honoria had. When he was a child the brilliant harbour seemed such an auspicious beckoning – he remembers himself filled up with a kind of adventurous jubilation; he remembers plunging into the dark sickroom where his sister lay, and dragging her up to the deck to see their New Beginning. The cliffs stretched to embrace the ship, the air was cool off the peaked water, workers were running along the dock, the long brown jetty grew and grew. Everything expanded. He clasped his sister's hand and squinted his eyes so that, in his swelling excitement, he would not overflow into tears. But within a year Neville's vision had begun to dessicate and contract; and in time he learned to resent his father's nation-changing decision. It left them all stranded, Neville thought. It made paternal meanness increase.

After an altercation George Brady withdrew his son from school, having decided, all things considered, it was a waste of time and money, and found him a position as an apprentice clerk at the harbourside firm of Woodruff and Blood, importers who supplied the colony with spices and cloth from the Indies, and familiar goods, chattels and foodstuffs from Home. Neville's work consisted chiefly in itemisation, counting stacked boxes and ticking off items, composing lists, cross-checking, adding long columns of large figures. It was dull beyond belief. The warehouses were ill-lit, bearing only high small windows, but also, in a strangely physical compensation, wonderfully scented. Neville would breathe in cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, tea; he would press his face to jute sacks and dip his hands into wooden chests to rub an aroma into his palms and the tips of his fingers: Neville was a boy seeking to take into his body all the spice that was missing from his life.

In his boy's-own boredom he planned a straightforward
escape: he would purchase – with his own money – a passage to India. He would leave his father for ever. Honoria might be persuaded to join him, or he could send for her after he had made his fortune. Neville spent five long years at Woodruff and Blood. When he emerged, blinking like an animal that had been furled in hibernation, he was eighteen, furry and deranged by ambition, and his skin carried the faintly ineradicable scent of boxed-up spice. He took his stash of secret savings – all that he had not yielded to his father – and secured his passage. As he floated out of the harbour he could see his sister's pink dress – or did he imagine it? – in the shape of a lampshade, and felt so inexplicably bereft that he buried his head in the woolly dark privacy of his cape and, grown man that he was, wept boiling tears.

Lucy, Neville thought, looked very like his sister, but the boy Thomas could have been any mother's son, masquerading as a nephew. The girl's resemblance touched him – her triangular face, her curly dark hair – but she was also precociously wilful and fierce; she brandished a magnifying glass and had a pyromaniacal stare. For want of words, he coughed.