Sixty Lights

by Gail Jones

  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.

  15

  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.

  16

  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.

  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.

  17

  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.