Sixty Lights

by Gail Jones

  All day the three cavorted together. Mrs Minchin had money: she bought a picnic of tea, scones and Spanish oranges, and later hired a smart pony-trap to carry them all home. They sat high watching London uncoil beside them. Ellen slept soundly in Mrs Minchin’s arms; the stowed baby carriage and camera equipment rattled for the entire journey.

  “We should live together,” Mrs Minchin proposed.

  “Yes, together.”

  “I mean it,” said Mrs Minchin.

  Lucy was drowsy. Her lungs tightened and ached as if they were being laced into a corset. She could feel an outbreak of cold sweat flooding at her forehead.

  “Yes,” she said softly, trying to sound neutral. She rested her head against the solid-fleshed woman beside her. Mrs Minchin. Rediscovered.

  What accidental pattern of life delivers us our friends? What, our lovers? Might there be a plot within biographies arranged entirely by affections? It was at Hampstead Heath, barely two months later, that Lucy would meet her second companion. She was photographing one of the ponds, trying to reproduce with fidelity the sky and the trees reflected, tremulous as atoms, on the surface of the water. Ellen kept toddling in and out of the frame; she wore a lemon-yellow frock and a cheeky expression. There were strewn leaves, darting birds, and a breeze that kept troubling the quality of the reflection.

  He must have been watching Lucy at work for some time. When she surfaced from the dark camera shroud, dreamily blinking, he stood beside her.

  “Jacob Webb,” the man said, proffering his visiting card.

  He gave a small self-conscious bow, without taking his eyes from Lucy’s face. He wore a fine cherry-coloured jacket and waistcoat over shabby trousers that were spattered all over with oil paint. Lucy noticed these first, before she looked closely at his features.

  Jacob Webb was a tawny, tall man of thirty or so years. He had a large nose, straw hair and deep brown eyes. He was an artist, he said, living hereabouts, in Hampstead. He wished to employ her services as an artist’s model. It was her face, in particular, that he wished to paint. Her face.

  Lucy blushed at the directness of his speech and of his gaze.

  “May I have the honour of knowing whom it is I am addressing?”

  “Mrs Isaac Newton,” Lucy responded. It was the first time she had ever called herself by this name.

  “Ah, prisms!” the gentleman responded. “Whiteness shattered! The spectrum revealed!” He smiled as if he had just told Lucy a clever riddle. She must ask Isaac. Names were foolishly entailing.

  48

  Dear Isaac,

  I write most of all to thank you for your words about Neville. To know that you remember him so fondly is a great comfort and consolation, and Thomas and I were moved by the loyalty and depth of feeling in your descriptions. Neville sounded both more comic and more serious than we knew him; perhaps, taking the parent role, he felt constrained with his charges and new responsibilities. In any case, Thomas has shown me the grave, which is a simple affair in a rather neat little churchyard, not far from where we live. My sweet sister-in-law, Violet, places flowers regularly upon it, although she knew Neville for less than one year.

  My brother continues to thrive in his business. The owner of the Magic Lantern Establishment, a Mr Childe, has made him a partner, and together they entertain novel schemes and vast ambitions. Thomas is convinced, as I am, that there will one day be moving-picture shows, which tell stories not by posed scenes but by the simulation of life itself, in all its restless mobile spirit and colourful complication. Patrons will enter the lantern show as though they are entering a dream, and see before them apparitions in a kingdom of light. There will be new effects and new sensations – “partickler when he see the ghost!” – as Neville used to say; it will be a communing with spirits more brilliant than any seance could contact or conjure. Thomas and I talk often of this idea. Like some photographers in London he is using magnesium to create a sudden flash of light, and though it is dangerous and volatile, believes something in its bright combustibility holds a key to the development of the magic lantern. Thomas is also experimenting with super-impositions and different lenses. He affixed a microscopic device to the magic-lantern camera and with the aid of a surgeon from the Royal College projected slides of cell life for training doctors to observe. I sat in the back row with Ellen and found the show a marvel – much more than the dreadful Mutiny I wrote to you about, or the endless, utterly conventional romances. Our inner substance, dear Isaac, is a series of blossom-looking cells, netted and sewn up with miniature veins and capillaries. We are plant life, it seems, and wonderfully intricate.

  The surgeon used a pointer to indicate areas of concern, but I could not follow his discourse, which was for doctors alone, and in a vocabulary largely incomprehensible. I found myself looking simply at the shapes before me, of which life itself – imagine! – is shrewdly composed. Thomas too was agog at this fleshly spectacle: when I saw him after the screening he was dumbstruck with awe and barely knew what to say. (“Partickler when he see the ghost.”) Thomas does not believe, as I most assuredly do, that the living body may be one day photographed inside: for him dead cells are the peak of visual exploration. Nevertheless, he was deeply impressed and talked of nothing else for two weeks. I must add that Ellen writhed and was inattentive throughout the surgeon’s show: how does one direct the vision of small children or assert which image is important or which inconsequential? Perhaps this can only be known by one’s self. Perhaps we are not part of all we have met, but of all that we sensationally or passionately notice. What do you think, my dearest Isaac?

  You ask for news of my work and I can report truthfully that my knowledge of chemistry is improving – largely through correspondence with the Society of Photographers – and that I am slowly mastering the wet collodion technique. Yes, I still stain my clothes and have a sprinkling of silver nitrate and powder stains on my hands, but am more careful now at mixing and decanting my collodion. As you know, the glass slide must still be wet with emulsion when the photograph is exposed, and for a long time I worried about the bubbles in the mixture and the appearance of thumbprints on the corners of the image. Now these seem to me charming, although the men of the Society of Photographers consider thumbprints a sin and me an irredeemable sinner for refusing their wise counsel and continuing wilfully to reproduce this faint mark of my own handiwork. The photograph should appear, one of them wrote to me, as if God had breathed it onto the glass. Reprobate that I am, I am still wedded to the maculate and the human sign, and accept now that my work will never be exhibited in the halls of South Kensington. If I could locate another woman interested in photography, I feel sure I could speak honestly and openly of these matters and defend more confidently my maculate aesthetic.

  I too have been experimenting and wishing to find new effects. When I take the lens cap off to expose the plate, I count the seconds carefully, one to five, but have now been leaving the cap off longer, or shorter, and recording the results. I have been using albumen paper as well, and remember that in the factory we used to dry it as quickly as possible to achieve an extra sheen on the surface of the paper. There is some link between sheen and heat I have not yet discovered. I take care with my glass plates – much more than with the chemicals – and am keen to try emulsion on metal (they are called ferrotypes, or tintypes) which I believe have a dark mysterious look to them and would be more suitable for someone as accident-prone as myself. It is of course you, dear Isaac, who has made this unprofitable employment possible: I know you asked me not to thank you again for your payments, but – just one last time – I am grateful, more than I can say, for all the material assistance you have given me, and more than that for your encouragement in my faltering art.

  My beloved Ellen remains the other true focus – there is no other word for it – of my time and devotion, and when she is able she too will utter thanks and embrace you as her honourable uncle. She has at last begun walking and launches herself into the world with a w
ild toppling gait, jerky and wilful. She has no fear of anything, and charges towards water and birds and flights of stairs with truly alarming rapidity and sureness of intent. I have to keep sweeping her up in my arms to restrain this movement, and fear for her safety more often than not. She inhabits her body so robustly, and with such ease of spirit, and has an appetite for substances of many kinds. I caught her this morning with a mouthful of bright green leaves: she looked like some bloated insect creature, caught at herbivorous luncheon. I had to put my fingers deep into her mouth to extract all the leaves, and she screamed at me and wailed, as though I had robbed her of a boiled sweet. I delight in her presumption, her imperious claim to space, her loud, loud voice, her curly hair, the sight of her arms waving like a windmill as she runs off to each new and important adventure. At this stage Ellen seems largely uninterested in speech; Thomas says it is because she uses her mouth for everything else! (She calls him Tom-Tom, which amuses him greatly – he says she sees still within him his old Brazilian ambition – but she cannot manage “Violet” in any form or contraction.)

  Enclosed with this letter is my favourite photograph of Ellen. Although it is a little blurry, since she would not be bribed to stay wholly still (and the Society of Photographers, I must say, would berate me for displaying such an image) – you can see her quicksilver glance and her aspect of intelligence. The beguilement of infants resides not in their posed formality or settled good behaviour, but in these evasions of order, these clever rebellions. You must not think the image blunted, but on the verge of locomotion. And if you look carefully with your magnifying glass – as I did, seeking particular details – you can see a curved arc of light resting neatly in each eyeball which is the cheval mirror I set at the window to train more light into the room. This felicitous inclusion, this bent light that places my intention upon and within my daughter’s face, excites and pleases me. It is another form of love, is it not, the studied representation? It is devotional. Physical. A kind of honouring attention. I think of photography – no doubt absurdly – as a kind of kiss.

  Let me now tell you about my new friend, Mrs Molly Minchin. When I was a child in Australia the same Molly Minchin came to stay with us. She was a friend of my mother’s, and a midwife, employed for the tragic birth I have spoken of to you. After the deaths of my parents she stayed on in our house, cooking meals, cleaning, trying hard to look after us. I despised Molly Minchin because in my grief-stricken reasoning I held her somehow responsible for my mother’s death, and I also resented her presence and her act of substitution. Now I have remet her – she was stomping about in Kew Gardens and reading Latin names with a clang as if she was ringing a brass bell. She has a sturdy vigour and openness to life which has quite revived me. I recognised her immediately because she carries a distinctive purple wine-mark, which covers one half of her face: this conspicuousness in the world has not marred or undermined her, but given her a resolute strength of character. I spied her through the lens of my camera and it was as if the long-past sprang phantomlike to confront me: I was afraid of a whiff of death, of some wound, or corruption, of something dark which would fly up like a bat and scratch at my face. I hid for a while, afraid, silently observing her in my black-out tent of velvet, before I saw her about to move on, and called out my own name.

  Molly grew up in Madras, so we speak together of India. We also speak of Australia, and of her memories of my parents. I tried for so long to forget my parents, but think now that Molly’s company is meant to return me to them. She has a fine collection of stories and a loving presence. Ellen adores her. We are both rescued from our loneliness, and I from the feeling of being perpetually foreign and from a country no-one else really knows of, or believes in.

  It is late now and time for the gas lamps to be lit. I greet you, dear Isaac, from across the earth and the ocean. The sun will now be rising on Malabar Hill. Please send me any news of Bashanti, and the others. I miss the self that I achieved in my year in India. She was a little braver than I am and more wide-awake, more healthy, more receptive to what is new. This is, I suppose, why we pale fellows travel. To find the person with these qualities, the one enfolded secretly, like a love letter, in stuffy dank England or monumental Europe, or easy, remote, complacent Australia.

  I photograph you in my mind,

  Your affectionate friend,

  Lucy Strange

  (By the way, what is the significance of your name?)

  49

  JACOB WEBB LEARNED as a young boy that nothing was fixed but art. His father, a Nonconformist lay preacher and farmer in Nottinghamshire, taught him that the Bible was inerrant, that man was sinful, and that the hand of God was at work mysteriously in every accidental, or miserable, or minor catastrophe. God was always responsible, it seemed, for things that went wrong.

  At the age of seven Jacob witnessed an astonishing hailstorm. It was deep mid-winter. The steely sky filled with stones the size of billiard balls, which catapulted with malevolent aim onto the heads of their chickens. Four died, knocked flat by the sky’s sudden ice. Jacob’s dog, Red, had been caught outside in the storm and cowered, whimpering softly, beside a rain barrel, so Jacob had to run like a madman through the hail to fetch him, and then half drag and half carry the poor animal towards the house. The air was crazy with missiles. He could hear the pounding of falling stones hitting the thatched roof, dropping into the hen-house, and bouncing off the woodshed; he could smell the pungent wet fur of his terrified dog; and he could feel the hard pellets of ice battering at his body. One caught his right shoulder with a sickening crack and another struck his outstretched arm. Foolishly, Jacob turned his face to the sky, and at that moment a hailstone hit him directly on the ear. He felt a pain like fire flash through the ball of his skull. He cupped his hand over his stinging and remarkably hot ear, and tugged hard at Red. But he was so confused and disabled that he was momentarily unsure in which direction they should move. The dog was lumpish and heavy and not helping at all. His own hands and feet were unendurably cold. Jacob thought: I will die here, right here; this is a kind of punishment. And Red will die too, and so will more of the chickens, and there will be a huge grave to cover us – boy, dog and chickens – all lying mixed together.

  Jacob’s father appeared from somewhere and gathered him in his arms. A great coat fell around the boy like the wings of an angel. It was a Miracle. Deliverance. These were words that he knew. His father ran directly to the house and lay him inside. Then he ran out again into the hail to rescue the dog. Jacob thought: Praise the Lord, praise the strength of my father!

  Later he realised there was a thread of blood trickling from his ear, and that his mother was by his side, binding his head with a bandage. He seemed to swim in pain. Light was too intense. The room washed before him and then gradually settled. He could see his father smoking a pipe in the large chair beside the fireplace, and Red, apparently now at peace and sound asleep, resting his head gently on Father’s feet. Jacob’s sister, Ruth, who was older by ten years and moved in the world of adults, was calmly kneading dough at the table in the kitchen. Things looked the same, but were not. They would never again be the same.

  When Jacob saw his body, the next morning, the top half was covered with bruises. “Ring-streaked and spotted,” it said in the Bible. The white bandage around his head looked like a little girl’s Sunday bonnet. Jacob was ashamed to wear it. He hated the sight of himself. He felt that such a cataclysm in the sky, and his vision of the mixed grave, and the casually strewn corpses, all this was an augur of something awful to come. His slim blue body, there in the mirror, showed the direct violence of the hand of God. He was “ring-streaked and spotted”.

  Jacob waited days for his presentiment of doom to be fulfilled, but nothing happened. Things were the same, after all. Then, two weeks later, just as he was beginning to relax and to doubt the sign of his bruised body, his father fell down in the meadow, gasping and gulping for air. His body was paralysed on one side and his mouth was fixed open.
Tears flowed from his eyes, but his face was inexpressive. He lay prostrate, like an infant, his grey head resting where it fell, in mud and shit. Jacob stared down at his father and understood at once: this was it, worse than death, this prone, sad sight. Skin like meat, a marble eye, the stinking sully of sheep-mess and unmanly, mute immobility. Mr Nicholls, the cartwright who lived in the cottage on the hill, was summoned to help carry Jacob’s father back to their house. Jacob stood stiff like a soldier and watched him slowly hauled up. His father’s left arm was dangling like Christ’s, in an old image he had seen of the deposition from the cross. His father half-dead, half-crucified. It frightened him to think about it.

  At first everyone fussed and attended the patient with care. He could not move or speak, and was given to uncontrollable tears. Jacob saw how very aged his father suddenly looked, and realised for the first time that he was many years older than his mother. He knew nothing about how they met, or of their courtship, or of their mismatched marriage. Jacob read the Bible to his father and fed him porridge with a spoon. The slack mouth failed properly to take its nourishment. Jacob wiped his father’s chin with a cloth and when he leaned very close he could smell death, sour death, lingering inside his open mouth. This was the man who had rescued him from the world of pelting ice. This was the man who had been as strong as an angel. Jacob wanted his father returned, his big strong father, not this ruin with a foul mouth and wet, wet eyes.