by Gail Jones
Lucy watched her lover Jacob Webb meditating in a shadow. She reached forward and took his hand, pulling him into a pool of light.
“You’re too grave,” she said, touching a single finger to his moist open mouth.
“Let me enlighten you.”
She would take this young man into her body. She would teach him all the forms of bioluminescence. She wanted to say this, to invite him in, but felt shy, wordless. Instead, she saw in a moment-not-yet-arrived his head dip in a tender arc, cautiously, lovingly, and offer her left breast an encompassing kiss.
53
HER SPECIAL THINGS seen and photographs not taken began to flash at her, disarrayed. Time was feverish. Was this, Lucy wondered, an effect of her illness? Would death be a sudden accession of vision from all the times and images she had known? It was not morbid curiosity that stopped her in the street to look up at the sky and wonder aloud such things. She looked into clouds and had a spacious, empty-headed feeling. Heaven was already entering her. She was already becoming pure space, a chamber of images.
Bashanti and her mother:
This image returns and returns: Bashanti leaning her amber cheek against her mother’s black hair.
A strange woman appeared in the kitchen and was preparing food. Lucy entered to fill a jug with water, and there she was, a small figure in a white sari, behaving as if the house was her own. “Good morning,” said Lucy. But the woman said nothing: she bent her head, a minute inclination to acknowledge the memsahib’s presence, but otherwise seemed barely to glance away from her task. She was frying onions and spices for the preparation of dahl; chilli, cumin and mustard-seed fragrance fizzed in the air. Lucy passed with her jug, staring at the old woman, but realised she was being deliberately ignored.
Bashanti’s mother – Isaac did not know her name – had been told many times to stay away, but came uninvited to the house to help Bashanti, to steal food (so Isaac said) and to sit in the sun with her daughter, whispering secrets.
For the first time Lucy realised that her servant was probably her age; her mother was youthful, perhaps forty, and seen together they were unmistakably mother and daughter: their faces were definite but imprecise mirrors – the same high foreheads and serious eyes, the same full mouths and pointy chins. Bashanti was taller than her mother and when they spoke she bent her head as if wanting to equalise their stature.
After her work in the kitchen Bashanti’s mother went outside to sit on the back steps. She was threading flowers for prasad, for her holy duties. A pile of marigolds lay to her left and she was linking them in a chain that grew like a golden snake before her. Bashanti approached her mother from behind, knelt at her back, and then placed her face softly against her mother’s hair. A curved brass bowl on a field of jet black. It was a gesture so simple and tender Lucy felt a sob and constriction in her throat and the revenant claim of something far, far away. She wanted to tell Bashanti of her private thoughts and memories and to chisel open the silence each was accustomed to. But it would have been such an impertinence to speak. There they were, very still, Bashanti appearing like a statue of devotion, her mother the quiet solid plinth of support, resting in a moment that was theirs alone.
Lucy understood then why Bashanti, who knew English, refused to speak it: to keep her own world intact. To keep it safe.
The night ascent:
Just before Lucy left for India, so long ago now, she had been abroad at night, in a parting outing, with Thomas and Neville. They had walked together for the first time to the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens and seen there a balloon lifting up into the sky. It was a gigantic inflation, a black-and-white striped pumpkin, rotund, ludicrous, sailing fantastically upwards. Passengers hailed down excitedly as they floated away. Uncle Neville agreed they should try it – when it’s daylight, he said – but Lucy begged and implored for a night ascent. Neville at last conceded: how could he refuse his niece – soon bound for Bombay, for Isaac – any parting gift? In the end Thomas and Lucy rode upwards together; they waved to Neville as he stood below, a glass of ale in his hand, smiling happily.
The logic of forces that drives a balloon is bewildering and magical. Lucy felt the shudder of the cloth ball, straining above them, and the waywardness and contingency of their route into the sky. Noise fell away, breeze uprose, and there was only the roar, now and then, of the balloon’s inspiration. When they bent to peer over the edge they saw London enflamed; the physical geography of the city had been remade by gas light, so that the main streets were rivers of light and the Thames a pitch-dark canyon, and the shopping districts were redrawn in legends of gold. “A fire map” was what the ballonist called it, and Lucy was delighted to think of London in this way: the Great Fire of London – not an abolition or destruction, but a miracle of gas. Elevation was joy: she must remember this. Overhead, the crescent moon was a meek contestant.
When they descended Thomas and Lucy were like bubbling children. They chattered and leapt about. They embraced each other heartily. It had been, Lucy said to Neville, a true “sensation” And only later, falling asleep, hearing Neville’s regular snoring close by in the next room, did Lucy remember the story of the Flying Dutchman, and thought then fleetingly, only fleetingly, of her mother, and her father, and of all the old sadness, and of distant Australia, and of all that was now everlastingly gone.
The geranium:
An image from long ago. How old was she, then? There is Mrs O’Connor, feeling her way around the back door with her claw-like left hand. In her right she carries a teapot without a lid. Mrs O’Connor raises the teapot and flings an arc of old tea leaves over a scrawny coral geranium, which nestles, somewhat neglected, just behind the back step. The plant is spattered with tea. Mrs O’Connor feels for the remains, which she scoops with her fingertips, and these too she flicks upon the besmirched geranium. Lucy watches her silently. She admires the confidence of the woman who lives in the dark. This woman who mucks the world so casually and with no meanness and ill feeling, leaving it speckled behind her.
The holy man:
Lucy had come upon a man naked, but for a smear of grey ash. His hair was matted and his body pitifully thin, and he bore on his forehead three white clay stripes: a Naga sadhu, Isaac explained. Isaac had been suspicious of what he called Lucy’s attachment to Indian extremities; he thought she succumbed far too easily to beggars and charlatans, and was too impressed by ragged prophets and skeletal children, by wailing paupers and sneaky fakirs. But she had set up her cumbersome camera apparatus, manipulated wet glass, hid beneath her sheath, and photographically reproduced him. To Isaac this was indecorous, a form of obscenity. To Lucy, looking now, in over-dressed England, at this man who willed his own deprivation so as to achieve holiness, it was a form of honour. The naked ash-smeared man, vague as a spectre, appeared to her beautiful. He looked proud, assertive. He looked worthy of his image. The stripes on his forehead looked like head-lamps to guide his way.
The hat:
One day, she thought, there will be a device for capturing the likeness of something that happens very rapidly, or even instantaneously. Lucy had seen a marvellous sight that she wished it possible to record. Strolling with Mrs Minchin, holding Ellen on her hip, they had one night seen a gentleman’s hat catch fire. He had been walking past one of the butcher’s undisciplined gas lamps, when a spurt of flame shot out, a great hungry tongue, and caught his top hat. It must have been coated with some excessively flammable substance, for it instantly lit and spread over the surface, creating a hat-shaped flame at the poor man’s head. He screamed and ran about, panicked and insensible, not having the wherewithal to remove the hat, until someone caught him, tackled him, and knocked it from his head. Ellen’s eyes were excited and blazing with what she had seen; Mrs Minchin tut-tutted the butcher’s irresponsibility, and Lucy saw in the event a new kind of art: the accidental application of wondrous anomaly. Imagine, she said, a painting of a burning stone. A burning bed. Even a burning giraffe.
54
> LUCY HAD SPENT many years controlling thoughts of her mother’s death, and Violet returned them to her with turbulent power. Within what seemed just a few months of their marriage, Violet was decisively and joyously pregnant, and Thomas full of the wry, baffled pleasure of fathers-to-be. Lucy was overjoyed at the prospect of a new baby in the family. She would advise and help Violet, and their children would love each other. Mrs Minchin would assist and they would all reconfigure their love in the endlessly elastic shapes that children create and inspire. But it was clear almost from the beginning that something was wrong. Violet found spots of blood staining her undergarments and felt frightening, obscure, stomach-clenching pains. Mrs Minchin advised as much bed rest as possible, so Violet gave up her piano teaching – leaving behind a whole class of disappointed girls – to concentrate on the careful nurturance of her child. Thomas fretted and became clumsy to the point of clownish collisions, and Max and Matilda Weller, alike in their concern, entrenched themselves as fixtures in the crowded house. Thomas found their presence an additional strain: they were fussy eaters and had lifetime habits of bizarre particularity. They wanted their tea the correct tone of pink, baths with specially purchased salts, and readings from the Bible at nine the morning and again at nine at night. Mr Weller brought some of his disembowelled clocks with him to the house and they lay dangerously strewn, a sorrowful disassembly.
When the catastrophe came, it was a gory miscarriage, sparing the life of the mother but ruining for ever Thomas and Violet’s plans and leaving them wrecked and sobbing, lying together on a bed still damp with blood. Lucy found them clutching at each other like orphan siblings in a fairy tale. Mrs Minchin gave Violet a laudanum draught to help her sleep, and later that evening Lucy saw her cradling Thomas, holding him across her lap in a large velvet armchair. He had his head resting at her bosom and was crying softly. Mrs Minchin stroked his hair and whispered motherly condolences.
“Now, now,” Lucy heard. “Now, now. Now, now.”
It was like a screen suddenly perforated, with darkness leaking in. Lucy had largely left her parents behind, veiled by journeys, new countries, lovers, Ellen, but now found reminiscences and bad dreams returning to disturb her. There is some point in life at which one begins fully to imagine one’s parents. Story fragments and memories begin to coalesce with force, begin to claim recognition and settle into human specificity. No longer figureheaded cut-outs or icons of power, they resolve into individual adult shapes, compellingly intimate. Lucy moved beyond the blue chrysanthemum fan, that fixed her mother at the point of enclosure and removal, to remember her inordinate fondness for the novel Jane Eyre, the objects in her wardrobe that spoke of idiosyncratic affections, the ribbon – why that? – uncurled to reveal “I adore you”. She remembered too a whole repertoire of gestures and sayings, even small moments of unremarkable contact, described by a hand reaching forward, the brushing of hair, or the sweep of a dishcloth over a grainy table. Then she moved on, travelling perhaps on the silken road of the ribbon, to imagine her mother, Honoria, with her own autonomy, with suitors and love affairs, her mother kissing a stranger, her mother touching her own breasts, her mother frustrated or lonely or with unfulfilled ambitions. Her mother, further still, wracked by loss and haunted by absences, which were so private she could not even whisper them in the dark, to her husband, asleep, lying quietly beside her. Then Lucy at last recalled the day of Honoria’s death, her glimpse, through the narrow cleft of a doorway, of her mother straining on the bed, rising up, screaming, her high belly sweat-glazed and shockingly naked. Mrs Minchin’s large body moving to close the door. The footfall afterwards. The sight of Mrs Minchin, bloody to the elbows, washing herself off in a white enamel basin. Then her father, distraught. His face smudged by fatigue. His brown-and-white striped pyjamas. His disappearance. Lucy at last allowed herself to grieve. She locked herself in her room, claiming a return of fever, and wept, at intervals, uncontrollably. She wept for her mother and for her remote gentle father. She remarried them in their tragedy and put them together to rest. When Lucy recovered her composure, she felt herself finally an adult. She re-entered the world – pulling down the bodice of her gown, tidying her hair – to offer Thomas and Violet her strength, to nurture her inimitably beautiful daughter, and to make love to the shy artist, Jacob Webb.
Violet sat in a wicker chair, a woollen rug across her knees, as Lucy read aloud to her from the sentimental novel, Jane Eyre. Ellen played on the floor like a kitten, with balls of coloured wool, and Mrs Minchin sat very still, sombrely knitting. They were their own community. At length Mrs Minchin rose to make tea, and to cut for each of them a slice of marble cake, and they sat together over their repast, eating slowly and talking in hushed friendly tones. Ellen decided to crumble her cake in her fist, and Mrs Minchin tut-tutted with a countermanding smile. Violet spoke of her love for Thomas and her fear that she had disappointed him, and Mrs Minchin and Lucy both lovingly consoled. Lucy explained that one might consider love analogous to the development process of photography: there are careful ministrations, the application of cautious shifts of shadow and tone, vision, patience, an oblique shimmering process, then the final achievement of something definite and recognisable.
Violet paused to consider.
“Not really,” she said.
“No,” Lucy agreed, with a conceding smile. “Not really. In fact, not at all.”
They exchanged sweet glances; they loved each other.
Mrs Minchin rose to draw the curtains and let afternoon light into the room. A beam of turmeric yellow fell like a wand across the floor. The effect provoked in Lucy’s heart a sense of jubilation.
“Camera lucida!” Lucy exclaimed, making a joke. But neither Violet nor Mrs Minchin understood.
55
IT WAS WITH the most passionate concentration that Jacob sketched her. He settled Lucy before him, posed on a chaise longue, her head tilted slightly away, her hands folded in her lap, and set about rendering her countenance in a way that would display, he hoped, her own artistry, inwardness and definition. She had a broad face, blue eyes and dark curly hair, but was not typically attractive or conventionally fair; rather she was, above all, distinctive. Jacob shaded and cross-hatched and recorrected outlines; he entered his labour as one enters a tunnel, with acute directed vision for the illuminated spot up ahead. Then he surprised himself by being rather pleased with his efforts – the first sketches were fulsome and honourably true. He was reminded of the time, as a boy, when he sketched the face of his dead father: it had been a similar act of untypical clarity – the force of circumstance, orbiting around death itself, had given his hand preternatural skill, just as now, in adoration, he knows the shape of his beloved. In truth, he is a little afraid of Lucy Strange. She is more intelligent than he, more bold and more brave. And photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall.
“Behold me,” Lucy silently entreated.
Lucy watched Jacob Webb sketch her in preparation for a painting. His reserve had fallen away; he stared at her with a piercing directness. At the same time, he was locked into his own task, radically alone, as artists are; he was self-communing and somewhat opaque. Around the room lay a dozen portraits at various stages of completion: Jacob specialised in a kind of prettified counterfeit, depictions of ladies in ruffled hats, children in neck bows, gentlemen with barrel chests and watch chains and solid leaden postures. Each figure was, she was sure, a reasonable likeness, but there was also a pastelly unfocused quality to the paint that made everyone appear more decorative than human. There was a gentleness, too, which Lucy recognised.
When she rose, for a break, to look at the sketches, Lucy was delighted to see that Jacob had included the silver-nitrate stains on her hands.
“Certainly my most maculate feature,” she told him.
Jacob smiled, but had no idea what she meant. Then Lucy slid her spotted hand into a gap in Jacob�
��s shirt, felt the skin on his chest, and drew him to her. She began unbuttoning his shirt, but he stepped back, a little alarmed.
“Permit me,” Lucy said quietly. “Permit me to show you what I feel.”
Lucy undressed Jacob Webb with delicate and deliberate slowness, learning his beauty inch by inch, feeling her own arousal at the aureoles of his nipples, the concave near his hips, the tufts of hair, the pink swelling penis. She led him naked to his bed, placed him there, then began, equally slowly, undressing herself, removing garments with taut and erotic delay, watching him watching her, enjoying his gaze. When she was undressed she lay her full body over his, then slid down, with delicious friction, to take him into her mouth. As he began to breathe more heavily, she raised herself over him and made love from above, watching his face. Jacob had a look of incredulity. Filamented lights shone in his eyes. Lucy moved her hips, helping him, creating their rhythm, and when at last he fell upwards, into her warm body, she collapsed downwards into him, her face hot and reddened, her own pleasure complete. Jacob had tears streaking his cheeks. Lucy lay there on his body, feeling him still inside her, their faces intimately together. Jacob’s arms were around her: he held her tenderly.
After a long silence Jacob said: “Thank you.”
Then, after another silence, and in a tone of apology, he added: “I’m sorry, Lucy. I have no words.”
