by Gail Jones
60
NOW, NOW. NOW, now.
Now that Ellen was a little older and much more settled, Thomas worried less. He still slept badly, from time to time, from an anguish he could neither decipher nor assimilate. Just one month after Lucy’s death, Mrs Minchin had also died: a heart seizure, they said. It was so sudden, so final. The whole world changed shape. Ellen had come into their house, a confused and perplexed child, conscious of great unsayable loss, muted by all she could not understand. At first she was withdrawn and ill-behaved, and they found her hiding under beds, or crouching filthy in the coal cupboard. She spat food and tore at her clothes; she howled like an animal in the darkness. Jacob’s regular visits had helped, and Violet’s loving attention had finally won her over. They all adored her. She looked exactly, Thomas thought, as Lucy had as a small child and in his emotional extremity this added an extra confusion. Sometimes he caught himself calling the child by his sister’s name.
Jacob had become prematurely grey, and appeared older than his thirty years and destroyed by grief. He was not coping well. If it had not been for Ellen, he confessed, he would have left this world with Lucy. It pained him that there existed only two photographs of his beloved. One was the ghost image, which the family could not quite bring themselves to dispose of, and the other was a studio photograph, taken in Bombay, in which Lucy stood posed beside Isaac Newton. She looked like a stranger, like a Mrs Newton, like someone unknown to them all. She was wearing unfamiliar clothes and had alien eyes. As her real face faded, slowly and imperceptibly, this false portrait would begin in sinister fashion to replace her. Jacob wished to paint an image from his sketches of Lucy, but was unmotivated, blank. He doubted his skill. He felt it an impossible task, to paint her luminosity.
Lucy had bequeathed to Jacob her Indian miniature – The Lovers, she called it. Jacob stared at the painting and found it childish, inept; it carried none of the nuance of oil paint and realistic portraiture. Yet something in the face of Radha subtly evoked Lucy’s face. She had an intractable self-possession and a whispering gaze. On her chest were beetle wings, representing her flighty heart. Jacob rubbed his index finger on the wings and felt his own heart respond: some mystery of after-life momentarily possessed and moved him. In the absence of likeness there remained this trace of a touch, this memento of something actual but wholly unpictured. He woke from a dream in which his body was battered by hail.
At the Childish Establishment Thomas continued his projectionist work. Each night he watched as patrons surrendered to visions fantastical, and exclaimed, laughed, gasped and applauded. He worked the screening apparatus, the light effects and the sequencing of story. But his joy was gone. Thomas felt himself full of shabby, unresolved emotions; he felt suspended in a kind of absent-minded grief, which threatened to overtake and finally capsize him. Violet busied herself with the child, Ellen, but he hung back, inert, and somewhat unresponsive.
One day Thomas took to his bed – simply took to his bed – to re-read Great Expectations. He read as carefully as possible, saturated by memories, and by the afternoon of the second day he was at the death-bed scene, in which the character Pip farewells his benefactor, the criminal, Magwitch. This is what Thomas read:
He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would, and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and a film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.
“Are you in much pain to-day?”
“I don’t complain of none, dear boy.”
“You never do complain.”
He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.
Thomas began to cry. He cried for his parents, for Neville and for Mrs Minchin. He cried for his cherished, irreplaceable sister, Lucy. He felt that the whole world was drenched in grief, and was unmanned, a boy again, a boy naked with a candle, fearing what might be screened unbidden on mirrors, or in dreams. Thomas was just moving beyond the vehemence of sobbing, just entering that state of calm and pause, when the bedroom door slowly opened before him. It was Ellen, seeking him out. She stood in a dusty diagonal beam of light, her small hand on the door, her attitude curious. Sensing, with an innate and precocious delicacy, that she had glimpsed something private, something she should not have seen, Ellen took a step backwards, very quietly, and pulled shut the door.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS BOOK WAS begun during a writer’s residency in India sponsored by Asialink (Melbourne). I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my colleagues and friends at Asialink, an institution dedicated to cross-cultural understanding, tolerance, and the generation of artworks inspired by the honouring and celebration of cultural difference. My work with and for Asialink has been immensely enriching.
I was shown great kindness and hospitality in India and wish to thank, in particular, Ruchira, Ajit and Paroma Ghose, Anuradha Rao, and Maya and Mimansa Krishna Rao for their support. Esther Kinsky and Beth Yahp generously offered me writing spaces, as did Peter Bishop at the Varuna Writers’ Centre. Special thanks to Susan Midalia for her perceptive comments on an early draft of the book, and to all my friends, particularly Victoria Burrows, who endured my endless disquisitions on anachronism and light. Zoë Waldie, of Rogers, Coleridge and White, has been enormously patient, helpful and diplomatic; without her assistance Sixty Lights would not have seen the light of day. Staff at Harvill have shown exemplary kindness, and Christopher MacLehose and Becky Toyne have offered unerringly clever and astute advice. My daughter Kyra, whose intelligence, sensitivity and fineness of spirit continue to inspire me, is at the very heart of this book.
The following texts have been especially useful in the composition of Sixty Lights. Lynda Nead’s splendid Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London (Yale University Press, 2000), Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light: Theses on the Philosophy of History (Princeton University Press, 1997), Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard, Flamingo, 1984) and Susan Sontag’s On Photography (Penguin, 1979).
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Epub ISBN: 9781448104901
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Copyright © Gail Jones 2004
Gail Jones has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Eduardo Cadava quote reprinted by permission of the author
Walter Benjamin quote reprinted by permission of the publisher
from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, © 1999 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
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