The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  There are many reasons why Huygens’ wife pulled the ring at that moment. He put the action down to womanly foolishness. She was pregnant at the time and her mind was not entirely her own. It was because of her state and the tears that she shed that he left the ruined clock as it was and the remaining months of her lying-in were marked by the silence of the hours.

  The boy was born and Huygens’ wife lay with childbed fever. In her delirium (it was still a time when women became delirious) she said only one thing, over and over again: ‘I will die. He will die. I will die. He will die. I will die FIRST,’ like a child picking the petals off a daisy. There were always five petals, and Huygens, whose head was full of tickings, likened her chant to the striking of a clock.

  (But before you get carried away, I repeat, there were many reasons why Huygens’ wife slipped her finger into the ring and pulled the chain.)

  When his first wife died, Sir David Brewster was to be found at the desk in his study, looking out at the snow. In front of him was a piece of paper, very white, which was addressed to her father. On it was written ‘Her brief life was one of light and grace. She shone a kindly radiance on all those who knew her, or sought her help. Our angel is dead. We are left in darkness once more.’

  In Sir David’s hand was a dull crystal which he held between his eye and the flaring light of the snow. As evening fell, the fire behind him and his own shape were reflected on the window, a fact which Sir David could not see, until he let the lens fall and put his head into his hands.

  There was more than glass between the fire, Sir David and the snow outside.

  There was a crystalline, easily cleavable and non-lustrous mineral called Iceland spar between the fire, Sir David and the snow, which made light simple. It was Sir David’s life’s work to bend and polarise light and he was very good at it. Hence the lack of reflection in his windows and the flat, non-effulgent white of the ground outside.

  Of his wife, we know very little. She was called MacPherson and was the daughter of a famous (in his day) literary fraud. MacPherson senior was the ‘translator’ of the verse of Ossian, son of Fingal, a third-century Scottish bard – who existed only because the age had found it necessary to invent him. Ossian moped up and down the highlands, kilt ahoy, sporran and dirk swinging poetically, while MacPherson read passages of the Bible to his mother in front of the fire. MacPherson was later to gain a seat in the House of Commons.

  All the same, his family must have found sentiment a strain, in the face of the lies he propagated in the world. I have no reason to doubt that his daughters sat at his knee or playfully tweaked his moustaches, read Shakespeare at breakfast with the dirty bits taken out, and did excellent needlepoint, which they sold on the sly. The problem is not MacPherson and his lies, nor Brewster and his optics. The problem is that they touched a life without a name, on the very fringes of human endeavour. The problem is sentimental. Ms MacPherson was married to the man who invented the kaleidoscope.

  *

  Kal eid oscope: Something beautiful I see. This is the simplest and the most magical toy; made from a tube and two mirrors, some glass and coloured beads.

  The British Cyclopaedia describes the invention in 1833. ‘If any object, however ugly or irregular in itself, be placed (in it) … every image of the object will coalesce into a form mathematically symmetrical and highly pleasing to the eye. If the object be put in motion, the combination of images will likewise be put in motion, and new forms, perfectly different, but equally symmetrical, will successively present themselves, sometimes vanishing in the centre, sometimes emerging from it, and sometimes playing around in double and opposite oscillations.’

  The two mirrors in a kaleidoscope do not reflect each other to infinity. They are set at an angle, so that their reflections open out like a flower, meet at the bottom and overlap.

  When she plays with it, her hand does not understand what her eye can see. It can not hold the secret size that the mirrors unfold.

  She came down to London for the season and met a young man who told her the secrets of glass. The ballroom was glittering with the light of a chandelier that hung like a bunch of tears, dripping radiance over the dancers. She was, of course, beautiful, in this shattered light and her simple white dress.

  He told her that glass was sand, melted in a white hot crucible: white sand, silver sand, pearl ash, powdered quartz. He mentioned glasswort, the plant from which potash is made; the red oxide of lead, the black oxide of manganese. He told her how arsenic is added to plate glass to restore its transparency, how a white poison made it clear.

  Scientific conversation was of course fashionable at the time, and boredom polite, but David Brewster caught a spark in the young girl’s eye that changed all these dull facts into the red-hot liquid of his heart.

  He told her how glass must be cooled or it will explode at the slightest touch.

  After their first meeting he sent her in a box set with velvet, Lacrymae Vitreae, or Prince Rupert’s Drops: glass tears that have been dripped into water. In his note, he explained that the marvellous quality of these tears is that they withstand all kinds of force applied to the thick end, but burst into the finest dust if a fragment is broken from the thin end. He urged her to keep them safe.

  Mr MacPherson’s daughter and Dr (soon to be Sir) David Brewster were in love.

  There is a difference between reflection and refraction, between bouncing light and bending it, between letting it loose and various, or twisting it and making it simple. As I mentioned before, Sir David’s life’s work was to make light simple, something he did for the glory of man and God. Despite the way her eyes sparkled when she smiled, and the molten state of his heart, Sir David’s work was strenuous, simple and hard. He spent long hours computing angles, taking the rainbow apart.

  Imagine the man of science and his young bride on their wedding night, as she sits in front of the mirror and combs her hair, with the light of candles playing in the shadows of her face. Perhaps there are two mirrors on the dressing table, and she is reflected twice. Perhaps it was not necessary for there to be two, in order for Sir David to sense, in or around that moment, the idea of the kaleidoscope; because in their marriage bed, new forms, perfectly different, but equally symmetrical, successively presented themselves, sometimes vanishing in the centre, sometimes emerging from it, and sometimes playing around in double and opposite oscillations.

  (One of the most beautiful things about the kaleidoscope is, of course, that it is bigger on the inside. A simple trick which is done with mirrors.)

  Perhaps because of the lives they led, these people had a peculiar fear of being buried alive. This resulted in a fashionable device which was rented out to the bereaved. A glass ball sat on the corpse’s chest, and was connected, by a series of counterweights, pulleys and levers, to the air above. If the body started to breathe, the movement would set off the mechanism, and cause a white flag to be raised above the grave. White, being the colour of surrender, made it look as if death had laid siege, and failed.

  Death laid early siege to the bed of Sir David Brewster and his wife. She was to die suitably; pale and wasted against the pillows, her translucent hand holding a handkerchief, spotted with blood. It was a time when people took a long time to die, especially the young.

  It is difficult to say what broke her, a chance remark about the rainbow perhaps, when they were out for their daily walk, and he explained the importance of the angle of forty-two degrees. Or drinking a cup of warm milk with her father’s book on her lap, and finding the skin in her mouth. Or looking in the mirror one day and licking it.

  It was while she was dying that Sir David stumbled upon the kaleidoscope. He thought of her in the ballroom, when he first set eyes on her. He thought of her in front of the mirror. He built her a toy to make her smile in her last days.

  When she plays with it, the iris of her eye twists and widens with delight.

  Because of her horror of being buried alive, Sir David may have had his wi
fe secretly cremated. From her bone-ash he caused to be blown a glass bowl with an opalescent white skin. In it he put the Lacrymae Vitreae, the glass tears that were his first gift. Because the simple fact was, that Sir David Brewster’s wife was not happy. She had no reason to be.

  Sir David was sitting in his study, with the fire dying in the grate, his lens of Iceland spar abandoned by his side. He was surprised to find that he had been crying, and he lifted his head slowly from his hands, to wipe away the tears. It was at that moment that he was visited by his wife’s ghost, who was also weeping.

  She stood between him, the window and the snow outside. She held her hands out to him and the image shifted as she tried to speak. He saw, in his panic, that she could not be seen in the glass, though he saw himself there. Nor was she visible in the mirror, much as the stories told. He noted vague shimmerings of colour at the edge of the shape that were truly ‘spectral’ in their nature, being arranged in bands. He also perceived, after she had gone, a vague smell of ginger in the room.

  Sir David took this visitation as a promise and a sign. In the quiet of reflection, he regretted that he had not been able to view this spectral light through his polarising lens. This oversight did not, however, stop him claiming the test, in a paper which he wrote on the subject. Sir David was not a dishonest man, nor was he cold. He considered it one of the most important lies of his life. It was an age full of ghosts as well as science, and the now forgotten paper was eagerly passed from hand to hand.

  *

  Ruth’s mother was deaf. Her mouth hung slightly ajar. When Ruth was small her mother would press her lips against her cheek and make a small, rude sound. She used all of her body when she spoke and her voice came from the wrong place. She taught Ruth sign language and how to read lips. As a child, Ruth dreamt about sound in shapes.

  Sometimes her mother would listen to her through the table, with her face flat against the wood. She bought her a piano and listened to her play it through her hand. She could hear with any part of her body.

  Of course she was a wonder child, clever and shy. Her own ears were tested and the doctor said ‘That child could her the grass grow Mrs Rooney.’ Her mother didn’t care. For all she knew, the grass was loud as trumpets.

  Her mother told Ruth not to worry. She said that in her dreams she could hear everything. But Ruth’s own dreams were silent. Perhaps that was the real difference between them.

  When Ruth grew up she started to make shapes that were all about sound. She wove the notes of the scale in coloured strings. She turned duration into thickness and tone into shade. She overlapped the violins and the oboe and turned the roll of the drum into a wave.

  It seemed to Ruth that the more beautiful a piece of music was, the more beautiful the shape it made. She was a successful sculptor, who brought all of her work home to her mother and said ‘Dream about this, Ma. Beethoven’s Ninth.’

  Of course it worked both ways. She could work shapes back into the world of sound. She rotated objects on a computer grid and turned them into a score. This is the complicated sound of my mother sitting. This is the sound of her with her arm in the air. It played the Albert Hall. Her mother heard it all through the wood of her chair.

  As far as people were concerned, friends and lovers and all the rest, she listened to them speak in different colours. She made them wonder whether their voices and their mouths were saying the same thing as their words, or something else. The whole message was suddenly complicated, involuntary and wise.

  On the other hand, men never stayed with her for long. She caused the sound of their bodies to be played over the radio, which was, in its way, flattering. What they could not take was the fact that she never listened to a word they said. Words like: ‘Did you break the clock?’ ‘Why did you put the mirror in the hot press?’ ‘Where is my shoe?’

  ‘The rest is silence.’

  When Ruth’s mother was dying she said ‘I will be able to hear in Heaven.’ Unfortunately, Ruth knew that there was no Heaven. She closed her mother’s eyes and her mouth and was overwhelmed by the fear that one day her world would be mute. She was not worried about going deaf. If she were deaf then she would be able to hear in her dreams. She was terrified that her shapes would lose their meaning, her grids their sense, her colours their public noise. When the body beside her was no longer singing, she thought, she might as well marry it, or die.

  She really was a selfish bastard (as they say of men and angels).

  Fruit Bait

  THE FIRST TATTOO was an audience in purple and green, with mouths that laughed when she lifted her arms. Never turn your back, the man told her as the last vermilion lost its sting. Spiders, fish, an octopus on her backside with a beak that opened and shut. She knew that the tattooist was mad when he talked to her about power, although she dreamt about applause all the time.

  She woke up to an empty room and a bad smell from the sheets, dreamt again of a blind woman and her serving boy, faithful unto death.

  A friend called at eleven o’clock and talked about people they knew. Pregnant women mostly, and men who couldn’t make up their minds.

  She slept again all afternoon and expected her body to be changed when she woke. The tattooist was there with a bouquet of flowers, tiger lilies on her hands and African violets in a chaplet on her thigh.

  The street was full of opportunities for a natural-born hero: people to follow, messages on the path, a faint smell of kerosene in a back alley. The cars floated by like a movie and there could have been anyone at the wheel.

  She bought a packet of cigarettes and then stole out of the shop, looking down the street for a man with a port wine stain, or a tear-shaped mole.

  An old geezer accosted her over coffee and recognised her voice from an ad for the telephone. ‘Reach out and touch …’ he said, ‘someone you love.’

  ‘Have you paid your television licence?’ she asked.

  ‘Just relax with Johnson’s tea,’ he said. ‘I can tell, you’re an actress to your fingertips.’

  ‘Well, to the tip of my tongue, anyway.’

  That night her radio voice took on a face. She was a rich girl and the tattooist swabbed a blue veil over her belly with a trompe l’œil rococo façade on her thighs. A cherub on either breast flew when she lifted her arms. A friend knocked on her door at four in the morning and found her body clean as a sheet.

  There was work on Wednesday. ‘Style! Lift! Gel!’ – another radio ad. She took the cheque and celebrated with a bag full of fruit which would catch the light on the table in her flat. Two hours were spent in a bookshop thinking about a volume of photographs that didn’t have any people in it at all, then she walked the streets again, feeding herself and waiting for the applause. A woman walked by with tanned décolletage like a gift to the unwary and her perfect breasts seemed to laugh at her face.

  The bag of fruit was beginning to weigh in her hand when she saw the man with the tear-shaped mole, that hung like a promise under one pea-green eye. He was dressed like an accountant and had large, uncomfortable hands. She trailed his sad back to the door of a firm in Merrion Square. (Oh boy. Right again.) As he walked up the steps she caught his arm. ‘You must have dropped this …’ putting a nectarine in his fist.

  There was no sleep at all that night, but she made extensive plans to get her hair cut and start drinking again. She sat opposite the door in Merrion Square at lunchtime and dressed the passers-by in brocade and panniered petticoats. He came out at last, with the shadow of a fob watch swinging above his belt, and she rolled an orange at his feet as he walked along. He picked it up on his toe like a hurler and flipped it in to his hand then looked round before she was gone.

  Apples, tangerines, peaches, a whole melon. By the end of the week she had bought a pineapple and the tattooist was going wild. There were birds all over her back singing in a tree with forked roots. He was causing her more pain. Blood was dabbed away with pieces of newspaper, and the earthquake on page seven cracked all over her torso when
she tossed in her sleep. He turned her front into an armchair with a chintz design. And on the last night she foamed like the sea while a cormorant dived from her throat.

  On Pineapple Day she dressed like Carmen Miranda, and walked around the square three times before settling by the door. The people passing by wore peacock hats and leopard-skin claws dangling at the throat when the man with the tear-shaped mole let himself out through the door. He kept his suit on, but the briefcase in his hand started to sprout as he walked past her down the steps. He turned in the street and faced her as she let the pineapple fall. It bounced from one step to the next and rolled to his feet.

  Historical Letters

  1.

  SO. I WOULDN’T wash the sheets after you left, like some tawdry El Paso love affair. No one is unhappy in El Paso. There is lithium in the water supply. So it all still smells of you and at four in the morning that’s a stink and at five it’s a desert hum, with cicadas blooming all over the ceiling. Because you are on the road.

  I am not hysterical. We have mice – just to go with all this heat and poverty and lust business, two women with grown-up salaries and lives to run after. Actually, it is hot, which I hate. If I want weather I pay for it, besides, the sun only came out for you. Actually, also, there is something in the water supply.

  I have prehensile toes because you made my feet grip like a baby’s fist. That’s not something you forget so easily.

  *

  You, on the other hand, do forget – easily and all the time. This is something I admire. You don’t make up little stories to remember by. Which means that I am burdened with all the years that you passed through and neglected. I can handle them, of course, with my excellent synapses that feel no pain.

  There is something about you that reminds me of the century. You talk like it was Before as well as After and you travel just to help you think – as if we were all still living in nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-five. There’s nothing special about you, Sunshine, except how gentle you are. And you talk like it was nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-four. ‘Live a quiet life, be true, try to be honest. Work, don’t hurt people.’ You said all this while putting on your socks, which were bottle-green, very slowly.