Black Mirror (17 page)

Amen
, added Mary.

 

When, late at night, Victoria set fire to the boat-shed, it was a magnificent thing. Convulsive flames transformed the ordinary into a theatre of light, and she watched it from a distance, from her little wedge of darkness, begin as a small lit window flaring in the night, and become a whole cathedral, and wholly glorious. And on the shining water a second boat-shed burned, puzzled by ripples as wood fragments began to scatter and fall. By the time the roof was ablaze boats had been released across the river, and they drifted there, made of fire, arks of brilliancy. The fire-brigade didn't have a chance; like the Lyric theatre the boat-shed was of Baltic pine.

(viii)

Only Mary Heany could possibly have told them. When the school expelled Victoria Morrell for criminal acts, Mary was not present at the ritual humiliation at Assembly. Victoria, said the headmistress, was a symbol to them all, a symbol of pure wickedness. She had disgraced the good name of her family, and the excellent name of her school. Three hundred girls, six hundred eyes, looked steadily upon her, thrilled at her abasement. Two teachers loaded Victoria onto the train, and neither offered comfort, neither waved.

 

Her conflagration returned, again and again. Sails of flame blowing open on water of dense black. Sparks. Scintillas. The whole vision bisected, streaming in two directions at once. This doubling made it much more impressive than the Lyric. She closed her eyes and saw it still, a kind of retinal after-image, cast like a flare on the screens beneath her eyelids, persisting into vision even in the darkness after fires.

 

Victoria felt powerful and incorruptible. Sweetly delinquent thoughts assailed her. She considered buildings for their immanent combustibility and wondered if she could rob a bank, or even commit murder. She could not have known then the other forms of darkness that awaited her. She stepped off the hissing train into a white-hot day, and saw that only her father and brother were at the station to
meet her. No Lily-white, no Ruby, no Miss Casey, no Mrs Murphy. For a moment Victoria could not comprehend what had happened. Henry was enormous, over six feet tall, and now eighteen years old, pimply, rigid-faced, with wiry brown whiskers and an Adam's apple, and her father in this company was both smaller and more corpulent, but aged not at all. (He tipped his Spanish hat, as though to a passing acquaintance.) Sometime during the three years she had been away at school they had both returned, and changed her home almost completely. Lily-white and Ruby had been banished — Victoria had no idea where and no one could inform her; Miss Casey, rejected, had returned to the city of her own accord; and only the widow Mrs Murphy remained. At the house she ran to Victoria and desperately engulfed her, crushing the young woman's body into her own. She had become thin and grizzled, a shadow of her former self.

 

So this was Victoria, then, caught in awful reversal and returned to a place which was no longer her home. The glassy eyes of stuffed animals followed her around the room, and she nestled in the curtain folds beside the giraffe, and experienced such extreme desolation that
Mel-bourne
was all she was, a kind of sound around an emptiness, a shape containing its own vacuity. She sang to herself in a way that recalled her lost mother, Lily-white. She cried, and forgot to eat, and was tormented by loneliness.

One day she sought out Mrs Murphy for company and a talk, and found her alone, seated at the peculiar task of cleaning a chandelier.

I wish I was made of glass, Victoria heard herself announce.

Mrs Murphy looked up from the smooth crystal petal she was polishing.

What was that, lovey? What? What?

But Victoria had fallen silent. It was not something she could repeat. It was too preposterous. She had become a girl who speaks nonsense, a girl spiritless and lost.

Mrs Murphy resumed her work, glum and uncommunicative.

 

Perhaps she needed some exclamation mark to show them how terrible she felt: Victoria decided to make a bonfire of her mother's clothes. She stole into her father's room and simply lit them where they were. It was impossibly easy.

But the space was too confined or her spirit too damp, because the fire was not special. Flames began and then sank almost immediately to smouldering, and the wardrobe filled up with acrid smoke. Something too had alerted and disturbed Mrs Murphy, for she ran in — crying out
Christ-Almighty, Christ-Almighty
— and then returned with a bucket of water and doused everything with one swing. Victoria was given the task of cleaning up, and made to feel ashamed.

She scooped scraps of burnt soggy fabric, holding her nose against the smell, and with these redolent remains, powdering even as she held them, wondered then what her mother, Rose Morrell, might actually have looked like. She knew her other mother Lily-white in such physical detail (she had even stared unflinchingly at the circular pit where the eye once lay, just to know her with close and loving particularity), but realised that she had no image of this Rose woman at all. She was perhaps like Mary's Mary, blue-eyed and black-haired, a woman taller even than her brother, and even more powerful. Victoria sifted small objects from the detritus of the burning: an opalescent buckle shaped as a broad petalled flower, buttons of bone and of pearl-shell, small coin-shapes of amber. These unburnable traces were precious to her. Most of the shoes were also unburned, but were ruined now, and sullied, and filled with mucky puddles of foul-smelling ash.

Les chasseurs
, Victoria whispered to herself.
Feu. Coeur. Cendre. Cinderella
. She put the shoes into a box, to be taken away.

It was only when Victoria leant right into the wardrobe, tilting, on her knees, into the space of scorched darkness, that she found the hidden treasure of her dead mother's journal, tucked in a far corner. She tilted back, almost nauseated from the stench and the enclosure, with the stowed-away book in her trembly hands. Her mother's journal. Its cover was splashed but its interior dry, and when Victoria opened
it she saw immediately that her mother was more elusive than she had imagined, writing mostly not in English, but in some cryptogrammic style. Only the curly ampersands were at all recognisable. It was like receiving a love letter written in the wrong language. It was exciting and heartbreaking, all at once. Victoria tucked the journal in her dress, and rushed to hide it in her bedroom. Her secret. Her mother. Dragged from the fire. Goosebumps rose on her skin, as though marking physically her entry to a paranormal zone.

 

When after work Henry Morrell heard of the wardrobe burning, he entered Victoria's room with a savage grin, and beat his younger sister about the head. In the morning she saw her own face swollen and discoloured, remade in lilac and indigo, and with two black eyes. This was almost unsurprising, to see something so monstrously sad. The mirror held her up, ruined and defeated, susceptible now to death-wishes and hauntings and the flitting retreat of all her hopes.

Victoria said:

I have several Black Mirror stories and I will give you three.

What are the Black Mirror stories, my Anna-lytical?

They are myself, unrecognisable. They are myself, writing disaster. I looked into a mirror and darkness looked back.

I do not remember her death,
but they say I was there.

I do not remember her funeral, but they say I was there.

My mother is everything I do not remember, a darkness with no flashes, an evacuated space, an
oubliette
. Sometimes I cannot bear so much black-coloured forgetting.

I once tried, like the artist Brauner, to paint with my eyes closed, believing this act might recover the lineaments of her lost face, or at least its vague aspect, or intimation; but there was still no consequence and no true icon. I tried too, like the poet Desnos, to speak Surrealistically at will; I imagined that a word-link, unconsciously chanced upon, would somehow reconnect us. But all contrivances failed. Art is the windowpane, the barrier, against which we press our searching faces.

When I was seventeen years old, I discovered my dead mother's journal in a coffin-like wardrobe, full of cinders. For several days I tried unsuccessfully to decipher it — it appeared to be written in an alien and difficult script — until one morning it accidentally fell open upside-down and I noticed that the words read this way were much more familiar. In fact the letters were cuneiform versions, upside-down and back-to-front, of the English alphabet: my mother had simply disguised them by making each more square and substantial; yet she had placed the ampersands the right way up, and by this simple trick misled intruding readers. I began at first to transcribe the shapes, but found after no time at all that I could read the words fluently.

 

You already know a little of what I discovered. My father, the chauffeur, seems to have been a young man of unusual patience and tenderness, or at least this is how my mother always described him. He existed to wait for her voice, to pop up the umbrella, to take her elbow and hold open the door as she stepped on the running board of the Daimler. He existed in the rain and in the car; he seems never to have entered the house. I think that perhaps my mother loved the terrible exclusion he bore. He must have known her best through the rear-view mirror — a lover in a glass box, small and rectangular; and she must have known him best by the back of his neck. And like all secret lovers they would have cherished their plaited
glances, the furtive outreaching, the hidden complicities. I have thought of this often and wondered how they sustained their secret. I picture my mother with cupid-bow lips and a pounding heart, approaching very slowly in one of those bulbous veiled hats, and this man, my father, shifting from foot to foot in the foggy cold, and tracking her motion towards him as though he were tracking a point of perihelion. She would have burned as she grew closer; his cold made her blush and feel her own warmth unendurably. She might have lowered her eyelids, only to glance up again as his hand pulled at the door handle, to see herself, a woman in a hat, floating in the lustre of his eyes. I imagine between my parents an enormous decorum and restraint, since the affair was apparently never discovered, and she never ran away with him. Together they practised an almost oriental formality, moving in tight patterns of oblique correspondence.

When I deciphered the journal I was at first dismayed. I did not judge my mother for taking a lover, but felt instead doubly orphaned by the long deception; Father was not my father; we had both been hoodwinked. And where was this chauffeur, this William, this man always shivery in the greyish light of rain or speed?

I dreamt a car sped past that I knew he was driving, but I saw only the back of a man's neck, in blurry retreat.

 

It's strange to remember it now: like all irrevocable revelations it carried with it a certain quality of
despair. I did not, of course, tell my father or brother of my discovery, but confided in Mrs Murphy. Her liver-spotted hands flew to her face and she looked at me with a puzzled stare as though she had suddenly gone deaf and was lip-reading gibberish. She was dismayed by my knowledge and demanded I destroy Rose's journal. She answered no questions and forbade discussion on the subject. She closed shut like a door. She banged in my face. I was left unassuaged and unbeloved, and I retreated behind the curtain folds like a five-year-old girl.

But small details, once revealed, find their own routes of enlargement. One day a letter came from Tilly, addressed to Mrs Murphy. The envelope lay on the kitchen table and I noticed, with just a peep, that it contained a return address. So it was that I eventually found out what I needed to know: I wrote to Tilly who lived somewhere in mythical Melbourne and asked her all the questions Mrs Murphy had forbidden me.

 

Tilly's correspondence returned quickly and in two separate parts. The first part was a parcel with a note attached: Tilly had stolen a stereoscope when she left my father's employ, had always felt guilty, and was now returning it. The stereoscope looked rather like a pair of opera glasses; two shafts of silver held with a wooden handle, and arranged at an angle which endowed images with three dimensionality. There was a neat boxed set of small strips of narrative — tiny little photographs with
one-line captions — that could be affixed to the viewing frame. The stereoscope Tilly returned had a story-strip already within it:

Frame one
: Portly rich man in opulent drawing room, possibly American. Wallpaper, ferns, paintings, chaise longue. Rich man to servant girl, coy and pretty: ‘Why my beauty, how long have you been our cook?'

Frame two
: Rich man steals kiss: ‘Oh you naughty man!'

Frame three
: ‘You bashful little creature', chucking her chin.

Frame four
: ‘Hands! Hands! What does she mean?'

The man's wife (one supposes), fierce, statuesque, is pointing angrily. He is looking in the mirror above the fireplace, and imprinted on his back are two floury handmarks.

Tilly wrote:
I wanted this so badly, I couldn't leave it behind. It belonged to your father.

When I think now of Tilly's theft the word
dolorous
attaches to it; it carries the sadness of servants, heavy, righteous, saturated with bleak longing for something possessed casually by others. I wonder too about her relationship with my father: how long, how often, whether it started before my mother died. In my memory Tilly figures as woeful and shrill, with alarmed upstanding hair and red eyes like a debil-debil. But this must be unkind. In any case, her letter was rather piteous.

I also wonder whether I saw the stereoscopic stories as a child, since those hands are one of my
important symbols. You see them everywhere throughout my paintings. White hands. Cameo hands. Hands like thin clouds on the verge of erasure. That Tilly was my father's mistress was unsurprising, but the line
hands, hands, what does she mean?
and those melodramatic hand prints, tell-taling something anterior, those astonished me. It was like a dream returning with spontaneous understanding:
une vague de rêve,
the Surrealists call it, a wave of dream.

 

The second part of Tilly's correspondence was a letter. Tilly wrote that she had known my chauffeur father well, and had always been fond of him. They lost contact when some of the household moved to the goldfields, and had not seen each other for several years. When they met again, in Melbourne, William had just returned from a trip to the goldfields, where rather belatedly he had learnt of Rose's death. He entered, Tilly said, a long period of depression; he became thin and spectre-like; his skin was blue and pallid with its lack of substance, and he had rings under his eyes so that he looked bruised and old. It was only then that she heard of the love between Rose and William, and of the child, and the severing, and the promises of reunion. At length William decided to return to London, where he had lived as a boy. He wrote to her from there, sending word of his work, and his marriage, and the birth of his new daughter. At some stage William stopped responding to Tilly's letters: she assumed he was caught up in his London life and fam
ily. She had printed out the London address boldly and underlined it.

Write!
she instructed.
He will love to hear from you
.

 

Sometimes I wonder how indeed I resisted writing, or what fear prevented it. In all lives there are these inexplicable pauses and hesitations. Lost chances. Failed words. Untimely hush. But when I arrived in London to enrol at art college the prospect of meeting my lost father was suddenly irresistible. I took the address dear Tilly had passed into my keeping, and found the house, and the green door, and the number painted on it, and behind the green door lived a diminutive pop-eyed widow, who clearly knew who I was, but did not want to admit me. I stood at the doorstep in silvery drizzle and the woman — her name was Flora — told me blankly of my father's death.

Nine years ago now. A tram. A tram killed 'im. We 'ad a loverly funeral, all carnations and ribbons.

She spoke in an East End accent and did not blink or avert her gaze, as though she was challenging me to contradict her with refutation of William's death. Behind her, in the dim hallway, appeared a tall young girl I assumed to be my half-sister. She too stood still, watching me. Light from behind her illuminated a crescent of fuzzy curls. I could see lumpy dark-coloured furniture with crocheted covers, and a standing lamp of dirty parchment. In the low-wattage light of the front room everything looked secretive, sad and only partially disclosed.

A tram, Flora repeated. It was a tram as killed 'im.

I remember peering into the house half-expecting my father to materialise. It did not seem possible I could learn of his death on the day I had at last decided to meet him. I wanted to ask for details, or to see a photograph, but words stuck in my throat. The tall girl in the dim hallway, looking so like an apparition, drifted slowly towards me. Her face was a nest of light. Her eyes were enormous. I reached past Flora and placed my address in her daughter's open hand.

I was damp, clammy and washed yet again by grief.

 

You would have liked my youngest sister Frances. Flora refused all her life to see me again, but Frances and I were good friends until she died fifteen years ago of cancer of the breast. We shared sisterly secrets and the same-shaped faces. She worked as housekeeper for a Catholic priest, and never married; yet neither did she disapprove of my life or my sequence of partners. And she loved me, I think, as I loved her, with gratitude for the discovery that had rendered us each less alone. In London we met regularly for tea and shopping (and she liked it when I wore my feathers in public — the cat-called remarks, the consternation, the stares), but I could never persuade her to visit me in Paris. You're the arty one, she used to say. It was a relationship that was curiously imperturbable. Nothing unsettled it. There is a deckle-edged photograph taken on a footpath in Leicester Square, and you
can see the solidarity of feeling that existed between us, the Surrealist show-off, madly feathered, and the prim-and-proper housekeeper with her handbag clutched anxiously over her crotch. We are both smiling radiantly. And we both share a glorious and sisterly likeness.

 

Frances once confided to me that she had a life-long ambition to appear as an extra in a Hollywood movie. She wanted to be, she said, a face carried forward into history in some incidental, irrefutable and time-defeating way; not important or even speaking, but incorrigibly visible. I loved her when she told me that. Since her death I have sometimes imagined that I spot her at the cinema, there, in a glimpse, in a brief screened resurrection. In movies we seek in the pallor of those giant faces the netherland of our own lost ghosts. We seek — don't you think? — the vehicle of the face. The transporting light.

 

Of our father Frances remembered a long shape in a winged armchair, and a certain, but definite, circlet of embrace. It was a memory Flora maintained she was too young to recall, but Frances insisted was true.

The shape of him, she said. Just the shape of him persists.

And I remember a man who stood outside in the front yard, called out my mother's name, and then sat on the earth with Lily-white, intently weeping. An emblem of tranced and concentrated grief. We talked
often about our father with just these traces. A shape and a grief-stricken waterfall of tears.

 

But you are wondering, aren't you, about my mother's death? You are wondering what Tilly's letter might have revealed.

How do I tell you this? How do I unconceal?

I suppose as a child I had always assumed that my mother committed suicide. With the discovery of the journal I decided that she was lovelorn and wholly despairing, and that the silence that gathered around her death was consolidating some private or public shame. Even Henry, my brother, didn't know how she died, and spent his childhood developing more and more barbarous theories. But her death was in fact a simple accident. A simple, appalling accident.

She had leant forward to adjust her hair in the long mirror above the fireplace, and the fine fabric of her long dress had brushed into the fire. It was something gauzy and light; something very beautiful flared up and killed her. The fire swept towards her face so that she became a bell of flame.