Sixty Lights (20 page)

With the doctor's confirmation of her illness Lucy was distracted for a while, then resumed her usual life. Ellen made it easy. Babies pull attention in their direction; they require fuss, organisation and sensible decisions, new clothes and new amusements for their amazing enlargement. Lucy was practical, maternal. Lucy kept calm, kept her
distance.
But at night she was assailed by imaginings of her own inner body. She imagined her lungs like honeycomb, fretted into unsupportable organic sculptures, lacy with their own death-dealing dissolution. She imagined air moving through the corridors of her altered anatomy, not finding the route to fuel her breath, but leaking out in a slow, suffocating exhalation. She saw, above all, a kind of city, all caves and pipelines and underground tubes, rather like the ones engineers were now creating under the streets of London – the Metropolitan, they called it – a dark new geography. Once she had stumbled upon workers emerging from a gape in the street; they had skin made of earth and looked like a fraternity of the underworld. She saw them blink and look lost. They wiped their faces with rags. Bog men. Lazarus men. Creatures of sub-London dark.

Someday – this she knew – doctors would have an apparatus
to photograph the inner body. To light the dark. They would present patients with crimson images of their hearts and lungs; they would show the skeleton in all its fine ivory architecture; they would reveal the tunnelling waterways of the blood and the convolutions of the bowels. They would photograph the baby within the womb, swelling into being, furled in great expectation, waiting upon its own features in its mother's developing fluids. They would even, Lucy imagined, photograph the brain, and these photographs would have a lyric and lambent quality: they would be like pods of loveliness, like newly discovered planets, remote, elaborate, drifting on glass plates like secrets still unbroken.

LUCY HAD BECOME
a walker. Something in her, some restlessness or sorrow or drive forward into life, compelled her to move through this city as though she could claim its whole compass. She strode out each day pushing Ellen – propped up now because she could no longer lie with comfort in the confining carriage – and walked from their new rooms in Stepney to Stepney Green, then along Whitechapel Road to Houndsditch Junction and down to the river along Bishopsgate. Sometimes she crossed London Bridge and headed to Kennington Park, one of her favourites. In another route she simply followed without plan the sinuous curve of the Thames, crossing bridges back and forth along the way. She knew all the bridge names and landmarks, and carried in her head the shiny ribbon of the Thames-shape she had seen on maps in the British Library, its humps and bows and thinning out to the west, its bright blue arterial representation that was nothing, nothing at all, like its actual brown. Sometimes, if she had money, she took the ferry to Westminster and then began walking west and north, tracking the city through its parks: St James's, Green, Hyde, up to Regent's, and then the long haul uphill to Hampstead Heath. It was a secret mission: to gaze on the water-shapes of rolling hills, to see again the world made extensive and open.

Several times Lucy combined walking and a carriage ride to travel from Stepney to Kew Gardens. She stood in the glass and iron palm house and gazed at peepuls, pepper-vines, tree-plants and palms, remembering India. The pavillion looked like the product of whimsy or the emanation of a dream; its rainforest light, its population of tropical plants garnered from all points on the equator, existed in unnatural defiance of the nature around it. Lucy moved in from the cold, pushing at the heavy swing doors with the nose of the baby carriage, into the artificial warmth caught under the high glassy chamber, then she pushed out again, and felt the cold air sting her cheeks. This was allegorical knowledge: the world split into zones, the bodily registration of selves that were divided, multiplied.

Lucy had spent entire days walking in this way, returning after dark, looking hollow-eyed and exhausted, with blisters on her feet and a ragged ill look. Thomas thought privately that this walking was a mild form of madness, an incessancy, a refusal to rest, that his sister had carried over from her long ocean travels. He saw that Lucy had grown thin and bore hoops beneath her eyes that in some lights appeared like dreadful bruises. She looked woeful, he thought. She looked like a fallen woman.

It was only when Lucy began taking her camera with her on these journeys that she learned to pause, to see again and more carefully images taken and untaken. Thomas constructed a kind of wooden box at the end of the baby carriage within which she carried her photographic equipment. The camera stand lay like a pronged spear along the side of the carriage, bound against it with twine. The baby carriage now looked like a new invention, a contraption that transported infants as it caught the world on a three-pronged spear. Heads turned as Lucy passed; she might have been an inventor, an eccentric.

It was in the spring, on these walks, that Lucy met through the contemplative vision of her camera the two companions who would save her from death by loneliness. One day at Kew, she was bent beneath the dark cloth shroud of her camera when she saw through the lens a face that was unforgettable. Beyond the glass walls of the palm house rising up into the sunshine, she saw a woman strolling by herself with her eyes closed and her face tilted to the sky, as if absorbing as much morning warmth as possible. She wore a feathered bonnet and a copious gown with a brown checkered front panel. It was Mrs Minchin. The purple shape that so marked her was for Lucy the coloured shock of the past returned: she swivelled the camera on its stand and watched as Mrs Minchin, who seemed not to have changed or aged at all, slowly began walking in her direction, then halted ten feet away and stood still in an oval-shaped flowerbed of blue crocuses, as if waiting to be photographed.

Lucy could have remained hidden but instead called out.

Mrs Minchin opened her eyes and looked around rather blearily, as if her ears had deceived her.

“It's me,” Lucy said loudly. “Lucy Strange. From Australia.”

She heard her own voice ring out into the open spaces and gardens.

Mrs Minchin stared. Then she was at once upon Lucy, and embraced her like a long-lost prodigal daughter. Ellen began to cry and Lucy bent to lift her; at this act Mrs Minchin's eyes filled with tears and she reached forward and took the howling infant in her arms, soothing it at once with her low voice and the ample bed of her bosom.

“Now, now. Now, now.”

“Let me look at you,” Mrs Minchin said to Lucy. “So grown up. So like Honoria.”

Then she added cannily: “Are you ill?”

Mrs Minchin had left Australia not long after Neville departed with the children. She stayed on until the house was sold, spending much of her time with blind Mrs O'Connor, but feeling bereft, distressed and alone in the world. Grief, she said, had almost destroyed her. It was like carrying a grey cloud over the heart. Like fog. Like blur. There were days when she cried for no reason, or sat staring at the wall, thinking in maddened ways of the children she didn't have. At length she found work as a nurse on a sea passage to England and had decided to stay, returning in London to her old profession of midwifery. Mrs Minchin now lived not far from Lucy – in Spitalfields – in a small room at the back of a building above a pharmaceutical store, from which leaked, she said, odiferous vapours. Lucy tried to imagine Mrs Minchin in her stinking room, resting on a narrow bed in her chequered dress, her purple face obscured, in a mote-filled light.

Now they were together in a place of incomparable greenness and unlikely coincidence. There were planted beds of daffodils, crocuses, tulips and pansies, and Mrs Minchin kept exclaiming at their prettiness then trampling them to pick samples for Ellen to chew at and tear. She was always leaving the paths and heading off to examine the Latin names pinned to the trunks of trees.

“
Prunus avium plena!
” she called out. She stood under a quivery cascade of full white blossom.

“
Hippocastanum!
”

“Horse Chestnut,” called back Lucy. “I know that one.”

All around the park decorous couples strolled arm-in-arm along the paths and entered and left the glass buildings with a sideways swish of a broad skirt, the collapse of a parasol, the removal of a hat. Mrs Minchin was unstoppable. She hitched up her dress and waded through flowerbeds and grasses, deviating from the paths to the sources of her own pleasure
and attention. Lucy watched her form and saw within it a hefty liveliness. Her girlhood feelings of antipathy instantly evaporated. Here was a woman of spirit and gumption, cutting swathes with her body in order to shout out the name of a tree. She carried Ellen resting low and secure on her hip.

The photograph Lucy took of them had from the second of its existence the redolent quality of a remembrance of things past: it framed Mrs Minchin and Ellen under a canopy of
Prunus avium plena
blossom, looking like a grandmother and her beloved granddaughter. The tree formed a drooping soft dome-shape around them. Fallen petals lay on their shoulders and in the fine nets of their hair. Mrs Minchin's wine-stain face appeared as a face in deep shadow. The photograph seemed almost to convey the fragrance in the air.

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.