Sixty Lights (20 page)
Authors: Gail Jones
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 â the Metropolitan, they called it â 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 â this she knew â 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 â propped up now because she could no longer lie with comfort in the confining carriage â 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 â in Spitalfields â 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.
Dear Isaac
,
I write most of all to thank you for your words about Neville. To know that you remember him so fondly is a great comfort and consolation, and Thomas and I were moved by the loyalty and depth of feeling in your descriptions. Neville sounded both more comic and more serious than we knew him; perhaps, taking the parent role, he felt constrained with his charges and new responsibilities. In any case, Thomas has shown me the grave, which is a simple affair in a rather neat little churchyard, not far from where we live. My sweet sister-in-law, Violet, places flowers regularly upon it, although she knew Neville for less than one year.
My brother continues to thrive in his business. The owner of the Magic Lantern Establishment, a Mr Childe, has made him a partner, and together they entertain novel schemes and vast ambitions. Thomas is convinced, as I am, that there will one day be moving-picture shows, which tell stories not by posed scenes but by the simulation of life itself, in all its restless mobile spirit and colourful complication. Patrons will enter the lantern show as though they are entering a dream, and see before them apparitions in a kingdom of light. There will be new effects and new sensations â “partickler when he see the ghost!” â as Neville used to say; it will be a communing with spirits more brilliant than any seance could contact or conjure. Thomas and I talk often of this idea. Like some photographers in London he is using magnesium to create a
sudden flash of light, and though it is dangerous and volatile, believes something in its bright combustibility holds a key to the development of the magic lantern. Thomas is also experimenting with super-impositions and different lenses. He affixed a microscopic device to the magic-lantern camera and with the aid of a surgeon from the Royal College projected slides of cell life for training doctors to observe. I sat in the back row with Ellen and found the show a marvel â much more than the dreadful Mutiny I wrote to you about, or the endless, utterly conventional romances. Our inner substance, dear Isaac, is a series of blossom-looking cells, netted and sewn up with miniature veins and capillaries. We are plant life, it seems, and wonderfully intricate.
The surgeon used a pointer to indicate areas of concern, but I could not follow his discourse, which was for doctors alone, and in a vocabulary largely incomprehensible. I found myself looking simply at the shapes before me, of which life itself â imagine! â is shrewdly composed. Thomas too was agog at this fleshly spectacle: when I saw him after the screening he was dumbstruck with awe and barely knew what to say. (“Partickler when he see the ghost.”) Thomas does not believe, as I most assuredly do, that the living body may be one day photographed inside: for him dead cells are the peak of visual exploration. Nevertheless, he was deeply impressed and talked of nothing else for two weeks. I must add that Ellen writhed and was inattentive throughout the surgeon's show: how does one direct the vision of small children or assert which image is important or which inconsequential? Perhaps this can only be known by one's self. Perhaps we are not part of all we have met, but of all that we sensationally or passionately notice. What do you think, my dearest Isaac?
You ask for news of my work and I can report truthfully that my knowledge of chemistry is improving â largely through correspondence with the Society of Photographers â and that I am slowly mastering the wet collodion technique. Yes, I still stain my clothes and have a sprinkling of silver nitrate and powder stains on my hands, but am more careful now at mixing and decanting my collodion. As you know, the glass slide
must still be wet with emulsion when the photograph is exposed, and for a long time I worried about the bubbles in the mixture and the appearance of thumbprints on the corners of the image. Now these seem to me charming, although the men of the Society of Photographers consider thumbprints a sin and me an irredeemable sinner for refusing their wise counsel and continuing wilfully to reproduce this faint mark of my own handiwork. The photograph should appear, one of them wrote to me, as if God had breathed it onto the glass. Reprobate that I am, I am still wedded to the maculate and the human sign, and accept now that my work will never be exhibited in the halls of South Kensington. If I could locate another woman interested in photography, I feel sure I could speak honestly and openly of these matters and defend more confidently my maculate aesthetic.
I too have been experimenting and wishing to find new effects. When I take the lens cap off to expose the plate, I count the seconds carefully, one to five, but have now been leaving the cap off longer, or shorter, and recording the results. I have been using albumen paper as well, and remember that in the factory we used to dry it as quickly as possible to achieve an extra sheen on the surface of the paper. There is some link between sheen and heat I have not yet discovered. I take care with my glass plates â much more than with the chemicals â and am keen to try emulsion on metal (they are called ferrotypes, or tintypes) which I believe have a dark mysterious look to them and would be more suitable for someone as accident-prone as myself. It is of course you, dear Isaac, who has made this unprofitable employment possible: I know you asked me not to thank you again for your payments, but â just one last time â I am grateful, more than I can say, for all the material assistance you have given me, and more than that for your encouragement in my faltering art.
My beloved Ellen remains the other true focus â there is no other word for it â of my time and devotion, and when she is able she too will utter thanks and embrace you as her honourable uncle. She has at last begun walking and launches herself into the world with a wild
toppling gait, jerky and wilful. She has no fear of anything, and charges towards water and birds and flights of stairs with truly alarming rapidity and sureness of intent. I have to keep sweeping her up in my arms to restrain this movement, and fear for her safety more often than not. She inhabits her body so robustly, and with such ease of spirit, and has an appetite for substances of many kinds. I caught her this morning with a mouthful of bright green leaves: she looked like some bloated insect creature, caught at herbivorous luncheon. I had to put my fingers deep into her mouth to extract all the leaves, and she screamed at me and wailed, as though I had robbed her of a boiled sweet. I delight in her presumption, her imperious claim to space, her loud, loud voice, her curly hair, the sight of her arms waving like a windmill as she runs off to each new and important adventure. At this stage Ellen seems largely uninterested in speech; Thomas says it is because she uses her mouth for everything else! (She calls him Tom-Tom, which amuses him greatly â he says she sees still within him his old Brazilian ambition â but she cannot manage “Violet” in any form or contraction.)
Enclosed with this letter is my favourite photograph of Ellen. Although it is a little blurry, since she would not be bribed to stay wholly still (and the Society of Photographers, I must say, would berate me for displaying such an image) â you can see her quicksilver glance and her aspect of intelligence. The beguilement of infants resides not in their posed formality or settled good behaviour, but in these evasions of order, these clever rebellions. You must not think the image blunted, but on the verge of locomotion. And if you look carefully with your magnifying glass â as I did, seeking particular details â you can see a curved arc of light resting neatly in each eyeball which is the cheval mirror I set at the window to train more light into the room. This felicitous inclusion, this bent light that places my intention upon and within my daughter's face, excites and pleases me. It is another form of love, is it not, the studied representation? It is devotional. Physical. A kind of honouring attention. I think of photography â no doubt absurdly â as a kind of kiss.
Let me now tell you about my new friend, Mrs Molly Minchin. When I was a child in Australia the same Molly Minchin came to stay with us. She was a friend of my mother's, and a midwife, employed for the tragic birth I have spoken of to you. After the deaths of my parents she stayed on in our house, cooking meals, cleaning, trying hard to look after us. I despised Molly Minchin because in my grief-stricken reasoning I held her somehow responsible for my mother's death, and I also resented her presence and her act of substitution. Now I have remet her â she was stomping about in Kew Gardens and reading Latin names with a clang as if she was ringing a brass bell. She has a sturdy vigour and openness to life which has quite revived me. I recognised her immediately because she carries a distinctive purple wine-mark, which covers one half of her face: this conspicuousness in the world has not marred or undermined her, but given her a resolute strength of character. I spied her through the lens of my camera and it was as if the long-past sprang phantomlike to confront me: I was afraid of a whiff of death, of some wound, or corruption, of something dark which would fly up like a bat and scratch at my face. I hid for a while, afraid, silently observing her in my black-out tent of velvet, before I saw her about to move on, and called out my own name.
Molly grew up in Madras, so we speak together of India. We also speak of Australia, and of her memories of my parents. I tried for so long to forget my parents, but think now that Molly's company is meant to return me to them. She has a fine collection of stories and a loving presence. Ellen adores her. We are both rescued from our loneliness, and I from the feeling of being perpetually foreign and from a country no-one else really knows of, or believes in.
It is late now and time for the gas lamps to be lit. I greet you, dear Isaac, from across the earth and the ocean. The sun will now be rising on Malabar Hill. Please send me any news of Bashanti, and the others. I miss the self that I achieved in my year in India. She was a little braver than I am and more wide-awake, more healthy, more receptive to what is new. This is, I suppose, why we pale fellows travel. To find
the person with these qualities, the one enfolded secretly, like a love letter, in stuffy dank England or monumental Europe, or easy, remote, complacent Australia.
I photograph you in my mind,
Your affectionate friend,
Lucy Strange
(By the way, what is the significance of your name?)
