Sixty Lights (21 page)

JACOB WEBB LEARNED
as a young boy that nothing was fixed but art. His father, a Nonconformist lay preacher and farmer in Nottinghamshire, taught him that the Bible was inerrant, that man was sinful, and that the hand of God was at work mysteriously in every accidental, or miserable, or minor catastrophe. God was always responsible, it seemed, for things that went wrong.

At the age of seven Jacob witnessed an astonishing hailstorm. It was deep mid-winter. The steely sky filled with stones the size of billiard balls, which catapulted with malevolent aim onto the heads of their chickens. Four died, knocked flat by the sky's sudden ice. Jacob's dog, Red, had been caught outside in the storm and cowered, whimpering softly, beside a rain barrel, so Jacob had to run like a madman through the hail to fetch him, and then half drag and half carry the poor animal towards the house. The air was crazy with missiles. He could hear the pounding of falling stones hitting the thatched roof, dropping into the hen-house, and bouncing off the woodshed; he could smell the pungent wet fur of his terrified dog; and he could feel the hard pellets of ice battering at his body. One caught his right shoulder with a sickening crack and another struck his outstretched arm. Foolishly, Jacob turned his face to the sky, and at that moment a hailstone hit him directly
on the ear. He felt a pain like fire flash through the ball of his skull. He cupped his hand over his stinging and remarkably hot ear, and tugged hard at Red. But he was so confused and disabled that he was momentarily unsure in which direction they should move. The dog was lumpish and heavy and not helping at all. His own hands and feet were unendurably cold. Jacob thought:
I will die here, right here; this is a kind of punishment. And Red will die too, and so will more of the chickens, and there will be a huge grave to cover us – boy, dog and chickens – all lying mixed together.

Jacob's father appeared from somewhere and gathered him in his arms. A great coat fell around the boy like the wings of an angel. It was a Miracle. Deliverance. These were words that he knew. His father ran directly to the house and lay him inside. Then he ran out again into the hail to rescue the dog. Jacob thought:
Praise the Lord, praise the strength of my father!

Later he realised there was a thread of blood trickling from his ear, and that his mother was by his side, binding his head with a bandage. He seemed to swim in pain. Light was too intense. The room washed before him and then gradually settled. He could see his father smoking a pipe in the large chair beside the fireplace, and Red, apparently now at peace and sound asleep, resting his head gently on Father's feet. Jacob's sister, Ruth, who was older by ten years and moved in the world of adults, was calmly kneading dough at the table in the kitchen. Things looked the same, but were not. They would never again be the same.

When Jacob saw his body, the next morning, the top half was covered with bruises. “
Ring-streaked and spotted,
” it said in the Bible. The white bandage around his head looked like a little girl's Sunday bonnet. Jacob was ashamed to wear it. He hated the sight of himself. He felt that such a cataclysm in the sky, and his vision of the mixed grave, and the casually strewn corpses, all this was an augur of something awful to come. His
slim blue body, there in the mirror, showed the direct violence of the hand of God. He was “
ring-streaked and spotted
”.

Jacob waited days for his presentiment of doom to be fulfilled, but nothing happened. Things were the same, after all. Then, two weeks later, just as he was beginning to relax and to doubt the sign of his bruised body, his father fell down in the meadow, gasping and gulping for air. His body was paralysed on one side and his mouth was fixed open. Tears flowed from his eyes, but his face was inexpressive. He lay prostrate, like an infant, his grey head resting where it fell, in mud and shit. Jacob stared down at his father and understood at once: this was it, worse than death, this prone, sad sight. Skin like meat, a marble eye, the stinking sully of sheep-mess and unmanly, mute immobility. Mr Nicholls, the cartwright who lived in the cottage on the hill, was summoned to help carry Jacob's father back to their house. Jacob stood stiff like a soldier and watched him slowly hauled up. His father's left arm was dangling like Christ's, in an old image he had seen of the deposition from the cross. His father half-dead, half-crucified. It frightened him to think about it.

At first everyone fussed and attended the patient with care. He could not move or speak, and was given to uncontrollable tears. Jacob saw how very aged his father suddenly looked, and realised for the first time that he was many years older than his mother. He knew nothing about how they met, or of their courtship, or of their mismatched marriage. Jacob read the Bible to his father and fed him porridge with a spoon. The slack mouth failed properly to take its nourishment. Jacob wiped his father's chin with a cloth and when he leaned very close he could smell death, sour death, lingering inside his open mouth. This was the man who had rescued him from the world of pelting ice. This was the man who had been as strong as an angel. Jacob wanted his father returned, his big
strong father, not this ruin with a foul mouth and wet, wet eyes.

Jacob's father lived on for three more months, dying just days before his son's eighth birthday. He was laid out on the kitchen table, his arms folded to his chest like resting wings. Ruth and Mother hugged each other, and Jacob lay on the floor under the kitchen table, hugging his dog, Red. Grief was this stillness descending, this closing of bodies into the warmth of one another, this dull refraction of energy into few words and little movement. There was a smell of candle wax in the air and a chill mean draught. Heather scent and sheep stink flooded into the room. The fire had gone out. Jacob imagined sharp frost crystals suspended in the air.

The morning after the death Jacob did a remarkable thing: he crept to his father's bedside before anyone else had woken, and in the icy light of early morning, the light of brand-new death, carefully drew a picture of the corpse's face. With a lead pencil from the bureau he worked in the most calm and concentrated way that he could. It was quite a good likeness. It was clear and noble-looking. He kept the image all his life, convinced that it had within it a faintly Christlike aspect. Christ in an icy light. Christ in deposition. Christ gone cold.

SHE WONDERED WHAT
death was like. What Ellen might see.

Fever had come upon Lucy and she had been sleeping and dreaming in the daytime, aware in her own body of the untimely derangement, conscious too of her irritation at being supine, and useless, and leaving Ellen in the care of Mrs Minchin. She realised she would begin to resent her illness, and that she would not, after all, be dignified and calm, but irascible, annoyed, a woman who fell into bed at eleven in the morning and woke three hours later still unrevived and vapid. Behind the veil of waking lay fragments of a dream about Rose, the woman from the albumen factory, beaten to death by her husband. Lucy had seen herself, once again, felled by his blow, and somehow in this dream she was both Rose and herself; somehow the taste of blood in her mouth was a fold back to the sudden irruption of violence and the blank shock of her fractured cheekbone and her cut swollen eye. Lucy could hear Mrs Minchin in the garden, talking to Ellen in the exclamatory tones adults offer to small children when showing them the world. Ellen made appreciative, high cooing sounds in response. Their voices were summery, normal. They sounded pure and joyful. She must rise, and make tea, and take Ellen into her arms. Her daughter was the instant cancellation of consumptive fever and bad dreams.

But Lucy lay in bed a little longer, turned her pillow to its cool side, and found herself dismissing the bloody dream to think about Jacob Webb. She had permitted him to call on her – to explain his work, he said – and he had arrived yesterday, at exactly ten in the morning, his head a smoky mass behind the frosted glass on the front door to the rooms she and Ellen now shared with Mrs Minchin. Lucy had paused a few seconds before opening, because Jacob Webb was their very first visitor, and she liked the round high shadow of his head, and the mystery of his features, effaced, patiently waiting. He looked like a grey flower, bobbing, set in a field of pearly light. She wondered whether it might be possible to photograph through blurry substances, whether a lens might be frosted, whether there might be filters or membranes or yet-to-be-invented substances that would produce effects like this, of a portrait undisclosed, of someone transformed to a floral effigy, just beyond human recognition.

When he was at last admitted Jacob Webb seemed inexplicably nervous. He wore once again his cherry-coloured waistcoat and jacket (with a pair of clean trousers, Lucy noted), but wasn't sure where to rest his hands and shuffled his feet as if he was on the verge of leaving. This evident self-consciousness surprised Lucy, since Jacob had seemed so bold and confident when they first met on the Heath. They shook hands and she bade him sit in their best armchair, while she perched on an upright one, her manner calm. Mrs Minchin had taken Ellen out for a walk, but first warned Lucy about strange men and their “designs”.

“Probably a bohemian,” was Mrs Minchin's parting sentence.

When Jacob was settled he looked around the sitting room and politely asked: “And your good husband? Mr Newton? Is he also at home?”

Lucy had looked at her ringless hands, then met Jacob's gaze.

“I have never been married,” Lucy said outright. “I'm what righteous people call a fallen woman.” She had decided to be honest.

Jacob was visibly taken aback. He blushed, averted his eyes and was silent for a moment. Lucy could hear Mrs Minchin's Swiss clock ticking on the mantelpiece. She thought with fondness of Max and Matilda Weller. Their supernumerous timepieces, all tyrannically stilled.

“Who is to say”, Jacob replied at last, “who among us is fallen? And who – only God decides – is truly righteous? Forgive me; I had not meant to pry.”

Lucy watched as the young man was recessed into his own thoughts; she imagined him in the act of falling backwards into a woven text of childhood homilies and churchy injunctions.
A fallen man.
Perhaps he was repelled, his response a type of embarrassed good manners.

“So there is no Isaac Newton?” Jacob persisted, sounding absurd.

“My benefactor,” Lucy rejoined. “The patron of my photography.”

“Ah. Just so.”

A stalemate, Lucy thought. He wants an excuse to leave. She heard again the infuriating tick-tock and understood Mrs Weller's sensible objection. And then he surprised her.

“May I have the honour”, he carefully asked, “of viewing some of your photographical images? If it is not presumptuous. If it is not inconvenient.”

He looked at her directly.

“Since, after all, we are both artists,” he added kindly.

So it was that they met in this way station of exceptional candour and found themselves standing, side by side, peering
at Lucy's art. Jacob put his face very close to the image, then moved back, then forward again, squinting slightly, as if it were an oil painting he was viewing, and not the flat uniform surface of a photograph.

“Very fine,” he murmured. He was looking at a blotchy heathscape, riddled with shadow.

“And this too. Very fine.” (A carbon-print portrait of Ellen asleep.)

Lucy was aware of the proximity of Jacob's body. The brush of his elbow. His slim jutting hip. Seduction, she thought, is never face to face; it is this side-by-side permission of inadvertent currents and connections. This galvanism of bodies alerted to each other. This prickling charge.

Lying in bed, with Mrs Minchin's and Ellen's voices still playing in the garden, hanging there like a kind of human music, Lucy wondered what contract they had entered into. This man also knew the consoling intimacy of images and the ardour that attaches to representation. Jacob Webb was polite to the point of impersonality, yet she glimpsed in him – as indeed he may have glimpsed in her – inalienable conviction and lunatic love. She liked his fidgety hands and his abashed courtesy. The large feet shuffling in restless agitation. Most of all she liked his response to her work: he had paused, captivated. He had the remote look of someone hauled into a state of hallucination. And when he returned to her presence he spoke in soft enquiring tones, like a foreign traveller unsure, asking careful directions. After they parted, she found she missed him. Something in his tentative manner, his interiorised concentration, seemed to Lucy a familiar and comfortable thing, an unqualifiable intimation or presumption of affinity.

She wondered again what death was like. Was it the eradication, above all, of these selves brought into being in
such small unspeakable moments, the self swaying between consciousnesses. Was it a halting of the sway? A negating rest?

Lucy turned in her bed. Perhaps something more simple: one wrestled with an angel and found oneself winning.

SHE WAS ON
Hampstead Heath, resting, her eyes gently glosed against incipiently stormy weather. Something redolent in the thrashing trees in the wind – their fierce breathy noise, their implication of wavy currents – made Lucy think again of the sea voyage that had returned her to England.

It was on this journey she had realised her life was a tripod. Australia, England and India all held her – upheld her – on a platform of vision, seeking her own focus. These were the zones of her eye, the conditions of her salutary estrangement. On the ship Lucy had befriended a sailor, Jock. He was a dour man of sixty or so, who shared her fascination for the ocean and its curious light effects. He joined her on the deck in his small leisured moments to talk in hushed confidences of his nautical passions. Lucy told him of the systems of exposure in photography that might capture sea-pattern or cloud, and of the chemical immersion that fixes the sheen of light upon water. Everything that is seen, Lucy told him, will one day somewhere be registered. No matter how fleeting. How slight. How apparently ineluctable. Jock the sailor was unconvinced. He would show her, he claimed, something which could not be trapped. For ten days Lucy and Jock watched the sunset together. On the eleventh day it happened:
the green ray.
There is in the mystery of receding light a casual, curious moment
in which, by some rare combination of refraction and the angle of descending beams, the sun itself flashes green for three or four seconds, just before it tips half the world into darkness. Lucy definitely saw it. It was unmistakable. Sailors everywhere across the globe call this phenomenon the green ray. The sky was ribbed with light. The sky resembled, Lucy thought, a silken sari enfolded, its colours flashing just as the moving body animated the ridges and valleys of a garment.