Sixty Lights (9 page)

When they were at last on the ship together, up high at the rusty, red-painted railing, Lucy and Thomas stood hand in hand – in biographical reversal and repetition – as Honoria and Neville had once done, approaching their New Beginning. Thomas pointed out that there were lovers shining mirrors at each other, one on the dock and one not far from them on the deck. It was the woman who was leaving. She tilted her oval mirror to catch at the sun and a young man, diminishing, answered from the shore. Lucy was transfixed. This was what she wanted, a photosensitive departure. Light trained by glass to locate and discover a face, a beam to travel on, a homing device, a sleek corridor through the infinity of sky itself.

“Knowledge comes only in flashes”

Walter Benjamin

THEY LEFT IN
winter, sailed for months, and arrived just in time for a second winter. London uncannily opposed Melbourne on the spinning globe; it was half a planet away, the far side of things known, dark when the other was light, cold when the other was warm, yet consecutive seasons somehow registered its peculiar affinity. However, Lucy looked out from her high window onto the city that lay before her too vast, too chill and altogether too drear.

Stranger
, she said to herself.

It was the scale of the place she could not assimilate: more roads and laneways than any girl could remember, thousands of chimneys jutting at the sky, buildings, endless buildings, with complicated façades like frowning faces with sightless eyes. The air was a brown and choking vapour: Londoners walked with their faces angled towards the ground, as if smoke and fog had a weight that pressed down upon their heads. All was weltering gloom. All looked infernal, oppressive. December rain fell quietly in failing light and Lucy's spirits, damp and wintry, also tumbled and fell.

Their dwelling was a modest house of two levels in Camden Town. The children each attended a local school, and were each bullied and teased, almost unceasingly, because of their accents. Thomas returned from his first day at school with a bloody nose
and Lucy's long hair had been dipped into Indian ink: they both bore on their clothes spotted patterns that announced their contemptible foreignness. Lucy had believed that orphans were the object of pity, but at school she was again and again disproven; she battled daily with insult and casual denunciation. Thomas and Lucy invented a series of truancies. Their games were for each other, their child community, just two.

Uncle Neville had taken the children on tours around the centre, but somehow this confirmed its unreality. The Houses of Parliament, London Bridge, the Tower of London: each was too monumental to be anything other than fictitious. They loomed sombre, full of great and terrible histories, they squatted by the Thames with intimidating command, their upper reaches swallowed by obliterating sky. Thomas told Lucy that the Tower contained buckets-of-blood; he scared her with his idiosyncratic re-tellings of British history and his rediscovered pleasure in tales of the macabre. Thomas beheaded so many old queens and princesses that Lucy felt herself quake for all the violence that bodies might attract. One day – on their way to visit Neville in the company office – they paused together on windy Blackfriars Bridge and Lucy by accident discovered a way to contest him. Somewhere down below, beyond the turbulent water, a woman on the riverbank began suddenly to sing; she lifted her voice and began an aria. Her song rose upwards in a string of beaded notes and resonated in the deep shadowy space formed by the stone walls of the embankment. When Lucy bent over to look she could see a hatless blonde woman in a frilly costume, holding her arms outstretched and performing to the river. The words may have been Italian; in any case Lucy heard something from within the body that was sweet, pure and given as a gift. Something which repudiated physical hurt. Something for which there was no equivalence and no particular image.

“Lunatic,” said Thomas, with a little smirk.

He tugged at Lucy's hand.

But Lucy was entranced. She raised her gaze and saw then the black sooty dome of St Paul's, fat as a breast and incontrovertible, and wondered whether there might be things that only girls and women know.

When they rode home atop the afternoon coach with Neville, Lucy considered saying something, to try to formulate whatever was resting, cloudy and inchoate, on the very fringe of her consciousness, but could not find the words. From their perch she could watch the massive head of the black horse, snorting and jerking and bobbing in front, and the driver with his high hat, scratching with dirty fingernails at the back of his neck. Neville was fidgeting with papers, trying to put them in order, and Thomas was employed picking the satin label from the inside of his Irish cap. Lucy knew herself double: these details – the horse, the cap, the dirty fingernails – were plaited stubbornly with the most imprecise intuitions. These details, the
so particular
nature of things, seemed to lodge in some ephemeral equation she could not calculate or figure. The commandment of ordinary things to look, and the countervailing sense of the world's detachment, troubled and distressed her. Lucy wondered how she might tell this, or to whom.

That first dreadful winter Lucy's nose became red and her hands were permanently frozen. Thomas turned blue and watery, and even Neville, staunchly Anglophile, expressed anguished longings for tropical India and the humane primrose tint of a non-English sun. Both children developed rattly chests and throaty voices as cold air settled like mist in their Antipodean bodies, and Neville was obliged to learn improved forms of tenderness as a nurse. He waited at their bedsides with handkerchiefs and balm, told funny stories about his
childhood, and read aloud from Dickens as the invalids settled for bedtime. The brand-new serial,
Great Expectations
, unfolded each night – “his best yet!” – a story driven by the tremulous anxiety of destiny unknown. Thomas called himself Pip for a while, but Lucy too wanted to be Pip and resented his claim. The novel made London seem altogether more actual and they were all delighted that Dickens had mentioned Australia: it validated an existence others here took as vague conjecture. When Lucy looked at Australia on the map, it was a fat anomalous island, loosely adrift by itself, with that bit sticking up on the right that had no reason to be there and looking like someone at school with their hand up, but with the wrong answer to the question. Nevertheless the shape pleased her, so she looked at it again, cross-eyed, and it pleased her still.

“Do you think”, she asked Thomas, “that we have Great Expectations?”

“Of course,” he replied. “Don't forget Brazil.”

And Lucy tried hard to not forget what she had never remembered.

There was a moment – it was all so simple – that Lucy and Thomas simultaneously realised that they loved Uncle Neville, and that they had somehow all managed to make a life in London together.

Outside their bedroom window night-life was busy in the street. Carts, vendors, the lively commerce of rich and poor. A raucous voice beneath their window shouted “Ott chestnuts! Chestnuts ott!” and a sweet roasting fragrance immediately followed the sound. Then, as if on cue, Neville appeared at the doorway with a brown paper bag of roasted chestnuts. He held it aloft, like a trophy, and grinned towards them.

“Ott chestnuts!” he called out.

He shook water from his shoulders, like a dog, then filled the room with his body.

Neville sat on the edge of the bed and shared the chestnuts precisely, counting one-two-three, one-two-three, as children do. For the first time Lucy and Thomas saw Neville's resemblance to their mother – something in the angle of the lamplight and his oblique posture on the bed – and they looked at each other reassured and with instinctive understanding.

“What larks!” Neville exclaimed. Then, mimicking further: “. . . ‘there certainly were a peck of orange peel. Partickler when he see the ghost'!”

This was their private three-way joke.

In
Great Expectations
Joe Gargery, the country father-figure, honest and uneducated, has been to his first theatrical performance – of
Hamlet.
Pip asks, “Was there a great sensation?” and Joe answers charmingly, according to his senses: the odour of orange peel. The children had needed the joke explained, and Neville thereafter enjoyed replaying the phrase.

“Partickler!” Lucy repeated as Neville said goodnight. He doffed an invisible cap, having discovered in himself, through the agency of the children, hidden resources of play as well as parenthood.

“Partickler!” he echoed. “‘Partickler when he see the ghost'!”

When she is an adult and loves London Lucy will discover a drawing of St Paul's Cathedral she sketched in her first miserable year in the city. The drawing is unbalanced and inept, an insecure shape, but still recognisable and lovingly executed. St Paul's does not appear, after all, like a giant breast. It appears like a bulbous lamp, pendant from the sky. And although it is dark and begrimed, it carries within it, Lucy thinks, a suppressed ivory glow. It is the light of that one, that very first, that
partickler
London winter, the winter which held the promise of three lives thawing into newness.

LOOKING BACK ON
those years in London, seven in all, she thanks of it not so much as a novelistic concatenation of events, the way people conventionally describe movement from childhood to adulthood, logical, sequential, cementing identity more firmly, but as an irregular sequence of
Special Things Seen.
Lucy kept a private diary, bound in purple morocco and tied with a black ribbon, in which she recorded and stored her apprehensions not of events, but of images. Unable to reason her profound sense of discrepancy in the world, discrepancy between bodies and words, between the niggardly specificity of things, often tiny, inconsequential, mundane things – a reflection in a puddle, laurel trees wildly waving, Thomas's face emerging scrubbed and reddened from an unwrapping towel – and the cloudy abstractions they brought in their wake, she decided she would know the world by its imagistic revelations. Seen this way, London presented a venerable randomness, by which, eventually, Lucy was won over.