Sixty Lights (12 page)

IT IS SOMETHING
peculiar, Lucy decided, about ocean travel, that one feels one has always done it. On a ship it is impossible to believe you ever had a life on land; the pitch of the deep sea, the state of being buoyed, these begin to feel like the unalterable and persistent state of being. She loved the murmurous waves and the sensation of perpetual motion. She enjoyed the tilted horizon, the smell of wet canvas and rope, the sound of sailors' quick feet slapping at the deck, the occasional slip of a glass across an angled table, the rocking of hammocks and curtains in gravitational adjustment: the whole disquiet of ships was an unending marvel. Most of all, however, Lucy loved the night, and when they were in the middle of the ocean they might have been sailing in sky. The stars were multiplied and everywhere extensive, and sparks on the ocean appeared as sunken reflections. In her private notebook of
Special Things Seen
, Lucy devoted almost ten pages to the oceanic night sky. It was like a glimpse of creation expanded; it filled her with awe and an impulse to artistry. She wanted to memorise it all, to reprint water and sky as her own wavy marks on paper.

Every night, as a kind of ritual, Lucy went to the deck after most of the passengers had retired, and watched the dark. She became familiar with constellations and tracked their slow
swipe across the heavens, and liked simply the wind on her face, and being wholly alone, and the sense of pushing on a solid craft into soft-seeming darkness. When she slept it was with the rush of water in her ears, with the sense of currents parting around her, and sleep – such sound sleep – as the great, great heaviness of sea water descending.

There is a state of grace, she wrote in her notebook, in sleeping surrounded by withheld water.

One night, when the ship was becalmed on a plain of black, she saw silvery threads of light in a thin film on the surface of the ocean. They followed the pattern of waves and looked like fluctuating stripes, breaking, reshaping, breaking again, reshaping. A hemline in a dance. A ribbon dropped from a sky-gondola. A broken trace of moonbeam surfing the waves. Like and like and like and like: in truth it was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was of itself and radically particular.

“Bioluminescence,” a voice somewhere said.

When Lucy turned to look, a little startled, she found a man standing close behind her, apparently peering at the ocean over her shoulder.

“Plankton, mostly. But underneath, down deep, there are fish that carry their own lights in spots on their cheeks, or in little pods dangling above their heads.”

Bioluminescence: it was a wonderful word. It was a word that sounded as if it had travelled from the future, from a completely new knowledge, from a new dimension of scrutability.

“Sometimes,” the stranger continued, “this shine is visible in decaying flesh or in plants; it's chemical, you know.”

The man introduced himself as Captain William Crowley, lately in the service of the East India Company, now working for Her Majesty. He was returning home, he said.

It was too dark on the deck to see exactly what he looked
like, but Lucy was attracted to his voice and his tall upright shape. She wanted to pretend she was blind and reach out to touch him – as Mrs O'Connor assuredly would have done – so that she would sense by contour alone the face of this man who named things in the darkness.

“It's a hobby,” he continued. “I'm interested in natural science. One day I hope to discover something, to have my name on a plant, or some half-invisible insect somewhere.”

Lucy was not sure if the man was joking, but liked him immediately. Perhaps, indeed, she was seduced by him then, when he named a new light and stood obscured in shadow.

Captain William Crowley, having imparted his information, politely said goodnight and moved away, down the deck. It was only later, much later, that Lucy realised he had not bothered to ask her name, or wanted to discover anything about her.

They saw each other often after that, and William Crowley began to accompany Lucy on the deck at night. She learned he had been to England to deal with his older brother's estate, and to take over guardianship of his two small nieces. They were placed in a boarding school; their mother, who was distraught, he said, and overcome by grief, he had placed in an asylum. William related these things as though he had efficiently tidied up his family; “One must be decisive”, he stated, “in matters emotional.”

In her youthful inexperience Lucy saw no duplicity; she saw a novelistic captain, dashing and firm. When first he leaned forward to kiss her they were slipping past Africa, the ship tracing the outline of the great continent with slow fidelity to the coast, and it seemed fitting to the remote majesty of whatever lay before them that this man wanted to seal the occasion with a kiss. He slid his hand into the gaping placket of her skirt, and Lucy responded with grateful enthusiasm; she
had waited for this touch, this confirmation, and for the fulfilment of the fiction she saw her life to be.

“Thank you,” she said softly, rising from the kiss.

Retrospectively, perhaps, she invented their relationship. Perhaps she gave him symbols he was incapable of recognising. But the first time they lay together – this she knew for sure – they were rounding the famous Cape of Good Hope and she took the turmoil of the ocean as a kind of answering sign. The ship tossed and rolled and it seemed to Lucy that the world was reforming to match her new body. Waves crashed high against the ship and swept over the decks. The sea was thunderous. The air was stinging and alive. Lucy lay beside William Crowley, looking at his flushed cheeks and his nose and his closed tired eyes, and felt wide-awake and powerful enough to alter everything around her. Beneath the rough sheets she had discovered something remarkable: she had arrived
into
her own body. She understood now what might move a man to sail the sky for a woman, or cause a woman to track a man to the other side of the globe.

“Tell me more”, Lucy whispered, “about bioluminescence.”

She brushed strands of damp hair back from his forehead.

William rolled away.

“You wouldn't understand,” he said sleepily. “It's science, natural science.”

So Lucy was left alone in the tossing dark.

“Please?” she said, sounding like a pleading child.

But William had begun snoring, or was pretending to snore. She longed to wake him to continue their unfinished conversation.

When they rose in the morning Lucy saw something she later read as ill-omen. On the deck a group of three gentlemen caught albatrosses with hooks and lines, pulling them screeching and crying from the open sky, and then gave them – five
in all – to the assisting sailors. The sailors cut off the birds' feet, stuffed them with bran to begin a process of drying, then created from these grisly relics small purses and pouches for tobacco. Lucy refused one when it was offered. She thought of the birds' eerie squeals and their shocked dying eyes, glazed by betrayal.

DICKENS
,
GEORGE ELIOT
, William Thackeray: Lucy discovered the ship's small library. She thought for the first time about what it meant to read a novel. What process was this? What self-complication? What seance of other lives into her own imagination? Reading was this metaphysical meeting space – peculiar, specific, ardent, unusual – in which black words neatly spaced on a rectangular page persuaded her that hypothetical people were as real as she, that not diversion, but knowing, was the gift story gave her. She learnt how other people entered the adventure of being alive. She saw them move and think and make various choices. Rain fell, sun shone, journeys were undertaken. In a high window framed by billowy white curtains, a heroine blew kisses to her lover standing in shadows on the street, his face upturned to receive its inexpressible sensation; and in this moment, composed of alphabets, Lucy knew the shape of her own yearning. There were sight-lines, image tokens, between people and people, between people and objects and words on a page, that knitted the whole world in the purest geometry of connections. One simply had to notice. One had to remark.

Lucy fell backwards onto her bunk, and let her novel fold in her lap. The grains of the oak-wood above her appeared
exquisite. There were knots, flaws, parallel lines. Lucy relaxed, and sighed, and closed her tired eyes.

Her mother's early stories flooded back to meet her. Lucy remembered oriental fantasies of dextrous artifice, fantasies of perished lovers and singular vehicles. She remembered the ice cave and a small girl learning to read. She remembered a tone of voice and the feminine scent of gardenia. It was like something swaying just in and out of vision – like light glancing in facets off ruffled water – a glimpse of herself, very tiny, as a six-year-old girl, nestled in a curve against Honoria's body.

This was memory as an asterix. The glory of the glimpse. The retrieval of just enough lit knowing to see her way forward.

“My mother used to tell me a story”, Lucy began, “about a Flying Dutchman in India. He sailed the sky in a gondola suspended by a balloon, checking all the palaces in India for a beautiful princess.”

William looked at Lucy, threw his head back, and laughed in a loud guffaw. “The Flying Dutchman in India,” he exclaimed. “You certainly are original.”

He could not be persuaded to explain the joke, nor did he wish to hear her mother's story.

The horizon was unhinging and sliding away. Lucy felt she was tilting into a kind of translucency. Her lover William Crowley could not quite see her. She was uncertain, sheer. She was the shape he entered, rocking her body, then departed too quickly, leaving the body-door ajar, leaving her feeling desolate and wide, wide open.

THE MORE LUCY
knew William's body, the more he withdrew. The more she adored him, finding the crevice to kiss, learning the curve of his shoulder, tracing the line from nipple to nipple or the small dent in his chin, the more he grew silent and generally evasive. He stopped meeting her on the deck, so that she was obliged to knock on the door of his cabin and ask to be admitted. Sometimes he simply refused outright to see her, so she stood at his door, declaring girlish love, feeling herself conspicuous and deeply humiliated. Lucy overheard two sailors speaking about her and felt that she would collapse with shame. At card games she watched him and in the dining room she contrived to sit beside him, whether or not he deigned to talk. And then, capriciously, he would sometimes seize her, or take her by the wrist into his cabin, and undress her almost brutally. To say she was confused would be to discount the certainty of her feelings: Lucy desired William's presence, his caress, even his mocking laugh, more than she had desired anything before.

At some stage they fell into a kind of negotiated truce, and met with each other, prearranged, every second night. This relieved the sexual anxiety on both sides. William was more cordial and even at times happy. Lucy told him of Isaac Newton, the shining man in the box, and how she was sailing
to meet him on a paid-for passage. Her lover was relieved and assured Lucy that the match was commonsensical and sound – a good fellow, well known, this Isaac Newton. William revealed he had a wife and four children waiting for him in Bombay. His father-in-law was wealthy, he said, and he would not jeopardise his fortune, nor his fine name. Lucy absorbed this information calmly. She realised he had assumed that she wished to claim him, when what she wished for was this dissolving of all her life into concentrated sensation, this extreme propinquity, and this perspective – resting her head sideways on his thin-haired chest – in which she discovered a silver scar and saw the very pores of his skin, in which the scented crust of dried sexual fluids, and the stain of her blood on the sheets, and the imprinted shape where the weight of two bodies lay, were the details of a hidden life she wanted uncovered. Along her arm were circular bruises where he had seized her too tightly: recording these marks in her notebook allowed Lucy to understand that such a grasp, on either side, is a kind of profanity, blemishing what it holds.

In
Great Expectations
Pip is in love with Estella, a woman incapable of returning, or even understanding, his feelings. This does not diminish his love, but renders it a form of despair, a strain in the throat, a slow
disheartening
as the heart remains unconfirmed. Lucy's remnant philosophies were all derived from fiction: she had no-one to whom she could confess, and could not write to her brother or uncle of what had occurred. How could she describe the changes wrought within her by unprecedented touch? William was smug and unworthy. But she was a young woman on a boat, a sixteen-year-old woman, floating towards a who-knows-what-destiny, presented as a daguerreotype in a velvet box. And she had collided and almost sunk in mid-ocean. She had collided with a physical enlivening she had until now only suspected.

If Lucy were to recover a
Special Thing Seen
from these meetings with a man who clearly did not love her, she would remember this: she had often been naked but for the locket that contained the silhouette of her mother, and one night, at last, he asked her what it was. She opened the Italian locket like a tiny book. When William glanced at the image he said casually: “She has your profile.” No-one had commented before on any likeness Lucy shared with her mother. Lucy saw Honoria's face-shape as if for the first time. She was aware that her own face was cast in gold by the spermaceti candle that stood in a glass tube beside their bed, and in her fancy, at that instant, they were alchemically fused: she was the bright-lit original for her mother, the shadow.

That night, unaccountably, Lucy dreamed of her Ballarat cousin, Su-Lin. She dreamed she was married to Su-Lin and slept beside her – calmly, peacefully, not even needing to touch. Mrs McTierney appeared from nowhere and bent to kiss her on the cheek. In this dream Lucy was dimly aware of the sound of the ocean: she heard the soft continuous wash and mesh of the waves, their forming and unforming and their plash against the ship, as though the ocean itself constituted the knitted pattern of dreams.