Sixty Lights (18 page)

His hands trembled in a way that filled Lucy with pity.

“Foolishness,” Isaac said, trying to explain away his feelings.

Lucy kissed Isaac on the cheek and promised that she would one day return, when baby Ellen was a girl, when Ellen was grown, so that he could see what had become of them and how their histories had unfolded.

“You won't return,” Isaac stated, just under his breath.

He blew his nose again; his misery was dreadful to witness.

Lucy thought he sounded like a wounded or petulant child, and only later, much later, knew that his prediction was true.

As the city receded the stormy dark skies split open. Rain fell in weighty slant-wise sheets, obliterating last glimpses of the Indian shoreline. The waves were choppy and agitated. Briny air in swift currents blew around the ship.

For now she retreated to her cabin, dragging her heavy splashed skirt and holding her small baby close. The air was a physical manifestation of tearful departure. It was crowded with clamour, smells and uncontrollable effects. People fled, looking dashed and damaged, or frowned at the sky from under canvas shelters, or wiped their wet faces and brushed back damp strands of hair, resentful of dishevelment and the intercession of large forces.

“Fookin' rain,” she heard a sailor exclaim. As though he had been personally insulted by the weather.

Against the authority of the world and its dramas, against Isaac, ships, journeys, sky, Lucy set in focus her insubordinate preoccupation with her child. In this vessel of iron and wood, built sturdily in defiance of the ocean itself, she lay on the creaking cabin bunk and gazed, wholly besotted, at her small rocking daughter.

Ellen was four months old and still startled by the dazzling novelty of the world. She looked at faces as if they appeared in a flash of lightning before her, and slept twitching and
whimpering, still communing with images, still responding to all she had incomprehensibly and vividly seen. When Lucy rose up at night to feed her, fighting through exhaustion and the fuzzy density of being half-awake, she was often confronted by Ellen's steady, wide-awake gaze, looking up at her, directly, in the wavering oil-lamplight. At the breast Ellen played with her mother's locket as she drank, leaned backwards for a rest, flinging out her arm, and then leaned forwards and drank again, never once breaking the compelling circuit of their gaze. She was complete and individual. A new set of eyes in the world. A new shining face.

Perhaps, Lucy thought, every parent feels this, the awe of so delicate, so partial, a connection. This belief that the curve of an infant's head is the loveliest thing ever to have existed. That the scent of breast milk is sweetly incomparable. That touch has never before been so fine. The earlobe. The eyelid. The pulsing fontanelle. Perhaps this is the most ordinary experience of all. Perhaps it has always been thus. Ellen's breath was a miracle. The weight of her small shape in the middle of the night was a gift. The budded mouth, the mobile expressions, the curled and uncurled hands, these were what Uncle Neville would call a New Beginning; these were what, in her sleepiness, isolation and unmarried-mother-shame, she realised was the rhapsodic element she had sometimes seen in a glance through the viewfinder – the swift intimation of unrealised beauty, the shaft of brightness unaccounted for, the revelatory outline.

In the peculiar duration of early maternity and with the slow flight of time on a long sea voyage, Lucy thought at length about what had been given to her to see. When, late at night, after feeding and settling Ellen, she looked again at the miniature painting that Isaac had given her, she felt she had achieved a small degree of understanding. She held the image to the
light, and rubbed the beetle wings with her thumb, gently testing their texture. The word was bioluminescence. There was in every living thing this elusive capacity. In lovers. In the newborn. In the congregation at a temple. In the man who was killed by a mirror and lay on his back looking at death. Every person was a lighthouse, a signal of presence. This was nothing sentimental: it was the single, wise thing that she utterly knew. It was the knowledge that would carry her through a night of deathly terror – when the ship pitched fearfully, the timbers groaned, objects shattered everywhere and dangerously flew, manly sailors wept with fear and called out to Heaven – to the surprising egg-yellow of a dawn becalmed.

THE RETURN WAS
a disturbing confluence of systems of doubling and subtraction.

Thomas was waiting at the dock with his friend, Violet Weller. They stood together, the same height, the same age, the same physical colouring, and the same open, honest, lovable faces. Lucy thought they could easily have been mistaken for twins. Thomas embraced his sister heartily, holding her as if he hadn't really believed she'd return, and Violet held Ellen on her hip, exactly as Lucy liked to hold her, exclaiming at her beauty, bending towards her like a mother.

“Neville?” Lucy asked.

“Neville died,” Thomas said softly. “Only two weeks ago. An accident. A ghastly accident.”

His voice petered and seized.

Later, after dinner, Thomas took Lucy into the garden and with moonshine on his face and a voice husky with pain told her the bare circumstances of Neville's death. Then, in a small act of self-protection, he told her at much greater length of Charles Dickens' death in June, of how he had stood in a line with thousands of others filing into Westminster Abbey, and felt the dignity of the occasion, and its ceremony, and its historical importance.

“The woman in front of me”, he said distractedly, “carried
a single stalk of white rose tied with a rag; she must have been at least seventy years old.” Something in this detail caused Thomas to pause. Two stripes of tears, the slick patina of moonlight, like trails of absence. And in the air a revenant sound: swish-swish, swish-swish.

THOMAS AND VIOLET
were married within a month of Lucy's return. There was a small ceremony at St Giles, attended only by Violet's parents, Max and Matilda, and Lucy and Ellen. Outside the church they all gathered, radiant together, under a soft fleecy sky, beaming at anyone or anything that happened to pass by. Pigeons sprayed upwards in an audible surge. There were broad waves, well-wishings, the doffing of a top hat. Violet held a posy of snowdrops and fishfern and Thomas wore one of Neville's old Indian scarves. Later Lucy posed the couple at Mr and Mrs Weller's house, and photographed them, now looking much more subdued, beside a gigantic brass urn and a rather striking floral arrangement of jagged red tulips. As she peered at her brother and his twinlike wife, Lucy noticed how the spirit on the church steps had entirely dissolved, how this false composure and formal arrangement had leached their jubilation. So many wedding photographs, she predicted, would be exactly like this, stolid, anaemic, respectable, dull. Figures in a formal, stiff relation. Yet the couple was thrilled that Lucy was an amateur photographer, and patiently arranged and rearranged themselves for her glassy stare. They struck various poses, the last one comical, with Violet pretending to leap on Thomas with cat's claws, and Thomas cowering beneath her, his hands open in alarm. (It was something, they
said later, they had seen in a magic-lantern show, some kind of private joke.)

As an afterthought Lucy asked for one last photograph: an image
maculate
, she announced. She moved the newlyweds to the back doorway so that they stood within a strong, specific frame and leaf-shadow across their faces showed them riddled with light. She stared at them staring back. They were trying hard not to blink or squint in the unseasonably sharp light. Lucy's hands became heavy. Her heart swelled with love.

With her head there, under the cover, she was hidden but not disassociated. She saw them link arms. Heard wingbeat high behind her. A whispered remark from Max. A “shoosh” from Matilda. Somewhere too, there was Ellen, gurgling in her perambulator, looking up at the sky. It was as if, for a second, evanescent time settled down. As if the glass lens, apt and uncomplicated, saw for her and for all time complete testimony of that moment.

“Thank you,” she said, as she emerged from the hood.

Violet performed a neat curtsy; she was full of play.

Over brandy and wedding cake, Max and Matilda Weller expressed concern at Lucy's recent bereavement – her being so young, and with a bairn, and so brave to float all that way across the ocean – and she realised that Thomas had told them she was a widow. The Wellers were too polite to enquire what poor Mr Newton had died of, but Lucy reminded herself she must ask her brother what story was abroad. Both Violet's parents seemed much older than Lucy had expected, and she learned later that her sister-in-law had been adopted from a foundling home at the age of five. The three shared an idiosyncratic culture of wordplays and jokes, and Violet often took her aged parents with her to the magic-lantern shows. They were, Lucy thought, like a family out of Dickens: Max had a bent grizzled friendliness and cutaway mittens which he waved
as he spoke; Matilda was pert, birdlike and wore old-fashioned pink bonnets that emphasised the flush jolliness and roundness of her face. Max Weller had been a watchmaker, and all around the parlour stood clocks of many eras, shapes and kinds, some half-disembowelled, their brass innards gleaming. They were all firmly stopped. Matilda couldn't bear, she explained, the false liveliness of clocks, the sound of all that incessant tick-tocking and chiming.

Violet Strange moved in with Thomas, Lucy and the baby, and from the beginning her marriage was a state of effusion. She even enjoyed her new name. “They were all strangers,” she said, “and yet they were unestranged. They were the strangest family in London and would produce strange, strange children.”

Since Thomas and Lucy had thought of their name only with a kind of habitual and vague disparagement, Violet's invigorated delight struck them as both enchanting and curious.

(“She married you for your name,” Lucy whispered to Thomas, and he tilted his head and heartily laughed.)

In bed at night, feeding Ellen as quietly as she could, Lucy could hear the intimate noises of Thomas and Violet talking together. The specific tone of their talk was that of voices given to each other, with pure relief, in new-found community.

It was a world now of small rooms, a commanding baby, and a bride who joked and cooked and planted little vases of violets (“so that you won't forget who I am!”) in every corner of their cosy dwelling. Lucy understood that both Thomas and Violet had a dimension of joy, of keenness-to-life, that she did not seem to possess. She admired the loving play between them and felt a little jealous; the air around the newlyweds was charged with sexual anticipation and neither Thomas nor Violet could pass each other in a room without in some way
brushing skin, or clothes, or offering inaudible words of endearment. Thomas had possessed a collection of snakeskins when he was a child: why does Lucy remember this now? There were three, in fact. He kept them in a box, revealing them on special occasions, and with inordinate pride. One by one he would hold them up like streamers, and they would dangle and sway frailly, strips of diamond or zigzag, finely woven sheaths, still magically intact after life departed. He guarded each snakeskin as if it was a talisman of secret knowledge. Now, watching Thomas and Violet prepare a meal together, cutting up meat and vegetables for Irish stew, talking softly in singsong voices, with their heads inclined in each other's direction, she thought again for some reason of the three papery skins her brother once kept in a box under his bed. Thomas had shed skins many more times than she. Thomas had been reborn into this contented husband who no longer sleepwalked, or was afraid of ghosts, or flinched at his own reflection arising suddenly, revocably, in the bathroom mirror. He was renewed, younger looking, his happiness evident.

Later Lucy would look at the wedding prints, as they glided in luminous fluid, surfacing to definition. Photography had given her second sight. She saw Thomas and Violet again, amorous, manifest. She had by magic and illusion travelled them through time, made them ever-alive, endowed their faces with the nacre of wet seashells and the promise of persisting youthfully, on their marriage day, for generations to come.

“Behold me,” each face called from the past to the future.

AS WELL AS
special things seen
, Lucy included in the title to her diary
Photographs Not Taken.
This way, she reasoned, she could include in her reckoning those things she had seen photographically but without her camera, those things that moved her, with or without a frame, and those things she had not seen physically, but been granted vision of, by others. There was a whole fugitive empire of images to which she felt affinity and loyalty. Her diary would compel attentiveness. Would claim these images. Would set her formally agape.