Sixty Lights (2 page)

A few hours before his death, Father emerged with bloodshot eyes, dishevelled and suddenly old, from the funereal bedroom, and beckoned to his children. He propped Lucy on
his lap and bade Thomas stand close beside his rose-velvet armchair; and then with flat stilted speeches made farewell presentations. Thomas must always look after his little sister, and he must take possession of a gold watch, once owned by his grandfather, and keep it tucked against his chest as a talisman of family pride. Lucy must take an ornate Italian locket, within which rested a silhouetted, cut-paper profile of her mother, purchased in Florence during her honeymoon. “The image is precious,” he said. “Keep it always.” Father's ceremonial manner disconcerted the children; they exchanged perplexed glances – uncomprehending – and wriggled to be free. Lucy recoiled from the foul smell of her father's pyjamas, and realised with disgust that he had not bothered to wash. The rash on his body made him appear diseased and in his hand the pretty Italian locket looked tarnished and grimy. She hid it in the bookcase, behind
Bleak House.

When he took rat poison, Arthur Strange understood, above all, the abasement of his own grief and his shameful refusal to endure for the sake of his children. A simple and savage desperation took hold of him. He swallowed the vile substance and thought of nothing in particular. Death was dull, it was drab, it was solitude confirmed. For the occasion of his death Arthur had been untypically well organised. He wrote a short formal letter to the Bank of Australasia, another to his father, and one to his brother-in-law, Neville, but nothing to his children. What words could explain the blasted hollow his wife's death had carved in him? Thomas was numbed, Lucy was relieved, and Mrs Minchin, her purple face livid, became mobilised, almost jaunty, with the extra responsibility. She laundered anew the mourning suits the children had worn two weeks before, her large body swift and efficient, her manner professional. It was, Lucy reflected, as if this woman had absorbed the human
energy that once belonged to her parents. Mrs Minchin had thick fingers and moved household objects abruptly. She instructed, took control.

The day of the second funeral was sweltering. The priest's garments were discoloured with circular patterns of sweat and he kept pausing in his speech to mop his brow. The children joked about it later, with miserable humour. A man from the bank said their father had been A Decent and Upstanding Citizen, Felled by Tragedy.

It may have been a fantasy, or perhaps it was a dream: Lucy had intervened to prevent her mother's death.

When Honoria was coral-pink and burning with poison, Lucy had taken ice and a spoon and a candle to light the way, curled up very small, small as a new baby, and squeezed, eyes closed, into her mother's belly. She had scooped out the fleshy matter that caused such harm, and then slept there a while, her job well done, within the snug crimson dome of her mother's secret insides. In this netherland she was absolutely cool and comfortable. She sucked on ice, and rolled it in a glass against her cheek. The little candle, unwavering, shone on and on. Casting out every threatening and mystifying shadow.

TO EVOKE A
face, in all its precision, is very difficult, but for a long time afterwards Honoria Brady thought about the precise moment in which she met her future husband, Arthur Strange. It was so suffused with romance, so
face to face.
She had been travelling on the coach from Melbourne to Geelong, and had open before her a copy of the novel
Jane Eyre
, so that she was busy imagining the unhappy estrangement of lovers. No thing distracted her, not the old woman asleep opposite, her fat eyelids flickering, nor the marmalade kitten the woman had brought with her, scratching at the walls of its tight basket. Not the smoky light, since it was still early morning, nor the jolting rhythms and vibrations of the vehicle she travelled in. The landscape fled by in a disintegrating blur, and the compartment Honoria inhabited was not this wood-panelled and glass-paned one, rattling along the road, but her own quiet space, with its own duration and propulsion. She travelled
Jane Eyre.
She was sped on by its melancholy and motivating desire.

I am Jane Eyre
, she secretly told herself.
I am honourable but unnoticed. I am passionate and strong. I need a lover who will carry my future in the palm of his hand.

The coach accident was a minor one: the two horses shied and swerved at something unexpected, and with a single swift jerk the coach flipped onto its side. Honoria was thrown
forward upon the bosom of the sleeping woman, who woke screaming and frantic with disorientation. The woman would not be calmed; she had no idea where she was, and thrashed about, upsetting her cat basket and knocking hard against the window. Outside were shouts and exclamations and the anxious whinnying of horses, but a man came running very fast, attracted by the screams. He bobbed, jumping, then heaved himself to the window, and gestured that the door be opened. When Honoria pushed the chestnut frame upwards she was only inches from his face. His eyes were large and glistening with the possibility of tragedy; she could see small flecks of bronze in their blue, and the pupils expanding.

“Is she hurt?” he asked. “I'm coming in.”

With that he hauled himself towards her, sliding on his stomach through the aperture, and was suddenly there, reaching in, lifting the woman under the armpits. Honoria pushed from behind, and together they manoeuvred her safely to the ground. The young man then held up his arms and Honoria, kneeling now with the kitten basket on the side of the upturned coach, simply slid into them. For the smallest moment he encircled her narrow waist, then turned his attention again to the older woman. Instinctively he brushed back a loose wisp of her hair: Honoria was moved by the purity of the gesture and by the shape of his large hand.

“Just a fright,” he murmured. “Just a little fright.”

Honoria reached for the kitten, arched in alarm, and was scratched in parallel lines on the wrist for her trouble. Gallantly, the young man produced a white handkerchief. He settled the old lady, summoned a cup of tea from an onlooker and then – unnecessarily, since it was so faint an injury – wrapped the cloth, monogrammed “A”, around Honoria's thin wrist. It was only then that he looked at her. She was about seventeen, plain, her skin rather bluish in the early morning
light, yet she carried about her an aura of erotic intensity, as though she had travelled with special knowledge from a foreign country. The young man looked away again, and fiddled with the knot of the handkerchief.

“Honoria Brady,” she announced, and proffered her unscratched hand.

“Arthur Strange, Coach Driver.”

Honoria realised she had not even looked at him when she boarded the coach, or at his boy assistant, now unharnessing and calming the horses.

“Edith MacMillan, Mrs,” said the lady behind them. “And Camille, the kitten.”

They were already a couple. They were already wed. Edith MacMillan, Mrs, their oversized cupid, paid for the honeymoon to cement her role in their happy collision.

Arthur Strange was twenty-two years old and lived in Geelong with his beloved father and stepmother. The son of Methodist missionaries, he had been born in Shanghai, China, where his mother had died of cholera two days before his eighth birthday. In an anguished crisis of faith his father, James, had suddenly quit his vocation and moved with his only son to live in Australia. They had initially settled in Sydney, where James had taken up building jobs to support his son, before meeting a tea merchant from the Toishen district in Kwantung province, who had travelled from Hong Kong and by odd circumstances ended in a tea shop in Swanston Street. Relieved to be once again speaking Cantonese, relieved to find a community of fellow souls – since James ineluctably felt more Chinese than European – he fell into partnership with Ah Chou and eventually married his daughter, Fen. It was a new beginning. Arthur adored Fen, not least for her cooking, but also because she made his father happy. A queen of the abacus, she doubled
James's business, doted on her husband, but to their mutual disappointment was unable to bear a child. The European community considered the family absurd
(strange by name, strange by nature)
, and the marriage was regarded as somewhat perverse; certainly it ruined Arthur's chances with many of the local women. But he had accepted his loneliness with equanimity, and at the age of eighteen taken a position as a coach driver, which kept him so much in motion, and so unlocatable and inconspicuous, that he would not need to show the world how ungrounded he was.

Honoria Brady was the accident he had given up hoping for.

Because he now lived in Geelong, and she in Melbourne, their courtship took place at the Melbourne coach house, in the hour, each weekday, between the coach arriving and returning. Under arches of steel ornamented with fluttering pigeons, and in the hustle and bustle of travel, of ticket-finding and luggage-carting, Arthur and Honoria exchanged their intimacies. No place in Australia had ever been so ardent; Honoria centred her day on the coach that arrived for just her; Arthur rode not to Melbourne, but solely to Honoria. Their first kiss coincided with the blowing of a whistle; it was something they joked about for years to come.

The impediment was her father. George Brady was a widower, embittered and mean and he worked as the manager of a bank so that he could practise his meanness daily and with professional aplomb. The pride and joy was Neville, his son in the Indian Civil Service, but he considered his wayward daughter a flirt and a flibbertigibbet. He had chosen a colleague, a decent fellow, whom he considered a suitable match, but Honoria was ungovernable and disobedient. In the end he agreed to the marriage on the condition that this Arthur chap move to live in Melbourne and take up a position, one with
real prospects, in a branch of his bank. Arthur readily agreed. He would have agreed to anything. He would have scaled the volcano Krakatoa if Honoria had been the prize. He would have swum to Tasmania to capture her kiss. At the wedding, to which Mrs Edith MacMillan and her husband were invited, George Brady was shocked by Arthur Strange's unconventional parents – he could not bring himself to acknowledge them, a Chinawoman and a Crank – but by then it was too late. Arthur and Honoria were inseparable. George resolved to make their lives a misery until grandchildren arrived.

Edith MacMillan held herself splendidly responsible for the Strange romance. She was eccentric and wealthy, and presented the delighted newlyweds with a card containing Camille's paw print, stamped in Indian ink, and a double sea passage to Italy so that they could honeymoon on the Continent. George Brady disapproved. He snorted into his beer and imagined shipwrecks.

Rocked on the ocean, then, in their own marital vehicle. Transported on scalloped waters and surging currents.

On their first night together Honoria told her lover Arthur Strange the entire plot of Charlotte Brontë's famous novel,
Jane Eyre.
Her triangle-shaped face lit up as she spoke. She was impassioned, fixated; she knew whole paragraphs by heart.

Arthur listened to the ocean wash against his new wife's voice. Thought Rochester a fool. Doted. Made a future. Fell at last into her warm body as if he were arriving somewhere safely, bathed in a white light from who-knows-where.

“
I WANT YOU
to have this. It's all I have of my first mother.”

“It's beautiful. Chrysanthemums. Tell me the story.”

“The story?”

“You know. Where it came from, how she found it.”

Arthur looked at his hands. He had never been asked for his stories before.

“When she first went to China,” he began very quietly, “my mother was afraid. She feared illness, the people. She feared the foreignness of it all. A woman – not a Christian convert, but some sort of medicine woman she consulted – gave her the gift of this chrysanthemum fan. This woman told her through a translator that it was a special gift, and that she must use it to cool herself if she contracted fever or met Demon Spirits. It would protect her, the woman said.”

Arthur's hands in his lap seemed to grow smaller.

“I think”, he added tentatively, “that my mother believed it. In her last illness, I remember, she insisted that it be present. She was too weak with fever to raise her own hand, so my father held the fan. She thought she would recover. She smiled up at the fan. Its shadow waved slowly across her face . . . I saw her, like that, with the shadow moving . . . And what about your mother? Do you have a story?”

Honoria paused.

“I was really too young to remember my mother. And my father, in any case, would never speak of her. My brother Neville says he remembers the shape of her dresses. Like lampshades, he says. Like illuminated shades. He doesn't remember her face, though he must have been five when she died . . .”

(A lampshade. A hoop-shape around an untellable story.)

AMONG THE FORMS
of her diligent revenge, Lucy took to burning small holes in Mrs Minchin's clothes. Mrs Minchin was bewildered; she thought a moth of some kind, or even a rat, was responsible. In the evening she patched what Lucy had destroyed in the morning; the children watched her sew in the chair that had not long before been their mother's.

The weeks after the deaths were almost unendurable. Apart from the dreary satisfactions of tormenting Mrs Minchin, Thomas and Lucy existed in a state of effacement and disability, as though they shared an undiagnosable illness. A kind of anaesthetic quality smothered their experience; they were disengaged in each task they performed, and their feelings, such as they were, were delayed and denuded. Moreover, the children had become convinced that there were ghosts in the house, presences that seemed everywhere to call:
behold me
! At night they saw flitting shapes and weird transparencies. Noises like whispers filled up the darkness. Once Thomas swore he saw his father's face – unshaven, eyes bloodshot – hovering on the surface of the hallway mirror; and Lucy dreamed that the baby that would have been their sister was crawling in the cramped, dark space beneath her bed. There was no vacancy to grief. There were instead these drastic invasions, that hung omnipresent in the air itself.