Sixty Lights (24 page)

HER FEVERISH ILLNESS
made Lucy susceptible to in-between states. She woke from a dream in which she had been performing the entire photographic process – handling the syrupy, sticky, collodion glass plates, sensitising them in a solution of silver nitrate and potassium oxide, placing the plate in the camera holder while it was still wet, exposing the plate, then developing it in a solution of pyrogallic and acetic acids. In the darkroom she removed the negative from the developer, washed it in water, fixed it with a solution of sodium thiosulphate to remove excess silver oxide, washed it once again, and finally set it to dry. This entire act – together with all the correct chemical labels and proper sequence of actions – had been performed disincarnate, as though she were a kind of spirit, doomed to filmy repetition of what she knew best. Lucy decided she must take a final series of photographs, one that would constitute her valediction forbidding mourning. She would allow error and chance – ripples in the collodion, over- and under-exposures, bright whitish patches or unexpected shadows – to enter her work, welcomed, as a mark of relinquishment of control.

Lucy took a series of portrait photographs, wishing to record each person she loved. There was a particularly lustrous image of Jacob Webb; he seemed to emit light, as those in love
sometimes do, and certainly he appeared in the photographs more handsome than usual. He had a glint in his eye and an expression of sensual compliance. Lucy added a blind stamp – her initials embossed in the corner of the photograph. It was perhaps an unforgivable mark of possession, but she had been finally unable to resist. In the future, she would like Jacob to look at his own image, and to see in the corner, faintly, her timeless salutation.

Lucy also took many photographs of Ellen. These were less successful, since she so hated sitting still, but there were one or two, in particular, that showed all her restrained energy and fullness of life. In one photograph, Ellen was showered with lamplight, giving her frizzy hair a gorgeous divine glow; in another she looked unusually thoughtful and child-serious, with an endearing pout and self-possession. In a third photograph Ellen was holding a bunch of lilacs. This was a concession to Mrs Minchin, who wanted something pretty, she said, something more like the studio portraits she had seen in shop windows in the Strand. For the same reason her own photograph – posed magisterial in her Sunday best and with her best bird-feathered hat tilted just so – was an imitation of one she had seen somewhere on display.

The photographs of Violet and Thomas showed they had become twins. The camera confirmed what Lucy had known from the beginning: they were matched physically and their union was arcanely inevitable. Both already looked a little older than in their wedding photographs; suffering had etched them, had given them a serious tone, had taken from them the light-heartedness of that day at Weller's house, blooming with expectation.

The failed photograph, and one that would distress everyone later on, was one that Jacob Webb had taken. Jacob insisted there should be a photograph which included Lucy,
so he sensibly suggested a collective portrait. Lucy carefully set up the photographic apparatus, prepared the collodion, set the process in motion, and then took her place between Thomas and Mrs Minchin (holding Ellen), with Violet standing, to the left, at her husband's side. They were posed beneath a high arched canopy of leaves and the ambient light was diffuse and bright. However, Jacob at some point became anxious and confused; he was unsure of the principles of actual exposure. Lucy watched for a moment until, impatient and without thinking, she left the pose to help Jacob behind the lens. The result was that the others photographed clearly, but that Lucy, having moved during exposure from her initial position, appeared in print as blurred and residual. These pale diaphanous images photographers called “ghosts”, and they were sometimes intentionally produced, Lucy had discovered, for the likes of Madame d'Esperance and Madame Noir. Jacob wished to try again, but Lucy refused.

Error and chance, she said. These are beautiful things. Clearly I am meant from now on to be a partickler ghost.

Thomas smiled sadly and kissed his sister: it was, Jacob thought, some kind of private joke. Something folded into families, something he had never experienced, knit them in special lexicons and private amusements.

In bed, later on, when they discussed the ghost, Jacob found Lucy stubborn. She would not pose again.

She was the instrument, she said, and not the subject. It was enough. It was her gift.

They made love in a luxurious and melancholy fashion. Jacob had learnt quickly the many ways to touch and enter Lucy, and she, in turn, knew many ways to receive him. They offered each other a correspondence of skin, widespread and generous. When they fell apart, each was varnished with sweat. Lovemaking had transfigured them.

“Marry me,” said Jacob, still breathless and heaving.

But Lucy refused. She would never marry.

“You know I am ill.”

“Then what”, he persisted clumsily, “is to become of Ellen?”

“Mrs Minchin will be her mother,” Lucy answered without pause. “Mrs Minchin will be a mother, after all.”

“Do you not love me?”

“Love and marriage are not the same.”

“I beg you,” said Jacob.

But Lucy turned away. There was no way she could explain that she was entering her own eclipse, that it was hers alone, that she must prepare. Lucy felt Jacob's hand slide slowly along her hip and come to rest firmly on her shining thigh.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I know,” she replied.

Lucy was more seriously ill than he guessed. She carried contagion deep within her. She had darkness in her chest, her own obscure chamber, and a presentiment not of dread, but of honourable mortality.

“When I was a child,” Lucy said, changing the subject, “I owned a magnifying glass. It was a proud possession. I took it everywhere. But I didn't use it to see the magnification of things; I used it to burn. It astonishes me now.”

“What?” asked Jacob.

“That I didn't know to see. Every blade of grass was a fuse. Every surface a temptation. I wanted ash, destruction.”

She paused, remembering. Outside, an ash-coloured shine opened the morning.

Jacob lay silent.

“When I was a child,” he said at last, “I believed the stories of the Bible. I believed in loaves and fishes, in walking on water. I believed in miracles.”

Lucy waited.

“I even”, he continued, “believed the story of Lazarus.”

“And now?”

“Now nothing,” said Jacob. “I believe in nothing but this.”

He touched Lucy's face gently, with his open hand.

JACOB AND LUCY
were looking at photographs together; she was explaining what she called art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction. They examined print after print, and Lucy spoke of practised seeing, methodical execution, and all the positive and negative relations that combine to conjure a beloved face. Her images came in many colours – browns, purples, sepias, olive – achieved by altering the developing silver with toning solutions of other metals – gold, iron, copper, selenium. Lucy was proud of her art: she saw before her an immanent opulence, recorded as her own metaphysics. These images would endure. These would gloriously outlive her.

“This one,” said Lucy, pointing to a portrait of Violet recovering, sitting by a window with a book in her lap, “this one is special.”

Jacob saw what he thought was a spoiled image. The right side of the print was overtaken by a circle of white light, and Violet was located to the left, as though cowering against glare.

“Halation, this is called. It is the halo of light that appears around a bright object in a photograph – a window, a lamp, a streetlight – which occurs in the printing process because of excess light rays from the brilliant object reflecting back from the emulsion support.”

“A reflection.”

“More than that, a flooding of light. A perceptible halo.”

“A technical mistake.”

“Yes, perhaps. The Royal College of Photographers would certainly deplore it. But it seems to me the loveliest accident. It shows us the force of radiance, its omnipresence.”

“What you describe others would call the Holy Spirit.”

“There are”, she responded, wishing to teach him, “many kinds of spirit, many kinds of shrine.”

“Halation.” Jacob Webb repeated the word.

And for some reason he did not understand, he thought suddenly of his father. He had been a child of seven and looked truly for the very first time. He had seen his father immersed in a wave of clarity. He had looked death in the face and performed his own resurrection.

IN THE AUTUMN
Lucy felt her body begin to flinch against the chill air, which had an abrasive icy quality that seemed to cut away at her lungs. Enfolded in a crimson scarf, a matching woollen hat, gloves, and her old overcoat patchily lined with velvet, she was still assailed by the wind and defeated by the weather. Somehow she had already foreseen all this, that she would know surely when her last season had arrived, but that she would persist, as though ignorant, to place herself alive into the world. Lucy maintained her walks with Mrs Minchin and Ellen, striding against the pain and shortness of breath that gathered in her chest. She was weak and easily exhausted, and when she stopped for a rest her legs were wildly trembling and darkness swooped down upon her, in a momentary faint. Everywhere broad leaves were falling away, and Lucy had always enjoyed this process; the sky filling with blown colour and slow descending shadows. But now it seemed a disintegration. Mrs Minchin's concerned face bent above her, its purple somehow enhanced and flashing like a warning, and Ellen tugged at her hem to continue their excursion; but this time, this walk, Lucy could not go on. She felt herself fall sideways, blood leaking from her mouth.

When she woke Lucy found herself in bed, propped on huge pillows. Mrs Minchin sat beside her, darning a sock stretched
taut over her competent fingers. Ellen, she explained, was with Thomas and Violet. Lucy knew herself to be in a state of high fever. She could feel her body burning intolerably so she flung off her bedclothes and tried to reach for the jug of water that stood close by on the side table. Mrs Minchin, who had never before seemed so purple or so very close, held her head and dabbed at her face with a damp cloth. She gave her sips of water and told her to sleep.

Time was elongated and then compressed in a concertina shape. Its pleats squeezed at Lucy's body, then stretched her into dreaming and delirium. Neither childhood nor future grew any less. She woke herself coughing. She felt a left-sided agony that seemed located at the heart. She reached instinctively to her throat and found there the cold Florentine beads that had belonged to her mother . . .

. . . Now it was Violet's turn to read.

“Let me see,” she said, checking the spines of volumes before her.

Violet sat close by the bedside, a little alarmed that Lucy, who had only weeks ago been bossily instructing them to pose, was now chalk-coloured and supine, her face striated with blue veins. Lucy had requested Keats, but Violet thought that morbid. So she had chosen instead a Wilkie Collins,
The Woman in White
, a popular novel which promised to centre on romance and be sufficiently uplifting and diverting for one so ill. So she began the tale of Walter, the artist, and his love for the heroine, Laura, and soon fell entranced into the complex machinations of plot – the evil Sir Percival Glyde, the foreign villain, Fosco. Unaccustomed to fiction, Violet sank agreeably into the fakery and mischief of made-up people, the rigmarole of mean and devious motivation, the scheming against love. Lucy listened to her reading and heard Violet's voice
quivering with excitement; she was charmed that her sister-in-law was so entranced by art.

Lucy had read the Collins novel before, and knew that Walter and Laura would end conveniently in each other's arms, that Fosco would be murdered and that Sir Percival would be burnt to death while tampering with a parish register to disguise his ignoble origins. But in her mind, now, the novel unplaited and reversed. The mysterious encounter with the woman in white, an enigma drifting out of the darkness with no identity and purpose, seemed to her especially poignant and compelling, and the end, not the beginning, of any story. Lucy closed her eyes against Violet's murmurous voice and saw herself, at midnight, meeting a woman in white, who might be her mother, or an Indian widow, or her own spooked self, a quivery pale presence, indistinct as water, something like the apparition screened on the ceiling, long ago, by Madame d'Esperance.

“Oh goodness me!” Mrs Minchin exclaimed, at some point in the narrative.

Lucy blinked open her eyes, and knew that the story had swollen into detail and kept moving on without her, and that she was transfixed, perhaps self-indulgently, by this single strange sign . . .

. . . She asked to be taken into the garden. Together Mrs Minchin and Violet lifted her onto a wheeled wicker chair and moved her, not outside – since it was raining – but to the back window. Lucy could see the rain-slicked path gleaming and orange leaves patterning the lawn. The trunks of the trees in the rain looked exceptionally dark, and were spotted with stains which resembled spilled silver nitrate.

Jacob was at her shoulder. He leaned across her for a kiss. Lucy could smell the tang of oil paint and see flecks and the open pores of his skin.

“Make love to me,” Lucy whispered.

There was desperation in what she said, a plea, a complaint.

But Jacob halted, surprised, and replied that she must rest. He caressed her hot cheek with a single finger.

Perhaps I am repulsive, Lucy thought, my face a distortion, my body lean and contracted and vile with consumption. Perhaps I carry the sullen grimace of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. She wanted nothing more than simply to encircle her lover, to call his name. She wanted him to lie with his head between her legs.