Sixty Lights (3 page)

The children were relieved when Grandpa James sent coach tickets to visit him. He had not attended the funerals because he was confined to a wheelchair; and besides, he too had this undiagnosable condition. But he had written several times, and they had several times replied, and something in their tone and their scant news told him that they would be better out of the haunted house. As the coach pulled away the children ignored Mrs Minchin's solicitous wave. Ned, left behind, howled and howled. Mrs Minchin held him by the collar as he strained to follow.

When they are adults they will understand that this trip was a redemption; it saved whatever still existed after the corrosions of grief, after the dreadful threat to the children of unstill ghosts. Grandpa James had an illness that made his body tremble, but he was still pleased beyond measure that the children had come to stay.

“It's joy,” he declared. “I'm weeping with joy.”

James now lived with Fen in the mining town of Ballarat. He had settled on the goldfields and opened a small general store, mostly servicing the community of Chinese diggers. He sold picks, pots and pans, clothing, canvas tents, and assorted day-to-day and mining implements. In return he was offered genuine friendship – such as he had never experienced as a missionary – and a supply of fresh vegetables, including luxurious ginger. With his second wife at his side he had believed himself blessed. But now James could not balance these gifts against the deaths of Arthur and Honoria. No calculation or figuring sufficed. He deplored his own sense of fatality and doom, his own unholy feelings of emptiness. He wanted to ask his lost God forgiveness for his survival. The children stepped down from the coach and James greeted them, weeping.

Fen busied herself making elaborate Chinese confectionery, and invited her younger nieces and nephews, four in all, to the house to play. At first Thomas and Lucy were disconcerted by such attention – they had never before sat with so many faces around the table, or heard so much talk, some of it incomprehensible, or seen so many dishes arrayed before them; and all presided over by a woman who dressed every day in fabrics that shone like glass.

But they came to cherish this time, in this exotic household. It was, Thomas announced, like a new beginning. They ate new food, and met new people and did wholly new things:
life after death.
Grandpa James patiently taught both children to play chess – they had to move the pieces for him, so that his trembles would not upset the arrangements of the board – and Fen, with equal patience, taught them bridge and mahjong. In the tiny operations of castles and tiles, of horses and playing cards, in those dwarf obsessive circuits and friendly competitions, they all found distraction.

Among the cousins Lucy met an especial friend; she was Su-Lin, a pretty girl who was almost her age. They would curl up together under the low scented branches of the lemon tree, pretending they were twins, and sharing secrets. Su-Lin had honey-coloured skin and gold rings in her ears, and Lucy was in love with her. They agreed to marry when they were grown up, and have many, many children, but in the meantime Lucy showed her how to use the magnifying glass to burn her own name in pieces of wood.
Su-Lin
, in Chinese characters, appeared on the gatepost in front of the house; and James and Fen, amused, could not bring themselves to scold her. Thomas was also in love with Su-Lin: he did cartwheels to attract her attention and caught good-luck crickets for her straw cage and years later Lucy discovered that Su-Lin had also promised marriage to her brother.

In the evenings the children wheeled their grandfather down the main street of Ballarat. He hailed complete strangers and smiled at everyone. And now that he was ill, and had lost his son, and was grievously afflicted, most people were kinder and some smiled back.

It was a shock to learn that Uncle Neville, their mother's only brother, was travelling all the way from India to collect them. Grandpa James said it was what their father had wanted. He had, Grandpa James insisted, written and arranged it. So when the time was near the children were moved again. Their new beginning ended. They boarded the coach to Melbourne, back to the haunted house, and to purple-faced Mrs Minchin. At the coach house, their grandfather was trembling all over; his head was shaking like a puppet and he was weeping shamelessly. The cousins were there and so was Fen. Lucy and Thomas watched their family diminish to chesspiece size, until in the distance all that was visible was an oriental garment that caught the sun's rays and glittered, like a tube of lit glass.

THE HOUSE LOOKED
closed up, but they knew Mrs Minchin was there. Although the gate was looped with its rusty chain and the curtains were drawn, they could hear the sound of Ned, frantic at their return, leaping and barking in the hallway, running back and forth, testing the limits of his closed space with manic excitement. When they knocked there was an explosion of barking and scratching, but no Mrs Minchin came hurrying to answer the door. The children stood hand in hand on their own doorstep, like characters in a fairy tale, wondering what to do.

“Perhaps she's died,” Lucy said hopefully.

“Murdered, I should think. With her throat cut,” Thomas added. “And purple blood in bucketsful.”

The boy was appalled by what he had just said. The children looked at each other, a little uncertain, and decided to consult the next-door neighbour.

Mrs O'Connor was blind and witchy and had hairs sprouting in a tiny neat plume from a mole on her cheek. She reached out for the children in case they were imposters, but they stood apart, and were ready to run if she grabbed at them.

“Thursday. She thinks it's Thursday that you're coming. She's up at Castlemaine, visiting her sister.”

Her narrow hands hung in the air, both in threat and supplication, willing the children to move forward and consent to be touched. They looked like dead things, suspended there, so grey and shrivelled. Lucy thought: people die in different stages, this woman first in the eyes and then in the hands; and Thomas thought: she is dead already, she is like a mummy from Egypt, artificially preserved. The children were no less afraid for being beyond her reach.

“That poor, poor dog,” Mrs O'Connor said. “Day and night it's been crying.”

Thomas remembered his manners, and knew how to be formal.

“Thank you very kindly for the information, Mrs O'Connor. Most useful. Indeed.”

And they ran off, back to their yard, and found the small square window, just near the kitchen chimney, that they knew could be forced. Thomas hoisted his sister up so that she stood balanced barefoot upon his shoulders, then she pushed, slid in on her belly, and he heard her plop down inside, accompanied by the yelps of Ned, now maddened with joy.

What was it in that pushing into shadows, so laden with dog-smell and must and the sour remains of foodstuffs (or was it the metallic taint of spilt blood or the emanations of ghost breath?); what was it in the simple dropping down and the dog leaping up that was still so terrifying? Lucy half expected to find Mrs Minchin dead, her neck cut open, her brown eyes staring, the sticky mess of a murder soaking their Turkish carpet. But it was not that at all. It was that she had never before been alone in their house, or seen it so closed. The stench, Lucy discovered, was of mutton and dog mess: Mrs Minchin had left a pile of bones for the dog, and a bucketful
of water –
purple blood in bucketsful
– and locked it inside. Lucy held her nose and looked around her. In the unlit kitchen familiar objects asserted a new kind of strangeness. The curtains with their twining ivyleaf print. The erect, looming chairs. The scratched surface of the table and the doily at its centre. The milk jug appeared enormous and very solid. Lucy could see blue beads glinting on its white lacy cover. She felt she must not touch anything; these belonged to somebody else. And in the drawing room this effect of distance persisted: the armchairs, the bureau, the standing lamp with the shade that ended in a bobbled flare – these objects disturbed her with their alien quality of autonomy. She made her way to the front of the house, skirting the furniture, and when she opened the front door Ned flew out before her as though shot from a cannon. Thomas almost fell as the dog leapt at him, frenzied with recognition.

That first evening the children lay facing each other, on their parents' double bed. They heard the sound of corrugated iron contracting in the cool of the night, the wind from the east stirring in the wattle by the window, the chickens settling down, their querulous throaty murmurs. Ned was on the floor, unrelaxed, his bony head cocked. They were a threesome afraid. As it grew darker, Thomas and Lucy talked quietly for a while but did not go to their own rooms or light the lamps. They undressed in the gathering darkness and slept very early, with their thin arms and legs bound in a wreath-shape, together.

Lucy dreamed a vague dream in which she was trapped in a confined space. There was the sound of wind blowing and a sensation of threat. She tried to use her magnifying glass to burn a hole to escape, but could not, in her anxiety, find the direction of the sun.

Rooster-call awoke them. In the morning the children
discovered that the skinny boy Harold, from a house nearby, had been hired to feed the chickens. His thin cluck-clucking awoke them at daybreak, and they thought at first, with alarm, that Mrs Minchin had returned. Thomas persuaded Harold, on pain of Chinese burns, not to tell anyone of their return – he left a welt to show the seriousness of his threat – and so began their four days together, with only Harold and the blind woman knowing, and their whole world contracting to a curtain-drawn space.

Daytimes were easy: objects recovered their propriety, their habitual look, and the children played cards and read, or scavenged for eggs and tomatoes. Mrs O'Connor called over the fence and gave them a fruit cake. She had baked it herself, measuring the ingredients by mysterious means with her ugly mummified hands, and though the children ate it cautiously, plucking out the bitter green cherries with their fingernails and flicking them away, it served as reassuring evidence of her residual humanity. She left them alone, Mrs O'Connor did. The gift of the fruit cake was her only intervention.

In the afternoon the children shared the wicker chair, wedged closely together, and Thomas read to Lucy from his book about railways.

Neither could have said what transformation occurred at night, but it was detectable even on the surface of the skin. Their hands were gluey and their faces appeared waxen and old. Ned was unsettled and turned in tight circles, whimpering. Shadows hung everywhere, all of them elongated. The children lay again on their parents' bed, a little apart, and both were close to tears. Thomas moved his head and whispered into his sister's ear.

“If Mrs Minchin doesn't come back we'll go to Brazil.”

“Brazil?” Lucy had never heard of it.

“There are jungles there, and gold. I'll find bucketsful of gold and we'll buy a passage to England and live there like swells. In a castle. Perhaps in Scotland.”

Lucy was impressed by her brother's whispery vision. He sounded confident and sure.

“Like a princess?”

Thomas didn't even bother to reply. He was thinking, he said. Thinking and planning.

Lucy remembered the puzzling story of the Princess and the Pea. She lived in a castle, this princess, and everyone knew she was a princess because under fifty mattresses she could still feel the presence of a pea. Why was this so? Lucy was enchanted by the magical sensitivity of princesses, who were so acutely aware of the world they felt the tiniest impression.

“Or Africa,” Thomas added. “There are diamonds in Africa.”

“In bucketsful?”

“Oh, yes. Diamonds in bucketsful.”

The grim night with its long shadows took on radiant possibilities.

Thomas had plans. Thomas would guide them.

So it was a surprise, later on, when Lucy was roused in the night – disturbed by a metaphysical shiver that awoke her – to find her brother walking in his sleep, apparently lost and bewildered. Thomas was naked and cradled his genitals in one hand; the other arm crossed his chest, reaching to the throat, as though feeling at the base of his neck for his pulse. It must have been near dawn, for the darkness was thinning, and Lucy could see his slender body, a pale human light, moving in slow motion in its otherworldly state, delicate, tentative, almost no longer her brother. She took the hand, which was shaking, away from his throat and as gently as she could, led him back to bed. He had the look of someone so nervous, so taut, that
he would surely detect a hidden pea like a storybook princess. Lucy cradled her brother's head onto a pillow, careful not to look into his open eyes, and kissed him in the centre of the forehead, exactly in the centre, just as she had seen her living mother do.

IT WAS NOT
a photograph, but it might have been, since it swam into Lucy's mind with the particular lucidity an image carries as it surfaces in its fluid, the lucidity of an entirely new vision, washed fresh into the world, wet with its image-birthing. It was of her mother as a child of seven or eight, standing in a pretty, flounced dress and a broad white hat, a hat which curved around her face like a materialising halo. This child looked directly ahead, but squinted slightly, as though she were peering into the future to meet her adult daughter's gaze, as though, in fact, the child knew it was possible that time might distort like this, might loop lacily and suddenly fold over. It was a canny image: the child seemed to know something of the future.

Behind the figure of Honoria Brady as a little girl was a mound of earth, perhaps fifteen feet high, a grass-covered hillock shaped like an old-fashioned beehive, and at the base of this mound there was a narrow tunnel. This structure was a handmade cave where ice, shipped in blocks from faraway places like Norway and Denmark, was stored for English country houses, so that the wealthy might have their chilled wine, their ice cream, their cold salmon and their ice packs. A suitable small hill was found, its interior hollowed out, and the ice stored there, settled in layers separated by straw. Kept
in this manner ice could last up to eighteen months. Lucy knew about ice caves from her mother's story.