Sixty Lights (4 page)

“Tell it again,” she would say. “Tell the ice cave again.”

And so her mother told it yet again and the swimming image of the little girl in the flounces and bonnet rose up, gained detail and gradually became fixed.

Honoria Brady was the only daughter of a widower, George, a young man not yet embittered, but dreaming of a New Beginning in Canada or Australia. The family lived in a small town on the edge of an estate in Nottinghamshire, where George worked as a lawyer's clerk and his son Neville attended the church school. Honoria stayed at home and though only seven, was expected to clean and tend the garden and learn cooking from an old woman who came each day to concoct some brown matter that she presented invariably as stew. It was a lonely time, and Honoria was a child given to escape and exploration. “Wayward” her father called her.

When she discovered the ice cave, on the property of the estate, Honoria was brave enough to enter. She walked into the tunnel, not needing to bend, but having no light saw only a kind of liquid glint, unidentifiable and veiled by shadows. Her hand pressed against something she thought at first was hot, so she withdrew it immediately. But the space was cool and damp, and the child felt safe and enclosed. Earth scent surrounded her and the air was watery, strange. When she returned with a candle the next day she discovered that what she had touched was ice, but she had never seen it in this abundant state before – a hidden mountain, tucked away and layered neatly with wet straw. She claimed this space as her own, and played there fantastic games with invisible friends. With a kitchen knife Honoria would chip away at the ice, and feed herself on its sparkly shards and slivers.

One day, perhaps inevitably, someone found her. The keeper
of the estate blundered through the tunnel, hunched over like a cripple, his giant shadow cast before him, to find the small child ensconced and perfectly at home. He seized her wrist and dragged her out. When he found her there again the following week, he marched her up to the large house for a reprimand from the mistress. (This is a part of the story Lucy disliked as a child, but enjoys now, as an adult, imagining her mother.)

In the large house Honoria met an ancient woman, a Lady Rosamund Leonowens, who peered at her through spectacles held on a fancy silver stick. She was stiff with black bombazine and frilled all over, and her head, Honoria said, was sharp and beaky, like a crow.

“Your punishment”, the woman commanded, “is that you must read to me daily.”

(Did Lady Leonowens really say this, or does Lucy require it to be so?) At this point Honoria confessed her illiteracy, and in a remarkable turn of events Lady Leonowens arranged for the child to have daily instruction in the alphabet, which she supervised herself. So it was that Honoria learned to read. Within a year, with flair and precocity, she was reading to the old woman. And when the family left for Australia, George Brady, who had known nothing at all of this strange transaction, was handed five guineas in a little purse, stained with tears, and an instruction that the child Honoria write regularly to her patron of her Colonial Adventures.

Lucy was six years old when she first heard this story. Even then, so young, it made her dizzy with pleasure. She had leaned into her mother's body, which was dusted with gardenia talcum powder and exceptionally sweet, and closed her eyes to see again the small girl in the cave, so brave and so clever, lighting up with her candle a whole mountain of ice.

Her mother bent to kiss her cheek.

“My Princess,” she whispered.

FOR ARTHUR THE
silhouette existed symbolically, to remind him of his honeymoon. To remind him that he had found and claimed Honoria. And not once, but twice. On the coach, and in Italy.

In their Florentine pensione it was clear to everyone they were newly wed: they had about them a nimbus of reciprocity and mutual regard and moved – as everyone noticed – as though in slow dance, each responding attentively to the shape of the other, to the subtle aesthetics and erotics of body configurations. Cynics were reminded that love is possible: here it was, incarnated. As the young man popped open an umbrella above his new wife, and she ducked beneath it, swiftly, in a pert concise arc, even their simplest movements were evidently beautiful.

The Pensione Rosa was full of English tourists, all of whom marvelled in chorus that anyone could have come so far. Australia signified a space so vast and remote that it was imaginable only in terms of exaggerated vacuity. The occasional black person or criminal, nightmarish flora and fauna, an empty dead centre where explorers wandered lost for a while and then vanished, heroically, into absolving thin air. Nothing much, really. Space. Immense space. Honoria and Arthur endured these descriptions with patient bemusement,
but refused to feel pleased on being congratulated for their civilised manners and their English-language competence. On the whole, they decided, their fellow travellers were arrogant, hypochondriacal, rudely nationalistic, and excited only by the prospect of a game of bridge.

The exception, and there had to be one, was a Miss Harriet White, a character, said Honoria, straight out of a novel. She was a forty-two-year-old woman from south London who travelled as a companion to her aged aunt; and undaunted by her servile role to a somewhat demented relation, was lively, intelligent and habitually ironic. She and Honoria were instantaneous friends, and shared above all a love of reading. They exchanged novels and sat on the armoire together, their bodies inclined in the church-shape of serious conversation under a lamp of such flourish that it could only have been Italian. Arthur watched from a distance, aware of a kind of exclusion, but it was almost a week before he realised Miss White was a rival. Once they had come in from a stroll, having visited yet another generically picturesque church, and she rushed forward to greet them as they stood at the doorway. Even before Honoria had removed her overcoat and shaken her bonnet, Miss White had reached out to brush away raindrops that were clinging to her hair; this gesture was so intimate and possessive that Arthur felt himself clench with jealousy. From that moment he noticed everything with cheerless clarity: how singularly Miss White's attention was fixed on his wife, how she responded as he did, watching the nape of her neck, noticing how she habitually fiddled with her earrings, following her entire movement as she stooped to retie a shoe. Her smallest mannerisms arrested them both. Arthur thought of his heart as a coach, dragged in Honoria's direction.

The most painful moment was when his special gift was usurped. Honoria and Arthur had been window-shopping on
the Ponte Vecchio when she had admired a pretty string of Venetian glass beads. Arthur resolved to return the next day and purchase the beads, but when he did they were gone, sold to somebody else, so that he bought instead another string – not quite so remarkable, but pearly and intricate and threaded with spirals of bronze. That evening, before Arthur could present his gift over dinner, Miss White intercepted them and presented her own. Honoria must have described to her friend the jewellery she admired, for there, in a black velvet case, lay what Arthur had sought. Honoria threw her arms around Harriet's neck and kissed her three times.

“How thoughtful,” she exclaimed. “What a lovely surprise!”

He watched as Miss White fixed the clasp, brushing away strands of trailing hair. Honoria's hand strayed up to caress her throat.

“How thoughtful,” she repeated.

She moved to a mirror and saw herself radiant.

“I'm afraid”, Harriet added in a tone of mock seriousness, “they don't suit you at all. A dreadful vision!”

And then they both laughed, and kissed again.

Arthur's misery was acute. He felt he could not now present the lesser gift. Later he stored the pearly beads in the bottom of his luggage, his wounding secret. And he could not sleep for thinking of the women's faces, laughing in the mirror, and Miss White's slender fingers as they tended the clasp, and himself, dumb, appearing empty-handed.

It rained every day during the two weeks they spent in Florence. The stony streets shone and the façades of the buildings were slick with rain-light. Horse mess lay everywhere in fresh steaming piles; under carriage wheels it grew rank and dispersed in yellow streaks.

“Such a ripe, ripe city!” Honoria beamed.

Nothing disappointed her. Even the Arno, swollen with
debris, sullied with churning mud and the occasional drowned dog, she found delightful.

That Harriet was in love with Honoria was indisputable, but Arthur had to concede that she behaved with tact and restraint. In truth, he admired her. At the same time her presence made him insecure: she and Honoria had formed such a quick attachment and were intense in all their interactions. Their talk enlivened each other: it was some quality of concept or emotion, perhaps some texture of knowing, he found mysterious and felt he could not provide. Jealousy confused him and damaged his happiness.

One morning the women prepared to go off together: Miss White wanted to take Honoria to a little shop she claimed sold the finest papers and parchments in the world. When she noticed Arthur's discomfiture she invited him to accompany them, but, though miserable, he politely declined. Miss White extended the courtesy of drawing a map.

“We'll be here,” she said, marking an X. “And shan't be more than two hours.”

Arthur waited less than an hour before he set out to find them. The rain was dense and slanted. He pulled tighter his day-coat, and walked with untypical rapidity, clutching Miss White's map marked with its Honoria-location. Perhaps it was his hurry, or his anxiety, but Arthur quickly became lost. He entered a piazza to find that it was the one that he had left, and when he looked back over his shoulder, to the direction from which he had come, this too was unfamiliar. Stone walls loomed above him. The streets off the piazza were all similarly awash and indistinctive. Arthur fumbled to unfold Harriet's map but discovered it was smeared with moisture and all its details inky and irredeemable. Panic overtook him. Not that he would not find his way, but that he would not find
her.
His life seemed suddenly so very contingent: so much depended
on the bright apparition of her face. He spun around, feeling helpless, then simply fled, choosing a street at random and hurtling down it. He doubled back, and zigzagged and became hopelessly confounded. When Arthur finally paused and leaned against a stone wall, his heart was racing. (Mustn't cry, he thought, a grown man, a foreigner, on the streets of Florence.) The rain had stopped but Arthur did not seem to notice. He set off again, a child-sob ballooning in his chest.

When she appeared before him he was almost unsure, but yes, the floral gown beneath the maroon-coloured overcoat, the precise tilt of her bonnet, her profile within it. Honoria was alone, staring into a shop window some distance ahead, and as Arthur rushed forwards and startled her, she immediately smiled.
Annunciation
, he thought.
Annunciation: her face.
All over Italy he had seen images in which the passage of spirit was rendered in a faint dotted line, a love-corridor, a dedication. Something in these particular images had moved him: the affirmation of imperceptible connection.

“Look at this,” said Honoria, as she directed his gaze through a window, which was not in fact a shop but a craftsman's workplace. A pretty woman sat in the window, staring to one side, and in the dim recess behind her an old man bent at a wooden desk, cutting out her profile in thin black paper. He worked with tiny implements and with extreme concentration, and not from a sketch but from the purposeful acuity of his vision.

“Harriet is off seeking a carriage,” Honoria said distractedly.

She had no idea, he realised, of his watery dissolution, his panic in installments, or his recovery in her presence.

“So clever,” she murmured.

He peered then, with care, and saw in the old man's antique fastidious labour some measure of his own pernickety devotion.

Honoria was persuaded to have her profile cut. When, ten
minutes later, Harriet White passed by, looking a little troubled and glancing all around her, Arthur rushed into the street to guide her in, and they sat quietly together, watching their beloved emerge, painstakingly, as a silhouette in black paper. Against the bright window Honoria appeared as a figure cut into pure light.

“It's rather morbid,” declared Harriet. “I don't like it at all. Like mourning brooches. Like death.”

But Arthur rejoiced. This token. This sign.

IN THE DARKNESS
Lucy awoke with a start, and called out “MA!”

And it was her brother, Thomas, who roused to tend her. He stretched out his hand, groping like a blind person, like the Egyptian Mrs O'Connor, and found and stroked her cheek.

“There's someone out there, at the window,” Lucy complained.

She sounded so little, like an infant of two or three. Fright had reversed her.

Thomas said: “No, go back to sleep.”

“But there is. There is.” (She whined, she sobbed.)

So he rose, lit a candle, and saw himself reflected in the glass window pane, a boy-genie, quaking. His face was the colour of saffron, and in the strange zone of night glass he seemed to waver and shift, his body composed of coloured smoke. He could see his chest, his nipples, his startled-looking eyes.

“It's the wattle tree, I think. A branch is scraping at the window.”

Lucy was reassured. He heard her turn over behind him, sigh, and re-settle.

Thomas remained standing before the window. This impersonation of himself was more fearsome than his father's face appearing on the hallway mirror. The dark around him was welling, as though it would swallow and cover him.
Darkness
in bucketsful.
Yet the force of his own double fixed him still, and this ordinary sight, compelled by so ordinary a reflective phenomena, was the hypnotic confirmation of a solitude that he would carry throughout his life, unassuaged by adulthood or success or lovers in his bed, untempered by rational or sensible assessment. Part of him would always be this insubstantial and isolated boy, fictitious, yellow, paralleled by alienation, barely there on the glass in the middle of the night.