Free Sixty Lights by Gail Jones Page B

direction of India, and systematically hovers over each one of its hundreds of palaces. One day the ice-woman looks up and there he is: it is magical; a sky-boat! It is her vision of liberation. She hastily writes a letter and ties it to a balloon, and up it goes, her freedom, her hope. The Dutchman is so excited to have at last found his journey’s end – he has even glimpsed her pretty, shining face appearing at a starshaped window – that he leans forward a little carelessly to claim the letter, topples from his basket and plunges to the earth. The woman sees him falling, flailing and desperate, the unread letter clutched tightly in his hand. His body is crushed below her on tessellated paving stones, his bright blood channelled into diamonds and hexagons. The Venetian boat, captainless, sails slowly away. No-one knows where. And what became of the woman? Her window was bricked up as a punishment and in her isolation and darkness she eventually went insane. For a long time she held fast to the vision of the wicker boat in the sky, full of romance and possibility, full of various transportations, but by the end of her life saw only Mogul patternsof Dutch blood, glistening in the heat of Indian sunlight.
    Lucy’s mother changed the story many times, but the end, in every case, was never a happy one. The Dutchman missed his target, or found the wrong lover and was doomed to a miserable and mistaken partnership. Or a storm swept the basket to the top of Mount Ararat, and the Dutchman died there, stranded and lovelorn. Or he arrived too late, sliding on his belly through the star-window to discover the woman long dead from loss of hope. Or the Englishwoman grew old, continuously sending out messages; or she grew blind with her effort and wrote something indecipherable. In the worst version the ice-woman was so distressed by the tragedy of her unanswered ribbons that she set fire to her room, and burned down the palace around her, her face appearing one last time in a flaming star. The palace simply melted, Honoria said.
    What shall Lucy do with her inheritance of story? Now she is left with a repertoire of exasperating desire, of hokum, memory, nonsense and tall-tale, that she has siphoned into herself as a stream of chill water. These stories fill her with an amorphous dissolving feeling. Even now, in the coin-light of warm summer sunshine, with her eyes closed and her mind bent on rational summoning, she is swept away and lost. And her mother’s face is so vague it might be a wet footprint, shimmering thin as a breath, transient as a sundial shadow, poised on the very edge of complete disappearance.

19
    LUCY WORE HER new white blouse and her new straw bonnet (topped with a posy of artificial violets), and carried on her arm her old herringbone coat; Thomas looked serious and grown-up in his best cap and stovepipe trousers and new navy serge jacket. Uncle Neville had arranged for the luggage to be sent ahead, so together they appeared as a group on a Sunday outing, all nervous expectation and dressed-up best-behaviour. The driver lifted Lucy by the waist to sit beside her brother, then Uncle Neville pulled himself up, setting the cart jolting and tilting with his awkward weight, and they perched there, all three, looking down at Mrs Minchin. To the children’s horror she began to cry; they had never seen Mrs Minchin cry before. Her face smudged over and the tears gushed, and Ned, by her side, let out a long, plaintive howl. Up to this moment the children had been restless and flushed with excitement, but now they too collapsed and Uncle Neville, with no experience of wailing children and fulsome scenes of departure, looked alarmed in his
loco-parentis
incompetence. He was unused to these hyperbolic displays of emotion. Honoria, he recalled, had been a fantasist: she had clearly inspired in her children these crude and exorbitant performances.
    In truth, Neville had been flattered by Arthur’s