The Luminaries

‘Didn’t mean to break your—’

‘You haven’t broken anything. Come in, come in—close the door!’

‘It’s not business, exactly,’ Balfour said, by way of apology, knowing that Lowenthal’s holy day was a day of rest. ‘It’s not work, exactly. I just wanted to talk with you about something.’

‘It is never work, talking with you,’ Lowenthal replied generously, and then, for the fourth time, ‘But you must come in.’

At last Balfour stepped inside and closed the door. Lowenthal resumed his seat and folded his hands together. He said, ‘I have long thought that, for the Jew, the newspaper business is the perfect occupation. No edition on Sunday, you see—and so the timing of the Shabbat is perfect. I have pity for my Christian competitors. They must spend their Sunday setting type, and spreading ink, ready for Monday; they cannot rest. When you came up the path just now, that was the subject of my thinking. Yes, hang up your coat. Do sit down.’

‘I’m a Church of England man, myself,’ said Balfour—who, like many men of that religion, was made very uncomfortable by icons of faith. He eyed Lowenthal’s candle with some wariness, quite as if his host had laid out a hairshirt or a metal cilice.

‘What is on your mind, Tom?’

Benjamin Lowenthal was not at all displeased that his weekly observances had been interrupted, for his religion was of a very confident variety, and it was not in his nature to be self-doubting. He often broke his Shabbat vows in small ways, and did not chastise himself for it—for he was sensible of the difference between duty that is dreaded, and duty that comes from love; he believed in the acuity of his own perception, and felt that whenever he broke the rules, he broke them for reasons that were right. He was also (it must be admitted) rather restless, after two hours of unmitigated prayer—for Lowenthal was an energetic spirit, and could not be without external stimulation for long.

‘Listen,’ Balfour said now, placing his fingertips on the table between them. ‘I’ve just heard about Emery Staines.’

‘Ah!’ said Lowenthal, surprised. ‘Only just now? Your head has been buried in the sand, perhaps!’

‘I’ve been busy,’ said Balfour, eyeing the candle a second time—for ever since he was a boy he had not been able to sit before a candle without wanting to touch it, to sweep his index finger through the flame until it blackened, to mould the soft edges where the wax was warm, to dip his fingertip into the pool of molten heat and then withdraw it, swiftly, so that the tallow formed a yellow cap over the pad of his finger which blanched and constricted as it cooled.

‘Too busy for the news?’ said Lowenthal, teasing him.

‘I’ve got a fellow in town. A political fellow.’

‘Oh yes: the honourable Lauderback,’ said Lowenthal. He sat back in his chair. ‘Well, I hope that he is reading my paper, even if you are not! He has featured in the pages enough.’

‘Yes—featured,’ said Balfour. ‘But listen, Ben: I wanted to ask you a question. I stopped in at the bank this morning, and I heard someone’s been putting up notices in the paper. On Mr. Staines’s behalf—begging his return. Am I allowed to ask who placed them?’

‘Certainly,’ Lowenthal said. ‘A notice is a public affair—and in any case, she left a box number at the bottom of the advertisement, as you might have seen; you only have to go to the post office, and look at the boxes, and you will see her name.’

‘“She”?’

‘Yes, you’ll be surprised by this,’ said Lowenthal. ‘It was one of our ladies of the night! Will you guess which one?’

‘Lizzie? Irish Lizzie?’

‘Anna Wetherell.’

‘Anna?’ said Balfour.

‘Yes!’ said Lowenthal, now smiling broadly—for he had an insider’s sensibility, and enjoyed himself the most when he was permitted to occupy that role. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed that, would you? She came to me not two days after Mr. Staines first disappeared. I tried to persuade her to wait until more time had passed—it seemed wasteful to advertise for a man’s return when he was only two days’ gone. He might have merely walked into the gorge, I said, or ridden up the beach to the Grey. He might be back to-morrow! So I told her. But she was adamant. She told me he had not departed; he had vanished. She was very clear on that. She used those very words.’

‘Vanished,’ echoed Balfour.

‘The poor girl had been tried at the Courts that very morning,’ Lowenthal said. ‘What rotten luck she has had, this year past. She’s a dear girl, Tom—very dear.’

Balfour frowned: he did not like to be told that Anna Wetherell was a dear girl. ‘Can’t imagine it,’ he said aloud, and shook his head. ‘Can’t imagine it—the two of them. They’re as chalk and cheese.’

‘Chalk and cheese,’ echoed Lowenthal. He took pleasure in foreign idioms. ‘Who is the chalk? Staines, I suppose—because of his quarrying!’

Balfour did not seem to have heard him. ‘Did Anna give you any indication as to why she was asking after Staines? I mean—why—’

‘She was attempting to make contact with him, of course,’ Lowenthal said. ‘But that is not your question, I think.’

‘I just meant—’ But Balfour did not go on.

Lowenthal was smiling. ‘It is hardly a wonder, Tom! If that fellow showed her the smallest ounce of affection—well.’

‘What?’

The editor made a clucking noise. ‘Well, you must admit it: next to Mr. Staines, you and I are very grey indeed.’

Balfour scowled. What was a bit of greyness? Grey hair dignified a man. ‘Here’s another question,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘What do you know about a man named Francis Carver?’

Lowenthal raised his eyebrows. ‘Not a great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard stories, of course. One is always hearing stories about men of his type.’

‘Yes,’ said Balfour.

‘What do I know about Carver?’ Lowenthal mused, turning the question over in his mind. ‘Well, I know that he’s got roots in Hong Kong. His father was a financier of some kind—something to do with merchant trading. But he and his father must have parted ways, because he is not associated with a parent firm any longer. He is a lone agent, is he not? A trader. Perhaps he and his father parted ways after he was convicted.’

‘But what do you make of him?’ Balfour pressed.

‘I suppose that my impression of him is not an altogether good one. He is a rich man’s son first and a convict second, but it might just as well be the other way about: I believe he shows the worst of both worlds. He’s a thug, but he’s conniving. Or, to put it another way, his life is lavish, but it’s base.’

(This character summation was a quintessential one for Benjamin Lowenthal, who, in his thinking, tended always to position himself as the elucidating third party between opposing forces. In his evaluations of other men, Lowenthal first identified an essential disparity in their person, and then explained how the poles of this disparity could only be synthesised in theory, and by Lowenthal himself. He was fated to see the inherent duality in all things—even in his own appraisal of the duality of all things—and was obliged, as a consequence, to adopt a strict personal code of categorical imperatives, as a protective measure against what he perceived to be a world of discrepancy and flux. This personal code was phlegmatic, reflexive, and highly principled; it was the only fixed seat from which he could regard these never-ending dualities, and he depended upon it wholly. He tended to be relaxed in his daily schedule, humorous in his religion, and flexible in his business—but upon his imperatives, he could not be mistaken, and he would not yield.)

‘Carver got me in a touch of hot water recently,’ he went on. ‘Around a fortnight ago, he left his mooring off-schedule—and in the middle of the night. Well, it was a Sunday, and so the shipping news had been published already, in Saturday’s edition. But because Godspeed wasn’t scheduled to leave that day, and because she left well after sundown, somehow her departure wasn’t recorded in the customhouse log. Well, nobody told me anything about it, and so her departure was never recorded in the paper