Oscar and Lucinda

In any case, he knew he had met a remarkable young woman, not his type, but unlike anyone he had known before.

"Of course," he said, pouring the leaves from Lucinda's first cup of tea into the little maidenhair fern he kept for just this purpose. "Of course you must, dash it." He gave her a lot of milk, more than she liked. (It was in deference to her youth, which he felt he must insist on.)

"But you understand that although I write a pamphlet or two, I really don't know anything about the manufacturing process. I might look at a glass factory and see no more than you might." Lucinda felt quite hot. If he would not help, she would go to the accountant whom Chas Ahearn had recommended. She would pay

Oscar and Lucinda

the accountant. She would write him a cheque and have him employ a man for her who could do what she required. Or was this man actually in the process of helping? He spoke less directly, more playfully, than she was accustomed to. Her mother had been proud to call a spade a spade. They had despised "shilly-shallyers." The tea was worse than Mrs O'Hagen's. The room was too hot. She was confused to end up with a clergyman when she had begun with a small pamphlet titled "On Laboratory Arts," a practical guide to glass work in the chemistry laboratory. She had written to the printer who had supplied her with the address of the author. She did not think of clergymen as practical people. Mr Horace (at Gulgong near Mitchell's Creek) had managed to chop off three fingers while trying to kill a sick hen. This man seemed to be confirming her prejudice, to be taking pride in confirming his uselessness.

"So I must warn you," he said, "that while I have adequate theory-in fact you have your saucer resting on it-I have no knowledge or experience of the commercial side."

"Then you cannot help me."

"On the contrary," he declared.

He saw her adjust to this. She did not say thank you, but rather: "The vendors must not know me as a woman."

"And why not?"

"They will act strange," she said, gesturing with her flexible fingers and palms, letting her eyes roll away. (Should she pay the clergyman for his labour?) "It would occupy you a great deal," she suggested. "There would be books-wouldn't there? — to examine." (He cannot be poor, she thought, if he burns four lamps on a sunny day.)

"Yes," he agreed, "a great deal to do. But the object is a lovely one, is it not? It is the object we should celebrate."

He stared at her so excitedly that she looked away, blushing crimson. When she looked up again he saw her eyes had hardened in some way. She lifted her chin. She sat straighter in her chair. He had been misunderstood.

Dennis Hasset hurried to correct the situation. He spoke about glass. He showed her a large lump of cullet, like a little piece of glass rock. She knew nothing, nothing at all. Thousands of pounds to spend, and she knew nothing about it. He insisted she handle it. From his drawer he produced a piece of waterglass. He rang for Frazer and had him bring a beaker that they might dissolve it. He showed her the green glass of Melbourne, that colour being produced by iron oxides in the

After Whitsunday

sand, and let her feel the pure white grains of Botany where one could find a good three feet of fine leached sand, its impurities washed away by centuries of rain. From this Botany sand you could produce the lens for a telescope this clear while-here, he showed her, held the two lenses side by side so she might compare-the lens from Hallet's of London had a faint yellow tinge to it, by no means desirable.

Lucinda thought this Botany lens quite lovely. She took a small lace handkerchief, one of her mama's, from her purse so she might hold the lens without contaminating it. And even when the vicar told her it did not matter if she smeared it, she would not touch it with her naked fingers, which were-she was too aware of this-damp with excitement.

Soon he had all manner of things arranged across his red leather desk. These were not placed with the artfulness whereby he had decorated his study in preparation for the French professor. No, here were particles of glass. A square of poison blue made that colour by the addition of lead oxide. A melted lump of common "beer" in the shape of an old man's face. He said it was the image of his bishop. He said his bishop did not like him, and she would see this in his expression. She saw it was true. He showed her a glass brick, the sole survivor of his compression tests. Lastly, of course, a Prince Rupert's drop which its owner offered to demonstrate.

"No, please. You must not."

"Why must I not?" Dennis Hasset was astonished to find himself peeved. For a moment he disliked his visitor. He did not like the directness of her eyes. He took exception to her tone. He fished in his bottom drawer, looking for some pliers. He found a screwdriver he thought might do, and then he rejected it because the performance would have been inelegant and-besides-he knew she was right. This did not improve his temper. "Why must I not?"

"Because you know what will happen," the girl said simply, "and so do I, and when it is gone you can't look forward to it any more." And then, seeing in his face some of the temper for which he was known-"Oh." She did not say it, but shaped her lips as if she had.

"Oh?" he asked, but in a belligerent sort of way which he watched, himself, with surprise, as if to say, Ah, so this is how I feel.

"Mr Hasset, I am so very sorry."

He felt himself seen through.

"Miss Leplastrier, there is nothing to be sorry for."

"I came to you for help. You were kind to me. I began to argue with

Oscar and Luanda

you about the disposal of your own possessions. Probably I am jealous of you."

"Surely not." He shut the bottom drawer and placed the Prince Rupert's drop on the blotting pad in front of him.

"Yes, quite jealous." She wished to look down, to bow her head, but she would not let herself. Dennis Hasset saw the eyes become excessively bright, like stones placed in water. She wore an odd smile, a neatly tied bow which only just kept the trembling parcel of the face together.

"And why," he said, leaning forward, feeling clumsy, seeking levity, and therefore imitating the accent of an Irishman. "And why," he said, "would that be now?" His brogue was perfect but she did not know that the Irish were such figures of fun that to duplicate their speech was cause for mirth. She knew only that the men walked in front while their women followed behind like prisoners.

"I am jealous because the drop is yours, not mine. Because, more than that, you can enter the glassworks."

"Through the main door, just as you may."

"But I cannot, don't you see? They will not treat me with anything but the greatest condescension. And, besides, I would be made into the creature they imagined I was. Do you understand me?"

She held him with her eyes. She was a child. She was not a child. Her eyes were clear and steady while her voice amplified the slightest trembling in her lower lip.

He was held by the strength and touched by the frailty. "No," he said, "I do not understand you."

"By the way they looked at me, by their perception of me, they would make me into the creature they perceived. I would feel myself becoming a lesser thing. It is the power of men."

"But I am a man."

"No," she said, too impatient to let him develop his argument. "Of men, men in a group, men in their certainty, men on a street corner, or in a hall. It is like a voodoo. Do you know a voodoo?"

"Yes," he said, impressed, not caring that Frazer had come to signal the arrival of lunch to which he had invited three distinguished ladies of the parish and a Mr Jenkins, newly arrived from Edinburgh with a letter of introduction. He waved away his gesticulating servant. Lucinda imagined a fly. It was not the fly season.

"You are appointing me your proxy, then," the clergyman said, "is that it?"

After Whitsunday

"You are making fun of me, and most likely there is justice in that. I am being cowardly," she nodded her head, but the nod was for herself, no* her listener. 'It is obvious to anyone that I am being cowardly, but I have thought about it and it seems I must work within the limitations of my character."

"I was most certainly not making fun of you."

"You would have every right…"

"Whoa, Dobbin!" cried Dennis Hasset.

Lucinda stopped.

"You wish to buy a factory to make glass. Tis a simple enough matter. Is that it?" He smiled. The smile did what the Irish accent never could have.

"Oh, yes, it is!"

"And you need a little help."

"I do know factories, you see," she said leaning forward. "We-I mean my dear parents, when they were alive-inspected many of them, and I am well aware that they are most usually foul and frightening places, but I do not wish this to put me off. I will face it, of course."

"I will be there in a moment, Frazer," said Dennis Hasset. "Yes, yes. Don't worry about him. No, stay, please. Soon, soon, though, I have clergyman's business to attend to. Not nearly so amusing as glass. But yes, I will help you. I did not know you half an hour ago, Miss Leplastrier, and I will tell you I am surprised to hear myself say 'yes' with such enthusiasm, but upon my word I do believe I am looking forward to the exercise. We will need to co-opt, of course. I have a friend, a very clever chap called Dawson…"

"I have more than ten thousand pounds."

Dennis Hasset, who had risen to his feet to conclude the interview, sat down again, his face animated by a quite remarkable smile. "The deuce you do."

"I only wish to invest half in this venture." She was apologetic, sorry she had mentioned the sum. She was only a girl. She had done nothing to deserve such a sum. She imagined she saw censure in his eyes.

"And the rest?" he asked, plunging into the question before his natural politeness could restrain him. If he had "more than ten thousand Pounds" he would leave the confusions of the Church tomorrow.

"As for the remainder, I am being cautious."

"Miss Leplastrier, you are being quite the opposite. You are being admirably reckless. When we began our little meeting I imagined it

Oscar and Lucinda

contents were transferred to a smudged journal ruled up with careful columns and the tickets themselves were held in a series of small manila envelopes in a shoe box marked Private which was kept in Oscar's bottom drawer.

How this betting ticket came to find its way to Hennacombe was a most unpleasant mystery. Oscar, who had, until this moment, shown a lightness, even a jauntiness in manner as he sat himself at his little table, was now prickled by a hot and suspicious sweat. It was a violation. It suggested other violations, other secret and improbable intrusions. Mr Stratton had said: "If you walk to prayers at Kidlington, I will know about it." As he turned over the betting ticket and found the clergyman's tight black hand there, this no longer seemed hyperbole.

Hugh Stratton wrote this on the betting ticket: "Can I assure your father that this is not yours? Or can you, instead, assure me that such a game can indeed be played for profit?" It was signed H.S. It did not occur to Oscar to label Hugh Stratton mad; that his mentor should attempt to blackmail him surprised but did not shock him. His pity for the clergyman enabled him to forgive this and all the other peevish and petty acts he continually committed against all those who came into his orbit. It was Hugh Stratton's nature that, as he became more seemingly unlovable, he was loved the more.

But what did shock Oscar was that this very private piece of paper should be spirited from his room to be used as ammunition against him. Who was the thief? Had Hugh Stratton himself paid one of his "flying visits" while Oscar was safely in tutorial? He did not know. He also saw it did not matter.

Oscar fetched his pen and ink and-without thinking that Hugh Stratton was, once more, responsible for making his porridge cold wrote:

My dear Mr Stratton, how excited I was to receive today one of your rare (and therefore much looked forward to) epistles, and how disappointed I was therefore to discover that it was not what it appeared to be, that you had sealed the envelope, and thereby excluded what we had both wished you to include. I am sure the good Mrs Millar has, by now, discovered the letter amongst the dinner dishes and I enclose a stamp in order that it might be sped on to me and I may hear how things go in Hennacombe and how the fund for the restoration of St Anne's progresses. Professor Arnold asked to be reminded to you and said something about a borrowed book but I am afraid

•m

Une Petite Amie

I have forgot the message and, if this makes no sense to you, I will go and ask him again in order that I may deliver it more faithfully. My fondest remarks to Mrs Stratton. Your, etc., O. Hopkins. From that date Oscar left his betting tickets at the course and all the while he was at Oxford, wrote his form records in a code decipherable to no one but himself. As for Mr Stratton, he believed every word of Oscar's letter. It was neither right nor fair that a gambling student should make him feel so soiled.

36

Une Petite Amie

Lucinda did not really want a factory. She was frightened of it. She walked down to Sussex Street and watched working men emerging from the mills and wharves there. She was repulsed by them just as she was moved by them-the condition of their trouser turn-ups, the weariness of their jackets. They were alien creatures. She watched them as through a sheet of glass, as we, a century later, might look down on the slums of Delhi as a jumbo jet comes in to land. She could not know that she would, within two years, beyond the boundaries of this history, be brought so low that she would think herself lucky to work at Edward Jason's Druitt Street pickle factory, that she would plunge her hands into that foul swill and, with her hands boiled red and her eyes stinging, stand on the brink of the great satisfaction of her life. But at this time (1859) her hands were white and dry. She pitied the workers their poverty and weariness. And yet there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it. She knew it as well as you do, but the knowledge did not make it any easier for she was, so to speak, contracted to proceed. It was the factory, she felt, that gave her the entrée

Oscar and Lucinda

to the vicar of Woollahra's home. It was glass that gave her this cornfort. And as a result of her meeting with Dennis Hasset a kind of a reduction, an intensification, took place so that whilst, previously, the town of Sydney had been wide and windy, the streets rude with larrikins and so many "proper" people prepared to hoot and laugh and point at anything outside their narrow experience of life, and the whole place a-clatter with hooves and rolling iron and such a wide and formless canvas of spitting, coughing strangers that she could not endure an hour without the onset of a headache, and even though the library in George Street (her chosen retreat) had reassuring walls of books, busts of Voltaire and Shakespeare, it remained a cold, green, formal place, the territory of glowering men in high collars who might-this happened, too-"tsk, tsk" to see her there-so she remained, even amongst her books, a foreigner, friendless, without a map, until, finding the vicar of Woollahra almost by accident, the world shrank back around her. Only then did she allow herself to see how frightened and lonely she had been. Having discovered that glass was the medium wherein a friendship could flourish, she did not intend to let it go. Her need was such that the lamps stayed burning in the vicar of Woollahra's study until an hour better suited to an illegal Pak-Ah-Pu parlour in George Street. Such an offence would not go unremarked in Sydney, although had you brought this to her attention she would have asked that you refrain from patronizing her. She was her mother's daughter. She felt that she and Hasset were above the "ruck and tumble." They were business associates with business to discuss, manufacturers combating chemistry, philosophers with philosophy to deal with. They must study the musty journals of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks as silently as detectives investigating forgery. There were also sample bottles. My bottles, she thought. Blue, amber, clear; bottles for acid, pickles, poison, beer, wine, pills, jam, bottles with vine leaves, laughing jackasses, flowers, gum nuts, serpents and PROPERTY OF imprinted on their underside.

Years later when she remembered how she and the vicar had looked at bottles, with what abstracted superior curiosity they had examined them, so removed from the loud and sweaty business of sauces and pickles and jams, she judged her young self harshly and forgot how much of what she would become was already there. She was neither as ignorant nor as innocent as she would later imagine she had been. But she did enjoy handling these bottles, and she could not see how

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Une Petite Amie

one could be judged "improper" for staying up late at night to do so. She was not ashamed, not of this, not of, sometimes (usually, often) falling asleep in the leather armchair beside the fire where she would, some time later, be woken with a mug of cream-rich cocoa. She clasped her hands around the mug and looked into the fire, wishing only that she did not have to travel the moonpale clay tracks to her hotel.

The girl did not know enough to care about the opinion of bourgeois society, but Dennis Hasset had no such excuse. He knew better, but gave way-although not without a certain amount of irritation-to the clearer demands of his protégé.

Lucinda had the habit of arriving at any time that suited her. She always apologized. She always hoped she did not inconvenience or interrupt, but such was the way she tilted her chin that she did not appear apologetic at all. He would come back from giving a lecture on "Common Salt," say, at a Mutual Improvement Association, and find her sitting by his fire in his study, or reading a book at his desk. It was true, as he often said from the speaker's lectern, that he saw education as a ladder standing on earth and reaching up to heaven and that to every high and glorious position there was a way from every condition of life, but he would not, just the same, have suffered anyone else reading his books as Lucinda did. She removed his crenulated leather bookmarks and put them back too early in the story. He would ring for a sandwich and only after he had waited too long for it would he discover that Cook was busy making apple pancakes for the girl who was now ensconced, reading, in the dining room.

And yet he thought her, against all this evidence, to be quite independent. On the nights she was absent he imagined her reading at Petty's Hotel; he had no suspicion that she had-as a lonely cat will always present itself at more than one back door-also found a place in Mr d'Abbs menagerie. Mr d'Abbs, as you will recall, was the principal of an accountancy firm, and supposed to be an associate of Mr Chas Ahearn. Lucinda had consulted Mr d'Abbs in secret because she was unsure of Dennis Hasset's business acumen. She lacked the courage to tell the vicar of Woollahra that she had sought this second opinion, that she had, as a result, been invited home to dinner and eaten goose at the long dark table beneath walls crowded with landscape paintings of the country Mr d'Abbs dubbed "Paradise." On those nights when she judged that Dennis Hasset had had enough of her, this is where she went, to sit with Mr d'Abbs, Mrs Burrows, Miss Shaddock, Miss Malcolm and Mr Calvitto. She liked to be with people.

Oscar and Lucinda

Dennis Hasset's diary shows Luanda's arrival in his life. It records the first meeting-the thirty minutes allocated Monsieur Leplastrier on the first Tuesday after Whitsunday, and, thereafter, a great number of red slashes across previous appointments, committee meetings particularly (St Andrew's Building, Ragged Schools, Hot Breakfasts for the Poor) but also the Zoological Society, a dinner with an old friend, and even a vestry meeting which was shifted three times within a month. He could never refuse her, and although he often imagined that he would, on the next occasion, send her packing, he never did. He was thirty-three years old, a grown man, but he was no match for her. Besides-and this surely is the heart of it-no matter how irritated he might be to see her sitting so proprietorially in his study chair, he always felt invigorated by her company, and when she fell asleep he sat contentedly opposite her and smiled while she snored. But he knew his behaviour was reckless. It was not consistent with his character. He wished success, and comfort. He hoped he would end his days in a bishop's palace with an intelligent dean to work beside him. And yet he drove this girl-biologically a mature female of the speciesdrove her himself to Petty's Hotel on three, sometimes four nights a week. She was rarely there before midnight, and often it was two a.m. when he rang the bell for the night porter. This night porter knew the young lady was also a friend of Mr d'Abbs. He found the situation amusing. But when this night porter winked at Dennis Hasset, the vicar was so tickled by the man's scurrilous misunderstanding, that he chuckled all the way home, sitting up on the box seat where his servant should have been, a parson in a parson's clothes in a city given over, at this hour, to footpads and the push.

Before August was properly started, Bishop Dancer had him in to give him what he liked to call a "caning." They did not like each other, anyway. The Bishop was a hunter after hounds, a High Tory with no tolerance for the subtleties of Whig theology. This was not the first of their disagreements. There had been a fierce fight about a sermon in which Dennis Hasset had argued against eternal damnation by suggesting ("You are not there to suggest," the Bishop had roared) that it was ridiculous to postulate a God with a less well-developed moral sense than our own and that damnation was, therefore, unthinkable. The Bishop would not waste his time arguing the point. Hasset was not to preach this Latitudinarian rot. When the vicar said he was not a Latitudinarian, the Bishop's face became as purple as his surplice.

The Bishop began this interview provocatively. He did not imagine himself provocative. Rather he saw himself as understanding-he came

A Game of Cards

right to the heart of what he thought the problem was: "Of course, Hasset, we all have our appetites."

Dennis Hasset did not imagine himself unduly fastidious, but he found this way of approaching Lucinda Leplastrier quite disgusting. She was a milk-breathed child he watched over when she slept by his fire. For a moment his handsome mouth looked as if it held a putrid oyster, but only for an instant, and Bishop Dancer did not notice.

The bishop was one to talk about appetites. He was a great fellow for hanging game until it was maggoty. Dennis Hasset tried to make him see the nature of his relationship with Miss Leplastrier. He spoke well and honestly. The Bishop nodded, rubbing his big hands across his high, bald dome, let his tongue show between his teeth, screwed up his eyes.

"Then post the banns," he said, with perfect misunderstanding.

"No, no," laughed the vicar of Woollahra, "we are too queer a pair to contemplate."

"Well," said Bishop Dancer, who was sick of trying to understand what the man was saying,

"you would be wise to marry someone."

"Indeed, yes."

And on that puzzling note, the interview ended. The Bishop imagined he had instructed the vicar to give up his "petite amie" and the vicar thought he had satisfactorily explained the innocence of their relationship: they were too queer a pair to contemplate., .-•: Later, when she knew Mr d'Abbs's house well-and she grew to know it very well indeed-she could smile at how she had perceived it, how she had exaggerated it in her mind, stretched and tangled it until it was a palace, a castle, the sort of home a peer might have, stretched out along the shores of Rushcutters Bay.

Oscar and Lucinda

It was not nearly as grand as she had, in her country innocence, imagined it. But it was the sort of house that leads to exaggeration. It was a ball of string. An untidy confusion of passages and stairs, the sort of place where you are always arriving where you do not exptect. There are long gloomy passages leading to bright alcoves containing nothing but a pair of uncomfortable chairs with dusty antimacassars. You go looking for the library and find yourself in a large laundry where the cement floor is covered with piles of tangled sheets. You look; to retrace your steps and find yourself in a garden where terraced palths lead down-via steps whose treads are far too high-to the harbonir. The hydrangeas are clipped for the winter and there is a gardener wiith rum on his breath (and odd socks on his feet) who offers to show y

The house taught Lucinda almost as much about Mr Ahearn as it did about Mr d'Abbs. It was obvious that Mr Ahearn had never seen the house. It would have offended him in every way imaginable. He would have thought it to be wasteful, ostentatious, unchristian. He could not, Lucinda realized, know Mr d'Abbs at all, and yet such was his desire to deliver her to "the right hands" that he had pretended acquaintance of a man he had only heard of. Mr d'Abbs was a small man of forty years and very particular anid precise in all his movements. He dressed expensively, artistically. He favoured serge and corduroy in olive green or navy blue. His ties were wool or even silk. He liked a walking stick, although he had no limp. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. He enjoyed being thought of in this way-it was no commercial liability in Sydneyand yet i.t was not the truth at all. Mr d'Abbs was married and had three children, and yet it seemed this family was insufficient for his needs. His wife was small and pretty.. Everyone remarked on her smile and her golden ringlets. Lucinda was immediately drawn to her. She wished to sit and talk quietly with her, but it was not a house of quiet talk and Mrs d'Abbs would sit at table with anger in her eyes and, more often than not, excuse herself halfway through the pudding. And perhaps it was because of this, because the marriage was so unhappy, that Mr d'Abbs liked to collect people around him and assemble them, not just one night a week, but every night, in his drawing room. Lucinda could not have imagined a room exactly like it, and although she had read descriptions of many grand rooms in novels, there was nothing in her literary experience which prepared her for the carelessness of Mr d'Abbs house, the way a rug might be thrown across a giltbacked couch to hide its bursting innards, the length, the breadth, the scandalous quantities of dust, the giddy electric view of the crags and battlements of the eastern shore of Rushcutters Bay. Within this grand expensive tangle danced the pristine Mr d'Abbs. He was a honey-eater amidst raging lantana, a lyrebird scratching the sticks and leaves of its untidy bower. Neither Elizabeth Leplastrier nor Mitchell's Creek had prepared her for this sort of habitat. You do not find this sort of character in a milking shed, and this was something of which Mr d'Abbs was himself aware. He would stand at his favourite place, his back against the glassdoored bookcases, a glass of good French cognac in his hand, and look around his wonderful drawing room and not quite believe that it was him, Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs's boy. The walls of his drawing room were crowded with pictures of every style and quality. They were crammed and jammed into every space available-water-colours with dusty glass in front of them, oils with grand gilt frames, chromos of masterpieces, caricatures, a colour engraving (from the London Illustrated News) showing Lord Elgin marching into Peking, a crude pen rendering showing blacks attacking a settler's cabin. He propped paintings by Sir Arthur Gibbs, RA, against the skirting board so that they could make way for the landscapes of his new discovery, Mr Calvitto, who was, at this moment, standing out on his veranda gazing out into the evening gloom of Rushcutters Bay. Mr Calvitto had a commercial interest in promoting the Tuscan wheat varieties, which he claimed to be immune to the rust disease that still plagued the colony. But he was also an Italian, an artist, an atheist, and these were all interesting things to be. Mr d'Abbs was pleased to hear him talk about anything he chose to talk about. Mr d'Abbs did not have a lot to say himself, not now. He would rather smile and nod and be amazed at the turns life can take. And in this last respect he shared more than he knew with his new protégé, Miss Leplastrier, although he found her, for all her obvious pluck, uncommonly dull. Later in the evening, he knew, she would come out of her shell, but this was no use to him now. She made him feel a little stiff, and it was not how he liked to feel. She had taken a chair next to Miss Shaddock who was doing her needlework beside the little walnut table. He understood Miss Leplastrier was unhappy. She was an orphan, of course,

Oscar and Luanda

and new to Sydney. He winked at her. She looked away.

Lucinda sat with her hands in her lap and presented a perfect wall to the room. No one could have guessed her feelings, which were so contradictory it is a wonder she could contain them without fidgeting.

First: she was, like Jimmy d'Abbs, amazed to find herself in such a place. The room, with its tangle of paintings and rugs, its odd mixture of fastidiousness and sloth, suggested more complex possibilities in life than she had previously imagined, and while it offended her carefully inculcated senses of order and restraint, it was also most attractive. Second: she was grateful to Mr d'Abbs for his kindness, and she would continue-no matter what evidence arrived to say she should not-always to be loyal to him on this account. Third: she was disturbed by Mrs d'Abbs whose eyes she found continually glancing in her direction. She now wondered if she had done something to offend.

Fourth: she did not like the way Mr d'Abbs had held his children out, away and at a distance as if they were, even when bathed, too sticky to be encouraged to affection. Fifth: she felt very lonely. Mr d'Abbs's friends made her feel alien. Miss Malcolm, Miss Shaddock, Mrs Burrows, Mr Calvitto-they were polite to her, she thought, but were in no hurry to have her a member of their circle.

Sixth: she was disturbed to find Mr d'Abbs and Mr Calvitto irreligious. When Mr d'Abbs winked she pretended not to see him.

Seventh: she would rather be in her own bed, drifting into sleep. This territory, between sleep and waking, was her only real home and it was this she sought in Dennis Hasset's armchairs. Eighth: she was waiting for Mr Calvitto to come in from the veranda so the real business of the evening could begin.

They were waiting for Mrs Burrows to leave so they could play cards. Mrs Burrows would not leave until Mr Calvitto was ready. Mr Calvitto was admiring Rushcutters Bay as it appeared in the evening gloom. Although he was a recent arrival in the circle he had already formed a friendship with Mrs Burrows although no one could speak clearly about what this friendship amounted to.

Mrs Burrows, a vocal supporter of the American rebels, was the widow of an army captain who had been killed by blacks in the "Falls" district near the head-waters of the Manning River. Lucinda did not like her at all. She had reprimanded Lucinda on the subject of the blacks. Mrs Burrows would have them given "bye-bye damper/' bush

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A Game of Cards

bread made from strychnine-poisoned flour. She knew this was extreme. She liked to be extreme. She was one of those who claimed no white man should be hanged for shooting blacks in selfdefence. Her opinions suited her face which was red in the nose, drawn in the cheeks, pinched. She was a critical woman and one would not have expected her to have a friendship with Mr Calvitto, on the grounds of atheism alone. She was so strongly against card-playing that they must all wait before they could play. But here she was, meekly waiting for an atheist to return from the veranda so she could announce her intention to go home.

Then they could play cribbage. Lucinda pressed herself back into the wing-back chair. It was doubtless sinful, but she did like cribbage. She liked it very much indeed. She found herself, during the day, looking forward to the game as she might not so long ago have looked forward to golden-syrup dumplings. When she played cards she was not dull or angry. She laughed. She looked prettier. She could feel her own transformation. People smiled at her. She was moved by playing cards in a way she could not explain even to herself. She had a feeling, not the same, but similar, to when they fought the grass fire on Bishop's Plain-that line of people, men, women, children, with their sacks and beating poles, even nasty old Michael Halloran, but all lined up in the choking smoke. Cards was not like this, and yet it was. They were joined in a circle, an abstraction of human endeavour.

But now she was lonely, and aware of her isolation, and everyone's isolation one from the other. There was a Dutch lamp-it was made from black iron filigree and had a gracefully shaped white mantle-above a round walnut table with three legs. Beside this table sat Miss Malcolm, the governess. She was a pretty young thing, or had been not so long before. On the other side of the table sat Miss Shaddock with her needlework. While Miss Malcolm was light and wispy in her nature, Miss Shaddock was dark and heavy. And while Miss Malcolm gave the impression of greater innocence than her age would agree with, Miss Shaddock gave off an odour of foreboding, as if whatever venture was discussed must come to an unhappy ending. And yet Mr d'Abbs, leaning against his case of books, was obviously so contented, so pleased to have the company of Miss Shaddock, to value her every bit as much as Mr Calvitto who was now-Lucinda could hear his leather soles squeaking-beginning to stir from his reverie on the veranda.

133

^^«îg^^-WTîçp^^* JA*ï-*%?&*

Oscar and Lucinda

Mr d'Abbs collected people. It was his passion. It was a distinction that Captain Burrows had been killed whilst bravely defending isolated settlers, that Miss Malcolm was the sister of a tenor, that Miss Shaddock's needlework had been presented to the Prince of Wales. Every now and then Mr Horace Borrodaile would drop in. Once he had brought Mr Henry Parkes (Mr d'Abbs still held his IOU). Here was Mr Calvitto, now, standing at the open door and speaking authoritatively about the landscape.

Lucinda did not listen to Mr Calvitto immediately. There was a cow bogged in the mangrove mud flats below the house. No one in the room thought to rescue it. It was not their cow. They were waiting for Mrs Burrows to leave so they could play cards.

"Shouldn't we do something about the cow?" she asked Miss Malcolm, but Miss Malcolm, although she looked at her, did not seem interested in what she said. Lucinda was indignant, but did not know what to do. No one would look at her. She felt a great sense of boredom, of purposelessness, sweep over her. The beast bellowed. It knew it would die. Its own kind would not help it.

"Yes, yes," Mr Calvitto was saying to Miss Shaddock, "but it is not '. a Christian landscape." Mr Calvitto had sunken eyes and a doleful \ countenance. He had black curly hair and a strong, wiry black beard., At the back of all this, like lamps placed at the back of a long room, ' one was aware of his eyes glittering. He was like a man who had been robbed of something precious and is waiting for others to see the injustice so they might restore it to him. "It is not a Christian landscape at all."

"You are not a Christian," said Miss Shaddock, her voice shaking as it always did when the conversation took this turn. \

"That is not the point, Irene," said Mrs Burrows.

"God made all the landscape," said Miss Shaddock. "Surely you be-: lieve that, Mildred?"

"Of course," said Mrs Burrows but turned to Mr Calvitto.

Lucinda was impatient that this conversation should continue. It was > hypocritical to proclaim your Christianity whilst this suffering con-} tinued. And yet she knew what Mr Calvitto meant. She had felt it herself, and her mind drifted to the back creek. In this place the water \ had been dark and still, brown from tannin, cut by church-like motes j of sunlight. Here she had plucked her doll bald. Here she had wept] when her papa died. Here she had seen two blacks standing as still | as trees. She was sixteen years old. She held her breath. There were! two more. Another two. This was in the years when the blacks oM

A Game of Cards

Parramatta were defeated. Their trunks were brown with mud, cracked like iron bark. She was frightened, not that they would hurt her, it was a bigger fear than that. She turned and ran, ran across the flat green pasture with plovers shrieking above her, ran out into the sunlight where the yellow sap-bright fence posts, peeled of slippery bark, with round shiny backs and rough straight sides, were lying in a higgledy-piggledy pile on a bed of stringy bruised bark. She knew what Mr Calvitto meant. You could feel it in the still shadows along watercourses. She felt ghosts here, but not Christian ghosts, not John the Baptist or Jesus of Galilee. There were other spirits, other stories, slippery as shadows.

She would have liked to say so. She was capable of ordering her ideas and her thoughts and presenting them properly, but she knew that only Mr d'Abbs would welcome it. He was standing there, leaning against his bookcases, swilling his brandy balloon. He looked at her and winked again as if to say: "What a jolly show Calvitto makes. What fun, eh?" The beast in the mangroves bellowed. Lucinda thought: I should not be here.

"What I do not understand about you, Mr Calvitto," Miss Malcolm said, "is how you live." She did not say "without faith" but everyone understood the meaning of her question. But Mrs Burrows began to rise, and whether this was intended to prevent the answering of the question or no, this is what it did. She made a small exclamation of pain, holding her bony back.

"Your business would be more prosperous," Mrs Burrows said, "if you were earlier in bed." Did this mean that Mrs Burrows knew about their gambling? Miss Malcolm turned her head a sharp, fast ten degrees to catch Miss Shaddock's eye. Miss Shaddock's eye remained steadfastly on her needlework but her white plump neck turned slowly red.

"Stay the night," said Mr d'Abbs. "I will have a bed made up for you."

"Please," said Mrs d'Abbs who had, until now, remained still and silent, her knitting in her lap (it always upset Miss Shaddock to see how slowly Mrs d'Abbs knitted)-they were, none of them, none except Lucinda who was new and did not count, sympathetic to Mrs d'Abbs. "Please do stay."

Thank you, no, Mr Calvitto will drive me home." 'We will deliver Miss Leplastrier to her hotel," said Mrs Burrows,

Banging her shawl. "Ox ^"' no, said Lucinda looking to Mr d'Abbs for help. "Not yet." 135

Oscar and Lucinda

Mr d'Abbs raised an eyebrow. Miss Shaddock looked over her rimless spectacles, frowning. There had been too much passion in this outburst.

"Mmmmm," said Mrs Burrows. It was a technique she had. It suggested she knew things.

"We are not right for you," said a great booming male voice from the doorway. "We are below you, Mrs Burrows. You would not be seen dead with us. And who can blame you?"

"Nonsense," shouted Mr d'Abbs, obviously very pleased.

"You think me a scoundrel," said the newcomer to Mrs Burrows who, whilst departing with Mr Calvitto, managed to look at once severe, but also pleased to be teased in such a way.

"Fig, you are a rogue," said Mr d'Abbs, making a face at the pink-cheeked bald-headed man with the tight, round little paunch. The face, a crumpled-up grimace, begged Mr Fig to be quiet for just a moment.

"Has the second sitting begun?" asked Mr Fig, winking hugely and miming card shuffling while Mrs Burrows was helped into her coat.

"You must away," he said to Lucinda, wagging a finger and sucking in his cheeks in what was a very poor imitation of the woman who was now-at last, Miss Malcolm's shoulders lost their tense edge-leaving the house. "This is a madhouse," said Mr Fig with relish. Mrs d'Abbs stood up. She tucked her knitting in the hatbox she used for that purpose. Lucinda did not hear what she said.

"Accepted, Henny," said Mr d'Abbs to his wife.

Lucinda was sorry that Mrs d'Abbs should slink away like this, put her arms around her breast, round her shoulders, and be so apologetic with her body while all the time-anyone with half a soul could see it-her eyes were filled with a grey and watery fury.

She did not like the things that happened in her house. She therefore had a right to put a stop to them. Her husband had an obligation to support her. If he were one quarter of the good fellow he pretended to be, he would feel it to be no sacrifice. Yet even whilst Lucinda was incensed on Mrs d'Abbs's behalf she also acknowledged that she wished to play cards, to empty her purse upon the table, and therefore she must be one of those whose will kept Mrs d'Abbs's shoulders rounded, for if she stood up straight she would, surely, send Miss Malcolm off to prepare her lessons for the morrow, Miss Shaddock home to her rooms in

A Duck to Water

Macquarie Street, and tell Mr Fig to return when he was sober.

Mrs d'Abbs, of course, did none of these things. She kissed her husband on the cheek and nodded and smiled agreeably before taking herself off to bed.

Lucinda rose from her chair and went to Mr d'Abbs who was removing the cards from their hiding place in the bookcase.

"Are you feeling lucky?" he asked her.

'Indeed, yes," said Lucinda, "but the poor beast is most unfortunate."

"Fig," called Mr d'Abbs, "you should hear the names you are being called." "No, no," said Lucinda, laughing. "Mr Fig, it is not true. There is a beast caught in the mud flats."

"Yes?" said Mr d'Abbs.

"I wondered if perhaps you might send a man to free it."

Mr d'Abbs looked at her and blinked. Lucinda was embarrassed. She had offended him in some way, but could not see how.

"I will see to it immediately," said Mr d'Abbs, but although he smiled, Lucinda did not feel easy.

"I hope I have not spoken out of turn."

"Of course not, of course not." But the truth was that he could not bear to be given what he thought were "orders" in his own home and although he went through an elaborate mime of leaving the room to order Jack the gardener to attend to it, he did no such thing at all. 38

A Duck to Water

"Ha-ha," Lucinda said. "You have beaten me, Mr Fig."

"I have, Miss Leplastrier," said Fig who had recently appeared in the "Ethiopian Concert" at the Balmain School of Arts. Then he had aroused much mirth with his impression of a nigger tickettaker, but

4

Oscar and Lucinda

now he rounded his vowels and rolled his r's. "I have robbed you blind," he said. "I have bailed you up and relieved you of your doubloons and ducats."

"Beaten," said Lucinda, "but I promise you I am not defeated." Mr d'Abbs liked Lucinda now. He liked her pluck, the way she laughed. He liked her plump lower lip, her sleepy eyelids, the feeling that she would be capable of the most unspeakable recklessness. Her upper lip was almost irresistible as it stretched and tightened-it was a charming little twitch — whenever she was excited.

"Shall we all take a trip together?" he said. He was less calculating that he might appear. He gathered the cards in across the grey blanket he had spread across the walnut table for their game. "Harry Briggs has brought a steamer. He will hire it out to us. We could take her up to Pittwater."

"Oh, yes," said Miss Shaddock. "Oh, I do so like Pittwater." Miss Malcolm stared at Miss Shaddock with a dreamy, dazed, slightly contemptuous expression. Mr d'Abbs understood what secret this expression advertised. Soon he would be forced to dismiss Miss Malcolm from his service.

Miss Leplastrier took the cards from Fig and shuffled them. Two weeks earlier she would have spilled them everywhere, but she had taken to the game like a duck to water. He found it both comic and endearing to see a pretty woman shuffle with the finesse of a croupier in a club. It was ten minutes past two o'clock. Lucinda was not in the tiniest bit sleepy. She took a sip of lukewarm cinnamon punch and began to deal another hand.

Miss Malcolm yawned.

"Have you had enough of cards?" asked Mr Fig, but would not address the question directly to Mr d'Abbs.

"Oh, please," said Lucinda, "let us play one more hand."

"You have already lost three guineas," said Miss Malcolm. Her tone was not friendly. She looked at Lucinda with the same heavy-eyed contemptuous expression she had bestowed on Miss Shaddock.

"One more," declared Mr d'Abbs, looking at Miss Malcolm through visibly narrowed eyes. "A chance for Miss Leplastrier to win her money back."

Lucinda dealt a card to Miss Shaddock. It slid across its fellows, and sailed through the air. Miss Shaddock snatched at it but sent it flying towards Lucinda. It bounced off Luanda's shoulder and fell at her feet. Lucinda leaned to pick it up.

A Duck to Water

She did not allow herself to see the suit of the card, but she did see that Mr Fig had taken off his boot. He had his leg stretched beneath the table. His stockinged foot was somewhere in amongst Miss Malcolm's skirts. Lucinda noted it with far less degree of shock than might be thought likely. She thought only: My mama would think this household horrid. She answered the question about her losses.

"One more game," she begged.

"Like a duck to water," said Mr d'Abbs.

Lucinda knew she would win this hand because she had dealt it. She knew she could control the cards with the strength of her will and there, now, here, the proof: four red threes and a two of spades. She could discard the spades and have a king. She would do this now. It was not a king. It did not matter. She would win

anyway.

I am rich, she thought. I can do what I like. It is only pennies. It is only a little fun. My mama would not condemn me to loneliness

forever.

Tomorrow she would have won or lost, but whatever happened, hap piness would be denied her. She could be happy now, not then. For if she won, she would know herself a robber. She was already rich. She had wealth she had not earned. To wish for more was sinful, greedy. But if she lost, it would be worse. Then she would feel not remorse, but terror. Her money was her cloak, her armour. She was a miser, counting it, feeling panic to be parted from it. She knew this already. She would go running to the Woollahra vicarage with her tail between her legs. She would read her Bible and attend Evensong. But now she was drunk on the game and only wanted more of it. The cards were sharp and clear, their blues pure ultramarine, their reds a brilliant carmine like the hearts of popish effigies. She saw the expression in Miss Malcolm's eyes. She heard the beast bellow from the mud flats. She patted her neck and felt her palm licked by loose, untidy flames of hair. The sight of her! It would drive her mama to a brushing frenzy, but Lucinda did not care about anything except cards and how to get the next hand moving.

"Come," she said, "look how attractive I can make the stakes." And she emptied the contents of her purse-the equivalent of sixteen jam jars-on to the blanket.

Mr d'Abbs was amused and pleased. He was about to pigeon-hole her childlike and then she looked up and he caught the clear green challenge in her eyes and then he did not know what it was he felt.

Personal Effects

Mrs Burrows did not like to be needed too much. It put her off. It was this which was the impediment in her relationship with Mr Jeffris, not the fact that he was a clerk employed by Mr d'Abbs. Where Mr Calvitto had cold eyes and would allow himself to show no passion, Mr Jeffris had an incendiary nature which one felt to be only just held in control. Tears sprang easily to his tortoiseshell brown eyes. His hands were often clenched or thrust hard in his pockets. He was a stranger to irony and sarcasm. He was as direct as a knife. And apart from his great passion for the widow of Captain Burrows, his great obsession in life was that he should be an explorer of unmapped territories. He was not tall like Burke, or well educated like Mitchell. But you could not hear him talk and doubt that he would finally triumph. Mr Jeffris was really very handsome. He had a great mane of coalblack hair, a high forehead, finely shaped full lips and fierce, animated dark eyes. He was neat, precise, self-critical. He was the youngest son of Covent Garden costers and dedicated to his own improvement. He was, in almost every respect, a perfect match for Mrs Burrows, except that he needed her. Mr Calvitto had passion, but it was of a different type. It was as cold as a windowpane in a warm room. It was this she trusted. She liked a little distance, the emotional equivalent of what Captain Burrows, always billeted up-country, had provided her with in miles. The difference between Mr Calvitto and Mr Jeffris is best illustrated by their reaction to that small tin trunk which Captain Burrows's commanding officer had labelled "Cpt. BurrowsPersonal Effects." The trunk contained a pair of gloves, some letters from Mrs Burrows, an envelope containing certain cards depicting Cossacks, and sixteen

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Personal Effects

leatherbound diaries containing maps, descriptions of journeys, raids against the blacks, and small pen sketches of various bivouacs, river crossings, etc.

Mr Calvitto, on being invited to inspect the diaries, told her plainly that her husband had no talent with the pen. He made disparaging remarks about his English composition and drew her attention to the dashes which Captain Burrows used instead of commas and full stops. He did not end there. He read a sentence out loud and made it sound ridiculous. He showed her how the

"settler's hut attacked by blacks" could not help but fall flat on the ground the minute the sketch was complete.

Mrs Burrows, like Mr Jeffris, believed in "improvement." Mr Calvitto offered "improvement" in large dollops, or at least that chastisement which Mrs Burrows had learned to be the precursor of improvement. And although she twice slapped his face in response to things he said, she could not help but be spoiled for Mr Jeffris's enthusiastic response.

Mr Jeffris arrived on Tuesdays and Thursdays with his own writing paper and pen. He wore an old-fashioned box-pleated jacket in the style of his hero, Major Mitchell. He sat down at the gate-legged table in the parlour and transcribed from Captain Burrows's diaries. He had a neat, graceful hand with certain flourishes of his own invention. He did not make rude faces about the little brass gewgaws and porcelain knick-knacks with which Mrs Burrows had decorated the room. Mr Calvitto, on the other hand had, on first being alone with her in her house, told her bluntly that she had no taste. He had picked things up and put them down. She had been standing in the parlour. She had a small porcelain elephant in her hand. He had been opposite her, with his back to the window. He had his top hat in his hand.

She had the elephant in her hand when they kissed. Later she found it on a dressing table. When Mr Jeffris admired this elephant, he put himself on her level, and this level was not high enough. Paradoxically, his natural affection for the elephant made her as fond of him as of a friend survived from early childhood.

Neither Mr Jeffris nor Mr Calvitto realized what a peculiar state Mrs Burrows was in. She gave no appearance of being anything but in control. Her period of mourning was over and her widow's weeds given to a charity, but she was still rocked and buffeted by the wake left by Captain Burrows's murder, the news

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Oscar and Lucinda

of which had reached her in three successive waves.

First there had been a polite letter of condolence delivered by a major. Then there had been the newspaper reports. Burrows had been hacked with axes the blacks had stolen from shearers on the Manning. He had been thrust through the neck and eyes with spears. And then, when she was still gasping, the personal effects arrived. Amongst the diaries was an envelope containing sixteen picture cards, numbered one to sixteen, like the cigarette cards little boys collected. Each card bore the title "Rape by Cossacks." She was not shocked by the coupling there depicted (or less shocked than she might have imagined), nor by the exaggerated male genitalia, but rather the combination of this with sword and scimitar, with hacked breasts, with women's mouths screaming wide with pain, eyes bulging with terror, and not even this, horrible as it was, but the question as to why Captain Burrows, who had liked to nestle his head sleepily at her breast, should carry cards like this upon his person. She could not get these pictures out of her head. They disturbed her and frightened her. There was no one she could speak to about them. And when she laid them out, like a hand of patience, on the gate-legged table on a Tuesday night, she was not in her normal mind at all. When Mr Jeffris arrived, she took his coat and led him to his normal seat. He saw he was to sit down. He sat. She held his coat and watched him while he studied the cards.

"Do they please you?" she asked.

"Please me?" ;.' c

She looked at him, with his slippery pretty lips half-opened. She did not need to hear his answer. She saw his eyes. He was not in control of himself. He was frightened of what he had seen. This was no use to her at all. She was already frightened. What use was it for him to be frightened, too?

She gathered in the cards and put them in their envelope. She refused to discuss the matter with him. He was concerned for her. She liked him to be concerned. But she did not like the timidity. She had always thought him a brave man, strong, manly. She now began to say frightful things to him, in a perfectly ordinary way. She talked quickly; breathlessly, it is true, but this had been her style before. She straightened out the white tablecloth on the gate-legged table and said that the blacks should straight away be poisoned.

She did not know why she said these things.

It did not occur to Mr Jeffris that she was not well, for the views she was expressing were only different from much opinion in New South

Personal Effects

Wales in that they were unambiguously put. He was, himself, fearful of the blacks in the Manning and the Macleay. It was likely he would one day have to confront them himself. He attempted to explain their behaviour to Mrs Burrows, not so much to calm her as to still, through explication, his own anxiety. These blacks, he said, were the most murderous of all, having been dispossessed of their lands and driven into the dense, tumbled country of the "Falls." They had their backs against the wall.

But this sort of talk did nothing to ease Mrs Burrows. She did not hear the words, but smelt something she would name as "unmanly." Her cheeks got hot spots on them and her face took on a chiselled look, pointed, clenched around the jaw, with tendons showing in her neck. She talked of calling out the army, of a final all-out war against the blacks. Mr Jeffris replied, but what he was addressing was only the thin, sharp ice on the deeper puddle of Mrs Burrows's argument in which blacks, the Cossacks and Captain Burrows all took on the forms of fish with teeth like knives.

Mrs Burrows did not feel safe. She said this often, but was not

understood.

When she returned from Mr d'Abbs's with Mr Calvitto, she resolved to show him the cards also. It was all that was on her mind while they disported in her bed. She placed them on the little night table where she would put the tea things afterwards. She made the pot which they then drank-it was their custom-sitting up in bed.

It was then that she gave Mr Calvitto the envelope. He lit a cigarette and blew a thin trail of smoke into the air. And then, in the manner of one performing a wearisome duty, he opened the envelope and looked at the cards, one by one, occasionally sipping his cup of tea, occasionally inhaling smoke from his cigarette. He nibbled at a biscuit. He said nothing. Mr Calvitto was dark with long wiry muscles, black hair which grew all over him in small tight whorls. He was lean like a racing dog. He had a long, thin, hooded penis which now, as he turned one more card, rose visibly beneath the sheet.

He looked at her and smiled, an unsugary expression, not weak, as austere as whisky with no water. She pressed herself against him, shivering, as once, in the potteries of Stratford, she had pressed wet clay against a plaster mould.

She would be a plate, God save her. Let the aproned decorators paint dancing Cossacks around her rim, or dead blacks like spokes around a poisoned water-hole.

40

Not in Love

The vicar of Woollahra was not in love. She was not pretty enough for him to be in love with. She was also too young. She was not "suitable." A great deal of this judgement about suitability was a function not of his assessment of his personal needs but of his highly developed social sense.

Sydney (or that tiny part of it he knew as "Sydney") would not think her suitable. And he liked to be liked. He did not like, although he thought himself a radical, to feel himself outside the comfort of the fold. He did not like to be criticized. And yet this was what was now happening to him all the time. No one-barring the Bishop-said anything to his face. But he could not accompany the girl to the waiting room of a solicitor-at-law without feeling, even amongst the clerks and message boys-this social shiver. He did not know about Jimmy d'Abbs and the games of cards, and yet he knew-without naming it for himself-that there was something. He saw the signs, just as you can posit, from the whorled skin of the sea, the presence of an unseen rock. Three weeks ago Sydney did not know her, and then only that she had put a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty's Hotel. Then it was remarked-this was before she abandoned the crinoline Mrs Ahearn had made for her in Parramatta-how oddly she dressed. And then they switched and said how well.

She played cards with Jimmy d'Abbs et al. But afterwards she took tea with the vicar of Woollahra. It was as if she had broken some law of nature, been ice and steam at the same instant-the two activities were mutually exclusive.

The vicar of Woollahra then took her shopping and Society, always feeling shopping to be a most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly

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Not in Love

scandalized-its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he had paid for her finery. When they learned this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse-enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks-the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.

Society-if you call it that, Lucinda would not-did not know what to do. It could not tolerate to see the two of them together, and yet it was in some way tickled. It squirmed and grimaced and hooted with derision to see him move with such a confident and manly stride, as if nothing were wrong. It could not have been funnier if he had walked beside a billy-goat and called it sweetheart. And as for "her"-she swung her arms. Indeed she did. Like a toy soldier. This might not have been so irritating if she had not walked beside "dear, good Dennis Hasset." Let her walk like this beside Jimmy d'Abbs or Harvey Fig or the Italian atheist. Let her drink wine and dance with them, and jolly good luck to her, in this life at least. But let her not walk in the places where Miss Barley Wilkes or Miss Harriet Crowley might more rightfully, and virtuously, tread. They watched the handsome vicar of Woollahra like a sleepwalker on a window ledge. He went with her to Jimmy d'Abbs's office to discuss the purchase of a glassworks. Even then he did not get it. He emerged as innocent as he went in. His friends tried to speak to him but he would not hear them. On this account he broke off relations with his friend Tom Wilson, the professor of classics at the university, the man he liked to call "the only educated man in Sydney." This happened on the very day the glassworks were finally purchased and when, in theory anyway, his association with Miss Leplastrier should end.

His "friend" Wilson had turned out as small-minded as the rest. He had claimed Miss Leplastrier stayed up all night gambling with "types" like Harvey Fig. This made Dennis Hasset's hands into tense claws and he cried out: "Agggh." He had reached a state which he could call "unhappy." He wrote the word on a piece of paper, then tore it up and threw it in the fire. It seemed to him, swivelling back and forth on his squeaky chair, that he had been, until his offer to assist with us

Oscar and Lucinda

the purchase of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks, a mostly happy man. And he soon became nostalgic for the time he could sit reading alone in his study, or feel his long, athletic form being admired as he stretched across the pleasant slippery chintz surfaces of Mrs Wilson's armchairs. And even if there were moments-like this one

— when he could sit alone in his study, it was not the same as hitherto. Anger, like a blow-fly, had been let into the room and buzzed against the sunlit glass. He did not understand this anger. He thought it all his, but a great deal of it was Lucinda's. She carried an intensity, a nervous tension, with her. She could not sit in a hitherto peaceful armchair without your being aware of a great reservoir of energy being somehow, against all the laws of physics, contained. Even when she was not here, he felt her restlessness. And he was angry-although it was unchristian of him-that this one calm corner, the place in his life where he might be free from the demands of parishioners had now been stolen from him. He could not concentrate on his Dickens or his Wilkie Collins. He was irritated, even whilst praying. If Lucinda was sitting in the house, he would wish her gone. If she was not, he might sit in a small chair by his window, looking constantly up the dusty road, wishing-he did not think it right to pray for it-for the plume of dust that might herald the arrival of her hansom.

But on the evening of the day he had ended his friendship with Tom Wilson, he did not need to wait for her. She arrived promptly at dusk, in order that they might celebrate the purchase. She was on time, but they were somehow not synchronized. They did not feel the way they were meant to. Lucinda had that fearful, tight-chested sensation she experienced after she had lost too much money at her cribbage. But this feeling was not caused by anything so doubtful, but by something which should be morally uplifting, i.e., the purchase of a factory. She was expected to be triumphant. She tried to be.

Dennis Hasset was still living the hurt of his argument with Professor Wilson. He was sick at heart, and angry. He poured dry sherry for a toast but launched straight into the story. It gave his voice a hard metallic edge and his eyes, although he did not intend it so, looked balefully, accusingly at Lucinda who could not, in the face of this, bring herself to sit down. She stood upright as if it were she, not Wilson, who was in the dock., «

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Not in Love

Dennis Hasset was inclined to forget Lucinda was only a girl, just as he was also inclined to forget she was not a child. He told her what was said about her.

Lucinda held her shoulders square and smiled. Her upper lip became very thin, but otherwise she did not show him how hurt she was. She could not see why she should be hated so much. She could see, of course. They did not like Mr d'Abbs because he laughed and had a little fun, because he wore a velvet smoking-jacket and was Christian enough not to be frightened when an atheist sat at his table. But she could also not see. She felt so small and weak in the face of the moving water-wall of hatred.

She should be sorry that Mr Hasset had argued with his friend. It was her responsibility. She should care for him and nurse him in the loss, just as she should properly celebrate the purchase she had begged him negotiate on her behalf. She raised her glass and smiled in a way she now knew was attractive. It involved a pursing of the lips, sleepy lids around the eyes. She knew, because she had performed it for the mirror, that it gave her a humorous, dare-devil appearance. But the room was cold. The curtains were drawn. The glass, greenish stuff from Melbourne, seemed black-and being an excellent conductor it was very cold to touch. She stood behind it. She imagined herself a portrait suspended in the gloom.

"Well," she turned. "1 must go."

She had not known she was going to say this. She looked at Dennis Basset's face. His mouth slightly open, his forehead suddenly carved by two deep clefts of frown.

"We are having beef," he said. He put his glass down. He put his two hands together. She felt his misery come out to swamp her. She could not bear his disappointment. She could not look at his face and feel its pain.

"I am so sleepy," she yawned.

All she could think was that she must play cards. She was a despicable person. Then she was despicable, and that was that. But she must go. She told a number of lies, one after the other, teetering above each other, a house of cards, all constructed in order that she might abandon the vicarage and fly-as fast as she could down the Glenmore Hill-to the house in Rushcutters Bay where they would lay a hand of shining cribbage across a grey wool-covered table. Netting Hill, you may not know it, derives its distinctive street plan from the racecourse which Anally bankrupted its-developer, Mr John Whyte. And while it is true that four years at Oriel had not only given Oscar a passion for racehorses, but produced sixteen smudge-paged clothbound notebooks in which were recorded not the thoughts of Divine Masters, not musings on the philosophy of the ancients, but page after page of blue spidery figures which recorded-you could not sit on your backside at Oxford and collect data like this but must travel, by train, by coach, by foot, so that a map of your journeys would be a spider web across the south of England-the names of horses, their sires and dams, their position at last start, the number of days since the last start, the weight carried at the last time, whether they were rising in class, or falling in class, who was the owner, who the jockey and so on, and so while he had this great passion (it was more extensive than I have suggested-his system of weighting would require a bigger book than Pittsburgh Phil's) and had wed his father's scientific methods to the sweating, mud-stained bride of racing, he had come to live in Netting Hill totally in ignorance of the fact that a ghostly imprint of a racecourse lay over its streets.

He did not hear the thunder of two-year-olds down Lansdowne Road. He did not see mud fly in the right turn on Stanley Crescent. He saw the name of Ladbroke, of course. You cannot miss a Ladbroke in Netting Hill. It is there on Square and Road and Terrace. But Ladbroke's was not yet a famous firm of London bookmakers and if the street names were coded messages from the future, Oscar did not know how to read them.

He came to Notting Hill, or so he insisted, only because he was familiar with the area, or the more genteel part of it. He had been

14«

If He Ask a Fish, Will He Give Him a Serpent?

accustomed to staying at the Wardley-Fishes' town house in Ladbroke Square, an address the Queen's physician, being unaware of the pigeeries a mile away in Netting Dale, and having visited, presumably, on a day the wind was blowing from the south-east, had claimed to be the most salubrious in London.

Oscar, being permanently in London, could no longer expect to be billeted at Ladbroke Square, which was, in any case, closed down again, with the servants left starved on half-pay and no scraps of fat to sell off at the back door while they waited for Lady Wardley-Fish to decide she was, once again, bored with the country.

Oscar's accommodation was on the south side of the Uxbridge Road, a block away from the rattle of the omnibuses and wagons and coaches. He had become a schoolteacher, and had a room in the third-floor attic of Mr John Colville's School for Boys. He was a Reverend Mr and chose to wear the collar but at this moment you would not know whether he wore it or not for he was lying in his bed, fully clothed, with the sheet clenched between his neat white teeth. His disgraceful shoes-scuffed quite white around the inner heelslay where they had recently fallen, the right one on its side on the black floorboards, the left standing upright with its toe curling upwards. You would not need to be a cobbler to know my great-grandfather's shoes were too big for him.

The room was cold. There was a grate but it was empty. The brass kindling box was shut but it did not serve to hold kindling in any case, but those letters, written in Theophilus's tight, small hand on an inexplicably expensive crisp white bond, which served to lacerate a conscience which was already as unhealthy as Sir Ian Wardley-Fish's liver.

He knew he was vile. His eyes were wide, staring at the sloping attic ceiling which bore brown marks like an unsavoury old mattress. It was the sabbath. The bells of St John the Evangelist had stopped some ten minutes before but the note for the day was declared more exactly, it seemed to him, by the stench of pig fat being rendered by the dangerous inhabitants of Netting Dale. Greyhound Row, where Mr Colville's school was situated, was genteel and quiet. Only the whisk-whisk of Mrs Fenn's straw broom broke the silence of the sabbath. Mr Fenn, the tailor, had his freshly painted bright green shutter firmly closed. The butcher's shop next door had a bright brass hasp and staple threaded with a heavy black enamelled padlock. Mr Brewer-he whose establishment was next to the butcher's-would, on this day, sell no cheese, no corn, no paper cones of boiled sweets and was, this

Oscar and Lucinda

could be relied on, in his pew with his family at St John's.

The Swann Inn, near the tollgate, was firmly closed but Oscar, lying in his bed above Mr Colville's empty school, could see the smudge of Brickfield's smoke across the yellow sky. He could hear the barking dogs. It was a great place for dogs, for dog-fanciers and dog-stealers. Certain individuals also wagered on the dogs.

He had become vile. The vileness was perhaps the product of the shape of Notting Hill, that he was made by this map, or chose the map without knowing he was doing it, was drawn to it like iron filings towards the magnetic horseshoe shapes of its street plan. Ever since his association with Wardley-Fish he had come to Notting Hill, and ever since that time he had been vile. He did not blame his friend for this. His friend gambled no more.

Wardley-Fish had a parish and worked hard on his sermons. And in any case it was not the gambling which was vile. Through gambling, imbued with God's grace, he had managed to feed and clothe himself. It is true there had been hard and hungry times when he felt himself alone and lost. (One bad spell in 1862 lasted from after Easter almost up to Trinity.) But although he had lost he was, as they said at the track, "ahead." He worked hard. He travelled to Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park. He collected his information and classified it. Indeed, you could look at his results and say he did it all himself, without God's help. But this was not how Oscar saw it. He saw God's hand everywhere about-bookmakers' favourites boxed in at the rails, carried off at the turn, interfered with, broken down, playing up at the barrier and particularly the case of the 2–1 favourite Sailor Boy who-he had this from Jim Clements, the jockeyheld his breath from the top of the straight in the two-year-old handicap at Newmarket and thus allowed Desire to win at 33-1.

He also bet without his system. He had lost money to Magsmen and Macers. He had bet on dried peas, spinning tops, and the progress of ants along a gold-tipped walking stick. He had played cribbage for two or three pounds a game. But he had never bet from greed or avarice. The state of his coal scuttle, the condition of his shoes, all attested to that. He would only bet for a proper godly purpose.

It was not gambling itself which was vile. What was vile was his passion, the extraordinary excitement he felt, the appetite which made him place a bet on every race on the card, not because it was wise, but just so he could maintain his frenzy and cheer home his chosen beasts until he was almost too hoarse to make himself understood at the railway ticket counter. What was vile was the need that took

If He Ask a Fish, Will He Give Him a Serpent?

possession of him at a moment like this when he knew that, at this very instant, in Netting Dale, they would be gathering their dogs together.

He shifted his bite on his sheet.

No matter what godly purpose his gambling was turned towards, it was not godly to pursue it on the sabbath.

This business with dogs was evil. It was Wardley-Fish-though not, dear Lord, his fault-who had taken him to this place. Oscar had been shocked, but excited too. There was the dangerous smell of the city poor: musty cotton, fustian, toasted herrings. Men sat in rows on benches with their dogs. Later, when the clock was running, they would cry out, but at first, when they were just entered, there was a curious quiet about the men and their dogs. They stroked and patted. There was a soft cooing like a dove house.

They all looked towards the pit. It was not a very large pit, about six feet in diameter, and painted a bright white. In the middle of the pit was a dark grey mound. The mound was soft, moving. The mound was composed of rats, clustering together, crawling over each other. The men cooed.

Then they stopped. They shifted on their seats, spat, coughed, said something softly to a neighbour or called out a raw-throated joke.

A fox terrier was placed into the ring. The fox terrier was called Tiny. It wore a woman's bracelet for a collar. It took the rats one by one, picked them up like fruit from a bowl, broke them while the dock ricked and the men roared so loud you could not hear your companion speak to you. On the day he first witnessed this, Oscar would not have believed he would ever be tempted to bet on such a thing. But the temptation came, not because he wished to see creatures put to death, but because it was a sabbath and there was no other betting to be had. Betting was like this: a monster that, must be fed.

He bit his sheet, and wondered, as he wondered often, if it might not be this, his need to feed the monster, that lay behind the scrubbed face of his seemingly Christian desire, i.e., to accumulate money in order to dare the formless terror of the ocean, to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales.

And yet the monster could not be the motive. For when he had made the commitment-two years before he lay in bed fretting over ratshe had imagined there would be no money to raise. The Church Missionary Society would pay his fare. He would need a sun-helmet (3s) and, apart from that, only a piece of celluloid (10s) to overcome his panic of the sea.

42 Called

Wardley-Fish did not like the people that he knew. They bored him. He imagined them as sturdy beasts grazing in a dense and matted pasture, chewing, swallowing, regurgitating at one end, plopping at the other. Naturally he did not show them what he felt. He acted jovially, even fondly, and what he showed was not exactly false-he felt all these things in a distant sort of waybut were certainly greatly magnified. He worried about his father's bleeding face, and he laughed at his brother's stories about the poacher he had netted in a pit-trap. He could ride with them all day and drink with them all night-they were round and comfortable in every part, and not a sharp edge to cut through the cushions of complacency.

And this was the quality that he valued in his embarrassing friend that he was itchy and angular in every sense, and whatever there was to disapprove of, you could not put complacency on the list.

There were so many things about the Odd Bod he did not approve of, phobias, fetishes, habits of mind so alien that they could not even be accounted for by the peculiar parent who, no matter how alarming he might be in his belief ("Are you saved, Mr Wardley-Fish?"), was at least neat in his appearance. But the son, no matter how the bookmakers pressed their wads of beer-wet currency on to him, would not spend money on his appearance. He had no money of his own. This was his view. The Lord saw fit to grant him money for his education, and it would be sinful to use this for gratification of what was, so he imagined, nothing but worldly vanity. Thus he bought his clothing from stinking stalls run by the Jews in Petticoat Lane, his shoes from a scrofulous pedlar who had nothing else to sell but a few herrings and a green silk handkerchief, an old-fashioned kingsman probably pickpocketed by his grandfather.

This mode of dress seemed to Wardley-Fish to be. conceited. And when, for instance, he found the gawkish Odd Bod, excluded from Cremorne Gardens because he had not made the slightest concession to fashion, he was momentarily enraged.

Wardley-Fish had on his white waistcoat and dresscoat. He had spent a lot of time on the waxed ends of his moustache. He stepped down from the hansom, a little late admittedly, and found his friend standing placidly in the splendid doorway whilst the porter glowered behind him. The Odd Bod had made no effort with his dress at all. It was he who had suggested this rendezvous. He knew what sort of place it was. Yet he made no effort. His coat was threadbare. His red hair was more alarming than usual, having developed a corkscrewing forelock to equal the flyaway sides. The porter did not understand that his appearance was a symbol of his incorruptibility. He had, therefore, refused him admittance.

The Odd Bod stood gazing across through the park, his white hands clasped upon his breast, a bemused smile on his face, waiting patiently for Wardley-Fish to set it right for him. The thieving cabby wanted half a crown and Wardley-Fish was too irritated to argue. This stance of Oscar's looked so like a pose. He could not believe it was not, at least partly, a pose. And yet he could not doubt the Odd Bod's integrity, or not for long. For he had seen him, on more than one occasion, discard that portion of his racecourse winnings he regarded as surplus to his needs, shove blue five-pound notes into some parish poor-box because he had enough for himself for the present. His jerky charity did not stop there, for there was a red-nosed clergyman from his own village who was also a recipient of bulging registered envelopes of currency which, from all that Wardley-Fish could judge, produced many emotions in the donee, but none of them having much resemblance to gratitude.

Oscar's holy profligacy infuriated Wardley-Fish, and yet it was exactly these acts of charity that he most treasured in his friend, and he could never make his mind be still about the question, which was like one of those trick drawings in Punch which have the contradiction built in so that what seems to be a spire one moment is a deep shaft the next. He took his friend by his shiny, threadbare elbow and propelled him before him, past the porter, into Cremorne Gardens. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, an hour at which the tide, so to speak, was already turning, and the clientele, having been for the most part respectable during the day, now seemed to transmogrifythe guard changed within the space of thirty minutes-into something more glamorous and dangerous. Oscar allowed himself to be propelled. He was pleased to have no

Oscar and Lucinda

choice. He felt luxury engulf him and the sensation was at once soothing and abrasive. A table loomed. He unhooked his umbrella from his arm and put it on the back of the chair. He removed the rolled-up parcel from his breast pocket and placed it underneath the table. He did all this without hurry, and when he sat down it would not have been apparent to a stranger that he was agitated. He had come here to make a very frightening decision. He smiled brightly at WardleyFish. He raked his hair with his fingers, pulled in his seat, placed his evangelical elbows square on the table. He gave all the appearance of being, dress apart, like a tourist come to Cremorne Gardens to have a look, but not a taste. He admired the room, the globed gas brackets, the pendant lustres, the high mirrored panels with ornate mouldings, the couples without wedding rings to explain their obvious intimacy.

"What a splendid place," he said.

But Wardley-Fish could feel the Odd Bod's agitated feet tapping beneath the table. It was not just feet. It was also fingers, drumming on the chair. The surface of the table assumed a nervous kind of energy. You could experience anxiety merely by touching it.

Wardley-Fish ordered champagne. He could not afford it, but neither could he bear the nerves beneath the marble. He would need the one to cure the other.

"How enticing it is," said Oscar.

Wardley-Fish thought none of this straightforward. The Odd Bod was in his "holy" pose and talking at a tangent. He was admiring in order to criticize, being dazzled so that he might thereby lacerate himself for being there.

"You do remember," Wardley-Fish said, "whose idea it was we meet here?"

"Mine!" said the Odd Bod, watching the champagne being poured. You could feel his quivering energy in the floor and table. It felt like a trout feels on the end of a line-all the energy of a life forcing its patterns on to inert matter.

Wardley-Fish had been looking forward to Cremome Gardens. It had existed as a soft, unfocused promise on the edge of his consciousness. He had not intended to "do" anything, but he had already seen the most delightful creature enter. She was an "actress." She had creamy skin and a tangled artifice of golden hair. She wore ten yards of watered taffeta. He gulped his first glass of champagne and watched it filled immediately. The table had stopped vibrating. He looked up to find the Odd Bod's pale green eyes waiting for him.

"Fish," said the Odd Bod.

Wardley-Fish felt depressed.

"Fish, I have spent a good deal of the afternoon with the Church Missionary Society."

"Yes."

"And they will have me if I wish."

"What for?"

"1 enquired about New South Wales."

Wardley-Fish put down his glass of champagne. He did not look at the Odd Bod. He reflected that there was no natural sympathy between glass and marble.

"Do you hear me?"

"Do not drum the table. It is very irritating."

Wardley-Fish slid his glass three inches to the right, then back again. Oscar folded his redknuckled hands around each other as if they were a puzzle he could not properly resolve. When Wardley-Fish spoke, it was very quietly and softly. "There is no need," he said, "for you to frighten yourself with such ideas."

But Oscar, when he replied, had his voice in that tight and scratchy register. "I must," said the Odd Bod. It was like fingernails across a

blackboard.

"So why have we come here?" asked Wardley-Fish, leaning back and folding his arms across his white waistcoat. "Are you to drive the money-changers from the temple, the pretty whores across into

the park?"

"It is a lovely place, Fish. I am very comfortable here." "Then relax, dear Odd Bod, and do not drum and squeak and fidget.

You will be back in college tonight and it will not be nearly so

much fun."

They were quiet for a moment. Wardley-Fish fussed around with his cigar as he tried to nip its end with a new patented device that did not seem to work as promised. Oscar watched him, with his palms

flat on the table.

"But I have changed," Oscar said when Wardley-Fish had his smoke alight, "look at me. Look at what I have become."

"Oh, strike me," roared Wardley-Fish. He pushed his chair back. He did not care that he made a bellow in such a quiet place. "You have not become this," and he waved his hands around to indicate the sort of trappings that did not exemplify Oscar's personality. "You are tiresome, Odd Bod. You have only one conversation, and it makes no sense. You belong no more here than you belong anywhere. Odd Bod, you must realize, you do not fit."

Oscar and Lucinda

"Speak quietly."

"You do not fit. You are wonderful. You are perfectly unique. Do you feel you 'fit' in Oriel?" Oscar looked down into his glass. "I have my friends."

"Who?"

"Pennington, Ramsay."

"Pennington is a drunk and a Puseyite. Ramsay fawns on anyone who looks at him. And do you have friends in Hennacombe? Do you fit there?"

Oscar's eyes looked hurt and troubled.

"Neither do you fit here. You are not corrupted. It is an impertinence to suggest that you are. You do not have to travel to New South Wales for a penance."

"And you?"

"And me? Oh, I 'fit.' I daresay I 'fit' all too well." Wardley-Fish leaned across and took the Odd Bod's hand. He shackled the wrist. "But you showed me that I might be saved." His smile was fixed. Oscar could feel the big hand trembling. "So do not," he whispered, "start pretending you must cross the world to save your soul, because I tell you it is not true. You must not leave. And anyway," he took back his hand and relit his cigar, "you cannot." Oscar was enfolded in blue smoke. He blinked and waved his hand while a slow smile budded on his lips.

"And why can I not leave?"

"Because you cannot bear a little agua. You could not sail as far as Calais." Oscar leaned down and picked up a little wrapped cylinder from amongst his papers on the floor. This he unwrapped slowly, smiling all the time at his friend. What he then held up was a flexible material which was transparent, but not so clear as glass. On this material were drawn those lines which my mother imagined represented latitude and longitude.

"What is this, Oscar?"

Wardley-Fish rarely called him Oscar. There was a sibilant sadness in the name which now made its owner pause before answering.

"It is known as celluloid, and is pretty much what it appears to be. But you see I can make these marks on it, and I can carry it around. It is very light and handy."

"This will cure your phobia?"

Oscar then explained his plan for viewing water through the celluloid. He could view it one square at a time, thus containing it. What was terrifying in a vast expanse would become "quite manageable." Wardley-Fish did not trouble himself with the theory. His friend was talking too much, too fast, in too high a register. It would not work. Only desperation would make a man believe it would.

"Has it ever occurred to you," he said when Oscar had finished and was rolling away his celluloid, "that what you call your 'phobia' is really the Almighty speaking to you?" "Don't mock me, Fish." "As a matter of fact I am very serious."

" 'Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death'-no, Fish, if my soul were clear, I would have no fear-Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.' "

"But has it occurred to you that what you call a phobia may be God telling you that you must not go near the water?" "Very clever, Fish."

Wardley-Fish shrugged. The extraordinary woman had found herself a companion. The Odd Bod was pushing a florin across the table to him. He picked it up, then put it down. "You wish me to flip this?" "Thank you, Fish."

"You know I only flip my own coins." He pushed the florin back across the table and searched in his own pocket. His handsome face was suddenly weary, pouchy around the eyes. He found, at last, a penny. He flipped the coin, lethargically, as if he had not guessed that he was tossing for his friend's destiny. It was a dull and dirty penny he sent spinning through the air.

"Call," he said.

The Odd Bod had gone pale and waxy. He had his hands clenched tight together on his breast. He was moving the fingers in the trap of the hands. He looked like a praying mantis.

"Call," said Wardley-Fish, but loudly so that blonde-haired women turned to stare. The penny slapped against his palm. "I cannot, Fish. You know it."

Wardley-Fish turned the penny on to the back of the wrist. He kept it covered with his right hand. "Why not?" he asked. "I am frightened," hissed Oscar. "You know I am frightened." "Then why do you do such things to yourself," smiled Wardley-Fish. "Come, dear Odd Bod, and-"

"Heads," said Oscar. Wardley-Fish sighed. He lifted his hand to reveal the head of Queen Victoria. The Odd Bod's face was ghastly, a mask carved out of white soap, and you did not need to be a mind reader to know that God was sending him to New South Wales. This happened on 22 April 1863. My great-grandfather was twentytwo years old.,-;; Leviathan

My father, I think I said before, was a swaggering little fellow, a cunning spin bowler, a smoker of matchstick-thin cigarettes, a practical joker. He was small, but he was proud that he stood straight with his shoulders back. I saw him fight Hector Thompson, a man twice his size, on the deserted forecourt of Carl Foster's service station. He had him down, crumbled, winded, with a bleeding lip, before anyone in the pub across the road had a chance to realize what was happening.

But when it came to celluloid, my father was a coward.

The celluloid was most definitely the property of my mother. It was the same piece Oscar had brought to Australia in 1864, and was certainly the first sample of that substance introduced to the ancient continent. Perhaps it was the first synthetic long-chain hydrocarbon in the southern hemisphere. This was something my father, being a chemist by training, pondered over, but only once out loud. My mother would not hear him speak of it, and not because she was silly, but because she understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

When my father spoke of the scientific history of celluloid (which, having a diploma in industrial chemistry, he was entitled to do) she felt that he was contesting her ownership of its original use, its meaning, its history.

And she was right. When my father said 'long-chain hydrocarbon," he was saying: "I am right. This one's mine."

But my mother would not let him have it. The celluloid was hers. The meaning of it was hers. The lines ruled on it were-I was brought up on this-lines of latitude and longitude. She would lay the yellowed, scratched material across a Shell road map and explain to us how it would have worked.

She became emotional, as she often did, when discussing the past, and because she wished Oscar to be a "missionary" and a "pioneer Anglican," we gew up imagining Oscar travelling out on steerage, on a clipper ship, crowded in amongst poor immigrants. We imagined our greatgrandfather with his map and celluloid, his Bible, his Book of Common Prayer. We saw himeven while we squirmed in embarrassment before my mother's holy-toned recitation-conducting sad funeral services for babies lost, a toothless sailmaker stitching up a sad little parcel in canvas, and young Oscar, his hair flaming red, his milkwhite skin burnt raw, squinting into the antipodean sun with the ultramarine sea swelling up above him.

My father surely knew what kind of ship it was Oscar sailed on. He knew its name, and if he knew its name he probably "looked it up." In any case, he said nothing about the Leviathan which was no more a clipper than the celluloid was a grid of latitude and longitude. j The Leviathan was 690 feet long, 83 feet wide and 58 feet deep. The I Ark (if one allows the cubit as 20.62 inches) was 512 feet long, 85 feet '.; wide, and 51 feet deep. This coincidence was not lost on Oscar who "discovered" the Leviathan two weeks after his fateful evening at Cremorne Gardens.

At this stage Ishmael Kingdom Legare's controversial liner was undergoing one of its crises in the Tyneside shipyards and it was thought the company would go bankrupt. These uncertainties were nothing to Oscar. He ignored them. He saw only that this was the ship he must travel on. It was unsinkable. Punch wrote that a man might travel from Southampton to Sydney and-so vast were the dimensions, so multitudinous the passages, alleyways, gangways, etc.-that the poor chap-although he might dance till he had no shoe leather, and dine till his buttons burst-might go all that way and never find his way to that most simple essential of an ocean voyage-a porthole with a view of the sea.

This was just the sort of ship that Oscar required. It had twin hulls (in case of icebergs), a cellular deck, and the capacity to carry its own coal for the journey.

Oscar Hopkins travelled to Australia not as my mother imagined but in the greatest luxury. And while he appeared, to those around him, to be so unworldly as to take no notice of this aspect of his journey, to be insensitive to the pleasures of "portières of carmine silk/' one should remember that Oscar chose Leviathan just as he chose Cremorne Gardens. Someone who had grown up in the limestone austerity of Theophilus's house could not be oblivious to either. The Church Missionary Society, of course, would not pay his fare on anything so grand. That he should have the nerve to suggest they should produced a certain degree of ill-feeling which he did not notice.

He would pay his own fare. Only God could provide so large an amount. He bet on dogs and horses.

In his heart of hearts he did not know if he was good or bad, holy or corrupt. He bathed in cold water when there was hot available. He went without coal when he could afford to buy it. He met with Wardley-Fish on Friday afternoon and drank pink champagne.

Wardley-Fish would have dearly loved a little flutter. But he had a curacy in Hammersmith, a fiancee, an impending wedding, and this combination of circumstances had meant that he had not only been forced to abandon his apparently "questionable" address near Drury Lane-no one seemed to think there was anything "questionable" about him coming here to live in the same house as his future wife-he had also given up the sporting life. There were good reasons to give up, but he would have liked to have had just an hour at the Holborn Casino, say, or even better, at Epsom. And he would have liked to do it with his hooting, embarrassing friend. However, they were grown up now, and he was a handsome fellow engaged to a bishop's daughter. His fiancée, Miss Melody Clutterbuck, did not know that Wardley-Fish would, in a moment, use the Bishop's coach to pay a visit to the loathsome person he always made such fun of. She understood this friendship to be almost finished. She had put the prickly subject from her mind, or almost, for there was always the anxiety that the ship the chickennecked madman had chosen to go to Australia-that this ship might somehow (The Times said it quite likely) never get built. She could not hear the Leviathan discussed (as it lurched from stasis to crisis in the City) without seeing my great-grandfather's prayingmantis head and his ridiculous long white wrists extruding from his grime-polished sleeves. Not being privy to the history of the unlikely friendship, she imagined the Reverend Mr Hopkins to be a bad influence, and although this misunderstanding made her fiancé most uncomfortable he lacked the courage to set her right. She had no sympathy for the Odd Bod and to learn, for instance, that he sat beside an empty coal skuttle because it would be wicked to spend his winnings on his own comfort-it was this which was presently agitating Wardley-Fish-would merely have confirmed what she knew already: that the silly little Evangelical was as mad as May-butter.

After all the jokes he had made at the Odd Bod's expense, WardleyFish could not have justified himself to her. There were things he could not explain, and this was one of them: why he should tiptoe down the staircase of her father's house with a pretty cane basket containing "things" wrapped in cast-out tissue paper. His fiancée was with her mother at early service in Knightsbridge. There was only the Bishop to contend with. The Bishop-no stickler for the observation of the sabbath-was in his study cataloguing what he called his "brimborions and knick-knacks" by which he meant certain items of the loot that Lord Elgin's victory had flushed out of Peking. The Bishop's focus of attention was intense. It was most unlikely he would hear. But just the same Wardley-Fish came down the stairs so slowly he made them groan and creak unnaturally. He reached the gloomy patch at the bottom of the stairs where black umbrellas hung like flying foxes from their cedar stand. In a moment he would be safe and out of the door towards the stables, but before the moment arrived the Bishop-intent on fetching the crackleglaze vase from the drawing room-had flung open his study door and stood not two feet away.

"Ho," he said.

It was not fright. The Bishop did not startle easily. It was a form of shyness, of politeness-the two men were always nervous with each other. They were each anxious to demonstrate goodwill. The Bishop was in his shirt sleeves. He had his cut-down glasses on his stubby nose. He held a stack of pink index cards in his hands.

"Apples?" he said jovially, and grabbed. When the hard irregular shape benath the tissue told him that it was not an apple at all, he was embarrassed. He felt he had walked into his guest room and found his guest unrobing. He did not know what to do, whether to carry on as normal, or to place the object back in the basket and retreat into his study. He looked at Wardley-Fish with his bushy eyebrows pushing up beneath his furrowed brow.

"Coal," said Wardley-Fish, but only because he did not have the nerve to stay silent. The Bishop pushed back the tissue paper and, indeed, it was as the young man said. The Bishop crumbled some between his thumb and forefinger and put it to his nose and smelt it, but once he had done that he had nothing more to do. He did not like to ask what this extraordinary arrangement might be for. His future son-in-law did not seem free to tell him. Wardley-Fish could not, standing there at the bottom of the stair, with twenty lumps of coal held in a silly little basket, explain it, not even to himself. =

45

Hymns

On the following Tuesday, Wardley-Fish happened to be in Martindale's bookshop. His fiancée had a fondness for the romantic novels of Mrs Plumber, and it was whilst she was enquiring after the most recent (in a voice that seemed, in that environment, too loud and confident) that he came across a copy of the elder Hopkins's Hennacombe Rambles. And here, with his umbrella hooked over his arm, he found a younger Oscar described as "the little botanist in skirts." This made him smile, of course. But for the rest of it, the smile became less certain and soon completely disappeared. It was as if he had netted Oscar in his home pond and could see 162

Hymns

him properly for the first time. And although he had visited the bare, wooden-floored cottage in Hennacombe and, indeed, listened at length to the elder Hopkins (who was immune, it seemed, to the freezing wind blowing through the open window) as the old man spoke of his wish that

"Christ's Kingdom should come in our lifetime," he now realized reading the book-that the pond was neither as he had seen it nor as Oscar had described it.

Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy's mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and lifedenying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the "even") was impressed and moved. Leaning against the counter at Martindale's with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner's, he read this passage: "the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance."

Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man's man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and ifexpediently-he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father's opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved-it nearly winded him-by the elder Hopkins's prose. Where he had expected hellnre and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. "I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless."

To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God's work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist's descriptions, what he had never felt-what he should have felt-in the psalm beginning "I will extol 163

Oscar and Lucinda thee, my Cod, ^,

He stood at tK Kin8; and J wil1 bless Thy name for ever and ever." one would expet)C°unter' his head bowed, with that moist-eyed look returning to di^, f° ** Produced by a sentimental story. His fiancee, the saucy-eyed JVer both the changed mood and the parcel which the one had caUs'stant was wraPPingfor him, saw immediately that disposed towar^ the other' and was therefore not sympathetically liked him best», he book-She knew him as bright and jolly. She They found a ^ red Jacket fifteen hands high, ton. Riding throu!nsom outside the shop and ordered it to Kensinggreen, he contin^ Hyde Park' with a11 the deep black trees shooting his secret visit w% to think/ as he had thought, continually, since a room with only the coa1' of his friend who had jailed himself in of a terrifying vo> birdless sky for company and only the prospect

Once when he failed to look forward to.

Harrow, he had iv *s voun8' so y°ung he was not yet a boarder at a single blue starry dled with a stamP in his father's vast collection, so reverent almost With a Picture of a swan. He had been so careful, damaged. His fath^j.and yet' somehow, the perforations had been ing which made hJ' °f course' had noticed, and it was not the birchafterwards, but that? blubber into his nanny's white starched bosom caused harm, and t?e had intended only admiration, and instead had It was his charaq is harm was irreversible.

and so it would be ^.to carry the burden of his mistakes with him, not clear his mind,^Uh Oscar'

He could not put it down. He could

The carriage lurcj^ lt-Wardley-Fish, Jiearihed °n to the brid8e across the Serpentine and her and knew he diq 8 his fiancee exclaim bad-temperedly, looked at gusting to him. He f^.not like her-Her Httle plump wrists seemed disso by the powder oh choked' claustrophobic, was made particularly He wished he had u her dimPled cheek.

He had put the idea j ne out to Africa-He had thought of it for a while, ing to Africa togeth^to the Odd Bod's head-They had talked of goGardens-but there, r~this was well before the day at Cremorne now he knew he sho *d been the Problem of the water phobia. But tion that had made V^ have 8one to Africa anyway and the ambicontemptible. him court the da" ghter of a bishop seemed

He knew she would

he asked if he might j,110'like the.elder H «pkins's book, and yet when but rather in the hop Cad her a little' he d>d not do it provocatively, "Melody,"hesaid, '-^ that he might be wrong. must share my secret with you." They had not

164

Hymns

spoken since they left the West End and, as this silence was unusual, he knew she would be uneasy. He did not normally read at all, and he knew his purchase of a book would seem strange. Still, he pulled the string on the green parcel, smiling queerly in her direction.

"We are almost there, dearest," she said, but took the paper and string from him and began to tidy it. Wardley-Fish did not see the reproof intended.

"A little only," he said. "Here. It is written by the Odd Bod's pater and not in the least what one would expect."

She nodded, severely, she hoped.

Wardley-Fish opened the book, not at the beginning, but at random. " The body is about one and a half inches thick.' " he said (this was not quite the sort of thing he sought) " 'and the same in height, of a purplish brown hue marked with longitudinal bands of a dull lilac, each band margined with a darker colour.' "

Melody Clutterbuck looked at her fiancé, perplexed. They passed a troop of guardsmen on horseback, a sight she normally loved. She did not even notice. She opened her mouth to speak, to object to the unsavoury scent-there was no other way to think of it-of this writing. It certainly did not seem appropriate for ladies. But her fiancé was ahead of her. He was already galloping on in search of better evidence. A paragraph here. A sentence there.

"You see, you see," he exclaimed, his eyes glistening wet. She had only seen him become this excited about horses. "The old boy is a marvel. The old boy is alarming. It is the 'Yea!' Melody, isn't it? Your father's 'Yea!' Mr Carlyle's 'Eternal Yea!' The one your pater speaks of." "Ian, please!" "From this," he waved the book with great emotion, "to a room with no hre."

"Dearest, you make no sense."

" Within a day or two after this, the other two of the same species lay their spawn.' No, no dearest. It is botany, or zoology. The old fellow is a fearsome Evangelical so we need not worry ourselves about propriety."

But talk as he might, he knew he had gone too far. He surrendered 'he book when she held out her left hand for it and he watched it join its partner-she was, in spite of her firm chin, very agitated-as the Pair of them, left and right, attempted to collaborate in rewrapping tl» e parcel. I am frightened of her, he thought, and it is far too young to know

such a thing.

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Oscar and Lucinda

It was the Hon. Mary Braden-Loch's day At Home. The young clergyman performed expertly. Melody Qurterbuck was pleased to have him much admired and had soon forgiven him his outburst in the cab. She was alarmed therefore to notice, in a break in the conversation, the dead quality of his lovely eyes. She could not guess that they held the indefinite sky of a window three storeys above the streets of Netting Hill. ^?

It was Mr Paxton-the same Mr Paxton who designed the Crystal Palace-who advised Lucinda Leplastrier to return to Sydney on the Leviathan. He spoke as an engineer, he said, and there is no doubt she would see nothing like it "so long as sanity is the general condition in my profession."

Lucinda expressed doubt that she should entrust her life to a vessel so described. He made it sound as if the ship were quite unsound.

"Its ability to float at sea is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it floating on the season of commerce. Go, " he said, "it is as safe as an elephant. It will be a great experience, aye, and a rare one, too, because she will be bankrupt two years from now, and Mr Legare can go back to building bridges which is more his line of work."

She bought her ticket with her customary confusion about the price. It was fifty-five pounds for second class. It was too much money. It was seventy pounds for first class. She could afford it. She bought a first-class ticket, but in all her to-ing and fro-ing about the rights and wrongs of this, she never imagined that the largest ship ever built would be so empty. London had been lonely enough. This was worse. And it was because of this, because of the grand and supercilious spaces, that she had come down on to the wharf and she was, the minute her feet were on the ground, much happier.

166

In a Trice

It was like descending from a town hall to a market place-suddenly there was life all around hersteel rails along the wharf and cranes rolling to and fro, donkey engines thumping, white blossoms of steam, and even the rain, although it wet her boots, did not depress her. She was pleased to be down here, amongst practical people. There were practical smells-coal, coke, anthracite, mineral oil. It was the mineral oil that made her think about her glassworks with which, in her absence, she had developed a closer and more affectionate relationship. She forgot the anxieties and tensions her ownership produced and felt, '} now, on Southampton wharf, sympathetically drawn to the man who; smelt of mineral oil-an engineer, she guessed, a frecklefaced Scot i with a clenched-up face who would never be welcome in Marian Evans's drawing room. Her glassworks smelt like this. All glassworks did. At the glassworks she visited in Trent, in London itself, and even in Nottingham where they were making sheet glass for Mr Paxton, there was the same smell, the smell of her own works on Darling Harbour. The pear wood they used to turn the foot of a vase would be soaked, not just in water, but in mineral oil, and she was suddenly made impatient to return-as impatient as she had been to leave-to the aroma of burnt pear wood, mineral oil, and the acrid chemical smells of sulphates and chromâtes oxidizing to green and yellow.

She was twenty-two years old and fashionably dressed in grey moiré. Her back was curved; her backside, as was the fashion, pronounced but not to the degree suggested by George Eliot in a sharp letter written at that time. The pamphleteer's daughter, according to the famous novelist, could have sat a tea tray on the ledge of her backside, but George Eliot was fifty-eight years old and bad tempered with kidney stones and she had misunderstood the girl completely. She is such a "little" thing, it would appear that all conversation has been squeezed out of her. She sits with her hands pressed in her lap, totally silent, but with no consciousness of her social inadequacy and it is difficult, after the second hour, to maintain one's natural sympathy for her. George [Lewes] was kind and took her to the British Museum and then to tea where she seems to have attempted to seduce him into a game of chance. Apart from this outburst she seems to have said little, and it is so difficult, no matter what one's intentions, to hold a conversation with someone who will not talk.

Lucinda had expected her mother's friend to share her mother's enthusiasms. But while George Eliot had encouraged Elizabeth's essays and pamphlets, she had never shared "Elizabeth's fanatacism" for

167

Oscar and Lucinda

factories. And while she was interested to learn that the orphan had actually purchased a factory, she did not wish to discuss the manufacture of glass. If Lucinda had employed female glass blowers, perhaps it would have been different, but her single attempt in that direction had been a failure. George Eliot was not interested, and she had work to do.

Lucinda thought George Eliot was a snob. She preferred Mr Paxton who laughed at her outright but who had, just the same, explained his new project, presented her with a blueprint of the broad schemata, and written her letters of introduction to the glassworks he dealt with. To be patronized by Mr Paxton was an altogether more pleasant experience than being disapproved of by her mother's famous friend.

Lucinda had come to London thinking of it as "Home." It was soon clear that this great sooty machine was not home at all. She had left Sydney with thoughts of marriage and children. She had left-^although it did not make her comfortable to remember this-in a temper with Dennis Hasset who, whilst remaining her close friend and confidante, obviously did not think her a suitable candidate for marriage. She had left him to stew in the juices of his own regret. She did not doubt she would have proposals in London, if only because of her wealth. She had steeled herself to fend off undesirables. Nothing like this had happened, although the stern Mr Paxton had behaved, twice, in an ungentlemanly way.

She stepped back to allow the steam crane to pass along its rails and, looking up to see what it might be carrying, saw a bellowing Poll Hereford with a canvas sling under its middle. The crane stopped and began to lower its burden on to the top of that mighty riveted cliff wall which was Leviathan.

The wharf resembled a sale yard and reminded the woman with the small bright eyes of the days she had gone into Parramatta with her father to buy a pig or sell the vealers. The air was redolent with fear and wet fur. The beasts were scouring, and thinking of this, she resolved to stand beneath no more airborne beasts.

She walked past the corralled animals, and did not mind the stares of the oilskin-wrapped shepherds who could not imagine why a woman, one of her class, would walk along a busy wharf in the rain. She was accustomed to this sort of stare and while she felt the implicit threat in it-the voodoo of a group of men-she was now a woman who employed such men, and her old fears in the face of their insulting confidence were allayed by the knowledge of her economic strength. It was wrong that she had this strength but she was, thank 168

In a Trice

God, pleased to have it. She did not make them lower their eyes, but she already had the power to do so. This power was primed by money, but it was not fuelled by it. And it was this, this turbulent, often angry sense of her own power, that was most responsible for her being lonely in London. Even George Eliot, no matter what her fiction might suggest, was used to young ladies who lowered their eyes in deference to her own. Lucinda did not do so. The two women locked eyes and George Eliot mentions (in the letter already quoted from) "a quite peculiar tendency to stare." It may well have been this, not her bitsand-pieces accent, her interest in trade, her lack of conversational skills, her sometimes blunt opinions or her unladylike way of blowing her noselike a walrus, said George Eliot-that made her seem so alien. And when she did, at last, lower her eyes, her lids were heavy and sensuous. They produced an effect which was ungenerously described as "sly."

She walked past the long-nosed Derby hogs, all pushed into each other like pieces in a puzzle, and found a great collection of wet and rusty cages and two men arguing over one of them, A hansom clipped past them, bursting with clergymen, or so it seemed. She noticed the unusual red hair of one of them, but only in passing, being more taken by the argument which concerned one cage only, it being, apparently through error, filled with wet and shivering rabbits.

"Crikey Moses!" said the short one. He had an eager sort of face with heavy sandy eyebrows pressing down upon his blinking eyes. "The blessed colony is half eaten out by rabbits. Why would I want more?" He screwed up his face and sent his voice up into falsetto.

"Don't ask me, guv. It's all writ here."

"Ill take the rest, but not the rabbits."

"Sorry, guv, t'ain' either or. It's all or bleeding nothing." Lucinda walked amongst the cages: rabbits, pigeons, pheasants, all addressed to a body known as the Acclimatization Society of New South Wales. There were also deer, half a dozen does and three bucks, all the males in separate cages, and one of them already bleeding badly around the head. And lastly, there were llamas, standing still and wet, each one in a separate cage, all marked with stern signs forbidding any contact. Lucinda tried to pat a doe, but it pulled its head away sharply and, when she persisted, tried to bite her.

She turned to walk back to the first-class gangway. The rain was beginning to ease back to its more usual drizzle. An officer, done up in braid like an Italian, saluted her. There were fifty-five days to Sydney. Fifty-five days before she would know if Dennis Hasset had-she bit 169

Oscar and Lucinda

her lower lip and scrunched up her eyes-married Harriet Borrodaile or Elizabeth Palmer. His letters had mentioned "the most appalling dances" but she did not trust the description. Dear God, let him still be a bachelor, not that I might marry him, but that he may be my friend. Dear God, please leave me someone with whom I can talk.

The rain started again, heavily, and the gangway ahead would not clear. She lifted her umbrella to see properly, peering up from the fourth step. It would appear that there were problems with an invalid. She recognized the red-haired clergyman as the one who had arrived in a hansom, or, rather, recognized the hair. It was he who was the invalid. She thought it strange they should carry a man backwards up a gangplank. But then, as she watched, she saw they were no longer going up, but coming down. And this was how she first saw Oscar, although there was not a lot to see because he had his hands pressed to his face.

The Reverend Oscar Hopkins was carried, moaning, backwards, off the Leviathan. The Reverend Ian Wardley-Fish carried the stretcher at the end where his feet were, and the Reverend Hugh Stratton, in spite of his bad back, carried the other. There were also, in this entourage, Mrs Stratton, Melody Clutterbuck, and Theophilus Hopkins, a bleakfaced old man whose eyebrows needed trimming; he carried a box full of soldering implements he had made especially for his son.

As Lucinda watched, the red-haired clergyman was blindfolded.

The handsome one with the blond beard clapped his hands together. The red-haired one was still moaning. The blond-bearded one said: "Speed. We need speed, Hopkins. That will do the trick." Then he clapped his hands together again, and gazed around like a man looking for a stick to kill a snake. He was quite drenched.

The old man with the grey-streaked beard held his gift like a sodden magus who has arrived at a disappointing destination. "Surely," he said, fiddling with the neck button of his oilskin, "surely, Oscar, you can walk?"

A large frowsy blonde woman with a loud Oxbridge voice and an enormous bosom now came forward and began to tug at the old man's coat. "Come," she said, "come, we shall go aboard." Lucinda pushed past and got on to the gangway before they could cause any more trouble. She found the English tiresome in the extreme. She acknowledged one more ostentatious salute and hurried to her stateroom. She left her umbrella dripping by the door, took off her hat, unlaced her boots, and then, with nothing on her feet but stockings, sat at the little bureau and tried to write in her journal.

170

Babylon

For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: "An exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere. Would dearly love cribbage."

She heard the crane's donkey engine. She leaned forward, to see if she might catch a glimpse of one more cow, when a large cage swung past the porthole, so close she involuntarily flinched. In the cage were three clergymen, the blindfolded one, looking quite green, squatted in the middle. His mouth was open. She could not hear what noise he made. The older clergyman (he looked like an aged boy) held the blindfolded one's arms. He looked very still and very pale and his mouth was shut. But the blond one with the mole was all animation. His hands were raised. His eyes were dancing. He looked as though he would shortly spring into the air. Lucinda could hear him quite distinctly.

"In a trice," he shouted, "I told you, Hopkins-in a trice." 47 Babylon

The saloons and cabins of the Leviathan were lofty and ornate. There was carving, scrollwork, plush. The grand saloon, in which Lucinda Leplastrier stood, quite alone, was almost three times her height, was sixty-two feet long and thirty-six feet wide. Two great funnels passed through this room but were covered with eight panels, four larger ones, which were mirrors, and four smaller ones, ornamented with paintings of children and emblems of the sea. There were couches upholstered in red plush, settees in Utrecht velvet, a carved mahogany organ, buffets and tables of elegantly carved walnut, arabesque panels filled with sentimental paintings. There were Brussels carpets on the floor and-those items Wardley-Fish had selected as somehow expressing

Oscar and Lucinda

the quintessential nature of the Leviathan's unseemly opulence portières of carmine silk. One could lean across the rail of the grand saloon as Lucinda did now, and gaze down into the second-class promenade. And whilst it is true that Mr Ishmael Kingdom Legare had not been quite so lavish there, he had, just the same, been generous with comfort and with space and if brutal iron girders crossed the ceiling of second classthey were also sympathetically decorated (after an oriental theme), being painted blue and red alternatively, the underside edged with gilt and the spaces between the beams divided into panels which were very lightly decorated in colour and gold.

Lucinda looked down at the second class and liked it better than the place she was in. She thought: I have done it again.

She had wasted money to be in a place whose privileges she somehow had imagined herself

"entitled" to, but once she had been robbed of the extra fifteen pounds involved, the privilege would only serve to make her feel squeezed and constricted and her voice would sound coarse, not just to others, perhaps not to others at all, but to herself. She could not imagine how anyone with warm blood in their veins could feel at home amongst the cool and polished distances in first class. She had pretended to herself that she was one of them, but she was not. And so she imagined that she would be much more at home in second class. She liked the way the secondclass cabins-they were in two tiers, like little terraces, one up, one down-all opened on to this central space, and she, conscious of her very public lack of wellwishers, was much attracted by the knot of people in second class; they were clustered around the men who had arrived by cage. It was not just curiosity made her wish to be amongst them, but something stronger, more physical, a need to push herself in amongst her kind, like a Derby hog or a rabbit in a cage. The crowd milling around the clergymen had increased since she had seen it at the gangplank. There were schoolboys. There had been four, but now there were three. These three were making a presentation of a memorial scroll to the red-headed clergyman who made a small speech in return. He moved his hands much when he spoke. He blew his nose. There was applause. There was a broad-shouldered man with a heavy beard-not a clergyman, but obviously a pedagoguewho shepherded the boys into one corner and arranged for them to have tea and cake. The fourth boy returned at this time. She wondered who was travelling and who staying. She considered, once again, transferring her baggage down to a second-class cabin, but faced with the bored

Babylon

and supercilious expressions of the stewards, did not have the energy. The red-headed clergyman was escorting the old man with the dark beard (his father, surely?), taking him from point to point around the second-class promenade, gesturing excitedly like a young artist at last admitted to the Royal Academy and the old man, excessively careful in his steps, was playing the part of the proud and newly frail. The younger woman of the party arranged herself (carefully, for she was fashionably dressed) on a velvet sofa, pressed her hands to her eyes, then looked up. Lucinda saw her smile, and returned it, not understanding that what she had thought was a smile was in reality a grimace.

Melody Clutterbuck-it was she who had grimaced-was almost sick with the embarrassment of being there. She was ill at ease and out of place. She was cowed by the ship, and yet it was not the ship that did it to her for she would not have felt like this in any other cornpany. Had she been here alone with Ian it would have been quite different, or with her father, or almost anyone she knew. But she was, by blind and unjust circumstances, forced into company with those for whom this ship was not intended and she was, therefore, one of them. She did not know which of her companions was the worst. They were an ensemble; their performance was too grotesque to be contemplated. There were, for instance, the Strattons, a type all too familiar to Melody Clutterbuck. She had observed their fellows at the dinner table of her father, the Bishop, since her earliest childhood. They smelled of dust and sherry and had shiny patches on their garments; the male had slippery eyes which could not hold the gaze a second; the female had great opinions and was noisy with her cutlery; they had what could be most politely termed "hearty" manners. The Strattons displayed all the characteristics of their caste. They leaned forward over plates of buns which had been made with the intention of amusing children. When they had their mouths full, for that brief period when further biting was impossible, they cast eyes around like clerks from Sotheby's come to value furniture. They were grubby, of course, but it was not a grubbiness you could detect at a distance. It was there so deep within their fabrics that you might think it part of them, as indeed it was. They had cultured voices, and it was this last part, the contrast between how they sounded and how they looked, that made them so disturbing. But these were the cream of her present society. They, at least, had precedents in her world. They were "types" and even if they were irritating, they also had a set place in the menagerie of life. But Oscar-Oscar made her flesh crawl and her hands dig into each other. Fingernail

Oscar and Lucinda

attacked flesh as if it might therefore create enough confusion in the brain, and with this smokescreen of pain block out of the other larger pain. She cound not bear the bony triangle of head. As a triangle it was far too long. The mouth occupied too small a space. The hair was quite beyond belief. He had a faint moustache now, but it was so feeble one wished to inform him there was no point persisting. She had a list. A long list. She could not, for instance, bear his fluting voice, his frightful flapping hands, his total insensitivity to how she felt about him which allowed him, in spite of everything, to bestow on her the most beneficent smiles. Even the way he ordered cocoa from the steward was, in the middle of this precise luxury, naïve to the point of idiocy. The stewards, it was easy to see, were the most frightful little snobs and Melody Clutterbuck sympathized with them (she also judged themthey were only stewards) when they saw the type of person they would be called upon to serve. In first class, she presumed, one would not be so embarrassed. She looked up at the lady in first class, made a little grimace, and was pleased to receive one in return.

The famous Theophilus Hopkins (he had made such a fool of himself with his letters to The Times attacking Mr Darwin) was, if it were possible, even worse than the son. He struck her as a somnambulist. His eyes had looked at her without giving any indication of knowing what they looked at. He carried his tin box as if it were the ashes of someone particularly dear to him. When he sat down he placed the tin box on his lap and rested his tea-cup on it. And yet it was not a lack of manners that Melody found disturbing. Indeed he could rest his cup and saucer on his box and make it appear almost respectable. It was the knowledge that he was batty. He was a handsome man in his way, and quite properly dressed. His hands, it is true, were large and horny, a tradesman's hands more than a gentleman's. But none of this mattered. What mattered was that he was likely to take it into his head that the ship was Babylon. It was this that Ian feared. She watched the old man warily, unsure what he was capable of. She had already endured two prayers, one at the foot of the gangway, and another as the colossal embarrassment of the crane got under way. Ian thought he might begin to lay about him with a whip, as Jesus had driven the money-changers from the temple. She wondered what was really in the tin box and had, indeed, offered to mind it for him. The offer had been courteously declined. She thought he was staring at the crimson portières. Ian claimed these would be the first to go. Their party, however, was by no means the only one gathering in the promenade. There was a preponderance of males and if some of

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

them appeared/ beneath their new suits, to be colonials of the rougher tvpe, then so much the better. The ranter would be stopped quickly. He picked up his tin box. She steeled herself. The son took his arms. They walked a little way and stopped. The father's eyes were dark and casting all around. • • * ••«,-..

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

The author of Cora/fines of the Devon Coast had an eye well trained to the nicest degree And although we would recognize this to be the result of synapses made by his own passions, millions of connections made like the kno: s in the butterfly net he had left hanging on his study wall in Hennaconbe, each knot occasioned by need and strengthened by use, Theophflis Hopkins, FRS, a proud man, was forever at war with any interpretation which gave him any credit at all. When he called his talent a "gift/ he meant the word not as a simile for talent but an explanation of it. That the gift was considerable is attested to by those drawing of sea ceatures, which were his life's work.

In the context cf the Leviathan, this gift is worth insisting on, for we are discussing ore of the great literal describers of his age, a man who could observe a mtterfly, say, for ten seconds and accurately recall the form and cobration of body and wing parts.

This man saw lothing of the Leviathan. Afterwards he had almost no impression, exept a (needless) concern that the huge paddle wheels on its side were ts only means of locomotion. So if his eyes were, as Melody Clutterbick thought, "all about," then what they were looking at was not tcbe found in the second-class promenade or saloon, not in the library the games room, the dining room, or anywhere else he walked (one step at a time, no individual step in excess of twelve

Oscar and Lucinda

inches) as he tried to hide his arthritic pain from the beloved son the Lord had taken from him. Oscar had left home in 1859. It was now 1865 and they had only met four times in the intervening years. These meetings had been more painful than either could bear, and not because the son had become a "sporting seat"-the father knew nothing of his source of income, imagining him supported by some Anglican mechanism-their disagreement had its roots in the most basic matters of theology. Yet every morning and every evening Theophilus had prayed for his son's soul, that he might yet sit beside God on.the Last Day, that they, mother, father, babes and Oscar, would all be reunited and stand in Glory amongst the Saints. These were not prayers said by rote, but new ones, every time, and anyone who happened to be walking up the long red path to Morley might be privy to the extraordinarily detailed information they contained. The most intimate details of Theophilus's sadness were discussed by everyone in Hennacombe, and yet there was no one with whom he could talk about it himself. The Strattons were kind to him. They were poor, far poorer than he was. They brought him broth and pudding with raisins in it. But he could not discuss the matter with them. They would not stand beside God in the Happy Day.

A second cousin of Mrs Stratton's held a post with the Church Missionary Society of London. That was how the Strattons knew that Oscar was to sail to New South Wales. It was they who brought Theophilus the news his anxious son had not yet summoned up the courage to deliver. Theophilus was miffed. It was worse than miffed. It was jealous. He bit the inside of his cheek and gnawed on his bottom lip until he broke the skin. He could not bear that they should invite him to accompany them on the train to farewell the boy.

God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over to the hands of the wicked. Yet he must bear it. The Strattons were in error, but they were also kind. He must not be full of pride. He prayed to God to prevent him falling to "that sin which most often besets me." He shared a second-class carriage with them to Southampton. He shared their too-sweet-toomilky tea and felt himself deceitful. He fully intended to save his son, not from Australia but from the Anglican heresy. To this end he worked at his Bible. He wrapped himself in his greatcoat-the carriage was unheated-and while the train rattled over the long low bridge at Teignmouth, he ignored the pleasures of the view, the bare-legged women collecting out on the mud flats, the

176

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

lovely lustrous sheen upon the wet earth, the misty blue-white sky. He knew all of the Bible by heart and if you wished to quote a verse to him he could continue from there, reciting until you bade him stop. But on this day, as the train rolled through Exmouth and Lyme Regis, he tore little strips of paper and made diminutive notes upon them. He used these pieces of paper as markers in his Bible, all in readiness for the prayer he would say over his son. The Anglicans insisted on talking. There was nothing in their conversation but money. He knew their situation was difficult. He felt a certain sympathy. But he had never heard such gross materialism. Mrs Stratton, so she told him, was engaged by a certain publisher to write a novel. Theophilus nodded politely. Inside he boiled. He did not doubt that Satan spoke through novels. Mrs Stratton wished to discuss the financial arrangements she made with publishers. He did not wish to speak of anything that might assist her plan. Mr Stratton wished to know how Oscar had obtained the money for his voyage. He did not press at this directly but came at it, like a mouse around a skirting board, all stops and starts and quick grey scurries. Theophilus thought this impertinent. He excused himself and went back to his work, but this did not stop the Strattons and they talked away, pennies and shillings, to each other. It was like sharing a carriage with a pair of grocers.

Theophilus became so out of temper with the Strattons-although

he thought it unchristian to be so-that he was quite unprepared for

the reunion with his son. He was hit before he got his muscles ready. He stood on grey, sooty Southampton station and was nearly washed

away. He watched Mrs Stratton embrace his boy. Jealousy ripped him.

He trembled. He did not embrace. He shook hands formally, but felt

so light in the head he feared he would faint. He found a bench on

the pretext of tying a bootlace, but when he got there, he dared

! not put his head down lest the blood rush to it. He placed his tin i box beside him on the seat and his Bible on top of it. The Bible

: shed some markers. Mr Stratton picked them up for him. Theophilus

stuffed them in his greatcoat pocket as if they were nothing but dead leaves.

He had felt faint ever since. He was like a man who arrives at Osaka when he had been expecting Edinburgh. Everything was odd, distant, trembling. His son was beautiful to him. His heart sang the Song of Solomon. He had his mother's fine, heart-shaped face, the face he had cupped in his hands at the wonderful moment when his seed spurted. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night between

Oscar and Luanda

my breasts. He had his mother's gorgeous hair and milk skin, his mother's animations and enthusiasm, her wide eyes and, most of all, her hope. This was not a dark face that would fall prey to pride of jealousy. It was a better face, a better face by far. He offered the gift. It was all he had.

The box, as you know, was a tin box containing implements for soldering, a technique Theophilus set great store by, but one never properly mastered by his son. He had made not just the box, but the wooden handles for the soldering irons themselves. He had given up his two best bottles (ones with ground-glass stoppers) for the acid and flux. He had made a smaller box to hold the resin. On the lid of the box he had riveted a little copper plaque on which he had etched:

"O.J.P. Hopkins, a gift from his father."

But even when the son had accepted the box and thanked him for it, Theophilus could not contemplate him without agitation. He wished to kneel with him and pray. It was not shyness prevented him from doing it on Southampton railway station. (He was never ashamed publicly to bear witness.) It was the fear of being overcome with emotion. This was his flaw, the crack in his clay, and the more dreadful for being so unexpected: that one who preached so fearlessly in front of even the most hostile audience could also break down and lose control in public. He had disgraced himself at the boy's mother's funeral. He had tried to say a prayer for her. They had led him away. He had not been able to say the words. His voice had become a stranger in his throat. When he heard the name Leviathan they were in a hansom, travelling across the slippery streets towards the docks. He did not think of a ship. He knew it was a ship. He had heard the Strattons lecture him with great authority on this subject. But when he heard the word Leviathan in Southampton, he thought of the giant whom God made to impress Job with his ignorance and powerlessness.

I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportions. Who can discover the face of his garment? Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up close together as with a close seal. Out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of hre leap out. The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are hrm in themselves; they cannot be moved.

This was the Leviathan Theophilus saw. He stood on the wharf and stared at it.

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

He saw his son tremble before the face of Leviathan. ;

Rain stood on the edges of his hair as on a holworth blossom.

"Surely, Oscar, surely," Theophilus said, "surely you can walk." But suddenly there was a stretcher, a blindfold, a cage. He wished to say his prayer but when he began no one noticed him. The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire. The pain prevented proper concentration, but the name Leviathan stayed with him and gave him a curious and unexpected comfort, reminding him that he should not question the will of God, that he was ignorant in His sight, that his son might not be damned after all. Theophilus Hopkins did not see the ship as the work of Satan. And what he did not like-satin, silk, plush-he did not look at. If the interior reminded him of anything, it was an Anglican cathedral, but he chose not to retain a single detail of it. He wished only to remember the face of his son.

He wished to go up on deck. He had a hunger for plain air. The sea was clean and uncorrupted. Oscar could not go up on deck. They therefore stayed below, walking up and down, arm in arm, as Theophilus had seen men do in Italy.

Oscar praised the natural lighting and thorough ventilation. He had a firm grasp of the principles. They went into Oscar's cabin where there was a sheet of celluloid, the new substance Theophilus had read about but never seen. The celluloid was marked with squares and was affixed to the porthole. He could get no proper explanation of its function, but did not persist. He thought they might say a prayer. He was wondering if the prayer he had devised on the train was the correct prayer after all. (It had been devised in jealousy and pride.)

Oscar showed how the bed folded up at day, and down at night. When the bed was down, Theophilus sat on it and was momentarily more comfortable in his joints. Oscar sat opposite him in a low chair with a carved back, but he could not be still and jigged his knee and played with his hands.

It was then that Theophilus gave Oscar the second present. It was tiny, wrapped in white tissue and wrapped with a black ribbon. It looked ominous, and the black (some leftover mourning ribbon from Theophilus's cabinet drawer) was perhaps in honour of the woman from whose womb the present had kept it, because it was said-superstitiously, of course-that such

Oscar and Lucinda

a thing would protect the child from drowning.

"Here," he said, holding it out with a hand that shook visibly. "It is your caul." And when Oscar did not understand: "From off your little head."

He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and unleashed the fragrance of Mrs Williams's ironing board. He blew his nose, not looking at his son. He was remembering a child and wife in a Devon lanemyrtles, perfumed hedges, luscious red mud, which caked so thickly on their boots that their feet became heavy and padded as creatures in a dream.

Oscar put the caul in the soldering box. It did not fit easily, but he crammed it in, jamming it around the bottle of acid, squashing it against the little box of resin, crushing the paper, kinking the mourning ribbon. He did not wish to harm it. He was much moved by the present. He clasped the lid shut and made a fuss of arranging the box on a long shelf behind his head. When he at last turned to face his father, his own expression was wary, hooded.

He was frightened of Theophilus's emotions. He could not name them. He could not guess their shapes and colours, and although he would spend the rest of his life wondering what these emotions were, now, when it appeared likely that they might be laid before him, as bare as knives and forks on a white tablecloth, he shrank from them.

He remembered his father's skin, that part of it where the black beard grew thin across the cheek, from there into the rippled mud-flat bay beneath the eyes. The skin looked like something that had been wrapped up too long. And there was a smell, a disturbing and familiar smell, which he recognized like the smell of a family home when it has not been lived in for a season. This combination of familiarity and distance was most disturbing. Also there were noises. They had been sounding for some time: electric megaphones. It would soon be time to go. Oscar felt the water stretching out endlessly behind his neck. The lines on the celluloid sliced through it, cut it into neat squares, which bled and joined again, were sliced, rejoined, sliced, rejoined. Oscar did something jolly and scuttled out on to the promenade.

The air smelt of new paint and electricity. There was also something vaporous, like brandy, and leather, like a St James's shoemaker in the week before Ascot. Through all this there threaded, subtle but insistent, the smell of the sea. Oscar imagined he detected movement in Leviathan. He stood outside his cabin door.

18/1