Oscar and Lucinda

"We were most improper."

"Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper."!*

"And we were noted," said Lucinda who, although she was smiling, was feeling her neck and shoulders set upon by a swarm of hot

prickles. "They could not help themselves," said Dennis Hasset, grinning broadly. "Then it is I who am responsible for your exile."

Oscar and Lucinda

"Oh, no." >v

"Oh, yes, and you have tried to hide it from me. I was such a child. I never thought the harm I did you." s KK;-,

"Hush."

"I never thought."

"Hush. Do you hear me? You're wrong. You are quite wrong. Now, please. It is wholly theological, I promise you." This was not exactly true. His situation had not been helped by the association.

"Do you give your word?"

"I do," he said. She did not catch the small grimace he made at the sound of his own falsehood.

"Then do not go," she said. "If that is truly the case, then you do not have to go."

"I do not follow your logic."

"There is no more logic in my argument than there is truth in yours," she said softly. He did not know whether to smile or frown at her. He remembered the afternoons he had found her, unannounced, asleep in his armchair. "How sad life is/" he said. Lucinda stood and went to the window. She was surprised to fine the view the same. She turned up the collar of her rabbit fur. She pulled on her gloves, as if she intended to leave, and then took them off again and arranged them on a crate, laying out the fingers, flattening the thumb. "You do not have to go. You have a choice."

Dennis Hasset stretched himself and no one, seeing the languid confidence of this action, would guess that he had felt himself charged with weakness and found guilty. "I need a living," he said.

"Only a bishop can provide one. There is no choice."

"Oh, you must not."

"Must not what?" he said crossly. "What must not?"

"Must not nothing," she sighed. She sat on the crate. She could feel the splintery roughness of the wood catch on the fur. She thought of her father's whiskers on her child's face. He raised his hands (tense, hard, splay-fingered) and then let them fall (soft as rag toys). The rag hand rubbed the whiskered face. "Oh, Miss Leplastrier," he smiled, "we owe each other more charity than this."

Lucinda picked up her glove and examined it closely. "Dear Mr Hasset," she said, "I am fond of you." She frowned as if the stitching were unsatisfactory. She had a red patch the size of a florin on each cheek. "I am so very, very sorry to be the one responsible for your removal 234

Home

from my company. And I admit-even now I am thinking only of myself and how lonely it will be, and what pleasure I have had buying the works with you, and I always hoped we could plan more together. I have purchased the cylinder process from Chance and Sons." From the corridor, too close, a woman's voice: "Arthur, do not do that\" Lucinda leaned forward, frowning, speaking more quietly. "It is delivered, already, and tomorrow I will engage engineers to install it. The furnaces will be alight within the week. And it seems to me, though I have no profound knowledge of the Thirty-nine Articles, or how many miracles it is you dispute, I do not see why you must go."

There were brisk footsteps in the passage. It seemed they would have a visitor, but no. The footsteps stopped, and then went back the way they had come.

"It is like being locked inside the Tower." Dennis Hasset smiled. "I must go where I am sent."

"By God?" ::•«•

"Of course."? yv-"Or a man, a bishop?" '•'>•" •;x/l •; \

He passed his hands over his eyes. s — ,<:»*,

She said: "You do not agree with this Bishop?"»•*-«-•

"Oh, please, Miss Leplastrier, please, do leave it alone." "I shall not."

"Then," he looked up, his face red, his eyes flashing, "you are impertinent." She stood. She felt humiliated, as if her face had been slapped, her backside paddled with a leather slipper. She began fiddling with her gloves again. "So it is impertinent to feel anger when your friends are mistreated and abused. It is impertinence to think injustice should not be accepted with a bowed head. You do not accept the Virgin birth, Mr Hasset. I do not accept the wisdom of turning the other cheek." He could not be angry for long. It was his handicap, a corollary of his genera] lack of passion. His tempers were like sparks from flint, but not tinder to catch on. When he spoke he was ironic, self-mocking and the seemingly simple words he spoke were cross-referenced to other self-critical thoughts that he imagined she would see but which were, of course, clear to one but himself. "Your opinions/' he said, "are strongly put." Lucinda's gloves would not come right. Here was a thumb inside out. She had to blow to make it come out right. "Yes, and I am generally most unsuitable. I am loud and opinionated. I am silent and

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Oscar and Lucinda

stupid. I am an embarrassment in proper society. My mother's friends, those who wrote most passionately and invited me to come Home, discovered, when they had me in their parlours, that their passion had been mistaken. They thanked the Lord-the ones not playing atheist that they had not lost a daughter to the Colonies. They would agree with you. I should not speak so bluntly to you. I should not address you like this, even if I do hurt on your behalf, on both of your behalf s. What will happen to you, Mr Hasset? You are too fine to be in a place where there can be nothing but mud and taverns. There is no church?"

"There is no church building."

"Stay." She had her gloves on, as if ready to depart. He did not rise. She sat. "We can have the works together."

So, she thought, I beg.

She saw him consider it. She saw a little life come into his eyes. (Say yes, say yes.) He straightened his back. He crossed his legs.

"I know nothing of business."

"We neither of us do."

He looked at her: her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, her lips parted, leaning forward and clasping her small, gloved hands together. He smiled, and shook his head. "You put the negative as a powerful argument for the positive."

She knew she could keep him. In one minute, two minutes, everything would be resolved. "It does not matter what we know. You said to me, when I was Mr Leplastrier, just walked into your study (this study here), you said I had a passion for things."

"And so do you." •;. — "You said it is a passion that matters."

"I think so still."

"Then it does not matter that we are ignorant of business. Our ignorance is temporary. Oh, Mr Hasset, dear Mr Hasset, we will make good things, things of worth, things we are proud to make. We will not be like these tallow-boilers and subdividers. We could be the most splendid Manufacturers of Glass."

"And neither of us lonely."

She looked at him with her mouth quite open, not knowing that her lower lip was almost indecently plump. She could not hold his eyes. They were soft and grey but she could not look at them. She shut her mouth. She felt herself go red around her neck and shoulders. She began to take her gloves off again. It was very quiet. A bullock team was pulling up the hill outside, but the driver made no noise. There

7Vi

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was just the squeaky wheel of the dray and, twice, the flick of the whip, which cut through the air like a bird-cry in the forest of their talk which had become, with this single comment, all stumps and hedgerows and not a tree to hide behind.

"I must go," he said, when the silence had become unendurable.

"So you may preach what you do not believe to men who do not care what anyone believes."

"That is not kind."

"But accurate."

"No, not accurate either. I will preach what I believe."

"That there is no Virgin birth."

"That Christ died for our sins that we might be redeemed through His blood, that we might sit at the side of God in heaven."

She was surprised by the passion in his voice. She was too used to hearing him say he had none, and too ready to accept it without cornplication. They had discussed church politics, but never once religion. They had talked on her subjects: glass, factories, the benefits of industry. He had catered to her needs and enthusiasms and she had been conceited and self-centred, and yet today, at this moment, she would rather not be an industrialist at all, would rather, if she could be persuaded it was Christian, have a little farm somewhere

up-country.

"So," she said, nodding her head, mentally listing her discoveries, "so there is a part of you that wishes to be sent away?"

"Quite a large part," he admitted.

"And all this," she gestured at the shattered room, the crates, the papers spilled across the floor,

"in a sense it pleases you."

He nodded, suddenly self-conscious. He rubbed his hands together, looked down, then out of the window. He was hiding his pleasure from her. She told him so. He admitted it. And these words, the accusation and the admission, were uttered, on each side, so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that they were like the slash of a razor which, being so sharp, causes no pain when it first cuts. But when Lucinda saw that the great weight she had placed on their friendship was far greater than the one he did, she felt more than simply foolish.

"Will you take all your books?"

"They say there is a problem, generally, with mould."

"So you will leave them here?"

"Oh, no, I will take them."

Looking at his handsome, smiling, apologetic face, she hated him.

Oscar and Lucinda

It was a spasm, coming and going in a moment. "Oh, don't you care?" she exclaimed. "Must you wait for mould to happen to you?"

And Dennis Hasset watched her, alarmed, unhappy, nervous of what might happen next. It occurred to him that he might propose to her and she would accept him. This was an odd idea, perfectly new-she had been a child when she went away, and he had been her protector-and the novelty was not unattractive. He glimpsed a passionate life, freedom from the tyrannies of bishops, something quite original. He had always imagined marriage to a tall and handsome woman. He did not think Lucinda handsome. It was no impediment.

The impediments were elsewhere. The first concerned the salvation of his soul and, peculiar though it might seem, he agreed with Bishop Dancer about the benefits of Boat Harbour. He did not feel his faith sufficiently. It was too much the creature of his intellect and he yearned for something simpler, rougher, more true to Christ.

The other impediment was no more than a rock under a wheel. (He hardly knew it was there, but it was enough to stop the wheel turning.) Dennis Hasset was a snob when it came to commerce. And as much as he would love to be free of the tyranny of bishops, he could not bear to walk down the street and be thought a merchant or a manufacturer. He thought glass a substance of great beauty, but the very originality of the life that Lucinda Leplastrier suggested to him, the very thing that made it so attractive, was what made it absolutely unacceptable. He did not dwell on any of this. The ideas and feelings were too much a part of him. He gave Lucinda no clue as to why he should now, ever so subtly, withdraw himself from her. She had one glove on, one glove off. She was barely aware of herself, turning over books in an open crate. She did not understand the reason for her rejection and humiliation. At the time she most wished to flee, she willed herself to stay. She forced herself to enquire about his journey and even made an appointment to drink tea with him before he sailed. But when she at last left the Woollahra vicarage, it was with the bleak understanding that there was no one in Sydney left to see.

She had to send a boy to call her coachman from a nearby tavern. He was not steady on his feet. She did not care. She could not remove the picture of Dennis Hasset's sad and smiling face from her mind's eye. It was to stay there a long while yet, no matter what instruments she used to scratch at it.

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Longnose Point

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely. When Lucinda came down the Parramatta River in Sol Myer's boat, she imagined her life would be a lonely one, and she felt strength through recognizing it. And yet what she imagined was not loneliness, which is boggy and sour, but something else which is bright and hard. The difference between what she imagined and what she finally experienced is the difference between a blade of a knife — an object of chilly beauty-and the chronic pain of an open

wound.

She imagined she had been lonely in Sydney and London, alone in her icing-sugar cabin aboard the Leviathan but until Dennis Hasset sailed for Boat Harbour, she had kept ahead of it. She had been a dancer racing a burning fuse. She had been busy, had plans, been on the way to London, on the way back. Her life had been a series of expectations, and even in her first years in Sydney, when she had spent many nights alone with nothing but the cornpany of her cats, she had always the prospect of company if she wanted it. She had thought herself lonely, but she had enjoyed her solitude.

She had moved out to the edge of Balmain and rented the fallingdown cottage on Whitfield's Farm, down along that rocky promontory which ends in Longnose Point. It was two storeys, stone, with a big old kitchen overlooking the Parramatta River. Joubert and Borrodaile (yes, the same) had not yet begun to subdivide this land. It was a bankrupt estate, with just a caretaker at the farm and the orchard heavy with the sweet, drunk smell of rotting windfalls. The grass grew waist high in summer and the road to her door was a silvery green-the grass rolled flat beneath the jinker she drove herself. She repaired the leaking stable. She planted some snapdragons and pansies. She had her crates of books

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delivered and carried up the loud, uncarpeted stairs. It was a romantic place to be, and it did not cease to be so the instant the vicar disappeared from Sydney Heads on the Susanna Cuthbert. She had plans. She had equipment to install. She met with Mr d'Abbs, but rarely socially. Rushcutters Bay now seemed too far away and she imagined the urge to gamble had quite left her. Her work was so demanding she would be asleep an hour after she had eaten. She woke early. She was alone, but not yet lonely. Her head was burning with dreams of glass, shapes she saw in the very edges of her vision, structures whose function she had not even begun to guess. She would build a little pyramid of glass. ' '

A tower. \

An arcade to cover all of George Street.:x*'

She did not think of farms or marriage.

She ate her porridge left-handed with a pen in her right. There was a peak of anger in her passion, a little of the Ill-show-you-Mr-Hassetwhat-it-is-you-could-have-had. She could not draw. She put her visions on paper and made them seem gross and malformed. She found a Frenchman, a Monsieur Huille, an artist, a friend of Mr d'Abbs. The lessons were not a success. Monsieur Huille, while very free with his own criticisms, would not put pencil to paper himself until, finally, as a result of his pupil's blunt insistence, he executed the most dismal oak tree. Pigs (or possibly dogs) grazed beneath its wispy limbs. The drawing was so very bad that Monsieur Huille, pretending to be posthumously affronted by her insistence on this "proof," resigned. He took the evidence of his incompetence with him. He said it was worth twenty pounds, but later she found it, leached by rain, blown in amongst the hay in the stable. At Easter she attended service in Balmain by herself, although that evening she rode across to Rushcutters Bay. Mrs Burrows was there, so there was no cards. She found the conversation dismal. She was separate, but not lonely.

After Easter she advertised for a woman to learn the art of glass blowing. She had imagined she might thereby create a partner for herself. She found a woman who played the trumpet at Her Majesty's. The woman was strong. Her lungs were good and she had large and powerful hands, but the men would not work with her. The furnaces went cold again, and Arthur Phelps, having come back to work for her, went back to the timber mill.

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Longnose Point

She wrote angry letters to Boat Harbour. But even these letters, once one is above the undergrowth of irritation, are celebratory. She described, with obvious pleasure, the scene in her own crate-filled study on the Easter holiday of 1866. And if she could not draw, she could execute a still life with words. She showed the exiled Dennis Hasset the deep burnt shadows, the splash of eggshell-white from the open heart of a book, the drape of a Delft-blue scarf on a chair, the sleeping marmalade cat, the long slice of sunshine cutting through the curtained windows on the northern wall and stretching itself, thin and silver, across the cedar floor. She made him, intentionally, homesick for Sydney, although he had never before thought of it as "home." He felt the warmth and the clean cut of the air. He imagined a gentle nor'easterly blowing, a sweet moist wind which brings rain, but later,

slowly.

I In a letter dated 22nd of August she reflected that an intelligent reader I need never be alone when she could spend her evenings in Barchester I or with Mr Nickleby, for instance.

• August is the first month of the westerly-rude, bullying winds that I cut across from Drummoyne or scream down the river from Bedlam

I Point and Hen and Chicken Bay. By August the upstairs rooms in Lu-cinda's cottage had become cold and dark. There were no slices of silver sunshine on the cedar floor. The cat had retreated downstairs where it had inflicted one more wound on the already scratched

pine door, miaowing bad-temperedly until its mistress had let it in by the hre.

So what might we expect to find downstairs? The young manufacturer with drafting board and ruler? Or, with the day's work over, deep in the spell of Mr Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. Both Waverley and Bleak House lie on the floor beside her chair. But she cannot read them. Every word leads her, by one course or another, to Dennis Hasset, to her own situation, her lack of industrial education, practical skills, to the publicly pitied condition of spinsterhood and isolation.

Lucinda is asleep, her head collapsed on her shoulder, her book lying where it has fallen on the Turkish rug. The lower lip which looked so shockingly sensuous to Dennis Hasset not two months before, now, in sleep, seems sulky and disconsolate. Her cheeks seem quite flat. The eyes quiver behind the heavy blue-veined curtains of her lids. Her jaw is heavy, lifeless. The wind rattles the windows in their sashes. The fire hisses. There is no gas light but a smoky paraffin one whose blackened mantle needs

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attention. The cat, alert, stares at the rattling window.

This is not the sleep of exhaustion. It is produced by two glasses of brandy, by the lack of oxygen in the room, but most of all by the viscous, sour, treacly chemicals of loneliness. You may suggest that she should have a maid. But she has a maid. All right, then-a maid to live with her. She has had. But she no longer wants a maid to live with her. Maids are young and alive. They have young men. They sit in the kitchen giggling. They only serve to make her feel more lonely.

Well, then-she should go out. To where? To Mr d'Abbs, of course, where she had so many pleasant times before. But it was not just the mediocrity of Mr d'Abbs's ménage she found depressing, not that peculiar Sydney combination of ignorance and bull-like confidence, it was Mr d'Abbs's determination that she not live a lonely life. There was always now some

"philosopher" or "poet" (feeling old and finally in need of marriage) placed at her lefthand side. Then she should have accepted other invitations. And, indeed, she would have liked to drink tea and talk about the most ordinary things. She would be interested in dancing the quadrille and discussing the adventures of babes in arms. Were not these things of interest in novels? Then why would they not be of interest in life?

But Lucinda had alienated all the people she might now wish to cultivate. It was not merely that her stride was wrong or her hair inadequately coiffured, her fashions, generally, inconsiderate of other feelings. She had held herself aloof. She had indicated she felt no sympathy for that loose congregation which one might call "her class." Even her house, the house she chose herself, placed her apart from people. Her display of arrogance would not be forgiven. Society would not invite her in a second time.

Fortunately, she did not yet realize that she was not welcome in her own works. She imagined this dry, brick-floored factory to be her home. It was her only connection with life. She liked the smell of working men, and I do not mean that in any vulgar sense, but rather that she valued the smell of common humanity. The smells suggested labour, warmth, usefulness. In winter her own house was cold. It smelt of floor polish. She could no longer bear to be there.

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The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

She had been happy once, properly happy, deeply happy. Now, as she hung her lantern on the nail in the stables and fussed with her stubborn gelding, she could not believe what she had become.

It was nine o'clock at night. And she was going for a trot.

She did not think where this trot would end. She did not even think very much about the place in which it began. It was frightening out here on Longnose Point.

There were so many things she could not think of. Her mind was dashing along corridors while she kept just ahead of it, slamming

doors.

She was going for a trot. She tightened the harness. She walked the horse along the mud-heavy track past Birchgrove House. The caretaker was singing. He was alone and singing, drunk, too. Last week he had burned down the cow bails in the night. Lucinda kept two pistols wrapped in a blanket underneath

her seat.

Rain came in long rips and ripples. She sought out the time when she had been happy. She shut out the drunken singing. She withdrew from the westerly wind. She was in Parramatta with her father. They were going home. Their big four-wheeler crossed the cobblestones and set off, their old Waler biting at his familiar enemy, the Percheron, beside him. They got up a nice trot, a linle too fast, through the High Street (look out there!) past the doctor's phaeton, the farmers'

buckboards, the swarms of drays and sulkies. There were big-skirted women, frock-coated shopkeepers, fanners with bow-yangs tied to their trousers so their thick legs looked like sausages with their ends tied off with string. When the Waler tried to bite the Percheron, her father hit it with a long stick. She laughed to see the little jump it gave, and did not know a horse could kill you.,-,,

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They carried scents behind them. She could still list them, the smell of bran, of pollard, oats, the soft, dusty, yellow smell of seed wheat. The smells joined to other smells, a necklace of smells, with some in Parramatta, others along the way home where, for instance, you might find the air suddenly rich with honey, and beside the road the privet hedges not yet called a noxious weed and shaking their luxuriant white blossoms at you, or appearing to, for it was not the privet itself but rather-see, Lucy, lookee see, quick-a splendid parrot, no, three, four parrots-brilliant red, blue, such jewellery shaking the white clouds of honeyed privet.

Past Grass Corner they thundered over a wooden bridge and through a little cutting. Once her father stopped there. He gave her the reins to hold and jumped down. He was short and; wide, strong in his arms and shoulders. He did exercises to; strengthen his legs but they always stayed the same. He smelled of apples and sometimes-on the trip to Parramatta-of eau-de-; Cologne. He carried paper bags with him at all times. Any bag that came his way was carefully folded and he would not hesi- ] tate to beg or borrow from anyone who possessed a bag but did not seem to value it. Lucinda was never embarrassed by this. She; never knew that stage of life where everything her parents didthe way they spoke or combed their hair-was an embarrassment. She was not critical of paper-bag collecting. She knew the bags were there to hold her papa's soil samples and that he might at any moment (like this one now, as he jumps down from the buckboard and unfolds the handle of his neat little spade) might use the bag that had hitherto held jelly crystals to contain a scoop of astringent sand, or a pungent, black, heavy soil, heavy with humus, or a clay so perfumed it seemed, to her senses, anyway, to be as luxuriant as privet. The clay in this cutting was a wonder. You might pass through it like a lesser person, a neighbour called Houlihan, Molloy or Rourke, a person who thought no more about this clay than he thought about Livy or Montaigne, but once you stopped you could contemplate a crimson bright enough for all the robes of paradise, a nankeen yellow that might-her papa jokedbe mustard off your plate. This joke led to her eating the soil when they were off again (labouring up Dyer's Hill from which broad plateau they would descend into their own little valley) expecting she would taste, at last, that hot forbidden substance; she found it only gritty mud which her laughing

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

father wiped off her solemn face with a handkerchief.

It was this very clay her father used to make the kitchen pots. Her mother made fun of these pots and it is true that they were lumpy and there was always trouble with getting a good seal with the lid, so much so that precious paper bags were used to fill the gaps, like the papier-mâche which served to plug the gaps between the slabs of their hut, and in neither case did the paper succeed as a seal against ants (red and small black) who came to contaminate the food with the scent of formic acid.

Her mother put down a plank of timber and showed her how to roll the clay to make a snake, and with the snake to make a pot. She remembered the way it began, always, so pleasantly, her fingers dry, the clay malleable, but somewhere, she did not know why, it would go wrong. Her mother, beside her, could make the clay obey her, and even if she made a mistake, she could nip it in, smooth it over, while the clay in Lucinda's hands was soon wet with slip and worked and reworked until, slimy, slippery, without form, it would break in her hands. And it did not matter that Mama had words for it (she always had words for things) and showed her how the coil could contain itself no more, had changed its structure from one state to another, from butterfly back to grub; nor did it matter that she understood perfectly how this was. It did not help. It could not stop the feeling-her hands first slippery, then desperate dry, the skin puckered, all life gone-the awful feeling of despair when a lovely pot she had begun to make was nothing but a twisted mess, like something you might stand in by mistake. The melted-mustard roads of her memory led her, tonight, to this spot. It was not the escape she had intended. It brought her full circle, from despair to despair. She was up on the ridge that they had named after Governor Darling. There were houses now, — all pushed close together for comfort. Through soft yellow windows she imagined she heard women's voices, women with round stomachs stirring pots, wiping children's faces. It was nine o'clock at night and squally and wet, but inside the houses she imagined children, zinc baths, steam, red, cooked little bodies. The manufacture of glass once more felt pointless. It collapsed inwards, like overworked clay. She would have liked, she thought, to sit at a table and polish cutlery. She would not recoil from the sweet milk-sick smell of children. And yet she did not stop. Of course she did not stop. She knew no

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one in these cottages. She drew her big oilskin coat around her and pulled her sou'wester down to the edges of her eyebrows.

There was a fire over at The Rocks. She made a Christian symbol of it, and then drove the symbol from her mind by thinking of why there might be, in real life, a fire at The Rocks. There were plague rats. They piled them up and burnt them in the streets.

She came down the rutted track of the ridge. She was frightened again, to be out by herself. These fears came and went, like the cold pockets of air by creeks. She did not believe in ghosts, but now she was easily frightened and jumped three inches in her hard seat when someone in a long coat rushed across her path. She wished she were back home, and then she reminded herself what it was like to be home. She used her whip unsentimentally, drawing a deft flick along the gelding's flank. The flick produced a skip of rhythm, a toss of the head, and they set off at a brisker pace, following the slippery clay-white lines of the track round the shores of White Bay. There were racing fools with no lanterns. A drunk wagoner with half his load tumbling off behind him. How cowardly Mr Hasset had been! To abandon her, here, when he did not even wish to go away.

She was angry, with Dennis Hasset, with the hallooing gallopers who rushed out of the dark, with the rutted track and the mud-churned soak where the drunker wagoner dropped a plank which almost jammed between her wheels.

Anger made her reckless. She drove fast. She was going for a trot. She went all the way into George Street although she did not like it at this time of night. She dared herself. She did not care. She brought her jinker up past the theatres. Her Majesty's. The Rappallo. Lyceum. The weather had not kept the crowds at home. The street was a river of wheels and horses, the banks awash with the flotsam and jetsam of men's hats.

There were gangs of larrikins afoot, up from The Rock with their hands boasting against their braces. She was afraid. Inside her big coat, she was small and white, soft-breasted, weak-armed, all soaked with sweat in the wind-cold night. A man spoke to her from a carriage. She put the tired gelding into a canter. There were shouts of, "Gee-up, Nelly." Laughter. She came in under the shadows of St Andrew's. The loathed St Andrew's. It stood grim and dark, the castle of Bishop Dancer. A crowd by the nave door announced not late service but a

?4A

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

fight. Two policemen ran towards it, momentarily brilliant and lividfaced in the gaslight. She swung into Bathurst Street at the last moment, nearly colliding with one more unlit sulky. The sulky gave up a wail of silk-and-feathered screams. Lucinda felt contempt. It curdled in her jealousy. She struck her horse and followed the line of wide verandas as if she were going to see her dear friend at Woollahra. But there was nothing at Woollahra. There was a too-pretty child with a hoop who said the house was hers.

"I am going mad," she said. She said it out loud. "I am unlaced and not connected." It was a frightful city in which to contemplate madness, all hard with eucalyptus, snapping sticks, sandstone rocks with fractured faces and cutting edges. You could not, not in Sydney, dear God, allow yourself to fall nto such a weakened state. "A mad woman," she whispered. "Trrrot up." She was going for a trot. The horse knew this. He knew the destination. "Not a mad woman," she said, as they went down into the smoky dark of The Rocks. You could not see the fire so close. It was on the other side. The drains reeked. They reeked everywhere, but it was worse here towards the quay. Her nerves were on edge. "Dear God, forgive me." She intended nothing more than a little Pak-Ah-Pu. This was a lottery run by the Chinese down at that end of George Street. It was dark down there, and dangerous. The front of the establishment had a candle burning-no gas-inside a glass lantern. There were men standing around in twos and threes. She could smell putrid meat but also liquor. These two smells were carried on the salty air of the harbour. The wind played on the rigging of the tall-masted ships. She tied the rein to the railing. Even before she betrayed her sex by the sound of her walk, the men around her were unnaturally silent. The big wet coat was an inadequate disguise. She affected a stiff-spined haut froid. she told herself this: "You're the boss." The front room pretended to be a shop. Everyone knew this was not the case, even the policemen on the beat (who wore gold rings and heavy watches). Lucinda did not look at whatever dusty goods were displayed, but walked-she heard her boots echo on the wooden boards-towards the curtained doorway at the back. She could hear how small her feet were. She felt their unmaleness.

The truth is that she no longer wished merely for a Pak-Ah-Pu ticket. She was having a trot. There is nothing to Pak-Ah-Pu except a lottery. There is none of the sting (her term) you get in a good game. But she began, once she reached the table, as she had originally pretended.

Oscar and Lucinda

It was nearly half past nine, time for the last draw of the day, and there was therefore quite a crowd standing around the table. Several of them were drunk, but they did not sway. They had that rather sullen stillness which is the mark of a betting shop late in the day. The floor was littered with crumpled paper, cigarette ends, matches broken nervously in three. The men had a look at once scuffed and glazed. She felt-or imagined-an anger, barely contained, but the anger may well have been her own.

She gave the Chinaman at the table her sixpence. She was given her ticket and she marked, quickly, urgently even, ten of the Chinese characters on the paper. There were eighty all told. She did not know what they meant. They were printed on coarse grey paper. Twice she pushed the unpleasant little chewed pencil stub (property of the house) through the paper. She wrote her name (not her real name) on the paper and gave it to the Chinaman who put it into a bowl, which appeared to be black but was probably a dark Chinese blue. The light was bad. She could see the squashed stub of a fat cigar near her foot. She tried to look at nothing while she waited for half past nine.

It took three and a half minutes. All this time she stood immobile. The air around her was still. Occasionally a man said something in a low voice. This would be followed by laughter. Once she heard a word she knew referred to copulation. She was quite drenched inside her oilskin coat. All this fear she felt, this hostility and danger, was but the aura surrounding something else, a larger body of feeling which was dense, compacted, a centre of pure will-Lucinda was willing herself to win. Her anger became as inconsequential as blue-flies, then less, like summer thrip. Six correct marks would bring her ten shillings. Seven would deliver four pounds, eight shillings and eight pence. Eight good marks was twenty-three pounds, six shillings and eightpence. This was all written on the blackboard above the back wall. She was not silly enough to waste her will on ten. She decided on eight, imagining that this was within her limit. There was a smell of incense, another like wet dog, and that other smell-the bodies of men who work hard sweaty work and only bathe once a week. You can produce a similar smell by leaving damp cleaning rags in a bucket. Not an attractive smell, but Lucinda liked it. The cigar smoker had lit another cheroot and made the air slightly blue and streaky. Through all this there came the soft crying of a baby in another room. Many of the Chinese, she had been told, had European wives. It was said the Chinese men were kind to their women. These were fallen women, beyond the pale. It was said-248

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

the reverend friend had said so-that they were loved and found happiness. She tried to block out the sound. She shut a large and heavy door on it and pressed it-for it did not wish to go-firmly shut.

There was movement now. A shoulder, blind of feeling, pressed against her. The men pushed, like fish feeding, or piglets rushing the teat-all feeling concentrated in the mouth, the rest of the body quite numb. There were eighty characters. They would put twenty in a bowl. Of these twenty, they would select ten. They were doing it now. She was crushed all about. The Celestial, one eye half-shut against his own cigarette smoke, drew out ten yellowed ivory counters and placed them on a little wooden tray.

She had been told that these characters represented virtues. She had trouble recognizing them in this light. There was the one with the roof, the one with the two Fs standing huffily back to back, the one with eyes like a cat staring from the grass, the one like a river, Jesus Christ Almighty, dear Lord forgive her, she had eight correct.

She felt light, high as a kite. The Chinaman gave her money but did not approve of her. She could not imagine him being kind to his wife. She did not give a damn what he thought. She was going for a trot. She was going to hell.

Don't think that!

She clenched all her muscles to resist the idea. Then, almost at once, she did not care. The punters saw the small woman in the big oilskin coat walk towards the door. She walked briskly and bossily towards it-not the door to the street, but the door in the back wall. She was going for a trot.

The second room was where fan-tan was played. It was dark all round its edges, much darker than in the Pak-Ah-Pu room. But the light above the zinc-covered table was brighter and the zinc itself threw back a dull glow into the faces of the noisy players, making them look sickly, tinged with green. No one looked up when she entered. She stayed back for a moment in the cover of dark. She felt, suddenly, quite wonderful. She could not explain why this change should come, that she should move from blotchy-faced hell-fear to this odd electric ecstasy merely in the moving from one room to the next. She felt herself to be beyond salvation and did not care. She would not be loved, not be wife, not be mother.

She felt the perfect coldness known to climbers.

The croupier was thin, with gold in his mouth. She could smell the rancid oil from his pigtailed hair. All sorts of smells here. Sailor's oilskin, someone's newly polished shoes. The croupier made a small

Oscar and Lucinda

cry-probably English, although it sounded alien, mechanical, as if he were an extraordinary construction from the Paris exhibition. The dark enveloped her, warmed her like brandy. The croupier threw-such a svelte motion-the brass coins. They sounded, as they hit the zinc, both dull and sharp; light, of no substance, but also dead and heavy. It was lovely to watch, just as lovely as a good butcher cutting a carcass, the quick movements of knife, the softness and yielding of fat from around kidneys, the clean separation of flesh from bone. The croupier's tin cup covered some of the coins while his right hand swept the others away. She was a Christian. Her mind found the parallel-Judgement Day, saved coins, cast-out coins-without her seeking it. Sheep on the right. Goats on the left. She drew the curtains on the picture, turned her back, and concentrated all her attention on the heather as he lifted the cup and set the coins-see how sweetly this is done, the suppleness of long fingers (three of them ringed, one of them with emerald)-and slid the coins into sets of four.

There was much barracking now. Cries of yes, it is, no, it's not, groans, and then an odd cheer, squeaky as a schoolboy's which attracted comments, not all of them good-natured.

'It's two."

'Toe," said the Celestial. "Numma toe."

He had placed all the coins in sets of four. There were two remaining. Anyone who had placed their stake on the side of the zinc designated "2" had trebled their money. The Chinaman gave out the winnings. He slid out six coins across the zinc. Someone expressed a wish to pass water in an eccentric style. Another wind. There was laughter and crudity. Lucinda was not lonely. She pressed forward now, to make her bet, but also to reveal herself. They must know she was there. It was to prevent their embarrassment. She would rather she did not reveal herself, but she must not delay it. She did not look at the faces of the men as she pressed between them to reach the bright square of pitted zinc.

She said: "Excuse me."

It took longer to register than you might expect, partly because of the alcohol, which gave the air in the room its volatility, but also because of the intense focus created by the zinc square which, at the moment she chose, contained nothing of any significance except the numerals (1, 2, 3, 4) which red forms had become almost ghostly with the heavy traffic of coins across their painted surfaces.

At last they felt her otherness, her womanness. She felt the bodies move aside. Where there had been a hot press, she now

— JRfl

.-tf

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

experienced a distinct and definite cooling. * < o

But she was not lonely, and she was not frightened or shy. She looked at the Chinaman-he was lonely, she saw, and very youngbut she observed this in a way that did not involve her capacity for compassion or sympathy. What moved her were his ringed hands, the black metal cup, the brass coins, the red scratched numbers, and these things, being merely instruments, provided the anticipation of an intense, but none the less mechanical, pleasure.

She placed a florin against the four. This was soon joined by the more customary coppers. The

"4" won. She felt herself liked. She felt the hot pulse of their approbation. They went from cold to hot. It was done as quickly as the cutting of a cockerel's throat. She did not acknowledge it, but she welcomed it. She was not lonely. She looked at no one. She played with inspired recklessness. She felt she could control the game with no other tool than her will. 4, 3, 2, 4, 4, 4, 4, 1, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 1.

She won until she touched the quicksand of the final "1." Then she could not get the run of it again. She was out of step. There was a hidden beat she could not catch. The men stopped following her then. They no longer announced their bets as "the same as the missus'."But they did not withdraw from her either. And when, at three o'clock in the morning, she snapped her purse shut, she had no more money than the poorest of them. The purse was empty, freed from all weight, contained nothing but clean, watered silk. She felt as light and clean as rice paper. She allowed herself to notice her companions. She felt limp as a rag doll, and perfectly safe. She saw that the boot-polish smell belonged to a would-be gentleman in a suit with too-short sleeves, the rancid smell not to the Chinaman at all, but to an ageing man with fierce ginger flyaway eyebrows and a strong Scottish burr. There was an odd-looking chap dressed in the style of the Regency and two young sailors who could not have been more than sixteen. She also noted the engraving of Queen Victoria in the deep shadow of the wall and, immediately beneath it, a living face in three dimensions which was disconcertingly familiar, although she could not, immediately, place it.

She opened her purse again. She pretended to look for something in it. There was, as I said already, nothing in it. She opened her purse to cover her confusion. She knew the face well, almost intimately. She managed to conjure, from the hitherto empty purse, a ticket from a London omnibus. She looked up and found the fellow winking at her. She tore up the ticket and dropped it on the floor. She snapped her

Oscar and Lucinda

purse shut. She tucked her purse in her bag. She was already imagining withdrawing her hatpin from its felt scabbard, when she remembered where she had last seen that heart-shaped face and flaming angel's hair.

"Oh, dear/' she turned, smiling, holding out her hand, quite forgetting that these manners were unexpected in this part of George Street. "Why," said the mystery woman, abandoning her stern countenance as easily as a painter's drop sheet. "Why," she said, advancing on my suddenly terrified great-grandfather. "Why, Reverend Mr Crab."

She swore later that Oscar's mouth dropped open. She described it for him. He was like a ventriloquist's doll from which the ruling hand has been rudely withdrawn, leaving the subject slumped, without a spine, unable to lift so much as an arm.

The silence that now fell on the little room was not complete-the Chinaman began to clear away his brass cup and coins. There can be no doubt what the misunderstanding was-he feared another Royal Commission into gambling. He imagined the slack-jawed, red-headed youth to be one more Reverend commissioner intent on proving his father an opium addict and his wife a prostitute. He slipped the coins into the pocket of his floppy coat, the cup into his back pocket and arranged to have himself dissolved into the shadow of the wall.

The room did not empty immediately. There were those more curious than fearful who waited a nosy minute or two while they considered the association of clergyman and oilskinned woman. In all likelihood they too came down in favour of a Royal Commission. In any case they soon departed.

"Oh, dear," Lucinda said. "I am so sorry."

"It is not Crab."! "No, no. I am so sorry. I don't know where the name came from." This was an untruth. She knew exactly where it came from-the image of a crab scuttling from red settee, to cabin, to red settee.

"It is Hopkins, not Crab," he persisted.

She thought his response too hurt and humourless. "It is the reverend," she said, "that I should first apologize for."

He smiled then, and she remembered how much she had liked him.

"Well," he said, flipping a coin into the air and catching it (slap) against the back of his wrist, "I suppose I must face up to facts-my disguise is done for. But in London, as I suppose you know, they would not be half as particular. In Drury Lane they expect to see a little cloth."

"You could try Ah Moy's."

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

"That's true. But it is such an awful trek."

"I am so sorry."

"Oh," he said, yawning and stretching-she could see his tonsils, a clean pink cave and quite surprisingly uncorrupted-"! am better off because of it. I should thank you, Miss Leplastrier, for saving me from

my weakness."

They were walking now, proceeding awkwardly, embarrassed, indecisive, through the Pak-AhPu room. The customers had all departed but two Chinese with a ladder were hanging a large Union Jack on the wall. They bowed politely, although this was not an easy thing to accomplish from the top of an unsteady ladder. One of them lost his balance, or perhaps he jumped intentionally. He was a nimble old man who landed with ony the slightest "oof"; he escorted them to the door on George Street with many polite Good evenings.

"This is dangerous work you do, Miss Leplastrier," said Oscar when the door had been bolted behind them and they were left alone in the dark and rain-shiny street. "You know we are not a minute from the Crooked Billet Inn where whatshisname obtained the pistol which he used to trick poor Kinder into shooting himself? Do you have a carriage? For me, alas, it is shanks's pony." "Then you do not have a living?"

"I do not wish one. But the Bishop would not hear of mission work. He gave me Randwick (it is far too grand for me) and there was a lovely carriage and a gelding by the name of Prince. But unfortunately I took some bad advice."

Lucinda was cold and wanted to be home with her cocoa but she could not leave him to walk four miles in this weather. She must drive him to his vicarage which lay in exactly the opposite direction to the one she wished to go in. She watched him warily, more detached than was her custom, as he stood before her, flapping his long arms around in the damp waterfront air, explaining, in such innocent, educated English, how it was that he had lost his horse and carriage (the one provided by the Randwick vestry) to a common racecourse tout who was also, he discovered the next Sunday, a member of his congregation. She was both enchanted and appalled by his innocence and it was this quality she was confused by, not knowing if it were genuine, or if it were a cloak for a mad or even criminal personality.

She drove him out to Randwick and on the way they managed to leave alone the tender scar which was their voyage aboard the Leviathan. When he proposed a game of cards she found herself, against her better judgement, asking if he could accept her IOU. 65

Bishop Dancer's Ferret

Bishop Dancer is a man you would most quickly understand if you saw him on a Saturday in Camden, dressed in his red hunting jacket and high black boots, leaning forward to accept some hot toddy from the stirrup cup. He had a handsome ruddy face which these days extended to his crown. What hair remained clung to the sides and back of his head; it was fine and white, cut very short, as was his beard. With no mitre to assist you, you might be inclined to think him a gentleman farmer. He had big thighs, strong shoulders, and although you could see the man had a belly, it was not one of your featherdown bellies, but a firm one. He sat well on his horse and it was a good specimen, too-sixteen hands and no stockhorse in its breeding. Dancer could not, of course he could not, have clergy who were notorious around the track, who lost their horses or their carriages because they heard a horse was "going to try." Sydney-a venal citywas too puritanical to allow such a thing. But had you informed Dancer of this story after dinner, he would have found it funny. He could find nothing in his heart against the races and he left that sort of raging to the Baptists or Methodists. The true Church of England, he would have felt (but never said) was the Church of gentlemen. Sometimes gentlemen incur debts. He had interviewed Oscar closely on his arrival. He put him through his paces, questioning the fidgety fellow as closely as a candidate from Cambridge. He was looking for signs of this Broad Church heresy. He could find none. He accepted Virgin birth, the physical Resurrection, the loaves and fishes. The Bishop allowed him his view on Genesis with a little uneasiness, but it was no longer politic to make a fuss about this matter. He soon sniffed out, however, Oscar's Low Church background. In normal circumstances he would not have cared for it at all. He loathed Evangelicals with all their foot-thumping "enthusiasm."

; Bishop Dancer's Ferret

He did not like their "bare boards" approach to ritual, and there was plenty of this in Oscar's attitude. Bishop Dancer was delighted to find it so. "This fellah," he told himself, "will be my ferret out at Randwick." And when he thought it, he imagined Oscar quite literally as a ferret, his long white neck disappearing down in a hole.

| He asked the untidy applicant about candles on the altar. Oscar I; throught they should be lit only for illumination. He asked about vestments. Oscar thought a simple surplice quite acceptable, but preferred a plain black cassock. He asked about genuflexion. Oscar confessed himself uncomfortable with the practice.

Bishop Dancer became quite hearty. He had the young man stay to luncheon. He had him fed beef, although the beef was cold, and was not even mildly disconcerted when the young man refused his claret. There was going to be fun out at Randwick, that bed of Puseyites with all their popish ritual. There would be a firstclass row out there, but he would win. He must win. For he had, by one of those anomalies which made the diocese so interesting, the right to appoint the incumbent himself. If the Randwick vestry did not like it, they could go over to the Church of Rome. They;, would not get their new parson dressing up in white silk and! red satin. This one was a nervous little fellow, the Bishop judged, I but he would not budge on this issue. He would not be susceptible j! to Tractarians, only to missionaries. Even at luncheon he per[sisted with a request that he be sent "up-country" (wherever i that might be-when asked he could not say). Bishop Dancer told him I bluntly that mission work was a waste of time. The blacks were dying

< off like flies, and if he doubted this he should look at the streets of I Sydney, man, and note the condition of the specimens he saw there.; The field was over-supplied with missionaries and Methodists fighting f Baptists to see who could give the "poor wretches" the greater numj ber of blankets. Leave the blacks to the Dissenters, Dancer advised. [God had work for him to do at Randwick.

; It did not occur to Oscar that a bishop might lie to him. He accepted \ Dancer's story and, indeed, relayed it to Theophilus who disseminated Î it further through the columns of The Times. It was because of this gullibility that Oscar allowed himself to be placed almost next door to the notorious Randwick racecourse. He was Bishop Dancer's ferret, but it was not Kebble, Pusey and Newman who were to cause him the greatest stress in his new parish, but Volunteer, Rioter, Atlanta, Mnemon, and Kildare.

66

St John's

Sydney was a blinding place. It made him squint. The stories of the gospel lay across the harsh landscape like sheets of newspaper on a polished floor. They slid, slipped, did not connect to anything beneath them. It was a place without moss or lichen, and the people scrabbling to make a place like troops caught under fire on hard soil. St John's at Randwick was built from red brick with very white mortar. The fine clay dust that overlay everything, even the cypress hedge beside the vicarage, could not soften the feeling of the place. It was all harsh edges like facets of convict-broken rock.

He had been ready to minister to his flock, but found them to be creatures of their landscape. They did not embrace him, but rather stood their distance. He found their conversation as direct as nails. They found his to be tangled, its point as elusive as the end of a mishandled skein. They warned him about snakes, spiders and the advisability of locking his windows at night. He thought the fault was with himself. He had his housekeeper bake scones and invited the vestry to tea. They sat stiffly on their chairs and conversation could not be got under way. He felt young, inadequate, inexperienced. He asked them about the parishioners, but it seemed they knew almost nothing. Only when he asked if there were natives in the congregation did they show themselves capable of smiling.

They knew he was Dancer's man. They waited and watched. They found his form of service as unappetizing as unbuttered bread.

He prayed to God to give him the key to their hearts. He had nothing else to do but pray and write his sermons. In the long winter afternoons he listened to the drum of horses' hooves. He sent his sixteen volumes of track records to Mr Stratton and swore never to gamble again. He had promised God in the midst of that dreadful storm. There was reason enough for Mr Stratton to gamble, but not for him. He was

•7 K f.

St John's

clothed and provided for. He had shelter enough for a family of eight. He had three hundred pounds a year, and a housekeeper to feed him mutton every night. He did not require wealth. He coveted nothing. The horses drummed through the afternoon. The track was hard in April but softened with the rains in May. He preached sermons against

gambling.

It was Mrs Judd, his housekeeper, who warned him off his gambling sermons and told him about the "generous gents" who not only contributed to the church's coffers but kept book at the nearby racecourse. This information gave him the excuse his cunning gambler's mind required. He must go to the course and see for himself.

Because he could not bet with men he had preached against, he got himself involved with a series of messengers, runners, touts and spivs who carried his money away and brought precious little of it back. He followed no system. He was just having "some fun" just like a smoker might have "just one" borrowed cigarette. The touts and runners led him, in due course, to the floating two-up games at the five hotels which lay, strung like beads on the deuce's necklace, between Randwick and St Andrew's. There was fan-tan down in George Street. There was swy and poker and every card game to be imagined among the taverns down in Paddington. Oscar had never seen such a passion for gambling. It was not confined to certain types or classes. It seemed to be the chief industry of the colony.

He was homesick, disorientated. He had enemies all around him and he could, you might imagine, if he had his heart set on playing rummy with Miss Leplastrier, at least have the brains to close the curtains. He was not so gormless that he didn't know he had these enemies, and yet he thought it wrong for him to know such a thing. So although he was not innocent of this knowledge, he felt it somehow, magically important to act as if he were. He left the curtains open. "Oh," he chimed, all knees and elbows, from the sofa, "this is nice." Lucinda Leplastrier did not think herself a snob, but she had inherited, from her mother, a strong objection to the word "nice" being used in this way. It struck an odd note. It did not match his educated vowels. She compared him, she could not help it, with Dennis Hasset and this had the effect of making everything Oscar did seem to be immature and frivolous.

And yet when you saw the way he dealt the cards you could not help but feel the whole thing might be a pose. Nothing fitted.

He was not vulgar, but the furnishings in his vicarage were vulgar in the extreme and she could not believe he could move amongst all

Oscar and Lucinda

this and be insensitive to it. The carpet had a stiff set pattern large enough to feel you might be tripped on it. It was a rich and gaudy green. The marble mantelpiece had the appearance of being carved by craftsmen more accustomed to sarcophagi, and the mirror above it was covered with a green gauze netting, placed there to stop flies spotting the glass. There was an excess of chairs, nine of them without counting the sofa on which she sat and the gent's armchair in which he seemed to squat, leaning forward so eagerly she felt herself pushed back. The thing with the chairs was colour. The brightest hues were in evidence: a blue not unworthy of a kingfisher, and whilst handsome, no doubt, on the bird, not something that sat comfortably with the carpet. No one had thought, whilst they spent so extravagantly, that the brilliant settee might have to sit upon the brilliant carpet.

She could not marry him.

Of course he had not asked her to, but she had sometimes, in remembering their meeting, been regretful that she had not acknowledged his final smile. She need only look at the ugly and illmatched assortment of little tables-oak, maple, cedar-to know that she need have no misgivings. There were paintings on the wall, though they were not paintings at all, but "chromos." The only thing she had in common with him was a serious weakness of which she was not proud. And, lonely or no, had it not been for the following incident, it is unlikely she would have sought out his company again.

The Messiah

The housekeeper at Randwick was a certain Mrs Judd who, had she not had reasons of her own for wishing to scrub the floors and black the stove and swat the flies that trapped themselves behind the orange and lilac panes of glass in the big sitting room, could have stayed

The Messiah

at home and eaten chocolates. The Judds were wealthy members of the congregation. Mr Judd's father may or may not have been transported, but Mr Judd was the successful proprietor of a hauling business, had teams of all sorts travelling throughout the colony, owned a ship which plied the coastal trade, and a splendid mansion in Randwick itself. He was a burly man and although his hip was injured-a defect which served to tip his broad body a little to the starboard and give him the appearance of someone with an invisible chaff bag on his broad back-he still worked as hard as the men he employed. He had only had his wife in control of the vicarage of St John's, but he liked to inspect it himself from time to time. He had a possessive feeling about the building, as well he might-his donation had paid for the greater part of it and it was his taste (or his upholsterer's) which dominated its interior. If there was a slate loose or missing from the roof, it was Mr Judd who would repair it, not by calling a tradesman, but by getting up on the roof and attending to the matter personally. He was a rough man, but a great one for the Church. And at the very centre of the maze of his tender feelings towards this institution there lay this single thing-he had a fine baritone voice, and he was

proud of it.

Each year at Randwick there Were all sorts of services in which great works of sacred music, the Messiah for instance, would be performed and then this rough and brawling man would feel himself transmuted into something very fine-spun gold from Mr Handel's pen. For this reason he loved the Church and habitually made himself humble around that being who provided these great moments in his life -

the vicar.

No one had, as yet, discussed the Messiah with Oscar. There had been a St Matthew's Passion just before he had arrived. There had been a fuss in settling in this new man and no one had mentioned the Messiah. Mr Judd could not bring this up himself. It would appear vain. And yet he sensed the performance was in doubt. He had heard that Bishop Dancer did not care for Handel, but then again he had heard the opposite. He was a direct man in most matters. He did not go in for this tangential shilly-shallying which was the hallmark of the ruling classes. But in this particular matter his emotions were too much involved. He could not ask the vicar the simple question that so occupied his mind. Instead he made himself humble. He chopped wood and brought it to the wood-box personally. Likewise he scraped clean the wooden shutters and stripped them back to the bare wood and then repainted them. While the rest of his fellow vestrymen held

TV)

Oscar and Lucinda

themselves aloof, and tight-lipped, Mr Judd was forward and friendly, attempting to engage the stork-legged new chum in talk of music.

But Oscar happily confessed he was tone deaf and could no more talk about music than he could about the breeding possibilities of merino sheep, if that was a subject at all. He wanted to talk about the blacks. Mr Judd did not; he sandpapered the louvres in silence. He soon became so anxious on the subject that he had-vanity or no-to sound out the more musical members of the congregation on their opinion of the new chap's attitude. The betting, he discovered with dismay, was against Handel. This was Bishop Dancer's man. Look at his vestments. There would be no Handel this year, Matty, good heavens no.

Mr Judd came and clipped the hedge and he returned, with his wife, at six o'clock on a Friday morning, in order to sweep up the clippings. He was deeply unhappy. He was also-it came in fits and starts, was sent away and invited back again-angry.

He was surprised to see the lights on and the window unshuttered. He bade his wife stay on the path while he climbed-very quietly-on to the veranda, and peered in. Well, you know what he saw.

There was also money on the table. He saw this, too. He saw a woman, cards moving, money. It was then that he started hammering on the panel

Unless you have the most particular reading habits it is unlikely you will be acquainted with the so-called "Wednesday Murders." People of my grandmother's generation still spoke of them, but they are forgotten nowadays. The most distinctive feature of these murders was not suggested by their name, which merely celebrated a coincidence-260

Serious Damage

that the first two murders occurred on Wednesday nights of succesI sive weeks. But the murderer would not let himself be so easily pigeon[holed and thereafter took lives on a Tuesday (the third victim) and i Sunday (the fourth). In spite of this-and let this be a lesson to anylone dealing with the press-the name stuck.

I The murders were so ghastly you might think it peculiar that LuI cinda, no matter how lonely she might be, would leave her house at I all, or, accepting the peculiarity, you may wrongly attribute great courI age to her when you hear she had driven, unaccompanied, through I streets that were still, for the most part, unlighted. Further, she was I by no means insensible to this murderer. She was informed that he I was, in all likelihood, a butcher or, the press suggested, an unsuccessful i apprentice. This was not melodrama or gutter-press imaginings. It was I clearly suggested by the manner of the murdering, the nature of the i cuts, the chops, the bonings. You could not live alone and not think of the Wednesday Murderer, and Lucinda, once her maid had gone at nightfall, was not only alone, but alone on an island promontory in a wind-buffeted cottage in which the floorboards sometimes groaned out loud, in which timbers-or was it the nails in the timber? — made inexplicable noises. Lucinda, alone with her nervous cat, sometimes thought about these matters to such a degree that she could not leave her chair beside the fire, not even when the coal scuttle was empty and it was three a.m. and cold enough for her breath to show. So the very excursions which may seem to us so brave, seemed to her most cowardly-she was not only fleeing loneliness, but also fear. She thought herself more vulnerable in a house than on the highway, in her bed than in a fan-tan parlour. And even though her good opinion of Oscar had been seriously damaged by his selfish behaviour aboard the Leviathan (a damage that showed in her unreasonable annoyance at the angle of his elbow, or the way his trousers rucked up to show a bony white shin with red garter marks left, like a high-water mark, above the fallen socks) she was not displeased to spend these hours with him, or not as displeased as she might have allowed herself to be if the Wednesday Murderer had not been at large. She was waiting for daylight.

He told her that his mantelpiece clock-a huge contraption with its brassy innards showing-was ten minutes fast. She did not doubt its gaudy unreliability and felt herself more reliably informed by the sky outside. She judged it almost six a.m. She had enjoyed herself, although not in that personal way she had enjoyed herself at Mr Borrodaile's table. On that occasion she had enjoyed him, and had allowed

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Oscar and Lucinda

her mind to construct all sorts of pleasant fancies. She had thought him an angel painted by Mr Rossetti. This was before he showed himself so thoughtless. But rummy was a game you could play with perfect strangers, with a man in a mask, or even (she imagined) a clever machine. She had arrived with nothing and now she had nearly five pounds-it was all there in notes and coins in front of her. She had taken the money slowly, and she had found the process as satisfying as drawing bent nails from old timber. She had enjoyed it as much as she had enjoyed the dizzy lightness of losing at fan-tan. It did not once occur to her that she might be punishing him. She was not tired. She could not afford to be tired. She had time to go home and bathe before taking tea with Mr Rolls, a builder lately arrived from Melbourne. She began to gather in her winnings. The notes were larger in those days. You had something more substantial for your efforts. If you pulled out a pound no one would mistake it for your cigarette papers or-if you were not of that class-your calling card. It was at this moment, as Lucinda began to gather these triumphantly proportioned notes together, that Mr Judd pushed his ruddy face against the window. He had been a boxer in his youth and this had left his face a little out of balance, the nose a fraction to one side, the ears of independent character. When you knew him you found him strangely soft and, though his hands were likely scabbed on the back and horny on the palm, you would find him gentle around gentle subjects-I am thinking of music when I mention this. But it is easy enough to imagine that such a face, without introduction, might appear-I will not say murderous-frightening.

Lucinda should have made allowances for the glass. It was not plate, but crown, of uneven thickness and marred by a yellow tinge produced by chrome salts in the sand. You can say she should have reacted more scientifically. She did not. She saw a butcher's face with hairy eyebrows. She saw a pig snout of unnatural yellow. That the face was partly veiled by a patch of condensation did not make it seem less terrifying.

She could not scream.

She made a noise which may be crudely signified: "Erg." j

Oscar smiled uncertainly.

"Erg."

She made him nervous, anyway. She knew better Greek. She

•seemed well schooled in theology. She did not smile readily.

She played cards with a cool elegance and skill which shocked

him. He liked her smell. He did not know how to treat her,

O£T

Serious Damage and when she stared at him and said "Erg," he became embarrassed.

"Well," he said, shuffling the cards. "Well, well, well." He did his fancy shuffle. He had taught himself this, although he had seen it done in a "hell" in Jermyn Street. There it had been done by a very frail and very drunk old actor who could, in shuffling cards, make a moving bridge one yard long. Oscar had taught himself this. It was, he supposed, a conversation piece. Mr Judd saw the bridge and could contain himself no more.

He banged.

Oscar's face then behaved as it had when Lucinda had called him "Crab." It lost its bones and colour. The muscles on his scalp contracted and pulled each hair to smart attention. He opened his mouth and Lucinda was treated this time, not to a clean pink tunnel and a little peak of epiglottis, but to some half-munched coconut macaroon suspended,

mid-mastication.

But then, of course, he turned and discovered Mr and Mrs Judd.

Lucinda could not credit what she saw him do. The unfriendly attitude of the intruders was perfectly clear, but the gangling vicar stood, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, went to the window, unlocked it, and let them in. Well, they did not enter, not immediately, but the man's voice entered and she did not have time to separate it from her nightmare, could not decipher all the moral outrage, felt herself to be swamped by an alien wave of tobacco-smelling rage.

"Mr Judd," she heard her host say. "Mrs Judd. Please do come in." Come in? Lucinda was incredulous. Come in? Her hand was at her hat, feeling for the silver peasized knob that marked its end. She thought about the properties of glass, not its wont to go yellow when there were chrome salts in the sand, but its tendency to shatter, to make shards which lie upon a carpet in the shape of crescent moons, scimitars, stilettos, daggers, pig stickers, a jigsaw armoury waiting to be released from its captive sheet and nothing more needed by way of a key than a pebble, a coin, a lump of coal. "Please," said Oscar, clapping his hands and rubbing them. "Please

do come in."

Lucinda removed her hat and held the pin behind her back. Oscar stepped back and both Judds, the second one with great difficultyshe was not only portly but impeded by skirts-stepped from the veranda, across the sill, and into the sitting room.

Oscar watched all this with almost as much astonishment as Lucinda. He had hardly been aware, so nervous was he, of what he had been saying. And although it is true that he invited the Judds in and that,

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Oscar and Lucinda

when he made the invitation, he was standing on one side of an open window and they on the other, he had not intended that they treat his window as their door. And yet-and he admitted this to himself later when he sat, groaning and punching his left hand with his right, in judgement on himself-it was he who had stepped backwards, and the stepping back was, in a sense, like moving a magnet back from a nail in that you must, if you know anything about the natural sciences, expect the nail to follow and it is no good-his father would have told him as muchprotesting your innocence when you know it is a law, a law without a name, but a law of physics none the less: when you have such a concentration of energy with all its vectors angled at you, and if you say "come in" and step back at the same time, the object of your attention will-it is like water on an inclined planefollow the line of least resistance and come right in. Now Mr Judd was unaware that he was obeying a law of physics. He knew nothing about physics at all. He knew about jute and hessian, about chaff and oats, about yokes, bows, bullock chains, the length of grass on the roadside between Sydney and Yass, but he was ignorant of the forces that propelled him. When he found himself standing on the vicar's Quality Bradford First Wool carpet, he was mortified. He looked down at his boots and saw the right one not properly laced and the left one with leaf-mould clinging to it and then he looked and saw his wife-God help me-trying to follow him. That was so like her. It was so exactly like her. Why could she not be aware of the picture she made? She was all backside and bosom and her poor little legs were too plump and short to get up to the sill, but there was no retreating now-he had to help her in. Mr Judd was angry with his wife, but he would not show it in public and he offered her extreme solicitude and did his best to help effect a dignified crossing. When she was, at last, standing inside he made sure her dress was properly rearranged before he thought about anything else. Thus he found himself, a manly man, fussing at her skirts like a dressmaker. For a moment he was at a loss, to see the figure he cut. Then the habits of a lifetime reasserted themselves and he did what he always did when caught at a disadvantage-he attacked.

"I'd not be the sort of fellow comes climbing through a window," he said. "And you should know that of me by now. But I'll tell you this, sir-we will not have it! We will not. All we want is our Handel. It is nothing but the glory of God, you don't see that. But 'Be not drunk with wine/ " he had not meant to quote, but the words came to him.

Serious Damage

He could see no wine. It was not wine he was quoting. " 'Be not drunk with wine/ " he looked at the cards. They were in full view, and money too. " 'Wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.' "

This produced a silence. They all stood with red faces and tried to understand their situation. Oscar thought "handle." There was a cold draught from the open window.

"You gambled," Mr Judd said, and he shook a surprisingly dainty finger at the clergyman.

"It is true, Mr Judd," said Oscar. He hugged his thin chest and then rubbed his hands. "I have gambled. I am sorry if it has caused offence."

"It's no good denying it."

"I'm not denying it."

"Don't you think the Almighty has an ear? Don't you imagine he'd like our hymns of praise?" "Oh yes, indeed, Mr Judd. Indeed."

"Then you should not be gambling, sir. It is a folly and a sin." Lucinda was unsure of what was happening. She no longer thought these people murderers, but she thought the situation to be most unstable. The man looked violent, and the woman seemed to think it her wifely duty to transmit, silently, an equal level of anger towards her. She glowered and moved her feet beneath her skirts, just like a cow bailed up for milking. Lucinda stood up.

"It does seem to me," Oscar was saying, "that we have the threads of quite different concerns involved in this upset."

Lucinda said nothing. She thought his conciliatory tone quite inappropriate.? ï,

"Upset?" said Mr Judd. "I am not upset." <. s-TS,',"'•••

"She is slipping out," said Mrs Judd.

"On the one hand, you have the issue of my gambling. On the other you have, it would seem, a love of music." '.

"Of sacred music. Sacred music."

"She is putting on her hat." ••'..'••:..:.?•»:

"She is my guest, Mrs Judd."

"A pretty name for it.";;?

"Mrs Judd," warned Mr Judd.

"Ill not be stopped," said Mrs Judd. "I have never heard of such a hypocrite. Yes, a hypocrite. We made him lovely vestments. You will not wear them, isn't that true? You think God would rather see you looking like a crow.".•••.-

Oscar and Lucinda

"I wear-" said Oscar, but was stopped from saying more.

"You dress like a scarecrow," said Mr Judd.

"I will not be stopped. He dresses like a scarecrow," she agreed, "and throws out our Messiah, and here he is with cards and women in the temple, and-" she looked backwards to the open window, and stopped a moment. "And here we are," she said at last. These last three words seemed to signify that she had, against the current of her natural good manners, been induced-it was witchcraft, perhaps-to climb through her employer's window and stand on expensive carpet in muddy shoes.

Lucinda had retreated from the draught and was warming herself against the fire. It is true that she had put on her hat, but not because she wished to leave, but because she was returning her hatpin to its proper place. She would not need that type of weapon.

"You are a rude woman," she said, "and you are a rude man." Mrs Judd opened her mouth. Mr Judd stood on his wife's foot. Mrs Judd's mouth stayed open and her head jerked sharply sideways as she tried to read her husband's face.

' You imagine," Lucinda pulled her skirt tight against her legs until she felt them burning, "that you are civilized, but you are like savages with toppers and tails. You are not civilized at all, and if gambling is a sin it is less of a sin than the one you have just committed. You should pray to God to forgive you for your rudeness."

Oscar was aghast to hear such patrician arrogance from a women he had seen, half an hour before, light a cigarette and draw the blue smoke up into her flaring nostrils (an action he found sensual in the extreme). He would have apologized to the Judds but he did not have the opportunity.

"You may leave," said Lucinda.

And the Judds, indeed, made uncertainly towards the door.

"Through the window," said Lucinda.

And the Judds left through the window. Lucinda had them shut it after them. She watched themit was not quite light-walk down the long mustard-yellow driveway. She could see them both talking at once.

She began laughing then. It was not a simple laugh, and was occasioned as much by her surprise at herself (how angry she must be at Sydney) as by delight in her own mischievousness. And her face, laughing, was lovely. For the first time inside the vicarage she was herself, unguarded, open-faced, and you could see the young girl and imagine her in the days on the farm near Parramarta. She looked pretty,

The Tablecloth

but Oscar did not see this for he was sitting back on an ugly green chair with his hands plunged into his unruly rusty hair.

"Oh dear," he said. "I'm done for."

And then Lucinda was like an athlete who, with her body warm, has ripped a muscle and not felt it. As she cooled, she stiffened, and felt-it hurt more than you would think possible-the damage. 69

The Tablecloth

Bishop Dancer's office-his entire house-was being redecorated. He could not bear to be around the place. He did not like to hear his wife hallooing for some tradesman, the sudden draughts from unavoidably open windows, the equally unavoidable sawing and hammering. It was an irritation to be there and he could not effect his business courteously. Particularly this business. This was how it came about that Bishop Dancer lunched with the Dean of St Andrew's and his wife. He did not much care for the dean, but he needed to borrow an office and the dean's office was the only one available which would bring with it the proper tone. 'Tone," you might correctly guess, was not a thing that a man like Dancer would normally concern himself with. He had the strength to carry his own "tone" without borrowing it from the dean's heavy desk and velvet drapery. But in this case he had been defeated. The office he required was one in whichthere was no avoiding it-he might effect his own surrender to the Randwick vestry. He did not like to lose at all, but he particularly disliked losing to people like this-jumped-up shopkeepers and stable hands, rag and bone men who would once have acknowledged their calling with three hats worn on top of each other but now dressed up in clothing of the classes they used to serve. Sometimes he thought of Sydney as an orphan's party with a dressing-up box. What a grotesque sight he found

Oscar and Lucinda

it-piemen affecting the dress of gentlemen, ladies' maids with glass tiaras. They were out there now, in the anteroom of the dean's office. Mr Allcock with his top hat and shiny breeches, Mr Judd, Mr Henry, and their leader, Mr Graham, MP, the well-known Puseyite. The bishop stayed at table, although the table was by now for the most part empty. He wished to make a demonstration to the dean, but the dean was apprehensive. He had invited the bishop to lunch from courtesy. He had watched him drink an entire bottle of his best claret and now he was nervous of the consequences.

"Let me show you," said the bishop.

"My Lord," the dean began. He could see that Dancer was in a dangerous sort of mood and he knew what had caused it. The press had got hold of this matter of the Randwick vicarage where, it was said, there had been behaviour of a most immoral type. It had involved women and cards. This had been Dancer's appointment. He had boasted of it. He had called the incumbent "my Reverend Mr Ferret."

"Do not 'My Lord' me," said Dancer. "Let me show you this thing and then you will see I was not boasting."

The bishop appraised the table. It was modestly set for such a demonstration. Almost all the luncheon service had been removed from the white tablecloth. There was a little silver tray of condiments, a showy gravy boat, a claret bottle with half an inch of sediment in it, two wine glasses, three of water. It was a bright day. The westerly had stopped momentarily and sunshine broke through the peach blossom outside the window and fell prettily across the table.

"I did not imagine it a boast," the dean said, pushing back his chair a little, but lacking the courage to stand. "But the wait will not improve the mood of your visitors. I imagine them quite high and mighty in their tone."

"Do you know?" said Dancer. He also pushed back his chair. He held the tablecloth as he had once seen his sister hold the train of the Duchess of York's wedding dress. He looked at the dean. The dean was a neat man. He kept a little brush and pan beside him at table and was not embarrassed to whisk away a fallen breadcrumb. His hair was, to Dancer's taste, overly neat. It was of a coarse material, steely grey, and looked as if it had been trimmed, one hair at a time, by razor. "I have aways thought, Dean, that men in our position should value the importance of relaxation."

The dean tried to look nonchalant. He could not. He folded his arms across his chest. It was a broad chest, and he was a young man and well built, and yet, Dancer thought, he behaves like a fussy barnyard

The Tablecloth

fowl. It was easy to imagine him pecking at the crumbs on the white tablecloth.

"I am quite relaxed, Bishop, I assure you. In fact I was rather wondering," and here the dean pushed his spectacles back on his nose and his mouth folded in a manner both prim and smug, "if Your Lordship was not feeling the pressure of this Randwick scandal."

"Scandal?" said the bishop, testing the tension on the tablecloth. "There is no scandal."

'To bring your man before the ecclesiastical court."

"My man? Ha, ha, Dean, really. The silly little fellow was an Evangelical. Hardly my man. Now, concentrate. Watch. You will not see this done in many other deaneries." Dancer felt the cords of his muscles stretched with a not unpleasant tension-they were tight like a baited line with a flat head pulling insistently on one end.

"Allow me then to remove the gravy boat."

"Sit down," ordered Bishop Dancer. The dean sat down. He buttoned up his coat.

The bishop took the pressure on the tablecloth. He felt it nice and tight. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated and he could feel, with the pressure on, the position of wine bottle (which, being both light and tall, was a tricky one) and the gravy boat, the set of condiments. He took the tension up another notch until he had it at the point just before movement. Then he pulled the cloth right off the table.

The bottles rose, teetered again, but settled nicely on the polished cedar. It made a long, low, ringing noise as it came to rest.

The condiments were never in doubt. It was only the gravy boat, an eccentric three-legged affair, which caught. This was partly the fault of the legs, and partly the fault of the dean who had insisted that the tablecloth always be starched crisply. A starched fold had caught the leg, the bishop guessed, and it would have done no real damage at all if the dean had only trusted him. But the dean, being as nervous as a rabbit, had started out of his chair the instant the cloth was pulled. He broke cover, so to speak, and placed himself directly in the line of hre. There was very little gravy left, hardly a spoonful. It made a small mark on the dean's thigh, but even this would not show-sponged or not-once it was dry.

"There," said Bishop Dancer. "You didn't believe I could do it." That night the dean would beg God's forgiveness for the thoughts he had thought at that moment. But as he picked up the broken pieces

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Oscar and Lucinda

of the gravy boat, his anger was not even mollified by the thought that it had been of a pattern he had never liked.

"I will replace it," said Dancer, folding the tablecloth with a surprising (to the dean) precision.

"You will not," said the dean, his face pale, his hands full of sharp shards. "You will kindly go to your vestry and leave this matter to me."

The bishop had to stop himself from ruffling his hair and it was not until his evening prayers that he, too, found room in his heart for remorse, but even then, praying on his bare knees in his nightshirt, a smile insinuated itself on to his face. He could not help it. Surely God would allow this contradiction?

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The Good Samaritan

The cloth was, likewise, pulled out from under Oscar's life. But do not imagine that the bishop's party trick was metaphorical, for were it so it would not be equal to the devastation. If we wish a metaphor we must load the dean's table with Doulton saucers, candlesticks, boats for gravy, bowls for custard, vases full of flag flowers, and even then we will not have anything to equal the damage Bishop Dancer did to Oscar. To provide an equivalent we would have to take to the table with a saw or axe.

Once Oscar's indiscretion came to the attention of the press, he was finished. It did not matter that Dancer was a card-player himself, or that he was not beyond a "something on the gee-gees." His private sympathies were of no account. He must cut himself free. He must rebuke, dissociate, etc. And Oscar Hopkins, whose whole character had been built around the certainty that he was one of the chosen, now found himself to be very publicly cast out. His name was made notorious in Sydney generally. He was not considered a suitable person to employ.

The Good Samaritan

That he was not a match for his scandalous story, neither in terms of personality nor appearance, did not make people question the slanders that were now told about him. Indeed, his innocent manner made his guilt appear more shocking.

He took rooms in a common lodging house in Bathurst Street. He learned how much we are the creatures of our station, one minute all snug and warm, worthy of affection and the esteem of total strangers, granted respect without a question, credit without a pause, and the next, the most despicable creature on whom it is quite permissible to spit; someone whom the slovenly owner of a run-down boarding house-unshaven, with a collar missing and a tattoo visible on his hairy wrist-admits only on condition of a large deposit.

September and October were reckoned the perfect months for new settlers to arrive in Sydney. September was no longer cold and windy. October was not yet hot. The blow-flies, bush-flies and house-flies were not the offence they would be when the York hams were in the ovens and muslin-wrapped puddings were boiling and bumping against the walls of cast-iron pots. September and October were bleak months for Oscar Hopkins. He was cut adrift from those who loved him. No mail could reach him, and he, for his part, was too ashamed to let anyone at Home know the disgrace that had befallen him.

His mail waited for him at the diocesan offices. His letters were locked up in a clerk's drawer together with the egg sandwiches which the occupant of the desk brought for lunch each day. The envelopes gained fatty butter spots. They smelled of egg. They lay there unopened and Oscar had no idea that Wardley-Fish was calling him in a passion, that he did not love Melody Clutterbuck, that the engagement was broken, that he, Fish, had been a self-deceiving wretch, an opportunist, a poseur. Wardley-Fish was booked to sail on the Sobraon to Sydney. Had Oscar read this locked-up letter he would have seen himself described as "good." This goodness was contrasted with the writer's "worldliness" and "falsehood," which he was now, in the act of buying this ticket on a clipper, casting from him, "like swine, dear Odd Bod, which I hereby drive across the cliffs of Dover, so they might break their nasty bristly backs and drown, for ever, their hoarse and brutish swine-ish souls."

Had Oscar read this letter he would have held himself responsible for the broken engagement. But if blame was a commodity like eggs or butter, he already had more than he could safely carry. And even while he prayed to God to ease his burden, he cast around for more

Oscar and Lucinda

to pick up and carry. He prayed as if he were greedy for punishment. He prayed as a man of forty, suddenly aware of his neglected gums, might brush them, not three times a day as the dentist recommends, but nine times, until they are red and raw and puffy, aching, in quivering shock from all this zeal.

He prayed he might be spared the hellfire.

His neighbours in the boarding house complained about his behaviour. They heard him groaning. They did not see the backs of his hands and if they had it is unlikely that they would have recognized the cause of the wounds thereon. You would need to have lived in a contemplative order to understand that these deep wounds are made by the nails of one hand attacking the back of the other. Not stigmata, but the stab wounds of prayer.

And yet he also, at the same time, on the same day, went to the racetrack. He bet on Falcon and Presto and Maid of the Lake and believed all the time it was (it must be) an offence against God who had smitten him on account of it. He felt the surge of those exhilarating chemicals which his body knew were manufactured at the racecourse, but he did not bet because he sought pleasureon the contrary, he feared it-but because he was desperate and had no other way to support himself.

You cannot bet effectively by day if you are to fear hellfire in the night. Any anxiety of this order prevents the proper functioning of those analytic skills which are a punter's only asset. So of course he lost more than he won, and it did not matter that he hung around the stableboys and jockeys, paid them a shilling for their friendship, that he studied the form as if he were cramming for Bigs at Oriel-he spent the two months of the racing carnival in very poor condition and was swooped by magpies at the start of the Drapers' Purse.

He lost weight although he did not have a lot to lose. His collar hung like a harness around his neck, and he walked in the way of men who would wish to be invisible, close to the walls of buildings, with hands deep in pockets and eyes forever caught at that point where the foundation stones of the buildings rise from the edge of the pavement. And it was in this condition that Lucinda found him, although he did not have the comfort of a wall to walk beside, was quite exposed on all sides as he hurried across the yard at the back of the post office. The Bombay, two weeks late with the English mail, had arrived the day before and so everyone was crowded round in George Street where the mail was collected. The yard was quite deserted. There was no throng to give him shelter from inquisitive eyes which might recognize the cut of his grimy broadcloth as belonging to a higher calling. The nervous and defeated

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demeanour of its wearer was at once perfectly in keeping with the letter he had come to post and, also, completely out of keeping. An observer would never have suspected the educated tone, i.e.: Dear Papa, I am so sorry to have caused you, by the extended silence which this epistle will now serve to end, so much anguish. You will think, when you put these pages down, that I am destined for that eternal fire of which we have been forewarned. I must confess that I feel myself to be an inhabitant of a purgatory through which I journey, the one hour in deep despair, even terror, the next in a state of (perhaps unhealthy) exaltation that he who has vouchsafed my soul shall see fit, for all my sins, to redeem me yet.

But, my most dear pa, I have a request to make of you, and it is to write to me, but to forebear doing so in that manner which your fond heart will first incline you toward, for I know that your most loving inclination will be to instruct me on the steps I must take to save my immortal soul. This advice I will most surely cherish, and I do not ask you to neglect your stern duty, but also, in a postscript if you like, to write to me about the little lanes of Hennacombe wherein we three once walked so happily.

I am homesick for hedges and birds with pretty melody, for the lovely chalky blue sky of England. This colony seems so hard and new, all newly broken ground, much clay and sandstone, but nothing yet to make the soil friable. The birds are bright but raucous. Everything is lacking in gentility and care, and society as a whole (although better dressed than anyone in England could imagine) seems little concerned with the common good, only individual benefit. This view is perhaps unnecessarily bleak and I pray it is a distortion caused by the unhappy predicament I now hnd myself in. However it does seem that there is nothing for a man to do once he has gained the reputation that has been so unjustly given to me. Such was the weight of the detailed confession that followed that it was no wonder he walked in such a leaden way that Lucinda, who had been thinking of him constantly ever since she had found the "scandal" in the Sydney Mail, did not recognize him. She had not immediately recognized him in the Mail for that matter. She saw the name, of course-Hopkins, but she did not think of him as Hopkins but as Crab, the creature who had scuttled sideways towards the porthole he was so in terror of. She read of Judd, the Reverend Mr Hopkins, and unknown "lady," and it was a full minute before she saw who and what it referred to.

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Oscar and Lucinda

"Oh, dear God, forgive me," she said. She was sitting in her kitchen at Longnose Point. She did not bother to thnk where the maid might be but went, straight away, on her knees and pushed her hands into her eyes and rubbed at them as if she might, in making all this lightning in the blackness, undo what she had so carelessly done.

She thought: I should not be allowed abroad. This is the second man I have ruined. She sat up and folded the Mail in her lap. She would go, this instant, to Randwick and apologize, or to the Bishop or whoever was important in the matter. Her next thought was that she must stay away and not compromise the poor nan any more. Her third thought-and this was the one that she finally acted upon-was that she must present herself and see what aid she might render. She dressed herself in her most drab and proper clothing, an unpleasant brown wool and a severe black bonnet which only served, against her best intentions, to accentuate her lovely complexion so it was, like a Ribstone pippin, a soft underwash of crimson overlaid with murrey brown. She drove herself out to Randwick. There she encountered not the Reverend Mr Hopkins but Mrs Judd who stood her ground high on the veranda and would communicate nothing except the pleasure of finding herself in so obviously powerful a position.

Lucinda drew her whip along her gelding's flank and sped out of the vicarage, rattling the cattlegrid and leaving a cloud of talcum-fine clay dust for Mrs Judd to sweep off her veranda. She thought: I have made it worse. She thought: I will leave it alone. She made towards the ridge road through Darlinghurst, intending to visit the glassworks. She did not articulate this to herself, but her face, which had, through the agency of her tense upper lip, grown long, now softened and regained its more usual contours. The idea of this visit to the glassworks was a formless, nameless, anticipated pleasure, such as a tobacco addict has when coming out of church. It was the next thing. The next nice thing. But it was only a habit, and when she saw what it was she had been thinking she saw that the packet was empty. It was three weeks since she had promised Arthur Phelps-he who called his gut his bellows-that she would mot visit the works. How had she promised such a thing? Was she not the owner, after all?

Arthur had kept his broad hands busy with his tobacco and papers. His eyes had been absorbed by the business of licking and lighting, he had not looked at her, but she had looked ait him, at the great sweating girth encased in wet hessian bagging, at the male, foreign otherness of his white-haired skin. He had spoken to her-all the time

The Good Samaritan

fussing with a dainty cigarette he could have attended to blindfoldwith great politeness and discomfort. He had taken her out into the yard where the window glass was being packed into wooden crates. The wood was newly sawn and sweet and sappy in the spring air. Yellow straw was lifted by the nor'easter and hung like scratches in the sky. Arthur kicked at the dry rutted clay with his big blunt boots.

Lucinda waited for him. She saw he had a great sense of his own authority, a "natural" sense, far greater than that which would lead her to book a first-class cabin.

When he had finished fussing with his little cigarette he lit it within the sheltered cup of his hand.

"Mum," he said, "it is better if I am sent for and come to see you at your office." The timber mill next door screeched, a long shrill line of pain up the heart of a new cedar log. Arthur had gone to work there before. If he did not like it at the works he could, doubtless, find work at the mill again.

"You mean no harm, mum, I grant you. But it makes my boys be edgewise and standing on politeness, and then we see the gob-gatherer get the gob wrong and the second blower have his walls uneven and the item not worth taking further, mum. They are poor ignorant lads, and easily distracted by a lady."

This simple speech made her feel a despair too deep for tears, or even anger. Her mouth opened.

"If by chance you wish to visit," Arthur said, "then perhaps, mum, you let it be known aforehand."

"How long aforehand, Arthur?" She watched the glasspacker. He was using insufficient straw.

"Oh, just one day, mum, no more. You let it be known, and we will be ready for you, mum, and a proper inspection it would be, mum, like in Her Majesty's Navy, and not all rags and bags and odd socks either-all lined up and shipshape."

"But this is my business, Arthur." There was no edge to her voice-a voice that was often thought to be too easily icy or sarcastic. There was no will. Her eyes were dry and scratched like the straw-littered sky. "I am the proprietor."

And Arthur Phelps said: "I know, mum, but it be our craft, mum, you see. It be our craft." And she had accepted this. She had accepted because she could never forget the emptiness, the hollowness which had occupied the very centre of her being when she had returned from London and found the works empty, the furnaces cold, and that kitten-the murdering

Oscar and Lucinda

crunch of its skull was part of the same feeling-that loneliness, sickness, with nothing bright or soft or sympathetic. She knew she should not have accepted Arthur Phelps's demands. She was angry that she had. She now went to the works at night when the firemen were working, stoking the furnaces or, sometimes, putting in a new clay crucible. She made the firemen uneasy, too, but they had not the conceit or the craft, and dared not ask her to leave the wooden throne on which Arthur drank his pints and practised his trade. It was warm and dry in the works. She was there almost every night. She brooded. And now she would brood about Oscar Hopkins as well. The furnace doors would swing open silently and clang shut abruptly. The firemen's shovels would scrape along the floor. She would sit on Arthur's throne and drink brandy from a flask. She would think of homes, homes she did not have, homes she had lost.

She day-dreamed of letters to the bishop which she did not send, advertisements in the personal columns of the Sydney Morning Herald which she did not place. She went to Ah Moy's but did not see him. She attended Homebush and Randwick. She gambled as if there were a horse that might, by the churning force of its hooves amongst the mud, blot out the pain she felt. She bet fiercely. She did not see him anywhere; and when at last she did, in the post-office yard, she did not recognize him, not at first. The gap between her memory of him and the figure he had become produced a most unsettling feeling.

"Mr Hopkins?"

The man spun. He had a pimple on his top lip, although pimple is perhaps too polite a term for such a swollen infection whose surround was of a deep and angry red. He had a cut on his cheek and this also had the appearance of infection. When he saw who it was, he buttoned up his coat as if by doing this he would hide the way his gaunt neck poked out of his oversized secular collar.

"Miss Leplastrier," he said. He had no hat to lift. He produced a letter from his pocket and waved it in the air instead.

She also had a letter. It was to Mr Paxton asking details of some channelling he had designed to prevent condensation dripping from glass ceilings. She waved it.

They posted their letters. She tried not to watch Oscar count out his farthings to make up the price of the stamps. She saw the back of his hands marked with their praying stab wounds. She had never before in all her life been aware of causing so much harm. All the qualities which had before so irritated her, the nervous frailties, the boyishness, the innocence which she had

The Strattons'Wager

found so disturbing, now seemed to her to be very fine things indeed. Her carriage was in the yard at Druitt Street. She hailed a hansom and did not need to cajole him into it. Her manner was what Arthur Phelps would label "bossy." She had the cab drive to the boarding house in Bathurst Street.

Lucinda was appalled by this boarding house. She was so affronted by the condition of life, by the filth on the floor, the lampblack streaking up the walls, by the slovenly appearance of the owner that-when the propriety of her visiting Mr Hopkins's room was raised by this "creature" she struck his desk top with her umbrella. She did not look closely at what she found in Mr Hopkins's room, although a half-empty bottle of colonial hock stayed in her memory. He had a trunk. She had the cabby bring it down and they drove to Druitt Street and, having transferred both passenger and luggage to her own vehicle, drove out to Longnose Point.

She left Scandal behind her. She drove Scandal in front of her. She did not care. She drove all her emotions through a tight funnel. She had the maid bring her hot water and bandages. She laid towels on her dining-room table and laid his injured hands on top of them. She imagined him wounded from fighting with his fists. The wounds were red, surrounded by purple; they opened yellow, like lips of skin. They were, she thought, like flowers of flesh, like banksias. She cleaned the pus from his wounds. He made high hooting noises like a nigh third. 71

The Strattons' Wager

If the Reverend Mr Stratton had been a horse you would not have bet on him. He would have had sweat foaming on his flank where it was obvious, not hidden in the secret folds of his woollen combinations. But horse or no, the signs were there for anyone

Oscar and Lucinda

with an eye to see them: a certain wildness in the eye, an inclination to bolt out of the gate before his wife had closed the door. He stamped around beside the gate while she came along the path.

"There is plenty of time, dear Hugh," she said, hurrying, just the same, along the path, arranging a scarf around her facefor although it was only September there was a cold wind blowing off the sea.

"By what clock?"

"We only have one clock, Hugh. We have not had two clocks for eight years."

"Nine years," said Hugh Stratton, holding out his arm. "That was my point."

"Then I do not understand the basis of your question. Please explain it to me," she said in that humble, neutral tone of which she was, secretly, so proud. She knew this was perhaps a risky tone to take with Hugh in such a fractious and nervous state, but she could not, even if she had wished to, respond in any other way.

"The basis of my question," said Hugh Stratton, who would see that Theophilus Hopkins lay in wait for them a little further up the hill, "is that we have one clock, while Tommy Parsons has quite another."

It was Tommy Parsons who drove a pony trap along the high road each day sometime between eight o'clock and nine o'clock. It was Tommy Parsons Mr Stratton was reliant on if he were to get to the races today at Newton Abbot.

'Tommy Parsons," said Mrs Stratton, "has, in all likelihood, no clock at all. I would be most surprised, Hugh, wouldn't you, to see Tommy Parsons with a clock." Hugh Stratton sighed bad-temperedly. "My point," he said, "my point, dear Betty, is that the little Methodist will not have a clock. He will have no idea of time at all. He could be cantering along the high road at this moment while we are here arguing about the time and, lookee, the Evangelical awaits us. He will make us later."

And indeed, Theophilus was now walking down his short path with his notebook in his hand. He pretended that he had not seen the Strattons at all and, so set was he on this deception, that he let them walk right through his gaze before he "saw" them.

"Ho," he said.

The Stations' Wager

"Ho," said Mr Stratton, but in a way that made Mrs Stratton give his arm a cautionary squeeze.

"Do you have news?"

"The mails have been bad," said Mrs Stratton. "It has taken two weeks for us to get our papers up from Oxford. I can't think what is causing it."

"Ah, yes," said Theophilus and, without attempting more conversation, stood there, looking at them both, nodding his head. He had a little lump of porridge in the corner of his mouth. It made him look neglected.

"And how is your health, Mr Hopkins?" asked Mrs Stratton.

"You must excuse us," said Mr Stratton.

"It is not yet eight," said Mrs Stratton who was always embarrassed by these meetings with Theophilus and, just because she would like to rush away, felt she must prolong them.

"Then go," said Theophilus in a loud voice which brought Mrs Williams's wild grey head to the window. "I do not seek to detain you."

"That is true," said Betty Stratton. "It is I who seek to detain you, whilst my husband takes the opposite position."

"Oh, help me," said Hugh Stratton.

Theophilus looked at Hugh Stratton as he always looked at him, as if he were a variety of beetle that God, in his infinite ineffable wisdom, had placed upon the earth. He saw the yellowed eyes, the livid skin, the deep creases like knife cuts beside his mouth. He saw the fury in his eyes and imagined it was because he had lost one more member of his congregation to the Plymouth Brethren. The Great Wolf himself must show just such a yellow-eyed rage when a lamb is placed safe inside the fold.

"You must excuse me," said Hugh Stratton, doffing his hat, "but my contrary position in the argument must place me on the highway." And, with a twisted smile which was not intended to be unfriendly but, given the turbulent state of his emotions, was all he could manage, he set off up the path and left his wife and Theophilus Hopkins in the tangled skeins of their mutual embarrassment.

Hugh Stratton carried one hundred and twenty-one pounds and sixteen shillings. The six shillings jingled in his trouser pocket. The soft leafy currency lay fat and soft and silent next to his heart. This was the sum of his wife's capital, the interest from which had hitherto allowed them some softening of their harsh

Oscar and Lucinda

position. It had paid for Mrs Stratton's periodicals, Mr Stratton's trips to Oxford, and a bottle of sherry once a week. Today he would apply this sum to the system supplied to him by young Master Hopkins.

Hugh Stratton was much impressed by what the system could provide, and never more so than when he had seen his protégé ensconced in luxury aboard the Leviathan. The image of those gold-leafed ornate columns had stayed a long time in his mind. And yet he was the wrong person to be setting off up the hill on his way to deal with bookmakers. He did not have the personality to control the system. His wife was thorough, dogged, calm, all those qualities she made clear to the world by her style of walking. Hugh Stratton on the other hand-everyone at Oxford had said so-had brilliant insights but never the patience to be a distinguished scholar, was always in too much of a hurry for a result, an effect, the reassurance that all his work was not being wasted on a fallacy.

Having decided that they would wager the whole of their financial foundation, Betty Stratton was quite capable of going round the racetracks in the proper manner, taking her time, slowly observing and collecting the information they would need to make Oscar's system work effectively, but Hugh-who felt he must control it-was too fearful to work properly. He made scrawling notes and could not read his writing. He watched a race and somehow saw nothing. He talked to a jockey but, so keen was he to appear expert, he would not ask an explanation of terms he did not understand.

And yet here he was on the way to the racecourse where he would throw their fortune into the maws of the bookmakers' bags. He believed the evening would see them wealthy, and yet he did not believe it sufficiently, and while the front of his expectations was bright and freshly painted, with red plush and fluted columns, there lurked, far beneath all this, like the memory of a dream involving rotting teeth, the knowledge that his preparation was inadequate. He could not bring himself to look at what was wrong. He must rush forward. He must not miss the pony trap. And if you saw his sweating lip, the angry stare in his eye, you would know that this was a man who had already decided to ruin himself and that only his wife, hurrying behind, with her body severely inclined from the vertical, still imagined that they might at last improve the financial conditions of their lives.

72

Mrs Smith

Lucinda had a maid, a Mrs Smith, a childless widow just turned thirty. She was not lively or talkative, but these qualities which Lucinda had once thought essential now seemed-after ten maids had come and gone inside twelve months-no longer so.

Mrs Smith was good at her job. She was small and thin, but you would not call her slight, for her limbs were strong like an athlete's and she liked to scrub, and beat, and sweep. She did this work silently, as if holding her breath. When she spoke, her eyes remained quite unengaged and the only thing that seemed to put them into gear was church. She was a Baptist. She did not find the house too lonely, although this had been a common complaint with her predecessors. She did not wish to go dancing at Manly or walking in the Domain. She wished only to have every sabbath to do what she described as her "Christian Duty" and she declared this so fiercely and belligerently that Lucinda imagined that Mrs Smith's religion was a jewel-bright and private room where an Anglican's presence would not be welcome.

The normal terms were fifteen shillings a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening off, and one free night a week. But Lucinda did not try to bargain. She offered Mrs Smith sixteen shillings a week and agreed to her terms. Mrs Smith said she would give the extra shilling to the Lord.

The arrangement was not cheerful but it was practical. The silver was properly cleaned and there was none of that bitter tasting crust on the fork tines that had so distinguished the tenure of the ninth maid.

The bathroom smelt of bright and pungent patent formulae. Waves of ammonia seemed to emanate from the waterside windows which were always, no matter what the weather, sparkling clean. And if the house became slightly hostile and chemical by day, this was conquered in the night by the rich aromas of the stews which were Mrs Smith's great skill. The stews were a surprise. There is something wild and

Oscar and Lucinda

generous abut the better stews. They are best put together on the winds of impulse, guided by the compass of intuition. These were all qualities that Mrs Smith would have appeared to lack. You would expect something thin and watery from her pot. There was no indication that this was a woman who threw her herbs in by the stalkful, cut her meat big and would know whether the fungus she found on the borders of Whitefield's paddocks could be eaten even if it were a poisonouslooking yellow and shaped like a lady's fan.

When Oscar Hopkins was brought into the house, Mrs Smith, similarly, showed herself to be not mean as her mouth suggested but both compassionate and practical. It did not occur to her to question the propriety of introducing a man into a house occupied by single women. She saw nothing untoward with him being attended to on the diningroom table. She fetched towels from the linen press and she got good thick ones lest the heat from the water she had been asked to boil should damage the French polishing.

Of course, she did not know who Oscar Hopkins was. She did not know he was a scandal. She saw his hands and, having more experience of the agonies of prayer than her mistress, recognized those half-moon-shaped infections. She tore up a cotton chemise-really still too good to throw away, but of the right softness and texture for cleaning wounds-and then she stood back, her arms folded, her head on one side, her eyes apparently as neutral of expression as a bird's and watched her mistress tend to the man.

She did not say anything in front of the man, but her face softened a fraction as she fitted her bigfingered hands together, rocking one hand back and forth on the tines of the other. In the kitchen she whispered to Lucinda: "Them cuts was made by praying," And she demonstrated how this might be done, shutting her eyes while doing so. Lucinda was repulsed and excited by this fervent prayerfulness. It seemed alien, popish, like Italian paintings of the torture of saints. She felt judged by it. She respected it, perhaps excessively, she who thought the kneelers at Balmain not soft enough. She found the iodine behind the cochineal where Prucilla Twopenny had hidden it.

The iodine hurt him, and when Lucinda would not bear to be the agent of more torture, it was Mrs Smith who took over the medication. She bound the young man's hands and asked him did he think he could manage to hold a mug of cocoa.

It was also Mrs Smith who made up the bed for Oscar. It would seem

I

Mrs Smith

the question of it being sinful had not entered her mind at that stage. Indeed it did not enter until she had been to church on Sunday.

On the Saturday she waited on them both, bringing toast and porridge to the little room upstairs, which looked through the thin grey veil of gum trees to the cobalt blue of the Parramatta River. Mrs Smith was in no way censorious. Indeed Lucinda was touched to see how bright and excited she was. You could imagine how she might be as a wife with a husband, or a mother with a son. She bullied him gently into taking golden syrup on his porridge and, with her luscious spoon held above the young man's plate, smiled conspiratorially at her mistress across the table. In this nectar drop of time, Lucinda was moved. She thought: I am happy. There were cockatoos on Cockatoo Island in those days, and they brought their shrieks and tearing beaks to breakfast on the Monday. They gathered in the Morton Bay fig on the south side of the house and made Lucinda laugh when they raised their yellow crests or waddled selfimportantly along its smooth-skinned, wrinkly-elbowed branches. It was then that Mrs Smith requested a word and Lucinda, having no indication from the face, went with her innocently, imagining that they were to confer on some domestic matter or that she was being asked to declare a holiday for Pentecost or Ash Wednesday. She went, still holding her napkin.

Mrs Smith could not carry her emotions as far as the front parlour. She got as far as the bottom of the stairs when she turned abruptly and said: "I cannot stay, mum. Not while you comport youself in such a way, mum."

"In what way?" Lucinda felt nothing but confusion as though she had been riding a trap which has, quite silently, lost a wheel, and there she was tipped over in the rock-studded roadside when the minute before she had been reclining on a cushion and thinking dreamy thoughts about the shape of clouds.

"The 'gentleman,' " said Mrs Smith. It was all she could manage. It was as if the word itself would choke her.

"But, Mrs Smith, it was you who made up his bed. And as you are in the house yourself, it seems to be perfectly proper."

"Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own."

"Have your friends at church been speaking to you?"

But Mrs Smith would not answer so direct a question and her eyes took on a dark and hard and glittering righteousness. She lifted her

Oscar and Lucinda

chin and clasped her hands in front of her pinafore. The passage where they stood was a dank place. Neither of them moved for a good two minutes.

When Lucinda returned to sit opposite Oscar at the table, he did not immediately notice the distress in her face. He noticed, rather, that she had tied her napkin in a large hard knot which she could not, no matter how she plucked at it, untangle.

73

Judge Not

If you saw Mrs Smith with her dun-coloured shawl around her shoulders, her cane basket in the crook of her wiry arm, saw her come up the hill past the butcher's in Mort Street, Balmain, you might remark, if you remarked anything at all, that here was a woman that kept the shutters of her life screwed shut, who kept herself close to the wall as she walked, and thus occupied that thin strip of dry shadow when all the rest of the street was wet with sunshine. A private women, you would think, until you found something livelier to interest you (therea tinker sitting in the gutter mending a tiny saucepan with a burnt black handle) and then you could forget her. And yet, three days after Mrs Smith had left Luanda's employ, there was not a maid in Sydney who did not know of the unorthodox situation out at Whitfield's Farm. This did not mean that there were no further maids or cooks available, but rather than the ones who put themselves forward were opportunists who imagined that they could, given the impropriety in the house, request a premium for their services. There was not one who asked for less than a guinea a week. This was offensive enough. But there were other things, not easily graspable, about their attitude-for while they swindled, or attempted swindling, they adopted an expression (all in the eyes and mouth) of moral superiority.

Judge Not

These interviews left Lucinda feeling soiled and angry, and she would have had no help at all had not Mrs Froud stepped forward.

Mrs Froud was the wife of Lucinda's second gatherer. She came to "do" two afternoons a week. Mrs Froud was jolly and friendly, but you could see-or so it seemed to Lucinda-that she had made an assumption. This assumption was quite incorrect. There was nothing to make an assumption about.

Oscar lay in his room and sucked his sheet. He wrote to Mr Stratton about the dangers of gambling life.

My dear Patron, [he wrote] 1 cannot help but have the greatest reservations about the serpent I have placed in your trusting at a time when I knew too well the effects of its poison. I sent my journals to you because I promised you, and now I beg you to make a promise: burn them. I regret the day 1 ftrst set foot upon the track. Opium, surely, would not be so great a curse. This will all seem far-fetched to you, but let me tell you that at this moment I am kindly lodged by a fellow sufferer, and although we inhabit a small house, no bigger than my father's cottage, we hardly speak to one another for fear that something that we say or do will lead to a horse, a game of cards and we shall, without intending to, hnd ourselves once more in that state of mad intoxication.

There were pages of it, all pretty much the same. They reflected Oscar's idea of what was happening in the house, but what was so obvious to him was not obvious to Lucinda at all. While he shrank from conversation, wary of where it might lead, she had hoped for it. While he tried to diminish himself, to make himself small and inoffensive, she sat at table and waited for him to join her. She did not like to go running to his room continually, and yet she could not leave him there alone. She imagined he was gripped by loneliness. She saw he did not hate her, and yet she felt him pulling back. The reason for this presented itself to her one night while she was preparing for bed.

He thinks I have him in mind for a husband.

It was only to set his mind at rest that she invented the romantic story of her passion for a clergyman whom Bishop Dancer had so cruelly exiled to Boat Harbour. She wished to make him imagine that her heart was already spoken for, that all she required from him was company and conversation. She wished him calm, steady, and to quit all this nervous scuttling about the house. But she told her story to a man whose emotions were in such a state that he could barely hold the load they carried, let alone the unhappy

?RH

Oscar and Luanda

story she asked him to lash on atop. He was much moved, too moved. It was ridiculous, he knew-he hardly knew her-but it took everything in him to stop bursting into tears. He chewed his lip, he grimaced, he excused himself while there was still sultana cake uneaten on the plate. She heard him creaking up the stairs. The door shut to his room. She picked up her tea-cup and threw it at the wall.

74

A Degree from Oxford

"This chap, Miss Leplastrier, is he any good?"

Mr d'Abbs held her eye quite fiercely for a minute, but he could not sustain. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. And while he enjoyed being thought of in this way-it was no commercial liability in Sydney-it was not the truth at all. He might let her glassworks go cold through timidity or cautiousness, but he would not break the law.

"He has a degree from Oxford."

"Oxford," said Mr d'Abbs. He was pleased, but did not wish to appear impressionable. His hands-large hands for such a small manplayed briefly with his blue silk tie, then held the edge of the desk, then slid until they found the drawer, and in the drawer a cigar. The cigar was such a big one that Lucinda, when she saw it, thought it made him look like a caricature in Punch.

"Oriel," she offered.

Mr d'Abbs blinked. He leaned forward a little as if he expected her to say more. When there was obviously no more to say, he frowned. "It is not just a question of clever men," he said. He fussed with some grey ash which had landed on his green corduroy jacket. "Really, there is no cleverness required. The work itself would drive him mad with boredom. All it requires is neatness. So why do you come to me with a man from Oxford?"

A Degree from Oxford

Mr d'Abbs really wanted to be flattered. He prided himself on his employees as he prided himself on the paintings and lithographs that crowded his walls at home. He was an artist himself. He liked artists. He was a philosopher. He liked philosophers. He provided them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

He could not tell anyone, not even his wife, what pleasure it gave him to know that now, at this instant, in the clerk's room next door, he had Mr Jeffris the poet and surveyor, Mr Trevis-Dawes the pianist, Mr Coyle the water-colourist whose views of Pittwater and the Hawkesbury adorned the cedar panels of his office. He did not wish to talk to them, and he certainly did not socialize with them. But he was very pleased, more pleased about this than anything, that they were there.

"So why come to me?"

"Oh, Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, "do not tease me." 'Tease?" said Mr d'Abbs, looking pleased. He relit his cigar and sent clouds of smoke into the air. "You told me yourself about your Mr Cloverdale." "Speaks Hindi, that's correct. It is absolutely no use to him in Sydney. But he is an honest man, Miss Leplastrier, and neat."

Lucinda assured him of Oscar's character. She said nothing of gambling. (She should say. She would not.) Mr d'Abbs was now explaining that money was kept in the office. He stood, took out a big bunch of noisy keys from his pocket, and opened the safe with one of them. He showed her money. There was ten thousand pounds in his safe. He showed her the money to stress the importance of honesty, but the other reason, the real reason, was that he could not believe it was him, little Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs's boy, who was standing in his own office in the colony of New South Wales, a cigar in one hand, ten thousand pounds in the other. "Fancy that," he said.

The things that moved Mr d'Abbs were clear to Lucinda. Sh was embarrassed for him, not that he should be so pleased about himself, but that he should reveal his pleasure so clearly, that he should stand naked at his bathroom window, not knowing he had an audience for all his imperfections.

"He knows Latin," she said, "and Greek." Mr d'Abbs looked up at her and blinked. He smiled and tapped a wad of banknotes against the back of his wrist.

"He has excellent references from his London employer. He was a schoolteacher." She spoke quickly, leaning forward, listing his achievements until she had said Greek three times and Latin twice. She spoke

7R7

Oscar and Lucinda

on and on, not because she wished to exaggerate Oscar Hopkins's attainments, but in order that she be too busy to notice the private reverence Mr d'Abbs showed the wad of currency-the one bright colour in this room of sombre water-colours.

Lucinda held her hands together. It gave her the appearance of "imploring." Her little shoulders were uncharacteristically rounded and Mr d'Abbs, without knowing quite what had triggered it, felt a stirring of the loins.

Others found Miss Leplastrier attractive. Absalom had taken a fancy to her. Old Gerald MacKay had dubbed her the "Pocket Venus" and sworn he would have her for wife. But Mr d'Abbs, if you discount that unfortunate occasion when he had placed his hand on her knee, had forgotten how to see her in this light. Their friendship at the card table had continued, but in business he found her the complete shrew. When she had returned from England she had thumped his desk with her little fist.