Oscar and Lucinda

But today he found her very "girlish." He could imagine this young Hopkins being smitten with her. She had a soft white neck.

He tossed the banknotes into the safe-thwack, ding, money's nothing to me-and locked its door with a heavy brass key. He returned to his new squeaky leather chair to hear how she would manage to tell the story of her involvement with this defrocked priest whom she now sought to recommend to him.

Well, she could not tell it, of course. She might slam her fist on his desk or drink Scotch whisky from a crystal tumbler, but she could not tell him about this one face to face. Jimmy d'Abbs knew the story. Of course he did. He was not a member of Tattersall's, the Masons and the Sydney Club for nothing. He smiled and nodded encouragement, but she told him nothing, and there was no hint, no rumpling of her white starched collar to suggest the amours he imagined her conducting with the priest in the tangled privacy of her bed. Lucinda found it hard to look Mr d'Abbs in the eye. She felt her cheeks colouring but could not stop them. She told Oscar's story without mentioning cards or horses. Mr d'Abbs noted the omission but was unconcerned. One could gamble and be honest. He gambled. He played most games a gentleman would play.

He asked her would she be so kind as to have Mr Hopkins supply a sample of his handwriting.

"What shall I have him write?"

"Some Latin," he said, "a little arithmetic." He placed the

Heads or Tails cigar in the ashtray so it might go out. "Some Greek." ••«*• •>": f'j

"Greek?"

Don't frown at me, young lady. "Greek," he said. He would like the Greek as he had once liked Mr Jeffris's trigonometry. What other accountant would demand a sample of your trigonometry?

The thought of Mr Jeffris-who was his head clerk these days-made him uneasy. Mr Jeffris did not like him to employ new clerks without consultation. This was fair. They had agreed on it. But was it not Mr d'Abbs's own practice? Was not that his own name on the door? Did he not have the right to employ whomever he liked without there being doors slammed and ultimatums issued?

"There is no hurry," he told Lucinda.

But when she arrived at Longnose Point that night, she brought a present with her. It was wrapped in maroon tissue paper from a Pitt Street stationer's-ink, a new nib, and three loose sheets of ledger paper.

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Heads or Tails

Lucinda had painted a picture of Mr d'Abbs. She had made him a shy creature, a dormouse with a waistcoat and a gold chain. Oscar had imagined a small pink nose all aquiver, seen his hands go to his face as he attended to his nervous toilet. He had gone to the meeting full of tenderness for Mr d'Abbs, not merely for his timidity, but for his Christian charity, that he should risk his own business name by employing a man in such public disgrace. But when he came, at last, to sit in Mr d'Abbs's office, he found that Mr d'Abbs was not a shy man at all, or if he was, his shyness was of a highly selective quality, was sensitive to distinctions of sex, perhaps, and rank, certainly, just as the Chinese are so attuned to the pitch of the human voice that one can ask directions to

Oscar and Lucinda

Li-Po, for instance, and not be understood until one's pitch is perfect. It was the eleventh day of October and early in the afternoon. Rain drove against Mr d'Abbs's window and although the Venetian blinds were fully hoisted the sky was so dark and bruised that it was necessary to light a lamp. The office looked across at the windows of other offices in which there were also lamps lit. Oscar listened to the thunder and imagined he would soon have his shirt sodden and clinging to his skin.

"You have no hand," said Mr d'Abbs. "You have no hand that would be worth a damn to anyone."

Oscar sat on the edge of his chair. He was aware of the spots on his trousers. His attempts at cleaning them had made them worse. They were dark spots ringed with watermarks. He felt them to be visible badges of his disgrace. And although he had warned himself about the dangers of fidgeting, when Mr d'Abbs peered bad-temperedly across the desk, Oscar could not stop himself from rubbing at his trousers with the back of his thumbnail.

He put his head on one side and looked at Mr d'Abbs.

Mr d'Abbs was accustomed to unconventional men. Indeed he collected them-artists, poets, philosophers-it was the great pride of his life that he could provide them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

But this was not an artist. This was a clergyman. He had expected someone at once broader and tidier. He had not expected "artistic" qualities in a sacked clergyman. This was a very queer chap, and Mr d'Abbs gazed at him quite openly, astonished to think that it was this uncombed stick-limbed fellow, this grasshopper, who had finally cracked the defences of she whom Gerald MacKay had dubbed "our pocket Venus."

White hailstones danced on the window ledge. There was a wild whinny from a panicked horse in the laneway below. Mr d'Abbs stretched his legs under the desk, crossed his thin white ankles, and wished he had never been so rash as to promise anything to Miss Lucinda Leplastrier. The priest's sample penmanship was still uncrumpling-he could hear it now-in the wastepaper basket beside his chair.

"I have seen some bad hands," said Mr d'Abbs.

"Indeed," said Oscar, crossing his ankle over his knee, then realizing that it showed his stocking and that, in any case, it was not the correct pose for an employee, he put his foot squarely on the floor. "Indeed, I would imagine you had."

Heads or Tails

"Well, before all this," said Mr d'Abbs, waving his hand grandly although there was not a great deal in the office to wave grandly at. "My own brother, now there's a fellow." And Mr d'Abbs saw, with his mind's eye, what Oscar could not even guess, a boy with his arms all itchy from those tiny red mites that were known as "harvesters" they came at harvest time and dug deep into the skin. They were a great discomfort. They were worse than thistles bound up in the oat sheaves.

"He was left-handed, like yourself," said Mr d'Abbs, recreating his brother contorted around his pen. "But they changed him over, you see. He was perhaps a little.old when they tried, for although my mater was a determined woman, it never really took. It mattered not so greatly to my brother, but for you, sir, in your previous profession. ." Oscar blushed bright and painful red at the memory of his "profession." He had thought it a secret in this context. Now he bowed his head under the weight of the shame. "Yes," he said, making himself look Mr d'Abbs in the eye, "it is a great inconvenience." Mr d'Abbs named this look a "glare." He thought it quite alarming. Oscar smiled.

Mr d'Abbs found a cigar in his drawer. It was crumbly, decidedly crumbly. He brought it out anyway and placed it on the blotter. "An inconvenience, sir. Indeed, a great inconvenience. I knew a parson in Basingstoke who was left-handed and could never hold a living, for once they saw him hold the sacrament in his left hand, they would not have him, and they would be off to the bishop, clipclop, and back again with a new chap."

Oscar saw Mr Judd riding off down the road, Mrs Judd behind on a big-bellied sway-back. Clipclop.

"Ah, now you smile, you see, but I warrant you never had a living in the English countryside." "I never did."

"I know you never did, sir. You would not have smiled had you done so. I met a witch in Mousehole, in Cornwall. She shook hands with me as though she were a man. You could not be a left-handed parson in those parts. You know your Latin? Sinister?" "Sinister, sinistu, sinistu, sinistrum, sinistris." "Sinistartorium, said Mr D'Abbs. He got his left hand into his drawer. He found the cigar clipper. "The ablative?" Mr d'Abbs did not answer, but he looked up, he appeared most

291

Oscar and Lucinda

pleased. "Well/' he said, "there is no Latin here, although my head clerk, Mr Jeffris, has a fondness for the classics. But what will we do with you? You smudge. I may possibly tolerate you, but Jeffris is a fiend. He will box your ears. No, sir, I am not assuming the poetic. I describe the action. It is prehistoric. It is proof of the ape in us if ever I saw it. One moment a civilized man and the next an animal. And yet he is such a genius at this work that I must permit him, for a good clerk is the secret of any successful practice. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It is the poor clerks with their celluloid cuffs who allow us gentlemen time for our club or leisure to dine at Government House. It is the clerks, sir, and I am not a radical. My observation is scientific. My task is to stand at the wheel, to tip the rudder a smidgin this way, a fraction that, and yet what will I do? Are you up to the job? It is different work from praying." Oscar could think of no way to answer such a question. He rubbed his hair. He found a piece of twig in it, caught there from his morning walk on Longnose Point. He pulled it out and looked at it-a gum twig three inches long.

"I hope you are up to it," said Mr d'Abbs, gazing at the twig and cocking his head. There was a little silence. Oscar put the twig in his pocket.

"I hope you are up to it, because if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man-and you probably won't see that, in your position, eh, that the act of employment is itself unpleasant?if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man, it is telling him that he can be employed no more."

Mr d'Abbs's leather chair was new and slippery and he had, whilst talking, slipped down in it, but now he sat up, fussed with his lapels, tugged at his silk tie and placed his corduroy elbows on the desk.

"You would not believe the scenes this little room has witnessed, Mr Hopkins. Men you would imagine civilized, men from Merton and Oriel, astronomers, masters of poetics-they have sat there, exactly where you sit and have threatened attacks on me, my chldren, my property. Gentlemen, too, or so they pretended, and next thing you know they are threatening me with litigation and saying they have friends in Government House and so on. And it does not matter that I have long before, well before, had a calm chat with just as I am having one with you, that I have explained the unpleasantness and worry. It all makes no difference in the end. But, please, write this down when you leave here today. Make a note of what I say to you, and when 292

Heads or Tails

Mr Jeffris finds that you do not meet his standards and you feel the inclination to throw a brick through my bedroom window, refer to your notes."

It was only when Mr d'Abbs stood up and held out his hand that Oscar realized he had been employed as a clerk. He should have been happy, but he was not. He felt no elation, only anxiety as to what would befall him.

"Well," said Mr d'Abbs and picked up the bell from his desk. He swung it, and he hoped the impression was that he swung it gaily. He did not, however, feel at all gay. For now he would have to endure Mr Jeffris's revenge for employing the chap. There would be days, perhaps months, of doors slammed, papers thrown, compressed lips, monosyllabic answers, a series of jarring chords and drumbeats, which would lead, in the end, to the scarecrow's dismissal. He put the bell back on his desk and looked at his new clerk. The fellow was tapping his left foot and jiggling the coins in his right pocket-a combination of activities which gave him an unusual stance, the pelvis forward, the right shoulder dropped down, and the whole of this topped by a gruesome smile, the intention of which was not at all clear.

Oscar had very few coins in his pocket. There were two pennies, great big coins-six would make an ounce-and three threepencescoins so light you would never feel their weight in an empty pocket. Now he pulled out a penny and looked at it. He did this so innocuously that Mr d'Abbs, who was staring at him, imagined that the simpleton was merely curious to see what had been making the din in his pocket. Mr d'Abbs hardly thought about it. But when the lopsided clerk jerked the penny in the air and caught it-snap-Mr d'Abbs thought about it then, by Jove he did. But as the only thing the action resembled was a person tossing heads or tails and, even though this might fit the character of a gambler, it did not match his demeanour, nor did it sit with the situation, the office, the interview, the money in the safe, the cigar in the drawer, the clerks next door, and so even when Oscar examined the coin on the back of his hand, Mr d'Abbs concluded that it was simply a nervous habit, like jiggling a leg or pulling sticks out of your head, unfortunate, but no more than the sort of eccentricity Miss Leplastrier would find-who could doubt it? — a positive recommendation of character. He sighed.

Oscar heard the sigh. He let it stand for the one he would like to make. The penny was a sign from God.

Heads.

He had to take the job.

293

76

Mr Smudge

Mr Jeffris did not biff him. He had expected to be biffed and yet he was not, not all the time he worked there. Neither did he see any of the other clerks-there were twenty of them in that long thin roomreceive anything more than-and this was in one case only-a sharp tug to the nose and as this assault was inflicted on the very youngest of the clerks and occasioned great laughter, even from the victim, it might not seem, in the telling, so bad a thing.

And yet there was about that room an almost unbearable tension, and if there was no actual biffing, one lived with the possibility of a biffing and it was this, Oscar thought when the whole nightmare was ended, that made working under Mr Jeffris such a tiring business that no sooner had he eaten his evening meal than he wished to sleep and would, if circumstances permitted, go a full ten hours without stirring.

His muscles were kept tense and tight all day, and yet no one threatened, and there was not a word to say on the subject of biffing. There were, in fact, very few words said on any subject at all, and although Mr Jeffris did not declare a policy to him, it was obvious after the first hour that he did not wish one clerk to talk to another and Oscar had the feeling, on entering the office, that it was not unlike an omnibus in which people travel every day and the passengers, having become familiar with each other, may exchange a nod (or perhaps not) but will not really acknowledge their community until there is a tragedy or a humorous mishap. When this arrives they will express their solidarity through laughter. Oscar provided an opportunity almost immediately.

Mr d'Abbs had rung the bell, not gaily at all, but sharply, nervously. He had introduced Mr Jeffris who did not, on first impression, seem in the least prehistoric. As for being proof of the ape in man, Oscar could not see it. Mr Jeffris was a young man, no older than Oscar, with the moustache and bearing of a Guards officer although, being just a fraction shorter than Mr d'Abbs, he was too small to have met the

9CU

Mr Smudge

physical requirements. He had jet-black hair and apart from the moustache-a thicker, deeper one than Mr d'Abbs-was cleanshaven. He had a dimpled chin and a blue cast to his very white skin. Mr Jeffris did not smile, but he did not scowl. He hardly moved his face at all, and yet he communicated the most colossal and even dangerous passion. It was all in there, expressed in the gap between the angry intensity in the eyes and the very still, leashed-in quality of the muscled body.

Mr Jeffris was very civil to Mr Hopkins. He led him into the clerks' room. This was a long office with a big stove in the middle. The black chimney traced an unexpectedly long route on its way to the wall, a long dog-leg, and you could see by the way the desks were arranged along its route, that it gave off a much-desired heat in winter and that, in its journey from hot to cold, it also indicated the rank of the clerk, Mr Jeffris being close to the stove and the youngest clerks well away. Oscar noticed the eccentricity of the flue, but did not understand it. He was more surprised by the expensive mauve and brown wallpaper (on the one hand) and the bare paint-speckled floor (on the other). It did not quite fit, and although no one bothered to tell him, it was because the previous tenants, very successful lawyers, had taken their carpet with them. The thing that made the greatest impression; on Oscar was the depth of the room which only had five windows, all of them at the Sussex Street end, and so he was surprised to be led towards the light and to be given a desk next to the window from: where he had a view, not only of the interesting iron-wheeled, cobblestoned goings-on in Sussex Street itself, but the muddled little jig; saw pieces of Darling Harbour which were visible at the end of two alleyways across the way. He could see the smokestack of Prince Rupert's Glassworks, too.

When he was shown this desk Oscar feared that he was being unduly favoured. He did not wish to make enemies so easily.

"But this, surely," he said to Mr Jeffris, "is far too fine a desk for me?" He said this in a whisper, for the room was very quiet, but just the same it produced a nasty roar of laughter. There was scraping of chairs, coughing, snorts, wheezes, a barnyard. Oscar's cheeks went flat like potters'

clay slapped hard with a paddle. He looked at Mr Jeffris who was biting his moustache. Then he looked at the other clerks who had already stopped. No one looked his way. He thought: I will not put up with this rudeness.:

Then he thought: I must. The fine spider-web capillaries in his cheeks were awash with blood. 295

Oscar and Lucinda

He sat at his desk, finding something in its sticky wax surface that was repellent to his fingers. He clasped his hands in his lap. The urge to stand up and walk away was still very strong. It came on him in waves like stomach-ache. Mr Jeff ris gave him three musty-smelling journals with moth-eaten leather spines. These were the debtors journals for John Hill & Co., John Bell (Homoeopathic Chemists) and Senior's, also chemists but making no claim to homoeopathy. Oscar was not a snob about commerce, but it was completely alien to him. When he saw the books he felt that he would never understand them. Mr Jeffris gave him the business's receipt books and asked that these receipts be transcribed into the journals. And although you might not think this so foreign an activity for a young man with a passion for racehorse journals, he did not see the similarity. He felt only despair that life could be passed in so low and slow and meaningless a manner. Mr Jeffris gave him a pen with a new nib, a pot of ink, and a sheet of pink blottingpaper which seemed, perhaps due to its colour, but then again perhaps not, to produce a fit of coughing and scraping amongst his fellow workers.

And that was how Oscar was employed. He tried to feel grateful. He sat on a hard wooden chair with no cushion, at a table with a wobbly leg which sometimes contributed to his smudges and blots. He found the work trying and the hours too long. Nothing in Hennacombe, in Oxford, in Netting Hill, at Randwick, had been so stultifying. As a clergyman he had enjoyed his mornings at the desk. He had drunk a little jasmine tea while he thought about the most demanding duty of his week-his sermon. Nothing had prepared him for the flavour of something so dull and mean. He wrote down the names of items he could not imagine and, in columns next to them, prices he could not afford to pay.

He transcribed Shower Baths.

Slipper Baths.

Hip Baths.

Foot Baths.!>

He entered Bagatelle Boards.»

Chiffoniers. -

Superfine.,

Millefleurs Powder.

And he sweated in the harsh afternoon sunshine which blazed across his desk and every day became hotter and hotter. He did not ask for a curtain. He knew what rude laughter would accompany the request. He would end his days with no feeling of release, but with a dull

1Q£.

Mr Smudge

headache and his shirt sticking unpleasantly to his skin. His dreams shrank until they could accommodate no larger idea than a curtain, or a crisply folded poplin shirt. He only had two shirts. The white one he wore for two days, the blue one he wore for three. And although he bathed three times a week and changed his collar daily, his shirts smelt like the old rags Mrs Williams kept in a bucket in the scullery in Hennacombe. The smell was remarked on by his fellow workers without anything ever being said. It happened, somehow, in the silence, although

"silence" is perhaps the wrong term. It was more that there was a pressure of silence, a lid of silence beneath which there were odd and secret stirrings of sound.

The Reverend Oscar Hopkins sat in his own stink above a dungfowled Sydney street suffering alternate waves of anger and depression which could be triggered by a blow-fly trapped behind sun-bright glass or the bells of St John's at Pyrmont, or St Andrew's in the city. He had told the Ecclesiastical Commission that his gambling had not been covetous, but he had not acquitted himself well. He had been nervous, overpowered by their confidence and authority. He had felt himself to be as venal as they imagined him to be. His voice had shaken as he stood before them, bishops in purple drinking tea from floral cups. He had said that he had never gambled for personal gain, and they simply did not believe him. And so he was cast out, spat upon, become anathema.

Mr Jeffris called him Mr Smudge. This was thought to be a great joke. He was appointed as clerk responsible for mixing ink, a messy job which ruined his shirt cuffs and had him going home each Monday night with ink soaked so deeply into his skin it took a pumice stone to remove it, or remove most of it, for even after a long and painful rubbing, a shadow still remained, a blue cast lay on his skin and he named it, joking to Lucinda, as his Monday Shadow. Elizabeth Leplastrier's daughter was not tolerant of his messy style his blue ink, the unpleasant smell of the shirts. And yet she thought it her Christian duty to assist him and so she laboured with him (not altogether graciously) on Saturday morning, stirring his clothes in the copper. Her face was wet with steam. Her eyes stung with smoke. He dripped boiling water all around him, splashing her, splashing himself, ooh-ing and ouch-ing as he thwacked the blue shirt and the white shirt down into the trough.

He was not manually dextrous, that much was obvious. He went at things in too much of a rush to do them neatly. He was ungainly, made bony angles, would hurt himself badly

Oscar and Lucinda

should he have ever needed to work in a glassworks.

Lucinda was interested in the way men made things, how they organized themselves. She sat her guest down in her kitchen and questioned him about the way in which the ink was manufactured. He surprised her with the fastidious nature of his answer-it did not fit in with all the shirt thwacking and dripping water.

To make the ink he must first take a brown paper bag of ink powder, a little metal cup, and a large bottle. He must carry these utensils to the alleyway which ran through the heart of the building. In the alleyway was a tap. There were other taps in the building, of course, but it was forbidden-there were signs above the taps expressly forbidding it-to make ink at these basins. No, he must go into the laneway which served as a thoroughfare, not only for snot-nosed message boys cutting through from Kent to Sussex Street, but also for the wagons and drays from the wheelwright who occupied the tangled courtyard in the centre of the building. Wind blew along this alley way even in the most clement weather and the tap was one of those widemouthed types with a lot of air in its gurgle, "all wind and no water" as a passing rag-andbone man observed to him. Here, crouching against the urine-sour brick wall, Theophilus Hopkins's son, now twenty-one years old, an age at which his father had already published two distinguished monographs, must measure out the ink powder from its paper bag with a flat steel spatula and transfer it, guessing the quantity, into a metal cup. This was not only menial, it was not easy. Ink powder blew in the wind. Specks of stinging pigment lodged in his already baleful bloodshot eyes. He must mix the powder into paste in the cup. The tap gurgled, spluttered, splashed. The spatula handle became wet, then blue. The blue was now on his hands, his face, and still he must dilute the sludge so it would pour, and then transfer it to the ink bottle and then, if there was time, and they had not sent young Summers down to tell him to hurry up, that the ink was needed as quickly as you like now, Mr Smudge, he would wash.

He made Lucinda laugh, but when the froth had subsided she was left with a black and slightly bitter taste, and this scene did not fit with her idea of Mr d'Abbs, who, no matter what his frailties and vanities, she had always thought of as a kindly man, not one to subject another human being to comic indignity.

She had many things to worry about at that time, things she would, herself, have imagined to be more important to her than her nervous, ink-stained lodger.

But she could not bear that he be called Mr Smudge. It was wrong

Mr Smudge

of him to tolerate it, and worse that he should joke about it. The gurgling tap stayed with her. She saw it clearly: its wide grey mouth, its verdigrised brass cock. It produced a feeling well out of proportion to its weight. It was she who was the author of this situation and she accepted more blame than she thought she should. She took it on herself while judging herself foolish for doing so. And when she had far more weighty matters to occupy herself with, she left her own office (just a little down Sussex, before Druitt) and walked-her back straight, her steps brisk and businesslike-down the alleyway towards the

wheelwright's.

The tap was on the south wall. She had imagined the north. There was a smell-men's urine-which would normally have made her quicken her step, certainly not stand still. There was no brass in the tap at all. It was a dull grey thing, a fat and ugly machine, dull grey, streaked with ink, the source, it seemed, of the drunk-man smell.

She turned it on, then off. Her lower lip was tucked in tight. She splashed her shoes. If Mr d'Abbs used his poets and his astronomers thus, he was not even a shadow of the man he posed as, but a barbarian like the rest of them.

Lucinda was suddenly very angry. She did not like her shoes wet. She would see the room wherein her friend, the "aesthete," the Medici, housed his poets. It was, perchance, a stable, a cupboard, a chookhouse, the bottom of a well.

She went up the cedar-panelled stairs towards the offices and found Mr d'Abbs (he must have passed her whilst she fiddled with the tap) on the stairs ahead of her. He looked at her wet shoes, but said nothing about the cause of it. Indeed, they travelled together all the way to Mr d'Abbs's anteroom without having said so much as a "Good morning." Mr d'Abbs was flustered. Lucinda imagined this related, somehow, to the tap. But he had not seen her at the tap. He was flustered because he did not like the routine of his arrival interfered with. He was not expecting Miss Leplastrier. He did not like what he did not expect. He was, in effect, receiving her. Yet it was not his job to receive. It was Mr Jeffris's entitlement, and this had been settled long ago. Now he was unsure of whether to go into his office and leave Miss Leplastrier in the anteroom or to usher her in irrespective of the rules; but then it seemed she did not wish to see his office, anyway. She would inspect the clerks' room.

Oh no, she would not, not on your nelly.

The anteroom was very small, and although its couch was

Oscar and Lucinda

comfortable enough and it had an ashtray, a brass spittoon and a copy of the London Illustrated News, it was hardly bigger than the carriage in which Mr d'Abbs had been driven to the city. They stood, therefore, very close together, both made uncomfortable by such intimate confinement with a member of the opposite sex.

'There can be no question," he said, making a fuss of placing his unbrella on the stand intended solely for the use of visits, checking his cuffs, and smiling in the direction of his client's shoulder (not in calm sequence either, but as if he were a machine with some part not securely connected and he wished, against the rules of his own manufacture, to do all three things at once). "There can be no question of you disturbing the clerks."

Lucinda nearly invented some excuse. Then she thought, No, I shall not demean myself by lying. She drew her shoulders back and tried to find his eye. She explained she wished to see the conditions under which the clerks laboured.

Mr d'Abbs thought: Ha!

He judged the woman smitten. And whilst this explanation made him smirk (she wished to see lover-boy, that was all) it afforded no relief.

She put her busybody little hand on the door of the clerks' room. This door had a small enamelled sign. It said "Private." There was a small chip out of the "e," but the meaning was clear. Mr d'Abbs stared at the sign as if the sheer intensity of his staring could force Miss Leplastrier to obey it. But she turned the rattly little knob in spite of him. Dash it. He would tell her the truth. He would, in effect, throw himself on her mercy. You could do this with a woman. She would understand his agreement with Mr Jeff ris. It was not an agreement at all. It was never spoken of, but it was understood that this, on the other side of the door, was Mr Jeffris's territory. Not even Mr d'Abbs, the, captain of the ship, entered this room. If he wished ledgers brought into his office, he rang. }

"Come, Miss Leplastrier," he said good-humouredly, and 1 opened the door leading to his own office. "Come. We will have tea brought to us."

But behind his back he heard a little "snick."

Lucinda stepped into the clerks' room. There were so many men in there, and rows of desks. It was not such a bad office, better than her own. She noted the big stove, the wallpaper. It seemed ordered and businesslike, although a little dim. She saw a little man-no taller than herself-come walking towards her. She wondered where Oscar sat.

Mr Smudge

The little man, she guessed, was Jeffris. He was broader in the shoulder, more handsome and athletic than she had imagined. He was attractive, but in a dark, unsettling way she knew better than to dwell on. He seemed to prance. He had little metal taps on the soles of his shoes. She heard him come towards her. Tap, tap, tap. She was, without having any reason, suddenly, frightened. She had opened a gate and found a black dog bristling at her, growling in the dangerous part of its throat.

In her ear she could hear (but not understand) Mr d'Abbs: "I have let him have this office, you see. A head clerk is everything. It is what it is all built on. You see, you understand. A head clerk is basalt, granite, you see, although it may not have occurred to you before." The words were dead leaves rustling. She felt him plucking at her with fingers like a begging gypsy, sharp little fingers plucking at the crêpe shoulder of her dress, the flouncing on her sleeve. Lucinda did not care for the look of this Mr Jeffris. He had dark and hostile eyes. She had earned his hate just by opening his door. It was too late to retreat and she walked beyond the reach of Mr d'Abbs's plucking invocations and out into the office, between the desks of clerks who, although they were grown men, and some of them quite stern and military in appearance, shuffled their feet and hid amongst their books like schoolchildren. She saw Oscar at last. The light was bright outside the window so he appeared to her in silhouette-the tangled shape of his hair was what marked him out. It was only when she was very close that she could see the expression on his face. He would not deny her. She saw that. He looked up and smiled but it was a pitiable expression. Oh, Lord, she thought, the poor man will have to stand. She swung on her heel. She felt the eyes of all the clerks. She smelt the alleyway, the sour smell of urine. She felt their scorn for her small body, her womanliness, for the sound of her tread on their boards. She nodded to Mr Jeffris, and to Mr d'Abbs who had returned to the open door like a dog forbidden the parlour. When she reached him, she turned.

"Thank you," she said. "I wished to see the conditions." She did not stay to talk to Mr d'Abbs. She felt a fool. She hurried back to her office, thinking how little she knew about how the world of men was organized.

That night she heard the puzzling postscript to her visit. Everything in the office had been thrown out of kilter. Mr Jeffris had stormed into Mr d'Abbs's office. There had been shouting. The clerks had stayed

3t their desks, not looking at each other.

irn

77

Happiness

She did not expect to be happy whilst parcelled up in a grubby apron, clogs on her feet, scrubbing her own floors, or being snubbed at the greengrocer's, kept out of her own works, denied the company of Dennis Hasset, becoming so cut off from life that her only companion was a homeless stray, a defrocked priest with blue-stained hands and a sweat-weary smell. These unpromising circumstances served to distract her attention whilst happiness snuck up on her like a poacher in the night.

She had not known she was happy, but it had been silently remarked on by others, by the glass blowers, by Mr d'Abbs, by Mr Chas Ahearn who had paid her a visit and brought her a gift of bantam eggs. They noticed, because her manner was gentler, because they were spared those ironies and sarcasms which Mr Ahearn, for one, had thought much too pronounced of late. She kissed his cheek and called him "uncle" and the old chap blushed to the lobes of his big fleshy ears.

Yet she had not recognized the moment when her scales had tipped from "down" to "up." She had been too busy to notice, until this morning, the Sunday before Advent. She was walking with her lodger down past her piebald cottage (half of it whitewashed, half red brick). It was an hour or so before early service and the Bal main bells were still silent. Sleek Herefords (the property of the bankrupt estate of Whitefield's Farm) gorged themselves on the new spring pasture. Lucinda wore a long white cotton voile with tiny roses worked into it. She carried her gloves and prayer book in one hand and her bonnet in the other. She walked along the thin cattle track along the spine of the point. There was still dew, not a lot, but she felt it soak into the hem of her dress. She did not mind. Oscar strode through the calf-high grass beside her. Nothing happened. Nothing was

Happiness

said. But she thought-I am happy.

She looked at Oscar. He did not notice her. He was busy looking out for snakes, surveying the harbour-a sea of rough hills poured full of silver glass. H had his head up, his head down, his eyes everywhere at once. He had stuck a tiny blue wildflower into the band of his tall black hat. She thought what a pleasant companion he had turned out to be, and if they were in such disgrace that the barely educated vicar of Balmain should think it best not to "see" them as they filed past him out of church, it was a most superior kind of disgrace. She had judged him too hastily. This was a bad habit. It had caused her trouble before. She had compared him to Dennis Hasset and had pursed her lips when he picked up his tea-cup in a certain way, or placed the pot back on the table a little too heavily. She had felt slighted when he had scurried back into his room and shut the door on her. And yet-how quickly it happened-she had come to be proud of the propriety with which they now shared the house, the sense of measured discipline (a virtue she much admired) that they brought to their conduct so that there was a great closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but of neighbours. They occupied a positon well above those Philistines who snubbed and slighted them. God, who saw all things, would not find their conduct unbecoming. They did not gamble or take hazards of any type.

Oscar had no experience of female friendship. At first he was shy with her, stammered, tripped over himself, tried to make himself invisible around her. Only in his unholy dreams did he ever imagine anything even slightly more intimate. And if there had been a maid, this is how it might have stayed. But Mrs Froud had retired due to being in a certain condition, and there was no maid at all. There was a cottage that must be looked after, a fireplace that must be red-leaded, soap to be made, carpets beaten, the brass doorknobs taken to with halves of lemon. Seeing how the young mistress worked-quick, small steps, slap of brush, flick of duster, smack of mop, clatter of bucket, an energy quite in excess of what was promised by her physical size-the lodger took off his shiny jacket, rolled up his sleeves to reveal thin milk-white arms, and worked beside her. Lucinda was embarrassed at first. She did not think it manly.

And yet this is how they became friends, by scrubbing the pitted,

Oscar and Lucinda

checkered tiles of the kitchen floor, working side by side, creeping backwards. They did their jobs inexpertly. They drank tea by the potful and kept the leaves to use in rug-cleaning. And when they had at last finished, usually around midnight, Lucinda would kick off her shoes and let them drop on the damp floor and Oscar would put his feet up on a chair. He would be smudged with red-lead, or W. G. Nixey's black-lead, and have sticky wax on his elbows. She thought him an "old woman," a "kind soul," "odd fellow." Sometimes she looked at him and saw him as if she had never seen him before-a "vision," humming, stirring his tea with the blunt end of his knife, hooting with high laughter, talking Latin which he expected her to understand. He was, in his conversation, so elliptical, so tangential. He made her feel plain, uncultured, inelegant. She did not guess her cast-off shoes were "dainty," the object of his admiration. She saw what she had seen aboard the Leviathan-that he was not a man to be so easily patronized, that he was a passionate man, an enthusiastic man, who would plunge into the jungle of ideas, not fearfully, but impatiently (thwack, slap, wet clothes from the copper), but also a pleasure.

He was very homesick and liked to talk about England. It was a different England from the one which had so disappointed her. It was a dear, green place, and she could not know that the Strattons' house was damp and cold or that the Baptist boys had made him eat a stone. He talked fondly of the Strattons whom he called "my patrons" and did not tell her that Hugh Stratton, having as much success with horse-races as he had had with farming, had used Oscar's system to lose all his capital and was into debt so deep he was now begging money from men he had not known since Oriel.

There was a bright white pack of cards in the cedar sideboard by Oscar's elbow. He saw it there, sitting askew beside a ball of grey wool and a tangled tape measure, saw it frequently, each evening when he reached out for the sherry decanter (engraved with the image of an emu) and poured out the two thimblefuls which was their "nightcap." He said nothing about the cards. He imagined his hostess-so disciplined in her running of the household-untroubled by them. He wisher* he had the strength of character to fling them away, but having made himself ridiculous aboard the Leviathan he dared not.

They did not discuss cards, but what they did not talk about gave

Happiness

their evenings a tense and tingling edge and left them both happy, yes, but wakeful in their beds. Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboad. She knew how passionate he had become about his "weakness." She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.

But she said not a word. And although she might have her "dainty" shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in.

Once she said: "I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to

laugh in."

Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees.

She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly

armour.

She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams-window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast-iron. A Crystal Palace, but not a Crystal Palace. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web-the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise

•viq

Oscar and Lucinda

enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.

Before she reached this point there were many essential matters she must attend to. The most important was to find a foundryman who would listen to her long enough to understand what it was she wanted made. She had travelled all round the shores of Darling Harbour and up the smoky lanes of Leichhardy, and on the Sunday morning when she finally knew herself happy, part of the happiness, surely, was produced by the knowledge that she had, in that sour old misogynist Mr Flood, found the man who-even if he had no God, no taste, no sense of humourcould cast the parts she required and work out how they could all be made to fit together. Indeed, he would deliver her a "proty-type" on Tuesday.

She pointed out an ibis to Oscar as it rose from the mangroves of Snails Bay. She named it for him, but she could not bring herself to say anything of her secret. All this she would share only with the vicar of Boat Harbour.

Oscar had seen her letters to Boat Harbour. They sat on the mantel, swollen, tumescent; he imagined them love letters. She knew he thought this. It had been her intention that he think this. The misunderstanding allowed them to share the house, to be friends. But she teetered, all the time, on the brink of sharing this thing, this single most important thing with him. On the morning she knew herself happy she looked across at her companion and saw his fine heart-shaped face, the fast birdlike movements, the blazing crop of hair; she saw the way he hit out at the grass with his walking stick; she saw the right hand plunged deeply into his jacket pocket; she saw a dear friend and companion, but she also saw a slightly dangerous, excitable, even self-absorbed young man. She might give him her secret (frail, as vague as a cloud) and see him destroy it because he did not know what it was he was handling. Or he might see it perfectly, more clearly than she did, and he might wrestle it from her, usurp it with his enthusiasm. So she did not show him the bat-boned glass castle and if there were a cloud then it was a cumulus with towering columns, canyons, spiralling heights, vertiginous depths. When she thought about it, all the tendons in her hands went tight. She played her fingers now, on Longnose Point. She closed her eyes, screwed up her face. It was a delicious feeling-tense, unbearable, an itch, an ache. Sydney Harbour had a silver skin. A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.

78 Ceremony

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On the Sunday following the Balmain Regatta, Arthur Phelps walked two miles to Whitfield's Farm. He brought his youngest boy with him. The pair of them were in their best, the little fellow in a sailor suit and Arthur in a three-piece tweed. They had carried their boots with them to save the leather and had stopped up at Birchgrove House to lace up, accept a draught of water and a fresh-pulled carrot from the garden.

Arthur had washed his beard and combed it. It was snowy white and soft like the hair of a newwashed dog. Lucinda almost did not recognize him. He looked so grand, like Mr Henry Parkes. He smelt of soap and mothballs.

She invited him in, but he would not come in. She held the door open and noticed mosquitoes entering whilst her guest wiped his boots on the treadmill of the front-door mat. She had had this

"respect" before. It always made her most uneasy.

Arthur had a speech to say. He stood up straight and tucked his "bellows" in. His boy was being bitten by mosquitoes, but Arthur was making his speech and would not let go the lad's hand. When she heard his speech, Luanda felt her ears burst into hot flowers. Arthur not only knew Oscar's name, he was linking it with hers. He was making an assumption. This was the first thing to shock her. The second was that Arthur was inviting them both to visit the works. They were invited together, as a couple.

Of all the ways this shocked her, this is how it shocked her the most: that this man, this glass blower who would presume to order her not to attend her own works without prior notice would now, the minute he assumed her to be connected with a man — and do not mind that the connection was thought to be scandalous — would walk two miles, on the sabbath, to make sure the lord and master should inspect his new territory.

And yet she accepted. How weak she was! Because she was touched that he should walk two miles, and ashamed of the great wall of anger

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Oscar and Lucinda

which threatened to swamp her. She did not even permit hersalf a sarcasm. She accepted. She said: "Very well," (you fool, you fool) and closed the door while Arthur was still saying good night. She would send a message, later, and find a prior engagement, but she put it off, and put it off, and the following Saturday saw her walking down the hill of Druitt Street towards the works. It was obvious to Oscar who walked, stick-thin and tangle-toed, beside his compact and tightly ordered friend, that she was not pleased. He thought: She is over-laced. But she was not laced at all, merely angry. The "lacing" was in her face, which had compressed lips, diminished mouth, which could not be hidden by her wide-brimmed hat.

The hat was too wide for someone of her height. It threw her out of proportion and made her smaller still. She knew this. Twice she stopped, in a public street, to fiddle with it, but all she succeeded in doing was making herself untidy.

Oscar did not understand the emotional weather. He was just released from Mr d'Abbs's office and was not keen to donate his Saturday afternoon, his first leisure of the week, to an inspection of such an uglylooking enterprise. He had become accustomed to picnics at Manly and Watson's Bay. Here, the air was fetid, although from what manufacture was not clear. A sawmill screamed. They crossed the shit-littered cobblestones of Druitt and entered a yard. In the yard were open-sided sheds. They stepped across puddles. There were crates of bottles in piles (one blue, one brown) of broken glass.

Australia was a loathsome place. He wished he had never come. Now he had drawn poor Wardley-Fish to follow him, or so he had been informed by a stale, fat-spotted letter recently released from diocesan custody. Wardley-Fish's ship was on the sea and could not be prevented. What would Fish say to find himself confronted with all this?

A suited man with ragged cuffs ran across the yard and disappeared into the round brick building with the rusty tin roof. Lucinda pointed towards him, at him, his cuffs, the door he entered by. She pointed with her Japanese umbrella-a sharp, short-tempered sort of polk. Oscar took all this bad temper on himself. He felt the umbrella pierce his rib cage. He knew he was not wanted here. Well, he did not wish to be here! He looked at Lucinda's bad-tempered face and did not like her. He smiled and raised his eyebrows and it was with this peculiar mask, no longer shaded by his tall hat, that he entered the works.

Nothing was as he had expected. Where outside it had been untidy and damp, inside it was very neat and pleasantly dry, like the palm of a pastrycook's hand. There were no windows in the walls; they were high up, under the roof. There were six furnaces in the middle of the room, 308

Pot and Kettle

and another five along the side. There was a long bed of trolleys and machines at present not in use. He assumed this was for making window glass, and he was right.

But what he expected least was to find the works garlanded with flowers: cornflowers, lachenalias, poppies, white and yellow daisies, freesias, flag flowers, daffodils, jonquils. They were tied in bunches to the big piers that held up the roof. They stood in great green-glass jars around the wall. They were embedded in a fishing net that hung between the furnaces and the doorway and beneath this banner of flowers the men all stood, their strong bow-legged forms pressing hard against the confinement of their suits. As Oscar and Lucinda entered, they burst into song.

"Oh, Lord, who filled our souls with love unbounded." Lucinda looked straight ahead. She was moved, of course she was moved. The fools had worked so hard to please her. But she was angry, too, and the tears that ran down her cheek were caused by quite different forces than those which were producing the identical phenomenon in her lodger. Both lots of tears were salt, I am sure, and were probably within the normal range of salinity, i.e., between one per cent and two per cent salt, but this is merely to show you the limits of chemistry, for while Luanda's tears were produced by diametrically opposed emotions, Oscar's were all in one direction and had their source in such grand territories as joy, wonder, humility, and love for these suit-trussed workers who had publicly enacted love for him, a stranger and an outcast.

79

Pot and Kettle

They were strangers to each other, two vessels on the one stove, the kettle whistling out great clouds of joy, the stew pot quietly burning, and each blind to the condition of the other. There was a glass-blowing demonstration. Lucinda imagined Oscar

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Oscar and Lucinda

to be bored and polite. He drank a pint of beer with the men; they offered her none. She put a smile on her face and despised them all as fools. She was belligerently unchristian. Mr Hopkins's tongue was quickly swollen with drink. It was bloated, as fat as an ox's inside his fine, small-toothed mouth. They had him sing a hymn for them. He had no voice. And whilst she knew her audience did not mind, she minded.

She was frump and dullard. He was as loose and floppy as a puppet. He watched them demonstrate how a tankard is made, 'i six times. No one seemed to worry about the cost of keeping the furnaces going. She could not mention it and still keep herself controlled. They spilt their ale on the brick floor and put their arm about him and called him (Michael Casey did)

"Father."

She was in the centre of a great cold space. She smiled until her face hurt. She enquired of squash-eared Billy about his wife and children and noted he could not tell her the age of his children. She did not care that he was poor. She smiled at him. He was drunk. He tapped her on the shoulder as he spoke to her. She left him as he tried to calculate the age of his middle child. Mr Hopkins was out in the yard. He had taken it upon himself to inspect her sand and coal. He was with Arthur Phelps.

She could howl. Could run round and round the yard like a dog hurt by a wagon wheel. And the sun was now so bright.

She thought herself a child. "I think, Mr Hopkins," she said, "that we have another appointment." He saw then, or so she thought. It was to his credit. He shook hands with Arthur and refused the invitation to come back inside to say farewell to "the boys." Arthur hung on his one hand with two of his.

"It is a great pleasure," he said, still holding the fine-boned hand with a clasp that felt, to Oscar, to be made from padded calico gloves, "it is a great pleasure, sir, to see our missus take up with such a gentleman as you, sir. And any time you wish to know anything at all, sir, when we have the window-making in full tilt, you just come along and we will be pleased to explain it to you." Oscar turned, his hand still held in the straitjackef of the blower's hand, and saw Lucinda, who had been by his side when this speech

Tin

Pot and Kettle

began, walking away. Her shoulders were round. Her neck was forward. He did not know what had gone wrong. Had he not been manly amongst her men?

"Thank you, Arthur, I will."

He heard cheering. He turned and saw the men had spilled out of the works and had lined up against the wall with their tankards. They were cheering their employer who was walking past, her head bowed. When the cheering began she put up her umbrella to shield her face from them.

"Goodbye, Arthur."

"Goodbye, sir, and it is a privilege, sir and I myself was never married and that is a fact, sir, and it is not that I am not a Christian. My mother was a Baptist and my old dad a Unitarian, and we attend a chapel now and then but I will tell you this, sir, for it is a comfort to me and may be one to you…"

"Thank you, Arthur."

"An old chap, a Mr Hollis, a what-you-call-them Christian Socialist, informed me that the institution of marriage-I'll walk with you, sirdon't worry about the lads. Give them a wave, sir, that's right. This old fellow, oh, what a beard he had, silver-white and down to his belt. He could tuck it in his trousers, and sometimes did when he was shickered. He told me that the institution was nothing our Lord said, but was introduced at a later date, and by one of the popes no doubt, and it was all to do with property, and not our Lord Jesus, but was related to the Church taking over the recording of things. Well, my memory is a leaky vessel. Give them a wave, sir, they're pleased to have you. They are happy for the missus, that she has a man at last. It has been hard for her. There are some of us that will regard you as a real relief, sir. Well, goodbye, and it has been a privilege."

Oscar hurried after the black, umbrella-humped figure. He waved back. And he made such a comic figure, his hat pushed back on his head, as he leaped across a puddle, waved an umbrella, jumped to avoid some oxen droppings, that the men all laughed, but not maliciously. They walked back to their barrel smiling and shaking their heads. Their new master was an odd bird, but not a knave.

What appointment? Oscar knew of no appointment. An appointment for her, perhaps, but not for him. He was disappointed for he wished to do nothing so much as talk to her. He felt he had opened a door into her life. He would like to sit somewhere, a place with marble tables. If it had been London they would go to the

Oscar and Lucinda

Café Lux in Régent Street. A glass of port wine for the lady. Or merely China tea, and then they could talk about this glass business of hers.

It had never occurred to him that a process of manufacture could be beautiful. Had you, an hour before, asked him to tell you what he would call beautiful he would have drawn on the natural world, and named the species along the lanes of Devon, or brought up for you, plunging his hands into the rock pools of memory, the anemone his father had drawn and named, these fine soulless creatures which had, just the same, been made by God. He would have shown you the Strattons' harvest stocks (and forgotten they had scratched his arms and made them itch all night) or the rolling, dangerous sea seen through a familiar window with a two-foot-thick sill. He would never have led you into a building with a rusting, corrugated roof, or taken you between lanes made from bottle crates, or littered with glittering shards. In these places you expected foulness, stink, refuse, and not, certainly not, wonder.

But it was wonder that he had found, and he had felt it in his water, before he saw anything to wonder at, that this dry, swept place-he knew this the minute he was inside the door-contained something exceptional.

They led him to a glory-hole, had him look in, into the protean world where you could not distinguish between the white of pure heat, the white of the crucible, and the white of the molten glass which they named "metal." When Arthur had said "metal," Oscar had understood "tin" or

"silver" or "gold." And when the gatherer drew out the substance it could have been all of these things. The red-hot orb at the end of the long rod which he watched, passing from man to man, from glory-hole to glory-hole, acquiring more metal, being blown a little, swung, handed on, until it came to that largest, most slovenly of all of them. And then he who dubbed himself (privately, whispered it in Oscar's ear) to be none other than the famous knight Sir Piss-andWind, took the long rod and was, at once, drum major, bagpipe master, trumpeter, transmuter, as he transformed the metal into a tankard. He sat himself at last on his wooden throne and rolled the long rod back and forth across its arms whilst he smoothed a base with wet pear wood which hissed and steamed in clouds around his tea-and-alestained whiskers. He took a snake of red elastic glass from the third gatherer and, lifting it high-where it looked as angry as a snake in an eagle's claws-made it, with a flourish, into a question mark, and thence, a handle. It was all so fine, so precise, and it was a wonder

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Pot and Kettle

that this miracle was wrought by a whiskered Falstaff with a fat belly and a grubby singlet showing through the layers of wet, sour hessian.

"I am a human bellows, sir," Arthur claimed, waving his hand for someone to come and take his creation from him. "That is what I have made of myself."

But it was not this that thrilled Oscar about glass, that a man had made his body to comply with the needs of manufacturing, but that a man so obviously gross and imperfect could produce something so hne.

Glass. Binding white. Glowing red. Elastic. Protean. Liquid. Vessel for light. He hurried after the proprietor. He was a tangle-legged usurper, a shiny-suited thief. He was a butterfly collector, an art buyer, walking fast after the thing that had produced such wonder. He would be a part of this, any way at all.

She fled him, walking quickly, like an honest citizen who feels a pickpocket on his tail. She headed up York Street and then turned in towards the crowds at the markets. He pushed his way through narrow alleys between the stalls. It was a sunny spring day, but in here there were lanterns hung between the sausages, and he followed her large black hat as she turned, bumping into people between bolts of calico, piles of moleskins, racks of blue metal shovels lined up like weapons in an armoury, and out into the blinding light of George Street. She walked at such a pace that even Oscar, with his legs a good foot longer, his stride another two feet in advantage, had trouble keeping her in sight.

But he would not let her go. He jostled and skipped, pushed and pardoned. He tracked her back down Sussex Street. They passed the alleyway above which the majority of his colleagues still worked over their ledgers. Only six buildings down, but on the other side of the street, she went into a tall brick building with bright yellow sandstone ledges to its windows. Prince Rupert's Glassworks (Office) 5th Floor.

Printing presses occupied the first three floors and the building thumped with their rhythms. The staircase was filled with the harsh and volatile odours of inks. Through an open door he saw men in aprons filling their forms from fonts of type. He was sweating as heavily as if he had sat in his normal place in Mr d'Abbs's establishment.

The farms on the fourth floor were, either through lack of custom or because of progressive management, closed for the Saturday afternoon. The landing was quite deserted, apart from a charlady on her

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knees, clicking her tongue about this second vandal come marching across her work. She was not mollified by tiptoeing.

Three firms had their names displayed on dark wooden doors on the fifth floor, all done in different scripts in careful gold leaf with jetblack gold shadows. The first one he looked at was Prince Rupert's Glassworks.

He knocked, but only lightly, and erttered after the very briefest pause. It was no more than a single room, a desk, three chairs, all crushed beneath a sloping ceiling. There was no rug on the floor, but the wall behind the desk held a framed etching of the Crystal Palace, and on the wall opposite the windows (at which Lucinda now stood, her graceless hat held in her hand) there was a great bank of glass shelves displaying a dustless collection of bottles (green, bright yellow, poison blue) and square book-sized sheets of glass in various finishes and colours. As the sun now played upon these shelves they glowed and bled and washed across each other like the contents of a casket in a children's story.

Smiling, Oscar thought: A bower-bird.

Her desk was cedar and also topped with glass. It held a single pot of ink, a pen, no blotter. A tall blue vase held a flag flower, which was now decidedly past its best. A single petal and a fine dust of pollen lay upon the glass-topped desk.

The smokestack of Miss Leplastrier's factory grew from her left shoulder. She did not turn. He could see the soft whirl of hair at the base of her neck. When he stood behind her-he was very close, no more than a foot away-he could see that the men had set up a tug of war in the yard. It was obvious that several of them were very drunk indeed.

It was only then, so close, that he saw her shoulders shaking. This emotion frightened him. He had not expected it. Now he did not know what he should do. He joined his hands together. He was aware of how sticky and sweaty he was. He thought: This is a private place. He thought: I must smell. He spoke her name. He touched her shoulder. She turned. Her proud face was all collapsed, like a crushed letter thrown into a basket. Her clear skin was suddenly marked with little channels-creases, cuts, in a delta down her chin, on her nose, and her big green eyes were glasses held by a drunk, brimful, splashing, not gay, of course, but caught in the pull of the outward tide of anger and the inward one of hurt.

He had no idea what caused it all but, stooping a little, he opened his arms to her and held her against him. She was so tiny.

TI4

80

THè Private Softness of Her Skin

He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of "nature." He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet. He fetched the chair from behind the desk. When he lifted it, the back separated from the seat and clattered to the floor.

"Oh dear." Lucinda sat, sniffing, on the window ledge. "Everything is in collapse." And, indeed, this was how the office seemed to her, not merely today, but today more than before. It had never been what it appeared to be-the physical monument to her success, her solidity. There was a heavy desk, various bureaux, cabinets, samples of manufacture, but she could never see them as solid, but as theatrics. This office was her place of exile, and never more than when the window framed a picture of drunken men playing tug of war. She felt humiliated and powerless, like a child dragged down the street by a large dog on a leash.

There was a claw hammer in the desk drawer. Oscar-although he was at first too energetic and it seemed that he would fail-succeeded in hammering the chair back together. She obliged him by sitting in it. Her back was bathed in afternoon sunshine.

She said: "You must think me really quite ridiculous." =

He said: "Oh, no, not at all." is

She held out her hand, received the handkerchief he offered, and blew her nose. She was anointed with a blue ink smudge. It sat right on the tip of her nose. "Am I right to say you guessed the reason for my tears?"

But he had guessed nothing. He felt himself to be too big, too tall, too awkward. She was so condensed and gathered. There was nothing

Oscar and Lucinda

superfluous about her. He squatted with his back against the opposite wall. His legs too long and thin, untidy as a heap of unsawn firewood.

"No," he said, "no, really, I have no idea."

Her face changed subtly. You could not say what had happened-a diminution of the lower lip, a flattening of the cheek, a narrowing of the eye. But there was no ambiguity in her intention. She had withdrawn her trust from him abruptly. "If you have no idea," she said, "how can you not think me ridiculous?"

"Because you do not have a 'ridiculous' character."

They looked at each other and saw each other change from combative stranger to familiar friend and back again, not staying one thing long enough for certainty. She had velvety green irises of extraordinary beauty. Her eye-whites were laced with tangled filaments of red.

"And are you curious?" she asked, pulling and pushing, challenging him even while she promised to confide. "About the reason for my tears? Are you curious a little bit?" He was curious, of course he was, but he had a lover's curiosity and he feared what she might say. He imagined the tears were somehow connected to the fat letters she left lying on her marble mantelpiece. He imagined they were produced by Dennis Hasset. He was curious. He was not curious at all. He had a lover's selfishness, was grateful for the intimacy the tears had made possible, was resentful of what they seemed to threaten.

They looked at each other until the look became a stare and both of them lost their nerve at once.

"Yes," he said, "of course I am curious."

He wet the corner of the handkerchief again and tenderly removed the smudge from her nose. She tilted her head a little and closed her eyes.

She told him how the men, her employees, had offered him a fellowship they had denied to her. Her mouth changed while she told it. It became small. He was aware of the cutting edges of her lower teeth.

He was sorry for her. He was a fool, and had been party to a great unkindness. He was sorry, so very sorry, and he said so. He was also privately elated that the tears were not to do with Dennis Hasset at all, and although he tried not to grin, he could not help it.

"Well," he said, "you should know why I came bounding after you."

"Not to dry my tears."

"Are you curious?"

"Oh," she smiled. "I am curious, of course." — ; '

He acknowledged her irony with a bow of his head. "I chased after you to tell you I had never seen anything, in all my life/

The Private Softness of Her Skin

quite as splendid as your works." He frowned., r.

Lucinda coloured, but it was not clear what she felt.

He pressed his clenched hands beneath his knees.

She said: "Oh dear."

He sighed and said: "Yes."

"Yes what?"

But he had only said "yes" in response to what he hoped "Oh dear" might mean, and he was not brave enough to be explicit. "Perhaps," he said, picking up his battered hat from the floor, "we should take tea." He was thinking of the Café Francasi, a place with marble tables.

"I will show you," she said, standing and smoothing down her velvet skirts. What this meant was most uncertain.

He did not ask her "what" or "where" but followed her as she left her office. His mind was out of focus at the edges, sharp at the centre of its lens. Her walk was unexpectedly jaunty, crisp, clear, echoing. On the landing she opened a door marked "Acclimatization Society of New South Wales."

Oscar thought: Mr Smith.

"Gone," she said, tapping the sign. "Vamoosed. Mine now." She unlocked the door and swung it open. He waited for her to enter, but she would not. She stepped to one side and made a gesture like a theatre usher. They collided and tangled in their own politeness. "Look," she said impatiently, "just look." What she asked him to look at was Mr Flood's "proty-type"; that construction which, only a second before, had occupied the crystal centre of her life. But when she stood beside Mr Hopkins in the doorway she no longer saw the cleverness of Mr Flood with his singed, hairy arms and his dividers and tables predicting "actual shrinkage." She saw only a dumpy little structure with a pitched roof like a common outhouse.

"You may approach," she said drily. "It is not sacred. It is merely," she said, imitating Mr Flood's pinched nasal tones, "a 'prory-type.' "

But Oscar did not see as Lucinda imagined. As the dust danced in the luminous tunnel of the western sun, he saw not a dumpy little structure, not a common outhouse either, but light, ice, spectra. He saw glass as those who love it perceive it. He understood that it was the gross material most nearly like the soul, or spirit (or how he would wish the soul or spirit to be), that it was free of imperfection, of dust, rust, that it was an avenue for glory. He did not see an outhouse. He saw a tiny church with dust dancing around it like microscopic angels. It was as clean and pure and free from vanity. It was at once so beautiful and yet so… decent. The light shone

Oscar and Lucinda

through its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a cathedral.

"Oh dear/' he said, "oh dearie me."

When he turned towards her, Lucinda saw his face had gone pink. His mouth had become quite small, as if the thing which made him smile was a sherbet sweetmeat that must be sucked in secret.

He said: "I am most extraordinarily happy."

This statement made him appear straighter, taller. His hair was on fire around the edges. She felt a pleasant prickling along the back of her neck. She thought: This is dangerous territory you are in.

He was light, not substantial. He stood before her scratching his head and grinning and she was grinning back.

"You have made a kennel for God's angels."

Whoa, she thought.

She thought: This is how the devil looks, with a sweet heart-shaped face and violinist's hands.

"I know God's angels do not inhabit kennels." He stepped into the room (she followed him) and crouched beside the tiny glass-house. It was six foot long with all its walls and roof of glass, the floor alone in timber. "But if they did, this surely is the kennel they would demand."

"Please," she said.

"But there is nothing irreligious," he said. "How could we have a sense of humour if our Lord did not?"

She smiled. She thought: Oh dear.

"Do you not imagine," he said, "that our Lord laughs together with his angels?" She thought: I am in love. How extraordinary.

"How could God, who is all-knowing, not understand the foundation the joke is built on? I mean, that here is something the size of a wolfhound's kennel which, thanks to your industry, is a structure of such beauty and joy as to be a habitation fit for His angels." He stood still now, having, while he spoke, danced like a brolga around the little glass building. He held out his arms as if he might embrace her and then brought them back across his chest and hugged himself and hunched his back a little.

She thought: He will ask me, not now, but later.

"And haven't you done something?" he said. "Haven't you done something with your life? I must confess to envy."

The setting sun bounced off the red-brick wall of the next-door

Promenade

warehouse. It was this that made the little room so pink. The light refracted through the glass construction on the floor and produced a spectroscopic comet which they stood, neatly, on each side of. Lucinda duplicated his stance without meaning to; that is, she hugged herself, kept her arms locked firmly around her own body while she felt the space between them as if it were a living thing.

81

":!

Promenade

; All this, Lucinda thought, I have inherited from my mama: that I am s too critical, that I ride my hobby horse into the ground, that I have a bad temper, that I will not relax and be quiet and because of this I push away those who mean me well. I will not allow anyone to be a simple

"good chap" as my papa always could. How can I be in love with him and be so lacking in the most simple trust?

These thoughts were occasioned by her response to Oscar who, whilst walking up Druitt Street towards Castlereagh, had attempted to take her arm. She had snatched it back on reflex. She was immediately cross at herself for doing so. Tears smeared the gas lights as if they were watercolour. Do not cry. I will not. Take his arm. I cannot. Take it. I cannot. You must. She took his arm, looking straight ahead, her heart pounding. It was that time of the evening when there is blue in the sky and yellow in the shop lamps. They promenaded, arm in arm, up the hill, towards Castlereagh. He had, he declared, "an idea" he would not tell her. The idea gave his mouth its rosebud smile. He would tell her his idea at dinner-she would be his guest. He teased her nicely with his silence on the subject. He was tall and stretched, with a long, twisting neck and a high black hat against the constraints of which one could see his hair protesting. She was short-the brim of her enormous hat was barely level with his shoulder. His gestures were jerky, hers controlled.

Oscar and Lucinda

She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit. They were different, and yet not ill matched.

They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric's lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. It was an out-offocus town of men with seas of bobbing hats. But on this night she felt the streets accept them. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?

They pushed past bold-eyed young women with too many ribbons and jewels, past tight-laced maidens and complacent merchants with their bellies pushing so forcefully against their waistcoats that their shirts showed above their trousers. Lucinda was happy. Her arm rested on Oscar's arm.

She thought: Anyone can see I have been crying. She thought: I have pink eyes like a dormouse. But she did not really care.

82

Oscar in Love

My great-grandfather was in love, and although he managed to hide all the signs of his despair from Lucinda, he was miserable. He made little jokes about the natty gents in checked waistcoats, laughed, patted her arm, but whatever happiness he felt he saw only as a sign of all that would be denied to him.

This was because he had an idea in his head, and I do not mean the idea that he had promised to reveal to Lucinda at the dinner table. This

Oscar in Love

was another idea, quite separate. The idea that caused the real trouble was the one that Luanda herself had lodged in his head-that she was in love with Dennis Hasset. She had done everything possible to make the idea stick. She had left the swollen envelopes on her mantel for days at a time. She had told him she was in love. She had spent hours of her Sunday at her secretaire. The letters grew so fat that they required excessive amounts of red wax to seal them properly. The idea had taken hold, and such was the stubborn set of Oscar's mind that it would not easily be knocked loose. So it did not matter that she took his arm. It was the prior action, the snatching away, that stayed in his mind. It was here the truth seemed contained, and in the second act, the taking of the arm, he saw only pity.

Oscar did not like Dennis Hasset. He had not met him, but he did not like him. Not that he imagined the man had bad qualities. Quite the reverse. He imagined hirn good, clever, handsome, generous, as a manly man who would be attractive to a lady. He could think of nothing to do to press his claim in competition, nothing except to display an excess of goodness, of selflessness, as if this behaviour, this loving self-denial, would provide him with the rewards that selfishness could not.

It was this that lay behind the dangerous wager he now planned to undertake in the dining room of the Oriental Hotel.

There were only two other tables occupied in the cavernous blackand-white-tiled dining room. A farming family occupied a table pushed gracelessly against a fluted pillar. A single gentleman in a frock coat sat beside a window; he read from a chapbook while he ate. Lucinda was not hungry. She ordered as Oscar did. Her mind was occupied with the problem of how to undo delicately the clever knitting of her lies concerning Dennis Hasset. She could not concentrate on anything as ordinary as food.

She thought: This is what it is like when you love a man. She watched him as he buttered his bread and cut it into nine small squares. Should not this hitherto alien act now feel dear to her?

"Do you know what I envy you?" she said. "It is that you are not constrained."

She meant: The way you walk, walk in here, your clothes like that, and do not give a hoot what opinion the waiters or the diners may have

of you.

He smiled, his piece of bread held between thumb and forefinger.

"You do not mind who sees you or who hears you or what they think of you. You know your own value, I think, and this puts you in a strong position."

Oscar and Lucinda

"And you?"

"Oh," she rearranged a small pin in her hair. "I am too careful." He thought about this for a moment or two while he chewed his bread, and as he had the habit of chewing thirty-two times, this gave him the appearance of great sagacity whereas he was merely wondering, whilst he counted, whether he should disagree with her own assessment of herself and cite her Pak-Ah-Pu and wonder if this was, really Miss Leplastrier, the habit of a careful woman.

But he said instead: "It does no harm to be careful."

They sat in silence. He seemed not to be discomforted by it. She was. The silence made her socalled love for Dennis Hasset seem too heavy and insurmountable an obstruction. It made her feel dull. It made her too aware of the waiters watching them. She did not like the Oriental Hotel with its crawling adoration of wealth. She began to resent the dining room and think how she would never have come here on her own initiative.

"What a lovely place it is," he said, gazing around.

She thought: Do not be irritated and do not judge. He is not Them and he is not You. He is himself, uniquely so. When he admires, he admires as someone who cannot afford this luxury, not as someone who takes it as their right. Be like your papa who would want to know how the fluted pillars were made and what sort of fish that man is eating, and where it was caught and whether it is sweet to taste.

"Shall I tell you my idea?" he asked her.

"Oh, yes, do please.",>;

"It involves glass.";«; «s?

"A subject close to my heart." * î

"We sometimes guard the things close to our hearts." «< She did not look at him. She said: "You do not need to tread so carefully with me."

"Yes," he said unhappily. He saw no invitation to intimacy in this. His preconceptions made such an interpretation impossible and so he understood her back to front. Lucinda heard his tone. She thought: I have been too bold. I am always in too much of a rush.

"And," she said, working against the current of a depression which now rose up and seemed destined to take possession of her mood, "of glass, tell me, what was your idea?" The waiter brought their consommé, not in a soup plate, in a deep bowl. Did he always have consommé? She had always thought it food for invalids.

Oscar in Love,

"You could manufacture conservatories." <

"Is this your idea?" she asked, her heart now truly leaden.

"Oh, no," he grinned.

"I would loathe," she smiled, "to manufacture conservatories." They both looked at each other, their soup spoons raised above their bowls. In that moment she felt ridiculously happy-She felt he loved her after all. She could not stop smiling. "So what," she said, laughing, "is your idea?"

He sipped his soup. He had a nice sipping mouth. She liked the way it came to meet the spoon. She desired the mouth. She breathed out very quietly.

"You must tell me," she said.

"Indeed."

But he did not tell her. Instead he bent over his soup bowl and went at it with speed. Once, halfway through, he looked up and raised an eyebrow. Lucinda felt that mixture of irritation and affection so well known to Wardley-Fish.

"There," he said, wiping his mouth with a fastidiousness perhaps induced by the quality of the napkin, "now I can speak without my soup going cold."

"You are a practical man," she laughed. She felt a little unreal-a thrumming sensation behind her eyes.

"In some respects, yes, I am, " he said. "How does your correspondent enjoy his living in Boat Harbour?"

She shut her eyes against the question's slap. She was shocked to feel its cold hostility. And even though hostility was not intended, she was not mistaken in detecting it. She straightened her cutlery. She said: "Well enough.",«-;

"And does he have a church built yet?" &S-*i

She thought: Fool, fool, do you think I care for Hasset? ',

She said: "They hold service in a room aboVe a cobbler's. They thaiv? his predecessor into the river." — "-;-1

"Oh dear."::;:

"Perhaps," she said, "they will do the same with him." Oscar looked up sharply, but Lucinda was finishing her soup. When he at last saw her face it was like a room swept clean of meaning.

A waiter took away their bowls.

Oscar said: "Mr Hasset should have a church."

She did not wish to discuss Hasset. She said nothing.

°scar did not like to think of Hasset either. It was the first time he had spoken the name out loud. When he said it he saw a hoe or a

Oscar and Lucinda

mattock, neither of them implements he had any fondness for. and yet he must say the name for he had an idea involving it, an idea that involved such a dreadful laceration of his own feelings that it is really hard to credit. And yet it was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light. The odds were surely stacked against him, and had it been a horse rather than a woman's heart he would never have bet on it, not even for a place.

"And what would his feelings be, do you imagine," he said, "if, when Mr Hasset awoke one morning, he looked out of his window and saw a church?"

Lucinda opened her mouth to reply.

"Made of glass," said my great-grandfather. (See! This is the sort of man I am!) It was at this point that the waiter brought the flounder. They said yes or no to tartare sauce, watched vegetables being spooned on to their plates, accepted spinach, rejected squash, and hardly knew what they were doing. All their emotions were fused together in this glass vision in which they saw that which cannot be seen-wonder, joy, the transparent traceries of angels dancing. They were smiling at each other in such a way as to be almost indecent and the chef poked his head around the door to see what he had heard reported by the waiter. The fish's flesh was white and moist. She lifted it carefully from its skeleton, and then replaced it.

"But what would one intend?" she asked, her voice very level and cautious. "What would one intend with such a gift?"

He hardly knew what he intended. That he be a perfect friend to her, that he show himself above jealousy, that she employ him, that he help her assemble this flawless thing, that he possess it in some way, that he be permitted to be a party to the manufacture of a prism, a prayer to God, that the prayer be made from glass and she would, therefore, because of it, love him. He could not see this glass church in his mind's eye without smiling. It had a force of its own. He looked at it as I once saw my own father, standing in a shiny-floored corridor in the Sydney Museum of Arts and Science, staring at a china cup inside a case.

"It would be a lovely thing," he said.

"Yes, I see that."

* He would not look her in the eye. '• "Such a gift," she said, "would not be personal?" she meant personal

Oscar in Love

as having to do with her and Hasset. So preoccupied was she with this problem that she did not even imagine the possibility of ambiguity. "Oh, no," he said, "not personal." He thought she meant personal as between him and her; he was embarrassed to have his scheme so clearly apprehended. "Oh, no, most definitely not." "Do we understand each other?"

"Yes." He looked her straight in the eye and she saw, then, the strength in him. He was so light and frail, so soft in his manner, that it was always a surprise to see this, the steel armature of his soul. She thought about kissing and then she pushed the matter firmly from her mind. She would not frighten him away.

"Yes," she said, "it would be a lovely thing." She had never dared to imagine anything so commercially senseless. She would be laughed at by all the whiskered sages of church and business. She thought: He is mad; I am mad. But when she objected, what she said was not in tune with her spirit which skipped impatiently ahead like a reckless little stone sent dancing across a river. "But it is hardly practical, Mr Hopkins."

"It is a dangerous word," he said, smiling, entranced by her upper lip. "Which word is that?"

"Practical. It is the word they use in Sydney when they wish to do something damaging to the spirit. Excuse me, you must think me rude." "No, no, although you must not hold me responsible for Sydney." "I never struck the term so much at Home. But here, you know, it is a word dull men use when they wish to hide the poverty of their imagination. But would you say it was

'practical' to sing hymns, to give glory to God, to pray, to fast? And what is the practical purpose of a church? For if it is only to provide shelter for Christians — and my dear papa would take this view-then it is better to have your congregation gather in cobblers' rooms. But if your church, no matter how small, is also a celebration of God, then I would say I was the most practical man you have spoken to all year."

"And there would be nothing personal in its intention?" "Do I appear a rogue?"

"No," she smiled, "you do not," and because he made her smile she did not think it a puzzling answer to her question. "Your fish…" She meant that his fish was cold, uneaten, although he still held a knife and fork as he had from the beginning.

"My fish does not matter. My fish is dead, but we are alive. We are gamblers in the noble sense. We believe all eternity awaits us. And am I wrong in supposing that you could pack a church in crates and

Oscar and Lucinda

transport it by cart? It is like the stairs at the library. It is what they call prefabricated. It comes in pieces. It has nuts and bolts and so on."

"Or by ship?"

"You could transport an entire cathedral and assemble it across the mountains. Can you imagine a glass cathedral?"

She could. She saw its steeples, domes, its flying buttresses, motes of dust, shafts of light. "Mr Hopkins, we are mad to think of it."

"Not mad, I pray not mad. But the sheer joy of contemplating it is hard to contain." She thought: I cannot separate love from glass; I must be just a little mad. He said: "I think it is this feeling that you are tempted to call madness, but there is a more accurate description. . but I will embarrass you…"

"You need not protect me."

"I embarrass myself. However., it is ecstasy we are feeling." She nodded, smiling, her eyes swimming. "But also mad."

"No, no, no." He banged his fist on the table. The cutlery jumped. The gentleman with the chapbook stood up and left. He said something, more than three words, less then twenty, but it does not matter what it was and did not matter at the time.

"And you," Lucinda said, "would it be amusing for you to assist me in this endeavour?"

"I am a practical man," said Oscar, giggling.

She paused, not knowing if he meant it ironically or literally. "But perhaps you might assist me none the less."

"With pleasure," said Oscar, who, now he had part of what he had coveted, was guilty and uneasy, as if he had stolen something from her.

"Can you imagine Hasset's face?"

The face she meant to conjure up was astonished, gawp-mouthed, sad to have been excluded from the manufacture of such a miracle. But the face Oscar saw was a man whose love has been rekindled. That was the risk inherent in the venture.

"But it is you, dear lady," Oscar said, "who must see his face. For it is you, surely, who must deliver it to him."

"Oh, no."

"But surely. ."he protested, his heart already lightening.

"Oh, no, I cannot leave the works."

"You would not…"

"It is quite impossible," she said sternly. "They are only just recovering from my last absence."

Oscar in Love

"Then I shall," cried Oscar, "on your behalf." *

Lucinda did not understand the source of his jubilation. She frowned, wondering if the balloon of their dream was not about to be pricked.

"It is approached by sea," she said. She remembered, although she had no wish to, his behaviour in the storm aboard the Leviathan.

"Then I shall go by land," he grinned, and clasped his hands contentedly and dropped "But, Mr Hopkins, I do not think you

understand."

He thought: It is difficult, yes, and dangerous. It is a bet against the odds, but if I am the adventurer then the odds, surely, must be swinging in my favour.

His smiling face made Lucinda fear for him. He was so frail, and white. He brought his fingers together and flexed them underneath his pointed chin. He could not imagine-she knew he could not-what this countryside was like. He used soft words like brook and lane and copse. He could not imagine its saw-toothed savagery.

"I will be your messenger."

"Mr Hopkins, please, no."

"You think it outside my scope?" asked Oscar. He was not offended, and the reason he was not offended was that there was no room in his soul for such a thing. His body was awash with all those chemicals he had hitherto found only at the racetrack.

"Say it," he said. "You think it beyond my scope."

"There is no shame in that," she said, and reached across to pat his sleeve.

"There is no truth in it either," he said jubilantly, feeling a caress in the pat. "I wager you I can do it. You may nominate the date."

His face was very pale yet also very bright. The skin was taut, the eyes were glistening and fixed on hers. She thought it best to take her

hand away. "Mr Hopkins, I like you too much to encourage you to injury."

"But I must."

"Come, please, this is madness now.,"

"I must," he said quietly. "It would mean a great deal to me." It was then she knew that he loved her. "You are doing this for me?"

It was not a question he wished to be asked. He felt his own silence humming in his ears. He would not look at her. "Yes," he said.

"Do you think I wish you dead?" "I am too happy to wish for death," he said. "I have no intention

Oscar and Lucinda

of becoming dead. Mr Judd, for instance-and I know you do not care for him…"

"Care for him?"

"But I take him as an example. Mr Judd makes journeys like this all the time. I am prepared to wager you I can have the glass church in Boat Harbour by, say, Good Friday." He had no basis for this date. He plucked it from the air. It felt appropriate. He had no idea how long the church might take to manufacture. This aspect of his wager, the financial part, was of no interest to him,

"And what can you bet?" she asked.

He saw heir face change as she spoke. Her eyes became sleepy-lidded, and her lower lip pouted.

'Ten guineas.". .-<.>.;.•:.;:•-•> K-. •-;.•-.-,,., .'..-.••• .-•••;••:?•. -••.-•

"It is not enough." ',•->:••..•*'•.*. > — ./>, ..-,•,:. <. ;'

"What is enough?". — "-d — ^ .-.'«-. v••>-.;-••. She opened her mouth and closed it. It was so quiet in the dining room Oscar heard the noise of the skin of her lips as they separated.

He placed his hands palm down on the table. "What is enough?" he repeated.

"Your inheritance," said Lucinda quietly. She had not bet in two weeks but she had never, in all her life, made a bet like the one she was about to make with Oscar Hopkins.

"My father may live until he's one hundred. He is not a rich man, anyway."

"It makes no difference."

"And you would bet?": *

"The same."

"The same amount?"

"The same. My inheritance."

"You already have it."

"Yes." •-,.(•:..',•-. — "Your works.":

"Yes. Everything."

"You wager all that?" ' ' <

"Yes."

"Then you are mad," said Oscar. "You are mad, not I. For heaven's sake." He scratched his head and looked around the dining room, surprised to find it empty. He felt himself the subject of her passion and yet (she loves Hasset) did not understand it.

"Five weeks," he said, "without even a game of penny poker, and now this."

Orphans

Lucinda smiled at him. She felt light. She would have him taken care of. She would employ the best tracker, an explorer, a surveyor. They would carry him safely, and they would bring him back. He would win. She would lose. She would give him all the armour she had hitherto used to keep herself safe. She was mad. She was pleased to be mad. She loved him. She would be looked after.

"Sleep on it," she said. "There is no requirement that you accept."

"But I must go."

"Sleep on it."

"I am not sleepy," he said. He was awed by her. He loved her.

"Then come home with me," she smiled, "and we will play penny poker until you are." She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of

her soul.

83

Orphans

Our history is a history of orphans, or so my mother liked to say. She used the word in a sense both literal and sentimental. She did not mean it in the sense that it is true for the nation as a whole, but only as it applied to the three corners of the family history, to Oscar, to Lucinda, to Miriam Chadwick, who lost her mother when the Grafton was wrecked crossing the bar at Bellingen Heads.

Miriam Chadwick would never forget how the black dye came and took her lovely peach silk dress. The dress fell like a rose, "Prince's Pride," into a copper of Indian ink. It sat there a second, its colour all the more precious and intense because of the glistening ebony framing of the dye, sat there as if it might have the will to resist the insinuations of death itself, and then-like the withering of a flower, but much accelerated-the dress sucked in the black and first it ran in blurry lines along the fine pleats and then it spread, a rush of grey, a blanket of

Oscar and Lucinda

black, and Mrs Trevis took the laundry stick and poked it, shoved it down into the dye, like a stake to the heart, and stirred.

Miriam never forgave her employer that stab. Everything else, but not the way she drowned the dress. There was a slight grunt, and then a strong-armed stir. She saw it, in the year that followed, over and over again, saw the mole on the wrist, the black hairs on the pale arm. Mrs Trevis had not expected a governess so young or one so beautiful. She was not sorry-you could not blame her if you knew her husband — to have her wrapped in mourning, and yet she did not mean the dyeing viciously. It was impatience and nothing more. She felt Miriam's upset about the dress and was inclined to judge her harshly for it, that she seemed as much grieved about finery as she was over the human being whose demise occasioned it. And if you are inclined to think the same, that she makes too much of the loss of a dress and not sufficient of her dear mama-whose body was delivered by the tide on to the flat at Bellingen Heads, found by crows before people-then you must consider her position, which was not only to be marooned, an orphan in a hard and hostile environment amongst people whom she would, at Home, have regarded as her inferiors, not only to be quite impoverished, but to have been plunged back into mourning when she had, at twenty years of age, spent almost all her adult life in black.

First there had been her maternal grandmother, then the paternal grandfather. Her mother, a dressmaker, had been most particular as to the correct etiquette for mourning and had followed, as far as her intense curiosity could reveal it to her, the Royal Precedent. Thus there would be three months of deep mourning, an entombment so complete that neither hands nor face should be shown without their covering of black. The process back to life was taken in gradual stages, like a diver ascending from the deep, until, at six months, one could eat in a public place, in nine months be seen at the theatre, and at the end of a year one might cast off one's black and, with luck, be asked to dance the Grenadier Waltz.

She was eighteen, and still in mourning for her paternal grandfather when her father, also in mourning himself, went down with pneumonia. It was winter. She sat in the coal-sleepy room, and even while she nursed him, while she sat beside his bedside, lifted his heavy body to a sitting position so he might more easily breathe, and saw his face all blotched, lost, suddenly old, his eyes shut, his lips dry and swollen so they were the size of the black boy on the Church Missionary Society money box, even while she waited and wept and heard him gurgle and

Orphans

choke himself to death, she felt another grief, another despair, an anger, selfish perhaps but intensely felt none the less-that she would end up an old maid because she must now spend another year in mourning.

But in the end it had not been a year, for her mother-although strict on matters of etiquette-was also a practical woman. She did not wish to waste precious space in their trunk with clothes they would never use once they were in New South Wales.

The mother was a strong-willed woman. The emigration had been her idea. She had announced it without consultation. It was she who found the daughter a position as a governess at Boat Harbour. In her ignorance she had imagined a town like Bournemouth. It would be a healthy place, she said, and gay. She made their new clothes, scandalously bright, it seemed to her daughter, to suit this new location. She chose taffeta and "Peking" silks. They had boarded the Sounion in a style that elicited much admiration (from strangers-the family had been farewelled in Hammersmith). They wore, mother and daughter, dresses of the palest and prettiest colours, the daughter in peach, the mother in a moiré grey, but both of them in bright petticoats and Miriam's crinoline cage producing an effect like a trumpet flower you might imagine growing in exotic latitudes: once on board, of course, this finery was packed away, for they could afford no better than steerage, and it was in that very trunk, the same big wooden trunk, all bound around with black iron bands, that the dress had travelled in the little brig from Sydney, transferred to the whaler outside Boat Harbour, and which had floated to the shore when all those souls had drowned.

This was on Christmas Day in 1858. Miriam had been the only one of thirty passengers saved from drowning. Her left arm was broken, and never quite set right, but she was alive. Her whole trunk was delivered to the Trevis house, for it was there she was to be employed as a governess. And on her first morning Mrs Trevis filled her copper with black dye and put her lovely new clothes into the copper, one by one. Miriam felt sick in her heart, as sick about this blackness as anything else. She would never forget that moment. The peach dress, a fallen bloom in a copper of ink.

When the clothes were dyed and dried and ironed, she put them on. The black got into her skin. It was the humidity. There was nothing to be done about it any more than there was to be done about the sandflies, the mosquitoes, the tropical rains that flooded the river and took the stock floating away. She taught the children as best she could. There were few books to help her. '.n i,

.>..>-,^KJ-.,

W1

Oscar and Lucinda

There was dancing, of course, quite a lot of it, too. But it would not be possible for her to go. She wrote long letters to Mrs Carson, who ran the governess agency in London. They pretended to take a cheerful or optimistic line while exactly communicating her despair. She begged to be sent to a place where learning might be appreciated. She complained she was asked to set the fire, to sweep the house, to "muck in." She put this term in sarcastic inverted commas. Nowhere did she make a comment on the Trevises' class or education and yet, somehow, it was made clear that they were below her.

Miriam could not have known it, but all of Mrs Carson's life was dotted with letters like this. They irritated her, and although she would permit two or three of them, the fourth was likely to attract a strong rebuke.

In January 1862, a year of floods so great they would not be repeated until 1955 (floods George White and his cohorts on the council like to forget when they issue development permits) Miriam Mason was married to Johnny Chadwick by Dennis Hasset's predecessor, the one who was thrown into the Bellinger River. There is no parish register showing this marriage, but there is a photograph of Johnny Chadwick in the local museum. He is standing in front of a log hut which the Historical Society has decided was his schoolroom. In fact it was his house. He is surrounded by his pupils, and you will read, on the little typewritten note George White had Sellotaped on to the bottom of the photograph that he died as a result of snakebite in 1863. It does not say that the snake was enraged by being thrown around the school ground by the pupils. They had long sticks which they used to flick it through the air towards each other. Johnny Chadwick, it seems, had tried to kill the snake.

In any case, Miriam had to dye her clothes again and she went back to work for Mrs Trevis who, of course, did not remind her that she, Mrs Trevis, had cautioned her against ripping up her old mourning clothes for dusters.

But with, oh, what zest, she had, in her optimism, Tom up her black and did not care it was a waste. And she had got herself again her lovely fabrics, silks and taffetas sent up from Sydney, and made the long dresses which were cool and light, and she began to see the beauty of the place, the long slow sweep of the river, its wide green banks, the green ever widening, pressing in against the khaki of the bush, and Johnny Chadwick was very quiet, but handsome and gentle, and they would sit in front of their hut and he would read her Walter Scott by the light of a lantern while white ants hatched, swarmed, and died and she had been foolish enough not to see this as a poignant symbol of mortality.

W)

The Weeks before Christmas

She wrote again to Mrs Carson. Mrs Carson replied with what can only be described as a stiff note.

Thus when Dennis Hasset arrived in Boat harbour she observed him from her cage of deep mourning. She stood high on the veranda at the Trevis house at Fernmount. From the veranda you could see the river as it swept around the promontory below. Into this view came the Reverend Dennis Hasset, correctly dressed, a book in his lap, sitting on a barge surrounded by his personal effects.

And if I say that she began-there and then, without having said a word to him, or heard one from him either-to lay plans for him, it would be unfair to judge her harsh and scheming. It is important to look instead at her options.

The first was to continue as a governess, a poor governess for the Trevis family who, having no education themselves and no great respect for it, were inclined to view a governess as a labourer and, should she be found with anything as useless as a book, would be requested to do something more practical around the place. Thus she was not only depressed and unstimulated, but she was also continually weary.

The second possibility was marriage. Having had experience of the two states she was much disposed towards the latter. She therefore took the eyeglass from Mr Trevis's bedside and while her pupils pulled each other's hair, she spied the clergyman on the barge. This happened two weeks before Oscar played his famous game of cards at Randwick vicarage. 84

The Weeks before Christmas

The bet had a life. They contained it. It was a bee in a box, an itch in a place that could not be scratched; it was this-not their now continual games of penny poker, crib, solo, those shifting diversions which could not satisfy any of their locked-up passions but left the house scattered 333

Oscar and Lucinda

with whole (one penny) or half (ha'penny) matches-it was this bee in the box, the Big Bet, the glass bet, which gave the days their excruciating tension, their lovely current, the nights their lightness, expectation. They did not kiss or hold hands. The bet gave them a future which they stretched towards.

There was a drought all through the state of New South Wales, but the first week of December was balmy with teasing nor'easterlies lifting and falling like clean muslin pudding cloths on a clothes line. The nights were clear and bright-starred. Lucinda and Oscar took tea at the zinc table above the black water. The frangipani was at last sprouting leaves from its nubbly fingers. The jacaranda was in blossom. They watched the flying foxes wheel above them, like shadows of thoughts, things so indistinct they would not exist without two witnesses. They were joined together in their conspiracy. They ached-like lovers do-to share their secret, but they had no one to share it with. Lucinda could not tell Hasset any part of it. She could not bear to have a sensible objection. She felt guilty, just the same, about keeping the secret from him. Soon he would hear she shared a house with a defrocked priest and that she accompanied the same peculiar gentleman everywhere, even as far as the New Steyne Hotel in Manly where she had clumsily danced for the first time in her life. Lucinda wrote Dennis Hasset long, dull, detailed letters as if this steady drone would block out the secret whispers of her heart. These letters, of course, made Oscar anxious and jealous. He had no one to share his agony with except Wardley-Fish and Wardley-Fish was the subject of a scandal of his own and was incommunicado, passing through the Suez Canal, sunburnt, drunk, telling outrageous stories until he went too far and became IT, the passenger the others try to avoid sitting next to on the promenade.

Oscar was like a man in a fairy story who is granted his wishes. He was employed by Prince Rupert's Glassworks. He was a party to the manufacture of glass. He walked with Lucinda into the works on a Monday morning and saw the glass-rolling machine from Chance Brothers turn the great red rubbery sheets of glass, like pastry, off its shiny metal rollers. Lucinda was at his side, seized by fury and jubilation in equal parts. She thought: I must not come here with him again; all my passion is as cold as ice. She meant, of course, that he was accepted so easily where she could not be, that he walked in a way that he would be probably shocked to learn appeared proprietorial.

Oscar was not insensitive to Lucinda's feelings. And when she sought to involve Mr d'Abbs in the project he did little more than murmur

The Weeks before Christmas

around the edges of his doubt. It was then that he saw what fierce loyalty Lucinda had towards those she thought her allies. And it did not matter that Mr d'Abbs had proved himself incompetent in caring for the works or in other vital matters, she would consult him about the design of the glass church.

"He is artistic," she said, "as, of course, you know." Oscar thought he detected a little belligerence in this sentence, and so did not remind her of the story she had told him not two nights before, of how Mr d'Abbs recommended Monsieur Huille, the drawing tutor whose cows had looked like pigs.

This was how Oscar came to return to Mr d'Abbs's office not two weeks after he had left his employ. He saw then, as he would see many more times before the glass church was loaded into its wooden crates, that it was an idea that had a strong attraction. There was hardly a soul who would not want to clasp it to their bosom, and even if they began, as Mr d'Abbs did, by making a mess with their cigar or their snuff, telling you sternly what an impractical idea it was, they always ended up in the same place, the place Mr d'Abbs came to on this sweltering December day, with a slightly silly smile on their face, a "by the deuce" on their lips, and, in Mr d'Abbs's case anyway, a plea (an assumption, Oscar thought) that he be permitted to draw up the plans for it himself.

"I could make the time available," said Mr d'Abbs. He opened his drawer and took out a single sheet of best white bond. He placed this sheet of paper in the middle of his desk. He opened another drawer and took out his French pen and then, on the paper, he made two or three fast strokes. He looked at those strokes appraisingly, his head on one side, and then looked up as if to say, "Not bad, not bad at all." Then, having satisfied himself as to his aptitude, he folded the paper into three, slid it into the breast pocket of his unseasonably hairy suit, and placed the pen carefully back inside the drawer.

Oscar bit his lip to hide his smile. He glanced sideways and saw Lucinda, sitting upright in her uncomfortable chair, looking as solemn as she did at morning prayer. She had decided to trust Mr d'Abbs a long time ago and did not seem likely to change her mind. This observation produced a razor-sharp corollary: her heart would remain similarly loyal to Hasset. So thought Oscar, squirming in his chair. He made a grotesque face, a caricature of agony. No one saw him. Lucinda was looking at Mr d'Abbs. Mr d'Abbs was now engaged with another piece of paper. This was a yellow sheet with green lines, of the type on which he was accustomed to make his notes (he called them "briefs"). He

335

Oscar and Lucinda

took out the pen again, unscrewed it, examined the nib against the glaring window light, pursed his lips so that his thin moustache buckled and let the tip of his pink tongue-like a tiny creature in a hairy shell-come out to sense the air.

"Now," he said to Lucinda, having ignored his ex-clerk from the beginning. "Now, what would be your intended congregation? That is the place to start with a church. It is one of the great mistakes made with churches. Too large and you have everyone feeling that the service is a failure. Too small and there is never enough in the plate to feed the vicar's family and then you are forever wasting your time with fêtes and benefits and all sorts of amateur theatricals, which are, in country towns, believe me, a chore to sit through. So this is the place to start, but it is a difficult thing to assess. It is more dependent on the quality of the sermon than the size of the parish."

"He speaks very well," Lucinda said, "and sometimes a little contentiously."

"Four hundred," said Mr d'Abbs, and wrote it down.

"It is only a little town," said Oscar whose own sermons had always been such an agony to him.

"One hundred, then," said Mr d'Abbs.

No one argued with him.

"And as to Doric and Corinthian, do you have a preference?"

"But, Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, leaning forward in her chair, "there is no Doric and Corinthian. It is to be constructed from glass and castiron rods, as I told you. We will not require this sort of support. The principle is the same, the same exactly as a glasshouse."

"Yes, yes, of course." Mr d'Abbs screwed the cap on his handsome tortoiseshell pen and laid it down beside his sheet of paper. "It's still a thing, ma'am, that you must decide. You look at it from the outside, as an amateur. Quite naturally, quite understandably, you do not imagine that it matters. It does not need to matter to you." (Oscar was offended on Luanda's behalf. He found the tone quite patronizing.) "But it must matter to me. It must matter a great deal. It is all a question of aesthetic laws. You may not see them, but they are there, just as the Ten Commandments are themselves not visible in this room."

"I'm afraid," Oscar said, "that I am quite bamboozled." Mr d'Abbs looked at him with great displeasure. It was an embarrassment to have an ex-clerk in this position. He was about to ignore the question when he saw that Miss Leplastrier expected him to answer it.

"It is a question of integrity," he said.

336

The Weeks before Christmas '

"In which way?" she asked. .•!>;.?;»,;