Oscar and Lucinda

"In which way, what?",, — .<<(-, -;

"In which way can it affect the integrity?"

Mr d'Abbs took out his watch and looked at it. Then he uncapped his pen and drew a little diagram on his yellow paper. He was not an architect. Of course he wasn't. He had never claimed to be. But he had drawn things up. It was in his line. One begins with some conveyancing, and then a little financing is necessary, and a client, owning the land, then needs a building. This would be a dandy little church. A lovely thing. He would have an artist do perspectives, of course. He had never mastered the perspective, but it had not prevented him from designing the new portico for the Sydney Club, but that, by Jove, that was Corinthian, and wasn't it admired. Bishop Dancer had paid him a great compliment-"d'Wren" he had called him, phonetically a difficult joke to understand, and a little high-flown, but he had been flattered. There was no reason why this little church should not have a dome. By golly!

"It affects the aesthetics," said Mr d'Abbs. "I would recommend the Corinthian, and if you doubt my advice-and why shouldn't you? — I am only your accountant-go up to Castlereagh Street to the new Sydney Club and tell me what you think."

Oscar looked at Lucinda. She did not seem troubled that a pagan style should be used to celebrate Christ's death and resurrection. She seemed to have accepted Mr d'Abbs's proposition. She said: "The whole will be framed around glass sheets three feet long and eighteen inches in breadth. The main columns should be five inches in diameter, no more. Each individual column would weigh about three hundredweight, or so I am informed."

Mr d'Abbs smiled and nodded, but-unlike Mr Flood, the foundryman who was always making calculations with his callipers and adding and subtracting figures in his grimy notebook-he wrote nothing down.

Indeed he screwed his cap back on his pen.

Lucinda and Oscar sat side by side, like passengers in that contentious vehicle-the Pitt Street tram. They faced Mr d'Abbs who picked up the bell on his desk and swung it. He put it down again and smiled at them for all the time it took Mr Jeff ris to answer his employer's call.

"Mr Jeffris," said Mr d'Abbs, when the head clerk had, at last, arrived. "You are, are you not, a licensed surveyor?" He said this just as he had, on other occasions, wished an employee to assure him that he was (or not) a Greek scholar, a published poet, a concert pianist, the cousin of a duke.

337

Oscar and Lucinda

"I am," said Mr Jeff ris. He stood in the formal at-ease position and nothing in his demeanour gave any clue to what he felt about Mr Smudge's elevation. He did not look at him. He stood beside him, facing his employer.

"And have you surveyed the road to Boat Harbour?"

Mr Jeffris said nothing. He sighed, a rather bad-tempered sigh, and Mr d'Abbs, as if this sigh was the most sagacious answer imaginable, smiled proudly at Lucinda. Then, lifting a fmger, as though he were the conductor of an orchestra calling for a certain grace-note from a flute: "Is there a road to Boat Harbour?"

"No, there ain't," said Mr Jeffris, and Oscar, who had no fondness for Mr Jeffris, still felt sorry that he had made this slip. He was a man who had worked hard to eliminate his ain'ts.

"But surely," coaxed Mr d'Abbs, "one could muddle one's way through?" Mr Jeffris did not answer.

"You surveyed the road up into New England, is that not so?"

"I was employed thereon," said Mr Jeffris who was beside himself with rage at being required to act this part for the benefit of Mr Smudge. "I was under the direction of a Mr Cruikshank."

"But this road will not do?"

"It is a fool's way to travel," said Mr Jeffris, no longer able totally to disguise his feelings. "And the question is hypocritical because no one would choose to do it. You do not approach Boat Harbour by road but by the sea. There is a tricky bar, as everybody knows, but anyone would prefer the bar to the other."

"And what would you say to Mr Hopkins here, if he were to tell you his intention to go by land?"

"Beg yours?" said Mr Jeffris who was genuinely perplexed.

"Mr Hopkins intends to travel to Boat Harbour by land."

"No," said Mr Jeffris, too surprised to be bad-tempered any longer. He turned to look at Oscar who had the feeling that he was being seen by Mr Jeffris for the first time. "Is this so, Mr Hopkins?"

"I am afraid it is."

"And why not water?" said Mr Jeffris. His tone had changed. It was gentler. You could see the echo of it in his eyes.

"And why not water?" he repeated.

"I have my own reasons."

Mr Jeffris's normal mood was that of a man whose temper was a large rock balanced precariously on a rusty nail. His clerks were inclined to walk around him on tiptoe. But now, as he regarded Oscar, he

338

The Weeks before Christmas

somehow made himself go soft and calm. The rock lowered itself on to the sand.

"These reasons," he said gently, "would all be categorized under the label 'exploration'?"

"Oh, no," said Oscar, and giggled.

Mr Jeffris's forehead made a complicated frown.

"He refuses the steamer/' said Mr d'Abbs.

Mr Jeff ris did not even look at Mr d'Abbs. "And you must go?" he asked Oscar softly, so softly that Lucinda could not believe this was the same man she had thought a "dangerous dog" when he had come clicking across the clerk's office in his metaltipped shoes.

"For your own reasons," suggested Mr Jeffris, "you are compelled to make this journey?" Oscar smiled at Mr Jeffris. He did not smile because he was happy. He smiled because Mr Jeffris's manner had made him frightened of what he had taken on himself. He smiled because he wished to lighten the grave solicitousness of Mr Jeffris's expression. But Mr Jeffris would not comply. He looked at Oscar sadly, up and down, as if he were a beast at Homebush saleyards who must be called to shoulder a burden in excess of its strength.

"I would not be you," said Mr Jeffris, "for anything." Oscar felt his windpipe knotting. He stroked his long neck and turned his "smile" to Mr d'Abbs. Mr d'Abbs was pleased. He was pleased with the resources of his office. He was pleased to offer these services to his clients and give them free, gratis.

"Thank you, Jeffris," he said. "Back to the troops now." Lucinda thought how arrogant and dismissive this was, but it was not arrogance, only the impersonation of arrogance, something Mr Jeffris permitted him in public. Mr d'Abbs undid his pen and drew-no one could see what he rendered-a lovely little barque with a seagull overhead.

"And so," he said.

He added some waves.

"And so," he screwed back the pen top, "you will obviously be transporting your prefabricaton on the sea."

"Perhaps we should discuss it further," Lucinda said to Oscar.

"Good lady," said Mr d'Abbs, "what is there to discuss?" Oscar stood. He saw the childish drawings on Mr d'Abbs's pad. His face was triangular, chalkybone, skin, locked-up eyes. Luanda's heart

Oscar and Luanda

was filled with pity. Oscar sat down again. He could not have been more terrified if he had sat, once again, inside a cage on Southampton Pier.

85

A Prayer

It was half past six in the evening and very hot. A feeble light entered the staircase from a high window, but not sufficient to show the decrepit state of the wallpaper or the condition of the runner. Mr Jeffris walked up the stairs with his gloved hands clasped together as if he might inadvertently touch something he would find repulsive. When he reached the first landing he plunged off into a dark passage, walking briskly where a stranger to these lodgings would have been compelled to pause and strike a match or feel the way along the wall. He rose two steps, turned to the left, and stopped at a doorway which was not only locked but padlocked. He did not fuss with his keys. The door lock made a dull "thuck," the padlock a sharp brass

"snick." The knob rattled. Mr Jeffris was home.

It was a small room with a window looking out at other windows and down into a small cobbled yard where three large black cats, the pets of the lodging-house cook, lay on top of a pile of lumber and grey rags.

The room was hot. Mr Jeffris threw open the window, pulled a face at what he smelt, and halfclosed it again. Two or three blow-flies entered the room and began, once they were there, to buzz and crash heavily against the glass. Mr Jeffris ignored them.

He removed his frock coat. It had wide shoulders and a narrow waist, and although the style was almost thirty years out of date, the condition of the nap was such that one could only

un

A Prayer

conclude that it had been recently tailored. Mr Jeffris placed this coat on a wooden hanger, brushed it, and hung it on the long rail he had himself suspended from the picture rail and then-it was a complicated system involving a triangulation of forcesheld out from the wall by a length of twine which dissected the air above his bed and was secured to a picture rail above its head. When Mr Jeffris sat on his bed (which he now did as he removed his boots) his knees almost touched the heavy bookcases which he had constructed himself in the same neat and handy style with which he had made all the other improvements in the room. Everything was at once temporary and sturdy. It would serve for a decade. It could be packed in a moment. It was, in short, a "camp."

At the foot of the bed there was a clear area marked by a sun-faded rug. Two dumb-bells, placed to one side of this rug, announced the purpose of this extravagance of space in so small and cramped

a room.

As he sat on the side of his bed, his hands placed flat on his knees, he exhibited such a perfect stillness that he might have been at prayer.

In fact, he was beside himself. He sat still as you might sit still on the edge of an abyss, or at the top of a pole, or on a tightrope strung between your lodgings and the country of your dreams. There was a silver-backed mirror and a comb in a carved chest on his bookshelf. He could reach them without moving from his seat. And when he leaned across and removed them it was easy to see that the chest was placed in this position for this reason. And when he combed his moustache, which he did now, slowly, very slowly, the action had the quality of a prayer or a meditation practised daily. He had a long lip and the hair was thick and luxurious. When he had had enough of combing he reached for the barber's scissors, he held up the silver-backed mirror and then snipped a little here and there. Only the movement of his broad chest betrayed his agitation.

All of his adult life had been spent in preparation for the day when he should survey unmapped country, have a journal, publish a map. Three times he had been employed on journeys of exploration and three Mmes he had resigned before the party had its animals purchased. He had standards, those of his hero, Major Mitchell, and he had no intention of lurching around the country with incompetents, idiots

Oscar and Lucinda

blindly putting one foot after the next and-no matter what names they named or maps they drewhaving no idea, in a proper trigonometrical sense, where on earth they were. Hume, Hovell, Burke, Eyre had all drawn their maps badly. They were useless for both settlement and exploration, but their authors were heroes and Mr Jeffris was a clerk in an office in Sydney. Mr Jeffris, against hope, against all good sense, had prepared himself as Major Thomas Mitchell would have him do. He had copied from Mitchell's Memoirs his self-deprecating advice to those who would follow him. Mr Jeffris had him. Mr Jeffris had executed the Major's prose in his admirable copperplate; he had made a frame for it; he had hung it above his bed. A little mathematical knowledge will strengthen your style, and give it perspicuity. Study the writings of great men. I would place Cae-| sar's Gallic Wars at the top of any list, but would advise you not ne-|, gleet Pliny, Plutarch, Sallus and Seneca. Study these writings both I for the subject and the manner in which they are treated. Arrangement is a material point in voyage writing as well as in history: I feel great diffidence here. Sufficient matter I can always furnish, and fear not to prevent anything unseamanlike from entering into the cornposition: but to round a period well, and arrange sentences so as to place what is meant in the most perspicacious view, is too much for me. Seamanship and authorship make too great an angle with one another. He would have copied more had the sheet of paper he had begun with been sufficient, for there was something of the actor in Mr Jeffris, and when he wrote the words of his hero on this piece of paper he felt himself become their author whose own frock coat (in an engraving dated 1835) bore a striking similarity to the one that Mr Jeffris had had made in 1864. Following the advice of Major Mitchell had led Mr Jeffris into areas a coster's son might not normally expect to enter. He had taught himself Latin so he might read what he must know. He had studied water-colour technique in order that he might record the landscapes of the New World. He had spent five years of his life as a brown-nose, arse-licking apprentice, assistant, dogsbody to the incompetent, asthmatic Mr Cruikshank in order that he might master that science which Mitchell placed above all others: surveying. He had come to Sydney that he might study under Mr Martin (the oil painter) and in so doing he had ended up;

A Prayer '

employed by Mr Martin's friend, Mr d'Abbs.

Mr Jeffris could not tolerate incompetence. He could quote scripture to support his view. He could not differentiate it from sloth. It was an offence to God who made us in His image. And yet he found it everywhere. It was as common as dust. There was not a man he had served who had been free from Mr Jeffris's censure.

Mr d'Abbs was incompetent. It was a wonder he had any business at all, and would not have had if he had not set up his kitchen and his cellar in the service of the fuddled complacent friendship of his dinner table. It was all social. That was obvious. He sat down with them at dinner. They drank too much wine and put their arms around each other. They imagined they discussed Philosophy and Great Issues when they could barely pronounce the names of the men they misquoted. He was "good old Jimmy d'Abbs," but he was a tosspot and incompetent. He could not add up. He could not bother to add up, and yet such was the condition of life that Mr Jeffris was called upon to serve him. It made Mr Jeffris angry, angry every minute he was in the office. He spent his days leashed in, trussed up; he could hardly bear to be there, except he must. But one day he would go. One day he would not be there to make sure the work was done correctly, and then all the second-rate firms who had grown to trust the idiot would find themselves in fearful trouble. D'Abbs would never have a head clerk as good, not because there were not others to be had, but because he would not know how to recognize one.

Jeffris had dreams about d'Abbs. He dreamed he slapped him and stabbed him in his sparrow's chest.

But now, like an ass which God has given frankincense to carry, d'Abbs had brought him this gift-an incompetent clerk who had it in his head he would go to Boat Harbour, by land, across unmapped territory. He was a frail little thing, a skippy girl with milk-white skin and a weakness for poker.

With a patron, wrapped and sealed, in tandem.

Mr Jeffris sat very, very still. He must be careful. He must approach the matter as if it were a timid animal, a little birdie to be trapped-no, not trapped, he was not strong enough to think himself a predatorbut to be coaxed, persuaded, wooed.

Mr Jeffris stood and then kneeled. There was barely room for him to squash in between the bookcase and the bed. It was a week Before Christmas. He asked God that he might be granted this Great Journey.

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That Lucinda should greet Mr Jeffris so enthusiastically when he arrived uninvited at her back door late on Christmas night, his arms full of presents, a bottle of warm colonial hock under his arm, should shake his square short-fingered hand and bring him into the parlour and thus ignore all her intuitions about the man she had privately likened to both a spider and a vicious dog, was merely one more product of the devastating sermon the Reverend Mr Dight had preached that morning, Christmas Day.

The reverend gentleman had not planned this controversial sermon, although Mr Chalmers, the warden of the vestry, was always at him with his "Do not be afraid to make a ruckus." But Mr Chalmers was in trade (three butchers' shops with prices writ in whitewash on their window panes) and was too often inclined, the Reverend Mr Dight thought, to regard the building of a Christian congregation as being no different from establishing good will in the High Street. Mr Dight knew his warden to be delighted with his sermon for, in the midst of his passionate address, he had looked down into his congregation and seen, in the midst of two hundred grave and attentive faces, Mr Chalmers's round and polished countenance wreathed in smiles. Mr Chalmers imagined that his nagging for a ruckus had at last produced results, but the Reverend Mr Dight had not planned the sermon. It is possible that he had it in his mind, that he carried it, like black flies on a sweat-damp back, without knowing it was there. But it was only when he stood in his pulpit-in that moment before he would begin to fiddle with his bookmarks-that he saw that They (the fornicators, gamblers) had dared to show their impudent faces on this holiest of days, and then the black flies rose in a fury, and he took for his text, not the Good News he had marked, but rather Matthew

5:27–30. "Ye have heard it said by them of old time, thou shall not commit adultery."

Christmas Day

He then had the pleasure of seeing his impromptu sermon take effect as his most carefully prepared addresses never had. There was a ripple, a shiver that'moved across the congregation like wind across the face of a pond. He froze them. He had them so quiet they hardly dared unfold their arms or cross their legs the other way. They formed a human lock around the two fornicators who sat rigid in their pew, their red necks advertising guilt. On Christmas Day the sky was a rich cobalt blue. The grass at Whitheld's Farm (being understocked) was long and golden and crackling underfoot.

The day had seemed perfect to Lucinda in every detail. She and Oscar had set a table in the garden before they left for church. The jacaranda had lost its flowers and was now a feathery umbrella of cool green. A soft nor'easter came off the harbour. They placed their presents on the parlour hearth and walked through the embarrassing plenty of Whitheld's Farm (all of New South Wales was in the grip of drought, and all the feed between Sydney and Bathurst was eaten down to the roots) through all the golden grass to church. Oscar said the colours felt wrong for Christmas. Lucinda said the colours in Bethlehem must surely have been like this: this dazzling blue sky, this straw-gold earth, and not the cold and bracken-brown of pagan Britain. Oscar smiled at her, his eyes glistening.

She thought: He does love me. And if his behaviour is always proper, then it is perverse of me to be irritated with him because of it. I could not respect him if he were to act improperly, to place, like Mr d'Abbs or Mr Paxton, his hand upon my knee.

She accepted the glistening fluid that threatened to spill over his lower lids as the exact equivalent of a kiss and she was moved, and excited, and bowed her head and fixed her bonnet although she had not planned to do so until they were amongst the new houses of Balmain. And then there was the sermon.

She felt herself slapped and spat on and all that landscape which she had smugly celebrated not half an hour before-she had gone on and on, naming trees and birds for her companion-now seemed a hateful place-dry, harsh, a tinder-box with black snakes coiled amongst its deadly grasses.

The urge to cry was so strong she must battle with her body to subdue it. She bit her lip and breathed through her mouth. She ran the gauntlet of the crowded churchyard with her face blazing red. She thought: They hate me, and it is not only the men. Oscar said: 'They do not even know us," but this voice was high and

Oscar and Lucinda

nervous. This tone was no help. She drew away from him.

"I cannot speak," she managed. She took off her bonnet and, in her agitation, wrapped it around her prayer book while they were still in sight of the church.

"It was a most unchristian sermon," said Oscar to whom had come, in the midst of all this turbulence and upset, the following very simple thought: It is my duty to save her name; there is no question but that I must propose marriage to her. This thought was both respectable and gentlemanly, but because it so neatly coincided with his own desires, he could not believe it uncorrupted. "Most unchristian," he repeated.

"Oh, do not be so hurt," she snapped.

"It is on your behalf I hurt."

"I thank you, but on my behalf it would be best if we did not discuss the matter." Lucinda did not like herself like this. She knew herself wrong and also in the wrong. She was poisoned by that hateful sermon, by its crudeness, its intolerance, its certainty of its own whiskyand-tobaccosmelling strength. And now she snapped and slapped at the one soul whose goodness and kindness she would not question. She was acting like a spoiled child, like her mother had acted on the days when her daughter hated her, and although she knew all this, she could not stop herself. She was tearing Christmas Day to shreds.

She had put such store in this day, and not merely in the care with which she chose a turkey and a pair of pale blue poplin shirts for her dear friend. In her imagination she had seen all the unspoken things between them come, at last, to be spoken of directly. She had imagined the shirts laid across the faded damask of the parlour armchair, seen crumpled paper and golden ribbon discarded on the blood-red Turkish rug. And other things, like kissing, but not quite so sharp and clear, with furry unfocused edges like a water-colour.

But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love. She drew herself into herself, and when they let themselves into the cottage she could not even look at the table she had set with so many feverish thoughts. She told herself: It does not matter what bigots think of me.

But it did matter. She could not bear to be so hated.

She took down the chipped brown-glaze tea-pot. She put the kettle on the stove and riddled the grate and then, feeling her tears well up inside her, she hurried upstairs to her room. Oscar saw the tumescent top lip and understood her intention. She was going to her room to cry.

Christmas Day

But he was to propose to her.

If he delayed the matter further all courage would depart him. And this is why he went chasing after her, up the clattery uncarpeted stairs, two strides at a time. He caught her on the landing and he dare not ask her to accompany him downstairs to some prettier place-he saw she would almost certainly refuse this for, not understanding his intention, she had a cornered, wild-eyed look. So it was here, in the gloomiest corner of the cottage, the sticky place were Prucilla Twopenny had once spilled a pot of honey from her mistress's breakfast tray, that Oscar put his proposal to Lucinda Leplastrier.

Some peeling wallpaper tickled against Lucinda's neck. She hit at it, imagining a spider. Oscar put his hand in his pocket and jiggled his pennies and threepences together. He wished to be principled. He did not wish to take advantage of a situation where a Christian and gentlemanly act would so benefit his personal desires. He therefore excluded from his breathless speech everything good and noble in his heart. He jiggled his change. He tapped his foot. He offered to marry her to "save your reputation in Balmain."

"Oh, no," she said, "you are too kind to me."

And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.

"Come in," she prayed. "Oh, dearest, do come in." But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.

Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.

It was into this environment that Mr Jeffris came with his hock bottle and his meticulously wrapped little gifts. He brought a packet of Eleme raisins for Lucinda and a brass compass for Oscar. And although he was not exactly a jolly man, and was, indeed, for the most part angry and when not angry rather doleful, he was capable of charm when there was sufficient reason for it. He was compact and good-looking with a great deal of lustrous black hair and very white even teeth beneath his big moustache and when he engaged you in conversation

Oscar and Lucinda

he had the trick of holding your eyes-no matter where his obsessive mind was really dwelling-as if what you had to say was of great importance to him. He was, as Mr d'Abbs would later claim, an actor, although not such a good one that he would, in normal circumstances, have deceived Lucinda.

But the circumstances were not normal and it was Mr Jeffris who rescued them from the embarrassment and estrangement of their ruined Christmas Day. His hock was warm and more than a little acid, but they drank it thirstily and ate his raisins and shared their shortbread and laughed gratefully at his jokes and talked about the journey to Boat Harbour in such a shy and tentative way that Mr Jeffris, not understanding the personal aspect of the matter, began to think that his own speech had "put them off."

"You should not pay much heed to my little speech in Sussex Street," he said. He smiled and tugged at his moustache and seemed to be debating as to whether he would continue to take them into his confidence. "I will tell you," he said. "My situation is that I am employed, eh? For the present at any rate. And while I am employed it is a case of he-who-pays-the-ftddler-calls-thetune, isn't that so, Miss Leplastrier?"

"Mr d'Abbs required you to answer in this way?" Lucinda asked. Mr Jeffris could see he did not have her full attention. He could not know that her mind was much occupied with the question of the lamp and whether she had turned it down low enough to hide the evidence of her red-rimmed eyes. Mr Jeffris thought the expedition in grave danger of being stillborn.

"He did not specifically tell me to answer as I did, Miss Leplastrier, but I understand my employer well enough. You must have noted how happy the little chap was with the answer I gave." (He said "little chap" on purpose. It was calculated to communicate the complications of their relationship.) "It has been on my conscience ever since. I mean, that I deceived you. I thought I might write you a note, and then there was too much delay involved in such a plan. I never like delay. There is so much of it that can be avoided. It is true in business and in journeys. So I said to myself, this is unnecessary delay, and besides," Mr Jeffris smiled at them, first at Oscar, then at Lucinda, "it was Christmas, so I called in person."

"It is very kind of you," said Oscar, squirming in his seat and hazarding a smile towards Lucinda whose moods and motives were of far more importance to him than Mr Jeffris's; so although he was, indeed, puzzled by the pleasant transformation of the head clerk's character,

Christinas Day

his interest in the man was of a much lower order than his interest in Lucinda Leplastrier who now, in the lamplight, bestowed such a sweet smile on him that he knew his rude assumption about marriage now to be forgiven. He might not be loved, not yet, but neither was he to be hated as he had feared all through the dreadful afternoon. He would not propose again until he had made the journey which Mr Jeffris was, at this very moment, so enthusiastically discussing. Oscar heard him say that there was, contrary to what he had said in Mr d'Abbs's office, a safe way to Boat Harbour.

"Provided," Mr Jeffris said, spreading butter on his shortbread and thereby causing Lucinda's eyebrow to raise itself, "provided you will gently-gently catchee monkey." It did not occur to Oscar that this philosophy did not mesh with one that could not tolerate delay. He was more interested in the butter on the shortbread and raised an eyebrow of his own and thereby-ah! — caused Miss Leplastrier to smile.

"You have probably heard about the butchering habits of the northern blacks," said Mr Jeffris. They had. They did not raise any more eyebrows. Mr Jeffris had their complete attention.

"This is the direct result," said Mr Jeffris, "of rushing. They are incompetents. They go straight through the centre of the niggers' kingdoms. It is like thrusting your bare hand into a beehive and it gets them hopping mad, ma'am, whereas if you took your time, as I should, and went around the boundaries," his whole demeanour changed; you could see his shoulders loosen; his hands soften, "why, as you can imagine, Jacky-Jacky would be pleased to let you be." The woman was alert and thoughtful. She asked: "Who knows these boundaries?" He answered: "I do."

He liked that. An answer like a pistol shot.

It was a lie. He had read some thoughts on the matter in the journals of Mrs Burrows's late husband (not a clever man) who had spent his last months like a chap rolling amongst beehives with a blazing torch. Mr Jeffris took these musings (you could not call them theories) and developed them as he spoke. He did not think that he was lying. Neither, had he paused to see what he was doing, would he have denied it to himself. He would now say anything which would result in him being put in charge of this expedition. He would write such journals as the colony had never seen. Every peak and saddle surveyed to its precise altitude. Each saw-tooth range exquisitely rendered. His

349

Oscar and Lucinda

prose would have a spine of steel and descriptions as delicate as violet petals, Mr Jeffris was a coster's son and although he now despised salesmen he had a salesman's skills and he spoke to Lucinda directly and often, not because he valued the opinions of women (he did not) but because he saw that this one was at least as important as Mr Smudge in deciding whether or not his lovely journals should e'er be born. He did not flirt because he saw this would not be welcome, but if it had been welcome, then he would have flirted without Oscar being aware of it.

Lucinda opened the bottle of claret she had intended for their lunch. And when Mr Jeffris finally departed, sometime in the early hours of Boxing Day, she and Oscar sat at the table in the garden and-midst the heavy perfume of the citronella which they rubbed on their faces and arms to keep away mosquitoes-ate cold dry turkey and drank strong black tea.

They said nothing to each other about the incident on the landing. Yet they thought of little else and all their tender feelings, their shyness, embarrassment, hurt, their edgy, anxious, sometimes angry love, were like loose flecks of precious thread caught in the warp of a sturdy carpet, incorporated in that conversation which concluded with them wondering if it might be (a) possible and (b) ethical to persuade Mr Jeffris to take a leave of absence from Mr d'Abbs so he might lead the expedition to Boat Harbour.

87

Gratitude

Long, scythed sweeps of sunshine ran across the carpet, cutting through dull olive and leaving it a mown and brilliant green. Mr d'Abbs sat with his mustard-checked knees in sunshine, his face in shadow. It was difficult to see his expression, but his voice, no matter what

•«n

Gratitude

private outrage he might feel about the theft of his head clerk, revealed only his own great satisfaction with himself, and if he was put out by these uninvited visitors, he did not show it. Lucinda sat on the edge of what was normally "Mrs Burrows's chair" facing Mr d'Abbs. She rolled open the plans, but they were not inclined to stay open and so Oscar held one edge for her. The plans were beautiful. Oscar was surprised that anything so light and fanciful had come from the gold-ringed hand of Mr d'Abbs. Fine graphite lines, soft crinkly yellow tissue paper-it was as though he held the map of a thought between thumb and forefinger.

"Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, "this plan has taken you eight weeks." Oscar thought: She is already doing that which, not half an hour before, she has sworn she will not do. She has not even complimented him.

Mr d'Abbs stiffened slightly. He crossed his legs. He had dainty feet and slender ankles. "Rome," he said, "was not built in a day."

Oscar crossed his legs too, in sympathy. His right knee clicked. He worried about his knees. Soon he would have to walk beside the wagons Mr Jeffris was commissioning. He would have to walk day after day, week after week. It was for this reason that he soaked his feet in methylated spirits every night and why, by day, he wore these extraordinary boots which caused his feet such pain.

"And what size sheet have you planned for?" asked Lucinda. She smiled, but she was not an actress and her cheeks-as they always did when she was unhappy-seemed to disappear; the smile was as bleak as a cipher scratched on the wall of a house.

"Oh," Mr d'Abbs's rings fluttered through the sunshine, retreated into shadow) "oh, 111 leave that to your discretion."

"But, Mr d'Abbs," she pronounced it Mis-ter, "I specified a particular sheet size." Oscar watched with alarm as Lucinda tried to hold her anger in its place. Her sinuses seemed to swell visibly. Her nostrils flared. Her hands were leaving damp stains on the crinkly yellow paper. She said: "That is the whole point."

"Your point." Mr d'Abbs uncrossed his legs and then crossed them the other way.

"My point, yes."

"But not my point."

"It is my life that is involved here, and yours only to the most limited extent. Your point, with respect, Mr d'Abbs, does not matter."

"There is no respect in that at all, Miss Leplastrier, and simply

«I

Oscar and Lucinda

saying 'with respect' does not put it there."

There was an alarming silence. Oscar could hear Lucinda breathing. He was afraid she did herself no credit with this behaviour and, in truth, he did not understand why she should be so very angry. It was a fanciful church, he saw that, and perhaps a little pagan, but that, surely, was not the root of the problem. He prayed: Dear Lord, grant her patience, and charity. But all Lucinda could see was an irreligious nightmare, a bloated monument to ignorance and tastelessness-curved canopies, Moorish screens, Tudor gables, Japanese "effects." It was a monster, too-one hundred feet across.

"An artist," Mr d'Abbs was saying, "cannot be constrained by blacksmiths."

"But, Mr d'Abbs, don't you see-you have taken eight weeks and I cannot build what you have drawn."

"Miss Leplastrier," (Mr d'Abbs's voice had a tremor in it) "eight weeks is nothing." He stepped into the full glare of morning sunshine. His eyes were baleful. His chin was quivering. The hands that had begun by gesturing so freely were now clasped tight, one manacled to the other behind his back. He sat down. He looked around the walls at all his crowded landscapes. He smiled. His eyes pleaded. "Eight weeks is nothing for a building that will last a century." As Mr d'Abbs spoke and as Lucinda looked at this tawdry church she began to suffer a tight, airless feeling in her chest. The fact that the object of their bet was now made to appear at once so vain and mediocre and that it was, in any case, impossible to build, conspired to act as a catalyst in Lucinda's soul, to make a focus for all the vague unease she harboured about the bet, and fearful thoughts which she had hitherto managed to keep submerged, now bubbled up like marsh gas and burst, malodourous, in the very forefront of her conscious mind. The tight band across her chest was a not unfamiliar feeling. It normally came on her after a night spent at the gaming tables. It was a panic produced by the fear of throwing away her fortune. She pressed her forearms against her abdomen. She looked to Oscar, wishing only that he would dispel her panic with a smile.

Oscar uncrossed his leg. His knee clicked again. He folded his arms which were sore as a result of Mr Jeffris's recommended dumb-bell exercises.

Mr d'Abbs leaned forward. He rubbed at the yellow paper as if he were a salesman in a Manchester department and the plans were fabric he had set his mind on selling. "You may not see the work in this plan."

Gratitude

"Oh," Lucinda sighed, "I see it, Mr d'Abbs, I really do." However she was not looking at Mr d'Abbs, but at the green-eyed man she had allowed herself to believe might love her. She could not see this man. She saw another, a queer stranger who rubbed his hands together like a praying mantis. She had made a bet with him and that was all. You could claim that it was code for a betrothal, a token of love, but not if you were sane. It was a bet, and only a mad woman would imagine anything else.

"With respect, Miss-you cannot see it. It is not here, but in all the scraps of paper, all the scribblings, the full-drawn plans that were flawed. I have been up early in the mornings. I have talked to my many artistic friends. I have pursued this most diligently, Miss Leplastrier, and not to make money."

"I am most appreciative," Lucinda said.

"You are not appreciative." His voice rose and the tremble could not be ignored. Oscar saw how the brown eyes pleaded, even while they closed down with anger. "I tender no fee, merely the pleasure of doing the job well for you because I care for matters of the spirit. ." A small vertical frown mark appeared on Lucinda's high forehead.

". . more than most men in this town. As you know, as you know. And I take it," his voice rose even more as a flock of white cockatoos rose shrieking from the Moreton Bay fig beside the window, "I take it most uncivilized to be hectored on account of it. Do you see my bill attached?" (Oscar crossed his leg again.) "Do you see an account of my worry? Or my hours?

Who protected your interests when you arrived in Sydney? You were lucky you were not robbed blind in daylight. Who invited you into his home, and provided you with friends? Here, in this room. How often you thanked me."

"Please," said Oscar, who could not bear the little man's pain. "Please, Mr d'Abbs…"

"You will hold your tongue, sir," said Mr d'Abbs, rising suddenly to his feet. He began to stride around the room picking up leatherbound volumes and banging them together. They.gave off a smell like old bacon fat. There seemed to be no sense in the action except the exercise of anger.

"I took you in when nobody would touch you. You were not a clerk's bootlace, sir. You were a smudge. A disgraceful, cast-out little smudge. You ruined my journals. I will always be able to look at the pages and remember your untidy habits. So do not," he shrieked, "presume to tell me how to draw a plan."

"I was not," said Oscar.

"Then do not," said Mr d'Abbs, quiet again. He took a breath and

Oscar and Lucinda

then expelled it. He turned to Lucinda, speaking to her even while he continued to pick up the books which last night's party had left abandoned on sideboard, sofa, table, ottoman. "I have not the skill to draw in perspective, miss, and I am not the only architect with this disability. Greenway-so Mr Fig informs me-was the same. But I have commissioned Mr Hill, from my own pocket" (by now he had half a dozen volumes clasped to his chest) "from my own pocket, to provide the perspective you have in front of you. You will see it is signed" (it was an untidy nest of books he held, quite unstable) "and if you do not like it" (a thick brown volume dropped and he kicked it-thwackagainst the skirting board) "if you do not like it, you may take it to Lawson's and sell it for ten guineas."

Oscar still held one corner of the plan between thumb and forefinger. He was now crouching awkwardly with his backside hovering above Miss Shaddock's low-slung sewing chair. He looked at Lucinda, expecting to see a sympathetic softening of the face, but saw, if anything, the opposite.

"Mr d'Abbs," she said, relinquishing the plans to Oscar. "You have been complacent about the most serious matter imaginable. Good taste aside, this church cannot be made. You ignored the information I provided you with. The sheets must be three feet long and eighteen inches wide. Did it ever occur to you," she cried, her voice shaking, "you who call yourself my friend, did you ever think what might depend on this?"

Mr d'Abbs was so loaded with his own emotions that he had no space to take on Lucinda's anguish or wonder what might cause it. He looked like an actor stabbed on stage. He opened his mouth and then shut it. He caught a book as it slipped from his grasp.

"There is a wager dependent on this, Mr d'Abbs. I stand to lose my fortune." In her heart Lucinda expected this revelation to have some effect on Mr d'Abbs. It was an expectation carried from the time when she had placed a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty's Hotel.

But she was not a little girl and Mr d'Abbs was not her protector. "What do you know about stakes?" he hissed.

Lucinda thought: So! He hates me. So be it. Why shouldn't he?

"You little brat. You are playing with money as if it were windfalls in an orchard. What do you know about business?"

This insult had a most salutary effect on Lucinda. It dismissed her panic. It unlocked all those not inconsiderable opinions which told her that she was a better person that Mr d'Abbs. She drew herself up to

1

Gratitude

her full height, unclenched her hands and rubbed their palms together.

"Do not patronize me, Mr d'Abbs," she said. "You are a dabbler. You are all dabblers." She felt herself at one with Oscar Hopkins. They stood together, outside the pale, united. "You are children."

"We are children?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," Lucinda said, imagining that the day would come when she would regret this outburst. "Indeed you are."

"We?"

"All of you," said Lucinda, indicating with a sweep all the empty chairs, thus summoning and dismissing the images of Miss Malcolm, Mr Calvitto, Mr Fig, Mr Borrodaile, and even-there-Mr Henry Parkes. Thus, with a disdain worthy of Elizabeth Leplastrier, she burned the last of her social bridges in Sydney.

Mr d'Abbs affected spluttering. "And you, I suppose, are adults?"

"We are wagering everything. We place ourselves at risk."

"Oh, how noble you are," cried Mr d'Abbs, his face quite twisted with passion, "how elevated."

"We are alive," said Lucinda and at that moment she felt herself to be what she said. "We are alive on the very brink of eternity."

Lucinda took the plans from Oscar and placed them gently on the low walnut table beside her chair.

"You get out of my house," said Mr d'Abbs, snatching up the plans. He looked as if he might cry if not obeyed. "You, sir, Mr Smudge,

go now."

"Do not call him Mr Smudge, if you please."

"This is my house and I will call him what I like."

For a moment Oscar thought Lucinda intended to strike Mr d'Abbs with her hand. Mr d'Abbs anticipated the same. He screwed up his face and this gave his hatred a slightly pathetic cast. Luanda's cheeks were flushed and her lips, hitherto so rightly rucked away, were now released and slightly parted. She gazed at Mr d'Abbs with an expression related to, but slightly kinder than, contempt. Her passions rushed through her veins declaring their intensity (but not their tangled nature) in lips, nostrils, in those extraordinary large green eyes. Oscar thought: How beautiful she is.

"You have no head for business," said Mr d'Abbs.

Oscar held out his arm. Lucinda took it. Oscar thought: I love her.

"She takes his arm," hissed Mr d'Abbs. "Not that door, unless you wish the sleeping quarters. You have no head for business and no eye either."

They found their way into the hallway. Oscar saw a woman (it was

355

Oscar and Lucinda

Mrs d'Abbs) holding the front door open for them. She was applecheeked with golden curls and she looked at them both with her eyes bright, her mouth open. As they passed through the door she pressed an orange into Oscar's free hand.

"Thieves walking out the door," announced Mr d'Abbs, running into the passage. "An idea stolen and no thanks given."

He stood beside his pretty wife watching Oscar and Lucinda walk arm in arm up the garden steps to their sulky.

"You are not the maid, Henny," he said. "It is hardly seemly that you open and close our door for riff-raff." But his tone was not as harsh as his words suggest and all the time he spoke, his eyes quizzed hers on quite a different subject which related to how much she had heard and what she thought of him as a result.

And all the while Henny d'Abbs was picturing her orange. She saw it peeled and broken into segments and thought how all that was good in it would soon be incorporated in a completely different world.

A Lecture Based upprj a Parable

That Mr Ahearn chose to walk four miles from his hotel in Pitt Street all the way to Whitfield's Farm, was partly the result of his habit of early rising, a good habit at home when one could light the stove, feed the hens, study the newspaper, and still be at one's office half an hour before one's clerks, but there was also, in this long slow walk, a kind of conceit. For to soak one's shoes in dew-wet grass, to pick one's way along a foot-wide path of the meandering type more often made by cattle than by humans was, to Mr Ahearn's mind, evidence of a kind of honesty, and this differentiated his advice (the advice he was about to deliver, the advice he carried with him) from that of people who travelled in hansoms at speed, cut a dash in traps, sulkies, broughams, phaetons. He could see himself in his mind's eye, a view from up and T;A

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

looking down-a man with a staff on a road, a traveller in a parable. Mr Ahearn was aware of how he looked to such a degree that, were he at all good-looking, it would be obvious that he was vain. But he was not good-looking, knew himself not good-looking, and yet he had a knowledge of his appearance so exact that it could only have been obtained by examining himself not with one mirror, but with two, and sometimes-there was a silver-backed one of his wife's he sometimes

used-three.

Mr Ahearn's face had become, in the five years since he saw Lucinda on Sol Myer's boat on the Parramatta wharf, more so. It had become more blotched and leathery. The cheeks seemed to have sunken, the Adam's apple to have risen, the long strands of hair across his bald pate to have reduced themselves in number while they increased their thin black definition. The nose craned forward while the belly had swollen, and underneath his cardigan he had permitted himself to leave a button undone. His shoulders were narrow, but his arms were long and powerful and his hips wide. And he did not need you to tell him it was so-he saw it all. He thought himself the tortoise, and from this, unlikely as it may seem, he drew great strength, and he saw, with all this peering at himself with two and three mirrors, not merely imitating the behaviour of a vain manhe was a vain man, although he knew perfectly well that most of the world would class him as downright

ugly.

Mr Ahearn believed his adult form was one for which he was personally responsible, that he had made his own face and manner through the habits of his life. He had cultivated goodness and propriety. He had begun as a poor clerk and thought himself lucky to have got that far. His mother was a rag and bone merchant and his father the same, but mostly drunk or absent. When he was twelve years old he had copied down the parable of the talents. He had written it on a small piece of white paper. He had a good hand, mercifully free of fashionable flourishes, and he was able to ht Matthew 25:14–30 on a piece of paper the size of a postcard. He folded it in four and kept it in his wallet, and he had the parable in his wallet now, fifty years later, as he walked across the rickety wooden plank bridge at the entry of Balmain, where Mullens Street is these days. It was a single plank, and often stolen, and in that respect Balmain has not changed very much, but it was not Balmain which was the subject, but this piece of paper, measuring six inches by four which was not the same piece of paper, of course not, as the original, for it was a piece of paper that received much wear, was taken out, folded, shown, to a child, to a 357

Oscar and Lucinda

grandchild, to a stranger in a coffee palace, and even the best paper will not withstand this, and so Mr Ahearn had, over the years, got himself into the habit of transcribing the parable on to a new piece of paper on every New Year's Day. He would begin: "For the kingdom of heaven is a man travelling into a far country…" and work slowly and painstakingly until, just as his wife was laying the roast potatoes out on a bed of brown paper and popping them back into the kookaburra oven, he would, with much satisfaction, transcribe: "And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." And thus, as Chas Ahearn folded the piece of paper into four between the thick pincers of his nails, a new year would begin. What talents he had been given, he had used. He was a man of property but a careful man, a Christian man, and if the Lord had seen fit to bestow on Lucinda Leplastrier an amount of capital equal to the sum of all his lifetime's labour, he had not been resentful of this. But he had watched her. He had watched her carefully, sometimes from close by, but more normally from a distance, via rumour and hearsay. He watched her as he might have watched a stranger's child playing with a crystal glass. In other words, it was not his right to say anything but he sat, on edge, waiting for the crash, hoping perhaps to catch the glass between the child's hand and the floor, unable to rest or read a newspaper for fear of what might happen. He had not approved of the purchase of the glassworks. He had thought it impulsive, illconsidered. But when he heard about the glass church, he was beside himself. He was angry. He could not help this anger, but he was now making this journey, not to chide her or vent his spleen, but to avert the crash. It was his Christian duty.

He came, at last, along the rocky ridge past Birchgrove House, a solid enough property which she would have been wise to purchase herself. He had told her so, four years ago. He had directions from a farmhand knee-deep in pig mire. The man pointed down through the orchard to a small half-painted cottage above the western side of the peninsula. He had burrs caught in his socks and in his trousers. There were burrs caught even in his shoelaces. The pasture was in poor condition, and Chas Ahearn, observing the burrs, the state of the sheds, fences, the piebald cottage, could not help himself valuing the property. If it had been his he would have had surveyor's pegs dotted like cribbage pegs throughout the orchard. The gate all but fell off the cottage fence. What this gate was meant 358

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

to keep in or out was not exactly clear. There was a cow tethered in its front garden. Mr Ahearn checked his gold fob watch. It was a gift from the Parramatta Benevolent Society of which he had been chairman for twenty years. He did his jacket up around his cardigan and knocked loudly on the door.

The servant was a fright. He had never seen such a servant, not even at Parramatta where every second one was a murderer. He had coal dust on his hands, and on his face. His hair was unruly, sticking out in all directions and although his beard was not heavy, the early sun, cutting in from the direction of The Heads, showed the orange stubble on his skin. His eyes were red and the left one smudged about with black.

"Is your mistress at home?"

He was informed she was still abed. This information was delivered in a voice so well educated that it confused Mr Ahearn a little, but not for long: he decided he was an actor, and having leapt to this conclusion, he clung to it.

He told the servant he would wait, but if he himself had not made to move towards the passageway, it is doubtful he would have been invited in. He was taken to the kitchen with the explanation it was "cosy." As the day was unpleasantly hot and humid Mr Ahearn could see nothing in this "cosy" but a convict form of clever rudeness. It was chaps like this who allowed Englishmen to write such patronizing accounts of their visits to the colony. And what a feast of sneering could be had here. The house was not clean. The kitchen was practically disemboweled. There were empty pots with burned bottoms and if these appeared to Lucinda as symbols of recklessness and joy, they were not perceived as such by Mr Ahearn. There was an item of female clothing strung across a chair like a fisherman's net. A bottle of brandy sat next to a small potted plant. A single tracery of cobweb ran across a sparkling clean glass window. A drawing board was propped on a workbench, which had, until recently, occupied a space more suited to it, inside the garden shed. On the drawing board he found evidence of the folly he had come to stop. Mr Ahearn sat heavily, leaning forward, his hat in his left hand, while the right hand wiped and smoothed and patted his head.

When Lucinda came downstairs to receive him, she found that he had taken it upon himself to remove the drawing from the place where she had left it so carefully pinned. He held it against the window pane, and was kneeling on her three-legged stool with his big sweaty nose (on which his wire-rimmed spectacles were precariously perched)

•ViQ

Oscar and Lucinda

pressed close to it. He was caught in flagrante delicto. He had no time to rearrange his face. His mouth was open, but his forehead creased, as if wonder and censoriousness were there lined up for battle.

He did not greet her formally. In fact he began as if she had, just a moment before, left him with an invitation to inspect her plan. He made no apology for the early hour but rather held out her plan to her as if it were a table napkin he had finished with, and she a woman with nothing better to do than take it to the laundry.

Oscar stood in the doorway and watched. He was quite insensitive to Mr Ahearn's rudeness. He saw only what he imagined Mr Ahearn must see-that in this room, two hours before, he had kissed Miss Leplastrier on her soft and pliant mouth. Lust was visible. Mr Ahearn should surely see it.

"Where will the vicar change into his vestments?" Mr Ahearn demanded. "Where will he blow his nose in private? When he is late, he will be on show, like a fish in an aquarium, and what will you do," asked Mr Ahearn, seating himself upon the three-legged stool, "about the heat?" Lucinda knew it impolite to greet the old goose in her gown, and yet she wished him witness to it. She was a free woman, and she dared stand before her visitor, uncorseted, with burnt pots and unwashed plates around her. She had kissed her lodger's mouth and held him hard against her loins. She stood thus before Mr Chas Ahearn and refused to be ashamed.

"A fatal flaw," intoned Mr Ahearn. "A cardinal error." Lucinda looked at Oscar and pulled a face. Oscar blushed. She knew why he blushed and, in the midst of her growing irritation, was warmed by the heat of it. She smiled at Mr Ahearn who, seeing, but not understanding, the sleepy contentment in the girl's face, was not only puzzled but also, a little, embarrassed.

"It is this which makes this church impossible," he said. He could see that the damned servant was listening to every word he said. "The Australian sun will scorch your congregation as though they were in hell itself."

"It was kind of you to come early to tell me this," said Lucinda.

"And have you become so sarcastic, Miss Leplastrier?"

She was sarcastic, it was true. It was not an attractive quality. But she could not tolerate the satisfaction he had from finding fault in her design. He stood in judgement on her work as passionately as she had so short a time before, stood in judgement on Mr d'Abbs. She could not bear it, even if he were right.

%n

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

But he could not be right.

It was far too late for him to be right.

Oscar came forward and picked up the brandy bottle, using two fingers like tweezers to open its long neck. He carried it from the room. Lucinda opened her mouth as if she would say something in explanation, but then she shut it again.

Mr Ahearn, however, did not seem to notice either Oscar or the bottle.

"Who has ordered this?"

"Ordered?" said Lucinda, anxious that he not attempt to fmd more faults, fearful that there were many there to fmd.

"Commissioned, purchased, requested that you manufacture this?" He knew the answer was "no one." But Lucinda said: "The Lord Jesus Christ." Mr Ahearn hissed.

"Whose glory it celebrates," said Lucinda, wrapping her gown a little tighter.

"The glory of God is not served by folly."

"There are circumstances where it is called folly to be wise."

"Do not banter with me," said Chas Ahearn. "It is not practical. It is too hot to sit in. No congregation will pay for it."

She looked for Oscar in order that he might come to her defence but he had begun to stack cups and saucers in the scullery. "It is," she decided, "to be built beneath a shady tree."

"Oh, fiddlesticks," said Chas Ahearn, rising to his feet. He buttoned his long grey jacket and retrieved his wallet from the secret pocket where no Sydney footpad would ever find it. He took out his parable which, being late in the year, had become very frayed at the edges.

"The Kingdom of Heaven," said Lucinda, "is a man visiting a foreign country."

"Travelling into a far country."

"Yes, I know."

Still, she took the piece of paper when it was offered to her. She had read it before. The paper smelled of boring afternoons in Parramatta.

"But you do not know. You do not act as if you know."

"Yes, yes. My fortune is unearned. It is the fruit of your clever subdivision, and it was bought by the labour of my mother and my father and the blood of the blacks of the Dharuk. I have no right to it."

"The scripture says no such thing."

"Perhaps that is a lack in the scripture.":"

Oscar and Lucinda

"It will be hot," he said, retrieving his parable, "as hot as hell. The congregation will fry inside," he said. "They will curse you. They will curse God's name."

"Mr Ahearn, please do be calm." Lucinda was not calm herself. "Mr Hopkins," she called,

"perhaps you would fetch Mr Ahearn a glass of brandy?"

Mr Ahearn thought: "Mister? She calls her servant Mister." His lips were showing small white bubbles at the sides and he was having a great deal of trouble fitting his parable back inside his wallet.

"I have come to tell you this in respect of the wishes of your mother who was my client. You were given such a start in life, young lady. And I have tried my best to steer you right." But this manner was not as his words. His voice was angry. There was something he did not understand at work within him, a rage so great he could not make his hands stay still. He saw himself tear up his parable. It was not symbolic. It was mechanical-the forces of agitation and rage at work. He could not bear this glass church, and yet he could not explain this, or any of his passions to himself. He saw himself, from a great distance, a tortoise-necked man with a quaking voice. He heard himself shout. He saw himself gently escorted from the sloth-house by the man who, he found out later that day, was not a servant at all, but a defrocked priest, the little harlot's lover. 89

Of the Devil

Lust was an insect, a beetle, a worm. It slipped into his belly like the long pink parasites which had thrived in the intestines of the Strattons's pigs, and he had tried to drown it with long clear draughts of tank water, with holy scriptures, with meditations upon hell. John wrote: "He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning."

Of the Devil

In Galatians it is said: "If we live in the spirit, we also walk in the spirit." But the mail from England said that the Reverend Mr Stratton had hanged himself from the rafters of his church while he who had corrupted him, the same Oscar Hopkins, the so-called servant of God, had seduced an honest woman, had pressed his lips against her teasweet mouth and felt the soft curve of her stomach against his loins.

It had been three in the morning. He had come out to draw more water and had found her there, in her Chinese gown. His penis was a hard rod against the softness of her stomach. He felt Satan take his soul like an overripe peach with a yielding stalk.

He kissed her dear, soft lips. He nuzzled her long white neck. He touched and broke away, touched and broke away, moaned and begged his God's forgiveness while the clock in the kitchen struck the hour.

He withdrew from her, made patting motions in the air with long outstretched fingers as if their passion was a silky beast between them that could be soothed and patted into docility. They went into the kitchen and drank tea. They did not discuss this thing, which Oscar, with extraordinary selfcentredness, saw as his responsibility. He did not think, She loves me. He thought, rather, I am seducing her.

They talked earnestly about the glass church, although not of its faults or impracticalities. When his unholy passion rose in him Oscar used fear to still it. He thought of the boat carriage that Mr Jeffris was having built at Mort Bay. Mr Jeffris had described the carriage in the most minute detail, at this very kitchen table and Oscar had listened with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as if it were not a vehicle for carrying a boat, but a gallows or a set of stocks. Mr Jeffris was precise and fastidious. He was pleased to demonstrate this in the design of the boat carriage. The two boats were carried one inside the other, like two spoons. Each was suspended on canvas slings and such was the ingenious nature of the design that neither could ever rub against the other.

The thing that made Mr Jeffris so proud served only to paralyze Oscar. He would be called to travel in a boat.

Dear God, give me hard and difficult things. Give me a rocky path that I may not sin. Mr Jeffris loved to talk of rivers, mountains, trigonometry. He Promised Oscar he would have him delivered to Boat Harbour, and do not fear. There was no risk from drowning. >..;.;.,••<

Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar had not known about these rivers when he talked about going overland. The Hastings, the Clarence, the Macleay, these rivers now snaked through his dreams. They were miles wide, bruised and swollen by the rain.

He was ill with fear at the thing he had begun. When he woke from sleep it was there to meet him, as cruel as death.

He thought: I will drown.

He thought: Dear God, take my soul into Thy safe-keeping.

He thought: I love her. He thought: I am impure. In the kitchen they bit each other, dragged at their faces. They wedged themselves together against the door jamb like two clothes pegs. The Reverend Mr Stratton had hanged himself from the rafter above his pulpit. Wardley-Fish must already be in Sydney searching for his friend who was ashamed and hid from him. He lusted after a woman who loved another.

He thought: God, do not have me lead her into sin.

He thought: There is no God. There is nothing. I do not have to cross these six rivers. I do not have to travel with mad Jeff ris with his cornpasses, his journals, his trained criminals, his dumbbells, his picks, his carpenter, his saddler, his three brass chronometers. I am someone put backwards on a horse and paraded through the bush for ridicule. He was baggage, carried by Mr Jeff ris, his ticket paid by Miss Leplastrier.

But he had promised God he would do this. I Although only because he wished Lucinda to love him. j!i >. Did she not love him? j Did she say so?

No, she did not. She kissed his lips and made them as blue as ink, but when he had offered to marry her, on Christmas Day, she had fled, weeping, to her room.

Why was this?; Because she loved Hasset.

Then why go through this danger, this risk, this crippling fear?. So she would love him. Because he had promised God. So he would not be cast into hell.

If there was no God?

But he had bet there was a God. He had bet on Goodness. He had bet he would be rewarded in paradise. He had bet he would carry this jewel of a church through the horrid bush and have it in Boat Harbour by Easter.

His life was riddled with sin and compromise. Mr Stratton had

A Reconciliation

wrapped a rope around his neck and committed the sin of suicide. God forgive him. He was murdered by Oscar Hopkins's system.

He had posed as a holy man to Wardley-Fish. He had enticed him to Botany Bay and then hidden from him.

He could not love his father enough. He had written "dearest papa" but he had been happiest when he was away from him. He had left this good and godly man to die alone and unloved except by his unlettered flock.

Give me a hard journey, dear God. Deliver me from evil. Lead me not into temptation. And then, inside the scullery, at breakfast, he offered his bruised and swollen lips to Miss Leplastrier, and the devil played the tune, and then he saw, in the corner of his mind, the possibility that the glass church was just the devil's trick. Mr Ahearn was right. It would be too hot. The congregation would curse Christ's name.

90

A Reconciliation

Mr d'Abbs had been to Miss Leplastrier's office on four occasions before he found her, at last, inside. He had come up those three wide sets of stairs four times, rehearsed his little speech four times, but when he found her, on the fifth, the meeting did not progress as he had rehearsed it. His first thought was: Consumption.

Her skin was very pale, stretched; it was shining, slightly blue, translucent. Her eyes seemed overly large, the whites not white but that bluish grey you find in certain porcelains. Her manner, in that bright, hot, sun-drenched room-all the windows open and papers smacking each other on a green felt board, and fluttering under glass-bottle Paperweights-seemed too fast, too frantic to Mr d'Abbs who immediately forgot his speech, which was all to do with the lasting value of

Oscar and Lucinda

friendship, that it should not be thrown away through one simple misunderstanding, but that friendship was what he valued more than anything in life. Except that one might guess that he was using "friendship" when what he really meant was "companionship," this was spoken truly. He had brought her a cribbage board and a signed edition of his friend Hill's engravings of Pittwater. He had intended to make the speech and then give the gifts, but when he saw how she looked he was overcome by thoughts of her mortality, and he pressed the gifts on her without proper explanation of his feelings.

He had dressed carefully in his splendid cream linen suit and his white straw hat. He had chosen the colours at least half-conscious of their symbolism: the blank page, the clean start, and if he had it in mind to say anything about Mr Jeffris, it was only as a by the by. But now, so disconcerted was he by Miss Leplastrier's over-bright appearance, that he mentioned Jeffris when she was still opening his gifts.

"Oh, by the by, Miss Leplastrier," he said, closing one of her windows without thinking what he did. (He could not bear paper fluttering in a room.) "You do know about Mr Jeffris's passion, do you not? It occurred to me that you might not. It is impertinent to mention it, were we not such old friends."

This was a dangerous tack to take, and he knew it. He could easily give the impression that he wished to sabotage her project and that he had come here, only pretending friendship, in order to assassinate the character of her trusted guide. And yet he could not protest friendship without telling her: Jeffris was a dangerous fellow, and although you could have him in your employ in an office where he might, like a guard dog on a leash, be at once frightening and useful, it would not be the same to entrust your life to his ambitions.

When he mentioned Mr Jeffris's passion he saw Lucinda tense and he feared he had "set her off" again.

"Oh, Mr d'Abbs," Lucinda sighed, then smiled (Mr d'Abbs thought: Her arms are thin, they were not so thin before). "Do tell me about Mr Jeffris, for I see you have come here with his 'passion'

most particularly in mind." And smiling very broadly, so broadly that Mr d'Abbs could easily have felt himself quite patronized, she sat herself behind her desk and folded her arms across her bosom.

"Indeed," said Mr d'Abbs, "it is not so." There was no chair for him to sit on. He would have shut the second window, but he judged she would misinterpret it. "Quite the contrary. The reverse. I came here intent on keeping it under my hat. I thought: It is not my business, no more than how many windows you wish to have open.

A Reconciliation

I really do take it very ill to be so uncharitably interpreted."

"Forgive me."

"You do not wish to be forgiven, you little scallywag. You completely lack the conventional sense of sin, upon my word I swear it is true."

"Indeed?" said Lucinda, quite pleased to be misunderstood in this particular way.

"Indeed, you have no shame. You are pure will, and I noted this in you when you first came into my office. You hold your chin high." (He thought: You can see the blood vessels in her neck; her lower lip is distinctly blue; these are not good signs.) "I said to Fig, it does not matter what the gossips say, she is above gossips."

Oh, that this were true.

"And what," she asked, "do the gossips say about Mr Jeffris?"

"See," said Mr d'Abbs with genuine admiration, "that is the other thing I always said about youthat you would not be diverted."

"So," said Lucinda, knowing herself flattered and surprised to enjoy such falsehood so immensely.

"So it is not gossip, but, please, really." He felt silly standing in front of her. He came to sit on the edge of the desk, but the desk was a trifle taller than the beginning of his bottom, and having attempted, with one or two discreet little hops which made him look a little like a mynah bird in a cage, he contented himself with leaning. "Really, it is most important that you know-he will use you."

"And I him," said Lucinda, but felt, even while she professed such certainty, the sort of panic and anger which Mr Ahearn had produced when he called the church a "folly."

"He cares only to make a name for himself with his trigonometry and explorations. He courted Mrs Burrows-what a pair, imagine it, eh? — so Miss Malcolm tells me, until he had everything transcribed from her husband's journals and then he courted her no more."

"I do not imagine Mrs Burrows would be so easily used."

"Mrs Burrows is not the tough old thing she pretends to be. And what do you mean with that little smile, but never mind. The point is: you wish Mr Hopkins to be delivered safely." It was cruel to speak to her like this. She said: "Mr Jeffris's trigonometry and explorations would seem the perfect qualifications."

"Mr Jeffris," said Mr d'Abbs, finally getting his backside on to the desk, "is a man in love with danger."

"You must realize, Mr d'Abbs, that I have interviewed Mr Jeffris at some length. We are engaged in this project," she gestured

Oscar and Lucinda

towards the sheets of paper which were pinned, as regular as the bricks of a wall, to the green felt board, "together. I find him to be fastidious."

"You are fastidious," said Mr D'Abbs. "Therefore he is fastidious. He is an actor. His performance will vary with his audience. If you wish to know him as I do you must hear him speak when he is alone with men. With women he is a different creature entirely. His every story, when he is with his own sex, ends with some chap fainting or hollering in horror when they see how brave old Jeffris had got himself bloodied or broken in some way. And now you have supplied him with the funds and he has a little army and he is out to make a name for himself."

"Mr d'Abbs," Lucinda said, "admit it: you have come to frighten me."

"I swear no."

"It was most ill mannered of me to steal away your clerk. Although I did not steal him. It was not my intention to steal, but still I can understand you might wish to punish me. This is why you speak to me like this."

"No," said Mr d'Abbs, waving his hands violently, "no, no, no. That is the past. I came to say nothing, to patch up our quarrel, and then I thought my silence hypocritical."

"Then what would you have me do?"

"Oh, please," said Mr d'Abbs. "Cancel the whole damn thing. It is too silly for words and you will make yourself a laughing stock."

Then he saw he had gone too far. He saw her face close against him, and he suddenly lacked the courage for the continued assault.

"Of course," he said, "I am a skeptic. It is probably a corollary of my age."

"Yes." \

"And I am peeved, of course, to have lost a damn good clerk. You must allow for that."

"I do," said Lucinda with some relief.

"And after that I wish only that our friendship be maintained. My wife says she is sorry not to have made a closer friend of you. She was so taken with you. She begs me to patch up my difference with you."

"It is patched," Lucinda said, and when she bade him goodbye, in a minute or two, she kissed him gently on the cheek. It was not something she had ever done before. The effect of Mr d'Abbs's visit was that Lucinda chose to believe that 1

A Reconciliation

Mr d'Abbs had accused Mr Jeffris falsely. What touched her was the picture she made of Mr d'Abbs grappling with the demons of his own falsehood. She did not know what to make of it, except that she was moved, as it seems she was by almost everything in that month of March as they prepared to make the journey. She was in an emotional state where the smallest thing, the frailness of a twig, the unravelling of a cloud in a blue sky, was filled with poignancy and that bursting love which is the anxious harbinger of loss. She saw goodness everywhere, perhaps attributing much of her own character or longings to others, and thus chose to see Mr d'Abbs's

"confession" of his falsehood as the keystone of his character, the main thrust of his speech. It is curious that Lucinda, while rejecting most of Mr d'Abbs's accusations, chose to believe that Mr Jeffris was in love with danger. Believing this allowed her to like Mr Jeffris more. She imagined she knew the disease he suffered from, that she too was in love with danger, not, of course, as it applied to blood and body wounds, but as it applied to the more general business of life. It was not just risk, but actual loss that quickened her. And on the day Mr d'Abbs found her in her office she had come from a Pitt Street solicitor's where she had, in the face of not inconsiderable resistance, formalized her bet in a document which she placed, that night, in her dusty-smelling cedar secretaire.

She did not tell Oscar what she had done and yet it was through the medium of this document that she believed that Oscar would, magically, triumph on his journey. She did not express what she believed, not even to herself. But the confidence she felt when she touched the rolled-up document (which she did often, at least twice each day), could only have its source in this simple superstition: that if she could manage to lose this bet, then Oscar Hopkins would not die. She was a thorough woman and she had a great capacity for detail, and so she did not tmst her beloved's safety solely to this voodoo in a cedar box. She had meetings with Mr Jeffris, far more than Mr Jeffris at first thought necessary. She went through his shopping lists and his accounts and if Mr Jeffris was at first outraged to suffer this from a woman, he soon discovered that his patron-far from being the niggardly boarding-house marm he had at first imagined-would question no expense that might relate to safety. But at first he had not understood her. She had spoken philosophically of the nature of danger. It was hard for him not to smirk at her. He thought her ridicu'ous, a monkey in a top hat, a woman acting like a man. But when 369

Oscar and Lucinda

the philosophy had finished he saw she would pay up for any item which might be seen to lessen danger. And she begged him to tell her the dangers. He took great pleasure in obliging her. He enjoyed himself. He made her very frightened.

Lucinda was too much in love to think of how masculine hierarchies are created, but it was a mistake to have these meetings with Oscar absent. It encouraged Mr Jeffris in his habit of thinking of Oscar scornfully.

Lucinda thought only that she loved him, that he must be safe.

When she had imagined 'love" it had always been with someone broad and square. Even Mr Hasset had been taller than this comforting prototype. When picturing her future husband she had seen strong square hands and a black square beard. She had never imagined the snaky insinuating passion she would feel to hold a thin white man whom she called (although not out loud) "my sweet archangel."

"He is a brave man," she told Mr Jeffris, "far braver than you or I."

"He is an extraordinary chap," said Jeffris.

"You will deal with mountains and rivers, but he will do battle with demons."

"One can only respect him, ma'am," said Mr Jeffris.

Mr Jeffris's eyes were soft and sympathetic, but his mind was totally dedicated to the satisfaction of his present ambition: to extract a cheque for twenty pounds for the purchase of three brass chronometers from Mr Dulwich of Observatory Hill.

91

A Man of Authority

J

Horses and bullocks were scarce in consequence of the long drought and although it was not Mr Jeffris himself who went to Parramatta sales in search of decent beasts, the worry of this item lay heavily on him, for it was no use at all tearing up the road to Wiseman's Ferry with

17f\

A Man of Authority

all the finest men, all perfectly kitted out, if all he had to pull them were beasts like you saw everywhere around the colony, with their spines showing like ridgepoles under the baggy canvas of their hides.

He had become a man of authority. He felt himself uncramped at last, free from the petty limitations of Mr d'Abbs's employ. He could say to one man, go, and he went, to another, come, and he came. He was conscious of standing straighter. He could feel the girth of his chest pressing against the buttons of his shirt. He employed tall men he knew he could control with the strength of his eyes. He was stern with them and unsmiling. He dispatched his overseer and bullock driver both with instruction that no beast he bought but that they both be in agreement. They took this order meekly, although they surely found it most distasteful. The bullock driver called him "Captain," Later this misunderstanding was to spread. Mr Jeffris engaged a storekeeper, two blacksmiths, a medical attendant, a collector of birds and a collector of plants (although these last two were entered on the paybook as "riflemen"), a groom, a trumpeter, two carpenters, a shoemaker, a cook.

Miss Leplastrier did not query him on a single point.

He borrowed two mountain barometers and entrusted one of these to the collector of birds and another to the collector of plants, telling them that it was to be their main duty whilst actually travelling to guard the safety of these barometers for he planned to go about this journey like a trigonometrist, knowing always, exactly, where he was in space, and he would not be, he told the red-necked, Belfast-born plant collector, like some fart-faced Irishman crashing through the undergrowth like a wombat.

They would carry axes and they would be razor-sharp at all times, for there is nothing a surveyor despises more than a tree that obscures his trig point.

Miss Leplastrier made a horse and sulky available to him so he might move about smartly. He was soon a familiar sight on the road out to Mort Bay, standing straight and flaying the poor animal to get a skip on. He was on his way to Harrison's shipyards where old Oliver Crawley, a wide, bow-legged shipwright with a white cataract on his left eye, was constructing two light whale boats, the smaller designed to fit inside the larger when the thwarts of the larger one were removed for travelling. The larger boat was then to be suspended within a frame of belts and canvases and the canvas most in contact with the boat was to be guarded with sheepskin and greased

371

Oscar and Lucinda

hide, and this whole sling, of course, was to be fitted into the boat carriage, that machine which rolled silently through the tracks of Oscar Hopkins's nightmares.

Mr Jeffris took each man, as he was engaged, to Anthony Hordern's store where they were kitted out, on account of Miss Leplastrier, with a suit of new clothing. There were strong grey twill trousers, a red woollen shirt which, when crossed with white braces, provided a military appearance. This was as Mr Jeffris had calculated it. He would require absolute obedience and he made it clear from the beginning.

It was his intention that Oscar Hopkins also dress in this manner. It was important that he not place himself, as it were, above the law. And yet Mr Jeffris could not come at the matter directly. He could hardly demand it, and yet he could not countenance any exception to his rule. He broached the subject with Miss Leplastrier but she only laughed and said it was something he must discuss with Mr Hopkins. When she laughed like that he would like to put her on her back in bed. He bowed formally and said nothing, but he went to Hordern's, anyway, and bought the correct items of clothing in sizes he guessed would suit the stick-limbed Mr Smudge. He cantered back across the city and out to the Darling Harbour glassworks where he was told Mr Hopkins was "in preparation."

He was amused at the idea of Mr Smudge preparing for anything. He had never, in all his experience, met anyone so mentally and physically unprepared for life. In the world that Mr Jeffris called the "real world," an imaginary place with neither parliaments nor factories, Mr Smudge would simply die. When he heard he was "preparing" he had a vision of him in baggy combinations, with pencil-thin arms, working with his dumbbells. Thus he arrived at the glassworks in an excellent humour, with his handsome dark eyes dancing and his teeth showing beneath the curtain of his moustache. He wore his wideshouldered, box-pleated coat and a pair of white cotton gloves. If the effect was eccentric, he was unaware of it. At this very moment there were sixteen men in Sydney whose only labour was to make his dream a reality. For I also am a man of authority, and I say to one man go, and he goeth, I say to another come and he cometh.

But when he entered the glassworks he was not pleased (not pleased? He was furious) to see that they were, once again, unpacking the glass church and all the crates, which had been, at six o'clock last night, screwed tightly shut, now had their lids (A, B, C, D, etc.) stacked

VT)

\\

A Man of Authority

against the walls, and all the hessian bags, which had been lined up and laced tight, were now as empty as bladders on a slaughterhouse floor. The furnaces were cold and the glass blowers were at the boxes like children on Christmas morning while the biggest child of them all, the pale and excitable Mr Smudge, was calling out instructions in his fluting choirboy's voice. And they obeyed him! Oh, my God, thought Mr Jeffris, I cannot bear it. It was against the natural order, that a man like this should give orders to men like these, and not only be obeyed, but be willingly obeyed.

'"No, no, Harry, no," the fool cried to Flood, the foundryman from! Leichhardt, "I must do it by myself without instruction." I He was incompetent. You could see he was incompetent. He had la little hessian bag labelled "Bl" from which he was removing the pieces of decorative cast-iron cresting, which was to run along the ridge of the roof. Why was he fiddling with this now? Was he not meant to be assembling a wall section?

Jeffris looked towards the one person whom he most reluctantly admitted as "competent." She, who should be disapproving of all this, I sat complacently in the glass blower's wooden throne. She was a handisome little woman with dainty feet and slender ankles and it angered I Mr Jeffris that she should choose to lie in bed with this extraordinary I child. I As for the church itself, it was the silliest thing he had ever heard I of. He imagined it was the single-armed foundryman-he who was [always cooing over the bits and pieces with a measuring rod and I calliper-who had tricked her into it. What a fortune he must be makiing from her with all his little extra frills, his fiddly crests, his gay little ["terminals," his ornate railing, all of themMr Jeffris assumedI "specials" and therefore charged out at a premium. E Mr Jeffris did not like the church even when it was packed away. I And yet he could not help but admire Miss Leplastrier for the way she I looked after the details of her own deception. She was a great woman I for lists. He was the same. His whole life now was a series of lists and I he saw, in Lucinda Leplastrier, his equal in meticulous order. He also I thought this list-making of hers to be demeaning to him. It was he, las expedition leader, who should be in charge of packing the cargo. I Yet she stated, very clearly-her eyes meeting his full square while she I did so-that the responsibility was hers. She gave him a list of cargo I appended to which she had written, all in a strong clear hand,

vn

Oscar and Lucinda

directions on how each wagon was to be packed. The whole damn thing was like a jigsaw puzzle. The long, hessian-wrapped "barleysugar" columns must lie on the starboard whilst boxes

"H" and "B"-being balanced in weight-must lie on the port. No box with a "2" suffix (A2, B2) could be packed over an axle, and so on. It took a full day to load, and now, just when everybody seemed happy, when the embarrassment had been covered with canvas and lashed down securely, the Hooting Boy had decided he must have the whole thing in pieces and go again. He was like a child who cannot leave his toys alone.

He was not wearing combinations as Mr Jeffris had imagined when he thought of him

"preparing." But the vision was very close to life. Oscar Hopkins was clad in a workman's boiler suit. His face was streaked with packing grease. He rubbed his hands together and returned Mr Jeffris's actor's smile.

"I am in rehearsal, you see," he said. "There is no doubt I will require some assistance at Boat Harbour, but it need not be skilled. I can glaze, you see. You must admit yourself surprised."

"Indeed," said Mr Jeffris.

"It is a tougher job than Latin verbs, I promise you."

Mr Jeffris had all his spleen. He wedged the parcel containing Oscar's uniform underneath his arm and held his arms behind his back. He rocked on his toes and heels and while Oscar teetered on a ladder, and clambered on the empty spider web of glasshouse roof, he made small talk with Miss Leplastrier about a play he had seen at the Lyceum in Pitt Street. He admired the church, and was able to use his knowledge of trigonometry to flatter the design. And all the way he wished only that they would pack the thing away.

Mr Jeffris did not like the church but he was certainly not without a sense of history. Each pane of glass, he thought, would travel through country where glass had never existed before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in history. They would slice the white dustcovers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains, and names, the streets of his birthplace, Bromley, married to the rivers of savage Australia.

There would be pain in this journey, and most likely death. Mr Jeffris knew it now. He felt the axe in his hands, the cut scrub, the harsh saw-teeth of mountains giving up their exact latitude to his theodolites. There would be pain like this wax-skinned girlie boy had never known, and if he was afeared of water he was afeared of the wrong thing entirely.

V7A

92

The Lord Is My Shepherd

Lucinda thought: Terrible things always happen on beautiful days. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on a rainy day. When they brought my papa home with his socks showing there were butcher-birds singing along the fences and king-fishers with chests like emeralds flying two inches above the surface of the creek. The sky was blue.

The sky was also blue in the week when her mama died, on the day Hasset sailed, and now, here, as they followed the wagons down to Semi-Circular Quay-she in her white hat and veil, he in the silly uniform that Jeff ris wished him in-it was a clear blueskied day. The uniform was too big around his chest and shoulders. It gathered and rucked. His braces were not tight. She thought of a poor creature she had seen in the street outside the Sydney asylum, a nurse on either side of him; he had a bare white neck so long you could not help but think of knives.

All her passion, all her intelligence, her discipline, her love had gone to produce nothing but a folly. She had not known this until she saw him in his humiliating suit. It would seem that he also knew this. There was a panic in his eyes, but now all these sixteen wagons would not be stopped. They were rolling like tumbrils through the public street of Sydney and urchins ran out of lanes hoorahing the procession. They called Mr Jeffris "Captain" and wanted to know if he was Captain Stuart. Mr Jeffris did not deign to answer them. His back was straight, his lips glistening. His horse was all impatience, eager to overleap the air. Lucinda felt an animosity towards the handsome chestnut she would not yet permit herself to feel towards the rider. T7<;

Oscar and Lucinda

The Lord is my shepherd

I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

There was not a single black in the party, although Lucinda had directed that this be otherwise. Now Jeff ris clattered beside her shouting that there was no point recruiting the unhappy souls in the streets of Sydney. He would recruit his niggers when they were up country.

"I am offering a bonus," Lucinda called, digging into her purse. They were now moving along the bottom end of George Street. The trumpeter-he was riding in the wagon behind-made a loud discordant noise on his instrument.

"No trumpets," roared Jeffris, wheeling and rearing.

Why pay for trumpets then? Lucinda thought. "A bonus," she shouted, having to wave the crumpled white envelope at Mr Jeffris. She knew this was too weak and desperate. She saw how he despised her and she was frightened of what she had done.

She told Jeffris that Mr Hopkins would hand over the money when he had been safely delivered. She then gave Oscar the envelope and as she had offended and humiliated her friend. She saw how patronizing she had been. She could have wept. She thought: They will cut his throat and steal the money from him.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

"The Lord keep you safe," she said.

She gave him the scroll which was the formal document of their wager. He also pushed an envelope at her. And then he was down on the ground, away from her. She felt the cruel emptiness in her arms and her chest, as if she were nothing but an empty mould-she felt an ache in the places where he had, a moment before, pressed against her. She touched her shoulders with the tips of her fingers. She embraced the echo of his presence. She wrapped a rug around herself although it was not cold.

All around her the navvies swore and cursed the sap-heavy boxes, which contained nothing to equate with the crystal-pure, bat-winged structure of her dreams, but a lead-heavy folly, thirty hundredweight of cast-iron rods, five hundred and sixty-two glass sheets weighing two pounds each, twenty gross of nuts and bolts, sixty pounds of putty, five gallons of linseed oil. She saw him walk out on to a barge, then be escorted to its neighbour. There was a man on either side of him.

V7(.

93 Doggerel

The envelope Oscar gave Lucinda was bent in half, and then quarters, and then eighths. It was folded and refolded until, in its tired and grimy state, its simple address smudged, its corners dog-eared, it became a flimsy monument to all her misery.

That she did not open it was not forgetfulness. On the contrary, she was more aware of that envelope than anything else on her slow return to Longnose Point. She placed it on her kitchen table, leaned it against the brown-glazed tea-pot which still contained the cold soggy dregs of their last cup of tea. There were blow-flies in here as well. They crawled around the milky rim of two tea-cups, neither of which was empty. She picked up the envelope, but did not open it. She did not wish to weep. She dreaded the sound of her howling in an empty house. This noise was a living nightmare in her imagination. And she would not open the envelope because she imagined it contained all of those fine feelings of the heart that they had, both of them, so passionately hinted at.

So this is how it was not until Tuesday 15 March, a full six days after the party's departure, that Lucinda opened it.

In her hand she found this simple doggerel:

7 dare not hope, And yet I must That through this deed, I gain your trust.

"Oh, my darling," she cried out loud to the kitchen as she had never done when he stood in it.

"You had my trust, always."

She sat down heavily on the rung-backed chair but then, driven by a great shiver of passion, sprang up again, her face contorted, her hands clutching at the loose hair at the nape of her neck. vn

Oscar and Lucinda

"My God, you fool."

She walked to the window. She took out hairpins. She put them back in. The light from the harbour was as harsh and cold as chips of broken glass. She bit the knuckles of her hand. She screwed up her eyes and grunted: aaaah.

She had not cared about the church. The church had been conceived in a fever. It was not a celebration of sacred love, but of their own. Likewise this wager-she saw now, with her head pressed hard against the window pane, with her eyes tight shut, that she had only made this bet so that she might finally do what she had never managed to do upon a gaming table, that is to slough off the great guilty weight of her inheritance, drop it like a rusty armour she did not need, that she be light as a feather, as uncorrupted as an empty purse, unencumbered, naked, with her face pressed into the soft and secret place at the bottom of his graceful neck. With this ring I thee wed, with this body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

"You knew," she said, walking to the sitting room, up the stairs. "You knew my heart. How could you misunderstand me to such an extent."

That very day she sent a messenger to find the party, but they had already departed from the expected track at Singleton and were pushing into unmapped country with the two blacks from the Wonnarua tribe.

94 %

Mr Smith

Mr Smith, Mr Percy Smith, he with the sandy hair and mild, blinking eye, Mr Borrodaile's friend, he who was forever removing llama hair from his trousers, Mr Smith had been engaged as a collector of animals for the expedition, and he had purchased, from his own funds, seven

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Mr Smith

octavo volumes of one hundred pages in each in which to record his findings, together with sixteen crates containing empty bottles, cork, paper, wax, etc. He had a barrel of formaldehyde and another of spirits together with other instruments, many of which he had, again purchased especially for this journey, which he understood was to enter that teeming semi-tropical country which the cedar cutters had named, typically, "The Big Scrub." But he had gone no further than a chain out from Semi-Circular Quay when the leader of the expedition, without being aware of his acquaintance with the Reverend Mr Hopkins, appointed him the tatter's keeper and told him, while all the rest of the men were more concerned with a passenger who had leapt from the deck of the berthing Sobraon and seemed intent on drowningit was the pilot boat that saved him in any case-that he should regard all other duties as second to this one. So while the pilot's deckhand forced a boat hook through the swimming man's breeches, Mr Smith assisted Mr Jeffris in inserting a metal funnel between Oscar Hopkins's clenched teeth. The funnel had last seen service inside the jaws of a dying Derby hog. It had not since been sterilized, but Mr Jeffris would not hear of such a nicety-he was already administering the first dose of laudanum which he had, he I claimed, purchased by the gallon jar for this specific purpose. It was then, with the treacly green liquid running down Mr Hopkins's pointed chin, with the shadow of the Sobraon's sails falling across his extraordinary passionate face, that Mr Jeffrishe who had been so dedicated, nay fanatical about the importance of professionally collecting fauna coolly, without apology, revised his duties. He put it to him thus: "You are to supervise him at all times. You are not to let him out of your sight. If you wipe your arse-hole, you will have one eye on him. While you have your hand upon your roger, you will have the other hand around his ankle. Where there are rivers to be forded, you will be advised, where possible, of the impending crossing, and you will administer five fluid ounces of the laudanum." Percy Smith thought: I am a weak man to agree to this. How can they always seek me out, and why do I smile at them and nod my head?

He had looked at Mr Jeffris's face at that moment, on the barge, when he was asked if these orders were acceptable. He had been unable to hold the eyes. His soul had shrivelled like a leech in salt.

At the first night's camp, Mr Jeffris had made a speech around the camphre. He had told the party: "You can be raging boys

Oscar and Lucinda

at night, but, by God, you will be soldiers in the day." And they were. Now on the second night, at Wiseman's Ferry, the men were shouting raving drunk and Mr Smith half-expected one of them to shoot or hack or slash his way into the lighted tent where the leader worked upon his journals. That they did not was as much due to the type of men Mr Jeffris had selected as the force of his character. They were men who, no matter how they might glower or curse, enjoyed being "soldiers." And Mr Jeffris's leadership was such that you could believe this former clerk would murder a man for disobedience. His hand was never far from pistol and sword, and, indeed, he had drawn the latter at a creek crossing that day-a leafy little place with clear water running six inches deep across a sandy bed-and had sworn he would cut the hand off the carpenter and feed it to the dogs, and this merely because the carpenter had expressed the view that the cargo was "safe enough." Mr Jeffris did not show a different character from the one he had revealed when wearing striped trousers in Mr d'Abbs office. He merely brought himself into keener focus. He drew his antique sword and called the man-he was a boy, really, with sandy hair and a newly sunburnt nose-"a frigging colonial frigging dog, a frigging lemonsucking incompetent." He would cut his hand off. By God he would. You watch him. He would feed it to him for his dinner. Etc.

Now Mr Smith sat on a log next to the young clergyman and stared into the hre. He had been on several journeys of exploration, and this always was a time of day he enjoyed. There was no shortage of water here, and so he had washed his day's clothes and hung them on a line he had rigged along the wagon where he and Oscar were carried as passengers. This was already dubbed by the overseer the "Ladies' cornpartment," on account of the canvas awning provided them. Mr Smith now wore clean clothes. They were cool against the skin and still smelt of his wife's ironing board.

His companion had neither washed nor changed his clothes. He had been too shy to bathe naked in front of the other men and must now, surely, be in a state of some discomfort. So much did Mr Smith enjoy the feeling of clean linen against his skin, that he was made vicariously uncomfortable at that thought of Oscar Hopkins's sweat-sticky garments. It had been hot travelling. The country was still very dry, and where ploughed, dusty. They had travelled half a day along a series of ridges still smouldering from bushhre. Tree roots were still alight and, twice, burning branches crashed dangerously close

Mr Smith

to the party. He and Mr Hopkins had travelled with wet handkerchiefs on their faces but their skin, of course, was filthy from the smoke and ash. Percy Smith could not bear for his companion to sit in his filth.

"It is a pleasant time for bathing," he said. "The moon up over the water. I think there is nothing so pleasant. In fact I have a mind to bathe again. Old mother night," he said, "throws a modest curtain on us."

Oscar said nothing.

Two Scots were singing somewhere by the boat carriage: '

"I woe tae ye a tale o' angel-named Beggs, Came down ta earth, silk purse 'tween ha legs." Percy Smith was embarrassed on the clergyman's account. He sipped his rum and water and stared at the fire. •;•'

"Does your throat still pain you?"

"Oh, it is not so bad."

"I have been thinking," Percy Smith said, taking out his pipe and tobacco pouch, "that if I were to coat the funnel with wax it might not be so painful. But then I fear your fit will make you bite it, and a loose piece of wax could easily choke."

"I had no fit."

"But you have a phobia about the water."

"All my life. Yet when I mounted the barge I had no phobia. I was merely sad to leave one I loved so dearly."

"Mr Hopkins," said Mr Smith, sending great plumes of blue smoke into the night, "Mr Hopkins, has the laudanum removed all memory from you?" And he laughed to show he did not mean it unkindly. "You forget."

"And what do I forget, Mr Smith?" The voice was cool and unfriendly. Mr Smith thought: He will not easily forgive me for what I must do to him. Yet he, too, is in the maniac's power. We are both in the same boat. He must forgive me. It is intolerable he should not.

Mr Smith said: "You forget I found you in a fit. Your teeth were clenched. Your face was red as butcher's meat. Your eyes had rolled and your veins were like worms lying on your brow."

"You found me thus, on account of that 'person' whom we stupidly engaged to deliver this cargo," Oscar hissed. "It was he who assaulted

Oscar and Lucinda

me and pushed me down and forced this 'medicine' upon me."

"He has a great responsibility," said Percy Smith. "He fears you will throw yourself into the water."

"He fears he will lose his bonus. But he will not lose me. I will not allow myself to be lost. I have much to live for."

"Do you forget it was I who introduced her to our table?"

"I am sorry…"

"Your 'much-to-live-for.' Do you remember who it was who arranged her invitation to Mr Borrodaile's table?"

"Oh, yes," said Oscar, and Mr Smith was pleased to hear the voice, at last, lighten.

"You have that to thank me for."

"Indeed."

A moment later, Oscar said: "I have never seen men behave like this." Percy Smith was not sure exactly what he referred to, whether he meant Mr Jeffris himself or the men who wrestled with each other by the edge of the fire or those dancing a drunken jig around the overseer's grey tent. There was also, of course-and this was quite normalmuch profanity in the night.

"I fear I am not suited to this life," the clergyman said. "There is a cruel feel to it. Indeed, it is extraordinary that one can go through life and know so little of it. I suppose much of it is like this."

"Oh, aye," said Percy Smith, and sighed. "Oh, aye."

"You need give me no medicine tomorrow. It does not agree with me." Percy Smith said nothing.

"Strictly speaking," Oscar said, "Mr Jeffris is in my employ." He stood up. For a moment it seemed that he would walk to Mr Jeffris's tent. Indeed he took a step in the direction of that tent, which glowed with the light of three lanterns. But then he stopped and Percy Smith stood to see what it was had halted him: it was the carpenter, he who had been threatened with amputation. He was kneeling in the outer circle of firelight and thus, with his fair hair touching the ground, was allowing himself to be penetrated by the overseer.

"May God save you," said Oscar Hopkins. He said it in a high clear voice. It cut across the campsite with that clean slice you hear in whipbirds in dense bush.

In a moment there would be a general eruption of laughter, an ugly noise which could contain, within its chaos, noises like doors slamming, donkeys braying. But for a moment, everything was very quiet. *

I

95

Arrival of Wardley-Fish (1)

Four weeks out from Home, Ian Wardley-Fish had looked into his silver-backed mirror and seen, above the unblemished white of his clerical collar, a gross and thick-lipped man with weak and watery bloodshot eyes, a buffoon who-even whilst standing in the dock before his Better Selftried to grin and joke his way to acceptance; but it would not do. Wardley-Fish placed his mirror upon the washstand and, having wedged his bulk between washstand and bed, kneeled upon his cabin floor. He vowed to God that he would henceforth forswear not only cards and alcohol and smutty talk, but also that he would acquit himself with dignity, that he would eschew the company of Messrs Clarkson and Maguire, those two "gentlemen" with whom he had, not three hours previously, been pleased to recite sixteen verses of "Eskimo Nell." His head hurt terribly. He had drunk a thing which Clarkson, an agent of some type in Sydney, called Squatter's Punch. It was made with grenadine, champagne and a particularly foul colonial rum, which Clarkson, who was addicted to the stuff, had carried with him to London. Maguire, being from Belfast, claimed he could drink anything, but had been defeated by the Squatter's Punch. WardleyFish was playing the "Modern Man of God." He had outdone himself last night. He had also, again, said unflattering things about his ex-fiancée's knees. He had said these things before. He had said it was the image of these knees-glimpsed accidentally in a moment on the Serpentinethat had made the marriage impossible to him. This was not true. But in his cups he had enjoyed drawing gross pictures for Maguire and Clarkson. They thought him exceedingly modern. But he would do this no more, and with his stomach rebelling against the smell of his own chamber-pot, he promised God he would henceforth behave as both a Christian and a gentleman.

.-<(

1

Oscar and Lucinda

Even as he made the vow he feared he had not the strength to keep it, and yet he did, well past the time when he had the queasiness of his stomach to assist him.

His earlier "shenanigans" had attracted a great deal of attention, and his period of reform was therefore quite luminous in its effect. Indeed, by the time the Sobraon heeled over for its last long straight tack into Sydney Harbour, the Powells and Halfsmiths and even Miss Masterson were all beginning to bid him good day and smile in that special fond way one reserves for those who have regained the fold.

And yet you would be surprised at the damage a man can do in the distance between the high wild cliffs that guard the entrance to Sydney harbour and the placid waters at Semi-Circular Quay. The distance is three nautical miles, no more.

The problem was that Wardley-Fish liked to be liked. It was a weakness, he knew, but having cut Clarkson and Maguire without explanation, and having ignored them completely for so many weeks, he wished to make his peace with them.

He could not hope to achieve this reconciliation and then refuse Clarkson's offer of a glass of rum. This rum was a very personal matter with Clarkson. It was not something he would entrust to a steward. It must be dispensed from a silver flask and have a dash of cloves cordial added with an eyedropper. Now Wardley-Fish was a big man and built-with his powerful haunches and hefty backside-not unlike a sturdy pottery jug. In normal circumstances he held his liquor well and yet on this occasion, drinking rum at the rails of the Sobraon, it took only two noggins to make his speech quite slurry. Perhaps it was excitement, to be at last in Sydney Harbour on this glorious blueskied day, or relief, that Clarkson (who had a prim red nose and a small censorious mouth) seemed so ready to accept him, once again, as a friend. But when he remarked that he would soon be dining at the Randwick vicarage, he said "vicarrish."

"You are drunk," said Clarkson, not pleased. "Blow me, I cannot see the point for the life of me. You cut us cold when there is fun to be had, and now you go on a bender when, who knows, maybe your bishop is waiting at the quay."

"I have no bishop."

"You have no Randwick vicarage either," said Clarkson, consulting his gold watch as he always did when he wished to give authority to himself. "The Randwick vicarage is burnt to the ground."

"No," said Wardley-Fish, his mouth wide open.

Arrival of Wardley-Fish (1)

"We sailed right past it." ' sr

"You tease." " r!;/-v <

"No, I swear," said Clarkson who was already enjoying the power of the Pure Merino over the New Chum. "Surely you saw it." And he pointed back towards Watson's Bay which is a good six miles from Rand wick.

"Look at your face," said Maguire.

"Look at your own, you rascal," said Wardley-Fish. "I know when my leg is being pulled." And he accepted more rum-held his glass steady while the little drops of cloves cordial were addedand could not understand why this lie should make his heart beat so wildly. He thought: I wonder will I see the dear Odd Bod tonight. He will be all settled in his manse with some old Mrs Williams giving him orders and telling him to sit up straight at table before she serves him. It is Saturday today. I will wait till the morrow. I will wait. I will go to his church and listen to his sermon. He will look down into the faces and see me sitting there. Yes, yes, that is what I will do.

There was plenty of wind in the harbour, but they had half the canvas bound and buttoned and were proceeding slowly. Wardley-Fish was suddenly overcome with impatience. He wished to be ashore. He wished to be asleep. He wished to wake and find it the morrow and be seated in the Rand wick congregation. He accepted a fourth glass. The cloves improved the flavour, there was no doubt of that. He looked down over the side and saw the pilot who had joined their ship outside The Heads was leaving before he reached the quay. The pilot boat nuzzled alongside to receive him. As the wiry grey-bearded man landed on his own deck again, Wardley-Fish looked up and saw, not twenty yards beyond the pilot boat, a whole series of barges being towed off the wharf. It was set up for an expedition-horses, carts, men dressed up like soldiers, a little Gilbert and Sullivan chappie with a huge dress sword strapped to his belt. And by his side Wardley-Fish saw this horrid puzzle, this vision, of the person he was waiting so impatiently to see — the Odd Bod — his chicken neck sticking out of a horrible red shirt, his narrow chest criss-crossed by silly braces.

"Oh, no," he said. "It is my friend," he said to Clarkson who nodded but did not seem to understand what was being said to him. "My friend," he said to little plump Maguire who rubbed his stomach as if he were being spoken to about a meal, or lack of a meal, but not this: that the man who should be dressed in a black cassock in a pulpit was here standing before them on a raft.

Oscar and Lucinda

"Hopkins," bellowed Wardley-Fish. He cupped his hands and called again: "Mr Oscar Hopkins."

"What chaps are these?" Maguire said. He had a little brass telescope he always carried with him on to the deck. Now he raised it and pointed it at the barges.

"It is my friend," said Wardley-Fish. "Mr Hopkins from the Randwick vicarage."

"Then wave," said Clarkson, setting the example himself. "Yoo-hoo," he cried in a mocking imitation of a woman. "Yoo-hoo, Mr Rand wick." He turned to Wardley-Fish. "Wave," he said.

"Your friend is leaving on an expedition to the inland. Wave, Fish, you will not see him for a year."

Wardley-Fish looked at Clarkson and knew that Clarkson did not like him, had not forgiven him, would not forgive him.

"Liar," said Wardley-Fish.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"Poppycock," revised Wardley-Fish who could not afford to waste time on this sort of petty discord but must find out, and rapidly at that, whether he was having his leg pulled or no.

'Is it someone famous?" asked Maguire, taking off his spectacles and readjusting the little telescope.

"Is it true?" asked Wardley-Fish, quietly, politely.

Clarkson poured himself rum but offered none. "You see that wagon there," he said, pointing with his eyedropper, "with its two boats fitted one inside the other? See that? Then tell me, Fish, why someone has a wagon like that, if they are not setting off to go exploring. And criminee, man, just look at them. Did you ever see such a lot of tin soldiers?" The barges were being pulled out across the water by a little steamboat. Wardley-Fish removed his jacket and laid it loosely across the rail. He took off his clerical collar and placed this across the jacket. He slipped the studs in his pocket.

No one took any notice of him, not even when he bellowed: "Mr Oscar Hopkins." Clarkson sipped his rum and cloves. Maguire leaned his belly against the rail and focused his telescope. Wardley-Fish clambered on to the rail and having first removed his shoes in full view of the Half smiths, Miss Masterson et ai, dived head first into Sydney Harbour. This was the "drowning man" who had a boathook driven into his breeches.

96

Arrival of Wardley-Fish (2)

The man who was saved from drowning had a backside like a horse and a bulk — so claimed Alfred Spinks, the deckhand who had so neatly hooked him-enough to cause a bloke a hernia. The hook got in the breeches without the gentleman's soft white bum getting so much as a scratch on it. The man was saved from drowning but did not want to bestow a reward. He was a New Chum of the lah-di-dah variety, a remittance man no doubt with nothing in his pockets and cheap rum on his breath.

Alfred Spinks, his spot of rescuing now done, stood in the wheelhouse with his foot shoved hard to bring the wheel round to the starboard. They would circle now while wall-eyed Captain Simmons-it was the leathery shrunken pilot with the silver beard-did a spot of questioning. It would be a rare old show, for Captain Simmons liked a reward as well as the next chap and he had a great aversion to New Chums and an even greater aversion to taking orders, and he was already turning his wall-eye towards the rescued man and his winking eye towards the appreciative Alfred Spinks.

The rescued man had a gold tooth and a mole on the edge of his fair beard which was easy to mistake for a shell-backed tick. "I will ask you one more time," the pommy said-you would think he was a frigging magistrate-"! will ask you one more time to deliver me to that place where the expedition barges are bound."

He was so bloody proper and dignified. It was a shame you could see his titty through his shirt. It was shocking that he had to cough and spit up all that smelly water. Captain Simmons lowered himself companionably beside the dripping man. Above his head the funnel farted black soot into the sky. "I was not aware," the pilot said, "you had a rank."

"A rank?"

"Yes, sir, a rank. An admiral, a vice-admiral, someone who is entitled — in certain circumstancesto give orders to the captain of a pilot boat."

Oscar and Lucinda

"I am a gentleman, you knave," said Wardley-Fish.

"You must not call me knave, sir. I am a captain."

This answer made Wardley-Fish narrow his eyes. If all of New South Wales was like this, why then, it was beyond toleration-nothing would get done. You could not argue with a man about whether he was a knave or not.

"I am a gentleman," he said.

"And I am a captain, and it's the other captain I must take you to visit, not go running you across the harbour."

"What other captain, man?"

"The Captain of the Sobraon, the Captain from whose authority you have thought to run away." Wardley-Fish sprang to his feet, but the blessed boat was so small there was nowhere to go. In two paces he was at the wheelhouse where he met the possum-bright eyes of Arthur Spinks. He looked up at the Sobraon but its decks were now crowded with faces, all carefully observing his public disgrace.

"I beg you, man," he hissed at Captain Simmons.

A smile stirred in the depths of Captain Simmons's silver beard. i "You do not look like a begging sort of man," said Captain Simmons, and began to tamp his tobacco with a broad black thumb.

Wardley-Fish cast another look towards the decks of the Sobraon. He caught the eye of Miss Masterson, she who, not five weeks before, he had imagined he was in love with. She did not avert her gaze, but neither did she smile. She looked down on him as if he were some species of marsupial rat.

The barges were now a quarter of a mile away. Wardley-Fish considered swimming but knew he was too drunk for it.

"Why do you take it to act so uncharitably?" he asked the captain. Captain Simmons thought that pretty rich: charity. But he said nothing.

"If you are a captain," said the gent, "you must be the slowest-witted captain on the sea. I told you once, I told your man here twice-I only wish to see my friend. He is over there. There he goes. I have travelled all the way from London to see him. And he is there, damn you, and you will not take me. Take me, please, I beg you," cried Wardley-Fish, but his manner, as the Captain had previously observed, was not that of a begging man.

"So he was on his way to see his friend," Captain Simmons exclaimed to his deckhand. "Is this the case?"

"You know it is," said Wardley-Fish. ' *

Laudanum

"And yet, you know, I have the damnedest feeling that there is a problem of a friend behind you, some problem perhaps, a little debt incurred whilst gambling, or a matter between you and the purser on the Sobraon, some little thing like that which made this 'friend' you saw upon the barge seem like a chap you must get in touch with urgently, if you get my meaning."

"Oh, you have a beastly, tricky little mind," roared Wardley-Fish. "Would you like money? I will give you five pounds if you take me where that barge has gone." Captain Simmons stood slowly. He tucked his pipe in his trouser pocket. "Ten pounds," he said. Wardley-Fish was caught in the tug of different violent passions his outrage at being robbed of ten pounds, his realization that he did not have ten pounds, that it was in his jacket aboard the ship, his knowledge that this hawk-nosed little chap would enjoy refusing credit, his mortification at disgracing himself in the eyes of the entire ship, his grief at missing his friend, his anxiety that all was not right with the Odd Bod who had seemed, in that ridiculous shirt and criss-crossed braces, like a poor fowl trussed up for a cooking pot. It was all of this, not his simple dislike of the sly aggressions of the pilot, that led him to pick the man up bodily in his bearlike arms and, with a terrible roar that could be heard by all aboard the Sobraon, hurl him into the water.

The incident created complications that kept him a prisoner in Sydney for two days. On the third day he set off in search of Mr Jeffris's expedition.

97 Laudanum

He had accepted the laudanum for three days because Percy Smith had begged him to, but now he was resolved he would accept it no more. The laudanum did not suit him. It gave him unsettling dreams. It made him nauseous and jittery. It also produced severe constipation

Oscar and Lucinda

and now he had haemorrhoids and his anus itched and bled continually. He had no experience of haemorrhoids and imagined a condition far more serious. He had dreams involving shit and blood, the buggered carpenter, and the endless ridge roads out of Sydney, which laced through his imaginings like the stretched intestines of a slaughtered beast. The others had all washed. He had not washed. He would not stand naked before them. He splashed water on his face and forearms and calves, but the rest of his body felt cased with a grimy viscous film. His modesty was somehow offensive to the party. Mr Jeffris suggested that it would be in his interests "to reassure the men that you have all the correct equipment." Oscar had never hated anyone before (not even they who made him eat a stone, or those who had let rats loose in his room at Oriel) but he hated Mr Jeffris who was now, on the fourth morning of their journey, strutting around the dead brown dew-wet grass finding fault with his "soldiers" and their wagons.

Oscar and Mr Smith stood beside their wagon. Mr Smith had the laudanum bottle perched on the metal step and the funnel stuck in the pocket of his twill trousers.

"I do not have the strength to defy him," he said, crossing his burly, sandy-haired arms.

"Then we will pretend," said Oscar. "You will pretend to pour. I will pretend to drink."

"No," said Percy Smith. "He will know."

Percy Smith had a kindly, decent face, one you would naturally trust to the end of the world. But Mr Jeffris had such a power over him that when Oscar looked at his face he was reminded of a rabbit on a laboratory bench assaulted by current from a voltaic cell.

"I am employed by him," pleaded Percy Smith, blinking.

"Look at him. He is too busy to know anything."

Mr Jeffris pulled at a rope on the lead wagon in such a way that a vast lumpy canvas swag fell to the earth.

"If you wish to change his orders, you must settle the matter with him."

"Oh, mercy," cried Oscar in despair. "You were there when I attempted it."

"And he said it could only be settled with Miss Leplastrier present. He does not accept your authority. But I must accept his. Dear Mr Hopkins, you are a good man-"

"An angry man."

"A good man, and I must ask you, please," said Percy Smith, sneaking his hand around Oscar's shoulder and suddenly clamping it around his jaw, "you must forgive me."

"No," said Oscar. The back of his head was jammed hard against

An Explorer

the buckle of Mr Smith's crossed white braces. He was pulled back,and down, out of the shadow of the wagon. The sun laid a stripe across his livid face. A blow-fly settled on his nose. He tried to wave it away. Mr Smith clamped his wrist with his other hand. Two bullocks in the carpenter's team defecated at once. Mr Jeffris was bawling out the cook and threatening to make him walk without his boots. And at this moment, with Percy Smith's hand held around his jaw, Oscar thought: I do not even know where I am.

Percy Smith had found the funnel and pushed it hard against his lips. Oscar opened his mouth. It hit his teeth. He opened more. He had already been cut. He could taste the blood. Percy Smith's breath was bad. He had his knees against the back of Oscar's knees, making him keel over backwards.

"No," Oscar said, or tried to say, for trying to speak made him dry-retch.

Percy Smith lowered him to the ground. Oscar did not struggle. His friend put a knee upon his chest. He had the stone bottle with "Manufacturing Chemists" engraved in brown upon its rotund middle. He pulled the cork with his teeth. And then, before he poured, he put the bottle down. He touched Oscar's cheek with the back of his hand. An odd, gentle, lover's pat. "I would not do this to you," said Percy Smith, "for anything."

And then he poured the muck into the funnel.

Oscar kicked out with his boots. He connected with nothing. He hated Percy Smith. 98

An Explorer

Until he had the ill fortune to imagine a glass church and therefore be obliged to take this journey, Oscar's knowledge of the world had been severely limited. He was, by his nature, a creature suited to burrows and hutches and so even at Oriel-which many would see as a

Oscar and Lucinda

civilized and unthreatening environment-he had his definite tracks beside which there were great unexplored areas he was either frightened of or had no interest in.

His knowledge of Hennacombe was confined to two households and various red-soiled paths no more than one foot wide. And although he had, in the very act of writing home, posed as an authority on Sydney, had been happy to relay the common platitudes (that it was, for instance, a working-man's paradise) he had known nothing of it.

Now he felt himself cast into a morass and little dreamed he was dragging his puffing, saddlesore friend, the bewildered Wardley-Fish, through the muck behind him. He felt himself a beetle inside the bloody intestines of an alien animal. And any idea he had harboured that the bush was, as the engravings of the Sydney Mail might suggest, a pure and pristine place of ferns and waterfalls was soon demonstrated to be quite false. There were ferns, of course, and waterfalls. There were clouds of splendid birds but this was not the point.

At Maitland, Wardley-Fish had been barely a day behind the party, but then there was a game of cards with squatters in a so-called Grand Hotel. He had tried to leave, but he was too far ahead and his cornpanions would not hear of it. By the time this game was finally settled Mr Jeffris's squeaking, whip-rattling convoy was far ahead: passing along burning ridges somewhere north of Singleton. The Odd Bod's eyes streamed. His lungs rebelled. His hard-sprung wagon lurched and banged over rocky tracks or squelched into fart-sour mud. The Odd Bod sat on a wooden bench and buttoned his long-sleeved shirt against the mosquitoes and the sun. He comforted the burly Percy Smith. He assured him that he was forgiven. The air was filled with foul language, such hatred of God as Oscar would have imagined suitable for hell itself. They travelled behind the quartermaster's wagon and thus behind the smell of bad meat which made up their diet. They travelled beside ugly windrows, great forest trees pulled into piles by settlers eager to plant their first crops.

In a pretty clearing beside some white-trunked paper-barks, Oscar saw a man tied to a tree and whipped until there was a shiny red mantle on his white shoulders and brown seeping through his Anthony Hordern's twill trousers. His "mates" all watched. Oscar prayed to Jesus but no prayer could block out the smell of thé man's shit.

He forgave Mr Smith. How could he not? He who stood witness to far greater crimes than his. He accepted his laudanum. He lay down on the grass and let the funnel be inserted. He had queer laudanum dreams and other thoughts you could not label so neatly.

An Explorer

If you plucked Sydney from the earth, he thought, like an organ ripped from a man, all these roads and rivers would be pulled out like roots, canals, arteries. He saw the great hairy, fleshbacked tuft, which he saw was Sydney, saw the rivers pushing, the long slippery yellow tracks like things the butcher would use for making sausages.

While he saw all this, he also saw Percy Smith's unhappy, pale, blinking eyes as he handled his blackened short-stemmed pipe.

He saw his father killing moths by driving copper pins into their eyes. He dreamed of enormous sea-shells, soft, like ladies' quilted jackets-pale pink, lilac, lily greencast up on a Devon beach. He had ecstatic dreams involving water in one of which his body assumed the form of a river. His anus itched. His head was jolted and thrown forward. Through all the physical discomforts, the dreams came to him, like complicated melodies played by a man lying in a bed of nettles. He dreamed he was somehow inside his father's aquarium. The cool water was very soothing to his prickling skin. He could see his father's wise and smiling face peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father's study. Sunlight streamed through a window. He thought: That window faces north. He felt very happy for he knew that the sunlight meant his father was now in the southern hemisphere.

But it was Wardley-Fish who was in the southern hemisphere. He was one day's fast trot behind the wagons. He had a tired horse, but plenty of money for a fresh one. He walked the darkflanked beast along the flat sandy path above the Macleay. The path was through tea-tree scrub. He came round a bend to find a man with a handkerchief tied across his face. As the man produced his pistol, bright loud birds flew across the path behind his shoulder. Oscar had dreams in which portions of the real world stumbled, like horses' hooves stuck in drought-cracked clay. These dreams were marked by the filigree of giant trees silhouetted against the sky, by beards, by curses, and the plant collector's German hymns. But only the longest and most beautiful dream transcended the jolting, jogging rhythms of the wagon. It involved a glass-house shaped like a seamless teardrop; the teardrop suspended in a wire net; the net held by cast-iron rods out from a cliff above the sea. On the sand below was the refuse from his other dreams, those enormous pink shells, his mother's buttons, a sherry bottle. In his dream he had one thought which turned and turned on itself like a shining steel corkscrew. The thought was this: I am not afraid.

Oscar and Lucinda

Wardley-Fish returned to Sydney in the company of a travelling draper of exotic extraction. He was indebted to the man for the trousers he wore. … ,".

*-*.

>K4f: V!' S*,

99

ArfOldm<^ltow

The sand for our glassworks did not come from Bellingen, but from Yellow Rock, which is on the coast, not far from where Mr Jeffris's party finally emerged from the bush. The sand at Yellow Rock is not as good as the Botany sand which Dennis Hasset, and others before him, tried to promote in London and Sydney, but it is good enough sand. It produces a glass with a faint yellow tinge, the effect of which, in the windows of old Bellinger Valley farmhouses, is to make the kikuyu pastures a particularly dazzling green. The sand was held in big corrugated-iron hoppers and when these ran low my father would employ a gang of men and we would take three wagons over to Yellow Rock and load them. I say "we" because I went too, even-and I cannot see how this was so, except that it waseven on a school day. We would stay overnight at the Old Blacks' Camp.

The Old Blacks' Camp consisted of seven weatherboard huts, built in a row. They were constructed after the style of the so-called "shelter sheds" which are still the feature of school playgrounds around Australia. They were bleak places, each with a single "room," a single door, three steps, one window. In these huts the surviving members of the Kumbaingiri tribe lived, and died.

The only one I remember is the one they called Kumbaingiri Billy. More commonly he was known as Come-and-get-it Billy. I do not know his real name, or even his age. My father liked Kumbaingiri Billy. He always brought him bacon. I think they were friends, proper friends. They drank tea together. My

Glass Cuts

father never made jokes about him. Once he said: "Kumbaingiri Billy has more brains in his nose than the whole shire council wrapped into one."

When I was ten, Kumbaingiri Billy told the story of "How Jesus come to Bellingen long timeago." Afterwards I made a patronizing joke about it and my father hit me around the legs with the electric flex from the kettle. I didn't make jokes about it again, although I listened to the story a number of times. Kumbaingiri Billy must have first heard it when he was very young, and now I think about it it seems probable that its source is not amongst the Kumbaingiri but the Narcoo blacks whom Mr Jeffris conscripted at Kempsey to guide the party on the last leg of its journey. But perhaps it is not one story anyway. The assertion that "our people had not seen white people before" suggests a date earlier than 1865 and a more complex parentage than! am able to trace. «

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The white men came out of the clouds of Mount Darling. Our people had not seen white men before. We thought they were spirits. They came through the tea-trees, dragging their boxes and shouting. The birds set up a chatter. What a noise they all made. Like twenty goannas had come at once to raid their nests. Anyway, it was not nesting time. We thought they were dead men. They climbed hills and chopped down trees. They did not cut down the trees for sugar bag. There was no sugar bag in the trees they chopped. They left the trees lying on the ground. They cut these trees so they could make a map. They were surveying with chains and theodolites, but we did not understand what they were doing. We saw the dead trees. Soon other white men came and ring-barked the trees. At that time we made a song:

VK

« «

Oscar and Lucinda

Where are the bees which grew on these plains? av The spirits have removed them. 72

They are angry with us.

They leave us without firewood when they are angry. They'll never grow again. <>> t We pine for the top of our woods, ' .;

but the dark spirit won't send them back. i. ^ ' ï 'The spirit is angry with us. < The white men spoke to two men of the Narcoo tribe. They were young men. They gave the white men a big kangaroo, and some coberra. The white men would not eat the coberra. They told the Narcoo men to show them the way to the Kumbaingiri, although the Narcoo men had never seen anyone from that tribe. They were neighbours, but they did not visit. The Narcoo men said: "You wait here."

They went back to the tribes and the elders had a big talk and then they told the young men:

"You keep them buggers going quick and smart."

So that is what the young men did. They showed them the way, although it was not easy. They had seven wagons. Sometimes the boss would say: "We going to camp here." And then he would gallop off and chop down trees and make more maps. Then he would come back and say: "Right you are, we go now."

It was in these camps the young fellows learned about Jesus. This was the first time they ever heard of such a thing. They were told the story of Jesus nailed.to the cross. They were told by the Reverend Mr Hopkins. Whenever they crossed a river this fellow had to lie on his back first. Then he would put a tin funnel in his mouth and then they would fill him up with grog. He must have been drunk, but the young men were never offered the bottle so they did not find out what it was he drank.

The Reverend Mr Hopkins told the Narcoo men the story of St Barnabas eaten by a lion. He told them the story of St Catherine killed with a wheel. He told them the story of St Sebastian killed with spears.

Naturally the Narcoo men misunderstood many things, but many things they understood very well. One thing they did not understand was the boxes on the wagons: they got the idea these boxes were related to the stories. They thought they were sacred. They thought they were the white man's dreaming.

Coming down Mount Leadenhall it was so steep they were lowering

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wagons on pulleys and ropes. It was a great bloody mess with ropes tied to trees and bullocks pulling up so the wagons would get lowered down. There was an accident. One of the boxes fell. Straight away the white fellows opened up this box. Naturally the Narcoo men were keen to see what was inside.

You know what they saw? It was glass. Up until that time they had not seen glass. There was glass windows down in Kempsey and Port Macquarie, but these fellows had not been to those places. They saw the glass was sharp. This was the first thing they noticed-that it cuts. Cuts trees. Cuts the skin of the tribes.

When the white men wanted to cross Mount Dawson, the Narcoo men did not wish them to. Mount Dawson was sacred. The young men were forbidden to go there. It was against their law. Then the leader of the white men shot one of the Narcoo men with his pistol. The other Narcoo man was named Odalberee. This Odalberee took them up Mount Dawson, and down towards the Bellinger Valley. He made a song.

Glass cuts.

We never saw it before.

Now it is here amongst us.

It is sacred to the strangers.

Glass cuts.

Glass cuts kangaroo. Glass cuts bandicoot.

Glass cuts the trees and grasses.

Hurry on, strangers.

.-.-.. Hurry on to the Kumbaingiri.

. Leave us, good spirits, go, go.

Odalberee led them down towards the coast at Uranga. He thought he should take them towards the sea so they could go away. But on the last night, when they were almost there, the Kumbaingiri knew there were strangers in their country. The Kumbaingiri came with torches at night. They walked through the bush to talk to the strangers. But the strangers got frightened. Odalberee got frightened too. The Kumbaingiri men did not understand him. Then there was a lot of shooting. The Reverend Mr Hopkins made a big fuss. He shouted. He ran about. The leader of the white men said: "Tie that fellow up." v>7

Oscar and Lucinda

They tied him up to a tree down in a gully. There were two men with him to keep him safe. Then they went back and fired more rifles at the Kumbaingiri. You could hear the red-haired man wailing. He was like a ghost in the night.

The next day Odalberee went off and found the Kumbaingiri again. He told the story of everything that had happened to him. He cut himself. He brought glass with him, wrapped in a possum skin. He was sick to have caused such death. He cut himself not only on the chest, but on the arms. He did this with the glass.

In a short time Odalberee was very sick. No one could cure him. Before too long he died. That glass was kept a long time by the elders of the Kumbaingiri, but it was not kept with the sacred things. It was kept somewhere else, where it would not be found. 101

Oscar at Bellingen Heads

When Oscar Hopkins arrived at the banks of the Bellinger, he had changed. Those limpid eyes, which had once irritated Wardley-Fish with their "holy" pose, now showed a dull, ash-covered anger. His face was burnt a painful vermilion and his nose-due to an illusion created by the peeling skin-seemed to have grown large and slightly hooked. It was a gaunt, scraped-out kind of personality you saw there, scarred by bushfire, incapable of so fat a luxury as tears. He was a red salmon as it enters the waters of its home river where it will spawn and die, no longer plump and silver but with its belly empty, its jaw become long and hooked, its whole body bright red and splendidly, triumphantly ugly.

Mr Jeffris's party found the Bellinger River at a place where the Narcoo man judged they would do the least amount of damage. This was at Urunga, a wounded place in any case. 30Q

Oscar at Bellingen Heads

In those days it was called Bellingen Heads.

As they came down the dry and pebbly ridge towards the high white trees, the Narcoo man slipped away. Mr Jeff ris took a pot-shot, but with no real intention of killing-just a shot which threw the white cockatoos into the air like screeching feathers from a burst pillow. Oscar sat beside Mr Smith under the canvas awning of the "Ladies' Compartment." Mr Smith was sharpening his axe on a stone. The laudanum bottle sat between them, but the humiliating funnel was nowhere in evidence. Since the slaughter at Sandy Creek, Oscar had administered his own laudanum. He kept a small clear-glass bottle in his jacket pocket which he replenished from the large stone demijohn. He sipped on it from time to time, but it was like water on a rock-hot fire-it gave off steam, but did not stop the heat. He sat on the hard wooden seat beside the silent Mr Smith who seemed to have contracted his whole being into the shadow of his hat. Mr Smith honed his axe. He had honed it for a long time now. Oscar Hopkins was drunk on laudanum. He sat with his back to the carefully labelled crates of glass and iron. He rubbed at the brown-stained bandages on his wrist. He knew his rope burns to be infected, but could not bear to speak of this, or any other matter, to Mr Jeffris who, now they were almost arrived at their destination, had begun to change in his manner towards him so that he could, cantering back up the hill towards him, actually smile and, without either apology or irony, ask him was it not sweet to be alive. Mr Jeffris was content. He had not made a great exploration-you could not have a great exploration with seven wagons in mountainous country-but he had done sound work, which would serve as evidence of his ability to lead other expeditions. He had put names to several largish creeks. He had set the heights of many mountains which had previously been wildly misdescribed. He had established a reputation for courage, having led his party through places inhabited by desperate blacks. His journals recorded that he had "given better than we took" from the "Spitting Tribe." Also: "6 treacherous knaves" from the Yarra-Happini had been "dispatched" by their guns. He had also successfully defended the party from the "murderous Kumbaingiri." He recorded all this in a neat and flowing hand which gave no indication of the peculiarities of his personality. His sketches of the countryside, the long ridges of mountains etc, were as good as anything in Mitchell's journals.

When he cantered up the ridge towards Messrs Smith and Hopkins, he felt as fresh and clean as the morning he had left Port Jackson, felt

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far better, for on that occasion he had suffered a mild case of jitters, a looseness of the bowels which had been difficult to hide from men with a keen eye for weakness. Mr Smudge was "not talking" to him. So, he thought, we have our little tiff. And a smile, he could not help it, ruffled the smooth cloak of concern he had arranged on his handsome face. Mr Smudge had still not attended to his toilet. There was a sprinkling of ginger hair upon his chin and some black charcoal marks on his ears where he had been scratching his mosquito bites. He was a contrast to his cornpanion who was, as usual, neatly kitted out in fresh-washed twill and cotton. Yet you could not conclude from this that one had "character" whilst the other had not. They were a pair, in Jeffris's eyes, and he thought the "Ladies' Compartment" aptly named. Mr Jeffris had, perhaps, been too harsh with Mr Smudge. But the man was alive, was he not? He would be delivered as requested. He was not speared or poisoned by serpents. He had seen things no Sydney clerk would ever dream of seeing: life, death, savages. He had eaten snake and played the missionary. And now he should not be sitting on his car with his ramrod back, but should be throwing his hat in the air and offering to shout his protectors' drinks. They had guaranteed his place in history.

It was such a crisp, clear day and the ridge was almost as good as Her Majesty's highway. Mr Jeffris brought his stallion to a trot and rode beside the "Ladies' Compartment" for a piece. The view was splendid: the Bellinger estuary swept beneath them like an illustration to à fairy tale: strokes of aqua, gold, turquoise. Three pelicans thrust out their chests and glided on the air below.

"Well, Mr Hopkins," said Mr Jeffris, as he plucked a blood-bloated tick from his stallion's neck.

"What do you say to that?"

"To what?" the clergyman said abruptly, turning his haughty red face briefly towards his questioner before looking back again. Beside him, Mr Smith honed his axe, and hid his anger and self-loathing from

no one.

"What do you say," insisted Mr Jeffris, "to this, the countryside?"

"If it was my country, sir, I would be feared to see you coming." Mr Jeffris laughed, a harsh, impatient laugh.

"And I would pray to God to forgive you, and all of us who are of your party."

"It has been an education for you," said Mr Jeffris complacently. "That I can understand." Oscar said nothing. His anus itched beyond belief. He thought: If

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Oscar at Bellinger Heads

I were a strong man I would leap on him now and commit the sin of murder.

"Churches are not carried by choirboys," said Mr Jeffris. "Neither has the Empire been built by angels," and he would have said more on the subject, for it was one he had a secret passion for, and his hand had just drifted to his broad moustache which he would stroke as he gathered in the strands of his defence, when he was interrupted by that bow-legged gentleman, the plant collector, who was, as usual, wanting to go cantering away from the main party, and wished to take the carpenter as "bodyguard." As it was Mr Jeffris's agreement that he had the rights of sale of all the plant collector's delicate drawings, he was more than pleased to humour him. The subjects of Empire and angels were forestalled by other calls on his attention, and finally he gave up. "We will drink," he shouted as he trotted back to settle some dispute that his brightly tattooed overseer was in the process of beginning. "We will drink champagne and send a message on the mail boat to Miss Leplastrier."

Oscar made a small noise, a little grunt of pain. In relationship to Miss Leplastrier, he felt only that he was a coward and complicitous in murder. As the wagon banged and thumped down the ridge into Bellingen Heads, its wooden brake squealing on the last steep drop, Oscar made a pair with his hunched and silent companion. He saw, in every blackened stump, every fallen log, in every shadow beneath a she-oak or turpentine, the same crumpled dark bodies, the frail and tender envelopes of human souls. He sought his laudanum. He imagined he could smell blood, and perhaps he could, for his own bandages were caked with it.

There were two taverns at Bellingen Heads and, discounting some grey neglected tents with dull, fat-leaved weeds growing along their perimeter drains, nothing else. The taverns faced each other across a sandy flat in the centre of which was a greenish-coloured waterhole surrounded by a ring of faeces. He and Mr Smith remained in their seat while the teams were unhitched and watered there, but when this lengthy business was at last completed Oscar climbed down.

"Come, Smith."

"Oh, God, man," said Percy Smith. "Surely you are not going to drink with them?" Oscar said: "I have already travelled with them."

Inside the tavern he placed his injured hands flat on a rough table. There was a smell here which was like a condensation of that slightly off odour, that blocked-drain smell which, mixed with salt air, was the

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distinctive odour of Sydney. There were small black flies everywhere. They climbed across his bandages, his face, across the lids of his eyes. He felt he had travelled to the very heart of New South Wales.

He did not wear his "uniform," but the shiny, frayed black suit he had worn as both clergyman and clerk. He had a collarless white shirt from which his long white neck sprouted to his staring crimson face and blooming ginger hair. He sat with his back very straight against the wall and held his hands together across his chest. He thought: I will smite them all. He trembled. He glared around the room at whiskered faces which not only stared back at him, but more often, laughed and pointed.

He said: "The pillars of society."

He thought: What would God have me do? He saw, in his mind, his father's face. He sighed. He was the subject of much curiosity. He himself felt only that he was in an evil place. He had no curiosity beyond that. Yet the little tavern was filled with curiosities. The bar was made from a single threefoot-wide plank of cedar. The walls had pennies and florins driven into place with six-inch nails. A couple seemed to be having sexual congress on the other side of the Tom curtain through which men — short, for the most part, broad and shovel-bearded, none of them too steady on their feet-would occasionally come and go.

While the day outside was clay-white, the inside was as dark and sooty as a painting above a fireplace. There was jostling going on around Mr Jeffris who seemed, in this environment, as white-skinned and genteel as an officer posing for his portrait.

The cedar cutters were insisting Jeffris must play cards with them. They spoke with humour, but if they were ready with a laugh and a wink they were also men whose faces spoke more of their cruelty and selfishness. These were faces that would "turn nasty" in a moment, and this information was, like a pitchfork, only partly hidden in the haystack of their laugh. Jeffris would be Captain Hackum if he had to, but he would not play them cards. He sent Moët et Chandon to Mr Hopkins's table and the blacksmith and the bugler to go and guard him. Oscar was unaware of all these currents. He was pressed by a crushing physical weight of evil. Mr Jeffris had been right: the Empire had not been built by choirboys. At that moment he was his father's son, and he would bring retribution on the wicked. He would burn the tavern down. It was this conflagration that gave his eyes their intensity. He did not wonder why

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Oscar at Bellingen Heads

anyone would drive a six-inch nail through the silver and copper images of the Queen but, rather, how one would leave them melted and twisted in the ash. His thoughts were of kindling, ashbuckets, Miss Leplastrier's fireplace. He had left his laudanum aboard the wagon. The blacksmith had signed the pledge and the bugler (who had only bugled once, as they crossed Sydney Harbour and had, for the rest, been called to obey the diverse and dangerous orders of Mr Jeffris), was of an age when he still cut himself with his razor and diluted his rum with lemonade. He was frightened, although not yet of anything in particular. The blacksmith was also nervous. The three did not speak to each other, but bunched, as you will see cattle in saleyards back their hindquarters against the rail until the auctioneer sends a rouster to prod them with his rod and make them run and skip and shit themselves before the buyers and sellers and those cagey souls who will not sell their stock until next week.

Mr Jeffris then excused his not playing poker on the grounds that, "This gentleman over here is a sky-pilot and it would cause him offence."

It is possible that Mr Jeffris was unaware of the degree to which the cloth was despised in that part of the country. He could not have known that Dennis Hasset's predecessor had drowned after being thrown in the Bellinger.

Oscar sat in the cold sticky envelope of his dirty skin and sipped his tepid champagne. Such was his disturbed state that he was not displeased to feel the heat of the cedar cutters' animus. He watched, and was watched. He had a nagging pain around his eyes that would only be cured by laudanum.

He was invited to step through the Tom curtain and "dip your wee white toe in the holy well." Several glasses of dark liquor were delivered by the publican's pale and pimple-faced wife with

"the compliments of Sir Roger Rogerer" or "Lord Pupslaughter," each glass being placed on Oscar's table in reverent silence, each announcement of the glass's donor being greeted with inordinate laughing and whistling.

You could feel the atmosphere becoming overloaded and had the tavern been a living organism it would soon have suffered a shiver of retro-peristalsis and spewed its poisonous contents out into the green shit-littered waterhole. But the tavern was inert, constructed from twofoot-diameter posts of Bellinger River turpentine, these being buried four feet down in the sandy soil. Mr Jeffris had not come this far to die in a tavern brawl. He fiddled with his sword hilt. The publican picked up a claw hammer and was

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Oscar and Lucinda

smacking its heavy head into the fleshy palm of his large hand. It was then-at the moment when everyone seemed to have focused on this hammer-that Oscar felt himself rising to his feet. He had not planned to. It was as if the pressure of his outrage could no longer be accommodated by the bent pipe of his body. He rose without a plan, but with the clear knowledge that retribution must be meted out to these blasphemers. He could not stand straight, but at an angle, and thus must prop his long arms out on the table.

There was a silence in the tavern. A woman was crying softly on the other side of the Tom curtain.

Oscar thought: What would God have me do?

Everyone seemed to move and breathe very slowly. A freakishly large red-bearded man raised a glass to his glistening lips. Oscar thought: Like the hand of a clock. He held up his own hand. He watched, as they watched, as his wrist emerged-a living thing-from the frayed shell of his sleeve.

"How thin my wrist is," he told them. "This wrist God made for me." No one said anything.

"How could I smite you?"

He did not feel afraid. He felt a great clarity. He saw his own hand. He saw it in his mind's eye holding a shining white flower with five petals. The flower became a hand of cards.

"But I will play you poker and I will win. And you may know now, this money will be your gift to God's work in Boat Harbour."

A movement at his own table made him cast his eyes down. He saw the bugler had spilled his drink. The bugler's red lips were moving. The boy was praying. Oscar thought: I am drunk with laudanum. He also thought: I need a little sip. He put his hand to his jacket pocket where his bottle would normally be and then remembered-how disappointing this was; how angry it made him feel — that he had left the blessed thing in the wagon. His fingers found, instead, the crumpled envelope Lucinda had given him with which to reward Mr Jeffris. God put this in his hand.

He took the envelope out and held it aloft. "I have a pot of one hundred guineas."

"No," cried the loathsome Mr Jeffris from the bar. "I forbid it."

"I would shoot you dead," cried Oscar above the general noise, "and go to hell for it; and I am only saved for want of a weapon." He pushed the table forward so that the blacksmith's glass of seltzer was toppled over and both blacksmith and bugler struggled to free themselves from their tangled chairs. "You murderer," cried Oscar. He put his hand

A Christian Man

in his pocket. His pocket was empty. Mr Jeffris had drawn his sword and was moving towards him. No one tried to hold him back.

" "The Lord is my shepherd/ " said Oscar, his eyes bright, his back straight, " 'I shall not want. Thou prepares! a table for me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil.'

"

Mr Jeffris's hand grasped Oscar above the elbow and pulled him so hard that he cried out with pain. Mr Jeffris's blue-black hair was carefully brushed. His moustache was waxed. He smelt of the barber's shop.

"Out," shrieked Mr Jeffris. "Out now."

"I warn you," called Oscar. He was yanked from the tavern like a tooth. He left much laughter behind, but he did not hear it. He was aware only of his outrage, of his pain, his impotence, his hatred. He was hurled on to the bare ground. He was kicked. Many times. There were no witnesses to save him. He was afraid. He was a crab scuttling across the grim grey sand. He was a cur. There was a wagon. He crawled beneath its rancid axle. The boot followed him. The sword poked between the spokes of the wheel.

He prayed: Oh God, give me the means to smite Thy enemy.

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Percy Smith had always thought himself a good and Christian man. He did not say his prayers by rote. The envelopes he put inside the felt-lined plate in his parish church were fatter than the custom, not because he was wealthy but because he saw it as his duty. He was a gentle man. He was gentle with the animals he tended and went to unusual lengths to make sure they suffered as little as possible. He was faithful to his wife, and a loving and tender father to his baby girls.

But what he feared about his character was that all his tenderness

Oscar and Lucinda

was but the visible shadow of his cowardice. When he was gentle and kind to those who might suffer it was because he was one with them, and he was frightened.

He could not bear to hear the stories of Christ's crucifixion. Neither habit nor repetition dulled the pain of that spear in the side, the long, slow, thirsty agony of death. When a preacher held up to him the shining example of the Christian martyrs, he feared that he-in such a moment-would deny his God.

The journey under Mr Jeffris's leadership had confirmed all these fears he had about himself. He was a counterfeit and coward. He had tortured Oscar Hopkins with a funnel. He had not stood up to defend him. He had lowered his eyes and "yes, sirred" the little martinet. He had "gone along." He had persuaded himself it would do no harm. And he had sat there-how damnable this waswhile natives were slaughtered. And when Mr Hopkins had protested he had been one of those who tied him to a tree-on Jeffris's orders-so that he would cause no harm. All his anger and disgust, all that which should have decently gone outwards, was driven inwards and he found himself-this happy, optimistic, loving man-sharpening his axe, honing it, so it would be as sharp as a razor.

He did not think: A razor for my wrists. He thought no actual words. He worked the round whetstone on and on, tasting only the great deep well of evil from which he had drunk. When he had done the axe he began on the tomahawk.

He was seated thus, in the Ladies' Compartment, when he heard a cry and saw Mr Jeffris, sword raised high, booting Mr Hopkins in the backside and ribs. Mr Hopkins held an envelope which Mr Jeffris tried to snatch.

Mr Hopkins disappeared underneath the wagon. And then he was up beside the Ladies'

Compartment, trying to clamber up the steps.

"God help me," said Oscar Hopkins.

Mr Hopkins was almost in the wagon when Mr Jeffris took him by his shoulder. Percy Smith raised his tomahawk and brought it down on Mr Jeffris's upper arm. The head had not much weight. But Mr Smith was a strong man. He felt the bone cut. He felt the most immense satisfaction, a great shudder of something so close to pleasure you could not give it another name.

As Mr Jeffris stumbled back from the wagon, blood spurting through the fabric of his bright blue coat, Mr Smith saw that

Did I Not Murder?

Mr Hopkins had hefted the axe.

Mr Hopkins stood with his feet astride, the axe held incorrectly, the two white hands too close together. His face was blazing red. His mouth open. As the clergyman brought the axe up above his head, Mr Smith thought: He will hurt himself, he does it wrong.

"Hi," screamed Oscar Hopkins.

He brought the hate-bright axe down in the middle of Mr Jeffris's glistening, brilliantined head. And then his hands sprung loose from the handle. They were quivering and clapping. Mr Jeffris slumped to his knees and then tilted forward in the direction indicated by the ash axe handle. The blade was three inches into his skull which split around the orbit of his left eye. All the drinkers were inside the tavern. Mr Smith noted this before he did a thing. Then he took the blanket from the seat and wrapped it around the quaking Hopkins. He brought him forcefully to the ground and there, without thinking why or what he was doing, he swaddled him as though he were a little child. He stilled the thrashing limbs by force. He held him bodily across his knees and parted him.

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"Mr Smith, did I not murder a man?" .'•'. •• ' ' >

"We did, we did." " '

"Then tell me, pray, why this dreadful levity? And why are we here? And where is our party?" Oscar had awoken on the morning of the day after the one in which Mr Smith had wrapped him in his blanket. It had taken some time to loosen himself from his sweaty swaddle, but when he was outside the familiar stained canvas walls of the tent, he discovered, not the scene of his nightmare, but a cool blue stretch of the Bellinger River, a wide, still sheet of water at a place where a rough little wharf had

Oscar and Lucinda

been constructed. At the wharf were moored two barges, or rather (because they were long craft with square-sawn bows), lighters. It was here that he found Percy Smith, a clean white shirt upon his back, busily hammering and sawing. He had already constructed an open platform across the two lighters.

"Our 'party' is at this moment going south in pursuit of Mr Jeff ris," called Percy Smith, bestowing upon Oscar a cheerful grin and running his hand through his short hair so that it stood up at the back in a cocky's crest. "They now think him nought but an oiler. They want their pay, and so they've gone to relieve him of it."

"Oh, Lord," said Oscar, and groaned, holding his head in his hands. Mr Smith put his hammer in his belt and sprang up the bound sapling ladder to the wharf.

"Whoa," he said. "Whoa, Neddy."

"Oh, God, " said Oscar, unconscious of where he walked, stumbling on piles of bearers which were stacked about his feet. "Oh, dear God, what have we done?"

"Ssh," said Percy Smith, guiding his friend back through the tangle of hessian bags and beams, off the wharf to solid ground.

"Ssh, you must not fear."

"I have killed a man."

"Your Maker will forgive you."

A shudder passed through Oscar's thin white body. Percy Smith felt it, and knew it for what it was. He was not without symptoms of the same variety, and yet what he felt, for the most part-he begged God forgive him-was exhilaration.

He felt so light. When he came across the wharf to Oscar he could have skipped.

'The Lord was his Maker, too," said Oscar severely.

"Look," said Percy Smith, "we are alive. He is dead. Give thanks to God for our deliverance." Percy Smith held Oscar by the arm and led him to a log beside the smoky camphre. He found some little sticks and leaves and, in a moment, had a blaze going. "They were nice enough to leave us tea and sugar and a billy. For the rest, they were in too much of a hurry."

"My church," cried Oscar, struggling to his feet.

"They did not take your church."

Oscar looked around him wildly and Percy Smith could not help laughing.

"Oh," said Oscar screwing up his white face into a crumpled page of irritation, "you are a madman."

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Did I Not Murder?

"Your church is here," cooed Mr Smith. "Your church is here, my reverend sir. Indeed it is."

"It is no good to me here, fool," cried Oscar, standing straight up from his log and brandishing the finger-thin stick with which he had been poking into the little fire. "It must be in Boat Harbour. I have murdered the man who might get it there. And you, you-" he sighed. "Oh, dear." He sat down again. "I cannot blame you, Mr Smith, and what does any of this matter now when we are likely to be arrested?"

"Dear Mr Hopkins, please do be more cheerful."

"Cheerful!" shrieked Oscar.

"You are a regular little rosella. Look at you-burnt crimson and shrieking from the treetops. If there were troopers here they would soon know where to find us. But there are no troopers in the district."

"No police?"

"And even if there were a herd of Sydney constables, I bet you your laudanum bottle they would be too slow for Percy Smith. You should be proud to know me."

"Oh," Oscar said, "I am far worse."

"Do not 'worse' me, Hopkins. The knave was buried before a soul came out to see the sunlight. Congratulate me."

"Oh, I am sorry, Mr Smith, I cannot."

"Then have some johnnycake. It is a shame you were not awake to enjoy it hot." Oscar sipped his tea while Mr Smith watched him. "Who would have known me for a murderer?" he said. "I would not have recognized it in myself. Think of my poor mother, when she suckled me. ." He stopped and gazed into the smoke.

"Do not stew on it."

Oscar cupped his tea in his hand and looked around their campsite. Percy Smith watched him narrowly.

"You must not dwell on it."

"And where is the church on which account so much blood has been spilt?"

"It is all around you. Do you not recognize a pane of glass?" And indeed there were parts of the iron and glass church-all with their little labels flapping like manila leaves-scattered in neat piles all around the campsite and out on the wharf as well.

"I thought you were going to trip on the mullions." ….',• r

"Oh," said Oscar softly, "oh dearie me.":

"Do not dearie me." «t j

"Oh, Lord."

Af\Q

Oscar and Lucinda

"Oh, nonsense." •'••

"And where are all the crates? And how will we. .?"

" 'Say not the struggle nought availeth, ' " said Percy Smith. " 'Our struggles and our hopes are vain.' How does it go? You have seen the crates."

"Smith/' said Oscar, "I beg you, I am in no state for silly puzzles."

"Then listen to me, and do not stew. I have rented these two lighters on the wharf. They are not, individually, big enough to carry the church, so I have done the mathematics. Now your church is fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide."

'Twenty-two feet and six inches."

"Good. And all these bits and pieces weigh twelve tons, as you have told me often enough. And to support twelve tons on the water we will need barges to displace two hundred and forty cubic feet. And these chaps here, these ones will do this. We can take the church upriver on the tide. I have arranged for help in the construction. Two men can pole and row to keep the barge in the centre-stream. I figure we can be there in two days."

"And then we must construct the church."

"Not then," said Percy Smith. He stood up. He began to stride around the fire. "Not then, now, here. On the barge. You see, I have worked it out. We will enter Boat Harbour in glory. Can you imagine it? Can you see the look on their godless faces? A crystal vision. My oh my. Can you see it, Mr Hopkins? What a visitation it would be to see God's temple come to them upon the water."

"Mr Smith, I am tired."

"Do not be tired, my Reverend Jolly-man," said Percy Smith. "Lean on me. I am a practical man. I have the base plate already constructed on the water. It is a simple matter."

"But what will happen at the other end?"

"Why, dear Mr Hopkins, listen to this. I asked myself the same question. It is easy enough, I thought, to get this glass church built on water, but what will happen at the other end? And the answer is this. I have twelve wooden joists laid across the two barges. You must have seen them. But you did not, of course. You were Macbeth in a dream. I have been busy. I have twelve joists across, you see. When we are at Boat Harbour I will have twenty-four men lift the church by these joists and they can carry it. You should congratulate me."

'Twenty-four would not be enough. They must carry half a ton each."

"Then forty-eight or ninety-six. It doesn't matter. These towns are always full of men wanting to prove their strength. We will have them carry it up the main street like a float in a procession."

Mary Magdalene

"Mr Smith, why are you like this?",

"You would not like the answer, Mr Hopkins." v

"Tell me anyway."

"I am like this because we killed an evil man," said Percy Smith. "It has done me a power of good. I cannot tell you."

"And do you feel no shame?"

"Oh, yes, of course. And guilt, but I will tell you, in truth, that I have felt more sorrow to have slain a beast. That is something you never become accustomed to. You take care to make your knife sharp and to make the killing quick, but the moment always comes when you look that poor beast in the eye, and you can ask other farmers the same question and if they are honest they will tell you the truth-it is a dreadful thing. But this man was cruel. I am glad we killed him. I could not have borne to be a jellyfish one more day."

"And what of the Commandment we have broken?"

"I am sure the Almighty does not have a mind like a railway clerk."

"By which you mean?"

"He is not a puffed-up little toad in the government offices. He knows you are not a bad man." Oscar reached his hand into his pocket and found his laudanum was in its proper place.

"You should wash," said Percy Smith. "I have some soap."

"Yes," said Oscar. He did not believe any of the things Percy Smith said about God. 104

Mary Magdalene

Kumbaingiri Billy was not in that tavern or any other tavern, ever. But the woman on the other side of the Tom curtain was his father's sister and she had been abducted by cedar cutters about a year before that time and was as reduced and miserable as any human being might

Oscar and Lucinda

ever be. Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister was about twenty years old. She said the tavern was very quiet when Oscar made his speech. She said he had a face that was Tom and peeling like the trunks of the paperbarks which grow in swampy land around the Bellinger. She saw great unhappiness there, said Kumbaingiri Billy, but that unhappiness, he reckoned, was most likely her own.

This young woman was a witness to the murder. It was she who showed Percy Smith the cesspit which was to be Mr Jeffris's final resting place. It was she who took him down along the river to the decaying homestead of H. M. McCracken and stood outside, scratching her long thin legs, while Percy Smith haggled with McCracken about a fair rent for his leaky lighters. She saw Oscar awake. She heard all the arguments about murder. She was squatting in the bush some five yards from them. She was very taken with Oscar. She thought him a good man. When he finished his damper she came out of the bush and told him there were two men she could get to help them with their building.

She saw the glass church built upon those lighters.

Kumbaingiri Billy knew the story. He said: "He moved fast, that man with the red face and the red hair. My aunty named him 'Bushfire' for the way he leapt from place to place on that barge, burning red, dancing in his own firelight. They got the columns up the first daythey were twistycurly things like rope, like the corkscrew on a can opener. These columns were black and greasy. The grease was black too. It made the white chaps into blackfellows. They braced these columns off with saplings. They could not use nails, of course. They tied the saplings on with rope. Then they got the trusses assembled on the wharf. There was no fancy stuff in the trusses. There was plenty of fancy stuff, but that came later-all this fancy iron like the houses down in Lawson Street-all this went around the bottom of the walls. There was other stuff along the top, a real cocky's crest it was, but the trusses were dead plain. They assembled them on the wharf and then they waited for the tide to go down. They waited. They had a smoke. Round about lunch time the tide went down. The top of the walls came level with the wharf and then this Mr Hopkins yelled out: 'Right you are.' They slid the trusses out and fixed them on. Mr Hopkins would not go out on the roof, but, by golly he was not shy to give those fellows orders. He called to them, you do this, you do that, you be careful, better not drop that thing and break it. They started two days before Palm Sunday. They worked on the sabbath too. That was the day they began to cover the iron with glass. They were working for a bet, or

Miriam

so I he'ard later, and this is why they broke the sabbath. They started at the bottom and moved from left to right, tap-tap. They must have used some metal clips, I reckon, to keep the glass in. This was when my aunty saw glass. My word, she was tickled by it. She had only seen glass in booze bottles until that day. She saw glass could be good. She had not thought this before. When she saw this glass church built she became a Christian. This was the day Jesus first came to the Bellinger. She saw Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Paul, and Jonah-all that mob she never knew before. She saw your great-grandfather was a brave man. She saw he had a halo like one of those saints. She saw that when it was night he shivered — not from cold, but from a sort of holy happiness. He told her: "You will live in paradise.' He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us Kooris in that way."

105 Miriam

Miriam Chadwick was not in mourning and had, once again, thrown away her widow's weeds although Mrs Trevis, her smudge-lipped employer, had thought, out loud, that this was tempting fate.

"Who have 7 to mourn for any more?" said Miriam Chadwick who was, when this conversation took place, holding Mrs Trevis's newborn babe, a bad-tempered little chap, always "sucky" and given to banging his little head against the governess's shoulder.

"You might mourn for me, or Mr Trevis," suggested Mrs Trevis.

"Oh, there is no likelihood of that," said Miriam Chadwick tossing her hair back off her shoulders-beautiful hair, coal-black hair, raven hair, but who was there to see its dark blue lights out here at Marx Hill? "No likelihood at all," said Miriam, bouncing the babe resentfully, and leaving her comment ambiguous as long as she dare, "with both you and Mr Trevis in such fine health."

413

Oscar and Lucinda

"Here/' said Mrs Trevis, reaching out for the babe while she gently cuffed her little boy who was reaching for a saucepan on the kitchen table. "Here, 111 take bubba. You try your hand at t'other."

"T'other" was the butter churn which wooden wheel of torture Mrs Trevis now abandoned to her governess.

"If you have nabbed young Reverend Hasset," Mrs Trevis began, an observation that had nothing to do with mourning or widow's weeds, but was intended to bring her uppity governess (she thought herself too good to set the fires or scrub the milk pails) to a proper understanding of her place in this society.

"I did not attempt, as you put it, to 'nab' the poor man, although there is no doubting he was properly 'nabbed' without him knowing what had happened."

"Jealousy killed the cat/' said Mrs Trevis, dipping her finger in the butter jar and then slipping it into her infant's sucky mouth.

Miriam Chadwick looked on with her handsome nose wrinkled.

"Curiosity."

"Beg yours?"

"It was curiosity that killed the cat."

"Curiosity in the beginning," said Mrs Trevis, "but jealousy in the end. It is bad luck to throw away your widow's weeds."

This conversation was in Miriam Chadwick's mind on the hot Thursday afternoon when, with the Trevises all gone into Boat Harbour to buy provisions for the Easter feast, she was savouring her solitude, sitting on the wooden step, looking down at the curve of the Bellinger River. She was running through her list of unsatisfactory or irritating or boorish suitors when she saw a church made from glass towed into her field of vision by two men in wide straw hats. Her first thought was disappointment that Mrs Trevis was not here to witness this thing with her, that she must exclaim to nothing but the empty air. "Oh, my," she said, feeling that some subtle victory had been somehow denied her, "just look at what you have missed. Just look. Just look at it."

It came up the river, its walls like ice emanating light, as fine and elegant as civilization itself.

"Who?" demanded Miriam Chadwick. "Who? Just answer me that." Who in this valley of muddy boots could be responsible for such a thing? For it was not simply that the little steep-roofed church was made from glass, but that it had all the lovely proportions and gracenotes of a fancy constructed for a prince, say, in Bavaria.

All along its roof ridge there was a decorative edging, a frill-she

Miriam

could not make it out exactly but it would seem, there, to be like a line of fleurs-de-lis. The glass sheets of its walls were not square and dull like window panes, but tall and thin, with a triangulation at the top, and a lovely cast-iron frieze made of medallions (crests?), which repeated in a frieze along the bottom of the walls. This cast-iron frieze must be nearly three feet high-ornate like the rood screen in a cathedral.

She did not see or appreciate Mr Flood's speciality-the cast-iron barley-sugar scrolls of which he had been so proud-and indeed it would not be more than a minute before she forgot the miraculous building entirely-it soon assumed no more importance than a pretty wrapping paper for, as the lighters slewed in the river, the glass regained its transparency, and she saw the blacksuited figure sitting on a chair inside the church. At this moment her sense of wonder was completely swamped by more practical concerns, for if this lovely building was a church — and was that not a cross at the termination of the cresting?then the blacksuited man inside was almost certainly a clergyman. She had an aqua moire-silk riding habit, which was thought "unsuitable" in Boat Harbour. She put it on. She had a little hat with a veil. She fastened it with a long pin. There was no time for bathing. She went out into the home paddock and caught the bad-tempered little Shetland which had been left at home, smacked it hard across the nose when it tried to bite her. The beast pulled its head back and its eye, though wild, was less wild than usual. "So," thought Miriam Chadwick,

"you are a bully like the rest of them." The pony pulled. Miriam hit it again, refllecting bitterly on the brutalizing effects of life at Fernmount.

The pony would not go slow. It went at speed, cantering, almost galloping down the rutted shaleloose hill towards the river. She lost her pretty little whip at the gate but the pony was hardmouthed and would not pull up. She came on to the cattle path beside the Bellinger. She came beside the rowing men and the glass church on the barge.

"Oh, dear God," she prayed, "do not let me appear as such a fool." She cried with fright as the pony stumbled on a crumbling piece of riverbank, regained its footing, and continued, leaving the church behind, in the direction of the landing wharf at Boat Harbour. She thought it obvious to everyone what she was up to and was, in consequence, ashamed. At Boat Harbour she had to hide an hour or two and not be seen by her employers or their children, who were, it seemed, at every

Oscar and Lucinda

draper's shop and corner. She sat in the prayer room above the cobbler's shop and having begun by pretending to pray, ended by doing it in earnest.

9

106

The Aisle of a Cathedral

The Bellinger was not like it is now, with wide electric-green fields pushing down on to the river. The banks were like green cliffs of camouflage pierced with giant knitting needles and spun and tangled all about with ferns and creepers. It was a landscape already bleeding from the stabbing and hacking of the cedar cutters, but the wounds were all internal, in the belly of the bush, and although Oscar saw how Percy Smith and his two helpers must jump and poke with their punting poles to keep them clear of floating cedar logs, he did not guess the history of these logs. He saw only the shrieking walls of jungle which threw up wide-winged birds as the church approached.

Laudanum or no, he was not at ease. He called for Percy Smith to lock the door. He placed his hard wooden chair in the very middle of the church. He prayed out loud and his voice had a hard vibrant quality inside the glass. He said: "Oh Lord, I am alive in the midst of Thy dreadful river. All Thy glory surrounds me, but I am afraid."

Outside the walls, he could hear the man named "rumgo" giggling. This had no more importance to him than the cries of savage birds.

My great-grandfather drifted up the Bellinger River like a blind man up the central aisle of Notre Dame. He saw nothing. The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible. He did not even imagine their presence. 41A

The Aisle of a Cathedral

Some of these stories were as small as the transparent anthropods that lived in the puddles beneath the river casuarinas. These stories were like fleas, thrip, so tiny that they might inhabit a place (inside the ears of the seeds of grass) he would later walk across without even seeing. In this landscape every rock had a name, and most names had spirits, ghosts, meanings. He had given his hat to Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister. It was the Wednesday before Good Friday, and although it was now cool in Sydney, it was hot at this latitude. Under the canopy of glass it was very hot indeed. Only on the dog-leg bend at Fernmount was the riverbank able to provide any shade.

Kumbaingiri Billy saw the glass church. He was a young boy, initiated only the year before. He was with the men, hunting, at the place which is now named Marx Hill. He saw the glass church in the distance-a prism, a cube, a steeple of light sliding into the green shadows of Fernmount. There were men with blue shirts and wide-brimmed hats. They held long poles. They stood around the perimeter. In the middle was a man. Even in the shadow, so Kumbaingiri Billy told my father, hre danced around this man's head.

Oscar could not see the blacks watching him. He was not frightened of the blacks. He was frightened of other things. The wooden platform beneath his feet was built on H. M. McCracken's two lighters, which remained, in spite of all the nails and planks and lashing that joined them together, two independent entities. Thus when one lighter bobbed it would not be in step with its companion and the result of this was that the foundation of the fragile bird-cage church would shift and twist. Glass, for all its great strength under compression, cannot easily tolerate this sort of twisting.

Three panes of glass had cracked. These panes were in the roof. They crazed and hung like iceknives. Their jigsaw edges refracted the colours of the rainbow across my great-grandfather's clasped hands. He was gaunt and ugly, with a bright Adam's apple and a bright red hooked nose. He looked like the most fearsome Calvinist. There were white unburnt rings around his eyes. His green irises were set in yellow whites and these were laced with fine red rivers. Percy Smith drove his pole into the mud. Vectors of force fought with each other for a resolution. The platform beneath Oscar's feet twisted. Another pane splintered and, this time,

Oscar and Lucinda

fell at the foot of the barley-sugar columns in the little chancel. "Oh, Lord," he prayed, as sweat ran down his brow and into his eyes, "I thank Thee for granting me this day." For answer, three more panes crazed. And while, according to all the laws of science, they should have fallen-there was no wire reinforcing in the glass, nothing but its own splintered edges to hold it there-it stayed in place. It was a blemish on the sky, like something curdledmilky-white, like crinkled cellophane. The man inside the church waved his hands, gestures which appeared, from the perspective of Marx Hill, to be mysterious, even magical, but which, inside the crystal furnace of the church, had the simple function of repelling the large and frightening insects which had become imprisoned there.

There were bush-flies inside the church. They did not understand what glass was. There were also three blue-bellied dragon-flies. For one hundred thousand years their progenitors had inhabited that valley without once encountering glass. Suddenly the air was hard where it should be soft. Likewise the tawny hard-shelled water beetle and the hang-legged wasp. They flew against the glass in panic. They had the wrong intelligence to grasp the nature of glass. They bashed against "nothing" as if they were created only to demonstrate to Oscar Hopkins the limitations of his own understanding, his ignorance of God, and that the walls of hell itself might be made of something like this, unimaginable, contradictory, impossible. While the three men worked around him with their long sapling punting poles, Oscar put his hands over his ears or waved them in the air. The fractured glass cast a burning spectrum across his forehead. He said: "Oh, God, I praise Thee. I praise Thy dreadful river. I am not afraid." But his hand sat on the hard lump in his pocket where the sticky laudanum bottle sat. He thought: It will soon be over.

But the church burnt his already burnt skin and he watched the exquisite jewel-blue dragon-flies crash against the glass. He felt a stab of panic, that he had made his bet on secondrate information. It was not God who had persuaded him, but that "other voice." He took his jacket off and put it over his head and shoulders, and that is how, when the fractured church was finally towed to the jetty at Boat Harbour, the government inspector mistook him, in the evening light, for a hooded nun.

41 «

•. 107:;-!: " •

Arrival of Anglican Church at Boat Harbour

The Reverend Dennis Hasset had discovered a leech in his sock. He was trying to walk home to his house so he might remove it. Actually, it was not merely one leech, it was two, although both of them were anchored at almost the one spot with the result that one had grown fat and bloated while the other stayed lean. The sight of this shining black slug with two tails turned his stomach and he would have run, were it not for the likelihood that, being seen to be in flight from something, he would be set upon by drunken bullock drivers or be pelted with potatoes by the snotty-nosed children of the Magneys or the Walls.

When he heard about the glass church his only thought was that he would not now be able to deal with the leech at home. He certainly did not make the connection with Lucinda. In fact he did not strictly believe what he heard. He knew only that there was a structure which his informant, the clerk from the government offices, imagined was a church and which would, eventually, prove to be a steam saw or a lifeboat or a smashed-up phaeton recovered from a shipwreck at The Heads.

To remove the leech, he needed salt. He could buy a ha'penny-worth at Hammond and Wheatley, which he did, favouring one foot a little, resisting the urge to rub ankle against ankle while he waited behind Mrs Trevis who was, between buying flour and bacon, relating the story of her Grandfather Dawson's service as a coach painter to Her Majesty the Queen. The clerk from the government offices ran in twice to fetch him and it was he who begged Mr Hammond please to serve the reverend gentleman because he was required by the government inspector to be at the landing wharf "quick and lively."

The Reverend Dennis Hasset got his salt. He was not accustomed to shopping. He was surprised at how much salt you got for a

419

Oscar and Lucinda

ha'penny. There was no way you could slip this into your pocket. It was a hefty bag and must be held under the arm. He did so, marching down Hyde Street while the government clerk, a huge fellow with hefty hands and a cowed spirit that made him bend forward and bow his neck, clucked and fussed and postulated this and that about this strange glass church. The Reverend Mr Hasset was plotting a way to get the salt in contact with the leeches. He was therefore disappointed to see that a crowd had gathered at the wharf. This would make the operation that much more difficult.

He listened to the clerk as they pressed through to the river. As usual, most of the crowd were drunk. They smelt loathsome: unwashed clothing, rum, vomit. Hell itself could smell no worse than this. Dennis Hasset opened his bag of salt and took a fistful.

It was then that he saw the church. He thought so many things at once. That it was a miracle, a spider web, a broken thing, a tragedy, a dream like something constructed for George in and then assaulted in a fit of rage. He thought: It has been hit with hail. He thought: it has been salvaged from a wreck out at The Heads. He thought: it was a mistake to triangulate those tall panes of glass when a Roman arch would be much more graceful. He thought: Lucinda. It was the latter thought that made the mole on his back turn hot and itchy because he had never, in all his letters, bothered to tell her that he was now a married man and soon to be the father of a child.

In the face of this crazed image of Lucinda's passion, he was numb with panic. His mole was driving him crazy with its itching. He held his salt. He stood with the most of his weight on the foot that did not have the leeches. He waited for Lucinda to emerge from between the barleysugar columns. He could not see through the glass itself-it had become, with all the splintering, almost opaque. He tucked the bag of salt under his arm and fixed a smile on his face, but as H. M. McCracken's leaky old lighters were moored to the bollards on the wharf, the figure that emerged from the church's wooden door was not that of Lucinda Leplastrier, but a gaunt collarless burnt-ghost figure who marched towards him carrying a little suitcase like a hat-box.

"Sir," said Oscar and held out his hand.

Dennis Hasset's hand, alas, was filled with salt. He opened it, by way of explanation. The burnt man stared at it and laughed; it was not a normal laugh but a dry noise like a cough.

"The Reverend Mr Hasset?"

!

Ain

Arrival of Anglican Church at Boat Harb°ur

There was something very dangerous about this staring man. His green-eyed gaze was too intense. He would not rel<*se his hold on Dennis Hasset's eyes, not even for a second.

"Yes," said Dennis Hasset.

"Then I have the pleasure, sir, to present this splen<*id church to you. It is a gift to the Christians of Boat Harbour fr" m th «most wonderful woman in New South Wales." The ghost seemed oblivious to the splintered state of the church. "I tell you now, without reserve," he roared, "I envy you. This woman loves you.'

Dennis Hasset felt ill. He wished to withdraw. All the godless of Boat Harbour pressed their thick necks and cauliflowerears forward. He stooped and poured his fistful of salt into his sow- The madman was now crying. His face was as di^X and tattered as the bandages around his wrists.