Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  Now that is all he said.

  But Lucinda, who was lying in her bed, knew it would cause trouble, and when Mr O’Hagen had gone her mother came and had her rise. She must dress in a hurry. She was not to worry with hair brushing, but just to rise, girl, and quickly, quickly.

  It seemed then that they were staying. They were not going Home. This was as a direct result of Mr O’Hagen’s comments about “pretty heads.” They unpacked—there and then—the crates they had so carefully packed. They carried them back to the barn themselves—six trips by lantern light. In the hayloft of the barn, Lucinda shivered while her mother delivered a long tirade against Irishmen. She did not like the way they treated their own women, or the assumptions they made about women in general. The Irishmen had been beaten and humiliated by the English soldiers for so many centuries that they must, like farmyard poultry, turn around and find a weaker creature to strike at themselves. She said all this on the edge of the loft, with her legs dangling into the pit of the night. There were mice there already, come to eat the feed. They had not been there before, and Lucinda remembered the sour smell of mice as if it were the smell of failure itself. Her mother said the Irishmen had their women walk after them with their heads bowed like prisoners of war.

  “We are not going to leave this country to the Irish,” she said, “so look smart, my girl, and help me here.”

  Sometime after midnight they burned the rest of Abel Leplastrier’s clothes. They made a bonfire on the river bank, and that was how the two women came to farm Mitchell’s Run at Mitchell’s Creek.

  23

  A Square Peg

  Lucinda did not know her mother well. This was not what she imagined. All her life she dusted and polished the fiction she had made as a child: that they were “intimates,” like sisters. In her memory there was always laughing and hair brushing, and tickling and cuddling. And there had been, it is true. They had fished for blackfish and waterlogged earthworms, been bitten—simultaneously—by bull ants, swum in the creek with their white singlets ballooning around them like sheets puffing up in a copper on washday morning. They had run shrieking and giggling from O’Hagen’s silly dribble-mouthed bull and read to each other on frosty winter nights while the wallabies thumped the hut. All these things really happened, but if they were remembered so vividly it was because anxiety and bad temper had been far more common. As Elizabeth came, in her bitter heart, to loathe farming, the more private she became.

  The more she hated it, the more she fought to prove she could do it well. She feuded with Michael O’Hagen over his fencing, not merely his habit of using wattle and other timbers that soon rotted, but over the lazy doodling lines these fences ran across the land. She berated the MacCorkals for neglecting their thistles. She rode to church in Gulgong with her hair clipped short, like a consumptive, and dressed in a style the congregation thought hilarious. Her letters to Marian Evans are filled with her spleen. She finds New South Wales “venal, materialistic, corrupt, and when not corrupt, plain damn stupid.”

  “I have spent sixteen years [she wrote] ruining my complexion so it would make you weep to see it now-freckled, dry, with a raw red spot on my neck that will not get better. I have not read a book, none save the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, in four years. I can only occupy my mind with money, a way to outwit the stock agent I know is cheating me, whether I might do with one hired Irishman instead of two, a clever construction for our feed bins which will—it is quite clever—drown the mice who plunder me. And this, which I have done to myself, I can tolerate, but what I have done to my pretty little Lucinda, I cannot bear to think about. She is so happy that I am, often, irritated that she should be blind enough to be so. Yet it is I who have made her blind, I who have kept her away from Parramatta and isolated her from every neighbour and member of the congregation who might, by some casual comment, reveal to her how society really is. I fear my Maker will judge me harshly for what I have done, but, dear Marian, I could not have been otherwise. My daughter lives in a fairy world I have made for her, and they would not tolerate her in open society in New South Wales where they hate women like us with a passion you would not believe without seeing their angry resentful little eyes. It would chill you, Marian, to walk down a street in Parramatta. All this is my great achievement as a parent, that I have produced a proud square peg in the full knowledge that all around, to the edges of the ocean there are nothing but round holes. We must return home.

  “I know farming bores you, although you are polite enough to only admit this very occasionally. However my latest farming news, I suspect, will prove an exception and unless I exaggerate your feelings for me, will have you clapping your strong and sensible hands together and crying: At last!

  “I have said some wicked things about poor Leplastrier’s “bargain” land purchase, but now, with the poor man unable to witness his vindication, I am about to reap the benefit. There is, as he always said, enough land here for five good farms and the prices are sufficient to make even the sanest woman (a creature I could not claim to be) quite giddy. In short: I shall sell. I am to have Ahearn, my very Low Church solicitor, over so he can arrange to have the place surveyed. That is how it is here—solicitors are great dogsbodies in this colony and it is no great shock to find them owning an inn, reading the lesson, and serving you three yards of muslin in their lunch hour. Once I am surveyed, I shall—God give me strength to tell my daughter—sell.

  “I give up, Marian, I retire, not quite defeated.”

  By the time this letter arrived in Bayswater Road, its writer had contracted Spanish influenza.

  While Oscar Hopkins read Greats at Oriel, Lucinda Leplastrier nursed her mother. Dr Savage (no relation to the grocer) came out from Parramatta to be told he was not needed. The Reverend Mr Nelson came from Gugong and found himself criticized for the ostentation of his vestments. Lucinda nursed her mother alone. She was two years older than Oscar—seventeen—and sensible and able, but no amount of praying or sponging, no broth or poultice could do anything to give ease to the red-faced, sweating woman whose only thought was that the harvest be brought in before it was ruined.

  It had already been brought in. Lucinda carried a whole stock and placed it by the bed. A stock was not enough to persuade her. She was dying, but did not say so. She fretted about the unharvested wheat. She had visions of canker and rust, mouldering stocks with Parramatta grass growing through their hearts. The fence posts went loose like bad teeth in decaying gums. They lay at odd angles. She straightened them. She tamped new soil around their bases but butcher-birds alighted on them and sent them crooked.

  She could not speak.

  The stocks turned into blacks. She knew they were not real. They were ghosts. They stood in the stubble-slippery fields keening.

  She had been implicated in something terribly wrong. It was hot and her thirst could not be slaked. It was Epiphany. The O’Hagens were already burning stubble and laying blue strands, like a pipe smoke, across the foothills of the mountains. She could smell the smoke. She thought it was summer, and the MacCorkals had “dropped a match” again. It made her twist her limbs in anxiety. She turned and turned on the bed and the stocks turned into blacks, and the blacks into stocks, and the stocks into blacks. Leplastrier had made this bed. Such a fussily made bed. How could a man who could kill a black man with his rifle make such a stupid, romantic bed? A knowingly rustic bed made with saplings and greenhide. Her husband had been a secret admirer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was a reactionary fool. She thought of sarcastic jokes about Rossetti and his women, but she could not say them. In any case there was something more important. She needed a pen.

  Such a small word. Possibly she could say it. Luanda’s face loomed. Such a dear top lip, but her paternal grandmother’s frightful hair. There was a noise of blow-flies. Pen—such a tiny word. It became a bead, a small black bead in her mind. Then the bead was stuck in her throat. It had been rolled in butter to ease its way. But then it had fallen on the floor.


  Oh, curse the earth-floored huts of New South Wales.

  Now the bead was covered with dirt, with sand; it stuck in her throat. She had made a mistake. She had made a truly dreadful mistake. She had given in to Ahearn so as not to damage his male pride. With a pen she could still change this mistake, but the word would not come. It stayed in her throat, unsaid, a small red pea coated with sand, dropped into the oesophagus.

  Damn you, Rossetti.

  Elizabeth Leplastrier died without attempting to amend her mistake, not realizing the mistake was not hers—if it was a mistake—but one made by those men who made the law. It was because of the law that Lucinda could not control her inheritance until she reached the age of eighteen. And even if Elizabeth had known herself to be dying—as distinct from signing a will—there is little she could have done to change it.

  She had not gone to see Ahearn about a will. She had been intent only on subdividing her land. She wanted, she said, to “slice and cut it as much as possible.” These words, and the tone in which they were delivered, so alarmed Charles Ahearn that, sensing incipient insanity, he started talking about a will.

  Elizabeth wanted only to rescue her daughter and take her back to London. She had no time for wills and then, when the earnest old goose showed himself so stubborn—oh dear Lord, he was a plodder-she saw it would be faster to get the will done so she could have his full attention on the subdivision.

  She was about to sign the will when she saw that it prevented Lucinda coming into her inheritance until the age of thirty. Chas Ahearn was worried—he had such an ugly Adam’s apple and a long neck like a plucked chicken skin and because he was “worried” there was movement in this quarter—he was most concerned, he said, about unscrupulous chaps who might prey on a young heiress. If Elizabeth had read his letters to the paper on such matters as the profligacy of the Parramatta poor, she might have had a more precise idea of the man she was dealing with, but she saw it only crudely—what an old fool he was. She said she would have no stipulation about age at all, and then he began to huff and blow. He started to “madam” her. He referred to Lucinda as “girlie.” Elizabeth rebuked him and then felt so sorry for him that she began to think only about how rude she had been and stopped listening to what he was saying. Thus she accepted eighteen as the age of Lucinda’s inheritance, not realizing that this was the best the law was prepared to allow her. She signed and watched impatiently while Chas Ahearn carefully sprinkled sawdust over the wet loops of ink. She certainly did not imagine she would be dead not long after Lucinda’s seventeenth birthday.

  So it was because of the law—not because of the “mistake” which tortured the dying woman—that the preposterous Chas Ahearn became the trustee of Lucinda’s affairs for a full six months. He was not a bad man. But he was, in matters of money as much as in public morals, a stern, even a strict man. He was a conscientious Christian with a great fondness for the parable of the talents. He was a big man, but soft and awkward, with his hips wider than his shoulders and his head craning forward myopically from the neck. He had a belly which he covered with woollen cardigans. He sat gold spectacles on the end of his big nose. He had thin strands of hair—a finite number, almost possible to count—on his pate. He had mutton-chop whiskers. He wheezed.

  Mr Ahearn could not budge Lucinda from the hut itself. She was a strong girl, and grief—stricken. He was sixty-two years old, and no longer well. He called in two Irish labourers and gave them a crown (which he later debited to the estate) to remove their new mistress to his jinker and thus ride with him—four of them in a light vehicle built to carry only two—into Parramatta.

  24

  Mr Ahearn’s Letter to the Parramatta Argus

  A correspondent has lately called attention to such nuisances as “polluted water,” public bathing, and a few other annoyances. I wish, if it should be convenient, that he would take a stroll now and then through the beautiful park of this town. It appears to me his graphic pen would describe what I cannot attempt otherwise than what is conveyed by broadly hinting that the details are too disgusting to be fit for publication.

  We have seen so many of the appliances and requirements of civilized society in this town in the shape of Oxford-educated clergy, French-speaking schoolmasters, intelligent magistrates and aldermen, that it can scarcely be credited that the Domain of Parramatta is being made such a haunt of infamy that no respectable lady, no innocent child, can venture to walk there morning, noon or night—it was no later in the day than three o’clock when, in taking a walk through the public park, that I saw the outrage which, I already said would be unfit to describe.

  The parties in question are of that class of society which have ample means to avail themselves of all the advantages held forth by education and religion: they would be the least likely, judged by appearances, to turn public vagabonds. I hope, by calling your attention to the infamy through the columns of your journal, that the laws of society are not to be outraged without exposure to public reprobation. Yours, etc., C. Ahearn, Parramatta.

  25

  Mrs Cousins

  When Mrs Cousins opened her door to Mr Ahearn she had, not ten minutes before, finished reading his letter to the paper and while, in her own parlour, she had been pleased to imagine exactly what this “outrage” might have been—just a little daydream, nothing harmful to anybody else, and if it recalled an occasion in her own past, then that was her business—but seeing the man himself, like a bailiff bursting into her dreams, she felt a hot flush of panic. Certainly Mr Ahearn did not come to her door in the manner of one paying a polite call. He knocked ten times, loudly, slamming the knocker like a man grown self-important with a warrant, and when she rushed to open up she found him standing there, sweating, puffing and blowing, holding his topper in hands which were—she observed this particularly—shaking slightly. Mr Cousins had sweated like this in the two years until his death, but the cause in Mr Cousins’s case had been Morton’s Rum whilst Mr Ahearn was known to be a Rechabite teetotaller.

  Mr Ahearn said almost everything he had to say on the doorstep. He said it all clearly enough, but Mrs Cousins, trying to connect what he was saying with what he had written, took a little while before she understood him properly. He told her how the girlie (he did not say which one) had met with a “tragedy” and how he must “expedite”—he liked to use this word and it was noted by many, Mrs Cousins included, who had never heard it before—the matter of her estate. The “poor little girlie” was to be rich. Her late mama had wished the estate subdivided and he must carry this through immediately while he had the power to protect her interests. In the meantime it was most important (he could not stress this enough) that she be accommodated correctly, so if Mrs Cousins’s establishment was full he would beg of her that she arrange for one of her young ladies to be accommodated elsewhere for the while. Miss Leplastrier, he said, still standing on the doorstep and twisting his beaverskin hat in his big hands, was most in need of Christian, nay, Anglican accommodation.

  Mrs Cousins invited him into her front room and—it being dim on the south side at this time of day—lit a lamp.

  Mrs Cousins was a handsome lady of forty—dark-haired, pale-skinned, almond-eyed and—it was often remarked, although the observation was true more of opera than life—rather Spanish in appearance. She had a tiny waist which she was proud of but, being these days wary of being thought to advertise her charms, chose not to emphasize. She dressed well, but rather austerely. Her hair was tightly coiffured and had you accidentally touched her shoulder you would have been surprised to find that it, too, was tightly put together, as if all its muscles had been drawn into a mat. And yet, for all this tightness, the excessive rigidity of her spine, Chas Ahearn might have seen (he did not) that when she lit the lamp she revealed, as she set it on the piano top, the shadow of a willowy, more supple person. The supple person had once lived in Bendigo, Victoria, and had followed the dictates of her heart more than Bendigo judged wise or proper. In Bendigo she h
ad been taught, most painfully, the value of propriety. She came to Parramatta to apply her knowledge.

  She listened to what Charles Ahearn said. And although she had once been a woman with a weakness for handsome men, she did not see Mr Ahearn (as one easily might, without being excessively cruel) as ugly. She responded to his dolefulness and solemnity. The effect was soothing, safe, like a good woollen worsted from Bradford. And only when he wished to be reassured on the Anglican question did she feel agitated. She straightened her spine and put her shoulders back.

  Mrs Cousins believed in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting. She had not been baptized in any church but attended the Church of England in Parramatta as though it were her right. It troubled her that she took communion without being confirmed. This was, a sacrilege. She tried to live a Christian life, but this was perhaps not enough. She did not know how to correct the matter. She would wake in the middle of the night and think about it—suddenly all cold and damp with fear. And when Mr Ahearn mentioned the matter she was alarmed almost as much as if she had seen a face in the street from Bendigo. But she showed—apart from this excessive uprightness in her posture—none of this to Mr Ahearn. She poured him tea and assured him that she could accommodate the young lady without evicting anyone, that Miss Leplastrier would indeed attend an Anglican church and that she would see her steered carefully through the difficult shoals of Parramatta society.

  But when the orphan materialized wearing bloomers, Mrs Cousins was overcome with an urge—it was visceral, self-protective, a thing of muscle and blood, nothing as rarified as an idea—to put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and push her back down the steps.