Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  “Bless me.”

  “Do not mock me.”

  “No, Fish, no. I swear to you. It is new to me. I thought you would have known, for what is called my ‘ignorance’ seems to be a popular topic in this college. I was raised very much out of the way, in a little village in Devon. We were concerned with botany and marine biology.”

  (“And buttons,” thought Wardley-Fish, but kept his face straight.)

  “We did not go in for fluttering, but I must say I rather like the sound of it.”

  All of this was most disturbing to Wardley-Fish. He felt as if he were involved in something wrong and he wished only to stop it. “Now look here, Odd Bod.”

  “Perhaps you could call me Hopkins.”

  “Yes.”

  “Odd Bod has an unpleasant ring to it. You would not expect to find that sort of name used in a Christian college.”

  The dignity of this request had an effect on Wardley-Fish who apologized, although he was eager to leave, more eager than before.

  “Perhaps next time you were intending to visit a racetrack, you might care for some company.”

  Wardley-Fish assured him that he would, he most definitely would. He then made his escape and ran up the stairs to West’s room where he received a most uncalled-for lecture on the evils of gambling from a man who had, a week before, in the paddock at Epsom, attracted comment by the size and rashness of his plunging

  Wardley-Fish left West in a thoroughly bad mood. He hated to go to the track alone. There was almost no point. He thought of inviting the Odd Bod and then dismissed the idea. The Odd Bod had no money. He would have to lend it to him, and then it would be lost. It would be an embarrassment. Also: he appeared so young. He had ginger down on his cheeks, not even a beard. Also: gambling was an offence for which one could be rusticated.

  But Wardley-Fish hated going to the track alone and so, at the bottom of the stair, he turned and went back to Oscar’s door.

  Only later, on the train to London, did the Odd Bod confide in him that he, Wardley-Fish, had been sent by God, that he had been prayed for, that he was an agent of the Lord, that the “flutter” was the means whereby God would make funds available to Oscar.

  Wardley-Fish sucked on his cold pipe and felt at once alarmed (that he had chosen a madman as companion) and remorseful (that he was about to corrupt an innocent).

  He lent my great-grandfather five sovereigns. Not knowing the ways of gentlemen, Oscar wrote him a receipt.

  28

  Store Up Treasures for a Future Day

  As they came off the train at Paddington, Wardley-Fish started to make a fuss about a key he thought he had misplaced. He used the sort of language Oscar was accustomed to hearing from village boys in Hennacombe. It was not the style he expected from a young man who would soon be called to Holy Orders. He did not “blast.” He “damn’ed.” He “criminee’d.” The key was of great importance but he did not explain why. He found it, finally, in his fob. It was a plain key with a brass tag. The number 35 was engraved in the brass. Oscar imagined it was the key to a room. He did not expect a locker. He had not been to Paddington since he was eight years old, and did not know about railway lockers anyway. He was, therefore, most surprised to see Wardley-Fish open a cupboard door with the key. There were someone’s clothes inside.

  Still Wardley-Fish did not provide an explanation. He sent away a woman trying to sell him lavender. He gave Oscar his beaver to hold. Then, with no show of embarrassment, he slipped off his frock coat and stood there, in public view, in his braces.

  Then he reached into the locker and removed a folded garment which revealed itself to be a loud hound’s-tooth jacket with a handkerchief like a fistful of daffodils rammed into a rumpled vase. He put this jacket on, smoothed it down a little, and then returned to the locker from which he conjured a stout stick, a checked cap and a long overcoat with dried mud on its hem.

  When he had these items arranged about his person he retrieved his beaver and his frock coat from Oscar, placed them carefully inside the locker, snibbed the door shut, and slipped the key into his hound’s-tooth pocket. He smiled at Oscar who, in spite of his confusion and shock, could not help but be affected by the happy and satisfied air of his friend.

  “Turn around,” said Wardley-Fish, and, when Oscar hesitated, put both his hands on Oscar’s narrow shoulders and did manually what could not be achieved with automatic.

  Oscar found himself facing a large mirror advertising Vedemma Curry Powder. Blue and yellow Indians in turbans bowed to each other all the way around the border. In the centre of all this obsequiousness stood Oscar Hopkins and Ian Wardley-Fish.

  “By Jove,” said Wardley-Fish, thumping his stick on the pavement. “Look at us. What a splendid pair of scoundrels.”

  Oscar, who had not changed his clothes, was puzzled to be included in this definition. He cocked his head and tried to assess his appearance critically.

  Wardley-Fish saw the Odd Bod cock his head and bring his hands up to his lips, rubbing them together, like a praying mantis. He had been offensive to the Odd Bod. He had not intended to.

  “Come,” he said. “We’re late.”

  Wardley-Fish ran quickly and Oscar had no choice but to follow. They must find a coach to get them up to Epsom. Wardley-Fish tore through the Saturday crowds hoping all this huff and puff would drive the insult from the funny little fellow’s head. But, dear me, it was true. Had not the Odd Bod, having just arrived at Oxford, wandered up and down the High Street without cap and gown without the bulldogs ever once thinking they should apprehend him? They had mistaken him for a grocer’s clerk, perhaps, but never once did it occur to them he was a gentleman. You could not say the fault was with his tailor, for he had no tailor. His trousers were three inches too short and his frock coat was something left over from the time of Dr Newman. And, indeed, this last assessment was an accurate one, for the frock coat had belonged to the Reverend Mr Stratton and its poor condition was produced not merely by its considerable age but by the vicar’s habit of stuffing windfalls into his pockets whenever the chance presented itself.

  They found a carriage and hired it to take them to Epsom. They were both excited, Wardley-Fish because he loved the races, and Oscar for so many reasons—because he would soon have money to pay his buttery account, because he was in London and the streets were filled with people, horses, carriages, ladies in bustles, children with hoops, men with three hats worn one atop the other, barrowfuls of pears and apples, a golliwog on stilts, tall houses with brass letter-flaps set into their front door.

  They passed a theatre with crowds milling outside its door. Oscar asked if it was, indeed, what he imagined it to be.

  “Have you never been?” asked Wardley-Fish.

  “No, never.”

  “Would you like to go?”

  Oscar hesitated. He saw the theatre with two sets of eyes, one his own, but one his father’s. The second set saw the theatre steeped in sin.

  “My father boasts that he has never read Shakespeare,” he said. “Do you think that is peculiar?”

  “Not at all. Would you like to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Wardley-Fish struck his stick hard on the floor of the coach. “Then you shall, Odd Bod. I shall take you myself. I shall ensure it. I shall guarantee it,” and he began to sing in a rich baritone:

  “Oh, I like the track, I love the track,

  ’Tis torture sweet

  ’Tis the scourge, the rack.

  ’Tis the scourge, the rack.

  But I love the track, aloo alack,

  I love the track, alack.”

  For a while he sang songs, offered his flask, thumped his stick, but after a while he became quiet and sat with his chin in his hand looking out of the window. Oscar, in order to cool his overheated system, took out his little traveller’s Bible and began to read it. He was thus engaged, in the second chapter of Revelations, when a great, “Halloo,” from Wardley-Fish made him jump.

 
; “What are you reading, Odd Bod?”

  Oscar held up the Bible. He was irritated. He did not like being called Odd Bod at all.

  “For heaven’s sake, man, we are going to the track.”

  Oscar did not see the source of conflict.

  “Then put the thing away,” shouted Wardley-Fish.

  “Do not call the Holy Bible a ‘thing,’ Fish. It is a blasphemy.”

  “Oh, Odd Bod, you are odd.”

  “My name is Hopkins or yours is Queer Fish.” He stared at Wardley-Fish defiantly, but the Bible in his hand was shaking. He put it on his lap so it would not show.

  “Is it true, Hopkins, that you are a literalist?” said Wardley-Fish quietly, politely, unexpectedly.

  Oscar was grateful for the Hopkins. “And do I believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke to him in a human voice? Yes, of course. Although I hear at Oriel that I am quite out of fashion and everyone would have me believe that Jonah was not swallowed by the whale, that the mother of our Lord was not a virgin, and all this from people who have sworn their acceptance of the Thirty-nine Articles of Faith.”

  “So the ass really said: ‘I am thy good and faithful ass. Why have you therefore smitten me thrice?’ The ass spoke like this, to a man, in Greek?”

  “I doubt it was Greek. Have you ever seen a starfish? Under the microscope, in cross section? Do you not think God created the starfish?”

  “Of course,” and Wardley-Fish who had, until that moment, been unscrewing his brandy flask, now screwed it up again and slid it back into his pocket.

  “Then having Balaam’s ass speak, even in Greek, would be a comparatively easy thing to achieve.”

  “And do you accept the doctrine of eternal damnation?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  There was a silence then. Wardley-Fish looked out of the window. Oscar, feeling the business not yet finished with, waited with his Bible on his lap.

  “Do you accept the doctrine?” he asked at last.

  “Yes,” said Wardley-Fish, but he stayed looking out of the window and it was not until Epsom Downs came into view that he was able to rally himself.

  He turned to Oscar with his face bright, but also serious. “Just five minutes,” he said, “and when we are on the track do not rattle your sovereigns like that or you will shortly discover you do not have them. There are pickpockets everywhere. Also, when you get there the undertakers will be on to you. You are exactly the sort of chap they are waiting for. They can smell you. They will be full of advice for you, how you should lay a sov or two on such-and-such, but they only sell stiffs so you need not waste your time with them. Do you understand? Good. Now the next thing is to avoid behaving like a plunger. Plungers,” said Wardley-Fish (who had, so little time before, been pleased to have the appearance of a scoundrel) “are a nuisance to everyone. West, the fellow on your staircase, is a plunger. They are the opium-eaters of the track. They are fools and madmen and are the reason the track is so discredited. All they have is a sordid appetite for gambling. That is West all over. He starts with a couple of sovs. It comes up trumps. Then he dabs it all down on the second and he has lost the lot.”

  “Please tell me what I should do.” Oscar was being polite. He had no intention of following earthly directions. But Wardley-Fish was so serious and tense that Oscar wished, with the salve of politeness, to ease whatever it was that gripped him.

  “Firstly we will make a quiet entrance to the ring. Dressed as we are we will attract no attention. We will keep our own counsel, Odd Bod. We will ask no one’s advice and when it is offered we will not respond. No one shall induce us to have a bet on a ‘real jam.’ ”

  “Jam?”

  “An alleged certainty. A jam. We collect our information from our own sources. We keep to the system. We store up treasures for a future day. Now this is the system. We never back the favourite. We back and second and third favourites. We never bet on a race when the betting is odds—on or even.” This advice continued without a break. Most of it made no sense to Oscar at all. In spite of which he stayed calm and happy. He was pleased to see Fish so scientific and careful about his gambling. He was surprised by his responsible air. It did not match his reckless yellow handkerchief at all. It clashed with his hound’s-tooth.

  “If you wish to win five shillings in a day, then you must invest five shillings on every race. I am writing all this down for you. If you are to make some money you must adhere to this. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes,” said Oscar, and tried to concentrate.

  As they arrived outside the track, Wardley-Fish took a large swig of his brandy. “I am damned, of course,” he said. “But Mr Temple and Mr Foulkes both argue that it cannot be eternal.”

  Then he looked up and saw the Odd Bod. He was smiling, but he was not listening. His green eyes were too large and bright.

  29

  Epsom Downs

  It was almost Ascension Day but there was a piercing wind and a low bruised sky. Oscar hunched his shoulders forward as if he wished to roll up his thin body like a sheet of cartridge paper. His temples hurt with cold. The tip of his nose was red. He was so excited he could barely breathe. He took long ungainly steps around the mud and puddles, lifted his head at the scent of pipe tobacco and horse dung, brandy and ladies’ eau-de-toilette.

  He had never been anywhere like this before. It seemed incredible that this—an entire kingdom—had existed all the time he had lived in Hennacombe. It seemed even more incredible that red-cliffed sleepy little Hennacombe could now exist at all, so much did the racetrack expand, like a volatile gas, to take up every available corner of the living universe. He saw mutton-chopped bookmakers with big bellies ballooning out against their leather bags of money. At this very moment the sea was fizzing across the sand. How good it was not to be near it. The Baptist boys threw stones at rooks somewhere in the myopic haze upon the moors. But he was here. He thought of Mr Stratton, of the damp, long, gloomy room where he and his wife would shortly eat their lunch, and although he was fond of them, and prayed that they might be granted happiness, he preferred to be here, bumping shoulders with gentlemen in grey toppers.

  And then he thought of his father, and he stopped the train of thought, uncoupled the engine from the troublesome carriages and reversed at full speed in his mind while, with his body, he pressed urgently forward, following Wardley-Fish towards the next row of stables where he would—in the straw—sweet alleys of this wonderful new world—obtain what he swore was “first-rate information.”

  Oscar knew this was not first-rate information at all. He was still more Plymouth Brethren than he liked to think, and the way he looked at the man who brought this information was not, to any substantial degree, different from the way Theophilus would have looked at the same individual. He was a stunted stable hand with the whiskerless face of a boy. He was pinched up around the nose and eyes and suggested with all his talk, guv’nor, about which horse would “try” and which would not—the vilest stench of corruption.

  Oscar thought this fellow damned. He would no more listen to his advice than he would invite the devil to whisper in his ear.

  And yet Wardley-Fish seemed to see none of this. He nodded eagerly and clucked wisely. He leaned towards the ferret-faced informer and Oscar suddenly saw that he was so eager to believe that he would believe anything at all.

  Wardley-Fish did not appear to be a man who had worked a system. There was no longer anything systematic about him. He was in the grip of a passion which made him, literally, overheat. He was quite pink above the collar and red on the cheeks above his beard. His earlobes were large and fleshy and now they shone so brightly red that Oscar was reminded of the combs of the fowls he had decapitated for Mrs Stratton.

  Wardley-Fish unbuttoned his overcoat and, by plunging his hands in his pockets, held the heavy garment out away from his chest. He looked like a rooster. He jiggled sovereigns in his pockets just as he had instructed Oscar not to. The stable hand looked towards this noise expe
ctantly. He suggested that Madding Girl was a “jam.”

  Oscar knew this information was worth nothing, but had he shared this opinion with Wardley-Fish it would not, of course, have been listened to. For this was what Wardley-Fish most enjoyed about the track—the whispered conversations, the passing of “tips for tips,” the grubby low-life corners, the guilt, the fear of damnation, the elation, it all dissolved together in the vaporous spirit of his hip-flask. He took off his overcoat and gave it to Oscar.

  “Come on, Odd Bod, we will be just in time to see them in the paddock.”

  They ran then, Wardley-Fish in front. He had big buttocks and thick thighs. Oscar could imagine him sitting on a horse. He ran heavily, but quickly. Oscar came behind with his knees clicking painfully, his borrowed coat flapping around him, and was—with his wild red hair in its usual unruly state—such a scarecrow that some aging Mohawks called out after him. He did not mind. He was intoxicated.

  This intoxication was quite different from Wardley-Fish’s. Oscar had no guilt at all. He knew that God would give him money at the races and thereby ease the dreadful burden that the Strattons had placed upon themselves. Now they would be released. God would do this just as He had told Moses to divide the land among the tribes of Israel: “According to the lot shall the possession thereof be divided between the many and the few.” The Almighty would be Oscar’s source of “information.”

  “Look at her,” said Wardley-Fish when Madding Girl was brought into the ring. Madding Girl was in a lather of sweat. It had a white foam inside its hind legs. The horse showed a peculiar look in its eye.

  “Look at her,” said Wardley-Fish. He took Oscar by the coat sleeve and dragged him so quickly forward that Madding Girl reared, danced sideways, turned, and then backed back, perhaps deliberately, towards them so they had to step back into the whiskered crowd or else have their feet crushed.

  “Look at the backside,” said Wardley-Fish.

  It was difficult to avoid it.

  “That, Odd Bod, is the first thing to look at in a horse, and when the track is wet, it’s a day for a powerful bum like that one.”