Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  Her arms, beneath her cape, were goose-pimpling. She wound a cotton scarf around her face and blew into her hands. Sol swung the wheel and, as the boat came about, she saw these words: Prince Rupert’s Glassworks. The board that bore the words was weathered and faded—lime green against a poison blue.

  The works were all in shadow, like a stranger’s face under a hat, and not any more inviting because of it. You could not see what it was, how it was made, how it was put together. There were sheds, a chimney with black smoke. It could have been a blacksmith’s, were it not for the crates of bottles.

  These glassworks were for sale. There was a sign that said so, not a new sign, but more recent than the one that said Prince Rupert’s. They looked intimidating, almost evil. Very well, she thought, if that is what it is to be. She made this decision without understanding that there existed, within this city, places with trees and grass and flowers.

  Sol brought his craft into the wharf, sliding it gently through the smaller craft, like a careful hand amongst bobbing apples. Lucinda stood up. The crinoline cage swayed. She moved along the edge of the boat self-consciously. She felt all the wharf looking at her, but she was wrong. She took her own case down from the cabin roof. It was heavy with books. The case banged against her thigh and bruised it. She did not know anything about Sydney. She did not know how to engage an omnibus or a hansom cab, what they cost, where they went or how they were stopped. She paid Mr Myer sixpence for the journey. He gave her a cauliflower and then, in a bristly rush, a kiss on her cold cheek. He delivered her on to the wharf amongst hessian bags and steel-wheeled trolleys. Two Chinamen, one wet, one dry, were slinging heavy parcels on to long cane poles. Lucinda walked like someone unused to shoes. She struggled up the hill from the wharf with her suitcase banging against her right side, a cauliflower clutched in her left hand. The suitcase put her skirt cage violently off centre. This is how she arrived at Petty’s Hotel. At first they thought her at the wrong address. She placed her cauliflower on the desk and asked them, blushing brightly, if there was a reliable library close to the hotel.

  She had decided to study glass.

  34

  After Whitsunday

  The Reverend Dennis Hasset, vicar of All Saints in Woollahra, was pleased, having received the letter to invite L. Leplastrier to discuss his queries on the “physical properties and manufacture of glass.” Not Lavoisier, Leplastrier, but a Frenchman doubtless. Lavoisier was a scientist famous for gases. Lavoisier, anyway, was dead. Dennis Hasset was flattered none the less.

  It was the day after the Whitsunday baptisms—fourteen babes-in-arms and the father of Morton the grocer. He had planned an idle day and this interview was an indulgence. He readied himself for it with a self-consciousness he found amusing. He placed around his study those learned magazines in which his work had appeared, did it in such a careful way (a self-mocking way, too, but that is not the point) that the wandering eye of a guest could not help but fall upon them. He could thus display himself like a case of Tasmanian Lepidoptera, with polished pins through his nose and earlobes. He could lay down the journals like a manservant lays out vestments, and even while he laughed at himself for doing something so childish, still approached the matter with the utmost particularity.

  “You see, Monsieur,” he told the empty room, “it is like this.” Like what? He did not know. He placed two large red split logs on the fire and went to sit behind his desk while the first red splinters spluttered and ignited.

  The study was dark, but not sombre, and the desk he had placed across one corner looked out on to a bright, cold vista: a curl of yellow road swirling through two lines of eucalyptus and then out of sight. Behind this was a two-inch brushstroke of ocean. He was burning lamps at midday, four of them. He had them dotted here and there to balance the brightness of the window. The Reverend Dennis Hasset found all this very satisfying. He placed his hands on the red leather top of the desk, regretted the round stain left by a glass of claret, but was pleased to remember that the claret, a Bechyville, had been a good one.

  He was a tall, well-made man in his early thirties. His face could almost be called handsome, and often was, for he gave his companions such a sense of his deep interest in them that they easily overlooked those heavy eyebrows—joined across the bridge of his nose—that marred his looks. He had dark curly hair, elegant side-whiskers, a slightly long face and a dimpled chin. His natural complexion was a step short of olive, although an increasing fondness for claret made it redder than the season could explain. But claret or no, he was one of those people who—should you lay a hand on his arm, say, in comradeship—you would find to be of a surprising hardness: surprising, that is, to you, but not to the twenty-four boys at St Andrew’s day school whom he coached in Rugby.

  He was a bachelor and he would have said it was not by choice, that he wished nothing more in his life than a wife and children, and yet the truth—which he acknowledged now, adjusting the level of the lamp on his desk so that it cast a low and golden light on the cedar surround of the leather top—was that he had become so particular in his habits that it would have taken the most impossible charity for him to permit, good fellow though he was, his beloved to alter either the number of lamps or their intensity. Was that the truth? Or was it what he feared to be the truth? Did he not enjoy the company of women? Would he not, as they said, “adjust”?

  It had not taken him long to discover that the women were by far the most interesting of the two sexes in the colony, although you would never imagine it the case if you met them with their menfolk present. For then they affected the most remarkable vapidity. But alone, or with their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to the vectors of the human heart.

  Besides—and he knew this himself—he was a vain man. They admired him and he liked to be admired. He liked to stretch his big body on their chintz-covered settees and accept another tea. He enjoyed this all a great deal and it would have been reprehensible had he not, at the same time, observed the little beetle of pride, the insect of lust, the segmented undulating caterpillar of conceit. So even while he stretched a leg to reveal a black wool ankle he was describing himself to himself, just as he might press his eye to his microscope and detail the mandibles of a colonial dragonfly. This was his great strength. It was his great weakness, too, an excess of detachment from his own life.

  He knew he was clever but not distinguished, influential but not powerful, or if so only in the most indirect way through the fathers who took an interest in the rugby-playing of their sons.

  Waiting for Monsieur Leplastrier, he arranged a piece of glass cullet on his desk, a large clear piece, like a great chunk of diamond, clear enough to make optical glass, made from the fine leached sands of Botany.

  Glass was his enthusiasm but not his passion, and while—for instance—he had enjoyed giving his lectures (“Some Surprising Properties of Glass”) to the East Sydney Mutual Improvement Society—the newspaper report of which had, he presumed, drawn the impending Leplastrier to him—he did not care sufficiently. There was something missing from his engine. It could not sustain the uphill grades.

  This quality, however, was represented in plenty by the young lady who was being admitted to his household at this moment. The Reverend Dennis Hasset did not hear the doorbell. He arranged the cullet on his desk, turning it half a degree so that a ray of morning sun was refracted, just so, to strike (he giggled at the cheap theatricality) his framed degree from Cambridge. He was so taken by this preposterous showing off that he did not notice the “Miss” instead of the “Mr” when his guest was announced.

  “Jolly good, Frazer,” said Dennis Hasset. “Show him in.”

  He was surprised, of course, to find Monsieur Leplastrier in skirts, but he was not shocked. He was delighted. He made his petite visitor blush by continuing to call her monsieur and it took a while before he saw his insensitivity, and then he stopped it.

  She sat opposite him. She was very young, but he could not
tell exactly how young. Her manner, in many respects was that of a woman in her twenties, although this impression was contradicted not only by her small stature, but in the way her confidence—so bright and clean at the beginning of a sentence where every word was as unequivocable as the unsmudged lines of her perfectly arched eyebrows—would seem to evaporate as she began, not quite to mumble, but to speak less distinctly, and her eyes, which had begun by almost challenging his, now slid away towards bookshelf or windowledge. There was also the charming, rather European way she gestured with her hands—they were very flexible and she could bend her palms right back from her wrists, her fingers back at another angle again—and there was something in these gestures, so ostensibly worldly, so expressive, even expansive which, combined with the shyness which her shifting eyes betrayed, gave an impression of great pluck. Dennis Hasset was much touched by her.

  She wore an unusual garment: grey silk with a sort of trouser underneath. Dennis Hasset—no matter what his bishop thought—was not a radical, and this garment shocked him, well, not quite shocked, but let us say it gave a certain unsettling note to their interview, although the discord was muted by the quality of the silk and the obvious skill of the dressmaking. These were things he knew about. The garment declared its owner to be at once wealthy and not quite respectable. She was “smart,” but not a beauty. There was about her, though, this sense of distillation. Her hands and feet were quite dainty, but it was in her face that he saw this great concentration of essence. It was not that her eyes were small, for they were large. The green iris was not a deeper green, or a brighter green. It was clear, and clean and, in some way he could not rationally explain, a great condensation of green. The eyes were gateways to a fierce and lively intelligence. They were like young creatures which had lost their shells, not yet able to defend themselves.

  The mouth was small, but there was no suggestion of meanness, merely—with the lips straight—determination or—when they were relaxed and the plump lower lip was permitted to show—a disturbing (because it appeared to be unconscious) sensuality.

  She wore a wide-brimmed grey hat with a kingfisher—blue feather which was, although “dashing,” not quite the thing. Her hair—what one could see of it—was brown, less than perfectly tidy. This lack of care, when every other part of her was so neat, and pressed, produced an unsettling impression. The hair seemed wilful. It did not occur to him that her hair was, as she would put it, “like that.”

  In any case, he knew he had met a remarkable young woman, not his type, but unlike anyone he had known before.

  “Of course,” he said, pouring the leaves from Lucinda’s first cup of tea into the little maidenhair fern he kept for just this purpose. “Of course you must, dash it.”

  He gave her a lot of milk, more than she liked. (It was in deference to her youth, which he felt he must insist on.)

  “But you understand that although I write a pamphlet or two, I really don’t know anything about the manufacturing process. I might look at a glass factory and see no more than you might.”

  Lucinda felt quite hot. If he would not help, she would go to the accountant whom Chas Ahearn had recommended. She would pay the accountant. She would write him a cheque and have him employ a man for her who could do what she required. Or was this man actually in the process of helping? He spoke less directly, more playfully, than she was accustomed to. Her mother had been proud to call a spade a spade. They had despised “shilly—shallyers.” The tea was worse than Mrs O’Hagen’s. The room was too hot. She was confused to end up with a clergyman when she had begun with a small pamphlet titled “On Laboratory Arts,” a practical guide to glasswork in the chemistry laboratory. She had written to the printer who had supplied her with the address of the author.

  She did not think of clergymen as practical people. Mr Horace (at Gulgong near Mitchell’s Creek) had managed to chop off three fingers while trying to kill a sick hen. This man seemed to be confirming her prejudice, to be taking pride in confirming his uselessness.

  “So I must warn you,” he said, “that while I have adequate theory—in fact you have your saucer resting on it—I have no knowledge or experience of the commercial side.”

  “Then you cannot help me.”

  “On the contrary,” he declared.

  He saw her adjust to this. She did not say thank you, but rather: “The vendors must not know me as a woman.”

  “And why not?”

  “They will act strange,” she said, gesturing with her flexible fingers and palms, letting her eyes roll away. (Should she pay the clergyman for his labour?) “It would occupy you a great deal,” she suggested. “There would be books—wouldn’t there?—to examine.” (He cannot be poor, she thought, if he burns four lamps on a sunny day.)

  “Yes,” he agreed, “a great deal to do. But the object is a lovely one, is it not? It is the object we should celebrate.”

  He stared at her so excitedly that she looked away, blushing crimson. When she looked up again he saw her eyes had hardened in some way. She lifted her chin. She sat straighter in her chair.

  He had been misunderstood.

  Dennis Hasset hurried to correct the situation. He spoke about glass. He showed her a large lump of cullet, like a little piece of glass rock. She knew nothing, nothing at all. Thousands of pounds to spend, and she knew nothing about it. He insisted she handle it. From his drawer he produced a piece of waterglass. He rang for Frazer and had him bring a beaker that they might dissolve it. He showed her the green glass of Melbourne, that colour being produced by iron oxides in the sand, and let her feel the pure white grains of Botany where one could find a good three feet of fine leached sand, its impurities washed away by centuries of rain. From this Botany sand you could produce the lens for a telescope this clear while—here, he showed her, held the two lenses side by side so she might compare—the lens from Hallet’s of London had a faint yellow tinge to it, by no means desirable.

  Lucinda thought this Botany lens quite lovely. She took a small lace handkerchief, one of her mama’s, from her purse so she might hold the lens without contaminating it. And even when the vicar told her it did not matter if she smeared it, she would not touch it with her naked fingers, which were—she was too aware of this—damp with excitement.

  Soon he had all manner of things arranged across his red leather desk. These were not placed with the artfulness whereby he had decorated his study in preparation for the French professor. No, here were particles of glass. A square of poison blue made that colour by the addition of lead oxide. A melted lump of common “beer” in the shape of an old man’s face. He said it was the image of his bishop. He said his bishop did not like him, and she would see this in his expression. She saw it was true. He showed her a glass brick, the sole survivor of his compression tests. Lastly, of course, a Prince Rupert’s drop which its owner offered to demonstrate.

  “No, please. You must not.”

  “Why must I not?” Dennis Hasset was astonished to find himself peeved. For a moment he disliked his visitor. He did not like the directness of her eyes. He took exception to her tone. He fished in his bottom drawer, looking for some pliers. He found a screwdriver he thought might do, and then he rejected it because the performance would have been inelegant and—besides—he knew she was right. This did not improve his temper. “Why must I not?”

  “Because you know what will happen,” the girl said simply, “and so do I, and when it is gone you can’t look forward to it any more.” And then, seeing in his face some of the temper for which he was known—“Oh.” She did not say it, but shaped her lips as if she had.

  “Oh?” he asked, but in a belligerent sort of way which he watched, himself, with surprise, as if to say, Ah, so this is how I feel.

  “Mr Hasset, I am so very sorry.”

  He felt himself seen through.

  “Miss Leplastrier, there is nothing to be sorry for.”

  “I came to you for help. You were kind to me. I began to argue with you abou
t the disposal of your own possessions. Probably I am jealous of you.”

  “Surely not.” He shut the bottom drawer and placed the Prince Rupert’s drop on the blotting pad in front of him.

  “Yes, quite jealous.” She wished to look down, to bow her head, but she would not let herself.

  Dennis Hasset saw the eyes become excessively bright, like stones placed in water. She wore an odd smile, a neatly tied bow which only just kept the trembling parcel of the face together.

  “And why,” he said, leaning forward, feeling clumsy, seeking levity, and therefore imitating the accent of an Irishman. “And why,” he said, “would that be now?”

  His brogue was perfect but she did not know that the Irish were such figures of fun that to duplicate their speech was cause for mirth. She knew only that the men walked in front while their women followed behind like prisoners.

  “I am jealous because the drop is yours, not mine. Because, more than that, you can enter the glassworks.”

  “Through the main door, just as you may.”

  “But I cannot, don’t you see? They will not treat me with anything but the greatest condescension. And, besides, I would be made into the creature they imagined I was. Do you understand me?”

  She held him with her eyes. She was a child. She was not a child. Her eyes were clear and steady while her voice amplified the slightest trembling in her lower lip.

  He was held by the strength and touched by the frailty. “No,” he said, “I do not understand you.”

  “By the way they looked at me, by their perception of me, they would make me into the creature they perceived. I would feel myself becoming a lesser thing. It is the power of men.”

  “But I am a man.”

  “No,” she said, too impatient to let him develop his argument. “Of men, men in a group, men in their certainty, men on a street corner, or in a hall. It is like a voodoo. Do you know a voodoo?”