Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  She did not know how ill he was. She was not even sure what had happened. She felt his pulse and would have loosened his collar except she did not know how. She tried to find the stud, but his neck felt warm, unduly intimate. It was wrong to be angry, but she was angry, about her cards, about the blanket which he had dragged off the card table. The room looked as if a scandal had been committed there. She picked up the money and the blanket. She was thrown against the wall twice. She got the blanket back on to her bed and smoothed it as well as she was able.

  She should call the ship’s doctor, but it was four o’clock in the morning. Surely he would wake in a moment? She sat and waited.

  Oscar did wake, but he was not able to leave her stateroom unassisted. She had had to call two stewards, just before dawn, and it had been their unenviable job—the ship was now pitching and rolling to a disappointing degree, and walking was therefore difficult—to carry the rigid man from the spinster’s stateroom, down the stairs and put him to bed in his own quarters.

  60

  Cape Town to Pinchgut

  The scene was witnessed by Mr Borrodaile, or so he claimed, for he was able, at breakfast the next morning, to paint a very detailed picture of the scandal for the rather queasy and waxy-skinned Mr Smith.

  The Captain also visited Lucinda, and perhaps his manner was contaminated by the knowledge that his great ship was a failure in bad weather—he had one helmsman in sick bay with a broken arm—but he behaved in a censorious and snobbish way, Lucinda thought, just like a glove salesman in Harrod’s who feels he should not be called to wait upon colonials.

  Lucinda was hurt by all of this, but she could tolerate it. She hardened her heart against all the ship except Mr Hopkins and set herself to wait for his recovery. She expected, as a matter of course, that he would apologize, and she looked forward to the moment when she could say, and sincerely too, that there was nothing to apologize for. It was the Captain who should apologize, and if she had had the power she would have made him. She had a vindictive part to her character, which she recognized and was not proud of. It had started as a tiny thing, but grown larger with the nourishment provided by men like the Captain, and the sniggering Borrodaile whom she met, clad in sou’wester, his grinning lackey at his side, on the rolling. slippery poop deck.

  After this she would not go on deck again. Neither, or course, was she free to seek out Mr Hopkins herself, and although his visit to her would not save her reputation, at least he could offer his support and friendship.

  It stayed rough down the coast of Africa, and although she understood why this might keep Mr Hopkins in his cabin, by the time she had been five days a prisoner in her stateroom, she felt herself deserving a proper apology.

  He did not come.

  She took her meals in her room which, for all the grey skies and green cat’s-eye-coloured sea, was most unpleasantly hot.

  She escaped ashore in Cape Town, and endured the self-righteous “tsk-tsk” of a Mrs Penhaligon (the wife of a Cornish farmer) but she still did not sight Mr Hopkins.

  Out of Cape Town the weather was rough again and Oscar stayed out of sight, cooped up, green and moaning. He was attended by a steward with the comic name of Sidebottom. He had his caul between his fingers so persistently that it soon became, through the twin agencies of perspiration and agitation, a most unpleasant piece of matter. His stomach could hold no more than beef tea and dry toast. He read his Bible when his eyes could bear the dancing print. He prayed. He promised God that he would never bet again.

  My great-grandfather did not manage to emerge from his cabin until the Pinchgut cannons saluted the great ship’s entrance into Sydney Harbour, and Lucinda Leplastrier, released at last from the most unpleasant voyage of her life, saw him sitting in the geometrical centre of the ship, on a red plush settee, in the second-class promenade.

  He looked up and smiled, but Lucinda had waited so long for that smile that it became, when it arrived, like something which has preoccupied one during a fever—it produced an unpleasant effect, evoking all the twisting tyrannies of an illness which one has, at last, escaped from.

  61

  A Business Principle

  Owning a business is like having chooks. You cannot go away and leave them, indefinitely, in the care of neighbours. You can buy an automatic feeder, and there are many good ones on the market—you will see them advertised in the back pages of the Weekly Times. You can arrange for your friend or your neighbour to “keep an eye on them” for a night or two, and no harm done. But do not expect to be away six months or a year and then return to find your hens in good condition. You will have mite and pullorum rampant, the water run out, your best layer dead from a dog, your rooster wounded by goannas—the list is not intended to be exact, merely an indication, but the point is, you cannot do it. And if you want to see Venice, Florence and the Old World, then first eat your chooks, or sell them, and then you will know you will have nothing worse to come back to than a chookyard full of rank weed.

  Lucinda did not know this. Or if she did, she managed to pretend that she did not. She was off to London to be married (although she fully intended that she would—God knows how—return. She imagined a certain type of husband who would make this possible). She thought she could leave the country for a year and entrust the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks to the care of others. Note the plural. This compounded the error, for if there is anything worse than leaving your business in the care of one person, it is leaving it in the care of two and if there is anything worse than two people, it is to do what Lucinda Leplastrier did—she left her business in the care of three people, and only one of them with any practical experience of glass.

  It is true that the vicar of Woollahra had some knowledge of the chemical composition of glass, but he was the last one to claim himself a manufacturer, and he shared with Wardley-Fish a dislike of dirt. He could not bear to have it on his hands. He did not like to be in places—even the ragged school he preached at every third Monday morning—where other people had it on their hands. When he was in the glassworks he could not concentrate.

  If Dennis Hasset had imagined himself actually responsible for the well-being of the glassworks he would—for he was a conscientious man—have declared himself unfit. But he knew that Lucinda had also asked her accountant, Mr d’Abbs of d’Abbs and Fig, to keep an eye on the business. He was to bank the incomings, pay the billings and the wages. For all this he was to receive a fee. The Reverend Mr Hasset was to receive no fee. He was a friend. He was there to “keep an eye on things.”

  Lucinda had asked both of these parties to trust the opinions of her senior blower, Arthur Phelps, who not only knew something about the manufacture of glass, but, being the senior blower, was therefore the natural leader of the men in the works. There is a deeply ingrained hierarchy amongst glass workers, and the senior blowers are its aristocrats. You would only need to watch Arthur Phelps to know that this was true, to see him, with the blowing tube in his mouth, his cheeks distended like a trumpet player, move his ciagrette from his left-hand side of his mouth and—with no manual help at all—“walk” it around the tube and thence to the right corner.

  Mr d’Abbs was a natty little chap whose dress (a blue corduroy suit, a woollen tie, a curly walking stick, perhaps) suggested more of the aesthete than the accountant. He painted a little, and had tried his hand at verse, but he was not sensitive to Arthur Phelps’s displays of skill. He did not “see” the set-up at the works at all. Neither, no matter what his other good qualities were, did the vicar of Woollahra.

  Arthur Phelps was a broad man with a plastic face, a big chest and a large belly which he liked to refer to as his bellows. He took his responsibility seriously and he felt himself abandoned by Lucinda and mucked about by the other two. He was forever being given contrary instructions and his sleep was ruined as a result. (Mr d’Abbs would not have credited that an ignorant working man, a grog-artist at that, would behave in such a way.) Arthur Phelps tossed and turned in his bed
at night until his wife went to sleep with the children in the kitchen. He worried that they were making too many poison blues and insufficient beers, that their sand would run out before Mr d’Abbs’s clerks paid the carter for the last load and thereby ensured the next, that the vase footings were of a style gone out of fashion, that Mr d’Abbs wanted a greater production, whilst the vicar of Woollahra, the very next day, would come poking about with his umbrella, opening a door at the wrong moment, letting in a draught that wrecked a jug handle, and holding up production while he worried at Arthur about the “seeds,” those tiny air bubbles, which had lately been appearing in their products.

  This seediness was offensive to Arthur, too. He was ashamed of it. But it was produced by nothing other than the taste induced by Mr d’Abbs. No one appreciated how hard the lads were working, or with what will. It was not for the Natty Gent or the Bible-basher that they did it, but for Miss Lucinda. They talked about her fondly. And if they were as patronizing as fathers and brothers, they were also as protective. They tried to satisfy the demands of her advisers. They tried to work quickly, even though the commands were given in an ignorant manner, with no respect for craft or the status of the craftsmen. As a result of this haste a young gob-gatherer had his lungs burnt and this, whilst always a possibility, never happens in a well-run works. He was not a silly lad, but helpful. They took up a subscription but Mr d’Abb’s contribution was insufficient. It was all wrong. It was because of this that Arthur began to weep. It was from imagining what would happen to the lad, worrying when the clay would arrive for the new crucible, how the twenty gross of seedy “poisons” would be sold. He was sitting on his stool. The second gatherer was collecting from the glory-hole. Arthur had a draught from his beer in readiness for the next blow. The gatherer handed him the rod, and it was then that he began to weep. The fireman, who had just come on, ran down to Sussex Street to fetch Mr d’Abbs, but the men thought so little of Mr d’Abbs that this did nothing but confirm their already low opinion of the fireman. Arthur said nothing to Mr d’Abbs. He blew his nose and drank his last pint of glassworks beer. He took a bottle for a souvenir, and Mr d’Abbs had the good sense not to attempt to stop him.

  They kept the furnaces going another week, but the works had lost their heart. Dennis Hasset saw what was happening, but did not even try to arrest the process. His mind was occupied with other matters. He was arraigned before the Bishop of Sydney to explain his sermons.

  62

  Home

  Dennis Hasset held the Virgin birth to be unproved and inconsistent with the perfect humanity of Christ. He rejected the miracles of the Old Testament. He doubted many of the miracles of the New. He rejected the doctrine of verbal inspiration. He did not think there was sufficient evidence to prove the physical resurrection of Christ. He accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, not merely as it applied to insects and animals (at which point Bishop Dancer drew the line) but also as it applied to humankind. He described his position as Broad Church.

  Bishop Dancer knew this position by the earlier label of heresy. He was a churchman of the old Tory school and had no time for Evangelicals (on the Low side) or Puseyites (on what was known as the High). He could not tolerate genuflexion or vestments, and the sight of candles—other than for the purpose of illumination—had him doing little manoeuvres with his dental plate. He was of the roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding school of theology, and thought the vicar of Woollahra’s polite and reasonable sermons to be the beginning of the rot. He would like—to use plain language—to “do him over” for heresy. But if this new Clerical Subscription Act would now prevent this, he would take him away from his fireplace and lamps at Woollahra, and send him up to the Bellinger River, to Boat Harbour in the Parish of Never—Never, where he would find his parishioners about as sympathetic as those at Home during the Reform Bill (a time the Bishop remembered all too well—he had been pelted with turnips and had his windows broken). Boat Harbour was filled with foul-mouthed sawyers, ex-convicts to a man, and was, as far as Bishop Dancer could gather, a little hell on earth. In the face of these difficulties the Reverend Mr Hasset’s faith might yet be reborn, or so, in any case, the Bishop managed to persuade himself.

  When Lucinda arrived at the Woollahra vicarage on the Tuesday before Palm Sunday, she knew none of this. She was in an emotional state for reasons of her own. She did not know if she had come to censure Dennis Hasset for what she had just found at her glassworks or if she was here to seek comfort in the face of this same catastrophe. All the way across the town—and what a tiny town it now appeared to be—she had thought of sarcastic and bitter things to say to him. But as she dismounted outside the vicarage (which was also meaner than her memory had allowed) she was suddenly fearful—perhaps it was the dullness of the red brick, the hollow shadow of the front veranda—that the state in which she had found her works was the result of some personal tragedy that had befallen her friend.

  She had found the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks deserted, its crucible gone grey and lifeless, the metal set hard inside them. Under the glass blower’s wooden throne she found a miaowing kitten with pus—filled eyes and paralysed back legs, a creature in so parlous a state that Lucinda, dressed in an ostrich-feathered hat and expensive black gloves, must take a heavy poker and, with her face twisted, her eyes closed, kill it. She felt the crunch travel up her arm.

  When the kitten was a soiled and lifeless rag, she leaned the murdering bar against the throne. She thought: I had the strength.

  And although she was mostly shaken by what she had done, there was a small part of her that was proud.

  So when she was reunited with her old friend, it had already been a most disturbing day. She did not meet him in quite the place she had imagined, not in the gentle book-lined study she had so often recalled, but in a room filled with wooden crates in which Dennis Hasset was permitted to camp while the new incumbent and his family made themselves at home in the remainder.

  Without a fire, the room proved both cold and damp. Lucinda shrank inside her rabbitskin coat. She had not even been shown into the room politely. She had been greeted at the front door by a too-pretty child with a hoop. She had found her friend sitting on a rough wooden crate and the floor around him slippery with old letters. He was smaller than he had been, hunched over, and although there was no invalid’s rug across his knees, his posture suggested one. Even when he stood he did not appear to straighten properly. She thought his hand very cold and bloodless. They looked at each other and although she sought much from the dear and familiar face she imagined she saw nothing there but exhaustion and defeat.

  “What a miserable day,” she said.

  Dennis Hasset thought her eyes “pouchy” and her skin pallid. He had looked forward to this reunion, but now he was irritated by her tone. She made it seem as if the condition of the weather was his responsibility. He peered out of the window, shrugged, and then sat down again. He reflected how quickly women age.

  “I am afraid,” he said, “that I must offer you a crate. The chairs are taken, but not for the purpose of sitting, just taken. I am so very sorry about your works. It came at a bad time.”

  “Your study is in ruins,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “I find it quite disturbing,” she said.

  “We grow too attached to things.”

  “Yes, but it is a shock.” The shock was not so much to do with what the room had become, but in the realization that this place—which she had all but eliminated from her memory—was the seat of all those feelings which make us call one city “home” above all others. It had been more of a home than her cottage at Longnose Point. It was certainly far more of a home than Mr d’Abbs’s house although it was the latter she had so romanticized in her absence, making it into a place of “comradeship” and “jolly good times,” which labels involved forgetting all that was tawdry and corrupted about the house and its occupants.

  But this room, Dennis Hasset’s room, had contained all that w
as true and good in her life. She had forgotten this because he had not proposed to her as she had thought he might, and she had been angry with him. But now she was back, she saw that Sydney would be unbearable without this friendship, this room. Everything in her wished to cry out like a child at the injustice of her homecoming. But she was not a child, and she would no longer demand her hot cocoa and her seat to sleep in by the fire. She was a grown woman with a damaged friend and she forced herself to show concern for him, teasing his story from him like a bandage from a congealed wound.

  And yet there was a part of her, a substantial part too, that did not give a damn about Dennis Hasset’s story. This part was angry. It thought Dennis Hasset a weak fool and a poor friend. It judged him for not valuing her sufficiently, for slumping over in his seat, for not lighting a fire. It coexisted with this other part that loved him. And these two factions fought within her all the while she listened to his story. She thought he had a kind and intelligent face and it was not wise to speak so indulgently about his enemies.

  “But surely,” she said at last, “Boat Harbour can be appealed against?”

  He shook his head.

  “But it is unfair. You still see yourself a Christian?” She wished he would sit up straight.

  “Of course.”

  “Then damn him,” said Lucinda, not softly either, “then damn him in hell.” And tears were coursing down her cheeks and he leaned over and enfolded her hand with his. But she did not wish her hand held. It was too late for that now. And, anyway, her tears were selfish tears, not really shed for him at all, but for herself. He had a big hand and it did not comfort her, merely reminded her of how small her own was. “He behaves like a cad,” she said, removing her hand on the pretext of finding her handkerchief. “Oh, Mr Hasset, please, and where is Boat Harbour?”