Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  He smiled and shrugged. She saw that he did not realize that her life would also be affected.

  “Is it far away?” She had come to have war with him about his neglect of her works. She had despised the way he sat so hunched on the crate, but she would not be without him. He was a good man, but too soft.

  She felt herself to be red and blotchy in her cheeks. The tiny veins on her eyelids would be showing.

  “Far enough,” he said. “It is the territory of the Kumbaingiri Tribe. What does ‘far’ mean in this country? I don’t know, Miss Leplastrier. I am so awfully sorry about your glassworks. The two crises arrived coincidentally.”

  “They were all I had.”

  “You have them still,” he said reprovingly, feeling she cared too much for her own predicament.

  “Yes, but not my partner.”

  The softness of her voice made him catch his breath. He checked himself. He had been, generally, too emotional of late.

  “I think I will never forget how you came into my study and I thought you a Mr Leplastrier. Do you remember the to-do we caused?”

  “We were most improper.”

  “Oh, we were a degree or two hotter than improper.”

  “And we were noted,” said Lucinda who, although she was smiling, was feeling her neck and shoulders set upon by a swarm of hot prickles.

  “They could not help themselves,” said Dennis Hasset, grinning broadly.

  “Then it is I who am responsible for your exile.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes, and you have tried to hide it from me. I was such a child. I never thought the harm I did you.”

  “Hush.”

  “I never thought.”

  “Hush. Do you hear me? You’re wrong. You are quite wrong. Now, please. It is wholly theological, I promise you.” This was not exactly true. His situation had not been helped by the association.

  “Do you give your word?”

  “I do,” he said. She did not catch the small grimace he made at the sound of his own falsehood.

  “Then do not go,” she said. “If that is truly the case, then you do not have to go.”

  “I do not follow your logic.”

  “There is no more logic in my argument than there is truth in yours,” she said softly.

  He did not know whether to smile or frown at her. He remembered the afternoons he had found her, unannounced, asleep in his armchair. “How sad life is,” he said.

  Lucinda stood and went to the window. She was surprised to fine the view the same. She turned up the collar of her rabbit fur. She pulled on her gloves, as if she intended to leave, and then took them off again and arranged them on a crate, laying out the fingers, flattening the thumb. “You do not have to go. You have a choice.”

  Dennis Hasset stretched himself and no one, seeing the languid confidence of this action, would guess that he had felt himself charged with weakness and found guilty. “I need a living,” he said. “Only a bishop can provide one. There is no choice.”

  “Oh, you must not.”

  “Must not what?” he said crossly. “What must not?”

  “Must not nothing,” she sighed. She sat on the crate. She could feel the splintery roughness of the wood catch on the fur. She thought of her father’s whiskers on her child’s face.

  He raised his hands (tense, hard, splay-fingered) and then let them fall (soft as rag toys). The rag hand rubbed the whiskered face. “Oh, Miss Leplastrier,” he smiled, “we owe each other more charity than this.”

  Lucinda picked up her glove and examined it closely. “Dear Mr Hasset,” she said, “I am fond of you.” She frowned as if the stitching were unsatisfactory. She had a red patch the size of a florin on each cheek. “I am so very, very sorry to be the one responsible for your removal from my company. And I admit—even now I am thinking only of myself and how lonely it will be, and what pleasure I have had buying the works with you, and I always hoped we could plan more together. I have purchased the cylinder process from Chance and Sons.”

  From the corridor, too close, a woman’s voice: “Arthur, do not do that!”

  Lucinda leaned forward, frowning, speaking more quietly. “It is delivered, already, and tomorrow I will engage engineers to install it. The furnaces will be alight within the week. And it seems to me, though I have no profound knowledge of the Thirty-nine Articles, or how many miracles it is you dispute, I do not see why you must go.”

  There were brisk footsteps in the passage. It seemed they would have a visitor, but no. The footsteps stopped, and then went back the way they had come.

  “It is like being locked inside the Tower.”

  Dennis Hasset smiled. “I must go where I am sent.”

  “By God?”

  “Of course.”

  “Or a man, a bishop?”

  He passed his hands over his eyes.

  She said: “You do not agree with this Bishop?”

  “Oh, please, Miss Leplastrier, please, do leave it alone.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Then,” he looked up, his face red, his eyes flashing, “you are impertinent.”

  She stood. She felt humiliated, as if her face had been slapped, her backside paddled with a leather slipper. She began fiddling with her gloves again. “So it is impertinent to feel anger when your friends are mistreated and abused. It is impertinence to think injustice should not be accepted with a bowed head. You do not accept the Virgin birth, Mr Hasset. I do not accept the wisdom of turning the other cheek.”

  He could not be angry for long. It was his handicap, a corollary of his general lack of passion. His tempers were like sparks from flint, but not tinder to catch on. When he spoke he was ironic, self-mocking and the seemingly simple words he spoke were cross-referenced to other self-critical thoughts that he imagined she would see but which were, of course, clear to one but himself. “Your opinions,” he said, “are strongly put.”

  Lucinda’s gloves would not come right. Here was a thumb inside out. She had to blow to make it come out right. “Yes, and I am generally most unsuitable. I am loud and opinionated. I am silent and stupid. I am an embarrassment in proper society. My mother’s friends, those who wrote most passionately and invited me to come Home, discovered, when they had me in their parlours, that their passion had been mistaken. They thanked the Lord—the ones not playing atheist—that they had not lost a daughter to the Colonies. They would agree with you. I should not speak so bluntly to you. I should not address you like this, even if I do hurt on your behalf, on both of your behalfs. What will happen to you, Mr Hasset? You are too fine to be in a place where there can be nothing but mud and taverns. There is no church?”

  “There is no church building.”

  “Stay.” She had her gloves on, as if ready to depart. He did not rise. She sat. “We can have the works together.”

  So, she thought, I beg.

  She saw him consider it. She saw a little life come into his eyes. (Say yes, say yes.) He straightened his back. He crossed his legs.

  “I know nothing of business.”

  “We neither of us do.”

  He looked at her: her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, her lips parted, leaning forward and clasping her small, gloved hands together. He smiled, and shook his head. “You put the negative as a powerful argument for the positive.”

  She knew she could keep him. In one minute, two minutes, everything would be resolved. “It does not matter what we know. You said to me, when I was Mr Leplastrier, just walked into your study (this study here), you said I had a passion for things.”

  “And so do you.”

  “You said it is a passion that matters.”

  “I think so still.”

  “Then it does not matter that we are ignorant of business. Our ignorance is temporary. Oh, Mr Hasset, dear Mr Hasset, we will make good things, things of worth, things we are proud to make. We will not be like these tallow-boilers and subdividers. We could be the most splendid Manufacturers of Glass.” />
  “And neither of us lonely.”

  She looked at him with her mouth quite open, not knowing that her lower lip was almost indecently plump. She could not hold his eyes. They were soft and grey but she could not look at them. She shut her mouth. She felt herself go red around her neck and shoulders. She began to take her gloves off again. It was very quiet. A bullock team was pulling up the hill outside, but the driver made no noise. There was just the squeaky wheel of the dray and, twice, the flick of the whip, which cut through the air like a bird-cry in the forest of their talk which had become, with this single comment, all stumps and hedgerows and not a tree to hide behind.

  “I must go,” he said, when the silence had become unendurable.

  “So you may preach what you do not believe to men who do not care what anyone believes.”

  “That is not kind.”

  “But accurate.”

  “No, not accurate either. I will preach what I believe.”

  “That there is no Virgin birth.”

  “That Christ died for our sins that we might be redeemed through His blood, that we might sit at the side of God in heaven.”

  She was surprised by the passion in his voice. She was too used to hearing him say he had none, and too ready to accept it without complication. They had discussed church politics, but never once religion. They had talked on her subjects: glass, factories, the benefits of industry. He had catered to her needs and enthusiasms and she had been conceited and self-centred, and yet today, at this moment, she would rather not be an industrialist at all, would rather, if she could be persuaded it was Christian, have a little farm somewhere up-country.

  “So,” she said, nodding her head, mentally listing her discoveries, “so there is a part of you that wishes to be sent away?”

  “Quite a large part,” he admitted.

  “And all this,” she gestured at the shattered room, the crates, the papers spilled across the floor, “in a sense it pleases you.”

  He nodded, suddenly self-conscious. He rubbed his hands together, looked down, then out of the window. He was hiding his pleasure from her. She told him so. He admitted it. And these words, the accusation and the admission, were uttered, on each side, so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that they were like the slash of a razor which, being so sharp, causes no pain when it first cuts.

  But when Lucinda saw that the great weight she had placed on their friendship was far greater than the one he did, she felt more than simply foolish.

  “Will you take all your books?”

  “They say there is a problem, generally, with mould.”

  “So you will leave them here?”

  “Oh, no, I will take them.”

  Looking at his handsome, smiling, apologetic face, she hated him. It was a spasm, coming and going in a moment. “Oh, don’t you care?” she exclaimed. “Must you wait for mould to happen to you?”

  And Dennis Hasset watched her, alarmed, unhappy, nervous of what might happen next. It occurred to him that he might propose to her and she would accept him. This was an odd idea, perfectly new—she had been a child when she went away, and he had been her protector—and the novelty was not unattractive. He glimpsed a passionate life, freedom from the tyrannies of bishops, something quite original. He had always imagined marriage to a tall and handsome woman. He did not think Lucinda handsome. It was no impediment.

  The impediments were elsewhere. The first concerned the salvation of his soul and, peculiar though it might seem, he agreed with Bishop Dancer about the benefits of Boat Harbour. He did not feel his faith sufficiently. It was too much the creature of his intellect and he yearned for something simpler, rougher, more true to Christ.

  The other impediment was no more than a rock under a wheel. (He hardly knew it was there, but it was enough to stop the wheel turning.) Dennis Hasset was a snob when it came to commerce. And as much as he would love to be free of the tyranny of bishops, he could not bear to walk down the street and be thought a merchant or a manufacturer. He thought glass a substance of great beauty, but the very originality of the life that Lucinda Leplastrier suggested to him, the very thing that made it so attractive, was what made it absolutely unacceptable.

  He did not dwell on any of this. The ideas and feelings were too much a part of him. He gave Lucinda no clue as to why he should now, ever so subtly, withdraw himself from her. She had one glove on, one glove off. She was barely aware of herself, turning over books in an open crate. She did not understand the reason for her rejection and humiliation.

  At the time she most wished to flee, she willed herself to stay. She forced herself to enquire about his journey and even made an appointment to drink tea with him before he sailed. But when she at last left the Woollahra vicarage, it was with the bleak understanding that there was no one in Sydney left to see.

  She had to send a boy to call her coachman from a nearby tavern. He was not steady on his feet. She did not care. She could not remove the picture of Dennis Hasset’s sad and smiling face from her mind’s eye. It was to stay there a long while yet, no matter what instruments she used to scratch at it.

  63

  Longnose Point

  To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely. When Lucinda came down the Parramatta River in Sol Myer’s boat, she imagined her life would be a lonely one, and she felt strength through recognizing it. And yet what she imagined was not loneliness, which is boggy and sour, but something else which is bright and hard. The difference between what she imagined and what she finally experienced is the difference between a blade of a knife—an object of chilly beauty—and the chronic pain of an open wound.

  She imagined she had been lonely in Sydney and London, alone in her icing-sugar cabin aboard the Leviathan but until Dennis Hasset sailed for Boat Harbour, she had kept ahead of it. She had been a dancer racing a burning fuse. She had been busy, had plans, been on the way to London, on the way back. Her life had been a series of expectations, and even in her first years in Sydney, when she had spent many nights alone with nothing but the company of her cats, she had always the prospect of company if she wanted it. She had thought herself lonely, but she had enjoyed her solitude.

  She had moved out to the edge of Balmain and rented the falling-down cottage on Whitfield’s Farm, down along that rocky promontory which ends in Longnose Point. It was two storeys, stone, with a big old kitchen overlooking the Parramatta River. Joubert and Borrodaile (yes, the same) had not yet begun to subdivide this land. It was a bankrupt estate, with just a caretaker at the farm and the orchard heavy with the sweet, drunk smell of rotting windfalls. The grass grew waist high in summer and the road to her door was a silvery green—the grass rolled flat beneath the jinker she drove herself. She repaired the leaking stable. She planted some snapdragons and pansies. She had her crates of books delivered and carried up the loud, uncarpeted stairs. It was a romantic place to be, and it did not cease to be so the instant the vicar disappeared from Sydney Heads on the Susanna Cuthbert.

  She had plans. She had equipment to install. She met with Mr d’Abbs, but rarely socially. Rushcutters Bay now seemed too far away and she imagined the urge to gamble had quite left her. Her work was so demanding she would be asleep an hour after she had eaten. She woke early. She was alone, but not yet lonely. Her head was burning with dreams of glass, shapes she saw in the very edges of her vision, structures whose function she had not even begun to guess.

  She would build a little pyramid of glass.

  A tower.

  An arcade to cover all of George Street.

  She did not think of farms or marriage.

  She ate her porridge left-handed with a pen in her right. There was a peak of anger in her passion, a little of the I’ll-show-you-Mr-Hasset-what-it-is-you-could-have-had.

  She could not draw. She put her visions on paper and made them seem gross and malformed. She found a Frenchman, a Monsieur Huille, an artist, a friend of Mr d’Abbs. The lessons were not a success. Monsieur Huille, while very free wit
h his own criticisms, would not put pencil to paper himself until, finally, as a result of his pupil’s blunt insistence, he executed the most dismal oak tree. Pigs (or possibly dogs) grazed beneath its wispy limbs. The drawing was so very bad that Monsieur Huille, pretending to be posthumously affronted by her insistence on this “proof,” resigned. He took the evidence of his incompetence with him. He said it was worth twenty pounds, but later she found it, leached by rain, blown in amongst the hay in the stable.

  At Easter she attended service in Balmain by herself, although that evening she rode across to Rushcutters Bay. Mrs Burrows was there, so there was no cards. She found the conversation dismal. She was separate, but not lonely.

  After Easter she advertised for a woman to learn the art of glass blowing. She had imagined she might thereby create a partner for herself. She found a woman who played the trumpet at Her Majesty’s. The woman was strong. Her lungs were good and she had large and powerful hands, but the men would not work with her. The furnaces went cold again, and Arthur Phelps, having come back to work for her, went back to the timber mill.

  She wrote angry letters to Boat Harbour. But even these letters, once one is above the undergrowth of irritation, are celebratory. She described, with obvious pleasure, the scene in her own crate-filled study on the Easter holiday of 1866. And if she could not draw, she could execute a still life with words. She showed the exiled Dennis Hasset the deep burnt shadows, the splash of eggshell-white from the open heart of a book, the drape of a Delft-blue scarf on a chair, the sleeping marmalade cat, the long slice of sunshine cutting through the curtained windows on the northern wall and stretching itself, thin and silver, across the cedar floor. She made him, intentionally, homesick for Sydney, although he had never before thought of it as “home.” He felt the warmth and the clean cut of the air. He imagined a gentle nor’easterly blowing, a sweet moist wind which brings rain, but later, slowly.