Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  It was Mrs Judd, his housekeeper, who warned him off his gambling sermons and told him about the “generous gents” who not only contributed to the church’s coffers but kept book at the nearby racecourse. This information gave him the excuse his cunning gambler’s mind required. He must go to the course and see for himself.

  Because he could not bet with men he had preached against, he got himself involved with a series of messengers, runners, touts and spivs who carried his money away and brought precious little of it back. He followed no system. He was just having “some fun” just like a smoker might have “just one” borrowed cigarette. The touts and runners led him, in due course, to the floating two-up games at the five hotels which lay, strung like beads on the deuce’s necklace, between Randwick and St Andrew’s. There was fan-tan down in George Street. There was swy and poker and every card game to be imagined among the taverns down in Paddington. Oscar had never seen such a passion for gambling. It was not confined to certain types or classes. It seemed to be the chief industry of the colony.

  He was homesick, disorientated. He had enemies all around him and he could, you might imagine, if he had his heart set on playing rummy with Miss Leplastrier, at least have the brains to close the curtains. He was not so gormless that he didn’t know he had these enemies, and yet he thought it wrong for him to know such a thing. So although he was not innocent of this knowledge, he felt it somehow, magically important to act as if he were. He left the curtains open.

  “Oh,” he chimed, all knees and elbows, from the sofa, “this is nice.”

  Lucinda Leplastrier did not think herself a snob, but she had inherited, from her mother, a strong objection to the word “nice” being used in this way. It struck an odd note. It did not match his educated vowels. She compared him, she could not help it, with Dennis Hasset and this had the effect of making everything Oscar did seem to be immature and frivolous.

  And yet when you saw the way he dealt the cards you could not help but feel the whole thing might be a pose. Nothing fitted.

  He was not vulgar, but the furnishings in his vicarage were vulgar in the extreme and she could not believe he could move amongst all this and be insensitive to it. The carpet had a stiff set pattern large enough to feel you might be tripped on it. It was a rich and gaudy green. The marble mantelpiece had the appearance of being carved by craftsmen more accustomed to sarcophagi, and the mirror above it was covered with a green gauze netting, placed there to stop flies spotting the glass. There was an excess of chairs, nine of them without counting the sofa on which she sat and the gent’s armchair in which he seemed to squat, leaning forward so eagerly she felt herself pushed back. The thing with the chairs was colour. The brightest hues were in evidence: a blue not unworthy of a kingfisher, and whilst handsome, no doubt, on the bird, not something that sat comfortably with the carpet. No one had thought, whilst they spent so extravagantly, that the brilliant settee might have to sit upon the brilliant carpet. She could not marry him.

  Of course he had not asked her to, but she had sometimes, in remembering their meeting, been regretful that she had not acknowledged his final smile. She need only look at the ugly and ill-matched assortment of little tables—oak, maple, cedar—to know that she need have no misgivings.

  There were paintings on the wall, though they were not paintings at all, but “chromos.” The only thing she had in common with him was a serious weakness of which she was not proud. And, lonely or no, had it not been for the following incident, it is unlikely she would have sought out his company again.

  67

  The Messiah

  The housekeeper at Randwick was a certain Mrs Judd who, had she not had reasons of her own for wishing to scrub the floors and black the stove and swat the flies that trapped themselves behind the orange and lilac panes of glass in the big sitting room, could have stayed at home and eaten chocolates. The Judds were wealthy members of the congregation. Mr Judd’s father may or may not have been transported, but Mr Judd was the successful proprietor of a hauling business, had teams of all sorts travelling throughout the colony, owned a ship which plied the coastal trade, and a splendid mansion in Randwick itself. He was a burly man and although his hip was injured—a defect which served to tip his broad body a little to the starboard and give him the appearance of someone with an invisible chaff bag on his broad back-he still worked as hard as the men he employed. He had only had his wife in control of the vicarage of St John’s, but he liked to inspect it himself from time to time. He had a possessive feeling about the building, as well he might—his donation had paid for the greater part of it and it was his taste (or his upholsterer’s) which dominated its interior. If there was a slate loose or missing from the roof, it was Mr Judd who would repair it, not by calling a tradesman, but by getting up on the roof and attending to the matter personally. He was a rough man, but a great one for the Church. And at the very centre of the maze of his tender feelings towards this institution there lay this single thing—he had a fine baritone voice, and he was proud of it.

  Each year at Randwick there Were all sorts of services in which great works of sacred music, the Messiah for instance, would be performed and then this rough and brawling man would feel himself transmuted into something very fine—spun gold from Mr Handel’s pen. For this reason he loved the Church and habitually made himself humble around that being who provided these great moments in his life—the vicar.

  No one had, as yet, discussed the Messiah with Oscar. There had been a St Matthew’s Passion just before he had arrived. There had been a fuss in settling in this new man and no one had mentioned the Messiah. Mr Judd could not bring this up himself. It would appear vain. And yet he sensed the performance was in doubt. He had heard that Bishop Dancer did not care for Handel, but then again he had heard the opposite. He was a direct man in most matters. He did not go in for this tangential shilly-shallying which was the hallmark of the ruling classes. But in this particular matter his emotions were too much involved. He could not ask the vicar the simple question that so occupied his mind. Instead he made himself humble. He chopped wood and brought it to the wood-box personally. Likewise he scraped clean the wooden shutters and stripped them back to the bare wood and then repainted them. While the rest of his fellow vestrymen held themselves aloof, and tight-lipped, Mr Judd was forward and friendly, attempting to engage the stork-legged new chum in talk of music.

  But Oscar happily confessed he was tone deaf and could no more talk about music than he could about the breeding possibilities of merino sheep, if that was a subject at all. He wanted to talk about the blacks. Mr Judd did not; he sandpapered the louvres in silence. He soon became so anxious on the subject that he had—vanity or no—to sound out the more musical members of the congregation on their opinion of the new chap’s attitude. The betting, he discovered with dismay, was against Handel. This was Bishop Dancer’s man. Look at his vestments. There would be no Handel this year, Matty, good heavens no.

  Mr Judd came and clipped the hedge and he returned, with his wife, at six o’clock on a Friday morning, in order to sweep up the clippings. He was deeply unhappy. He was also—it came in fits and starts, was sent away and invited back again—angry.

  He was surprised to see the lights on and the window unshuttered. He bade his wife stay on the path while he climbed—very quietly—on to the veranda, and peered in.

  Well, you know what he saw.

  There was also money on the table. He saw this, too. He saw a woman, cards moving, money. It was then that he started hammering on the pane.

  68

  Serious Damage

  Unless you have the most particular reading habits it is unlikely you will be acquainted with the so-called “Wednesday Murders.” People of my grandmother’s generation still spoke of them, but they are forgotten nowadays. The most distinctive feature of these murders was not suggested by their name, which merely celebrated a coincidence—that the first two murders occurred on Wednesday nights of successive weeks. But the mu
rderer would not let himself be so easily pigeonholed and thereafter took lives on a Tuesday (the third victim) and Sunday (the fourth). In spite of this—and let this be a lesson to anyone dealing with the press—the name stuck.

  The murders were so ghastly you might think it peculiar that Lucinda, no matter how lonely she might be, would leave her house at all, or, accepting the peculiarity, you may wrongly attribute great courage to her when you hear she had driven, unaccompanied, through streets that were still, for the most part, unlighted. Further, she was by no means insensible to this murderer. She was informed that he was, in all likelihood, a butcher or, the press suggested, an unsuccessful apprentice. This was not melodrama or gutter-press imaginings. It was clearly suggested by the manner of the murdering, the nature of the cuts, the chops, the bonings.

  You could not live alone and not think of the Wednesday Murderer, and Lucinda, once her maid had gone at nightfall, was not only alone, but alone on an island promontory in a wind-buffeted cottage in which the floorboards sometimes groaned out loud, in which timbers—or was it the nails in the timber?-made inexplicable noises. Lucinda, alone with her nervous cat, sometimes thought about these matters to such a degree that she could not leave her chair beside the fire, not even when the coal scuttle was empty and it was three a.m. and cold enough for her breath to show. So the very excursions which may seem to us so brave, seemed to her most cowardly—she was not only fleeing loneliness, but also fear. She thought herself more vulnerable in a house than on the highway, in her bed than in a fan-tan parlour. And even though her good opinion of Oscar had been seriously damaged by his selfish behaviour aboard the leviathan (a damage that showed in her unreasonable annoyance at the angle of his elbow, or the way his trousers rucked up to show a bony white shin with red garter marks left, like a high-water mark, above the fallen socks) she was not displeased to spend these hours with him, or not as displeased as she might have allowed herself to be if the Wednesday Murderer had not been at large. She was waiting for daylight.

  He told her that his mantelpiece clock—a huge contraption with its brassy innards showing—was ten minutes fast. She did not doubt its gaudy unreliability and felt herself more reliably informed by the sky outside. She judged it almost six a.m. She had enjoyed herself, although not in that personal way she had enjoyed herself at Mr Borrodaile’s table. On that occasion she had enjoyed him, and had allowed her mind to construct all sorts of pleasant fancies. She had thought him an angel painted by Mr Rossetti. This was before he showed himself so thoughtless. But rummy was a game you could play with perfect strangers, with a man in a mask, or even (she imagined) a clever machine. She had arrived with nothing and now she had nearly five pounds—it was all there in notes and coins in front of her. She had taken the money slowly, and she had found the process as satisfying as drawing bent nails from old timber. She had enjoyed it as much as she had enjoyed the dizzy lightness of losing at fan-tan. It did not once occur to her that she might be punishing him.

  She was not tired. She could not afford to be tired. She had time to go home and bathe before taking tea with Mr Rolls, a builder lately arrived from Melbourne. She began to gather in her winnings. The notes were larger in those days. You had something more substantial for your efforts. If you pulled out a pound no one would mistake it for your cigarette papers or—if you were not of that class—your calling card. It was at this moment, as Lucinda began to gather these triumphantly proportioned notes together, that Mr Judd pushed his ruddy face against the window. He had been a boxer in his youth and this had left his face a little out of balance, the nose a fraction to one side, the ears of independent character. When you knew him you found him strangely soft and, though his hands were likely scabbed on the back and horny on the palm, you would find him gentle around gentle subjects—I am thinking of music when I mention this. But it is easy enough to imagine that such a face, without introduction, might appear—I will not say murderous—frightening.

  Lucinda should have made allowances for the glass. It was not plate, but crown, of uneven thickness and marred by a yellow tinge produced by chrome salts in the sand. You can say she should have reacted more scientifically. She did not. She saw a butcher’s face with hairy eyebrows. She saw a pig snout of unnatural yellow. That the face was partly veiled by a patch of condensation did not make it seem less terrifying.

  She could not scream.

  She made a noise which may be crudely signified: “Erg.”

  Oscar smiled uncertainly.

  “Erg.”

  She made him nervous, anyway. She knew better Greek. She seemed well schooled in theology. She did not smile readily. She played cards with a cool elegance and skill which shocked him. He liked her smell. He did not know how to treat her, and when she stared at him and said “Erg,” he became embarrassed.

  “Well,” he said, shuffling the cards. “Well, well, well.” He did his fancy shuffle. He had taught himself this, although he had seen it done in a “hell” in Jermyn Street. There it had been done by a very frail and very drunk old actor who could, in shuffling cards, make a moving bridge one yard long. Oscar had taught himself this. It was, he supposed, a conversation piece.

  Mr Judd saw the bridge and could contain himself no more.

  He banged.

  Oscar’s face then behaved as it had when Lucinda had called him “Crab.” It lost its bones and colour. The muscles on his scalp contracted and pulled each hair to smart attention. He opened his mouth and Lucinda was treated this time, not to a clean pink tunnel and a little peak of epiglottis, but to some half-munched coconut macaroon suspended, mid-mastication.

  But then, of course, he turned and discovered Mr and Mrs Judd.

  Lucinda could not credit what she saw him do. The unfriendly attitude of the intruders was perfectly clear, but the gangling vicar stood, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, went to the window, unlocked it, and let them in. Well, they did not enter, not immediately, but the man’s voice entered and she did not have time to separate it from her nightmare, could not decipher all the moral outrage, felt herself to be swamped by an alien wave of tobacco-smelling rage.

  “Mr Judd,” she heard her host say. “Mrs Judd. Please do come in.”

  Come in? Lucinda was incredulous. Come in? Her hand was at her hat, feeling for the silver pea-sized knob that marked its end. She thought about the properties of glass, not its wont to go yellow when there were chrome salts in the sand, but its tendency to shatter, to make shards which lie upon a carpet in the shape of crescent moons, scimitars, stilettos, daggers, pig stickers, a jigsaw armoury waiting to be released from its captive sheet and nothing more needed by way of a key than a pebble, a coin, a lump of coal.

  “Please,” said Oscar, clapping his hands and rubbing them. “Please do come in.”

  Lucinda removed her hat and held the pin behind her back. Oscar stepped back and both Judds, the second one with great difficulty—she was not only portly but impeded by skirts—stepped from the veranda, across the sill, and into the sitting room.

  Oscar watched all this with almost as much astonishment as Lucinda. He had hardly been aware, so nervous was he, of what he had been saying. And although it is true that he invited the Judds in and that. when he made the invitation, he was standing on one side of an open window and they on the other, he had not intended that they treat his window as their door. And yet—and he admitted this to himself later when he sat, groaning and punching his left hand with his right, in judgement on himself—it was he who had stepped backwards, and the stepping back was, in a sense, like moving a magnet back from a nail in that you must, if you know anything about the natural sciences, expect the nail to follow and it is no good—his father would have told him as much—protesting your innocence when you know it is a law, a law without a name, but a law of physics none the less: when you have such a concentration of energy with all its vectors angled at you, and if you say “come in” and step back at the same time, the object of your attention will—it is like water on
an inclined plane—follow the line of least resistance and come right in.

  Now Mr Judd was unaware that he was obeying a law of physics. He knew nothing about physics at all. He knew about jute and hessian, about chaff and oats, about yokes, bows, bullock chains, the length of grass on the roadside between Sydney and Yass, but he was ignorant of the forces that propelled him. When he found himself standing on the vicar’s Quality Bradford First Wool carpet, he was mortified. He looked down at his boots and saw the right one not properly laced and the left one with leaf-mould clinging to it and then he looked and saw his wife—God help me—trying to follow him. That was so like her. It was so exactly like her. Why could she not be aware of the picture she made? She was all backside and bosom and her poor little legs were too plump and short to get up to the sill, but there was no retreating now—he had to help her in.

  Mr Judd was angry with his wife, but he would not show it in public and he offered her extreme solicitude and did his best to help effect a dignified crossing. When she was, at last, standing inside he made sure her dress was properly rearranged before he thought about anything else.

  Thus he found himself, a manly man, fussing at her skirts like a dressmaker. For a moment he was at a loss, to see the figure he cut. Then the habits of a lifetime reasserted themselves and he did what he always did when caught at a disadvantage—he attacked.

  “I’d not be the sort of fellow comes climbing through a window,” he said. “And you should know that of me by now. But I’ll tell you this, sir—we will not have it! We will not. All we want is our Handel. It is nothing but the glory of God, you don’t see that. But not drunk with wine,’ ” he had not meant to quote, but the words came to him. He could see no wine. It was not wine he was quoting. “ ‘Be not drunk with wine,’ ” he looked at the cards. They were in full view, and money too. “ ‘Wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.’ ”