by Peter Carey
75
Heads or Tails
Lucinda had painted a picture of Mr d’Abbs. She had made him a shy creature, a dormouse with a waistcoat and a gold chain. Oscar had imagined a small pink nose all aquiver, seen his hands go to his face as he attended to his nervous toilet. He had gone to the meeting full of tenderness for Mr d’Abbs, not merely for his timidity, but for his Christian charity, that he should risk his own business name by employing a man in such public disgrace. But when he came, at last, to sit in Mr d’Abbs’s office, he found that Mr d’Abbs was not a shy man at all, or if he was, his shyness was of a highly selective quality, was sensitive to distinctions of sex, perhaps, and rank, certainly, just as the Chinese are so attuned to the pitch of the human voice that one can ask directions to Li-Po, for instance, and not be understood until one’s pitch is perfect.
It was the eleventh day of October and early in the afternoon. Rain drove against Mr d’Abbs’s window and although the Venetian blinds were fully hoisted the sky was so dark and bruised that it was necessary to light a lamp. The office looked across at the windows of other offices in which there were also lamps lit. Oscar listened to the thunder and imagined he would soon have his shirt sodden and clinging to his skin.
“You have no hand,” said Mr d’Abbs. “You have no hand that would be worth a damn to anyone.”
Oscar sat on the edge of his chair. He was aware of the spots on his trousers. His attempts at cleaning them had made them worse. They were dark spots ringed with watermarks. He felt them to be visible badges of his disgrace. And although he had warned himself about the dangers of fidgeting, when Mr d’Abbs peered bad-temperedly across the desk, Oscar could not stop himself from rubbing at his trousers with the back of his thumbnail.
He put his head on one side and looked at Mr d’Abbs.
Mr d’Abbs was accustomed to unconventional men. Indeed he collected them—artists, poets, philosophers—it was the great pride of his life that he could provide them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.
But this was not an artist. This was a clergyman. He had expected someone at once broader and tidier. He had not expected “artistic” qualities in a sacked clergyman. This was a very queer chap, and Mr d’Abbs gazed at him quite openly, astonished to think that it was this uncombed stick-limbed fellow, this grasshopper, who had finally cracked the defences of she whom Gerald MacKay had dubbed “our pocket Venus.”
White hailstones danced on the window ledge. There was a wild whinny from a panicked horse in the laneway below. Mr d’Abbs stretched his legs under the desk, crossed his thin white ankles, and wished he had never been so rash as to promise anything to Miss Lucinda Leplastrier.
The priest’s sample penmanship was still uncrumpling—he could hear it now—in the wastepaper basket beside his chair.
“I have seen some bad hands,” said Mr d’Abbs.
“Indeed,” said Oscar, crossing his ankle over his knee, then realizing that it showed his stocking and that, in any case, it was not the correct pose for an employee, he put his foot squarely on the floor. “Indeed, I would imagine you had.”
“Well, before all this,” said Mr d’Abbs, waving his hand grandly although there was not a great deal in the office to wave grandly at. “My own brother, now there’s a fellow.” And Mr d’Abbs saw, with his mind’s eye, what Oscar could not even guess, a boy with his arms all itchy from those tiny red mites that were known as “harvesters”—they came at harvest time and dug deep into the skin. They were a great discomfort. They were worse than thistles bound up in the oat sheaves.
“He was left-handed, like yourself,” said Mr d’Abbs, recreating his brother contorted around his pen. “But they changed him over, you see. He was perhaps a little old when they tried, for although my mater was a determined woman, it never really took. It mattered not so greatly to my brother, but for you, sir, in your previous profession …”
Oscar blushed bright and painful red at the memory of his “profession.” He had thought it a secret in this context. Now he bowed his head under the weight of the shame. “Yes,” he said, making himself look Mr d’Abbs in the eye, “it is a great inconvenience.”
Mr d’Abbs named this look a “glare.” He thought it quite alarming.
Oscar smiled.
Mr d’Abbs found a cigar in his drawer. It was crumbly, decidedly crumbly. He brought it out anyway and placed it on the blotter. “An inconvenience, sir. Indeed, a great inconvenience. I knew a parson in Basingstoke who was left-handed and could never hold a living, for once they saw him hold the sacrament in his left hand, they would not have him, and they would be off to the bishop, clipclop, and back again with a new chap.”
Oscar saw Mr Judd riding off down the road, Mrs Judd behind on a big-bellied sway-back. Clip-clop.
“Ah, now you smile, you see, but I warrant you never had a living in the English countryside.”
“I never did.”
“I know you never did, sir. You would not have smiled had you done so. I met a witch in Mousehole, in Cornwall. She shook hands with me as though she were a man. You could not be a left-handed parson in those parts. You know your Latin? Sinister?”
“Sinistur, sinistu, sinistu, sinistrum, sinistris.”
“Sinistartorium, said Mr D’Abbs. He got his left hand into his drawer. He found the cigar clipper.
“The ablative?”
Mr d’Abbs did not answer, but he looked up, he appeared most pleased. “Well,” he said, “there is no Latin here, although my head clerk, Mr Jeffris, has a fondness for the classics. But what will we do with you? You smudge. I may possibly tolerate you, but Jeffris is a fiend. He will box your ears. No, sir, I am not assuming the poetic. I describe the action. It is prehistoric. It is proof of the ape in us if ever I saw it. One moment a civilized man and the next an animal. And yet he is such a genius at this work that I must permit him, for a good clerk is the secret of any successful practice. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is the poor clerks with their celluloid cuffs who allow us gentlemen time for our club or leisure to dine at Government House. It is the clerks, sir, and I am not a radical. My observation is scientific. My task is to stand at the wheel, to tip the rudder a smidgin this way, a fraction that, and yet what will I do? Are you up to the job? It is different work from praying.”
Oscar could think of no way to answer such a question. He rubbed his hair. He found a piece of twig in it, caught there from his morning walk on Longnose Point. He pulled it out and looked at it—a gum twig three inches long.
“I hope you are up to it,” said Mr d’Abbs, gazing at the twig and cocking his head.
There was a little silence. Oscar put the twig in his pocket.
“I hope you are up to it, because if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man—and you probably won’t see that, in your position, eh, that the act of employment is itself unpleasant?—if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man, it is telling him that he can be employed no more.”
Mr d’Abbs’s leather chair was new and slippery and he had, whilst talking, slipped down in it, but now he sat up, fussed with his lapels, tugged at his silk tie and placed his corduroy elbows on the desk.
“You would not believe the scenes this little room has witnessed, Mr Hopkins. Men you would imagine civilized, men from Merton and Oriel, astronomers, masters of poetics—they have sat there, exactly where you sit and have threatened attacks on me, my chldren, my property. Gentlemen, too, or so they pretended, and next thing you know they are threatening me with litigation and saying they have friends in Government House and so on. And it does not matter that I have long before, well before, had a calm chat with just as I am having one with you, that I have explained the unpleasantness and worry. It all makes no difference in the end. But, please, write this down when you leave here today. Make a note of what I say to you, and when Mr Jeffris finds that you do not meet his standards and you feel the inclination to throw a brick through my bedroom window, refer to your note
s.”
It was only when Mr d’Abbs stood up and held out his hand that Oscar realized he had been employed as a clerk. He should have been happy, but he was not. He felt no elation, only anxiety as to what would befall him.
“Well,” said Mr d’Abbs and picked up the bell from his desk. He swung it, and he hoped the impression was that he swung it gaily. He did not, however, feel at all gay. For now he would have to endure Mr Jeffrie’s revenge for employing the chap. There would be days, perhaps months, of doors slammed, papers thrown, compressed lips, monosyllabic answers, a series of jarring chords and drumbeats, which would lead, in the end, to the scarecrow’s dismissal. He put the bell back on his desk and looked at his new clerk. The fellow was tapping his left foot and jiggling the coins in his right pocket—a combination of activities which gave him an unusual stance, the pelvis forward, the right shoulder dropped down, and the whole of this topped by a gruesome smile, the intention of which was not at all clear.
Oscar had very few coins in his pocket. There were two pennies, great big coins—six would make an ounce—and three threepences—coins so light you would never feel their weight in an empty pocket. Now he pulled out a penny and looked at it. He did this so innocuously that Mr d’Abbs, who was staring at him, imagined that the simpleton was merely curious to see what had been making the din in his pocket. Mr d’Abbs hardly thought about it. But when the lopsided clerk jerked the penny in the air and caught it—snap—Mr d’Abbs thought about it then, by Jove he did. But as the only thing the action resembled was a person tossing heads or tails and, even though this might fit the character of a gambler, it did not match his demeanour, nor did it sit with the situation, the office, the interview, the money in the safe, the cigar in the drawer, the clerks next door, and so even when Oscar examined the coin on the back of his hand, Mr d’Abbs concluded that it was simply a nervous habit, like jiggling a leg or pulling sticks out of your head, unfortunate, but no more than the sort of eccentricity Miss Leplastrier would find—who could doubt it?—a positive recommendation of character. He sighed.
Oscar heard the sigh. He let it stand for the one he would like to make. The penny was a sign from God.
Heads.
He had to take the job.
76
Mr Smudge
Mr Jeffris did not biff him. He had expected to be biffed and yet he was not, not all the time he worked there. Neither did he see any of the other clerks—there were twenty of them in that long thin room—receive anything more than—and this was in one case only—a sharp tug to the nose and as this assault was inflicted on the very youngest of the clerks and occasioned great laughter, even from the victim, it might not seem, in the telling, so bad a thing.
And yet there was about that room an almost unbearable tension, and if there was no actual biffing, one lived with the possibility of a biffing and it was this, Oscar thought when the whole nightmare was ended, that made working under Mr Jeffris such a tiring business that no sooner had he eaten his evening meal than he wished to sleep and would, if circumstances permitted, go a full ten hours without stirring.
His muscles were kept tense and tight all day, and yet no one threatened, and there was not a word to say on the subject of biffing. There were, in fact, very few words said on any subject at all, and although Mr Jeffris did not declare a policy to him, it was obvious after the first hour that he did not wish one clerk to talk to another and Oscar had the feeling, on entering the office, that it was not unlike an omnibus in which people travel every day and the passengers, having become familiar with each other, may exchange a nod (or perhaps not) but will not really acknowledge their community until there is a tragedy or a humorous mishap. When this arrives they will express their solidarity through laughter. Oscar provided an opportunity almost immediately.
Mr d’Abbs had rung the bell, not gaily at all, but sharply, nervously. He had introduced Mr Jeffris who did not, on first impression, seem in the least prehistoric. As for being proof of the ape in man, Oscar could not see it. Mr Jeffris was a young man, no older than Oscar, with the moustache and bearing of a Guards officer although, being just a fraction shorter than Mr d’Abbs, he was too small to have met the physical requirements. He had jet-black hair and apart from the moustache—a thicker, deeper one than Mr d’Abbs—was cleanshaven. He had a dimpled chin and a blue cast to his very white skin. Mr Jeffris did not smile, but he did not scowl. He hardly moved his face at all, and yet he communicated the most colossal and even dangerous passion. It was all in there, expressed in the gap between the angry intensity in the eyes and the very still, leashed—in quality of the muscled body.
Mr Jeffris was very civil to Mr Hopkins. He led him into the clerks’ room. This was a long office with a big stove in the middle. The black chimney traced an unexpectedly long route on its way to the wall, a long dog-leg, and you could see by the way the desks were arranged along its route, that it gave off a much-desired heat in winter and that, in its journey from hot to cold, it also indicated the rank of the clerk, Mr Jeffris being close to the stove and the youngest clerks well away.
Oscar noticed the eccentricity of the flue, but did not understand it. He was more surprised by the expensive mauve and brown wallpaper (on the one hand) and the bare paint—speckled floor (on the other). It did not quite fit, and although no one bothered to tell him, it was because the previous tenants, very successful lawyers, had taken their carpet with them. The thing that made the greatest impression on Oscar was the depth of the room which only had five windows, all of them at the Sussex Street end, and so he was surprised to be led towards the light and to be given a desk next to the window from where he had a view, not only of the interesting iron-wheeled, cobblestoned goings-on in Sussex Street itself, but the muddled little jigsaw pieces of Darling Harbour which were visible at the end of two alleyways across the way. He could see the smokestack of Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, too.
When he was shown this desk Oscar feared that he was being unduly favoured. He did not wish to make enemies so easily.
“But this, surely,” he said to Mr Jeffris, “is far too fine a desk for me?” He said this in a whisper, for the room was very quiet, but just the same it produced a nasty roar of laughter. There was scraping of chairs, coughing, snorts, wheezes, a barnyard. Oscar’s cheeks went flat like potters’ clay slapped hard with a paddle. He looked at Mr Jeffris who was biting his moustache. Then he looked at the other clerks who had already stopped. No one looked his way.
He thought: I will not put up with this rudeness.
Then he thought: I must.
The fine spider-web capillaries in his cheeks were awash with blood. He sat at his desk, finding something in its sticky wax surface that was repellent to his fingers. He clasped his hands in his lap. The urge to stand up and walk away was still very strong. It came on him in waves like stomach—ache. Mr Jeffris gave him three musty-smelling journals with moth-eaten leather spines. These were the debtors journals for John Hill & Co., John Bell (Homoeopathic Chemists) and Senior’s, also chemists but making no claim to homoeopathy. Oscar was not a snob about commerce, but it was completely alien to him. When he saw the books he felt that he would never understand them. Mr Jeffris gave him the business’s receipt books and asked that these receipts be transcribed into the journals. And although you might not think this so foreign an activity for a young man with a passion for racehorse journals, he did not see the similarity. He felt only despair that life could be passed in so low and slow and meaningless a manner. Mr Jeffris gave him a pen with a new nib, a pot of ink, and a sheet of pink blotting-paper which seemed, perhaps due to its colour, but then again perhaps not, to produce a fit of coughing and scraping amongst his fellow workers.
And that was how Oscar was employed. He tried to feel grateful. He sat on a hard wooden chair with no cushion, at a table with a wobbly leg which sometimes contributed to his smudges and blots. He found the work trying and the hours too long. Nothing in Hennacombe, in Oxford, in Notting Hill, at Randwick, h
ad been so stultifying. As a clergyman he had enjoyed his mornings at the desk. He had drunk a little jasmine tea while he thought about the most demanding duty of his week—his sermon. Nothing had prepared him for the flavour of something so dull and mean.
He wrote down the names of items he could not imagine and, in columns next to them, prices he could not afford to pay.
He transcribed Shower Baths.
Slipper Baths.
Hip Baths.
Foot Baths.
He entered Bagatelle Boards.
Chiffoniers.
Superfine.
Millefleurs Powder.
And he sweated in the harsh afternoon sunshine which blazed across his desk and every day became hotter and hotter. He did not ask for a curtain. He knew what rude laughter would accompany the request. He would end his days with no feeling of release, but with a dull headache and his shirt sticking unpleasantly to his skin. His dreams shrank until they could accommodate no larger idea than a curtain, or a crisply folded poplin shirt. He only had two shirts. The white one he wore for two days, the blue one he wore for three. And although he bathed three times a week and changed his collar daily, his shirts smelt like the old rags Mrs Williams kept in a bucket in the scullery in Hennacombe. The smell was remarked on by his fellow workers without anything ever being said. It happened, somehow, in the silence, although “silence” is perhaps the wrong term. It was more that there was a pressure of silence, a lid of silence beneath which there were odd and secret stirrings of sound.
The Reverend Oscar Hopkins sat in his own stink above a dung-fowled Sydney street suffering alternate waves of anger and depression which could be triggered by a blow-fly trapped behind sun-bright glass or the bells of St John’s at Pyrmont, or St Andrew’s in the city.
He had told the Ecclesiastical Commission that his gambling had not been covetous, but he had not acquitted himself well. He had been nervous, overpowered by their confidence and authority. He had felt himself to be as venal as they imagined him to be. His voice had shaken as he stood before them, bishops in purple drinking tea from floral cups. He had said that he had never gambled for personal gain, and they simply did not believe him. And so he was cast out, spat upon, become anathema.
