by Peter Carey
Glass. Binding white. Glowing red. Elastic. Protean. Liquid. Vessel for light.
He hurried after the proprietor. He was a tangle-legged usurper, a shiny-suited thief. He was a butterfly collector, an art buyer, walking fast after the thing that had produced such wonder. He would be a part of this, any way at all.
She fled him, walking quickly, like an honest citizen who feels a pickpocket on his tail. She headed up York Street and then turned in towards the crowds at the markets. He pushed his way through narrow alleys between the stalls. It was a sunny spring day, but in here there were lanterns hung between the sausages, and he followed her large black hat as she turned, bumping into people between bolts of calico, piles of moleskins, racks of blue metal shovels lined up like weapons in an armoury, and out into the blinding light of George Street. She walked at such a pace that even Oscar, with his legs a good foot longer, his stride another two feet in advantage, had trouble keeping her in sight.
But he would not let her go. He jostled and skipped, pushed and pardoned. He tracked her back down Sussex Street. They passed the alleyway above which the majority of his colleagues still worked over their ledgers. Only six buildings down, but on the other side of the street, she went into a tall brick building with bright yellow sandstone ledges to its windows. Prince Rupert’s Glassworks (Office) 5th Floor.
Printing presses occupied the first three floors and the building thumped with their rhythms. The staircase was filled with the harsh and volatile odours of inks. Through an open door he saw men in aprons filling their forms from fonts of type. He was sweating as heavily as if he had sat in his normal place in Mr d’Abbs’s establishment.
The firms on the fourth floor were, either through lack of custom or because of progressive management, closed for the Saturday afternoon. The landing was quite deserted, apart from a charlady on her knees, clicking her tongue about this second vandal come marching across her work. She was not mollified by tiptoeing.
Three firms had their names displayed on dark wooden doors on the fifth floor, all done in different scripts in careful gold leaf with jet-black gold shadows. The first one he looked at was Prince Rupert’s Glassworks.
He knocked, but only lightly, and entered after the very briefest pause. It was no more than a single room, a desk, three chairs, all crushed beneath a sloping ceiling. There was no rug on the floor, but the wall behind the desk held a framed etching of the Crystal Palace, and on the wall opposite the windows (at which Lucinda now stood, her graceless hat held in her hand) there was a great bank of glass shelves displaying a dustless collection of bottles (green, bright yellow, poison blue) and square book-sized sheets of glass in various finishes and colours. As the sun now played upon these shelves they glowed and bled and washed across each other like the contents of a casket in a children’s story.
Smiling, Oscar thought: A bower-bird.
Her desk was cedar and also topped with glass. It held a single pot of ink, a pen, no blotter. A tall blue vase held a flag flower, which was now decidedly past its best. A single petal and a fine dust of pollen lay upon the glass-topped desk.
The smokestack of Miss Leplastrier’s factory grew from her left shoulder. She did not turn. He could see the soft whirl of hair at the base of her neck. When he stood behind her—he was very close, no more than a foot away—he could see that the men had set up a tug of war in the yard. It was obvious that several of them were very drunk indeed.
It was only then, so close, that he saw her shoulders shaking. This emotion frightened him. He had not expected it. Now he did not know what he should do. He joined his hands together. He was aware of how sticky and sweaty he was. He thought: This is a private place. He thought: I must smell. He spoke her name. He touched her shoulder. She turned. Her proud face was all collapsed, like a crushed letter thrown into a basket. Her clear skin was suddenly marked with little channels—creases, cuts, in a delta down her chin, on her nose, and her big green eyes were glasses held by a drunk, brimful, splashing, not gay, of course, but caught in the pull of the outward tide of anger and the inward one of hurt.
He had no idea what caused it all but, stooping a little, he opened his arms to her and held her against him. She was so tiny.
80
The Private Softness of Her Skin
He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of “nature.” He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.
He fetched the chair from behind the desk. When he lifted it, the back separated from the seat and clattered to the floor.
“Oh dear.” Lucinda sat, sniffing, on the window ledge. “Everything is in collapse.” And, indeed, this was how the office seemed to her, not merely today, but today more than before. It had never been what it appeared to be—the physical monument to her success, her solidity. There was a heavy desk, various bureaux, cabinets, samples of manufacture, but she could never see them as solid, but as theatrics. This office was her place of exile, and never more than when the window framed a picture of drunken men playing tug of war. She felt humiliated and powerless, like a child dragged down the street by a large dog on a leash.
There was a claw hammer in the desk drawer. Oscar—although he was at first too energetic and it seemed that he would fail—succeeded in hammering the chair back together. She obliged him by sitting in it. Her back was bathed in afternoon sunshine.
She said: “You must think me really quite ridiculous.”
He said: “Oh, no, not at all.”
She held out her hand, received the handkerchief he offered, and blew her nose. She was anointed with a blue ink smudge. It sat right on the tip of her nose. “Am I right to say you guessed the reason for my tears?”
But he had guessed nothing. He felt himself to be too big, too tall, too awkward. She was so condensed and gathered. There was nothing superfluous about her. He squatted with his back against the opposite wall. His legs too long and thin, untidy as a heap of unsawn firewood.
“No,” he said, “no, really, I have no idea.”
Her face changed subtly. You could not say what had happened—a diminution of the lower lip, a flattening of the cheek, a narrowing of the eye. But there was no ambiguity in her intention. She had withdrawn her trust from him abruptly. “If you have no idea,” she said, “how can you not think me ridiculous?”
“Because you do not have a ‘ridiculous’ character.”
They looked at each other and saw each other change from combative stranger to familiar friend and back again, not staying one thing long enough for certainty. She had velvety green irises of extraordinary beauty. Her eye-whites were laced with tangled filaments of red.
“And are you curious?” she asked, pulling and pushing, challenging him even while she promised to confide. “About the reason for my tears? Are you curious a little bit?”
He was curious, of course he was, but he had a lover’s curiosity and he feared what she might say. He imagined the tears were somehow connected to the fat letters she left lying on her marble mantelpiece. He imagined they were produced by Dennis Hasset. He was curious. He was not curious at all. He had a lover’s selfishness, was grateful for the intimacy the tears had made possible, was resentful of what they seemed to threaten.
They looked at each other until the look became a stare and both of them lost their nerve at once.
“Yes,” he said, “of course I am curious.”
He wet the corner of the handkerchief again and tenderly removed the smudge from her nose. She tilted her head a little and closed her eyes.
She told him how the men, her employees, had offered him a fellowship
they had denied to her. Her mouth changed while she told it. It became small. He was aware of the cutting edges of her lower teeth.
He was sorry for her. He was a fool, and had been party to a great unkindness. He was sorry, so very sorry, and he said so. He was also privately elated that the tears were not to do with Dennis Hasset at all, and although he tried not to grin, he could not help it.
“Well,” he said, “you should know why I came bounding after you.”
“Not to dry my tears,”
“Are you curious?”
“Oh,” she smiled. “I am curious, of course.”
He acknowledged her irony with a bow of his head. “I chased after you to tell you I had never seen anything, in all my life. quite as splendid as your works.” He frowned.
Lucinda coloured, but it was not clear what she felt.
He pressed his clenched hands beneath his knees.
She said: “Oh dear.”
He sighed and said: “Yes.”
“Yes what?”
But he had only said “yes” in response to what he hoped “Oh dear” might mean, and he was not brave enough to be explicit. “Perhaps,” he said, picking up his battered hat from the floor, “we should take tea.” He was thinking of the Café Françasi, a place with marble tables.
“I will show you,” she said, standing and smoothing down her velvet skirts. What this meant was most uncertain.
He did not ask her “what” or “where” but followed her as she left her office. His mind was out of focus at the edges, sharp at the centre of its lens. Her walk was unexpectedly jaunty, crisp, clear, echoing. On the landing she opened a door marked “Acclimatization Society of New South Wales.”
Oscar thought: Mr Smith.
“Gone,” she said, tapping the sign. “Vamoosed. Mine now.”
She unlocked the door and swung it open. He waited for her to enter, but she would not. She stepped to one side and made a gesture like a theatre usher. They collided and tangled in their own politeness. “Look,” she said impatiently, “just look.”
What she asked him to look at was Mr Hood’s “proty-type;” that construction which, only a second before, had occupied the crystal centre of her life. But when she stood beside Mr Hopkins in the doorway she no longer saw the cleverness of Mr Flood with his singed, hairy arms and his dividers and tables predicting “actual shrinkage.” She saw only a dumpy little structure with a pitched roof like a common outhouse.
“You may approach,” she said drily. “It is not sacred. It is merely,” she said, imitating Mr Flood’s pinched nasal tones, “a ‘proty-type.’ ”
But Oscar did not see as Lucinda imagined. As the dust danced in the luminous tunnel of the western sun, he saw not a dumpy little structure, not a common outhouse either, but light, ice, spectra. He saw glass as those who love it perceive it. He understood that it was the gross material most nearly like the soul, or spirit (or how he would wish the soul or spirit to be), that it was free of imperfection, of dust, rust, that it was an avenue for glory.
He did not see an outhouse. He saw a tiny church with dust dancing around it like microscopic angels. It was as clean and pure and free from vanity. It was at once so beautiful and yet so…decent. The light shonethrough its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a cathedral.
“Oh dear,” he said, “oh dearie me.”
When he turned towards her, Lucinda saw his face had gone pink. His mouth had become quite small, as if the thing which made him smile was a sherbet sweetmeat that must be sucked in secret.
He said: “I am most extraordinarily happy.”
This statement made him appear straighter, taller. His hair was on fire around the edges.
She felt a pleasant prickling along the back of her neck. She thought: This is dangerous territory you are in.
He was light, not substantial. He stood before her scratching his head and grinning and she was grinning back.
“You have made a kennel for God’s angels.”
Whoa, she thought.
She thought: This is how the devil looks, with a sweet heart-shaped face and violinist’s hands.
“I know God’s angels do not inhabit kennels.” He stepped into the room (she followed him) and crouched beside the tiny glass-house. It was six foot long with all its walls and roof of glass, the floor alone in timber. “But if they did, this surely is the kennel they would demand.”
“Please,” she said.
“But there is nothing irreligious,” he said. “How could we have a sense of humour if our Lord did not?” She smiled.
She thought: Oh dear.
“Do you not imagine,” he said, “that our Lord laughs together with his angels?”
She thought: I am in love. How extraordinary.
“How could God, who is all-knowing, not understand the foundation the joke is built on? I mean, that here is something the size of a wolfhound’s kennel which, thanks to your industry, is a structure of such beauty and joy as to be a habitation fit for His angels.”
He stood still now, having, while he spoke, danced like a brolga around the little glass building. He held out his arms as if he might embrace her and then brought them back across his chest and hugged himself and hunched his back a little.
She thought: He will ask me, not now, but later.
“And haven’t you done something?” he said. “Haven’t you done something with your life? I must confess to envy.”
The setting sun bounced off the red-brick wall of the next-door warehouse. It was this that made the little room so pink. The light refracted through the glass construction on the floor and produced a spectroscopic comet which they stood, neatly, on each side of. Lucinda duplicated his stance without meaning to; that is, she hugged herself, kept her arms locked firmly around her own body while she felt the space between them as if it were a living thing.
81
Promenade
All this, Lucinda thought, I have inherited from my mama: that I am too critical, that I ride my hobby horse into the ground, that I have a bad temper, that I will not relax and be quiet and because of this I push away those who mean me well. I will not allow anyone to be a simple “good chap” as my papa always could. How can I be in love with him and be so lacking in the most simple trust?
These thoughts were occasioned by her response to Oscar who, whilst walking up Druitt Street towards Castlereagh, had attempted to take her arm. She had snatched it back on reflex. She was immediately cross at herself for doing so. Tears smeared the gas lights as if they were water-colour. Do not cry. I will not. Take his arm. I cannot. Take it. I cannot. You must.
She took his arm, looking straight ahead, her heart pounding.
It was that time of the evening when there is blue in the sky and yellow in the shop lamps. They promenaded, arm in arm, up the hill, towards Castlereagh. He had, he declared, “an idea” he would not tell her. The idea gave his mouth its rosebud smile. He would tell her his idea at dinner—she would be his guest. He teased her nicely with his silence on the subject. He was tall and stretched, with a long, twisting neck and a high black hat against the constraints of which one could see his hair protesting. She was short—the brim of her enormous hat was barely level with his shoulder. His gestures were jerky, hers controlled. She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she—although she wore a flowing white cotton—appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit.
They were different, and yet not ill matched.
They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric’s lot—the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. It was an out-of-focus town of men with seas of bobbing hats.
But on this night she felt the streets accept them. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a
match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?
They pushed past bold—eyed young women with too many ribbons and jewels, past tight-laced maidens and complacent merchants with their bellies pushing so forcefully against their waistcoats that their shirts showed above their trousers. Lucinda was happy. Her arm rested on Oscar’s arm.
She thought: Anyone can see I have been crying. She thought: I have pink eyes like a dormouse. But she did not really care.
82
Oscar in Love
My great-grandfather was in love, and although he managed to hide all the signs of his despair from Lucinda, he was miserable. He made little jokes about the natty gents in checked waistcoats, laughed, patted her arm, but whatever happiness he felt he saw only as a sign of all that would be denied to him.
This was because he had an idea in his head, and I do not mean the idea that he had promised to reveal to Lucinda at the dinner table. This was another idea, quite separate. The idea that caused the real trouble was the one that Lucinda herself had lodged in his head—that she was in love with Dennis Hasset. She had done everything possible to make the idea stick. She had left the swollen envelopes on her mantel for days at a time. She had told him she was in love. She had spent hours of her Sunday at her secretaire. The letters grew so fat that they required excessive amounts of red wax to seal them properly.
The idea had taken hold, and such was the stubborn set of Oscar’s mind that it would not easily be knocked loose. So it did not matter that she took his arm. It was the prior action, the snatching away, that stayed in his mind. It was here the truth seemed contained, and in the second act, the taking of the arm, he saw only pity.
Oscar did not like Dennis Hasset. He had not met him, but he did not like him. Not that he imagined the man had bad qualities. Quite the reverse. He imagined him good, clever, handsome, generous, as a manly man who would be attractive to a lady. He could think of nothing to do to press his claim in competition, nothing except to display an excess of goodness, of selflessness, as if this behaviour, this loving self-denial, would provide him with the rewards that selfishness could not.
