Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  He took his jacket off and put it over his head and shoulders, and that is how, when the fractured church was finally towed to the jetty at Boat Harbour, the government inspector mistook him, in the evening light, for a hooded nun.

  107

  Arrival of Anglican Church at Boat Harbour

  The Reverend Dennis Hasset had discovered a leech in his sock. He was trying to walk home to his house so he might remove it. Actually, it was not merely one leech, it was two, although both of them were anchored at almost the one spot with the result that one had grown fat and bloated while the other stayed lean. The sight of this shining black slug with two tails turned his stomach and he would have run, were it not for the likelihood that, being seen to be in flight from something, he would be set upon by drunken bullock drivers or be pelted with potatoes by the snotty-nosed children of the Magneys or the Walls.

  When he heard about the glass church his only thought was that he would not now be able to deal with the leech at home. He certainly did not make the connection with Lucinda. In fact he did not strictly believe what he heard. He knew only that there was a structure which his informant, the clerk from the government offices, imagined was a church and which would, eventually, prove to be a steam saw or a lifeboat or a smashed-up phaeton recovered from a shipwreck at The Heads.

  To remove the leech, he needed salt. He could buy a ha’penny-worth at Hammond and Wheatley, which he did, favouring one foot a little, resisting the urge to rub ankle against ankle while he waited behind Mrs Trevis who was, between buying flour and bacon, relating the story of her Grandfather Dawson’s service as a coach painter to Her Majesty the Queen. The clerk from the government offices ran in twice to fetch him and it was he who begged Mr Hammond please to serve the reverend gentleman because he was required by the government inspector to be at the landing wharf “quick and lively.”

  The Reverend Dennis Hasset got his salt. He was not accustomed to shopping. He was surprised at how much salt you got for aha’penny. There was no way you could slip this into your pocket. It was a hefty bag and must be held under the arm. He did so, marching down Hyde Street while the government clerk, a huge fellow with hefty hands and a cowed spirit that made him bend forward and bow his neck, clucked and fussed and postulated this and that about this strange glass church.

  The Reverend Mr Hasset was plotting a way to get the salt in contact with the leeches. He was therefore disappointed to see that a crowd had gathered at the wharf. This would make the operation that much more difficult.

  He listened to the clerk as they pressed through to the river. As usual, most of the crowd were drunk. They smelt loathsome: unwashed clothing, rum, vomit. Hell itself could smell no worse than this. Dennis Hasset opened his bag of salt and took a fistful.

  It was then that he saw the church. He thought so many things at once. That it was a miracle, a spider web, a broken thing, a tragedy, a dream like something constructed for George III and then assaulted in a fit of rage. He thought: It has been hit with hail. He thought: it has been salvaged from a wreck out at The Heads. He thought: it was a mistake to triangulate those tall panes of glass when a Roman arch would be much more graceful. He thought: Lucinda.

  It was the latter thought that made the mole on his back turn hot and itchy because he had never, in all his letters, bothered to tell her that he was now a married man and soon to be the father of a child.

  In the face of this crazed image of Lucinda’s passion, he was numb with panic.

  His mole was driving him crazy with its itching. He held his salt. He stood with the most of his weight on the foot that did not have the leeches. He waited for Lucinda to emerge from between the barley-sugar columns. He could not see through the glass itself—it had become, with all the splintering, almost opaque. He tucked the bag of salt under his arm and fixed a smile on his face, but as H. M. McCracken’s leaky old lighters were moored to the bollards on the wharf, the figure that emerged from the church’s wooden door was not that of Lucinda Leplastrier, but a gaunt collarless burnt-ghost figure who marched towards him carrying a little suitcase like a hat-box.

  “Sir,” said Oscar and held out his hand.

  Dennis Hasset’s hand, alas, was filled with salt. He opened it, by way of explanation. The burnt man stared at it and laughed; it was not a normal laugh but a dry noise like a cough.

  “The Reverend Mr Hasset?”

  There was something very dangerous about this staring man. His green-eyed gaze was too intense. He would not release his hold on Dennis Hasset’s eyes, not even for a second.

  “Yes,” said Dennis Hasset.

  “Then I have the pleasure, sir, to present this splendid church to you. It is a gift to the Christians of Boat Harbour from the most wonderful woman in New South Wales.” The ghost seemed oblivious to the splintered state of the church. “I tell you now, without reserve,” he roared, “I envy you. This woman loves you.”

  Dennis Hasset felt ill. He wished to withdraw. All the godless of Boat Harbour pressed their thick necks and cauliflower ears forward. He stooped and poured his fistful of salt into his sock.

  The madman was now crying. His face was as dirty and tattered as the bandages around his wrists.

  “How you can stand there,” Oscar said, “when Miss Leplastrier pines in Sydney, why, it is quite beyond my comprehension.”

  The salt in Dennis Hasset’s sock was as painful as ground glass. He thought: When, oh Lord, will my past follies stop returning to torment me?

  He put his hand on the shoulder of the weeping man. He intended Christian charity, but felt only an alien body as hard and bony as a suit of armour. It was then, wondering how he could stop the germs of scandal which were already multiplying around him, that he saw Miriam Chadwick’s bright green riding costume.

  “Mrs Chadwick,” he said, “I wonder could you assist us?”

  Thus, while Percy Smith was busy shifting his mooring in accordance with the wishes of the government inspector, Dennis Hasset and Miriam Chadwick escorted Oscar Hopkins up the rutted track to Hyde Street. Both men limped a little, one from an injury incurred upon a journey, the other on account of blood-red salt grinding against a naked high-arched foot.

  At the Hyde Street corner, Dennis Hasset requested that Oscar excuse them both. He left him standing, still weeping, in the shelter of the post office while he conferred with Mrs Chadwick whose large, dark brown eyes, so obviously filled with charity for the weeping man, moved him greatly.

  “Miriam,” he said, “you must help me, please. I must hurry to my wife before she hears all this puffed up by gossips. Would you be the good Samaritan? Here is a crown. Buy him bandages and mercurochrome. Here is the key to the meeting room. You can lock the door and keep the busybodies out. Look after him. He is in such a sorry state, poor beggar. Can you manage this? Will Mrs Trevis permit you?”

  “Dear Dennis,” said Miriam Chadwick, who was at once delighted to have exactly what she wished and outraged that a man who had (not long ago either) cruelly spurned her, should now beg favours of her. “Dear Dennis, you must hurry home to Elizabeth and leave this wounded soul to me.”

  She accepted the large brass key, the crown piece, and the torn bag of salt which Dennis Hasset thrust into her bosom. And then my great-grandmother took Oscar Hopkins by the arm and walked very slowly, oblivious to the stares, to the meeting hall above the cobbler’s shop. There she locked the door and began her ministrations.

  108

  Oscar and Miriam

  When Oscar Hopkins and Miriam Chadwick came down the stairs to the cobbler’s shop at last, it was to announce their impending marriage.

  There was a small wet stain on the back of my great-grandmother’s green silk riding habit. This was remarked on—how could it not be—but nothing was ever said out loud, and, in any case, Miriam had plied the young traveller with Mr Hammond’s expensive emollients and creams, with stinging iodine, blue-red mercurochrome, bright yellow “Healing Ointment,” had rubbed him with so many healin
g dyes that he soon looked like a tropical fish in his father’s aquarium; with so many wet and greasy substances about, no one could be surprised if Miriam also spilled a wee drop on her clothing.

  Oscar, when at last he opened the heavy cedar door at the top of the stairs above the cobbler’s, had the stunned and slightly vacant air you might see in some one rescued from a burning house.

  As he walked down the loud, uncarpeted stairs, he felt his sin declared to all the world.

  I love Lucinda Leplastrier.

  The cobbler was working at his bench. Oscar could not meet his gaze. He looked instead at a pair of dancing pumps hanging from the door. To these he nodded.

  He had fornicated in God’s temple, he who had judged the cedar cutters at Urunga.

  All my life, he thought, I have sought the devil’s murmuring in my ear, have let him persuade me that it is holy that I bet, that I abandon my father, that I draw poor Stratton into the morass, and all the while I am armoured by conceit. I play the saint. When Miss Leplastrier and I were most passionately engaged, I imagined it was I who restrained us from sin, I who ensured our chastity until that happy day (today, today I might have written to her in triumph) when she might have seen what I am and accepted my proposal that we stand as bride and bridegroom in God’s sight. But it was not I. And the proof is here: that the moment a ministering hand is placed on that part of my anatomy, the minute, the instant it is touched, the first time in all its life—why, then, I fail the test. And find my Christianity to be but a spiderweb, so easily it is brushed aside. And I am a dog in the street prepared to be crushed by a waggon’s wheel in order to let its beastly nature have its head. I cannot even justify my act by calling out “love, love, I did it for love.”

  His punishment was that he must marry this woman he had compromised. It did not occur to him that it was she who had compromised him. He must marry her. He took the laudanum from his pocket and sipped it in the deep shadowed doorway of the cobbler’s shop. The street was lined with bullock waggons all loaded with logs as thick as four big men. The air was fat and warm and syrupy, sweet with forest sap, urine, brandy. There were yellow dogs and yellow clay earth littered with furry bark.

  Oscar’s eyes remained focused in the middle distance. He sucked in his cheeks, biting them harder than he knew. He limped beside my great grandmother as they set about this business, each equally determined that the job be done properly, and yet with a definite distance between them, like allies in a business venture, or the captains of opposing cricket teams. They posted the banns. It was done in fifteen minutes. They went to Bernie Lovell and each rewrote their wills. It took half an hour. They went to the offices of the Courier-Sun and filled out a little form for the advertisement which announced their engagement.

  Only when my great-grandmother saw he did not write “Reverend” in their engagement notice, did she suspect he might not be a clergyman. She certainly had no idea that he was now the owner of a glass church in Sydney and a fortune of ten thousand pounds.

  Oscar had forgotten this himself. He was sick at heart, preoccupied by what he had lost, not gained. All he could think was that the glass church was the devil’s work, that it had been the agent of murder and fornication. The only clear thing he could think, the only thing he could hear above the raging passions of his beating heart, was how he could destroy the hateful thing.

  It was just five o’clock, and the government clerks were already closing their shutters for the day, when he began to bid her goodbye. She had employment to return to, and although he should have seen the word “Governess” on both her will and the marriage banns, he had not; her employment remained a mystery to him. Like two strangers introduced to business partnership by medium of a newspaper advertisement, they agreed to meet at the post office at ten o’clock upon the morrow. He saw her on to her pony which she had tethered in the government paddock. He must have known, already, that he would not commit himself to her in any but a legalistic way, for he felt only mild dismay to see how she treated the animal. He made the motion of doffing his hat to her, although he had no hat, having given the same to Kumbaingiri Billy’s father’s sister. He held open the gate of the government paddock, and when the pony and its rider had passed through, he walked thoughtfully down towards the river, dragging a stick behind him, scratching a line in the baked clay track and thus—his route marked by this fine erratic line—he disappeared for ever from my great-grandmother’s life.

  109

  A Cheque amidst Her Petticoat

  When Miriam was old, she wore long black dresses and violent-coloured petticoats (crimson, royal purple, blazing yellow) and it was easy enough at that time to see her as an ugly old parrot in a Victorian cage, but when she stood in Dennis Hasset’s little study—hardly a study at all for it was what they call, in Bellingen, a sleep-out, a makeshift enclosure of a pleasant back veranda—when she stood there, she was straight and young and strikingly handsome. She had strong features, a straight nose, a long jaw, wide-placed brown eyes above defined cheekbones. She was almost severe, but yet was not severe, and her true obsessive qualities were clouded by her habit of making small flirtatious gestures which she offered—she could not seem to help herself—even when she was in a hurry. Thus she might lower her eyes, or lean forward in a certain way or even let some part of her clothing brush against her listener, all this in a soft, yes, even seductive style, while you could see, if you had an eye for these things, the tight and secret clenching of her jaw.

  She was in mourning for Oscar, and although she would very soon grow out of her flirtatious habits, she would never abandon this particular style of mourning. It was not a fashion in mourning. It was something she invented herself to cater for all her conflicting needs, and although this style would finally look—as I said before—cranky, Victorian, simply crazy, this was not the effect when Dennis Hasset looked at her.

  She wore long black watered silk, cut tight around her well-formed bosom and flowing in expensive folds across her bustle. She wore a black veil and a black hat with feathers in it. Her petticoats showed here and there. They were bright red. They said: To hell with you; I will do what I like.

  If Dennis Hasset had ever regretted not marrying her, this was no longer the case. He recognized her as a dangerous woman. He wished her to leave his study. She smiled at him and twice, accidentally he supposed, touched his trouser leg with the toe of her little buttoned boot.

  She had never guessed the size of Oscar’s estate until Dennis Hasset had come to her, begging her to give it up. It was he, this handsome, educated man who trembled like a girl before the godless cedar cutters, who had tried to trick her into signing a “waiver.” It was only then, and very slowly, that she began to understand about the wager which was celebrated in that rolled-up document the dead man had carried in his little case.

  It was then that she began her lifetime habit of acting against the dictates of the “best advice.” The best advice would have had her still a governess, less than a governess, a target for the milky-white spew of the youngest Trevis. The best advice would have her leave the glassworks in Darling Harbour, and have her believe it quite impractical to remove them to so isolated a post as Boat Harbour. She said (many, many times): “I loved Boat Harbour. It was my home. How could I leave it?” She sold off the land in Darling Harbour and transported what she could, including glass blowers and their families, all of whom she persuaded, by dint of personal visits, gifts, bribes, bonuses, to make the dangerous sea journey north.

  She did not love Boat Harbour at all. She loathed it. But now she was rich and she began a lifetime of paying back those who she felt had slighted her. And she would, in the careful, almost feudal structure she built to hold the hierarchy of offences, place this clergyman near the top of the triangle, the apex of which was occupied by Mrs Trevis.

  There was no room in the little study. You sat crammed on a straight-backed chair and looked across the vicar’s shoulder to the open-sided veranda where the crates of
books his present circumstances made it impossible to unpack stood greying and gathering new watermarks each time the wind came from the south. Or you could, if you cricked your neck a little, look down the long thin block of land, past the vicar’s Jersey cow picking what it could from the low winter grass, to where the black bones of the glass church stood, its panes mostly cracked or crazed, with long dried strands of dead water clinging to its roof.

  This church belonged to Miriam, or so it had been determined in the court at Sydney. Dennis Hasset had imagined it was his, for it had been intended as a gift and he had taken it upon himself to have it transported on to his back paddock.

  Miriam sat on the chair and smoothed her skirts. She placed her hands in her lap, quite so, not attempting to hide—Dennis Hasset thought her intention to be the opposite—the tell-tale roundness of her stomach. She crossed her leg, showed a little petticoat, and looked at him in such a way he could not hold her gaze.

  “I have been speaking to Mr Field from Gleniffer,” Miriam said, removing a black glove to reveal than an extra wedding ring had found its way on to her pretty hand in Sydney. “He says there are now fifteen Anglican families who would be pleased to fill a plate each Sunday.”

  Dennis Hasset thought; Fill a plate. She says it so grandly, but she has not seen the coppers and threepences looking so lonely on the green felt base. When Mr Field says he will “fill a plate” he is being a grand man with his thumbs stuck in his braces, but the reality is different. They will have me, Dennis Hasset thought, riding out to Gleniffer twice on a Sunday and expect me to do it for the love of God and twopence ha’penny.

  “And that is when it came to me,” said Miriam, smiling sweetly, “that we might make a present of my dear little church to them. Mr Field says he has no shortage of corrugated iron, and as for the walls, he explained to me how he would fix weatherboards to it.”