Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

68

Elizabeth

Her husband's horse, that silly, nervous, prancing horse, trotted behind. Pandora she was called. Was ever a beast so aptly named?

You fool, she thought. It was a stupid horse to buy. I said nothing to you, God knows I should have. Why did I bite my tongue? I let you spend thirty pounds on a horse, a horse. And now you have gone and killed yourself.

1 will go Home, she thought. There is nothing for me to stay for. God save me. Do not think these things.

She rubbed her hands together. They were dry and horny. She thought: I am an essayist. I am an intellectual. I should not have hands like these.

Dear Lord Jesus, do not let him be dead. He has broken his arm, he has fractured a collar-bone. When she thought of broken bones she was not angry with him. She loved him. She would miss him.

But now the men and their wagon were at the gate of the home paddock and turtle-necked Chas Ahearn was fiddling at the gate and she could see ("Hurry, Lucinda, clear them away. Kettle, kettle-put the kettle on") that there was someone in the cart wrapped in a yellow and black checked blanket. She saw Ahearn look her way. The sun had gone. It was very cold. She shivered. She thought, I have wasted ten years in New South Wales to be rewarded by this moment. The silly man has widowed me. But when she saw Ahearn's face as it turned to herpouchy-eyed and turtle-slow-grief came on her. It was like a punch in the stomach. It caught her hard and winded her. She steadied herself against the daub-dusty wall, her mouth wide open, her hand patting her neat, braided hair. A great gust of grief blew down her open mouth, so much air she could barely stand. She was a sail. A great hard curve pushed inwards inside her guts. The wagon had Mr Savage's name in gold letters on its black slabsides. Someone had misspeUed

"vicuals." The killer horse bent its head to eat, but there was no grass here, you stupid beast. Chas Ahearn imagined the woman had not understood her plight. She held out her hand and shook his. She smiled, a little vaguely, but she was known to be aloof and also quite eccentric. Only the furrows on her high forehead suggested any understanding at all. As the men brought the body from the cart and laid it on the kitchen table, she made a fuss about his boot being lost. Elizabeth was thinking about London. She thought: There is nothing to keep me. I am quite free. The reason I must stay exists no more. And then she bit the inside of her cheek so hard that the morrow would find it infected and she had to

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gargle salt water for a month before it passed.

But it was true, she had no reason to be in New South Wales. She did not care for farming. Farming was her husband's concern. He was a soil scientist but secretly romantic. It was he who had such dreams of country life and she who was careful not to pry into the wells from which these desires sprang lest she find something so foolish she would cease to love him altogether. Elizabeth Leplastrier was Elizabeth Fisher — that Fisher-whose great passion in life was factories. In London, this passion had been something of a joke. (She is that person Carlyle refers to in his correspondence as the "Factory.")

Like her daughter after her, the diminutive straight-backed woman was a great enthusiast and it was said that there was not an object, idea or person she could not "lasso" and drag into the stable with her hobby horse. She had seen industrialization as the great hope for women. The very factories which the aesthetes and romantics so abhorred would, one day soon, provide her sex with the economic basis for their freedom. She saw factories with nurseries incorporated in their structure, and staffed kitchen, fired by factory furnaces, that would bake the family dinners the women carried there each morning. Her factories were like hubs of wheels, radiating spokes of care.

When her husband became enamoured of New South Wales, Elizabeth thought about it only in terms of her obsession and she saw, or thought she saw, that innovations of the type she promoted would be more easily made in a place where society was in the process of being born. And, besides, they could slough off the (for Elizabeth) uncomfortable weight of an inherited house in Sloane Square. They could, at last, use their capital. And it was this-and only this-that lay behind her enthusiasm for the colony. She would have her factory. She saw it in her mind's eye, not as something fearful and slab-sided, belching smoke from five tall chimneys, but as others might see a precious mineral. It emanated light.

And yet somehow it did not happen like this. She let gentle passive Abel somehow persuade her that it would be wiser, in the short term, to invest in these twenty thousand acres at Mitchell's Creek. It was a bargain. It was a bargain made them poor. It was a bargain thatthis was not clear immediately, but it became clear soon enoughprevented the factory, which he had promised they would lease in Parramatta, ever being more than a dream. She had had better dreams in London. She did not know how angry she was until that odd collection

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Elizabeth

of men came down the track on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. And then she thought such bright and bitter thoughts that it occurred to her, in passing, that the devil had taken possession of her soul.

She berated Chas Ahearn for having lost her husband's riding boot.

The hut soon filled with the smell of Irish. Damp fustian, stale woolwrapped skin, the warm, mouldy smell of her neighbours. There was old Mrs Kenneally with whiskers on her chin who tried to persuade the widow she should cry. She would not cry. She would rather slap someone. (God save me, she thought, vouchsafe my soul.) Mrs Kenneally tried to persuade the rigid little woman to drink rum, but she would not even unclasp her hands to hold the glass. The O'Hagens and the MacCorkals took possession of the body-this was later, when it was properly dark-and they set up candles and lanterns and washed poor Abel on the cold grass outside, but politely, modestly, and all the time singing in high keen voices, as alien as blacks. And they, too, came, the blacks. They stood on the edges of the lamplight amongst the wattles by the creek. As her daughter was to be, so Elizabeth was now, and not merely physically. In the face of grief, she became energetic. She made decisions. In the face of guilt and uncertainty, she became definite. Now she gave orders. They were obeyed. The MacCorkal boys, the smallest of them taller than six foot, brought chest and trunk across from the hayloft in the barn. It was now around nine o'clock at night. There were people everywhere, but Elizabeth, although a socialist, had no friend to talk to. She had only the neighbours who cooed around her, were alien and gentle, brought her a pot of stew, milked her cow, stacked her pumpkins against the veranda, offered to take her butter in to Parramatta to sell.

Elizabeth became a door her daughter could only press against. She would not wear black. She announced it that night. She maintained her resolve on the cold and widowed morrow. They neither of them wore black, not even to the funeral, the first ever burial at the cemetery-it was only a paddock with two cypress trees not four foot high-at Gulgong. They were all set to go Home. It was this Elizabeth would discuss with Lucinda, and nothing else.

"We must not give in to grief," she said. "This is what your papa would expect of us." But it was anger, not grief, which was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher's trap ready to snare the unwary. Lucinda learned

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instead of two, a clever construction for our feed bins which will-it is quite clever-drown the mice who plunder me. And this, which I have done to myself, I can tolerate, but what I have done to my pretty little Lucinda, I cannot bear to think about. She is so happy that I am, often, irritated that she should be blind enough to be so. Yet it is 1 who have made her blind, I who have kept her away from Parramatta and isolated her from every neighbour and member of the congregation who might, by some casual comment, reveal to her how society really is. I fear my Maker will judge me harshly for what I have done, but, dear Marian, / could not have been otherwise. My daughter lives in a fairy world I have made for her, and they would not tolerate her in open society in New South Wales where they hate women like us with a passion you would not believe without seeing their angry resentful little eyes. It would chill you, Marian, to walk down a street in Parramatta. All this is my great achievement as a parent, that I have produced a proud square peg in the full knowledge that all around, to the edges of the ocean there are nothing but round holes. We must return home.