Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

Lucinda, imagining the expression referred to her red cheeks, was mortified, but Mr Ahearn had liked the expression for its sound, not its verisimilitude-the hat was not too small, nor her cheeks too red. He was a silly puritanical man who wished to show that he cared for her, but had no proper way of doing it, and his attempts resembled his wife's wobbly walk-all that bumping and shoving when all he intended, as she did, was solicitude. It was already noon, late for a weekday market trip, but not for a

Oscar and Lucinda

Saturday when there was a night market in Sydney. The cauliflowers would be sold under gaslight. But there was no heat in the sun and the shadows of the ramshackle timber warehouse behind the little party seemed, to Lucinda, to be filled with the most hostile and uncaring cold. There was a smell of bad fish and a confusion of noises, steam whistles, human voices, the heavy thwack of river timber against wharf iron rings. There was a dinghy caught beneath the wharf and in danger of being sunk by the rise of the tide. There were boatmen calling for its removal, and others, in mid river, jockeying so they might take their turn at the busy wharf. Sol Myer was the subject of abuse for not shifting his boat on. There was now a rush to have Lucinda aboard.. She hurt her ankle jumping down. There was no time-thank God-.> for tears, embraces (she thought of that cardiganed stomach-it was "\ as repulsive as a governor's) or recriminations about her actions.]

She stood straight on the deck with her arms by her sides.

Chas Ahearn could not see the expression on her face. When she; saluted him, as formal as a sentry, he did not know how to take it, | A barge carrying a shining black donkey engine now blocked his view.] It was a large engine and when the men gathered around it to effect its *

transfer to the wharf, he completely lost sight of her. In any case, it. was only a very small smile, and it is unlikely he would have seen it from that distance.

'..""".' 32 U",:,;,/'

Prince Rupert's Drops

There was a small roofed section on Mr Myer's boat, but it seemed that this was more intended for the shelter of the engine than the driver and, in any case, it was decorated with so many oily cans and rags that she thought it better to pretend an affection for the bracing air beside the cauliflowers. A thin sheet of cloud began to materialize in the sky — the smoke from

Prince Rupert's Drops

burning hedgerows on farms along the banks — and it was soon so general that the river, in response, assumed a pearly yellow sheen. She had never been on a boat before. She had never been to Sydney. She sat on a rough packing case in the bow, her hands in her lap, shivering. Sol Myer, like all of Chas Ahearn's clients, knew the story of the tragedy. He saw the way she held herself-the straightness of the spine, the squareness of the shoulder. He had not missed the irony of her last salute, but he was most conscious of her dignity, of her solitariness — both qualities being emphasized by her small stature-and he felt, as he did not often with strangers, that he knew her.

He would like to give her something, a gift. It would give him pleasure. He imagined it, his face creasing. But he had nothing except cauliflowers, and these, look at her, she was stealing from him in any case.

She sat so straight, such a good back, such a proper back, a back you would trust in any crowd, and there was her hand-a different animal entirely-scuttling off down, a tiny crab with its friend the snake, gone stealing little florets of cauliflowers.

Sol Myer started giggling. You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

The river journey was picturesque, with so many pretty farms along its banks. Lucinda could not look at them without feeling angry. She looked straight ahead, shivering. It was cold, of course, but not only cold that caused this agitation. There was a jitteriness, a sort of stage fright about her future which was not totally unpleasant. She dramatized herself. And even while she felt real pain, real grief, real loneliness, she also looked at herself from what she imagined was Sol Myer's perspective, and then she was a heroine at the beginning of an adventure. She did not know that she was about to see the glassworks and that she would, within the month, have purchased them. And yet she would not have been surprised. This was within the range of her expectations, for whatever harm Elizabeth had done her daughter, she had given her this one substantial gift-that she did not expect anything small from her life. It would be easy to see this purchase-half her inheritance splurged on the first thing with a FOR

SALE sign tacked to it-as nothing more than the desire to unburden herself of all this money, and this may be partly true. But the opposite is true as well, i.e., she knew she would need the money to have any sort of freedom. It is better to think about the purchase as a piano manoeuvred up a staircase by ten different circumstances and you cannot say it was one or the other that finally got it there-even the weakest may have been indispensable at that

Oscar and Lucinda

tricky turn on the landing. But of all the shifting forces, there is this one burly factor, this strong and handsome beast, i.e., her previous experience of glass via the phenomenon known as larmes bataviques or Prince Rupert's drops.

You need not ask me who is Prince Rupert or what is a batavique because I do not know. I have, though, right here beside me as I write (I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to and fro across the page) a Prince Rupert drop-a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail. And do not worry that this oddity, this rarity, was the basis for de la Bastie's technique for toughening glass, or that it led to the invention of safety glass-these are practical matters and shed no light on the incredible attractiveness of the drop itself which you will understand faster if you take a fourteenpound sledgehammer and try to smash it on a forge. You cannot. This is glass of the most phenomenal strength and would seem, for a moment, to be the fabled unbreakable glass described by the alchemical author of Mappae Clavicula. And yet if you put down your hammer and take down your pliers instead-I say "if," I am not recommending ityou will soon see that this is not the fabled glass stone of the alchemists, but something almost as magical. For although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin, kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes. And where, a moment before, you had unbreakable glass, now you have grains of glass in every corner of the workshop-in your eyes if you are not carefuland what is left in your hand you can crumble-it feels like sugarwithout danger.

It is not unusual to see a glass blower or a gatherer scrabbling around in a kibble, arm deep in the oily water, sorting through the little gobs of cast-off cullet, fossicking for Prince Rupert's drop. The drops are made by accident, when a tear of molten glass falls a certain distance and is cooled rapidly.

You will find grown men in the glass business, blowers amongst them, who have handled molten metal all their life, and if you put a Prince Rupert's drop before them, they are like children. I have this one here, in my hands. If you were here beside me in the room, I would find it almost impossible not to demonstrate it to you, to take my pliers and-in a second-destroy it. So it was a Prince Rupert's drop, shaped like a tear, but also like a seed, that had a powerful effect on Lucinda Leplastrier. It is the nature