Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

I

Prince Rupert's Drops

of these things. You can catch a passion from them, and the one in question, the first one Lucinda saw-at an age when she had dimples on her knees-was a particularly beautiful specimen, twisted red and milk-white glass from the damp brick island of Murano. It was sent to Abel Leplastrier by his great friend John Bell, FRS, the author of the enthusiastic piece in the Britannica. And Lucinda, entering Sydney on her bed of cauliflowers, would have reason to remember the day it arrived, eight years before, in Panamatta.

The post-office steps were made from wood and there was a great fat swathe of sunshine spilled across them. It was winter and the sunshine was welcome. She could feel it through the cotton of her dress. The packet steamer had just arrived from Sydney. Her papa sat beside her on the step. He had Mr Bell's parcel. It was this that took his attention and he could be no more bothered by the complaints of the owners of passing skirts and trousers (sour-smelling wool, velvet with mothballs) than by the demands of all the other mail from Home; these last he threw into his sugar bag.

His hands were like his body-board strong-but they were shortfingered and surprisingly delicate in their movements; they attacked Mr Bell's parcel like a pair of pale-bellied spiders. Pick, pick. Red sealing was shattered. Brown paper was Tom in such a way it could never be reused. Lucinda pressed close against her papa. She liked the rough feel of his jacket on her cheek, all the hairy smells of bran and tweed and apple skins. She saw the Prince Rupert's drop emerge from its nest of wrinkled paper but mistook it-ooh! — for a humbug or a sally twist. She reached out her hand, but her father held it from her.

"No," he said. He did not look at her. He read the letter which accompanied it. Her father made a noise-a little moan-and jumped to his feet. Lucinda stood also.

"Stay, Lucinda."

She felt herself shot through with dread. She did as she was bade. She sat on the steps. She cradled the sugar bag in her lap for comfort, and watched her father run away from her. Down the steps he went, two at a time, pushing past brilliantined clerks and bent-backed lags. He sprinted-a broad man with short legs-across Church Street. He raised his arm and hurled the glass at the sandstone wall of the magistrate's court. A policeman rose from his chair on the veranda of the court. He watched as her papa picked up the glass humbug. The policeman called out something over his shoulder and another policeman-a thin man

Oscar and Lucinda

with a grey beard almost as wide as his chest-came out to join him. Together they both stared at her papa who, without knowing himself observed, now walked back across the rutted street, fouling his boots on steaming ox dung, wiping them clean on a surviving patch of tussock grass. The thin policeman went back into the court. The other policeman resumed his seat. Her papa trudged up the steps and-no longer smelling quite so sweet — sat beside her. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, and produced his clasp knife. His hands were trembling. He had difficulty setting the knife the way he wanted it-with the largest blade pulled out just a fraction. He looked at Lucinda and gave a gruesome sort of grin. Then he put the tail of the Prince Rupert's drop between the blade and handle and forced the blade hard home.

The drop shattered, of course. It sprayed like brown sugar across the post-office steps, sprinkled a young widow's bonnet, dusted the black whiskers of a flash-looking man in nankeen breeches. There were other affected. There was much brushing and head turning, and perhaps there would have been trouble, for Parramatta could still be a violent place, but when these who had been so rudely assaulted located their assailant, they found him weeping; and not only him, but the solemn little girl beside him. They could not know-how could they? — that while the father and daughter had tears in common, this single effect was produced by two quite different causes. For Abel Leplastrier had been given, in John Bell's letter, an annotated index to the event he had just witnessed. The glass was by way of being a symbol of weakness and strength; it was a cipher for someone else's heart. It was a confession, an accusation, a cry of pain. It was for this he wept.

Lucinda was moved by something much more simple-grief that such a lovely thing could vanish like a pricked balloon. But her feelings were not unlayered and there was, mixed with that hard slap of disappointment, a deeper, more nourishing emotion: wonder.

It was very more-ish.

It was her mother who provided the second Prince Rupert's drop. This did not arrive unexpectedly, but was sought out by advertisement. The cynical interpretation of this was that Elizabeth Leplastrier, although careful with pennies, would not be denied what her husband and little girl had experienced. The more generous explanation is that the little girl had not stopped talking about it and her mother decided she should have one for her ninth birthday. It turned out to be a great extravagance, and Abel sulked and made the cynical interpretation.

Glassworks

They "let it off" on the steps of their hut. It was early, with the sun just slanting through the crisscrossed needles of the casuarinas which lined the creek. There was dew on the grass and their boots were wet from it. The larme batavique caught the light and gathered it in like molten metal straight from a glassworks' glory-hole. It withstood her father's hammer and her mother's axe. And then Lucinda-it was her birthday, after all-took the needle-nosed pliers and snapped-it took a grunt to manage it-the tail.

Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence. There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

33

Glassworks

The glassworks at Lanson's Wharf in Darling Harbour were the first in Sydney. There was nothing pretty about them, no suggestion of the molten mysteries which took place within, no light from the glory-hole, just a smudge of black smoke against the cold chalky

Oscar and Lucinda

sky. It would have been easy for Lucinda to have missed them, easy for any number of reasons. The first is that Lanson's Wharf was behind the Market Street Wharf, and had the latter not been crowded with a tangle of punts, barges, and a steamboat (the cockney pilot of which was taking picturesque exception to a Chinaman moored in a dinghy) Sol Myer would have brought his load of pale-stemmed cauliflowers alongside and Lucinda would never have travelled the extra distance up into the throat of Darling Harbour where the glassworks lay waiting. And even then it would have been so easy for her to have ignored them. There was nothing in their architecture to separate them from their neighbours.