Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

Mrs Smith could not carry her emotions as far as the front parlour. She got as far as the bottom of the stairs when she turned abruptly and said: "I cannot stay, mum. Not while you comport youself in such a way, mum."

"In what way?" Lucinda felt nothing but confusion as though she had been riding a trap which has, quite silently, lost a wheel, and there she was tipped over in the rock-studded roadside when the minute before she had been reclining on a cushion and thinking dreamy thoughts about the shape of clouds.

"The 'gentleman,' " said Mrs Smith. It was all she could manage. It was as if the word itself would choke her.

"But, Mrs Smith, it was you who made up his bed. And as you are in the house yourself, it seems to be perfectly proper."

"Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own."

"Have your friends at church been speaking to you?"

But Mrs Smith would not answer so direct a question and her eyes took on a dark and hard and glittering righteousness. She lifted her

Oscar and Lucinda

chin and clasped her hands in front of her pinafore. The passage where they stood was a dank place. Neither of them moved for a good two minutes.

When Lucinda returned to sit opposite Oscar at the table, he did not immediately notice the distress in her face. He noticed, rather, that she had tied her napkin in a large hard knot which she could not, no matter how she plucked at it, untangle.

73

Judge Not

If you saw Mrs Smith with her dun-coloured shawl around her shoulders, her cane basket in the crook of her wiry arm, saw her come up the hill past the butcher's in Mort Street, Balmain, you might remark, if you remarked anything at all, that here was a woman that kept the shutters of her life screwed shut, who kept herself close to the wall as she walked, and thus occupied that thin strip of dry shadow when all the rest of the street was wet with sunshine. A private women, you would think, until you found something livelier to interest you (therea tinker sitting in the gutter mending a tiny saucepan with a burnt black handle) and then you could forget her. And yet, three days after Mrs Smith had left Luanda's employ, there was not a maid in Sydney who did not know of the unorthodox situation out at Whitfield's Farm. This did not mean that there were no further maids or cooks available, but rather than the ones who put themselves forward were opportunists who imagined that they could, given the impropriety in the house, request a premium for their services. There was not one who asked for less than a guinea a week. This was offensive enough. But there were other things, not easily graspable, about their attitude-for while they swindled, or attempted swindling, they adopted an expression (all in the eyes and mouth) of moral superiority.

Judge Not

These interviews left Lucinda feeling soiled and angry, and she would have had no help at all had not Mrs Froud stepped forward.

Mrs Froud was the wife of Lucinda's second gatherer. She came to "do" two afternoons a week. Mrs Froud was jolly and friendly, but you could see-or so it seemed to Lucinda-that she had made an assumption. This assumption was quite incorrect. There was nothing to make an assumption about.

Oscar lay in his room and sucked his sheet. He wrote to Mr Stratton about the dangers of gambling life.

My dear Patron, [he wrote] 1 cannot help but have the greatest reservations about the serpent I have placed in your trusting at a time when I knew too well the effects of its poison. I sent my journals to you because I promised you, and now I beg you to make a promise: burn them. I regret the day 1 ftrst set foot upon the track. Opium, surely, would not be so great a curse. This will all seem far-fetched to you, but let me tell you that at this moment I am kindly lodged by a fellow sufferer, and although we inhabit a small house, no bigger than my father's cottage, we hardly speak to one another for fear that something that we say or do will lead to a horse, a game of cards and we shall, without intending to, hnd ourselves once more in that state of mad intoxication.

There were pages of it, all pretty much the same. They reflected Oscar's idea of what was happening in the house, but what was so obvious to him was not obvious to Lucinda at all. While he shrank from conversation, wary of where it might lead, she had hoped for it. While he tried to diminish himself, to make himself small and inoffensive, she sat at table and waited for him to join her. She did not like to go running to his room continually, and yet she could not leave him there alone. She imagined he was gripped by loneliness. She saw he did not hate her, and yet she felt him pulling back. The reason for this presented itself to her one night while she was preparing for bed.

He thinks I have him in mind for a husband.

It was only to set his mind at rest that she invented the romantic story of her passion for a clergyman whom Bishop Dancer had so cruelly exiled to Boat Harbour. She wished to make him imagine that her heart was already spoken for, that all she required from him was company and conversation. She wished him calm, steady, and to quit all this nervous scuttling about the house. But she told her story to a man whose emotions were in such a state that he could barely hold the load they carried, let alone the unhappy

?RH

Oscar and Luanda

story she asked him to lash on atop. He was much moved, too moved. It was ridiculous, he knew-he hardly knew her-but it took everything in him to stop bursting into tears. He chewed his lip, he grimaced, he excused himself while there was still sultana cake uneaten on the plate. She heard him creaking up the stairs. The door shut to his room. She picked up her tea-cup and threw it at the wall.

74

A Degree from Oxford

"This chap, Miss Leplastrier, is he any good?"

Mr d'Abbs held her eye quite fiercely for a minute, but he could not sustain. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. And while he enjoyed being thought of in this way-it was no commercial liability in Sydney-it was not the truth at all. He might let her glassworks go cold through timidity or cautiousness, but he would not break the law.

"He has a degree from Oxford."

"Oxford," said Mr d'Abbs. He was pleased, but did not wish to appear impressionable. His hands-large hands for such a small manplayed briefly with his blue silk tie, then held the edge of the desk, then slid until they found the drawer, and in the drawer a cigar. The cigar was such a big one that Lucinda, when she saw it, thought it made him look like a caricature in Punch.

"Oriel," she offered.

Mr d'Abbs blinked. He leaned forward a little as if he expected her to say more. When there was obviously no more to say, he frowned. "It is not just a question of clever men," he said. He fussed with some grey ash which had landed on his green corduroy jacket. "Really, there is no cleverness required. The work itself would drive him mad with boredom. All it requires is neatness. So why do you come to me with a man from Oxford?"

A Degree from Oxford

Mr d'Abbs really wanted to be flattered. He prided himself on his employees as he prided himself on the paintings and lithographs that crowded his walls at home. He was an artist himself. He liked artists. He was a philosopher. He liked philosophers. He provided them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.