Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar and Lucinda

She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit. They were different, and yet not ill matched.

They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric's lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. It was an out-offocus town of men with seas of bobbing hats. But on this night she felt the streets accept them. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?

They pushed past bold-eyed young women with too many ribbons and jewels, past tight-laced maidens and complacent merchants with their bellies pushing so forcefully against their waistcoats that their shirts showed above their trousers. Lucinda was happy. Her arm rested on Oscar's arm.

She thought: Anyone can see I have been crying. She thought: I have pink eyes like a dormouse. But she did not really care.

82

Oscar in Love

My great-grandfather was in love, and although he managed to hide all the signs of his despair from Lucinda, he was miserable. He made little jokes about the natty gents in checked waistcoats, laughed, patted her arm, but whatever happiness he felt he saw only as a sign of all that would be denied to him.

This was because he had an idea in his head, and I do not mean the idea that he had promised to reveal to Lucinda at the dinner table. This

Oscar in Love

was another idea, quite separate. The idea that caused the real trouble was the one that Luanda herself had lodged in his head-that she was in love with Dennis Hasset. She had done everything possible to make the idea stick. She had left the swollen envelopes on her mantel for days at a time. She had told him she was in love. She had spent hours of her Sunday at her secretaire. The letters grew so fat that they required excessive amounts of red wax to seal them properly. The idea had taken hold, and such was the stubborn set of Oscar's mind that it would not easily be knocked loose. So it did not matter that she took his arm. It was the prior action, the snatching away, that stayed in his mind. It was here the truth seemed contained, and in the second act, the taking of the arm, he saw only pity.

Oscar did not like Dennis Hasset. He had not met him, but he did not like him. Not that he imagined the man had bad qualities. Quite the reverse. He imagined hirn good, clever, handsome, generous, as a manly man who would be attractive to a lady. He could think of nothing to do to press his claim in competition, nothing except to display an excess of goodness, of selflessness, as if this behaviour, this loving self-denial, would provide him with the rewards that selfishness could not.

It was this that lay behind the dangerous wager he now planned to undertake in the dining room of the Oriental Hotel.

There were only two other tables occupied in the cavernous blackand-white-tiled dining room. A farming family occupied a table pushed gracelessly against a fluted pillar. A single gentleman in a frock coat sat beside a window; he read from a chapbook while he ate. Lucinda was not hungry. She ordered as Oscar did. Her mind was occupied with the problem of how to undo delicately the clever knitting of her lies concerning Dennis Hasset. She could not concentrate on anything as ordinary as food.

She thought: This is what it is like when you love a man. She watched him as he buttered his bread and cut it into nine small squares. Should not this hitherto alien act now feel dear to her?

"Do you know what I envy you?" she said. "It is that you are not constrained."

She meant: The way you walk, walk in here, your clothes like that, and do not give a hoot what opinion the waiters or the diners may have

of you.

He smiled, his piece of bread held between thumb and forefinger.

"You do not mind who sees you or who hears you or what they think of you. You know your own value, I think, and this puts you in a strong position."

Oscar and Lucinda

"And you?"

"Oh," she rearranged a small pin in her hair. "I am too careful." He thought about this for a moment or two while he chewed his bread, and as he had the habit of chewing thirty-two times, this gave him the appearance of great sagacity whereas he was merely wondering, whilst he counted, whether he should disagree with her own assessment of herself and cite her Pak-Ah-Pu and wonder if this was, really Miss Leplastrier, the habit of a careful woman.

But he said instead: "It does no harm to be careful."

They sat in silence. He seemed not to be discomforted by it. She was. The silence made her socalled love for Dennis Hasset seem too heavy and insurmountable an obstruction. It made her feel dull. It made her too aware of the waiters watching them. She did not like the Oriental Hotel with its crawling adoration of wealth. She began to resent the dining room and think how she would never have come here on her own initiative.

"What a lovely place it is," he said, gazing around.

She thought: Do not be irritated and do not judge. He is not Them and he is not You. He is himself, uniquely so. When he admires, he admires as someone who cannot afford this luxury, not as someone who takes it as their right. Be like your papa who would want to know how the fluted pillars were made and what sort of fish that man is eating, and where it was caught and whether it is sweet to taste.

"Shall I tell you my idea?" he asked her.

"Oh, yes, do please.",>;

"It involves glass.";«; «s?

"A subject close to my heart." * î

"We sometimes guard the things close to our hearts." «< She did not look at him. She said: "You do not need to tread so carefully with me."

"Yes," he said unhappily. He saw no invitation to intimacy in this. His preconceptions made such an interpretation impossible and so he understood her back to front. Lucinda heard his tone. She thought: I have been too bold. I am always in too much of a rush.

"And," she said, working against the current of a depression which now rose up and seemed destined to take possession of her mood, "of glass, tell me, what was your idea?" The waiter brought their consommé, not in a soup plate, in a deep bowl. Did he always have consommé? She had always thought it food for invalids.

Oscar in Love,

"You could manufacture conservatories." <

"Is this your idea?" she asked, her heart now truly leaden.

"Oh, no," he grinned.

"I would loathe," she smiled, "to manufacture conservatories." They both looked at each other, their soup spoons raised above their bowls. In that moment she felt ridiculously happy-She felt he loved her after all. She could not stop smiling. "So what," she said, laughing, "is your idea?"

He sipped his soup. He had a nice sipping mouth. She liked the way it came to meet the spoon. She desired the mouth. She breathed out very quietly.

"You must tell me," she said.