Oscar and Lucinda - First Edition cover
This novel about two strange characters, Oscar
and Lucinda, tackles the great gambles in life – religious faith and human
love.
KumKum, Zakia, & Gopa
The writing has a different kind of energy
than novels written in the West. The hero and heroine are people who have a
surprising angularity, and share a great obsession.
Mathew, Kavita, & Esther
That the persons named in the title only
meet in the novel after 200 pages makes the reader impatient with the often
detailed and rather pointless descriptions that burden the book.
The image of the glass church dominates
the last quarter of the book, and a brilliant image it is. The conclusion sees
the church itself turned into a fateful vault for Oscar – recalled two generations
later by the great grandchild who is the unseen narrator of the story.
The group of readers pose at the end of the reading:
Kavita, Esther, Gopa, KumKum, Ankush, Mathew, Sunil, & Joe
To read the full account click below ...
Oscar
and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Reading on Mar 28, 2014
Present: Esther, KumKum, Joe, Sunil, Mathew, Gopa,
Kavita, Zakia, Ankush
Absent:Talitha (out of town), Preeti (out of
town), Thommo (busy with sister's travel)
These are the dates for the next two
sessions:
Apr 21-27: Shakespeare Festival, with reading by KRG on Sat Apr 26
May9, 2014: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gopa who chose the book introduced it. An
Australian friend in 2004 suggested she would enjoy the novel and when she
found it in London at a charity shop for 50p she could not resist – or rather
took a gamble, suggested Sunil, laughing. It is not like the usual novel with
heroes and heroines who have no blotch on their characters. Even Maggie of Mill
on the Floss, the novel by George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans), had
qualities. The writing too has a different kind of energy than novels written
in the West. Someone suggested its size (519 p or 180,000 words) was a
qualifying factor to be considered for the Man Booker Prize. KumKum thought
that the prize laid even more store by 'strangeness,' a quality this novel is
blessed with.
Esther provided a link to the BBC Book
Club interview with Peter Carey:
Lucinda's character can be ascribed to her
upbringing. She was a born-again feminist. Toward the end of the novel it is
related that after she loses everything in her wager with Oscar, she goes to
work in a pickle factory and fights for the rights of women workers.
The oddest of passions brings Oscar &
Lucinda together – gambling. But in the novel both of their worst fears come
true. Oscar's was the fear of drowning, and hers, the loss of her inherited
wealth.
Ankush counted the number of sects of
Christianity that show up in the novel, many of them represented by individuals
who are only caricatures, like Mr Stratton, according to Joe. However, Gopa
demurred – she said she is familiar with two priests who are exactly like that.
A 'structure for divining the true will of God' is mentioned in Ch 9 – Throwing
Lots. It comes across that the four contending denominations in Hennacombe
were Evangelists, Baptists, Catholics, and Anglicans. For a detailed article on
the novel see
Bob’s Dreaming: Playing with Reader
Expectations in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda by Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, University of La
Rochelle
Another article suggests that the
Victorian legacy of doubt in Christianity did not affect the characters in this
novel. The final sinking of the glass church is seen as a precursor to modern
times with its lack of belief:
About the wager on God's existence and the
role of the narrator who appears here and there in the novel, see:
Sunil said there are 142 Christian sects
in Kochi, including one called the Children of God, who had to hastily change
their name because it belonged to a group that had gained some notoriety
abroad.
1. KumKum
The reading from the chapter 'Happiness'
finds Oscar and Lucinda cohabiting, but separate and wakeful in their beds:
there was a great closeness, the closeness of
intimates, but also a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but
of neighbours. there was a great closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also
a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but of neighbours.
The intimacy grows, Lucinda overcomes her
prejudices and day to day chores bring them closer:
they became friends, by scrubbing the pitted,
checkered tiles of the kitchen floor, working side by side, creeping backwards.
It's all peaceful domestic bliss, said Joe
laughing! What else can a defrocked priest do, asked KumKum? Ankush complained
that when reading the novel he became impatient that the two protagonists had
not met even after 200 pages.
2. Esther
Esther chose the chapter 'Prince Rupert's
Drops.' For more information, see
Prince Ruperts drops
The description of the fabled 'glass of
the most phenomenal strength' which can sustain a hammer blow without breaking,
entrances the reader, as it did Lucinda. Esther’s readings ended with a
paragraph composed of a single161-word sentence, as Esther noted. Its rapturous
note expresses the thrill experienced by Lucinda who decides to buy the glass
works on that consideration alone: 'a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a
material as any to build a life from.'
Gopa said the writing style is different
than that of the majority of UK & US writers. KumKum remarked that some of
the characters do not help the story move along at all. The governess, Miriam,
is quite a character, however.
3. Kavita
Kavita read the chapter in which Lucinda
realises she is in love with Oscar while walking with him:
They promenaded, arm in arm, up the hill, towards
Castlereagh. He had, he declared, "an idea" he would not tell her.
The idea gave his mouth its rosebud smile. He would tell her his idea at dinner
– she would be his guest.
The phrase 'she was starched and pressed
as a Baptist in a riding habit,' brought a smile to readers' lips.
4. Mathew
The passage chosen from the chapter 'After
Whitsunday' describes the cleric, Denis Hasset. He takes the measure of Lucinda
sitting opposite him in grey silk and trousers, and assesses her as 'remarkable
young woman, not his type, but unlike anyone he had known before.' As in much
of the book the description of the two people occupies a large part of the
matter.
5. Sunil
The weird events of the chapter titled 'Oscar and Miriam' were the
subject of Sunil's reading. Quicker than the Odd Bod can roll over he begets a
child by Mriam, and all because of a singular skill she exercised, 'the moment
a ministering hand is placed on that part of my anatomy …'
The reading ends with Oscar walking into the glass church while it
was still floating on the wooden base set on the catamaran; he sits on a chair
in the middle. The whole edifice sinks, Oscar drowns; and thus said Joe, the
author solves the critical problem of how to end the novel. Someone suggested
the author's publishing agent must have been after him to finish, and under
pressure he found the key to ending the novel.
6. Joe
Joe, like Ankush, noted it takes half the
book before Oscar and Lucinda meet. The reader has to cut through a thicket of
descriptions, replete with details. For instance, does anyone recall by the end
of the novel that early on Mr Fig had taken off his boot and stretched his leg
beneath the table so that his stockinged foot was somewhere in amongst Miss
Malcolm's skirts?
Typical
of such pointless and tedious description is this of Mrs Stratton making
scones:
This was not for the
lunch, but the tea Mrs Stratton liked to give for the Old Men (although the
Squire looked after them anyway and Mrs Stratton had no business to give away
what she could not afford). She needed the big table to make the scones, but
Theophilus had the table so she tried to make do in the pantry, using the back
of the wooden breakfast tray. She balanced it on the top of a stool and had to
kneel to roll the dough across it. But the tray slipped and the dough fell. She
said nothing out loud. She scraped the dough off the floor and carried it to
the little window to examine it. She was a thin, nervous woman with dark sunken
eyes and brisk movements, but she was, while she examined the dough, very
still. She was thinking, weighing up, knowing the fuss that would be made if
they found her dough in the bucket for the hens. She pushed the dough together
and sat it on the tray. Then she went to the doorway where she surveyed the
mournful man. He did not see her. As she watched, he sighed.”
No
wonder, said Joe, he could read this 500-page novel fast for one can
delightfully skip through it, although he had to decelerate toward the end, when
it became more interesting.
He
liked that glass church very much. What a brilliant way to capture a man’s
heart! Unfortunately it becomes Oscar’s mausoleum as well.
Sunil said half the clergy were into
gambling. Pascal's argument on why we must assume God exits is also adumbrated
in the book.
7. Ankush
Ankush chose a passage on gambling which
is one of the two obsessions revealed in the book. When it turns out by
interrogation that Lucinda knows the ins and outs of gambling terms in cards,
Osacr says she is not culpable, and there is no sin to be absolved of.
"Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We
bet – it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of
England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough – we bet that there is a
God. We bet our life on it.”
Sunil remarked that Mr Stratton uses
gambling to make money (with codebooks sent by his adopted son, Oscar) and goes
bust trying, and commits suicide in the end.
In an interview Peter Carey denied that
the novelist, George Eliot, had any influence on this novel, and in fact he did
not approve of George Eliot, who has similarities with Lucinda.
8. Gopa
Gopa read the passage where Oscar is
punished cruelly for eating Christmas pudding because his father (one of the
Plymouth Brethren sect) believed 'pudding was the fruit of Satan.' Joe wondered
why she read the passage of child abuse – there were after all many other
bright or curious passages in the novel. In those days it was not child abuse
to rap a child on the head, said Gopa. Carey never meant to criticise the
church. His life was 'shaped by Christianity,' he says in the interview.
Sunil had a story about a priest in
Kanamaly who having preached one week against the evils of drink was found
quite pissed the next week.
Matthew mentioned that for a book of this
size the glossary is much too small! KumKum had a story about some brethren-type
of person who came to evangelise her all dressed in a pressed shirt and tie in the
mid-summer heat of Delhi.
The Readings
KumKum
Ch 77 Happiness
She did not expect to be happy whilst
parcelled up in a grubby apron, clogs on her feet, scrubbing her own floors, or
being snubbed at the greengrocer's, kept out of her own works, denied the
company of Dennis Hasset, becoming so cut off from life that her only companion
was a homeless stray, a defrocked priest with blue-stained hands and a
sweat-weary smell. These unpromising circumstances served to distract her
attention whilst happiness snuck up on her like a poacher in the night.
She had not known she was happy, but it
had been silently remarked on by others, by the glass blowers, by Mr d'Abbs, by
Mr Chas Ahearn who had paid her a visit and brought her a gift of bantam eggs.
They noticed, because her manner was gentler, because they were spared those
ironies and sarcasms which Mr Ahearn, for one, had thought much too pronounced
of late. She kissed his cheek and called him "uncle" and the old chap
blushed to the lobes of his big fleshy ears.
Yet she had not recognized the moment
when her scales had tipped from "down" to "up." She had
been too busy to notice, until this morning, the Sunday before Advent. She was
walking with her lodger down past her piebald cottage (half of it whitewashed,
half red brick). It was an hour or so before early service and the Bal main
bells were still silent. Sleek Herefords (the property of the bankrupt estate
of Whitefield's Farm) gorged themselves on the new spring pasture. Lucinda wore
a long white cotton voile with tiny roses worked into it. She carried her
gloves and prayer book in one hand and her bonnet in the other. She walked
along the thin cattle track along the spine of the point. There was still dew,
not a lot, but she felt it soak into the hem of her dress. She did not mind. Oscar
strode through the calf-high grass beside her. Nothing happened. Nothing was said.
But she thought-I am happy.
She looked at Oscar. He did not notice
her. He was busy looking out for snakes, surveying the harbour-a sea of rough
hills poured full of silver glass. H had his head up, his head down, his eyes
everywhere at once. He had stuck a tiny blue wildflower into the band of his
tall black hat. She thought what a pleasant companion he had turned out to be,
and if they were in such disgrace that the barely educated vicar of Balmain
should think it best not to "see" them as they filed past him out of
church, it was a most superior kind of disgrace.
She had judged him too hastily. This
was a bad habit. It had caused her trouble before. She had compared him to
Dennis Hasset and had pursed her lips when he picked up his tea-cup in a
certain way, or placed the pot back on the table a little too heavily. She had
felt slighted when he had scurried back into his room and shut the door on her.
And yet-how quickly it happened-she had come to be proud of the propriety with
which they now shared the house, the sense of measured discipline (a virtue she
much admired) that they brought to their conduct so that there was a great
closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also a considerable distance, the
distance not of strangers, but of neighbours. They occupied a position well
above those Philistines who snubbed and slighted them. God, who saw all things,
would not find their conduct unbecoming.
They did not gamble or take hazards of
any type.
Oscar had no experience of female
friendship. At first he was shy with her, stammered, tripped over himself,
tried to make himself invisible around her. Only in his unholy dreams did he
ever imagine anything even slightly more intimate. And if there had been a
maid, this is how it might have stayed. But Mrs Froud had retired due to being
in a certain condition, and there was no maid at all. There was a cottage that
must be looked after, a fireplace that must be red-leaded, soap to be made,
carpets beaten, the brass doorknobs taken to with halves of lemon. Seeing how
the young mistress worked-quick, small steps, slap of brush, flick of duster,
smack of mop, clatter of bucket, an energy quite in excess of what was promised
by her physical size-the lodger took off his shiny jacket, rolled up his
sleeves to reveal thin milk-white arms, and worked beside her. Lucinda was
embarrassed at first. She did not think it manly.
And yet this is how they became
friends, by scrubbing the pitted, checkered tiles of the kitchen floor, working
side by side, creeping backwards. They did their jobs inexpertly. They drank
tea by the potful and kept the leaves to use in rug-cleaning. And when they had
at last finished, usually around midnight, Lucinda would kick off her shoes and
let them drop on the damp floor and Oscar would put his feet up on a chair. He
would be smudged with red-lead, or W. G. Nixey's black-lead, and have sticky
wax on his elbows. She thought him an "old woman," a "kind
soul," "odd fellow." Sometimes she looked at him and saw him as
if she had never seen him before-a "vision," humming, stirring his
tea with the blunt end of his knife, hooting with high laughter, talking Latin
which he expected her to understand. He was, in his conversation, so
elliptical, so tangential. He made her feel plain, uncultured, inelegant. She
did not guess her cast-off shoes were "dainty," the object of his
admiration.
She saw what she had seen aboard the
Leviathan-that he was not a man to be so easily patronized, that he was a
passionate man, an enthusiastic man, who would plunge into the jungle of ideas,
not fearfully, but impatiently (thwack, slap, wet clothes from the copper), but
also a pleasure.
He was very homesick and liked to talk
about England. It was a different England from the one which had so
disappointed her. It was a dear, green place, and she could not know that the
Strattons' house was damp and cold or that the Baptist boys had made him eat a
stone. He talked fondly of the Strattons whom he called "my patrons"
and did not tell her that Hugh Stratton, having as much success with
horse-races as he had had with farming, had used Oscar's system to lose all his
capital and was into debt so deep he was now begging money from men he had not
known since Oriel.
There was a bright white pack of cards
in the cedar sideboard by Oscar's elbow. He saw it there, sitting askew beside
a ball of grey wool and a tangled tape measure, saw it frequently, each evening
when he reached out for the sherry decanter (engraved with the image of an emu)
and poured out the two thimblefuls which was their "nightcap." He
said nothing about the cards. He imagined his hostess-so disciplined in her
running of the household-untroubled by them. He wisher* he had the strength of
character to fling them away, but having made himself ridiculous aboard the
Leviathan he dared not.
They did not discuss cards, but what
they did not talk about gave their evenings a tense and tingling edge and left
them both happy, yes, but wakeful in their beds.
Esther
Ch 32 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 fourteen-pound 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 it you 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 careful and what is left in your hand you
can crumble-it feels like sugar without 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 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.
…
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.
…
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 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.
They "let it off" on the
steps of their hut. It was early, with the sun just slanting through the
criss-crossed 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.
Kavita
Ch 81 Promenade
All this, Lucinda thought, I have
inherited from my mama: that I am s too critical, that I ride my hobby horse
into the ground, that I have a bad temper, that I will not relax and be quiet
and because of this I push away those who mean me well. I will not allow anyone
to be a simple "good chap" as my papa always could. How can I be in
love with him and be so lacking in the most simple trust?
These thoughts were occasioned by her
response to Oscar who, whilst walking up Druitt Street towards Castlereagh, had
attempted to take her arm. She had snatched it back on reflex. She was
immediately cross at herself for doing so. Tears smeared the gas lights as if
they were watercolour. Do not cry. I will not. Take his arm. I cannot. Take it.
I cannot. You must.
She took his arm, looking straight
ahead, her heart pounding. It was that time of the evening when there is blue
in the sky and yellow in the shop lamps. They promenaded, arm in arm, up the
hill, towards Castlereagh. He had, he declared, "an idea" he would
not tell her. The idea gave his mouth its rosebud smile. He would tell her his
idea at dinner-she would be his guest. He teased her nicely with his silence on
the subject. He was tall and stretched, with a long, twisting neck and a high
black hat against the constraints of which one could see his hair protesting.
She was short-the brim of her enormous hat was barely level with his shoulder.
His gestures were jerky, hers controlled.
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-of-focus 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.
Mathew
Ch 34 After Whitsunday
He was a tall, well-made man in his
early thirties. His face could almost be called handsome, and often was, for he
gave his companions such a sense of his deep interest in them that they easily
overlooked those heavy eyebrows-joined across the bridge of his nose-that
marred his looks. He had dark curly hair, elegant side-whiskers, a slightly
long face and a dimpled chin. His natural complexion was a step short of olive,
although an increasing fondness for claret made it redder than the season could
explain. But claret or no, he was one of those people who-should you lay a hand
on his arm, say, in comradeship-you would find to be of a surprising hardness:
surprising, that is, to you, but not to the twenty-four boys at St Andrew's day
school whom he coached in Rugby.
…
She sat opposite him. She was very
young, but he could not tell exactly how young. Her manner, in many respects,
was that of a woman in her twenties, although this impression was contradicted
not only by her small stature, but in the way her confidence-so bright and
clean at the beginning of a sentence where every word was as unequivocable as
the unsmudged lines of her perfectly arched eyebrows-would seem to evaporate as
she began, not quite to mumble, but to speak less distinctly, and her eyes, which
had begun by almost challenging his, now slid away towards bookshelf or window ledge.
There was also the charming, rather European way she gestured with her hands they
were very flexible and she could bend her palms right back from her wrists, her
fingers back at another angle again-and there was something in these gestures,
so ostensibly worldly, so expressive, even expansive which, combined with the
shyness which her shifting eyes betrayed, gave an impression of great pluck.
Dennis Hasset was much touched by her.
She wore an unusual garment: grey silk
with a sort of trouser underneath. Dennis Hasset – no matter what his bishop
thought – was not a radical, and this garment shocked him, well, not quite
shocked, but let us say it gave a certain unsettling note to their interview,
although the discord was muted by the quality of the silk and the obvious skill
of the dressmaking. These were things he knew about. The garment declared its
owner to be at once wealthy and not quite respectable. She was
"smart," but not a beauty. There was about her, though, this sense of
distillation. Her hands and feet were quite dainty, but it was in her face that
he saw this great concentration of essence. It was not that her eyes were
small, for they were large. The green iris was not a deeper green, or a
brighter green. It was clear, and clean and, in some way he could not
rationally explain, a great condensation of green. The eyes were gateways to a
fierce and lively intelligence. They were like young creatures which had lost
their shells, not yet able to defend themselves.
The mouth was small, but there was no
suggestion of meanness, merely-with the lips straight-determination or-when
they were relaxed and the plump lower lip was permitted to show-a disturbing
(because it appeared to be unconscious) sensuality.
She wore a wide-brimmed grey hat with a
kingfisher-blue feather which was, although "dashing," not quite the
thing. Her hair – what one could see of it-was brown, less than perfectly tidy.
This lack of care, when every other part of her was so neat, and pressed,
produced an unsettling impression. The hair seemed wilful. It did not occur to
him that her hair was, as she would put it, "like that."
In any case, he knew he had met a
remarkable young woman, not his type, but unlike anyone he had known before.
Sunil
Ch 108 Oscar and Miriam
When Oscar Hopkins and Miriam Chadwick
came down the stairs to the cobbler's shop at last, it was to announce their
impending marriage.
There was a small wet stain on the back
of my great-grandmother's green silk riding habit. This was remarked on-how
could it not bebut nothing was ever said out loud, and, in any case, Miriam had
plied the young traveller with Mr Hammond's expensive emollients and creams,
with stinging iodine, blue-red mercurochrome, bright yellow "Healing
Ointment," had rubbed him with so many healing dyes that he soon looked
like a tropical fish in his father's aquarium; with so many wet and greasy
substances about, no one could be surprised if Miriam also spilled a wee drop
on her clothing.
Oscar, when at last he opened the heavy
cedar door at the top of the stairs above the cobbler's, had the stunned and
slightly vacant air you might see in some one rescued from a burning house.
As he walked down the loud, uncarpeted
stairs, he felt his sin declared to all the world.
I love Lucinda Leplastrier.
The cobbler was working at his bench.
Oscar could not meet his gaze. He poked instead at a pair of dancing pumps
hanging from the door. To these he nodded.
He had fornicated in God's temple, he
who had judged the cedar cutters at Urunga.
All my life, he thought, I have sought
the devil's murmuring in my ear, have let him persuade me that it is holy that
I bet, that I abandon my father, that I draw poor Stratton into the morass, and
all the while I am armoured by conceit. I play the saint. When Miss Leplastrier
and I were most passionately engaged, I imagined it was I who restrained us
from sin, I who ensured our chastity until that happy day (today, today I might
have written to her in triumph) when she might have seen what I am and accepted
my proposal that we stand as bride and bridegroom in God's sight. But it was
not I. And the proof is here: that the moment a ministering hand is placed on
that part of my anatomy, the minute, the instant it is touched, the first time
in all its life-why, then, I fail the test. And find my Christianity to be but
a spiderweb, so easily it is brushed aside. And I am a dog in the street
prepared to be crushed by a waggon's wheel in order to let its beastly nature
have its head. I cannot even justify my act by calling out "love, love, I
did it for love."
His punishment was that he must marry
this woman he had compromised. It did not occur to him that it was she who had
compromised him. He must marry her. He took the laudanum from his pocket and
sipped it in the deep shadowed doorway of the cobbler's shop. The street was
lined with bullock waggons all loaded with logs as thick as four big men. The
air was fat and warm and syrupy, sweet with forest sap, urine, brandy. There
were yellow dogs and yellow clay earth littered with furry bark.
Oscar's eyes remained focused in the
middle distance. He sucked in his cheeks, biting them harder than he knew. He
limped beside my great grandmother as they set about this business, each
equally determined that the job be done properly, and yet with a definite
distance between them, like allies in a business venture, or the captains of
opposing cricket teams. They posted the banns. It was done in fifteen minutes.
They went to Bernie Lovell and each rewrote their wills. It took half an hour.
They went to the offices of the Courier-Sun and filled out a little form for
the advertisement which announced their engagement.
Only when my great-grandmother saw he
did not write "Reverend" in their engagement notice, did she suspect
he might not be a clergyman. She certainly had no idea that he was now the
owner of a glass church in Sydney and a fortune of ten thousand pounds.
Oscar had forgotten this himself. He
was sick at heart, preoccupied by what he had lost, not gained. All he could think
was that the glass church was the devil's work, that it had been the agent of
murder and fornication. The only clear thing he could think, the only thing he
could hear above the raging passions of his beating heart, was how he could
destroy the hateful thing.
It was just five o'clock, and the
government clerks were already dosing their shutters for the day, when he began
to bid her goodbye. She had employment to return to, and although he should
have seen the word "Governess" on both her will and the marriage
banns, he had not; her employment remained a mystery to him. Like two strangers
introduced to business partnership by medium of a newspaper advertisement, they
agreed to meet at the post office at ten o'clock upon the morrow. He saw her on
to her pony which she had tethered in the government paddock. He must have
known, already, that he would not commit himself to her in any but a legalistic
way, for he felt only mild dismay to see how she treated the animal. He made
the motion of doffing his hat to her, although he had no hat, having given the
same to Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister. He held open the gate of the
government paddock, and when the pony and its rider had passed through, he
walked thoughtfully down towards the river, dragging a stick behind him,
scratching a line in the baked clay track and thus – his route marked by this
fine erratic line – he disappeared for ever from my great-grandmother's life.
Joe
Ch 80 The Private Softness of Her Skin (Oscar sees the glasshouse church as a thing
of beauty and joy, fit for angels (591 words))
But Oscar did not see as Lucinda imagined. As the
dust danced in the luminous tunnel of the western sun, he saw not a dumpy
little structure, not a common outhouse either, but light, ice, spectra. He saw
glass as those who love it perceive it. He understood that it was the gross
material most nearly like the soul, or spirit (or how he would wish the soul or
spirit to be), that it was free of imperfection, of dust, rust, that it was an
avenue for glory.
He did not see an outhouse. He saw a tiny church
with dust dancing around it like microscopic angels. It was as clean and pure
and free from vanity. It was at once so beautiful and yet so ... decent. The
light shone through its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the
distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a
cathedral.
"Oh dear” he said, "oh dearie me."
When he turned towards her, Lucinda saw his face
had gone pink. His mouth had become quite small, as if the thing which made him
smile was a sherbet sweetmeat that must be sucked in secret.
He said: "I am most extraordinarily
happy."
This statement made him appear straighter, taller.
His hair was on fire around the edges.
She felt a pleasant prickling along the back of her
neck. She thought: This is dangerous territory you are in.
He was light, not substantial. He stood before her
scratching his head and grinning and she was grinning back.
"You have made a kennel for God's
angels."
Whoa, she thought.
She thought: This is how the devil looks, with a
sweet heart-shaped face and violinist's hands.
"I know God's angels do not inhabit
kennels." He stepped into the room (she followed him) and crouched beside
the tiny glass-house. It was six foot long with all its walls and roof of
glass, the floor alone in timber. "But if they did, this surely is the
kennel they would demand."
"Please," she said.
"But there is nothing irreligious," he
said. "How could we have a sense of humour if our Lord did not?"
She smiled. She thought: Oh dear.
"Do you not imagine," he said, "that
our Lord laughs together with his angels?"
She thought: I am in love. How extraordinary.
"How could God, who is all-knowing, not
understand the foundation the joke is built on? I mean, that here is something
the size of a wolfhound's kennel which, thanks to your industry, is a structure
of such beauty and joy as to be a habitation fit for His angels."
He stood still now, having, while he spoke, danced
like a brolga around the little glass building. He held out his arms as if he
might embrace her and then brought them back across his chest and hugged
himself and hunched his back a little.
She thought: He will ask me, not now, but later.
"And haven't you done something?" he
said. "Haven't you done something with your life? I must confess to
envy."
The setting sun bounced off the red-brick wall of
the next-door warehouse. It was this that made the little room so pink. The
light refracted through the glass construction on the floor and produced a
spectroscopic comet which they stood, neatly, on each side of. Lucinda
duplicated his stance without meaning to; that is, she hugged herself, kept her
arms locked firmly around her own body while she felt the space between them as
if it were a living thing.
Ankush
Ch 42 Called
The Odd Bod stood gazing across through the park,
his white hands clasped upon his breast, a bemused smile on his face, waiting
patiently for Wardley-Fish to set it right for him.
The thieving cabby wanted half a crown and
Wardley-Fish was too irritated to argue. This stance of Oscar's looked so like
a pose. He could not believe it was not, at least partly, a pose. And yet he
could not doubt the Odd Bod's integrity, or not for long. For he had seen him,
on more than one occasion, discard that portion of his racecourse winnings he
regarded as surplus to his needs, shove blue five-pound notes into some parish
poor-box because he had enough for himself for the present. His jerky charity
did not stop there, for there was a red-nosed clergyman from his own village
who was also a recipient of bulging registered envelopes of currency which,
from all that Wardley-Fish could judge, produced many emotions in the donee,
but none of them having much resemblance to gratitude.
Oscar's holy profligacy infuriated Wardley-Fish,
and yet it was exactly these acts of charity that he most treasured in his
friend, and he could never make his mind be still about the question, which was
like one of those trick drawings in Punch which have the contradiction built in
so that what seems to be a spire one moment is a deep shaft the next. He took
his friend by his shiny, threadbare elbow and propelled him before him, past
the porter, into Cremorne Gardens. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, an
hour at which the tide, so to speak, was already turning, and the clientele,
having been for the most part respectable during the day, now seemed to
transmogrify-the guard changed within the space of thirty minutes-into
something more glamorous and dangerous.
…
Ch 57 Confession
When she found Mr Hopkins standing in
her doorway, the first thing she thought, when thought came, was-the cards. She
had laid them as a bait, but not for him, for anyone but him. But there was a
moment, before this, when she did not think at all. Her mouth echoed the open
door.
And then she thought: The cards. He
must not see the cards, or money either. There were coins and notes, a fiver as
purple as a bishop's vest-it was such a luminous colour, like flowering
lasiandra, signalling invitations to stumble-footed insects which would help it
mate without knowing what they did. All this was calculated to catch the eye,
but not this eye, another one.
She thought: What a dear face. The
extreme delicacy and refinement of the face impressed itself on her. She did
not, not yet, question the propriety of this visit, unchaperoned to her room;
that would come in a moment, and with it anxiety, like a draught of hot whisky.
She had completely forgotten her request for confession. She saw only the very
pleasant man she had feared driven away by her forwardness.
"Do come in." These were the
only words that either of them spoke. She tried to lead him into the curved
corner of the stateroom, further from the game of poker. She thought to point
out the luminescent sea. She knew herself favoured with 'landscape
windows" and thought to make a conversation of the fact. But he literally
turned his back upon them, and moved like a crab in the opposite direction, finding
his way into a chair like a blind man, at the very table she did not wish him
to sit.
She was aghast, too much in terror
about having her vice discovered
to think his behaviour peculiar. She
noticed perspiration on his brow, but it did not come to her mind until much
later, when the incident was over.
She thought it odd he did not excuse
himself for sitting while she stayed standing. "You must excuse me,"
he said instead, "for not corning earlier."
…
When Oscar tried to think good thoughts
he always thought of his father. He did this now: it was this that made him
groan – the loneliness he had caused this stern and loving man.
The voices of the stewards came through
the ventilation, but neither of them listened.
Still, the priest withheld absolution.
"This dice you played on the train,"
he asked, "was it Dutch Hazards?"
Lucinda looked up quite sharply, but
the priest's head was bowed and twisted sideways towards his right shoulder.
"Yes," she said. "It was. We also played another game."
"Old British, perhaps."
Lucinda felt her bowed neck assume a
mottled pattern. "In New South Wales," she said, "it is known as
'Seventh Man.' "
Her feelings were not focused, were as
diffused as a blush, a business of heat and blood.
Oscar could not keep the picture of his
father clear. A certain reckless joy – a thing without a definite form, a fog,
a cloud of electricity – replaced the homely holy thoughts.
"And who was it," he asked,
unclenching his hands and bringing them up on to the table, "who provided
the Peter?"
Lucinda Leplastrier put her head on one
side. She opened her eyes. Her confessor had a blank face, what was almost a
blank face, but was prevented from being completely blank by the very slight compression
of the lips.
Lucinda narrowed her green eyes.
"The Peter?" 'Is the term unknown to you?"
She was looking at the mouth. She could
not quite believe what she saw there. "No," she said, very carefully.
"No, I think it is quite familiar."
"I thought so," said Oscar
Hopkins. He closed the little prayer book and stuffed it in the pocket which
contained the caul. When his hand touched the caul, he remembered the ocean
behind his book. It caused no more than a prickling in his spine.
"And these terms, Mr Hopkins, are
they also familiar to you?"
"Afraid so." He smiled, a
clear and brilliant smile.
Lucinda also smiled, but less certainly.
"Mr Hopkins, this is most improper." Oscar took a handkerchief from
his jacket pocket and wiped first his clammy hands and then his perspiring
brow. "Oh?" he said, "I really do not think so." He looked
so pleased with himself.
"But you have not absolved
me."
"Where is the sin?"
She was shocked, less by what he said,
but by the sudden change of mood that took possession of him. He spoke these
words in an angry sort of passion quite foreign to his personality. His eyes
went hard. He made a jerky gesture towards the cards-ha! he had seen them after
all-in front of him. "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet
– it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England
might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough – we bet that there is a God. We
bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with
the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a
cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter.
And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at
prayer beside our bed ..." His hands were quite jerky in their movements.
There was a wild sort of passion about him, and the eyes within that
sharpchinned face held the reflections of electric lamps. Lucinda felt the hair
on the back of her neck stand up. Her eyelids came down. If she had been a cat
she would have purred.
"I cannot see," he said,
"that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble
our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence ... It is true! We
must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the
unprovable fact of His existence."
Lucinda shivered, a not unpleasant
shiver and one not caused by cold. There were so many reasons for this
involuntary ripple, not least the realization that her vice would not lose her
his friendship. But it was also caused by recognition: she saw herself mirrored
in him, the sudden coldness of the gambler's passion-something steely, angry
even, which will not be denied. She was disturbed, too, to find her confessor
belittling the worth of her confession and this-the pulling out of the
tablecloth beneath the meal-gave a salt of anger to her own emotions even while
she delighted-celebrated, even-the vital defence my great-grandfather was
assembling, like a wild-haired angel clockmaker gesturing with little cogs,
dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before
he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.
Gopa
Ch 3 Christmas Pudding
On this Christmas Day, his father said: "You
have reclassified your buttons, I see."
The buttons were on the window ledge. It was a deep
sill. Mrs Williams had put the buttons there when she set the table.
Oscar said: "Yes, Father."
"The taxonomic principle being colour. The
spectrum from left to right, with size the second principle of order."
"Yes, Father."
"Very good," said Theophilus.
Oscar scraped his plate of stew clean. He finished
his glass of water. He bowed his head with his father and thanked God for what
He had provided. And when Mrs Williams came to the door and asked would he
please help her add pollard to the pigs' swill, he went quickly, quietly, a
light, pale, golden-haired boy. He thought about his buttons, not about what he
was doing.
The two women stood side by side like two jugs on a
shelf. One was big and floury, the other small and freckled, but their smiles
were mirror images of each other and they held their hands in front of them,
each clasped identically.
They had "It" on a plate. They had cut it
into quarters and covered it with lovely custard. Mrs Williams pushed her
hairbrush deeper into her pinny pocket and thrust the pudding at him. She moved
the bowl through the air with such speed that the spoon was left behind and
clattered on to the cobble floor.
Mrs Williams stopped, but Fanny Drabble hissed:
"Leave alone." She kicked the fallen spoon away and gave Oscar a
fresh one. She was suddenly nervous of discovery.
Oscar took the spoon and ate, standing up.
He could never have imagined such a lovely taste.
He let it break apart, treasuring it inside his mouth.
He looked up and saw the two mirrored smiles
increase. Fanny Drabble tucked her chin into her neck. He smiled too, almost
sleepily, and he was just raising the spoon to his mouth in anticipation of
more, had actually got the second spoonful into his mouth when the door
squeaked behind him and Theophilus came striding across the cobbled floor.
He did not see this. He felt it. He felt the blow
on the back of his head. His face leapt forward. The spoon hit his tooth. The
spoon dropped to the floor. A large horny hand gripped the back of his head and
another cupped beneath his mouth. He tried to swallow. There was a second blow.
He spat what he could.
Theophilus acted as if his son were poisoned. He
brought him to the scullery and made him drink salt water. He forced the glass
hard against his mouth so it hurt. Oscar gagged and struggled. His father's
eyes were wild. They did not see him. Oscar drank. He drank again. He drank
until he vomited into the pigs' swill. When this was done, Theophilus threw
what remained of the pudding into the fire.
Oscar had never been hit before. He could not bear
it.
His father made a speech. Oscar did not believe it.
His father said the pudding was the fruit of Satan.
But Oscar had tasted the pudding. It did not taste
like the fruit of Satan.
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