Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  “You would not find the story pretty.”

  “You need not worry about my sensibilities, little lad.” He gave the wrist a harder squeeze and his mouth, for that moment, was twisted by the spasm of his anger. “My poverty does not allow them.”

  “You would not be proud of me.”

  “Would not? Am not. Oh, I pray You, stop him prattling.”

  “If I were to tell you and my papa were to hear of it, it would be a torture beyond his toleration.”

  “You have my word he never shall,” said Hugh Stratton and, seeing that Oscar still hesitated, “oh, dear Oscar, you must accept my word.”

  “I have gambled,” said Oscar, “as you long ago suspected.”

  “So,” said Mr Stratton, and let out some air, “gambled.”

  “I think the ship is moving.”

  “You have a system, then? Is that what it is called?”

  “A system?”

  “Yes, a system. Temple has explained them to me. You have a system and you will write it down for me.”

  And, indeed, he was selecting, from the over-full pocket of his shiny coat, a used envelope and a stubby pencil which he now managed to push at Oscar without ever once letting go his painful hold on the wrist.

  “It is not so simple. It is not a thing you can just write down. We have left it too late.”

  Mr Stratton’s hand relaxed its grip on the wrist and his jaw was slack and all the skin on his face seemed lifeless and crushed, a second-hand substance from the bottom shelf in the scullery.

  Oscar wished to retrieve his wrist, but did not.

  “Write it down, boy, please, I beg of you.”

  He did not know what it was he was asking. It was not possible. The charts and tables that made up the system were contained in sixteen black clothbound journals. They were at once as neat as the boxes of buttons he had classified in his father’s house, all ruled with columns and divisions, and, at the same time, smudged and blotted. His hand was a poor servant to his mind—the first was a grub whilst the second was a fastidious fellow with white cuffs on his sleeves and a tyrant for having everything in its place.

  These notebooks were in his trunk. They would be worth nothing to him in New South Wales. Surely there was time to run to his cabin and thrust them into Mr Stratton’s hands. The clergyman would not understand them, of course, but the explanation could be conducted by mail and what was important was the gift. For the books did prove that a man could make a good living at the track if he should apply himself with Christian industry.

  But no, he could not relinquish them.

  He did not know why he could not. He had not expected to be asked, and when it happened he felt not generosity, but anger and confusion. The books were so intimately involved with his life, were his life, his obsession, his diaries, his communion with his God, his tie to the monster who must be fed. They were private. They were secret. They were five years’ work. He had travelled all over the south of England recording the coded information therein. He had assembled a history which, blots and smudges aside, was superior to any bookmaker at Tattersall’s—the record of five hundred and twenty-five racehorses, positions, weights, whether rising in class or in weight, distances of race, conditions of track, etc, etc. And although he did not bet on mares or fillies, he had the information on them just the same.

  “Please, I ask you to leave me, Mr Stratton,” said Oscar gently. “You hold a very dangerous secret and can therefore be confident I will write to you from New South Wales. I will tell you how I have achieved it.”

  He was a miser. He was unchristian. He must give away the books. Even if he had owed the Strattons nothing, he should give away the books. But he was a weasel, cunning with excuses, with substitutes.

  “I will send the letter to you by return post from Sydney. I give you my solemn word before God. And you are quite right that I have been thoughtless and unkind in not thinking of your situation. I feared only that you would inform my papa.”

  Hugh Stratton held the gaze of the young man’s clear eyes, not quite daring to trust them.

  “Write it down.”

  “It is not so simple. I cannot.”

  “You swear before God?”

  “I do.”

  What did he swear? Simply that he could not transcribe the books in five minutes. This was true, quite true, but he had become too clever at this weaseling kind of “truth,” which was not a truth at all.

  “Is it horses?”

  Give him the books. Give them.

  “It is.”

  Mr Stratton let go the wrists. He nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, but the sirens triumphed. He nodded once more, then again. He was making a dangerous decision on how to fund his betting programme. He ran up the stairs, grimacing with the pain in his sciatic nerve. At the top of the stairs he called out something but Oscar did not hear. He was examining the bright red bracelet Mr Stratton had imprinted on his skin. He sat in the sumptuous cavern of the second-class promenade, alone with this new knowledge of his corruption.

  50

  Pachinko

  In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet. A door must open at a certain time. Opposite the door, a red plush settee is necessary. The Obsessive, the one with six bound volumes of eight hundred and eighty pages, ten columns per page, must sit on this red settee, the Book of Common Prayer open on his rumpled lap. The Compulsive gambler must feel herself propelled forward from the open doorway. She must travel towards the Obsessive and say an untruth (although she can have no prior knowledge of her own speech): “I am in the habit of making my confession.”

  But even this, a conclusion which requires, of the active party, a journey as complex as that of a stainless steel Pachinko ball (rolling along grooved metal tunnels, sloping down, twisting sideways, down into the belly of Leviathan, up, sideways, up, up, and out of the door to face the red settee) might not have taken place if the ventilation system of Leviathan had not displayed a single eccentricity of which its designers had been totally unaware.

  The eccentricity was this: it carried conversation from one stateroom to another, and that was how Lucinda was haunted by the sounds of bored stewards playing cards all night. They were not in the stateroom next to hers. That was empty, as were all the other first-class staterooms which she had imagined, when looking at the shipping company’s brochures, would supply her with companionship for the voyage. (There were Bavarians in Imperial first class, but these were separated by a silken blue rope.) The stewards were several empty staterooms along, and such was the design of the ventilators that had they been closer, she might not have heard them at all.

  Their conversations were perfectly transmitted, as if every one of them had a voice tube of his own.

  She could not read because of it. It was not the noise. It was the subject matter. Now, she thought, it is Tuppenny they play, now Blind Jack, now poker. The cockney with the high voice is the best player. She liked him. She imagined him with sandy, spiky hair and a habit of screwing up his eyes. He would grin a lot. Sometimes he would suck a match. He would give away no secrets. There was another one who always spoke more quickly when his hand was good. This one was from Liverpool. He was, of all of them, the most worried by his new job. He was previously chief steward of the Sobraon and Lucinda would have learned, if she had not known already, that the Sobraon was a well-regarded ship. This man’s chief had been so outraged that he would depart his post for another ship that he had said that the chief steward would never be signed on again by him, “Not,” he kept repeating, “under no circumstances whatever.”

  The stewards thought of themselves as the “crème de la crème.” They were proud of their work. They were not the simple snobs that Melody Clutterbuck imagined. It was she who was the snob. These men were perfectionists. They were as proud as glass blowers. They had been tricked. They expected to serve people who would respect, or at least recognize, their finesse; but instead they found a
preponderance of colonial bullies who wished to lord it. Down in second class there was a Mr Borrodaile, a rich and argumentative man who got drunk and threw biscuits down the ventilator.

  Lucinda liked them all without seeing them. She would like to sit around a table with them. They could smoke and have a drop too much. She would not mind.

  She did not belong in this stateroom with its vast curved empty space, its maroon carpets, its shiny icing of luxury. She did not even belong in the clothes, smart clothes from Marian Evans’s dressmaker in the Burlington Arcade, and she recognized, the first night in her stateroom, with Barchester Towers resting in her lap, that it was only at Mr d’Abbs’s house that she could be relaxed amongst ordinary people.

  If these stewards had met her in the company of Mr d’Abbs, Mr Fig and Miss Malcolm (and it was by no means possible) they would play cards with her and not think about it. They would see that she could laugh, even drink and, if they were not careful, fleece them of their shore pay at three in the morning. It was a vulgar house, it was true, and in many ways, quite morally doubtful. It was a shock to realize that one “belonged” there—it was so second rate, colonial, even ignorant, but she could sit at the table there and not feel herself constrained by the corsets of convention. She did not have this dreadful tightness, in the throat, the arms, the chest.

  In the dining room these stewards were actors in a play—they used different voices. She could not match the voice she heard at night with the voice that served her in the morning. When she sat at table she felt complicitous with them. She imagined that they, like her, felt restricted by their parts.

  Meals, in any case, were an embarrassment. The dining room was all Grecian, with fluted columns, empty tables. There were four reluctant officers appointed to dine with her. She entered, blushing red. She ate as quickly as politeness would allow. She knew (or imagined) that her character, her passions, her occupation would all be unacceptable, even shocking, at this table. Her companions thought her a mouse. So she was. They made her one. She would rather have been playing Blind Jack or poker. There was, she thought, as she sliced her grey roast beef, so much to be said in favour of a game of cards. One was not compelled to pretend, could be silent without being thought dull, could frown without people being overly solicitous about one’s happiness, could triumph over a man and not have to giggle and simper when one did it. One could kill time, obliterate loneliness, have a friendship with strangers one would never see again, and live on that sweet, oiled cycle of anticipation, the expectation that something delicious was about to happen. Which is not to say that the pleasures were all related to gain or greed. One could experience that lovely lightheaded feeling of loss, the knowledge that one had abandoned one more brick from the foundation of one’s fortune, that one’s purse was quite, quite empty, had nothing in it but a safety pin, some dust, its own water silk lining, and no matter what panic and remorse all this would produce on the morrow, one had in those moments of loss such an immense feeling of relief—there was no responsibility, no choice. One could imagine oneself to be nothing but a cork drifting down a river in a romantic tale by Mr Kingsley.

  In her first months as proprietor of the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks she had played a hand of cribbage with the men during their breaks. She had seen this as a way whereby she could get to know them. But within a month they sent a message to her (back through Mr d’Abbs of all people) that they did not think it “proper” that this practice continue.

  She would never be able to think of this message—delivered by an embarrassed Mr d’Abbs in the foyer of Petty’s Hotel—without feeling the sting of their rejection. It hurt out of all proportion. It would not go away. She thought: All the time I have enjoyed the games, they have thought me a tart or something worse. She wished to weep for her stupidity, or slap them for theirs.

  She had been proud of what the works produced. She was moved by the process as she always would be by the collaborative nature of human endeavour. She saw she had purchased a hell-hole that must always be a hell-hole and yet she was much affected by the way the men made themselves into a chain with chaos at one end and civilization at the other—the cockeyed little first gatherer, the sturdy, barrel-chested second gatherer, the handsome old third gatherer who would never be a master, the blower himself with his great grey beard and his arms as big as a boy’s legs, the finicky stopper-offer who ran about, fast, bent over, like a mynah bird on a branch. She had felt it wrong to be the proprietor of such a hell-hole where the men must work in water-doused chaff bags, be awake at three a.m. (or ten p.m. or dawn) to meet the demands of the furnaces. But even though she could never become romantic about the hardness of their lives she also came to envy them their useful comradeship and it was through the doorway of a game of cards she hoped to enter it. She aspired only to play a useful part in manufacture, even though she was their “master.”

  Their rejection of her produced the most unchristian passions in her breast. “No gentleman,” they told her, “would gamble with a lady.” Her feelings were of the same order as those of a parent who wants to dash a howling baby to the floor.

  She listened to the Leviathan’s stewards and imagined being admitted to their game. She would knock on their door. She would introduce herself.

  But she knew, of course, that they would immediately revert to their “steward” character. It would be an intrusion on their privacy too gross to contemplate. But surely, somewhere, there was a game got up. She imagined carpenters and engineers ‘tween decks. She took her own deck of cards, the new ones purchased in Old Bond Street. They were Wetherby Supremes with the handsome black and gold filigree on their calendered backs which she always believed to be especially lucky. She snapped open the griffin seal which kept them in their place and shuffled them in her practical little hands, lengthening her top lip as she always did when excited—not a useful tic for a poker player to have—and cut them, splayed them, made a bridge and closed it. She had an ache. She felt it in the back of her knees, in her knuckles, a tension both pleasant and unbearable.

  If she just walked, for instance, down to the regions known as ‘tween decks, there would be an open door. There would be a game. She would stand and watch. They would not mind. She imagined it exactly. Four working men at a table. She would show them her own cards.

  Silly. Too stupid for words.

  She put her Wetherby Supremes in her velvet purse and walked out of her stateroom. She was going for a walk, that was all.

  She was going—of course she was—to inspect her cargo in the hold. This was her right. She was a manufacturer. She might not look like one to you, sir, but that only demonstrates your colonial nature. Not all manufacturers have side-whiskers and smoke cigars.

  The equipment was from Chance Brothers. It would make the first window glass in New South Wales. She did not expect a town named after her for this. But neither, sir, did she expect to be patronized.

  She opened the door to C deck and descended the stairs. She did not think about what she was doing.

  Lucinda was looking for a game.

  She moved along steel intestines of empty corridors from which she viewed, not four men around a table, but empty cabins whose new mattresses were still wrapped in brown paper; in some there were wood shavings and sawdust, even on D deck—a carpenter’s tool box with a set of chisels so sharp that the sticky-beaking passenger cut her finger and had nothing but sawdust with which to staunch the flow.

  It was not like being inside a ship at all, but like the innards of a reveted bridge, a great mechanical beast, the organs of an empire whose chimneys rose high into the Atlantic sky.

  E deck contained animals, stall after stall of sheep, cattle, llamas. There was a sort of terror here. The air was not pleasant. It was rich and thick enough to make her—she who still thought herself a countrywoman, at home with dung, mud, beasts—rich and thick enough to make her gag. There were caged birds, too, and a young lad who said it was his job to feed them and wanted, most of all
, to know what it was like atop. He was a strong, well-made boy, but his face was pale, and his face thrust at her from the fetid gloom—one yellow electric light every ten yards—and she did not feel easy with his belligerent curiosity. He was not what she was looking for.

  He asked if she was a nurse. She was not a nurse. Then he wanted to know if it was true, what he had been told, that there are ladies and gentlemen atop who played racquets and hoops and would she please, when they were in Sydney, employ him, for he was good around animals and practical, and would not, not for his life, ma’am, go back to cruel England again. She barely heard him.

  She asked him where the hold was. He did not know, but pretended he did. She knew he was lying with his directions, and yet she had the compassion to see him as innocent and herself not so—a beast in heat looking for a beastly game.

  She found her way, by mistake, to the engine-room. She did not actually enter, but opened a great riveted door where the fragrance of oil was strongest and, looking down into the giddy steel pit, saw the two giant connecting rods churning round and round, a nightmare from Gargantua, and men, so far below they seemed like smudged ivory dolls, stripped to the waist, with tiny shovels. No one here was playing cards. They stopped and looked up at the intruder. She stepped back and closed the door.

  If she had felt this bad in Sydney, she would have cooled her passion by visiting the Chinese. There were no Chinese here.

  She did not like the feeling of this ship. It had tossed like a cork in the Bay of Biscay and all those long steel corridors seemed to be painted with the smear of sweat. There was no life in the ship. There had been races for ladies scheduled by a games committee but now it seemed they would not be held, for there were so few ladies on board and most of them not of a racing age. She climbed steel stairs, heading upwards. She passed an officer who blushed to see a woman where he had not expected one. She did not ask him where the hold was. She continued up. She passed a door on the other side of which something improper seemed to be occurring.