Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  She had tried to persuade Mr Paxton to take her to a cock fight.

  She had eavesdropped on stewards. She had set up a table in her room like a trap for them. She had wished to play poker.

  There were other matters but her confessor hardly heard them. He sat with his head bowed, trying to still his wildly beating heart. He clenched his hands and pressed them down between his legs. He groaned.

  Lucinda heard this noise. She sat with her head bowed, not daring to look at him. She waited for absolution. She heard another noise, muffled, its meaning not clear. She thought, He will not be my friend now. She clenched her eyes shut to drive out such temporal thought, clenched them so tight that luminous bodies floated through the black sea of her retina.

  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?”

  “’Fraid 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 sharp-chinned 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 clock-maker gesturing with little cogs, dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.

  “Every instant,” said Oscar, and held up a finger as he said it, calling attention to a low roly-poly laugh issuing from the ventilator.

  “There,” he said triumphantly, as if he had caught the laugh, as if the laugh was the point of it all, and he was like a man who has trapped a grasshopper in mid—air, smiling as if the miracle were tickling his palm.

  “There. We will never hear that man laugh that laugh again. The instant is gone.”

  It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further “use” for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction.

  Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul.

  “Every instant,” he said.

  She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him “before dawn.” It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and window both.

  “That such a God,” said Oscar, “knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager …” He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work—that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss Leplastrier. “That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing a line first, unless,” (and here it seemed he would split his lips with the pleasure of his smile, which was, surely, caused more by Lucinda’s admiring face than by the new thought which had just, at that moment, taken possession of him) “unless—and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me—it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.”

  “Mr Hopkins,” Lucinda said, coming at last to sit down, “we must not place our souls at risk with fancies.”

  She meant this sincerely. She also did not mean it at all—there was nothing she liked better than to construct a fancy. She put great weight on fancies and was not in the habit of using the word in a dismissive way. The Crystal Palace, that building she admired more than any other, was nothing but a fancy of a kind, and there were ideas like this, the philosophical equivalent of great cathedrals of steel and glass, which were her passion, and she held these to her tightly, secretly.

  “Not a fancy,” said Oscar.

  He picked up
the cards and put them together. It was not his intention that they play. It was Lucinda who suggested the game of cards. But later, when she knew Oscar better, she confessed that she had only done it because she thought it was what he had intended.

  58

  Reputation

  It was already a scandal. It was known about by Mr Smith and Mr Borrodaile, by Mr Carraway, Mrs Menzies, Mr and Mrs Johnston. The stewards, of course, all knew—for they were not only judges but also conduits and they wound their way from class to class and even down into the rivet-studded steel innards of the ship, not quite as far as young Master Smiggins (whose task it was to ready the live-stock for the approaching storm). He knew a lady had “lost her reputation” but he had this from Long-nosed Clemence, the apprentice engineer. He did not know it was “his” lady for whom he had planned to work.

  “She gone and bleeding done it now. She lost it now,” said Clemence who was frightened by the animals.

  “What?” asked Master Smiggins.

  “Er reputation. I told you, didn’ I? Compreyvous?”

  “Course I bloody compreyvous. I got a sister, ain’t? Now nick off. I got me animals and the sea’s coming up.”

  “Coming up your back passage more like,” said Clemence, but stepped back, ready to run.

  Master Smiggins kicked the llama doe in the backside and forced it into its crush. He strapped the crush shut.

  “There,” he said, “all tucked in now. Can’t roll out of bed no matter what.” He went to deal with the buck. “Now, don’t you fuss,” he said. He looked around. Clemence had gone. “Lost her reputation,” he said. He had a stick to prod the buck with.

  “Course,” he said. “Course I bloody compreyvous.”

  59

  Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

  Lucinda liked to play poker on a table covered with a grey wool blanket. This, of course, is how she first played cribbage in the house of Mr d’Abbs, and on windy nights, alone in her rented cottage at Longnose Point, she sometimes laid a blanket across the oilskin on her kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of patience. It was a comfort to her: to drink tea, to riddle the grate on the stove, to feel the soft blanket beneath the slippery cards. She did not feel the same affection for the tables in gaming houses. She liked the games, my word she did, but it was a different sort of “like” to the one she had for the grey blanket-covered tables of her home and Mr d’Abbs’s. The tables of gaming houses were cold and slippery. It was an icier pleasure, a showy dancer’s thrill, like a tight, stretched smile or a pair of shiny patent-leather shoes.

  In her stateroom, alone with the priest, Lucinda took a blanket from her bed and draped it across the little table. She knew this action lacked propriety but she did not let herself address the matter. She must have it right. She would be blinkered. If he was shocked, she would not look at him. She would have everything in its proper place. She took a little amber lamp and set it to one side.

  She thought: Alone in my bedroom with a priest.

  “There,” she said, but could not bring her eyes up to look at him. She laid her hand flat on the blanket. She had been biting her nails. She hid the evidence beneath her palm.

  “So,” she said, and looked him boldly in the eye.

  His face was not how she had imagined it. She had rebuilt it in her imagination, had made it long and censorious when it was, in reality, doelike, almost pretty, with soft eyes regarding her from beneath long lashes.

  “Shall we play?” he asked.

  Lucinda blushed.

  They played with penny bets.

  It was such a still game. She might not have remarked on this quality were it not for the fact that he had previously been so agitated, such a kicker and scuffer, a squirmer in his seat—she had felt him next to her at dinner, had felt the vital life in his body through the table, through the legs of her own chair. But now she felt only this concentrated stillness. It was not a lifeless stillness—it was not that dead—eyed mask most men adopted when playing poker, their eyes gone blind like statues. He was a cello, a violin, he was all strapped down like Ulysses at the mast.

  She lost. She felt so light, an airy, dragon-fly wing of feeling. It was always like this when she lost. She felt such guilt and fear after she had lost that she did not imagine she liked losing, and yet this sensation always came with it, and once, seeing the carcass of a grasshopper all eaten out by ants, only its delicate and papery form remaining, she had recognized, in that light and lovely shell, the physical expression of this feeling she had when losing.

  She shed her money, sloughed it off. A penny, a penny, a three penny piece. Mr Hopkins played the most exquisite poker. She complimented him, as another woman might have complimented her partner at a waltz. She sat up straight. She fanned her cards neatly. She had lost a sovereign but she did not wish to stop. She knew she would have the perfect voyage now. She knew herself happy.

  At half past one the ship began to bluster in the wind and she felt the beginning of a long, deep swell. The ship made noises which made Lucinda think of a pianist cracking knuckles. She accommodated the motion of the ship to her idea of happiness.

  She smiled at Oscar. He smiled back. He rested his left ankle across his knee. He jiggled it, but he did not knock the table and she did not notice.

  At two-thirty the game turned again. He pushed through, bluffing to victory three hands in a row. He was breathing through his mouth. There was perspiration on his forehead but she took this to be produced by the excitement of the game.

  He observed that the ship, although large, seemed to move as one would imagine a small ship to move. He remarked on the size of the sea. It was such a large thing, he said. “ ‘Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?’ ” He smiled, showing the neat, ordered set of his lower teeth.

  She smiled. She had no appreciation of his phobia.

  He raised his betting. A crown to see her. There was a tremor in his voice it would have taken Mrs Williams to explain.

  The game had changed. It was no longer still and calm. Lucinda no longer played leaning back. She bent forward. She rubbed her neck. She was making a small red spot, just from friction.

  Oscar was pale. He played with a sort of clipped breathlessness. His foot tapped against the table leg. She minded this not at all. He took her for two pounds and five shillings. She raised the betting again. She was so light, almost giddy. She confessed her happiness out loud. She hardly noticed the pitching of the ship. Her hat case tumbled off its rack and a vase of paper flowers—left carelessly on a side table, slipped and rolled—not breaking—across the floor.

  It was three twenty-three. The first wave washed across the deck. They turned (“Hoo,” said Oscar) to see the next wave—its white head towering over them like a ghost in the night.

  It was frightening. Lucinda found it frightening. She made some silly comment and turned to see her partner, white-faced with terror, his mouth open, crouched over the table trying to pick up cards without looking at them. He was not handling these cards as a card-player might, but like a savage. He was cramming them into his pocket. He made a repetitive noise—“Uh-uh-uh-uh”—that came from the back of his throat, the top of his stomach.

  The wave smashed across the deck. You could feel the weight of it in your vital organs.

  “Uh-uh-uh.” He crumpled up more cards. She was angry with him. They were her Wetherby Supremes, from Hare’s in Old Bond Street.

  “I have led you astray,” he said. He was standing now, gripping the edge of the table. He was not looking at her. He was pulling a paper parcel from his pocket. As he pulled it out he produced a shower of the crumpled playing cards.

  The parcel, of course, was his caul.

  The ship reared and crashed down so far you could feel your stomach falling after it had landed. You would not think so large a thing could be tossed
so far.

  On the bridge it took ten men to steer the rearing beast.

  Through the din (creaking, groaning, a slamming door) she could hear bells ringing.

  He said: “You must forgive me.”

  The vase rolled past her feet. She had time to wonder that such an ugly thing should not break, would probably survive a shipwreck when everything beautiful and useful was sunk to the bottom. She picked up the vase. She held it in her lap. The clergyman was banging his thigh with his clenched fist.

  “Yes,” she shouted, “yes, of course, I forgive you.”

  But she did not understand him. She did not put the two together, the cards and the storm. It did not occur to her that one might be the cause and the other the effect. It did not occur to her to think in so primitive a manner. She could not guess that a man who knew that phosphorescence was produced by sea blubbers could also believe that this storm was a sign from God.

  But Oscar knew he should not have gambled just for pleasure. He knew his defence of gambling had been displeasing to God. He knew he had led the young woman into sin. Waves slapped the face of the ship. Water surged across its high deck. The mighty Leviathan reared and rolled sideways across the cliff face of the storm.

  “Oh, dear,” said Oscar, “I am afraid.”

  The portholes could be opened with a little winding handle. He clutched his caul to his chest and lurched uphill to get there. Then he stood, facing down into the dark pit of the sea while he forced himself to do the thing he dreaded most—unwind the handle.

  Lucinda thought he wished to be ill. She stumbled down the sloping floor to help him. Then she saw what he was doing—putting her Wetherby Supremes out the window, posting jacks and queens like letters.

  “No,” she yelled into his ear. She scrabbled at his hands and tried to pull away from the porthole. His lips were moving. His eyes were shut. She scratched the back of his hands but could not stop him. She saved a two of clubs and a five of diamonds. Her emotions were confused—anger, sympathy, alarm. He turned to look at her and she saw his eyes wandering in their gaze. He clutched at her. She was frightened and stepped back, and he fell into a swoon at her feet.