Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  This produced a silence. They all stood with red faces and tried to understand their situation. Oscar thought “handle.” There was a cold draught from the open window.

  “You gambled,” Mr Judd said, and he shook a surprisingly dainty finger at the clergyman.

  “It is true, Mr Judd,” said Oscar. He hugged his thin chest and then rubbed his hands. “I have gambled. I am sorry if it has caused offence.”

  “It’s no good denying it.”

  “I’m not denying it.”

  “Don’t you think the Almighty has an ear? Don’t you imagine he’d like our hymns of praise?”

  “Oh yes, indeed, Mr Judd. Indeed.”

  “Then you should not be gambling, sir. It is a folly and a sin.”

  Lucinda was unsure of what was happening. She no longer thought these people murderers, but she thought the situation to be most unstable. The man looked violent, and the woman seemed to think it her wifely duty to transmit, silently, an equal level of anger towards her. She glowered and moved her feet beneath her skirts, just like a cow bailed up for milking. Lucinda stood up.

  “It does seem to me,” Oscar was saying, “that we have the threads of quite different concerns involved in this upset.”

  Lucinda said nothing. She thought his conciliatory tone quite inappropriate.

  “Upset?” said Mr Judd. “I am not upset.”

  “She is slipping out,” said Mrs Judd.

  “On the one hand, you have the issue of my gambling. On the other you have, it would seem, a love of music.”

  “Of sacred music. Sacred music.”

  “She is putting on her hat.”

  “She is my guest, Mrs Judd.”

  “A pretty name for it.”

  “Mrs Judd,” warned Mr Judd.

  “I’ll not be stopped,” said Mrs Judd. “I have never heard of such a hypocrite. Yes, a hypocrite. We made him lovely vestments. You will not wear them, isn’t that true? You think God would rather see you looking like a crow.”

  “I wear—” said Oscar, but was stopped from saying more.

  “You dress like a scarecrow,” said Mr Judd.

  “I will not be stopped. He dresses like a scarecrow,” she agreed, “and throws out our Messiah, and here he is with cards and women in the temple, and—” she looked backwards to the open window, and stopped a moment. “And here we are,” she said at last.

  These last three words seemed to signify that she had, against the current of her natural good manners, been induced—it was witchcraft, perhaps—to climb through her employer’s window and stand on expensive carpet in muddy shoes.

  Lucinda had retreated from the draught and was warming herself against the fire. It is true that she had put on her hat, but not because she wished to leave, but because she was returning her hatpin to its proper place. She would not need that type of weapon.

  “You are a rude woman,” she said, “and you are a rude man.”

  Mrs Judd opened her mouth. Mr Judd stood on his wife’s foot. Mrs Judd’s mouth stayed open and her head jerked sharply sideways as she tried to read her husband’s face.

  “You imagine,” Lucinda pulled her skirt tight against her legs until she felt them burning, “that you are civilized, but you are like savages with toppers and tails. You are not civilized at all, and if gambling is a sin it is less of a sin than the one you have just committed. You should pray to God to forgive you for your rudeness.”

  Oscar was aghast to hear such patrician arrogance from a women he had seen, half an hour before, light a cigarette and draw the blue smoke up into her flaring nostrils (an action he found sensual in the extreme). He would have apologized to the Judds but he did not have the opportunity.

  “You may leave,” said Lucinda.

  And the Judds, indeed, made uncertainly towards the door.

  “Through the window,” said Lucinda.

  And the Judds left through the window. Lucinda had them shut it after them. She watched them—it was not quite light—walk down the long mustard-yellow driveway. She could see them both talking at once.

  She began laughing then. It was not a simple laugh, and was occasioned as much by her surprise at herself (how angry she must be at Sydney) as by delight in her own mischievousness. And her face, laughing, was lovely. For the first time inside the vicarage she was herself, unguarded, open-faced, and you could see the young girl and imagine her in the days on the farm near Parramatta. She looked pretty, but Oscar did not see this for he was sitting back on an ugly green chair with his hands plunged into his unruly rusty hair.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “I’m done for.”

  And then Lucinda was like an athlete who, with her body warm, has ripped a muscle and not felt it. As she cooled, she stiffened, and felt—it hurt more than you would think possible—the damage.

  69

  The Tablecloth

  Bishop Dancer’s office—his entire house—was being redecorated. He could not bear to be around the place. He did not like to hear his wife hallooing for some tradesman, the sudden draughts from unavoidably open windows, the equally unavoidable sawing and hammering. It was an irritation to be there and he could not effect his business courteously. Particularly this business.

  This was how it came about that Bishop Dancer lunched with the Dean of St Andrew’s and his wife. He did not much care for the dean, but he needed to borrow an office and the dean’s office was the only one available which would bring with it the proper tone. “Tone,” you might correctly guess, was not a thing that a man like Dancer would normally concern himself with. He had the strength to carry his own “tone” without borrowing it from the dean’s heavy desk and velvet drapery. But in this case he had been defeated. The office he required was one in which—there was no avoiding it—he might effect his own surrender to the Randwick vestry.

  He did not like to lose at all, but he particularly disliked losing to people like this—jumped-up shopkeepers and stable hands, rag and bone men who would once have acknowledged their calling with three hats worn on top of each other but now dressed up in clothing of the classes they used to serve. Sometimes he thought of Sydney as an orphan’s party with a dressing-up box. What a grotesque sight he found it—piemen affecting the dress of gentlemen, ladies’ maids with glass tiaras. They were out there now, in the anteroom of the dean’s office. Mr Allcock with his top hat and shiny breeches, Mr Judd, Mr Henry, and their leader, Mr Graham, MP, the well-known Puseyite.

  The bishop stayed at table, although the table was by now for the most part empty. He wished to make a demonstration to the dean, but the dean was apprehensive. He had invited the bishop to lunch from courtesy. He had watched him drink an entire bottle of his best claret and now he was nervous of the consequences.

  “Let me show you,” said the bishop.

  “My Lord,” the dean began. He could see that Dancer was in a dangerous sort of mood and he knew what had caused it. The press had got hold of this matter of the Randwick vicarage where, it was said, there had been behaviour of a most immoral type. It had involved women and cards. This had been Dancer’s appointment. He had boasted of it. He had called the incumbent “my Reverend Mr Ferret.”

  “Do not ‘My Lord’ me,” said Dancer. “Let me show you this thing and then you will see I was not boasting.”

  The bishop appraised the table. It was modestly set for such a demonstration. Almost all the luncheon service had been removed from the white tablecloth. There was a little silver tray of condiments, a showy gravy boat, a claret bottle with half an inch of sediment in it, two wine glasses, three of water. It was a bright day. The westerly had stopped momentarily and sunshine broke through the peach blossom outside the window and fell prettily across the table.

  “I did not imagine it a boast,” the dean said, pushing back his chair a little, but lacking the courage to stand. “But the wait will not improve the mood of your visitors. I imagine them quite high and mighty in their tone.”

  “Do you know?” said Dancer. He a
lso pushed back his chair. He held the tablecloth as he had once seen his sister hold the train of the Duchess of York’s wedding dress. He looked at the dean. The dean was a neat man. He kept a little brush and pan beside him at table and was not embarrassed to whisk away a fallen breadcrumb. His hair was, to Dancer’s taste, overly neat. It was of a coarse material, steely grey, and looked as if it had been trimmed, one hair at a time, by razor. “I have aways thought, Dean, that men in our position should value the importance of relaxation.”

  The dean tried to look nonchalant. He could not. He folded his arms across his chest. It was a broad chest, and he was a young man and well built, and yet, Dancer thought, he behaves like a fussy barnyard fowl. It was easy to imagine him pecking at the crumbs on the white tablecloth.

  “I am quite relaxed, Bishop, I assure you. In fact I was rather wondering,” and here the dean pushed his spectacles back on his nose and his mouth folded in a manner both prim and smug, “if Your Lordship was not feeling the pressure of this Randwick scandal.”

  “Scandal?” said the bishop, testing the tension on the tablecloth. “There is no scandal.”

  “To bring your man before the ecclesiastical court.”

  “My man? Ha, ha, Dean, really. The silly little fellow was an Evangelical. Hardly my man. Now, concentrate. Watch. You will not see this done in many other deaneries.” Dancer felt the cords of his muscles stretched with a not unpleasant tension—they were tight like a baited line with a flat head pulling insistently on one end.

  “Allow me then to remove the gravy boat.”

  “Sit down,” ordered Bishop Dancer. The dean sat down. He buttoned up his coat.

  The bishop took the pressure on the tablecloth. He felt it nice and tight. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated and he could feel, with the pressure on, the position of wine bottle (which, being both light and tall, was a tricky one) and the gravy boat, the set of condiments. He took the tension up another notch until he had it at the point just before movement.

  Then he pulled the cloth right off the table.

  The bottles rose, teetered again, but settled nicely on the polished cedar. It made a long, low, ringing noise as it came to rest.

  The condiments were never in doubt. It was only the gravy boat, an eccentric three-legged affair, which caught. This was partly the fault of the legs, and partly the fault of the dean who had insisted that the tablecloth always be starched crisply. A starched fold had caught the leg, the bishop guessed, and it would have done no real damage at all if the dean had only trusted him. But the dean, being as nervous as a rabbit, had started out of his chair the instant the cloth was pulled. He broke cover, so to speak, and placed himself directly in the line of fire.

  There was very little gravy left, hardly a spoonful. It made a small mark on the dean’s thigh, but even this would not show—sponged or not—once it was dry.

  “There,” said Bishop Dancer. “You didn’t believe I could do it.”

  That night the dean would beg God’s forgiveness for the thoughts he had thought at that moment. But as he picked up the broken piecesof the gravy boat, his anger was not even mollified by the thought that it had been of a pattern he had never liked.

  “I will replace it,” said Dancer, folding the tablecloth with a surprising (to the dean) precision.

  “You will not,” said the dean, his face pale, his hands full of sharp shards. “You will kindly go to your vestry and leave this matter to me.”

  The bishop had to stop himself from ruffling his hair and it was not until his evening prayers that he, too, found room in his heart for remorse, but even then, praying on his bare knees in his nightshirt, a smile insinuated itself on to his face. He could not help it. Surely God would allow this contradiction?

  70

  The Good Samaritan

  The cloth was, likewise, pulled out from under Oscar’s life. But do not imagine that the bishop’s party trick was metaphorical, for were it so it would not be equal to the devastation. If we wish a metaphor we must load the dean’s table with Doulton saucers, candlesticks, boats for gravy, bowls for custard, vases full of flag flowers, and even then we will not have anything to equal the damage Bishop Dancer did to Oscar. To provide an equivalent we would have to take to the table with a saw or axe.

  Once Oscar’s indiscretion came to the attention of the press, he was finished. It did not matter that Dancer was a card-player himself, or that he was not beyond a “something on the gee-gees.” His private sympathies were of no account. He must cut himself free. He must rebuke, dissociate, etc. And Oscar Hopkins, whose whole character had been built around the certainty that he was one of the chosen, now found himself to be very publicly cast out. His name was made notorious in Sydney generally. He was not considered a suitable person to employ.

  That he was not a match for his scandalous story, neither in terms of personality nor appearance, did not make people question the slanders that were now told about him. Indeed, his innocent manner made his guilt appear more shocking.

  He took rooms in a common lodging house in Bathurst Street. He learned how much we are the creatures of our station, one minute all snug and warm, worthy of affection and the esteem of total strangers, granted respect without a question, credit without a pause, and the next, the most despicable creature on whom it is quite permissible to spit; someone whom the slovenly owner of a run-down boarding house—unshaven, with a collar missing and a tattoo visible on his hairy wrist—admits only on condition of a large deposit.

  September and October were reckoned the perfect months for new settlers to arrive in Sydney. September was no longer cold and windy. October was not yet hot. The blow-flies, bush-flies and house-flies were not the offence they would be when the York hams were in the ovens and muslin-wrapped puddings were boiling and bumping against the walls of cast-iron pots.

  September and October were bleak months for Oscar Hopkins. He was cut adrift from those who loved him. No mail could reach him, and he, for his part, was too ashamed to let anyone at Home know the disgrace that had befallen him.

  His mail waited for him at the diocesan offices. His letters were locked up in a clerk’s drawer together with the egg sandwiches which the occupant of the desk brought for lunch each day. The envelopes gained fatty butter spots. They smelled of egg. They lay there unopened and Oscar had no idea that Wardley-Fish was calling him in a passion, that he did not love Melody Clutterbuck, that the engagement was broken, that he, Fish, had been a self-deceiving wretch, an opportunist, a poseur. Wardley-Fish was booked to sail on the Sobraon to Sydney.

  Had Oscar read this locked-up letter he would have seen himself described as “good.” This goodness was contrasted with the writer’s “worldliness” and “falsehood,” which he was now, in the act of buying this ticket on a clipper, casting from him, “like swine, dear Odd Bod, which I hereby drive across the cliffs of Dover, so they might break their nasty bristly backs and drown, for ever, their hoarse and brutish swine-ish souls.”

  Had Oscar read this letter he would have held himself responsible for the broken engagement. But if blame was a commodity like eggs or butter, he already had more than he could safely carry. And even while he prayed to God to ease his burden, he cast around for more to pick up and carry. He prayed as if he were greedy for punishment. He prayed as a man of forty, suddenly aware of his neglected gums, might brush them, not three times a day as the dentist recommends, but nine times, until they are red and raw and puffy, aching, in quivering shock from all this zeal.

  He prayed he might be spared the hellfire.

  His neighbours in the boarding house complained about his behaviour. They heard him groaning. They did not see the backs of his hands and if they had it is unlikely that they would have recognized the cause of the wounds thereon. You would need to have lived in a contemplative order to understand that these deep wounds are made by the nails of one hand attacking the back of the other. Not stigmata, but the stab wounds of prayer.

  And yet he also, at t
he same time, on the same day, went to the racetrack. He bet on Falcon and Presto and Maid of the Lake and believed all the time it was (it must be) an offence against God who had smitten him on account of it. He felt the surge of those exhilarating chemicals which his body knew were manufactured at the racecourse, but he did not bet because he sought pleasure—on the contrary, he feared it—but because he was desperate and had no other way to support himself.

  You cannot bet effectively by day if you are to fear hellfire in the night. Any anxiety of this order prevents the proper functioning of those analytic skills which are a punter’s only asset. So of course he lost more than he won, and it did not matter that he hung around the stableboys and jockeys, paid them a shilling for their friendship, that he studied the form as if he were cramming for Bigs at Oriel—he spent the two months of the racing carnival in very poor condition and was swooped by magpies at the start of the Drapers’ Purse.

  He lost weight although he did not have a lot to lose. His collar hung like a harness around his neck, and he walked in the way of men who would wish to be invisible, close to the walls of buildings, with hands deep in pockets and eyes forever caught at that point where the foundation stones of the buildings rise from the edge of the pavement. And it was in this condition that Lucinda found him, although he did not have the comfort of a wall to walk beside, was quite exposed on all sides as he hurried across the yard at the back of the post office. The Bombay, two weeks late with the English mail, had arrived the day before and so everyone was crowded round in George Street where the mail was collected. The yard was quite deserted. There was no throng to give him shelter from inquisitive eyes which might recognize the cut of his grimy broadcloth as belonging to a higher calling. The nervous and defeated demeanour of its wearer was at once perfectly in keeping with the letter he had come to post and, also, completely out of keeping. An observer would never have suspected the educated tone, i.e.: