Oscar and Lucinda

by Peter Carey

  “It is patched,” Lucinda said, and when she bade him goodbye, in a minute or two, she kissed him gently on the cheek. It was not something she had ever done before.

  The effect of Mr d’Abbs’s visit was that Lucinda chose to believe that Mr d’Abbs had accused Mr Jeffris falsely. What touched her was the picture she made of Mr d’Abbs grappling with the demons of his own falsehood. She did not know what to make of it, except that she was moved, as it seems she was by almost everything in that month of March as they prepared to make the journey. She was in an emotional state where the smallest thing, the frailness of a twig, the unravelling of a cloud in a blue sky, was filled with poignancy and that bursting love which is the anxious harbinger of loss. She saw goodness everywhere, perhaps attributing much of her own character or longings to others, and thus chose to see Mr d’Abbs’s “confession” of his falsehood as the keystone of his character, the main thrust of his speech.

  It is curious that Lucinda, while rejecting most of Mr d’Abbs’s accusations, chose to believe that Mr Jeffris was in love with danger. Believing this allowed her to like Mr Jeffris more. She imagined she knew the disease he suffered from, that she too was in love with danger, not, of course, as it applied to blood and body wounds, but as it applied to the more general business of life. It was not just risk, but actual loss that quickened her. And on the day Mr d’Abbs found her in her office she had come from a Pitt Street solicitor’s where she had, in the face of not inconsiderable resistance, formalized her bet in a document which she placed, that night, in her dusty-smelling cedar secretaire.

  She did not tell Oscar what she had done and yet it was through the medium of this document that she believed that Oscar would, magically, triumph on his journey. She did not express what she believed, not even to herself. But the confidence she felt when she touched the rolled-up document (which she did often, at least twice each day), could only have its source in this simple superstition: that if she could manage to lose this bet, then Oscar Hopkins would not die.

  She was a thorough woman and she had a great capacity for detail, and so she did not trust her beloved’s safety solely to this voodoo in a cedar box. She had meetings with Mr Jeffris, far more than Mr Jeffris at first thought necessary. She went through his shopping lists and his accounts and if Mr Jeffris was at first outraged to suffer this from a woman, he soon discovered that his patron—far from being the niggardly boarding—house marm he had at first imagined—would question no expense that might relate to safety. But at first he had not understood her. She had spoken philosophically of the nature of danger. It was hard for him not to smirk at her. He thought her ridiculous, a monkey in a top hat, a woman acting like a man. But when the philosophy had finished he saw she would pay up for any item which might be seen to lessen danger. And she begged him to tell her the dangers. He took great pleasure in obliging her. He enjoyed himself. He made her very frightened.

  Lucinda was too much in love to think of how masculine hierarchies are created, but it was a mistake to have these meetings with Oscar absent. It encouraged Mr Jeffris in his habit of thinking of Oscar scornfully.

  Lucinda thought only that she loved him, that he must be safe.

  When she had imagined “love” it had always been with someone broad and square. Even Mr Hasset had been taller than this comforting prototype. When picturing her future husband she had seen strong square hands and a black square beard. She had never imagined the snaky insinuating passion she would feel to hold a thin white man whom she called (although not out loud) “my sweet archangel.”

  “He is a brave man,” she told Mr Jeffris, “far braver than you or I.”

  “He is an extraordinary chap,” said Jeffris.

  “You will deal with mountains and rivers, but he will do battle with demons.”

  “One can only respect him, ma’am,” said Mr Jeffris.

  Mr Jeffris’s eyes were soft and sympathetic, but his mind was totally dedicated to the satisfaction of his present ambition: to extract a cheque for twenty pounds for the purchase of three brass chronometers from Mr Dulwich of Observatory Hill.

  91

  A Man of Authority

  Horses and bullocks were scarce in consequence of the long drought and although it was not Mr Jeffris himself who went to Parramatta sales in search of decent beasts, the worry of this item lay heavily on him, for it was no use at all tearing up the road to Wiseman’s Ferry with all the finest men, all perfectly kitted out, if all he had to pull them were beasts like you saw everywhere around the colony, with their spines showing like ridgepoles under the baggy canvas of their hides.

  He had become a man of authority. He felt himself uncramped at last, free from the petty limitations of Mr d’Abbs’s employ. He could say to one man, go, and he went, to another, come, and he came. He was conscious of standing straighter. He could feel the girth of his chest pressing against the buttons of his shirt. He employed tall men he knew he could control with the strength of his eyes. He was stern with them and unsmiling. He dispatched his overseer and bullock driver both with instruction that no beast he bought but that they both be in agreement. They took this order meekly, although they surely found it most distasteful. The bullock driver called him “Captain,” Later this misunderstanding was to spread.

  Mr Jeffris engaged a storekeeper, two blacksmiths, a medical attendant, a collector of birds and a collector of plants (although these last two were entered on the paybook as “riflemen”), a groom, a trumpeter, two carpenters, a shoemaker, a cook.

  Miss Leplastrier did not query him on a single point.

  He borrowed two mountain barometers and entrusted one of these to the collector of birds and another to the collector of plants, telling them that it was to be their main duty whilst actually travelling to guard the safety of these barometers for he planned to go about this journey like a trigonometrist, knowing always, exactly, where he was in space, and he would not be, he told the red-necked, Belfast-born plant collector, like some fart-faced Irishman crashing through the undergrowth like a wombat.

  They would carry axes and they would be razor-sharp at all times, for there is nothing a surveyor despises more than a tree that obscures his trig point.

  Miss Leplastrier made a horse and sulky available to him so he might move about smartly. He was soon a familiar sight on the road out to Mort Bay, standing straight and flaying the poor animal to get a skip on. He was on his way to Harrison’s shipyards where old Oliver Crawley, a wide, bow-legged shipwright with a white cataract on his left eye, was constructing two light whale boats, the smaller designed to fit inside the larger when the thwarts of the larger one were removed for travelling. The larger boat was then to be suspended within a frame of belts and canvases and the canvas most in contact with the boat was to be guarded with sheepskin and greased hide, and this whole sling, of course, was to be fitted into the boat carriage, that machine which rolled silently through the tracks of Oscar Hopkins’s nightmares.

  Mr Jeffris took each man, as he was engaged, to Anthony Hordern’s store where they were kitted out, on account of Miss Leplastrier, with a suit of new clothing. There were strong grey twill trousers, a red woollen shirt which, when crossed with white braces, provided a military appearance. This was as Mr Jeffris had calculated it. He would require absolute obedience and he made it clear from the beginning.

  It was his intention that Oscar Hopkins also dress in this manner. It was important that he not place himself, as it were, above the law. And yet Mr Jeffris could not come at the matter directly. He could hardly demand it, and yet he could not countenance any exception to his rule. He broached the subject with Miss Leplastrier but she only laughed and said it was something he must discuss with Mr Hopkins. When she laughed like that he would like to put her on her back in bed. He bowed formally and said nothing, but he went to Hordern’s, anyway, and bought the correct items of clothing in sizes he guessed would suit the stick-limbed Mr Smudge. He cantered back across the city and out to the Darling Harbour gl
assworks where he was told Mr Hopkins was “in preparation.”

  He was amused at the idea of Mr Smudge preparing for anything. He had never, in all his experience, met anyone so mentally and physically unprepared for life. In the world that Mr Jeffris called the “real world,” an imaginary place with neither parliaments nor factories, Mr Smudge would simply die. When he heard he was “preparing” he had a vision of him in baggy combinations, with pencil-thin arms, working with his dumbbells. Thus he arrived at the glassworks in an excellent humour, with his handsome dark eyes dancing and his teeth showing beneath the curtain of his moustache. He wore his wide-shouldered, box-pleated coat and a pair of white cotton gloves. If the effect was eccentric, he was unaware of it. At this very moment there were sixteen men in Sydney whose only labour was to make his dream a reality.

  For I also am a man of authority, and I say to one man go, and he goeth, I say to another come and he cometh.

  But when he entered the glassworks he was not pleased (not pleased? He was furious) to see that they were, once again, unpacking the glass church and all the crates, which had been, at six o’clock last night, screwed tightly shut, now had their lids (A, B, C, D, etc.) stacked against the walls, and all the hessian bags, which had been lined up and laced tight, were now as empty as bladders on a slaughterhouse floor. The furnaces were cold and the glass blowers were at the boxes like children on Christmas morning while the biggest child of them all, the pale and excitable Mr Smudge, was calling out instructions in his fluting choirboy’s voice.

  And they obeyed him! Oh, my God, thought Mr Jeffris, I cannot bear it.

  It was against the natural order, that a man like this should give orders to men like these, and not only be obeyed, but be willingly obeyed.

  “No, no, Harry, no,” the fool cried to Flood, the foundryman from Leichhardt, “I must do it by myself without instruction.”

  He was incompetent. You could see he was incompetent. He had a little hessian bag labelled “B1” from which he was removing the pieces of decorative cast-iron cresting, which was to run along the ridge of the roof. Why was he fiddling with this now? Was he not meant to be assembling a wall section?

  Jeffris looked towards the one person whom he most reluctantly admitted as “competent.” She, who should be disapproving of all this, sat complacently in the glass blower’s wooden throne. She was a handsome little woman with dainty feet and slender ankles and it angered Mr Jeffris that she should choose to lie in bed with this extraordinary child.

  As for the church itself, it was the silliest thing he had ever heard of. He imagined it was the single-armed foundryman—he who was always cooing over the bits and pieces with a measuring rod and calliper—who had tricked her into it. What a fortune he must be making from her with all his little extra frills, his fiddly crests, his gay little “terminals,” his ornate railing, all of them—Mr Jeffris assumed—“specials” and therefore charged out at a premium.

  Mr Jeffris did not like the church even when it was packed away. And yet he could not help but admire Miss Leplastrier for the way she looked after the details of her own deception. She was a great woman for lists. He was the same. His whole life now was a series of lists and he saw, in Lucinda Leplastrier, his equal in meticulous order. He also thought this list-making of hers to be demeaning to him. It was he, as expedition leader, who should be in charge of packing the cargo. Yet she stated, very clearly—her eyes meeting his full square while she did so—that the responsibility was hers. She gave him a list of cargo appended to which she had written, all in a strong clear hand, directions on how each wagon was to be packed. The whole damn thing was like a jigsaw puzzle. The long, hessian-wrapped “barley-sugar” columns must lie on the starboard whilst boxes “H” and “B”—being balanced in weight—must lie on the port. No box with a “2” suffix (A2, B2) could be packed over an axle, and so on. It took a full day to load, and now, just when everybody seemed happy, when the embarrassment had been covered with canvas and lashed down securely, the Hooting Boy had decided he must have the whole thing in pieces and go again. He was like a child who cannot leave his toys alone.

  He was not wearing combinations as Mr Jeffris had imagined when he thought of him “preparing.” But the vision was very close to life. Oscar Hopkins was clad in a workman’s boiler suit. His face was streaked with packing grease. He rubbed his hands together and returned Mr Jeffris’s actor’s smile.

  “I am in rehearsal, you see,” he said. “There is no doubt I will require some assistance at Boat Harbour, but it need not be skilled. I can glaze, you see. You must admit yourself surprised.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr Jeffris.

  “It is a tougher job than Latin verbs, I promise you.”

  Mr Jeffris had all his spleen. He wedged the parcel containing Oscar’s uniform underneath his arm and held his arms behind his back. He rocked on his toes and heels and while Oscar teetered on a ladder, and clambered on the empty spider web of glasshouse roof, he made small talk with Miss Leplastrier about a play he had seen at the Lyceum in Pitt Street. He admired the church, and was able to use his knowledge of trigonometry to flatter the design. And all the way he wished only that they would pack the thing away.

  Mr Jeffris did not like the church but he was certainly not without a sense of history. Each pane of glass, he thought, would travel through country where glass had never existed before, not once, in all time. These sheets would cut a new path in history. They would slice the white dust-covers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains, and names, the streets of his birthplace, Bromley, married to the rivers of savage Australia.

  There would be pain in this journey, and most likely death. Mr Jeffris knew it now. He felt the axe in his hands, the cut scrub, the harsh saw-teeth of mountains giving up their exact latitude to his theodolites. There would be pain like this wax-skinned girlie boy had never known, and if he was afeared of water he was afeared of the wrong thing entirely.

  92

  The Lord Is My Shepherd

  Lucinda thought: Terrible things always happen on beautiful days. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on a rainy day. When they brought my papa home with his socks showing there were butcher-birds singing along the fences and king-fishers with chests like emeralds flying two inches above the surface of the creek. The sky was blue.

  The sky was also blue in the week when her mama died, on the day Hasset sailed, and now, here, as they followed the wagons down to Semi-Circular Quay—she in her white hat and veil, he in the silly uniform that Jeffris wished him in—it was a clear blue-skied day.

  The uniform was too big around his chest and shoulders. It gathered and rucked. His braces were not tight. She thought of a poor creature she had seen in the street outside the Sydney asylum, a nurse on either side of him; he had a bare white neck so long you could not help but think of knives.

  All her passion, all her intelligence, her discipline, her love had gone to produce nothing but a folly. She had not known this until she saw him in his humiliating suit. It would seem that he also knew this. There was a panic in his eyes, but now all these sixteen wagons would not be stopped. They were rolling like tumbrils through the public street of Sydney and urchins ran out of lanes hoorahing the procession. They called Mr Jeffris “Captain” and wanted to know if he was Captain Stuart. Mr Jeffris did not deign to answer them. His back was straight, his lips glistening. His horse was all impatience, eager to overleap the air. Lucinda felt an animosity towards the handsome chestnut she would not yet permit herself to feel towards the rider.

  The Lord is my shepherd

  I shall not want

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

  He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  There was not a single black in the party, although Lucinda had directed that this be otherwise. Now Jeffris clattered beside her shouting that there was no point recruiting the unhappy souls in the streets of Sydney. He would recruit his niggers when they were up country.


  “I am offering a bonus,” Lucinda called, digging into her purse.

  They were now moving along the bottom end of George Street. The trumpeter—he was riding in the wagon behind—made a loud discordant noise on his instrument.

  “No trumpets,” roared Jeffris, wheeling and rearing.

  Why pay for trumpets then? Lucinda thought. “A bonus,” she shouted, having to wave the crumpled white envelope at Mr Jeffris. She knew this was too weak and desperate. She saw how he despised her and she was frightened of what she had done.

  She told Jeffris that Mr Hopkins would hand over the money when he had been safely delivered. She then gave Oscar the envelope and as she had offended and humiliated her friend. She saw how patronizing she had been. She could have wept. She thought: They will cut his throat and steal the money from him.

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  “The Lord keep you safe,” she said.

  She gave him the scroll which was the formal document of their wager. He also pushed an envelope at her. And then he was down on the ground, away from her. She felt the cruel emptiness in her arms and her chest, as if she were nothing but an empty mould—she felt an ache in the places where he had, a moment before, pressed against her. She touched her shoulders with the tips of her fingers. She embraced the echo of his presence. She wrapped a rug around herself although it was not cold.

  All around her the navvies swore and cursed the sap-heavy boxes, which contained nothing to equate with the crystal-pure, bat-winged structure of her dreams, but a lead-heavy folly, thirty hundredweight of cast-iron rods, five hundred and sixty-two glass sheets weighing two pounds each, twenty gross of nuts and bolts, sixty pounds of putty, five gallons of linseed oil.

  She saw him walk out on to a barge, then be escorted to its neighbour. There was a man on either side of him.