Oscar and Lucinda bw-1988

by Peter Carey

  The Reverend Oscar Hopkins was carried, moaning, backwards, off the Leviathan. The Reverend Ian Wardley-Fish carried the stretcher at the end where his feet were, and the Reverend Hugh Stratton, in spite of his bad back, carried the other. There were also, in this entourage, Mrs Stratton, Melody Clutterbuck, and Theophilus Hopkins, a bleakfaced old man whose eyebrows needed trimming; he carried a box full of soldering implements he had made especially for his son.

  As Lucinda watched, the red-haired clergyman was blindfolded.

  The handsome one with the blond beard clapped his hands together. The red-haired one was still moaning. The blond-bearded one said: "Speed. We need speed, Hopkins. That will do the trick." Then he clapped his hands together again, and gazed around like a man looking for a stick to kill a snake. He was quite drenched.

  The old man with the grey-streaked beard held his gift like a sodden magus who has arrived at a disappointing destination. "Surely," he said, fiddling with the neck button of his oilskin, "surely, Oscar, you can walk?"

  A large frowsy blonde woman with a loud Oxbridge voice and an enormous bosom now came forward and began to tug at the old man's coat. "Come," she said, "come, we shall go aboard." Lucinda pushed past and got on to the gangway before they could cause any more trouble. She found the English tiresome in the extreme. She acknowledged one more ostentatious salute and hurried to her stateroom. She left her umbrella dripping by the door, took off her hat, unlaced her boots, and then, with nothing on her feet but stockings, sat at the little bureau and tried to write in her journal.

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  Babylon

  For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: "An exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere. Would dearly love cribbage."

  She heard the crane's donkey engine. She leaned forward, to see if she might catch a glimpse of one more cow, when a large cage swung past the porthole, so close she involuntarily flinched. In the cage were three clergymen, the blindfolded one, looking quite green, squatted in the middle. His mouth was open. She could not hear what noise he made. The older clergyman (he looked like an aged boy) held the blindfolded one's arms. He looked very still and very pale and his mouth was shut. But the blond one with the mole was all animation. His hands were raised. His eyes were dancing. He looked as though he would shortly spring into the air. Lucinda could hear him quite distinctly.

  "In a trice," he shouted, "I told you, Hopkins-in a trice." 47 Babylon

  The saloons and cabins of the Leviathan were lofty and ornate. There was carving, scrollwork, plush. The grand saloon, in which Lucinda Leplastrier stood, quite alone, was almost three times her height, was sixty-two feet long and thirty-six feet wide. Two great funnels passed through this room but were covered with eight panels, four larger ones, which were mirrors, and four smaller ones, ornamented with paintings of children and emblems of the sea. There were couches upholstered in red plush, settees in Utrecht velvet, a carved mahogany organ, buffets and tables of elegantly carved walnut, arabesque panels filled with sentimental paintings. There were Brussels carpets on the floor and-those items Wardley-Fish had selected as somehow expressing

  Oscar and Lucinda

  the quintessential nature of the Leviathan's unseemly opulence portières of carmine silk. One could lean across the rail of the grand saloon as Lucinda did now, and gaze down into the second-class promenade. And whilst it is true that Mr Ishmael Kingdom Legare had not been quite so lavish there, he had, just the same, been generous with comfort and with space and if brutal iron girders crossed the ceiling of second classthey were also sympathetically decorated (after an oriental theme), being painted blue and red alternatively, the underside edged with gilt and the spaces between the beams divided into panels which were very lightly decorated in colour and gold.

  Lucinda looked down at the second class and liked it better than the place she was in. She thought: I have done it again.

  She had wasted money to be in a place whose privileges she somehow had imagined herself

  "entitled" to, but once she had been robbed of the extra fifteen pounds involved, the privilege would only serve to make her feel squeezed and constricted and her voice would sound coarse, not just to others, perhaps not to others at all, but to herself. She could not imagine how anyone with warm blood in their veins could feel at home amongst the cool and polished distances in first class. She had pretended to herself that she was one of them, but she was not. And so she imagined that she would be much more at home in second class. She liked the way the secondclass cabins-they were in two tiers, like little terraces, one up, one down-all opened on to this central space, and she, conscious of her very public lack of wellwishers, was much attracted by the knot of people in second class; they were clustered around the men who had arrived by cage. It was not just curiosity made her wish to be amongst them, but something stronger, more physical, a need to push herself in amongst her kind, like a Derby hog or a rabbit in a cage. The crowd milling around the clergymen had increased since she had seen it at the gangplank. There were schoolboys. There had been four, but now there were three. These three were making a presentation of a memorial scroll to the red-headed clergyman who made a small speech in return. He moved his hands much when he spoke. He blew his nose. There was applause. There was a broad-shouldered man with a heavy beard-not a clergyman, but obviously a pedagoguewho shepherded the boys into one corner and arranged for them to have tea and cake. The fourth boy returned at this time. She wondered who was travelling and who staying. She considered, once again, transferring her baggage down to a second-class cabin, but faced with the bored

  Babylon

  and supercilious expressions of the stewards, did not have the energy. The red-headed clergyman was escorting the old man with the dark beard (his father, surely?), taking him from point to point around the second-class promenade, gesturing excitedly like a young artist at last admitted to the Royal Academy and the old man, excessively careful in his steps, was playing the part of the proud and newly frail. The younger woman of the party arranged herself (carefully, for she was fashionably dressed) on a velvet sofa, pressed her hands to her eyes, then looked up. Lucinda saw her smile, and returned it, not understanding that what she had thought was a smile was in reality a grimace.

  Melody Clutterbuck-it was she who had grimaced-was almost sick with the embarrassment of being there. She was ill at ease and out of place. She was cowed by the ship, and yet it was not the ship that did it to her for she would not have felt like this in any other cornpany. Had she been here alone with Ian it would have been quite different, or with her father, or almost anyone she knew. But she was, by blind and unjust circumstances, forced into company with those for whom this ship was not intended and she was, therefore, one of them. She did not know which of her companions was the worst. They were an ensemble; their performance was too grotesque to be contemplated. There were, for instance, the Strattons, a type all too familiar to Melody Clutterbuck. She had observed their fellows at the dinner table of her father, the Bishop, since her earliest childhood. They smelled of dust and sherry and had shiny patches on their garments; the male had slippery eyes which could not hold the gaze a second; the female had great opinions and was noisy with her cutlery; they had what could be most politely termed "hearty" manners. The Strattons displayed all the characteristics of their caste. They leaned forward over plates of buns which had been made with the intention of amusing children. When they had their mouths full, for that brief period when further biting was impossible, they cast eyes around like clerks from Sotheby's come to value furniture. They were grubby, of course, but it was not a grubbiness you could detect at a distance. It was there so deep within their fabrics that you might think it part of them, as indeed it was. They had cultured voices, and it was this last part, the contrast between how they sounded and how they looked, that made them so dist
urbing. But these were the cream of her present society. They, at least, had precedents in her world. They were "types" and even if they were irritating, they also had a set place in the menagerie of life. But Oscar-Oscar made her flesh crawl and her hands dig into each other. Fingernail

  Oscar and Lucinda

  attacked flesh as if it might therefore create enough confusion in the brain, and with this smokescreen of pain block out of the other larger pain. She cound not bear the bony triangle of head. As a triangle it was far too long. The mouth occupied too small a space. The hair was quite beyond belief. He had a faint moustache now, but it was so feeble one wished to inform him there was no point persisting. She had a list. A long list. She could not, for instance, bear his fluting voice, his frightful flapping hands, his total insensitivity to how she felt about him which allowed him, in spite of everything, to bestow on her the most beneficent smiles. Even the way he ordered cocoa from the steward was, in the middle of this precise luxury, naïve to the point of idiocy. The stewards, it was easy to see, were the most frightful little snobs and Melody Clutterbuck sympathized with them (she also judged themthey were only stewards) when they saw the type of person they would be called upon to serve. In first class, she presumed, one would not be so embarrassed. She looked up at the lady in first class, made a little grimace, and was pleased to receive one in return.

  The famous Theophilus Hopkins (he had made such a fool of himself with his letters to The Times attacking Mr Darwin) was, if it were possible, even worse than the son. He struck her as a somnambulist. His eyes had looked at her without giving any indication of knowing what they looked at. He carried his tin box as if it were the ashes of someone particularly dear to him. When he sat down he placed the tin box on his lap and rested his tea-cup on it. And yet it was not a lack of manners that Melody found disturbing. Indeed he could rest his cup and saucer on his box and make it appear almost respectable. It was the knowledge that he was batty. He was a handsome man in his way, and quite properly dressed. His hands, it is true, were large and horny, a tradesman's hands more than a gentleman's. But none of this mattered. What mattered was that he was likely to take it into his head that the ship was Babylon. It was this that Ian feared. She watched the old man warily, unsure what he was capable of. She had already endured two prayers, one at the foot of the gangway, and another as the colossal embarrassment of the crane got under way. Ian thought he might begin to lay about him with a whip, as Jesus had driven the money-changers from the temple. She wondered what was really in the tin box and had, indeed, offered to mind it for him. The offer had been courteously declined. She thought he was staring at the crimson portières. Ian claimed these would be the first to go. Their party, however, was by no means the only one gathering in the promenade. There was a preponderance of males and if some of

  Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

  them appeared/ beneath their new suits, to be colonials of the rougher tvpe, then so much the better. The ranter would be stopped quickly. He picked up his tin box. She steeled herself. The son took his arms. They walked a little way and stopped. The father's eyes were dark and casting all around. • • * ••«,-..

  Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

  The author of Cora/fines of the Devon Coast had an eye well trained to the nicest degree And although we would recognize this to be the result of synapses made by his own passions, millions of connections made like the kno: s in the butterfly net he had left hanging on his study wall in Hennaconbe, each knot occasioned by need and strengthened by use, Theophflis Hopkins, FRS, a proud man, was forever at war with any interpretation which gave him any credit at all. When he called his talent a "gift/ he meant the word not as a simile for talent but an explanation of it. That the gift was considerable is attested to by those drawing of sea ceatures, which were his life's work.

  In the context cf the Leviathan, this gift is worth insisting on, for we are discussing ore of the great literal describers of his age, a man who could observe a mtterfly, say, for ten seconds and accurately recall the form and cobration of body and wing parts.

  This man saw lothing of the Leviathan. Afterwards he had almost no impression, exept a (needless) concern that the huge paddle wheels on its side were ts only means of locomotion. So if his eyes were, as Melody Clutterbick thought, "all about," then what they were looking at was not tcbe found in the second-class promenade or saloon, not in the library the games room, the dining room, or anywhere else he walked (one step at a time, no individual step in excess of twelve

  Oscar and Lucinda

  inches) as he tried to hide his arthritic pain from the beloved son the Lord had taken from him. Oscar had left home in 1859. It was now 1865 and they had only met four times in the intervening years. These meetings had been more painful than either could bear, and not because the son had become a "sporting seat"-the father knew nothing of his source of income, imagining him supported by some Anglican mechanism-their disagreement had its roots in the most basic matters of theology. Yet every morning and every evening Theophilus had prayed for his son's soul, that he might yet sit beside God on.the Last Day, that they, mother, father, babes and Oscar, would all be reunited and stand in Glory amongst the Saints. These were not prayers said by rote, but new ones, every time, and anyone who happened to be walking up the long red path to Morley might be privy to the extraordinarily detailed information they contained. The most intimate details of Theophilus's sadness were discussed by everyone in Hennacombe, and yet there was no one with whom he could talk about it himself. The Strattons were kind to him. They were poor, far poorer than he was. They brought him broth and pudding with raisins in it. But he could not discuss the matter with them. They would not stand beside God in the Happy Day.

  A second cousin of Mrs Stratton's held a post with the Church Missionary Society of London. That was how the Strattons knew that Oscar was to sail to New South Wales. It was they who brought Theophilus the news his anxious son had not yet summoned up the courage to deliver. Theophilus was miffed. It was worse than miffed. It was jealous. He bit the inside of his cheek and gnawed on his bottom lip until he broke the skin. He could not bear that they should invite him to accompany them on the train to farewell the boy.

  God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over to the hands of the wicked. Yet he must bear it. The Strattons were in error, but they were also kind. He must not be full of pride. He prayed to God to prevent him falling to "that sin which most often besets me." He shared a second-class carriage with them to Southampton. He shared their too-sweet-toomilky tea and felt himself deceitful. He fully intended to save his son, not from Australia but from the Anglican heresy. To this end he worked at his Bible. He wrapped himself in his greatcoat-the carriage was unheated-and while the train rattled over the long low bridge at Teignmouth, he ignored the pleasures of the view, the bare-legged women collecting out on the mud flats, the

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  Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

  lovely lustrous sheen upon the wet earth, the misty blue-white sky. He knew all of the Bible by heart and if you wished to quote a verse to him he could continue from there, reciting until you bade him stop. But on this day, as the train rolled through Exmouth and Lyme Regis, he tore little strips of paper and made diminutive notes upon them. He used these pieces of paper as markers in his Bible, all in readiness for the prayer he would say over his son. The Anglicans insisted on talking. There was nothing in their conversation but money. He knew their situation was difficult. He felt a certain sympathy. But he had never heard such gross materialism. Mrs Stratton, so she told him, was engaged by a certain publisher to write a novel. Theophilus nodded politely. Inside he boiled. He did not doubt that Satan spoke through novels. Mrs Stratton wished to discuss the financial arrangements she made with publishers. He did not wish to speak of anything that might assist her plan. Mr Stratton wished to know how Oscar had obtained the money for his voyage. He did not press at this directly but came at it, like a mouse around a sk
irting board, all stops and starts and quick grey scurries. Theophilus thought this impertinent. He excused himself and went back to his work, but this did not stop the Strattons and they talked away, pennies and shillings, to each other. It was like sharing a carriage with a pair of grocers.

  Theophilus became so out of temper with the Strattons-although

  he thought it unchristian to be so-that he was quite unprepared for

  the reunion with his son. He was hit before he got his muscles ready. He stood on grey, sooty Southampton station and was nearly washed

  away. He watched Mrs Stratton embrace his boy. Jealousy ripped him.

  He trembled. He did not embrace. He shook hands formally, but felt

  so light in the head he feared he would faint. He found a bench on

  the pretext of tying a bootlace, but when he got there, he dared

  ! not put his head down lest the blood rush to it. He placed his tin i box beside him on the seat and his Bible on top of it. The Bible

  : shed some markers. Mr Stratton picked them up for him. Theophilus

  stuffed them in his greatcoat pocket as if they were nothing but dead leaves.

  He had felt faint ever since. He was like a man who arrives at Osaka when he had been expecting Edinburgh. Everything was odd, distant, trembling. His son was beautiful to him. His heart sang the Song of Solomon. He had his mother's fine, heart-shaped face, the face he had cupped in his hands at the wonderful moment when his seed spurted. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night between