Oscar and Lucinda Page 14

  Mr Ahearn had it into his head that she should on no account travel down to Sydney with the hoi polloi aboard the packet. He was one of those men who must always deliver you safely to his friend, his associate, his colleague. If you are going to Woop-Woop, he will know the bank manager of the Australasian or the dog-catcher or Jimmy Jones, the sergeant of police. As for Sydney, he was not quite so knowledgeable, but he had a letter of introduction to Petty’s Hotel and to Mr James d’Abbs the accountant—a funny little chap, but somehow a relation of his wife. And Miss Leplastrier certainly must not travel on the packet steamer, but with his good friend and trusted client, Sol Myer, who was taking nothing down to Sydney but cold white cauliflowers and would, in any case deliver her gratis to the Market Street Wharf where there were none of your predatory types you found at Semi-Circular Quay waiting to prey on foolish young ladies.

  The foolish young lady’s face hurt from false smiling.

  It was Ascension Day and you could feel the winter lying like a snake along the water. Lucinda’s hair had been spared the scissors for three months and now that it had grown to a length her custodians judged more ladylike, Mrs Ahearn had pulled it up tight on her head and secured it with pins and clips. But pins and clips would not work. They had never worked. Her hair was a sea of little snakes, each one struggling to insist on its freedom. She patted her prickling neck feeling as the first wisps of hair escaped. The pins were merely ineffectual, but the patented clips grabbed at her. They dragged and stretched the hair at the roots. Lucinda could not understand the logic: how one’s hair must be grown long in order to be pulled up short. Her nose and cheeks felt far too prominent. She wished her hair released so it might stop her headache, so her features might be softened, but no, it was not allowed. She got, instead, the Garibaldi hat and Mr Ahearn’s little joke—he pretended to be much amused by ladies’ fashions—that it looked like a pimple on a pumpkin.

  Lucinda, imagining the expression referred to her red cheeks, was mortified, but Mr Ahearn had liked the expression for its sound, not its verisimilitude—the hat was not too small, nor her cheeks too red. He was a silly puritanical man who wished to show that he cared for her, but had no proper way of doing it, and his attempts resembled his wife’s wobbly walk—all that bumping and shoving when all he intended, as she did, was solicitude.

  It was already noon, late for a weekday market trip, but not for a Saturday when there was a night market in Sydney. The cauliflowers would be sold under gaslight. But there was no heat in the sun and the shadows of the ramshackle timber warehouse behind the little party seemed, to Lucinda, to be filled with the most hostile and uncaring cold. There was a smell of bad fish and a confusion of noises, steam whistles, human voices, the heavy thwack of river timber against wharf iron rings. There was a dinghy caught beneath the wharf and in danger of being sunk by the rise of the tide. There were boatmen calling for its removal, and others, in mid river, jockeying so they might take their turn at the busy wharf. Sol Myer was the subject of abuse for not shifting his boat on. There was now a rush to have Lucinda aboard. She hurt her ankle jumping down. There was no time—thank God—for tears, embraces (she thought of that cardiganed stomach—it was as repulsive as a governor’s) or recriminations about her actions.

  She stood straight on the deck with her arms by her sides.

  Chas Ahearn could not see the expression on her face. When she saluted him, as formal as a sentry, he did not know how to take it. A barge carrying a shining black donkey engine now blocked his view. It was a large engine and when the men gathered around it to effect its transfer to the wharf, he completely lost sight of her. In any case, it was only a very small smile, and it is unlikely he would have seen it from that distance.

  32

  Prince Rupert’s Drops

  There was a small roofed section on Mr Myer’s boat, but it seemed that this was more intended for the shelter of the engine than the driver and, in any case, it was decorated with so many oily cans and rags that she thought it better to pretend an affection for the bracing air beside the cauliflowers.

  A thin sheet of cloud began to materialize in the sky—the smoke from burning hedgerows on farms along the banks—and it was soon so general that the river, in response, assumed a pearly yellow sheen. She had never been on a boat before. She had never been to Sydney. She sat on a rough packing case in the bow, her hands in her lap, shivering.

  Sol Myer, like all of Chas Ahearn’s clients, knew the story of the tragedy. He saw the way she held herself—the straightness of the spine, the squareness of the shoulder. He had not missed the irony of her last salute, but he was most conscious of her dignity, of her solitariness—both qualities being emphasized by her small stature—and he felt, as he did not often with strangers, that he knew her.

  He would like to give her something, a gift. It would give him pleasure. He imagined it, his face creasing. But he had nothing except cauliflowers, and these, look at her, she was stealing from him in any case.

  She sat so straight, such a good back, such a proper back, a back you would trust in any crowd, and there was her hand—a different animal entirely—scuttling off down, a tiny crab with its friend the snake, gone stealing little florets of cauliflowers.

  Sol Myer started giggling. You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

  The river journey was picturesque, with so many pretty farms along its banks. Lucinda could not look at them without feeling angry. She looked straight ahead, shivering. It was cold, of course, but not only cold that caused this agitation. There was a jitteriness, a sort of stage fright about her future which was not totally unpleasant. She dramatized herself. And even while she felt real pain, real grief, real loneliness, she also looked at herself from what she imagined was Sol Myer’s perspective, and then she was a heroine at the beginning of an adventure.

  She did not know that she was about to see the glassworks and that she would, within the month, have purchased them. And yet she would not have been surprised. This was within the range of her expectations, for whatever harm Elizabeth had done her daughter, she had given her this one substantial gift—that she did not expect anything small from her life.

  It would be easy to see this purchase—half her inheritance splurged—on the first thing with a FOR SALE sign tacked to it—as nothing more than the desire to unburden herself of all this money, and this may be partly true. But the opposite is true as well, i.e., she knew she would need the money to have any sort of freedom. It is better to think about the purchase as a piano manoeuvred up a staircase by ten different circumstances and you cannot say it was one or the other that finally got it there—even the weakest may have been indispensable at that tricky turn on the landing. But of all the shifting forces, there is this one burly factor, this strong and handsome beast, i.e., her previous experience of glass via the phenomenon known as larmes bataviques or Prince Rupert’s drops.

  You need not ask me who is Prince Rupert or what is a batavique because I do not know. I have, though, right here beside me as I write (I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to and fro across the page) a Prince Rupert drop—a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail. And do not worry that this oddity, this rarity, was the basis for de la Bastie’s technique for toughening glass, or that it led to the invention of safety glass—these are practical matters and shed no light on the incredible attractiveness of the drop itself which you will understand faster if you take a fourteen-pound sledgehammer and try to smash it on a forge. You cannot. This is glass of the most phenomenal strength and would seem, for a moment, to be the fabled unbreakable glass described by the alchemical author of Mappae Clavicula. And yet if you put down your hammer and take down your pliers instead—I say “if,” I am not recommending it—you will soon see that this is not the fabled glass stone of the alchemists, but something almost as magical. For although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a p
air of blunt-nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin, kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes. And where, a moment before, you had unbreakable glass, now you have grains of glass in every corner of the workshop—in your eyes if you are not careful—and what is left in your hand you can crumble—it feels like sugar—without danger.

  It is not unusual to see a glass blower or a gatherer scrabbling around in a kibble, arm deep in the oily water, sorting through the little gobs of cast-off cullet, fossicking for Prince Rupert’s drop. The drops are made by accident, when a tear of molten glass falls a certain distance and is cooled rapidly.

  You will find grown men in the glass business, blowers amongst them, who have handled molten metal all their life, and if you put a Prince Rupert’s drop before them, they are like children. I have this one here, in my hands. If you were here beside me in the room, I would find it almost impossible not to demonstrate it to you, to take my pliers and—in a second—destroy it.

  So it was a Prince Rupert’s drop, shaped like a tear, but also like a seed, that had a powerful effect on Lucinda Leplastrier. It is the nature of these things. You can catch a passion from them, and the one in question, the first one Lucinda saw—at an age when she had dimples on her knees—was a particularly beautiful specimen, twisted red and milk-white glass from the damp brick island of Mur ano. It was sent to Abel Leplastrier by his great friend John Bell, FRS, the author of the enthusiastic piece in the Britannica. And Lucinda, entering Sydney on her bed of cauliflowers, would have reason to remember the day it arrived, eight years before, in Parramatta.

  The post-office steps were made from wood and there was a great fat swathe of sunshine spilled across them. It was winter and the sunshine was welcome. She could feel it through the cotton of her dress. The packet steamer had just arrived from Sydney. Her papa sat beside her on the step. He had Mr Bell’s parcel. It was this that took his attention and he could be no more bothered by the complaints of the owners of passing skirts and trousers (sour—smelling wool, velvet with mothballs) than by the demands of all the other mail from Home; these last he threw into his sugar bag.

  His hands were like his body—board strong—but they were short-fingered and surprisingly delicate in their movements; they attacked Mr Bell’s parcel like a pair of pale-bellied spiders. Pick, pick. Red sealing was shattered. Brown paper was torn in such a way it could never be reused.

  Lucinda pressed close against her papa. She liked the rough feel of his jacket on her cheek, all the hairy smells of bran and tweed and apple skins. She saw the Prince Rupert’s drop emerge from its nest of wrinkled paper but mistook it—ooh!—for a humbug or a sally twist. She reached out her hand, but her father held it from her.

  “No,” he said. He did not look at her. He read the letter which accompanied it.

  Her father made a noise—a little moan—and jumped to his feet. Lucinda stood also.

  “Stay, Lucinda.”

  She felt herself shot through with dread. She did as she was bade. She sat on the steps. She cradled the sugar bag in her lap for comfort, and watched her father run away from her. Down the steps he went, two at a time, pushing past brilliantined clerks and bent—backed lags. He sprinted—a broad man with short legs—across Church Street. He raised his arm and hurled the glass at the sandstone wall of the magistrate’s court. A policeman rose from his chair on the veranda of the court. He watched as her papa picked up the glass humbug. The policeman called out something over his shoulder and another policeman—a thin man with a grey beard almost as wide as his chest—came out to join him. Together they both stared at her papa who, without knowing himself observed, now walked back across the rutted street, fouling his boots on steaming ox dung, wiping them clean on a surviving patch of tussock grass. The thin policeman went back into the court. The other policeman resumed his seat. Her papa trudged up the steps and—no longer smelling quite so sweet—sat beside her. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, and produced his clasp knife. His hands were trembling. He had difficulty setting the knife the way he wanted it—with the largest blade pulled out just a fraction. He looked at Lucinda and gave a gruesome sort of grin. Then he put the tail of the Prince Rupert’s drop between the blade and handle and forced the blade hard home.

  The drop shattered, of course. It sprayed like brown sugar across the post-office steps, sprinkled a young widow’s bonnet, dusted the black whiskers of a flash-looking man in nankeen breeches. There were other affected. There was much brushing and head turning, and perhaps there would have been trouble, for Parramatta could still be a violent place, but when these who had been so rudely assaulted located their assailant, they found him weeping; and not only him, but the solemn little girl beside him. They could not know—how could they?—that while the father and daughter had tears in common, this single effect was produced by two quite different causes.

  For Abel Leplastrier had been given, in John Bell’s letter, an annotated index to the event he had just witnessed. The glass was by way of being a symbol of weakness and strength; it was a cipher for someone else’s heart. It was a confession, an accusation, a cry of pain. It was for this he wept.

  Lucinda was moved by something much more simple—grief that such a lovely thing could vanish like a pricked balloon. But her feelings were not unlayered and there was, mixed with that hard slap of disappointment, a deeper, more nourishing emotion: wonder.

  It was very more-ish.

  It was her mother who provided the second Prince Rupert’s drop. This did not arrive unexpectedly, but was sought out by advertisement. The cynical interpretation of this was that Elizabeth Leplastrier, although careful with pennies, would not be denied what her husband and little girl had experienced. The more generous explanation is that the little girl had not stopped talking about it and her mother decided she should have one for her ninth birthday.

  It turned out to be a great extravagance, and Abel sulked and made the cynical interpretation.

  They “let it off” on the steps of their hut. It was early, with the sun just slanting through the criss-crossed needles of the casuarinas which lined the creek. There was dew on the grass and their boots were wet from it. The larme batavique caught the light and gathered it in like molten metal straight from a glassworks’ glory-hole. It withstood her father’s hammer and her mother’s axe. And then Lucinda—it was her birthday, after all—took the needle—nosed pliers and snapped—it took a grunt to manage it—the tail.

  Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.

  There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

  33

  Glassworks

  The glassworks at Lanson’s Wharf in Darling Harbour were the first in Sydney. There was nothing pretty about them, no suggestion of the molten mysteries which took place within, no light from the glory-hole, just a smudge of black smoke against the cold chalky sky. It would have been easy for Lucinda to have missed them, easy for any number of reasons. The first is that Lanson’s Wharf was behind the Market Street Wharf, and had the latter not been crowded with a tangle of punts, barges, and a steamboat (the cockney pilot of which was taking picturesque exception to a Chinaman moored in a dinghy) Sol Myer would have brought his load o
f pale-stemmed cauliflowers alongside and Lucinda would never have travelled the extra distance up into the throat of Darling Harbour where the glassworks lay waiting. And even then it would have been so easy for her to have ignored them. There was nothing in their architecture to separate them from their neighbours.

  The little steamer shuddered, cleared its throat of a clot of smoke, and pushed past the tangle at Market Street. The sun was low but had not yet been blocked by Pyrmont. It bathed the eastern bank of Darling Harbour which is also—for those of you not familiar with Sydney—the backyard of the city. Where there was white it shone. Where there was sandstone it turned a soft and lovely pink. But for the most part there was no white or sandstone showing, only coal and rust and these drank the light like sand takes water.

  Sol wiped his engine’s copper piping with an oily rag and made the rag steam. Lucinda picked at a cauliflower. She did not much like the look of Sydney. A wine bottle floated in water that rippled with a rather satanic beauty: mother-of-pearl; spilled oil from a steamer. There was a stink, like tallow rendering, but perhaps this was only Sol’s rag on the hot copper pipe. Sol rubbed the glass of his pressure gauge with another filthy rag which was different only in that it came from a nail high on the right, now low on the left. He was not satisfied with the result and used his elbow. He looked over his shoulder—a Chinaman was being fetched out of the water. He thanked God for Chinamen. It was a bitter joke he could make only with himself. He continued up into the pinch of Darling Harbour.

  They passed the jumbled mud-smeared logs of Walter O’Brien’s Colonial Timber Mill just as the sun dropped beneath Pyrmont. They passed beneath the peeling walls of MacArthur’s Hour Mill; it was a grey weatherboard structure, tall and thin, and leaning sideways at an angle.

  The waterfront seemed clogged with logs, iron, sheets of corrugated roofing, abused timber with giant bolts rusting in it. Lucinda was afraid. She felt very small. She wished Sol Myer would suddenly demand that she act her age and return to Parramatta.